Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  At the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, 1970s.

  Increasingly I met people in the film world. Leslie Caron was intending to buy the rights of my novel August Is a Wicked Month for herself and Laurence Harvey to star in. One night she asked me to dinner in Montpelier Square, and I found myself seated next to Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando, with an intelligence so quick and lethal, his whole being taut, like an animal, ready to spring. He decided that he would take me home and, to my dismay, dismissed the chauffeur, despite my reminding him that black taxis did not cruise in Putney late at night. We sat in the kitchen, where he drank milk and I drank wine. Another bard. Stories. Of the vengeances he had wreaked on those who had thwarted him, including a judge who had sent him down for reckless motorcycling, and then, in boyish contrast, he spoke with reverence of Stella Adler, the acting teacher who had been his mentor and muse. He was playful and teasing, saying he wanted to ask me a question that I must answer immediately and with the truth. I could not imagine what it might be. I got more and more embarrassed as he teased out the suspense, merely saying in different, emphatic intonations that I must tell the truth. The question when it came was somewhat harmless: Was I ticklish?

  It was a chaste night, as he ruefully confirmed in the letter he would write early the next morning, in the Connaught Hotel, where we went for breakfast. He took a long time puzzling over the words, in which he cast himself as Othello and, for good measure, gave me a spotted handkerchief, though it did not have the emblem of the strawberries. That, and a book by Abbie Hoffman.

  We took a stroll in Grosvenor Square before he left to go to the airport, and quite unexpectedly he asked, “Are you a great writer?” The question, so sudden and daunting, caught me off guard. I did not want to boast, and yet I did not want to belittle myself, so that I heard myself say, “I intend to be.” Nearby there were bucket swings, and he sat me on one and gave me a beautiful, dizzying, headlong push to the longed-for altitudes of language.

  Each Monday morning I would go up to the top of the house to write. There was no connection whatsoever between the two worlds, the dizzy world of the parties and the wrenching world of the work. Then, in a dream, I came to see my divided self. It was still my own kitchen, only much larger, with red emergency bells along the wall, as if it had been converted to a hospital. On the long black stove were the pots of boiling water and shallower pans with hot sizzling goose fat. Without thinking, I picked them up and threw the contents over the throngs of startled, disbelieving guests. The era of parties was drawing to a close.

  On days when I couldn’t write a word, I took to tidying, emptying the hot press, sorting out clothes that the children had grown out of to take to the charity shop, and always I would come upon it, the forbidden cigarette. It so happened that Maurice Girodias had come to Putney to try to encourage me to write a sequel to The Story of O, and on leaving had presented me with the cigarette, suggesting the magic properties it held. This long white cigarette, such as I imagined Aubrey Beardsley smoking, held a fearful fascination for me. What might it do? Set me adrift in rosy nebulous places, or send me down into the fearful seas that I dimly knew I had once been to? I probably exaggerated its potency, but nevertheless I would put it safely back in the scarf and into the drawer. I attended workshops and seminars in search of the transcendental self, and numerous parties where there were people floating, claiming to have lapis lazuli visions and to have touched the navel of wisdom, spouting tosh that passed for real poetry. Deep down, I was afraid of losing whatever stability I had.

  Once, in Philip Dunn’s beautiful farmhouse in Mallorca, to which his daughter Nell had got me an invitation, there was another visitor extolling the alternative life. He was a Dutchman who carried around a veritable cache of drugs, and when I declined, he decided on a more drastic solution. Trepanning. With a Black & Decker drill he wished to bore a hole in the center of my forehead to give me the third eye and the enlightenment that I craved. From that too I fled, though unconsciously I was courting disaster.

