SOURCE: "'That Trenchant Childhood Route'?: Quest in Edna O'Brien's Novels," in Éire-Ireland, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 74-83.

At the close of Mother Ireland, Edna O'Brien defines her aim both as a writer and as a woman:

Ireland for me is moments of its history and geography, a few people who embody its strange quality, the features of a face, a holler, a line from a Synge play, the whiff of night air, but Ireland insubstantial like the goddesses poet dream of, who lead them down into strange circles. I live out of Ireland because something in me warns me that I might stop if I lived there, that I might cease to feel what it means to have such a heritage, might grow placid when in fact I want yet again and for indefinable reasons to trace that same route, that trenchant childhood route, in the hope of finding some clue that will, or would, or could, make possible the leap that would restore one to one's original place and state of consciousness, to the radical innocence of the moment just before birth.

Eleven years before the publication in 1976 of Mother Ireland, Miss O'Brien expressed the same desire—less poetically, it is true—in an interview with Nell Dunn [in Talking to Women]:

… the reason I think on the whole that women are more discontent than men is not just that they get old sooner or that they have the vote, or that they haven't the vote, or that they bleed, but that there is, there must be, in every man and every woman the desire, the deep primeval desire, to go back to the womb. Now physically and technically really … a man partly and symbolically achieves this when he goes into a woman. He goes in and becomes sunken and lost in her. A woman never, ever approaches that kind of security.

The journey back to the state of being before knowledge, to reclaimed innocence, is one Edna O'Brien's heroines have tried to make in each of her eight novels. That the journey is a perilous one, as earlier pilgrims attest. Christian struggles from the City of Destruction through the Slough of Despond, By-Path Meadow, Doubting Castle, and Vanity Fair to the Heavenly Gates of the Celestial City. Though the madness of his sinful love attends his knightly quest, Lancelot glimpses the Holy Grail. Faust experiences the heights and depths of life to discover in a vision of chanty the moment to which he can say, "Stay, thou art so fair." Henry James's Isabel Archers and William Faulkner's Ike McCaslins earn a lost innocence through suffering and endurance. But Miss O'Brien's heroines, pursuing an even course in the early novels, appear to have lost their way.

Reviewing the early novels in the pages of Éire-Ireland [Spring, 1967, pp. 79-80], Seán McMahon noted that the first novel, The Country Girls (1960), established Miss O'Brien "as an important new Irish writer with a fresh, unselfconscious charm, an acute observation of life, and a fine, ribald sense of humor"; the second novel, Girl with Green Eyes (1962), affirmed this reputation; and the third, Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), proved startlingly disappointing. The trilogy, it is true, carries a pair of innocents, Caithleen Brady and Baba Brennan, from their school days in County Clare to divorce and adultery in London. Because the note of ironic disillusion first sounded in Girts in Their Married Bliss grows more strident with each succeeding novel, the reader asks why the journey, the quest for good love, so regularly fails for Miss O'Brien's heroines.

In the first novel of the trilogy, The Country Girls, Caithleen tells the poignant story of the drowning of her adored mother, the brutal rages of her alcoholic father, the stifling conventions of the convent school to which she and Baba are sent. As tender and vulnerable as Baba is malicious and full of swagger, Caithleen seeks the love her mother had provided in a neighbor, the elderly and married Mr. Gentleman, whose qualifications are his sad, chiseled face and his genteel manners. Once Baba has contrived their escape from the convent school to Dublin, Mr. Gentleman proposes a holiday in Vienna with Caithleen. But her first experience of romantic love, as well as The Country Girls, ends with his failure to resist the threats of his wife and Caithleen's father. Wounded but still game, Caithleen in Girl with Green Eyes becomes the mistress of Eugene Gaillard, a director of documentary film, who, like Mr. Gentleman, has a melancholy, sculptured face. Try as she does to be all-in-all to Eugene, she realizes that "Eugene and I were all right alone. But when anyone else came I lost him to them…. I had nothing to talk about really except things about my childhood, and he had heard all of that." The liaison ends less because of the bludgeoning attacks of her father than because of Eugene's contempt for her:

… even in loving him, I remembered … the separated, different worlds that each came from; he controlled, full of reasons and brain, knowing everyone, knowing everything about everything—me swayed or frightened by every wind, light-headed … bred in (as he said …) 'Stone Age ignorance and religious savagery.'

It is Baba, disillusioned with her bar-hopping conquests in Dublin, who engineers the country girls' flight to London.

