Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary portrait of the author Edna O’Brien is a reminder that most writers – most people, in fact – don’t have lives anywhere near as exciting or fulfilling as hers. The film, with diary entries read by Jessie Buckley, shows us that O’Brien was always a witty, generous and good-humoured interviewee over the years; this film includes an extended interview with the author herself just before her death last year at the age of 93, in which she speaks with a softly sibilant but beautiful voice, her natural prose-poetry never deserting her.
This film really does have a staggering story to tell. As a young woman in rural Ireland, Edna O’Brien ran away with writer Ernest Gébler, a glamorous but authoritarian figure; their unmarried cohabitation so outraged everyone that he took her away to England where they got married and had two children. Her runaway success with her first novel The Country Girls in 1960 infuriated religious opinion in Ireland, and also Gébler, who appeared to go mad with envious rage; he became a grotesque abuser, harassing and menacing Edna and even scribbling sneering taunts in her diary.
Incredibly, in those days O’Brien was obliged to sign over her royalty cheques to her husband, who allowed her small amounts of “housekeeping” money. Finally, she refused; Gébler grabbed her by the throat and demanded her submission. In her diaries she records she said: “Yes … yes …” and O’Shea allows us to absorb the ironic similarity to Joyce’s Molly Bloom. They divorced and the children said they wanted to live with Edna – which triggered another breathtaking outburst of spite from Gébler, unforgivably targeted at the children themselves.
As for O’Brien, her work continued on a book-a-year basis in an age when literary novelists were commercially viable, and a hugely lucrative Hollywood deal (writing the racy comedy Zee and Co with Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor) allowed O’Brien to buy a smart Chelsea townhouse. Ironically, it had been Gébler’s own Hollywood deals which had probably allowed him to take his young family away to England.
As the 60s wore on into the 70s, Edna had fashionable parties and affairs with unattainable and undeserving men, including a British politician who is not named. Denunciation turned occasionally to mockery of the sort that male writers didn’t receive. Kingsley Amis had praised her (like O’Brien, he had a fondness for putting the word “girl” in the title) although the film doesn’t mention Martin Amis’s sly digs in his own debut novel The Rachel Papers.
O’Brien also dabbled with LSD and psychoanalysis with RD Laing, she experienced a creative drought, loneliness, depression, but returned with fiction that vigorously engaged with Northern Ireland and Bosnia, vibrant to the end. The film speaks to Walter Mosley, Anne Enright and Andrew O’Hagan who talk insightfully about her work, and perhaps most touchingly of all with her sons Carlo and Sasha Gébler. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging study.