  The Sleeve of Saskia

  The morning I had elected to take LSD with Laing was sunny and bright. Yet I had misgivings. It was 6 May 1970; the room was tidied, masses of peony flowers, white and pink, with blood-red spattering, in a big jug, and the river outside a picture of calm and tranquillity. Laing arrived punctually at ten o’clock, wearing a good suit and a collar and tie, which I had rarely seen him wear. I’d been a patient of his for about six months. The sessions, it is fair to say, were unorthodox, and sometimes he talked, and sometimes he would laugh, just quietly to himself. He was an admirer of the psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck, whose methods were equally unorthodox and who extolled the benefits of madness. Getting back to the original source, the family romance, was what mattered, and sometimes he told me some of his own infant memories, fearful figures to the left and right of the cot, an angry mother and his crawling over a mock-parquet linoleum floor. One day I brought a punnet of fresh figs, and he looked at their dark, aubergine skins, then got a knife out and slit them apart. He had us sit on the floor and observe them for the fifty-minute session, the opened figs, with the seeds in the pulp of reddish flesh.

  On that morning in May when he arrived, I felt I should broach the dream I’d had, but at the same time I was hesitant. In it I was a very young girl on the way to school, when I tripped and fell on the road, a sharp stone splitting my forehead open. My brain tumbled out, and took the shape of a spinning top, when presently passersby, young and old, danced and trampled on it. As if that were not warning enough, I had learned from Sean Connery, with whom I had had dinner the previous evening, that his trip with Laing, both being old friends from Scotland, had its freight of terrors. Yet I did not cancel the appointment. It was as if in some way I believed I could go through with it and yet escape the terrible ordeal. My reasons for wanting to take it were multiple. A secret part of me longed to be nearer to Laing, and another part of me believed, from various literature I had read, that my dreams and therefore my writing would be enriched.

  I drank my potion from a glass. I do not recall it having any taste. As I sat there, I remembered that I must ask him to hold me, or at least hold my hand, but as the words came stuttering out, he had suddenly, in that winged armchair, metamorphosed into a rat, an executive rat, trussed inside a suit with a collar and tie. It was my last semi-rational thought on that day. The world was spinning, spinning, and the floor underneath began to sway like the waves of an ocean. I ran to the kitchen to escape it, only to find that it too was swaying and the walls to the touch had become flesh. I went back to the sitting room, where he was dancing, but I declined the invitation to dance with him, falling apart as I was. It went on for hour after hour. I was no longer sitting, I was on the floor, gasping, each onslaught more hideous than that which preceded it. Womb. Blood. Hell. Fire. The wounded pith of an opened fig.

  At one point he picked the huge gilt mirror off the wall and showed me my purple-faced, mad-eyed, gyrating self. I broke water as when I had given birth, cascades of it gushing out of me, and yet I could not feel any damp on the floor that I knelt on. No sense of time or changing light. A garbled account of coming into this world with a memory and a set of despair, and then twice I said, “The edges are splitting on and on, and that you have to die more than once, my mother, my mystery, my little children, I can only bear you.” I was dimly mindful of them in a boarding school in Petersfield, far away, too far away, ever to reach.

  He left some time after that and I was alone, crawling around that room like a wounded animal. I would have liked him to stay. I would have liked him to hold me. I would have liked a biscuit, and I knew exactly the soft ginger biscuit I wanted, except that I could not reach the kitchen, where the tin was kept. I crawled to the telephone, which was on a little table, and attempted to ring Ted Allan. The face of the phone had a metal front, with the lettering and numbers in a recess, and as I tried to dial, it was like dialing into my own gums and it proved beyond me. That was when I cried, end
less tears and an untoward and useless pity for a whole world that I could not get to.

  Respite of sorts reached me. Just before dark, I saw the evening light fade, and as it did, I had intimations of resplendent colors, in the sky, on the river, colors shooting out of my mind, rich and streaming. I was seeing, as I once had in Vienna, Pieter Brueghel’s hunters in the snow, and in that whiteness, the black trunks of the trees and the few crows were blacker still, while two hounds of velvety russet were asking to be stroked. The huntsmen with their spears dwindled in size as they went across a plain, toward the snowy peaks and the unseen gorge between mountain and whey-green sky. Then it was the sleeve of Saskia, the second wife of Rembrandt, as for ceremony, gold and dipping, and I suddenly wished that I had danced with the Rat Man. How long would it take me to get back to where I had been? As long, perhaps, as it had taken me to get there.

