Edna O’Brien was the last great Irish iconoclast

Great Irish literature is defined by dissent. So why do so many writers uphold the status quo?

“Irish poets, learn your trade,” WB Yeats beseeched his contemporaries in his poem “Under Ben Bulben”, written months before his death in January 1939. It is not just a plea, but an argument too: Yeats contends that artistic greatness – immortality, perhaps – could be achieved only through close study of fellow countrymen, acknowledgement of national history, and a willingness to subvert establishment norms. Nearly 80 years on from the poem’s composition, Edna O’Brien – who died on 27 July aged 93 – quoted these same lines at a dinner held in her honour in London in 2019. Adversity, she argued, was the secret to learning the trade.

O’Brien certainly faced plenty of adversity in her career. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was banned by the Irish censorship board and declared “filth” by the then minister for justice, Charles Haughey (who would become taoiseach some 27 years later). A parish priest from O’Brien’s home town was one among many to publicly burn the book. The public responded to O’Brien’s alleged sins – writing female characters who possessed sexual desire, criticising the Catholic mores of 1950s Ireland, taking the first steps of Ireland’s eventual retreat from Rome – with venom.

Of course, only a country fully captured by the papacy could succumb to such moral hysteria, or what O’Brien euphemistically described as “heated discussion”. But this is the Ireland into which O’Brien published The Country Girls – hyper-conservative with stern ideas about female domesticity, where women had only recently been condemned in their thousands to the Magdalene Laundries run by nuns. Divorce was not legal until 1996, abortion not until 2018. In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor – who died last year – took a sledgehammer to her career when she tore up an image of the pope live on American television. Dissent was rare and it was punished.

But it is O’Brien’s iconoclasm that afforded her a deserving place in the Irish canon. The towering figures of Irish literature – Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, JM Synge, Seán O’Casey – shared a dissident sensibility, dogged questioning of the national story, and a disdain for the established order. Both Synge and O’Casey triggered riots with their plays – neither willing to cow to narratives of noble republican sacrifice; Joyce’s Ulysses was banned for obscenity; Yeats cleaved closer to Oscar Wilde as the commanding heights of the country rejected him. They also all in some form wrote about Ireland from outside of Ireland (O’Brien wrote from London). When Yeats entreats his fellow poets to learn their trade, perhaps this is what he means: subversion has always been the beating heart of the Irish intellectual. In a country long – and still – under the cosh of conventional mindedness, these luminaries burned even brighter.

O’Brien understood this. Her truculence in the face of priggish norms, her belief that women were more than auxiliary servants, her insistence to keep publishing in face of such opprobrium (she joked that The Country Girls looks like a prayer book in comparison to the next two in the trilogy) reminds us of the tradition she inherited.

Of course, disrupting the status quo alone does not afford literary greatness. But O’Brien wrote with clarity and levity, prose that is both sparse and imaginative. The spectre of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is evident. And The Country Girls – with its two young female protagonists, who navigate courtship and adolescence – was not just a “quintessential tale of Irish girlhood” in the 1950s; it was a blueprint for it.

There is a looming anxiety that Irish iconoclasm is dying with O’Brien. O’Casey challenged the republican idealism of the early 1900s, and O’Brien the Catholic mores of the middle of the century. Now Ireland has adopted a liberal patina it tells a new story about itself, of a weary and Catholic place transformed by Europe and modernity into a tolerant utopia. Recent riots, violent clashes with police, anti-immigrant agitation and suspected arson attacks on asylum centres suggest that this narrative does not exactly cohere with reality. With the exception of the Booker-winning Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, challenges to the national story are scant in the contemporary Irish canon. The fiction scene is obsessed with sexual politics, tawdry class commentary, and the comedown of the Celtic tiger – all imbued with leftist pieties. These books can be hard to distinguish from one another.

When Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Ulysses, says “non serviam” (I will not serve), he is expressing the thesis statement of the Irish literary realm: there can be no deference to the establishment. Instead, it is the role of the artist to scope out alternative views of history. This is the trade Yeats speaks of. O’Brien – for her moral courage and lucidity, her refusal to cow to a sneering public, and her willingness to tell a different story of Ireland – earned her place in this tradition. There are plenty of contemporary Irish novelists who write into the zeitgeist. But their forebears rallied against it. It is not clear who follows in their wake.