The Country Girl
May 6 2013


She was a beauty
with flaming hair, fierce blue eyes
a famous blush,
who defied her elders
danced, did drugs,
chose her lovers
on impulse, lust.

And who persists
in gradations of grey,
as if a ghostly apparition
had wandered into the frame
and was snapped.
Unnaturally still
for a woman who lived so fast,
was never black and white.
So we can peruse, at leisure,
reading-in a life
of colour, and depth,
what went before
might have, after.
A reflection, perhaps
less of her, than us.

When the cause of death
is old age,
we forget they once were young.

That in retrospect
future generations
will see us as contemporaries,
not notice, or care
who came early, who came late
to the same shared century.

Forget
that in the vast history
of life on earth
we flicker, instantly
in-and-out.
That the presumption of youth
who are immortal,
the invisibility of the old
who feel no older
are mere conceits,
the narcissism
of the living,
repeatedly coming of age.

So I am grateful,
her voice still fresh
in the writing she left

to posterity.
While her exhausted body
will not wait long
for us,
who will soon arrive
like unexpected guests
at one of her fabulous affairs.


There was a terrific column about the author Edna O'Brien in The Globe and Mail this weekend. (I've copied it below; which is probably an infringement of copyright, if such a thing applies to obscure blogs).

The piece reminded me of the narcissism of youth, the solipsism of generations, our patronizing attitude to the elderly. After all, it doesn't take much of a long term view to realize that we are all contemporaries, despite the self-absorption of youth, the invisibility of old age. This is what I mean by "the narcissism/ of the living": in 100 years, all of us -- from newborn to centenarian -- will all be gone, replaced by billions more who -- like us -- feel themselves at the centre of the universe, as if they were exempt from the fate of all who came before; who see their predecessors as 2-dimensional figments, and those to follow as merely hypothetical. So we distance ourselves: unable to identify with ancestors who persist, at best, in faded black and white pictures; unable to appreciate that our shared humanity transcends generations.

I also thought about the power of the still photograph: the archaic impression we get from sepia, or black and white; and the evocative power of seeing life in this unnatural state of fixation -- the reading-in, the implication -- that probably says as much about the viewer as the subject. Since McLaren never mentions a photograph, perhaps I was thinking of that formal author picture that appears on every dust cover. Or perhaps it was just the way she brought this woman to life, like injecting colour into black and white: taking someone who was just a name to me, who I knew was an old woman, and who must have written vintage and very proper books; then bringing her to sudden life in the most unexpected way. And probably also because I had just read another feature in the same section of the paper, which was about two celebrated photographers: the Brazilian Sebastiao Selgado, who works in brilliant black and white, and whose photographs reminded me what a surprisingly epic and eternal quality black and white confers; and the Canadian Edward Burtynsky, whose large format works are full colour, and breath-taking in their monumental scope. The Selgado photographs are of the natural world, untouched; but they seem almost other-worldly in their power. Black and whit pictures really arrest my eye in a way that colour can't. There is an analogy here in poetry, where less is almost always more.

So when we see old photographs, we not only see -- and imagine -- more than there is, but the old fashions and black and white format distance us even further. It is only when a fine write like Leah McLaren brings someone to life -- as she does here with Edna O'Brien -- do we find ourselves identifying with someone so much older than ourselves; and then reflecting on how absurd to have entertained the notion that a few decades could have made that much difference in a life.

The line "...repeatedly coming of age" tries to get at something we all feel as we age: how deceptive is our exterior; how we seem to get fixed on a certain age -- usually late teens or early twenties -- and in our interior lives never feel older than that. This is something I think we will all experience: looking into a mirror, and wondering who that old geezer staring back could possibly be!

The title of McLaren's column (just below) refers to the recent HBO series Girls. Lena Dunham is the precocious young talent who stars, writes, directs, and produces. I love Girls (which may seem strange, for a man, who is middle aged, and has nothing to do with Brooklyn!) The conflation of Dunham and O'Brien reminds me even more how everything old is new again: a useful cliché, that probably sums up the poem as well as anything more original and profound.

One more note. If you never realized that the writer's life is one of envy, then I feel obliged to confess that I wish it had been me, instead of Leah McLaren, who wrote: "clanged like a recess bell in my teenage brain." Nice!!