  Eventually the doorbell rang and I found myself able to stand, then to walk, in order to answer it. Ted Allan and Sean Connery had come to see how I was faring, and as they later said, they were shocked to find a woman so drastically altered, talking daft, disconnected things and walking as if on stilts. My conversation ranged from bygone memories to snatches of learning, to prescriptions I had made up in the chemist’s shop, to a line of a poem, “O thou lord of life, send my roots rain,” inevitably to the golden sleeves of Saskia. I asked for a biscuit and some red wine. The color of the wine was glorious. From the very meniscus down, I could see bands of different deeper reds, and I drank slowly as if it were nectar. They stayed for a long while, and by the time I went to bed, I was tired in body and in mind, having lived many lives in less than twenty-four hours.

  The aftermath was frightening, as I became somewhat unhinged. Beth came with me to visit the children on the Sunday, and to bring the hampers, she doing most of the talking so that they would not notice the peculiarity in me. Some weeks later, in a shop in Bond Street, buying Hessian boots that were embroidered with daisies, I suddenly saw the yellow stamens stir and the flowers come to life. I, who love theater, could no longer go. In a theater in St. Martin’s Lane I had to vacate my seat almost as soon as I sat down, as the crown of my head was being lifted by swords in order to reach the elaborately carved ceiling.

  The trip to Paris was to countenance these various seizures, but instead it precipitated one. I was with Roger Vadim in his apartment in the rue de Rivoli as we discussed the possibility of doing a remake of Diderot’s The Nun. Jane arrived from a day’s filming with Jean-Luc Godard, but was not her customary wooing self, as she threw down a cardboard box full of oysters and said something dismissive to Vadim.

  It was the next day in my room in the hotel that the hallucinations returned. On my mantelpiece at home in London, I remembered, I had a postcard of the painter Jacob Cornelisz depicting The Adoration of the Christ Child in a brown interior, the browns enriched with motes of gold and angels suspended from the eaves playing trumpets in tribute to the naked infant lying on a wooden trestle; but my visitors were different. It was in L’Hôtel in Paris, once known as Hôtel Alsace, which I had chosen for the fact that Oscar Wilde had died there and had left an unpaid bill. Tiny creatures, spitfires in little bibs, were swinging from every corner of the ceiling and hissing. Mere amoebae at first, they began to swell and multiply. I was doing what I could to evade them. I tried various strategies, reminding myself that in a guidebook I had read that the Eiffel Tower was held together by 2.5 million rivets and 18,000 pieces of metal, and bizarrely I thought of John Berryman in a hotel in Dublin drinking a quart of whiskey a day and trying to finish a poem. Then it was the turn of Salvador Dalí, whom I remembered as being in that same city but in a different hotel, jumping up to the ceiling to squash invading creatures with a towel. From the anteroom, which adjoined the bedroom, in order to give it the category of a suite, a grotesque figure appeared, a man with side whiskers, who lay above me, his whiskers frothed and wet with porter as the trolls in their corners laughed their little lungs out. I thought I was finished and rang a bell, which I found behind the silk pleating of the wall. A doctor was summoned, and it was he who diagnosed the cause of the hallucinations—I’d had a bad oyster. Medicines were got, and having taken them, I crept down into the center of the bed and pulled the quilt up over my eyes to ward off the invaders, whom I imagined to be skulking and muttering.

  I had asked for no visitors to be allowed up, and yet, three times, they were. Marguerite Duras was the first; feeling my forehead and my pulse, she hurried out and went to the pharmacy for suppositories and lime-blossom tea. Peter Brook was next, as we were supposed to be writing a screenplay together. It had a title and a theme, but not much else. It was called Vacant. He had conceived the whole structure of it in images, and on large white sheets of paper there were drawings, a shifting kaleidoscope of ideas that I was too fuddled to grasp, so the meeting ended inconclusively. Then it was Samuel Beckett, no stranger to sickrooms and asylum rooms in his fiction, who opened the mini fridge, took out a miniature of whiskey and a glass, and sat down. It was some time before he asked me what was wrong, and I told him of the weird visitations, followed by the arrival of the two visitors, Marguerite Duras and Peter Brook.

