IT IS nearly 50 years since Edna O'Brien's debut novel The Country Girlswas published, but the allure of this most enduring of Irish women writers remains as strong as ever.
Fans queued for more than an hour to hear O’Brien round off a successful Dublin Book Festival with an audience in the council chamber at City Hall. Fittingly, she sat on the raised dais of the chairman’s seat like a monarch presiding over a packed court.
Novelist and playwright Éilis Ní Dhuibhne introduced O’Brien by quoting Philip Roth who described her as the “best woman writer in the world”.
The preternaturally youthful O'Brien, who looks about three decades younger than her 78 years, reminded the audience that her earliest days were "quite a while ago" and that the £50 advance for her first nove l The Country Girlsin 1958 was "like gold to me".
She described The Country Girls, which caused something of a scandal at the time, as an "elegy for the life I had, even though that life was not that happy".
She spoke extensively of her mother as a strong-willed, dominant, judgmental woman whose good points outweighed the bad, but who felt that all literature “reeked of sin”.
"She had a point," said O'Brien. She read from her 2006 novel The Light of Eveningwhich features the relationship between mother and daughter.
When Ní Dhuibhne suggested the novel did not get the attention it deserved, O’Brien replied with a quotation from Lord Byron: “A man should calculate his powers of resistance before embarking on a literary life.”
O’Brien mused that women had made great progress, but suffered from a “Cinderella Syndrome” and could be cruel to each other.
Ní Dhuibhne cited a review in the Observerof The Light of Eveningwhich said O'Brien was "playing an old tired tune badly in one of Dublin's cheesier Irish pubs". O'Brien's response to this was: "One can never crumble under attack."
She cited Charlotte Bronte's classic novel Jane Eyre, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov as her greatest influences.
She finished with a poem she has written called Watching Obama, about having observed the new President of the United States since he first appeared at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
O’Brien’s conversation, which was sponsored by The Irish Times, was the last event in the festival which saw more than 5,000 people pass through City Hall over the weekend.
On Saturday the bid to make Dublin the Unesco City of Literature was formally announced.
UCD academic Eibhlín Evans, who is writing the final draft of the application, said there was a “conviction” that Dublin should be a City of Literature given the weight of tradition it has, but that it was “not a foregone conclusion”.
She said such a designation would “seal Dublin’s identity” as a city of literature.
At a discussion on the future of Irish publication, Michael O’Brien, who runs one of Ireland’s biggest publishing houses, the O’Brien Press, said there was a need for a national book policy in co-operation with writers and publishers, but also with the Government.
He said it was an imperative for the Arts Council, which gives a third of its revenues to theatre, to increase the level of money it gives to publishing, currently at 9 per cent of its budget.
Brandon/Mount Eagle publisher Steve MacDonagh said there was a need for a strategy for the industry which would involve both Enterprise Ireland and the IDA.
In a discussion on the future of Irish poetry, poet Theo Dorgan said many Irish writers such as Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Roddy Doyle and John Montague had forecast how the obsession with material wealth would eventually lead to the present economic situation.
He said Irish writers had shown a “grand refusal” to go down the “cul de sac into which we were blithely marching where money and values driven by money were the key determinants in our national identity . . . The humane values of the imagination and the humane memory of who we had been had been neglected.
“The truth is that it is the literary presses as much as the writers who have done more than their fair share of keeping a vision of a humane, humanistic, visionary Ireland alive among us.”
He called on the public to resist any attempts to cut the funding to the Arts Council as our “core cultural identity is the most important thing of all”.