With Girls in Their Married Bliss the reader, accustomed to Caithleen's lyrical innocence, is jarred to find Baba speaking in her slangy, obscene patois. Sourly she recounts that Caithleen has married the sadistic Eugene; had a son, Cash, whom she cherishes; and despairing of her inadequacy, is being divorced. Baba herself has married a wealthy businessman—stupid, crass, and impotent. The unhappy close to the country girls' siege of London is Baba's pregnancy by a faddist drummer and Caithleen's sterilization to prevent the conception of children with future lovers. "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone"; hereafter, Miss O'Brien's heroines will not look for fulfillment in marriage. As Peter Wolfe comments [in "Husbands and Lovers," Saturday Review, February 17, 1968], Miss O'Brien's subject has become "sex, its dynamics and ethics, and she treats it as a many-sided problem."

And "a jaunt into iniquity" is the phrase Ellen Sage uses to describe her sexual orgy on the French Riviera in August Is a Wicked Month (1965). She is separated from her husband, who, as in Caithleen's experience with Eugene, had taken her "into the fresh pastures of ideas and collective thought and flute music" and lost patience "when she hankered after the proverbs and accordion music and a statute of the virgin hewn from blackthorn wood." Again like Caithleen, she has an adored son of eight, Mark, whose holiday in Wales with his father enables Ellen to emplane for Cannes.

Here, however, the resemblance ends. As Grace Eckley observes in her highly sympathetic monograph Edna O'Brien, "August marks a transition between the heroine's earlier quest for self-development through marriage with a hero and the later knowledge that such is impossible. That dream was almost relinquished in Girls and was retained only in the ideal of a lover in August." A tone of self-pitying rancor replaces Caithleen's Irish rhythms as Ellen acts out her conflict between the Roman Catholic teachings of her youth and her rebellious libertinism. On the one hand, she is "a great believer in punishment"; "people," she says, "get what they deserve." On the other hand, she clings to her defiant conviction that "slipped in between the catechism advocating chastity for women was the secret message that a man and a man's body was the true and absolute propitiation." When, during her debauches, word comes from her husband that Mark has been killed by a speeding motorist, Ellen feels that she has killed her son. If she had not left her husband, she would have been holidaying with him and Mark and would have prevented the accident. Numb with guilt, bored and disappointed in her lovers, she finds she has contracted a venereal infection from Bobby, a Hollywood actor. Returning to London and nothing, she regards her "punishment" as just. "You know what I want," she tells an earlier lover, "To cease to be me … I want to love someone other than myself." "It is your Roman Catholicity," he responds.

Like August Is a Wicked Month, Casualties of Peace (1966) appears to be a transition between the artless candor of the early novels and the overt sensuality of the later ones. The most appealing of Miss O'Brien's heroines, Willa McCord is not only a disillusioned victim of male sadism, like Caithleen and Ellen, but also a terrified one. Twenty-six and virginal, she has escaped her husband, Herod—Herod of the "long-suffering icon face, his forehead high and pale, lineaments fixed in thought, an expression of pity that turned out to be merely self-pity." Her escape is dual. First, it is a profession, work in glass, for "glass is not human … does not endure," like her horror-ridden dreams and memories. Second, it is the peace of a home with a young Irish housekeeper, Patsy, whose speech and exploits are very like Baba's, and her husband, Tom, a factory-worker and handyman.

What Willa forgets, both in her studio and at home, is that she and Patsy are women and thus in need of love. She has permitted herself to love only a neighbor's nine-year-old son. Then Auro, a direct lineal descendant of Bobby in the previous novel, comes to purchase one of Willa's glass works for his wife. Patiently and tenderly he cracks her glass image of herself. At home, Patsy becomes pregnant by Ron, a fellow she met at a bar, and determines to leave Tom for him. The plot, as contrived as the symbolism of glass and color is clogged, centers about a white fur coat with irregular black patches. Auro, a Jamaican Negro, gives it to Willa, who lends it to Patsy as consolation for Ron's disappearance and Tom's murderous rage at his wife's infidelity. Agreeing to go to a hotel until Willa has dismissed Tom, Patsy returns the coat to Willa. Wearing it, Willa goes to her assignation with Auro. But Tom does not leave; instead, he plots Patsy's murder by strangulation. It is, of course, Willa who returns home at dusk in the coat and is strangled. Willa's recurrent nightmare of her murder and her belief that she is fit only for a coffin have been realized. At the close of the novel, Patsy gives Auro the letters Willa had written and not sent him. Reading Willa's account of Herod's impotence and masochism, Auro comes to understand how Willa saw herself as distorted, like the sheets of colored glass in which she worked.

Of her next novel, A Pagan Place (1970), Edna O'Brien told David Heycock [in "Edna O'Brien Talks to David Heycock about Her New Novel, A Pagan Place," The Listener, May 7, 1970]:

I wanted this time … to get into the kingdom of childhood. I wanted to get the minute-to-minute essence of what it is when you're very young, when you're both meticulously aware of everything that's going on around you and totally uncritical … And of course the only place I could set it is in Ireland where all my associations, all my dreams and all my experience is…. I was brought up very much on mythology and folk-tales, and on verse, and I wanted, as I always do, to write an extremely non-literary book.