  “Ah, that could do it to you,” he said, and continued in his meditative mode.

  It had grown dark and the objects in the room were indistinct. It was a well-known fact that Beckett did not like too much talk. All his works are littered with the aggravation of the nonstop talkers, the quaquaquas. Finally I ventured to ask what he was writing, to which he replied, “Nothing much, and what use is it anyhow?” Somehow the talk came round to burial places. I told him of my grave on an island in the Shannon, so isolated, with its several churches, roofs opened to the skies, wild birds swooping in and out, tombstones chalked with lichen. He was surprised and wondered if I was going back for a perpetual “dose of disgust.” He may have been remembering the monstrous treatment meted out to James Joyce, whom the authorities and Irish undertakers were so repelled by that his remains were never brought back. I remembered then that shortly after I had met Beckett in 1964, he had sent me a postcard—perhaps it was a manifesto he sent to many—saying he was in Dublin for the last time and had bought a black mourning hat in Elverys. Yet there remained so much of Ireland in him, in his voice, his walk, his stick, and in his writings, “the ruinstrewn land between road and ditch, the dear back roads, the daisies, the sheep, the lambs, the afterbirths,” as he observed them on the mountain walks which he had taken with his father, all that and the silver-voiced hammer of the stonecutters heard in the distance. Not even Synge had captured Ireland with such feeling. I always thought of Jack Yeats, Synge, and Beckett in the same breath, men of kindred spirit, tramps of a noble scion, who literally walked the ground they would enshrine in painting or in language. The very first thing I had ever read of his was in the London Library, on the fourth floor, in that darkish cranny, where by chance I came on a book with reproductions of Yeats’s paintings, a book that I was very tempted to steal. In a brief radiant introduction Beckett had written that the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere and has no kin. I mentioned it and he looked up, pleased, forgetting that he had written it at all, instead remembering the long walks that he and Jack Yeats had in north Dublin, always taking their rest in some quiet pub to ponder. It may seem inappropriate to broach drink concerning such an exigent man, but most of the Irish geniuses, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and many others, were well-known habitués of the tavern, putting their sojourns to sedulous good use.

  It was soundless in that room, except for the squeak of the casters of his chair on a bit of skirting board and chambermaids out on the landing calling peremptorily, yet gaily, to one another. He sat gazing ahead and sometimes up into the corners, where the freaks had earlier shown themselves.

  “No need at all to go back,” he said, with a kind of resignation, and I knew that he could not have written of the ditches and the daisies and the ruinstrewn land unless he had loved it with
such a beautiful, sad, and imperishable loneliness.

  Some months after I returned from Paris, the author Patrick Seale approached me about writing an article for a magazine about the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Blithely I said yes. He pointed out that I would have to renounce my Catholic faith and become a Muslim in order to be allowed to take part, and again I said yes. Yet a dream told a different story. The heavens opened and I saw the bearded face of God, in all His wrath and all His omniscience. He had come to call mankind to account. A battle for the end of the world was being waged. The opposing armies comprised Jewish and Muslim opponents, battalion after battalion wiped out before my very eyes. Eventually they had run out of weaponry, and the improvised weapons became flaps of human flesh, cut up as pastry might be and filled with human blood that mysteriously acquired lethal powers. I was in the Jewish camp, but truth to tell, both sides were equally crazed and equally bloodthirsty. In death they were thrown upon one another in heaps, the very fraternity that appalled them in life thrust upon them in extinction. Just as I entered the front line of battle, I heard a voice, my own or another’s, cry out, “It is not for earthly considerations we fight, we suffer so, it is to catch sight of God.”

  I telephoned Laing for an appointment.

  “What could it be?” I asked him, as I recounted the various terrors and scourges, birth and death and the desert sands of Arabia, where I had never been. He said the trip itself and the subsequent “flashes” were a replay of experiences I had lived long ago and would have to live again. That was how it had to be.