A picture of the King is displayed in every British Embassy. But in Ireland’s London embassy, there proudly hangs a portrait of the world’s most famous Irishwoman, the novelist Edna O’Brien (1930-2024).
Edna, the unacknowledged Queen of Ireland, is the subject of a new, acclaimed documentary film, The Blue Road, produced by James Bond mogul Barbara Broccoli. It includes last interviews with the great lady as she approached death, last July, aged 93.
Barbara B has been in love with Edna since her schooldays – just like everyone else. When I once ventured a mildly critical view of Edna’s early novels (beguilingly written, I suggested, but essentially chick lit), I was told, fiercely, that I was just jealous.
Of course I’m jealous! Here’s an honorary dame with talent, beauty, sex appeal, personal letters from Beckett, Pinter, Ted Hughes and Saul Bellow, the admiration of Richard Burton, Jackie Kennedy and Marlon Brando, and a night of romance with Robert Mitchum!
Edna’s life is now an epic and a legend – from simple country lass, rebelling against her primitive and reactionary family, a narrow church and repressive state, to the glossy celebrity of a cosmopolitan, arty life in London and New York, where she was adored by all.
As with all legends, there’s an element of fable. It’s claimed that Edna was seen as a pariah in Ireland at the start of her career. Not quite: the Irish media treated Edna as a star from the 1960s onwards.
Barbara B seems to believe the claim Edna’s books were burned by priests. But exhaustive researches, published in the Irish Times, have found no evidence for this.
In her own memoir, Edna recalls that it was a priest, Father Peter Connolly, who defended her when local women in County Clare called her a trollop (more jealousy!)
In 1965, I was, for a short time, Edna’s secretary and she was a generous, indulgent and warm-hearted person.
She was hopeless with money. She always fell for bad boys. Her rough peasant father proved to be correct about the man she chose to marry, Ernest Gébler (1914-98), who put her through humiliation, a horrible divorce and a wretched custody battle. She had a soft spot for the IRA cause, and compared Gerry Adams to ‘a medieval monk’. She was an intensely fond mother. She was a devotee of champagne and, even on her deathbed, told a friend, ‘Prosecco is the enemy.’ When Barbara Broccoli heard Prosecco was on the menu at her memorial service, she promptly got some Bollinger in.
People are fascinated by Edna’s life because of its epic storyline, but to her, it was her work that counted. And, although I didn’t always appreciate the themes of the novels, I came to see that her short stories are among the best ever written, collected in a volume titled The Love Object.
The applause is deserved.
The Duchess of Sussex tells us one of her favourite hobbies is mah-jong. How delightfully retro! I hear it’s also popular in France.
Mah-jong appears frequently in Somerset Maugham stories of the 1930s, especially those set in the Malay states. These fretful tea-planters and unhappy wives are brought together with a session of mah-jong (and bridge).
A mah-jong revival satisfies my theory that everything eventually comes back into fashion.
Some American states have restored the firing squad as a means of delivering the death penalty – including South Carolina, Oklahoma and Mormonish Utah.
I don’t favour capital punishment but, if it legally exists, the firing squad must count as the most dignified dispatch. It also absolves any one individual of being executioner, since no shooter knows who fired the fatal bullet.
There’s an Irish ballad that extols the valour of death by firing squad: ‘Shoot me like a soldier, do not hang me like a dog.’
I’ve been influenced – again – by Marlene Dietrich, playing a Mata Hari figure facing the firing squad in Josef von Sternberg’s movie Dishonored (1931). Dietrich coolly applies her lipstick, as the commanding officer offers her a blindfold to shield her from the guns. She takes the bandana and slowly wipes the tears from his eyes.
Rather more momentous than being strapped to a prosaic gurney for a euthanasia injection.
To mark this summer commemorating the end of Second World War, a friend took me to the Battle of Britain Memorial site at Capel-le-Ferne, between Dover and Folkestone.
For a location which recalls war’s turbulence, it’s a strikingly peaceful environment: a wide green space atop those white cliffs overlooking the Channel, theatre of all that aerial combat.
On a plain wall are inscribed the names of those young men who gave their lives in the crucial battle that halted the invasion of these islands.
A bench nearby memorialises one squadron leader, Richard McQuillan, who survived, with his radio call, ‘Over Dover, Over.’
Three words expressing the joy of return on a wing and a prayer.