A Pagan Place is told by an Irish child—called only "you"—who records the impressions of her youth and who tells the story of her parents' shame at her sister Emma's easy virtue and illegitimate pregnancy. Seen from a little sister's point of view, Emma becomes a dull wanton, lacking the touching bravado that redeemed Caithleen's Baba and Willa's Patsy. Since her plight fails to interest, except as it partially motivates the child narrator to elect the vocation of nun, the reader turns to the child's impressions and her sensibility. Here the novel is not "extremely non-literary," for it resembles an unstructured, diluted Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. There are the violent politics of the father, who "burnt the house rather than let the Black and Tans occupy it as a barracks"; the peace-making of the mother, whose suffering stabs the heart of the child; the quarrel on Christmas Day; the bewilderment of the child that a single word can mean more than one thing; the experience of sex; the vision of hell, "the tongues of flame touching every part of you"; and the mortification of all the senses as penance. With such Joycean echoes are the familiar O'Brien characters, anecdotes, and phrases. There are the father given to bouts of drinking; the dearly loved mother; the faithful hired hand, this time named "Ambie," not "Hickey," as in the trilogy; the adored young priest; the school mistress of flaming temper. There are the incidents of the horse the father bet on, which "stood up to shit and is shitting still," and the bus-driver who got out to "pay-pay, getting the word for pee-pee wrong." And there is the lyrical rhythm of the child narrator's yearning for home with the "crushed stone in a field, and the wind, and the way it touched you on the face and the cattle too, an accompaniment to everything," as well as the usual comment of the girl's seducer: "I could go through you like butter."

Like A Pagan Place, Night (1972) derives from Joyce: from the long soliloquy of Molly Bloom in the final pages of Ulysses. It is the repetitious and bawdy reminiscence of an aging Irish floozy, Mary Hooligan, hired as caretaker by a couple during their absence from London. During one long night in their fourposter, she reveals a personal history already familiar to O'Brien's reader. Only the names are new: the beloved mother and the deeply feared father, here Lil and Boss; the malicious best friend, here Madge rather than Baba or Patsy; the sadistic husband, here Dr. Flaggler, not Eugene or Herod; a son, Tutsie, about whom, as with Caithleen's Cash, Ellen's Mark, and Willa's nine-year-old, Miss O'Brien writes her most winningly; the Irish tinker woman who stole a pair of shoes; and the series of lovers whose sexual preferences are graphically described.

Consequently, critical opinion of Night and Mary Hooligan varies sharply. Stanley Kauffman remarks tolerantly [in "Women of Worlds Apart," World, January 30, 1973]:

There seems little reason to doubt that O'Brien is still producing (largely) confessional fiction, tricked out with a deliberately transparent persona. The style has changed from impudent charm and wide-eyed mischief to lyrics of the loins, laced with a warmly cherished sense of disillusion … It would have been false and precious for her heroines to have remained the Caithleen of the first book; that is not the argument. But it would have been tedious by now to follow her bed stands except that she has some humor and some insight … and she is subject to fits of really good writing.

Dr. Eckley also regards the seven novels as conveying a personal odyssey, but she finds in Mary Hooligan "the creation of a fully integrated personality." The clash between ego, represented by the sensitive and inadequate Caithleen-character, and alter ego, depicted in the extroverted and aggressive Baba-character, is resolved into a harmonious whole in Mary. "This," writes Dr. Eckley, "is the achievement of Mary Hooligan in Night, where the country past impinges on the city present, and religion, the ex-husband and the near friend converge through dramatic rumination." The O'Brien heroine, now mature, faces independence and the consequent loneliness with integrity. Conversely, Charles Lam Markmann takes a harsh view of Night [in "Nothing Above the Belt?," The Nation, May 14, 1973]:

If a lesser author had written Night, one would never have bothered to read it through. But Miss O'Brien is a novelist of many gifts, including poetry and comedy and compassion: that is why the reader keeps the presumption of innocence alive by forced feeding to the very end, and why he then feels so frustrated and cheated…. The reasons for the book's failure may be indeed more interesting than the book. Is it conceivable that the vein has been mined out? Is it possible that virtually nothing new can be thought or said about the emptiness of lives that are just plain empty? Is it thinkable that there are really subjects that not even the finest writer can bring to life because there is simply nothing there? Apparently, yes.