The Lena Dun­ham of Her Time

LEAH McLAREN (lm­claren@globe­and­mail.com)
The Globe and Mail
4 May, 2013

When I was a girl, I wanted to grow up to be just like the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien – or at least how I imagined her to be. Her 1960 novel, The Country Girls, clanged like a recess bell in my teenage brain, ringing in my first adult notions of life and love and longing. Lena Dunham and her kicky gang of Brooklyn neurotics can thank Kate and Baba, O’Brien’s emancipated 1950s Irish convent girls set free in the big city, for inventing the genre they now so anxiously inhabit: clever girls gone wild.

O’Brien, whose wonderful autobiography Country Girl was just published in Canada this week, wasn’t just a pioneer. She also paid dearly for her home truths. Her books were banned in Ireland, her local Catholic parish burned copies in a bonfire, and her family was publicly shamed. O’Brien’s husband, on reading her first manuscript, spoke the words she describes as “the death knell of an already ailing marriage – ‘ You can write and I will never forgive you.’ ” Her mother later disowned O’Brien for refusing to send her own children to Catholic school. In short, she got her lusted-after literary fame and sexual freedom, but she also paid the price.

It’s easy to forget the social sacrifices made by women writers of O’Brien’s generation. They weren’t just breaking boundaries “to make a splash”; they were risking social exclusion and, in some cases, their sanity (see Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath for details) to make a point we now take very much for granted: that young women should, within reason, be allowed to speak, behave and – most crucially – have sex in whatever way they wanted.

O’Brien certainly did that in the end. She is now in her early 80s and still writing the luminous sentences for which she became famous. It took her a while to escape the clutches of her first and only husband and later regain custody of her young sons; but by the late sixties, she was living in a mansion in swinging Chelsea, writing bestselling novels, hit West End plays, and screenplays with Peter Brook. Her parties were legendary, and she writes about them with the innocent enthusiasm of a wideeyed interloper who makes name-dropping a pleasure.

Over those wild years, she played host to a fantastically bizarre mix of inebriated notables, including Judy Garland, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Richard Burton and her close friend Sean Connery. A flamehaired beauty, she was heavily pursued by many (Paul McCartney, Marlon Brando, and Burton among them) and ended up in bed with more than a few (most notably Robert Mitchum).

She tried everything – drugs; interpretive dancing; even dropping acid with the original celebrity shrink, R.D. Laing. But beneath all this taboo-busting revelry lurked the lingering effects of her religious upbringing. Single and heartbroken from a love affair at 40, she received a letter from her mother imploring her to “never bother again with men outside of meeting them in everyday life or for work. I pray for you, and each day of life, I go down on my knees and ask Christ that you remember the words of St. Paul, ‘Flee fornication.’ ”

O’Brien is one of the great talents and rule breakers of her generation, a woman who knew everyone and was loved by the literary public in turn. My own encounter with the author some years ago was so spontaneous and surprising, it could almost be an anecdote from one of her early novels.

Ten years ago, when I first moved to London, I went on a date at the Chelsea Arts Club. From the moment I sat down with the sour, humourless man – a complete stranger, as the date was a set-up – I knew it was going to be an excruciating evening. Sipping my cocktail, I debated what to do, and when it was my turn to go to the bar for more drinks, I panicked. I turned to a handsome, jolly-looking chap at the bar. “Listen,” I said, “I’m on a terrible date and I need to get out of it, so will you pretend to be my long-lost friend?”

The words weren’t out of my mouth before the man was throwing his arms around me and buying me a drink. I wriggled out of my date, and my saviour and I ended up having dinner. He turned out to be Sasha, Edna O’Brien’s younger son. When I told him that his mother was one of my favourite authors – and had recently been the answer to a trivia question at at quiz at my local pub (“Which author believed August is a wicked month?”) – he laughed out loud. We became friends and kept in touch.

One day he texted to ask if he could come to my quiz night, which I found strange (it was a skeezy pub in a not very fashionable part of London). But when he arrived with his mother in tow – a regal woman in her 70s wearing a fabulous purple velvet coat dress – the entire pub fell silent, then burst into applause. She was charming and witty, with a good head for trivia.
In other words, exactly the sort of woman I’d like to grow up to be.

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