Conceivably, Miss O'Brien would say, "Apparently, no," for she sees her subjects as inherent in an Irish heritage, not peculiar to her individual experience:

Loneliness, the longing for adventure, the Roman Catholic Church, or the family tie that is more umbilical than among any other race on earth? The martyred Irish mother and the raving rollicking father is not peculiar to the works of exorcised writers but common in families throughout the land. The children inherit a trinity of guilt (a Shamrock): the guilt for Christ's Passion and Crucifixion, the guilt for the plundered land, and the furtive guilt for the mother frequently defiled by the insatiable father. [Mother Ireland]

Though she does not include the husband or lover of the pensive, delicately carved features, she does admit to attraction to a "Peter Abelard face." Reflecting upon the many descriptions in the novels and in Mother Ireland of the Christ of the Sacred Heart, the reader can but speculate that He is the physical archetype of the men with whom the O'Brien heroines relentlessly fall in love. Miss O'Brien's reply to Suzanne Lowry's question about the genesis of Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) lends support to the conjecture. "The idea came," Miss Lowry reports [in "Edna We Hardly Knew You," Limerick Evening Press, July 20, 1977], "from seeing a friend of her son in a play who seemed the stuff from which saints are made." Nora, the narrator, likens Hart, who is a college friend of her son and her lover, to a saint, to St. John of the Cross, to Michelangelo's David, and to Christ.

In prison, awaiting sentence for the murder of Hart, Nora, the middle-aged monologist, ponders her motives for suffocating the boy when, during their lovemaking, he suffered an epileptic fit and cried wordlessly for help. One reason, she realizes, was to revenge herself on her mad, drunken father, "scion of all fathers, who soiled my mother's bed, tore her apart, crushed her and made her vassal" on the brutal husband who "had threatened that if I did leave I would find myself committed to an asylum"; on her son toward whom she feels "incest raising its little tonsured head"; and on her lovers, whose faithless promises were "the real villains of affection." It was also to avenge all "us Gerties, us Nancies, us Delias, us Kittys, us Kathleens" upon "men the stampeders of our dreams." These reasons are not inclusive for Nora. True, in Hart she killed the image of all men, but why Hart, mere surrogate for her son? Why had she not killed her father, her husband, her earlier lovers? The answer comes with her recall of the actual murder:

He begged for help, with the worst, the most humiliating, the most craven, the needful beg, and undoubtedly I saw my own begging famished self-reflected in him, and I took the pillow from under the bed cover, placed it across his contorted face, pressed with all my might, and held it there until he went quiet as a baby, whose breath is almost inaudible.

In Hart, then, she tried to murder her self-image: the image of a middle aged woman so lonely and so lacking in resources as to consider sensitive-looking boy half her age as her last chance at life.

Of Johnny I Hardly Knew You, Anatole Broyard wryly comments [in "One Critic's Fiction: I Hardly Knew You," New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1978]: "The title of the novel is intended as a rueful irony, addressed to the young man who is its love object; but I'm afraid that I hardly knew him either and I see no reason to regret his demise. I'm more perplexed by the fact that the heroine could get worked up enough to kill him." Nor is Hart's the only minimal characterization; the other persons about whom Nora soliloquizes—mother, father, husband, son, lover—are those of the previous novels thinly apostrophized. Equally disappointing is Nora's characteristic style of expression, even more slipshod than Mary Hooligan's, as in such errors as "pertaining to be" for "purporting to be," "origined" for "originated," "like" for "as if," and "but blood nor water carry no issue." Such flaws, however, are insignificant beside the despairing, and distorted, focus of the novel: the search for self-fulfillment ends in self-destruction.

The quest for "radical innocence" has taken a tortuous route for Miss O'Brien's heroines. Caithleen and Baba of the early trilogy looked for and failed to discover it in marriage. Disillusioned with marriage, Ellen of August Is a Wicked Month sought it in a festival of sex and found only boredom and despair. In Casualties of Peace, Willa's efforts to overcome her dread of sex, marital and extramarital, resulted in her death. And Mary Hooligan of Night, divorcée and many times mistress? Surely the murderess Nora of Johnny I Hardly Knew You, a novel written after Dr. Eckley published her monograph, dissipates the theory that, in Mary Hooligan, the O'Brien heroine attained to maturity. In undertaking the journey to earned innocence, Miss O'Brien's heroines select one route only: sex. They never consider the professions, social service, art and music, politics, travel. Willa, it is true, works in glass, but less as a craft or art than as a defense; and Nora, who restores paintings, does so only for a livelihood. A monomaniacal lot, these women reject all of life but sex. Indeed, in greedily defying an incest taboo, Nora rejects life. Unless a future heroine plots the journey afresh, she must continue to record not "that renchant childhood route … to one's original place," but a tedious sojourn in decadence and despair.