Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Being as I was from the “old country,” he listed the several blends of Irish whiskey in the Plaza cocktail cabinet, and how agreeably the time would pass, listening to music, sipping our cocktails, and getting to know one another. He was so close to me now that I could see the lettering engraved on the gold medallions that hung on his dark chest. The whole experience, he could promise, would be etched in my mind forever. It was on the word “etched” that I got shaky. I made for the door and he followed. We were now outside, his voice barely audible, because in the adjoining doorway a man with cats and a litter of kittens, whose station it was, was holding up a cardboard sign alerting passersby to his pitiful circumstances.

  I was sometimes invited to do readings in different states across America.

  In a revolving restaurant in Duluth, I saw that it was snowing outside, and I felt like someone trapped inside a paperweight. “I will never get out of Duluth,” I said to myself, and I watched the traffic down below, seeming to go at a snail’s pace, crawling, as it were, along the several lanes, the headlights so wan. Bob Dylan had left Duluth just as Scott Fitzgerald had left the wheaten steppes of Minnesota, though he modeled Gatsby on a local tycoon who built the railroads joining the Great Lakes with the Pacific Ocean.

  I had been invited to give a reading in a college that was a few miles outside the town, the invitation so beguiling that I found it difficult to decline. Reality was different. Duluth and its big lakes were for oceangoing vessels and not for me. Earlier that day I had had a walk down Main Street, a main street with its sad, sullen aspect, like main streets all over the world. In the porch of a church, along with various flyers, there was an announcement for a song competition, the winning prize being a trip for two to New York to see the musical Anything Goes. There was the Red Bull Inn, from which not a single sound emitted, and, farther along, a queue of men waiting to give blood, for which they would receive a stipend of two dollars a pint. I pitied them, just as I knew that they would despise me for my pitying of them. They wore wadded jackets, quiet men, dour men, the kind of men Bob Dylan would write a great, lonely lyric about.

  Something had happened after my reading that unnerved me.

  I kept being told that it was “outstanding,” and the word circulated in the room where a party was being held. It was very genial. The women wore long skirts and sensible shoes, and there was a selection of salads and dips, along with white wine and mulled red wine in a jug. I was drinking the red wine when an eager young student asked me why I had been so unforgiving of my mother in my fiction, and lo, the glass of red wine literally floated out of my hand and I no longer felt outstanding. I can still see the little crimson puddle on a white rug. A message from beyond.

  Up there in that revolving room, I thought of all the writers who had written about snow: Nabokov’s snow-smothered estates, Hemingway’s evocation of the creaks that the skis made up in the Austrian ski slopes, John McGahern’s drops of blood on a wounded owl, dragging a steel trap across snows, and Sylvia Plath’s line “The snow has no voice,” except that it had: it was telling me, as it castled beyond the several panes of window, that I would never get out of Duluth. Four days later I did.

  It is true to say that on my trips away from New York I felt somewhat stranded. In Los Angeles, where I had gone to meet producers who had taken an option on my short story “Paradise,” I was more or less confined to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking the odd stroll in their tropical gardens. I received large bouquets of flowers, but met nobody, and in the adjoining bungalow a man with a loud voice would ring his stockbroker in New York very early each morning and give a bawling out to the person at the other end of the line.

  My forays into the film world were intermittent. In 1963, after I had left my husband, I had worked with Desmond Davis on Girl with Green Eyes and found it so happy and congenial that I used to walk up Curzon Street in the evening, looking forward to the next day’s collaboration. Sometime after, I was invited to do a brief stint of rewriting on a film in Rome, with the director Damiano Damiani. Our method of working was this: I would write each day, and each evening he would come to the Hassler Hotel, having read the previous day’s work, and in a charming but resigned way, he would hand me back the pages and say, “I think it is an herror.” Eventually, in that same lobby, the producer called me aside to say that my services were no longer required and my successor was being escorted to the table where I had just sat.

  For the adaptation of Andrea Newman’s Three into Two, directed by Peter Hall, in which Claire Bloom, with beautiful restraint, played the deceived wife, Frances, I worked with the American producer Julian Blaustein. Each morning, when I arrived at his flat in Chesham Place in London, he would hold up a white card, always with the same perplexed question: “What is the motivation of Frances’s vagina?” I didn’t have an answer.

  It was in London one bright, solitary Saturday evening that a surprise call came from John Huston, whom I had not seen or heard from for at least ten years. There he was, with that inimitable, persuasive voice, inviting me to Puerto Vallarta to work with him on a script. I was jubilant. It was a novel by A. E. Ellis called The Rack, and there, in the heat of Mexico, I would hope to construct love scenes set in a sanatorium in the deep snows of Switzerland. The script sessions went well, and Huston was full of praise at first for scenes that I had written. He would arrive each morning about eleven, like a high priest, in a long white tunic shirt, coughing on the stairs. He was followed by his dog Don Diego. From the maid, Lupa, I knew that Don Diego could tear a person to pieces. At the canine school to which he went, Don Diego had been taught certain key words, which when spoken were the cue to go for the jugular. It was not always easy to concentrate on script matters, seeing Don Diego’s rhubarb gums and dark molars, knowing that if, by the merest fluke, I uttered one of those key words, I would be a goner. Not that I could mention it. Huston loved animals and only respected people who also loved animals. “Honey, I can’t stand cowards” was a refrain I heard many times.

  Things went well for the first month, although I almost expired in the heat and was covered with various creams and sprays to ward off the mosquitoes. I had been relieved of all my possessions, so that my wardrobe for the remaining ten weeks was scant, not that it mattered.

  For his birthday that August I had managed, with what I might only call clairvoyance, to find the only two bottles of Dom Pérignon in all of Puerto Vallarta. Huston came with his much younger girlfriend, Mariella, and it proved to be one of those enchanted nights. He was at his most expansive, as he talked and reminisced, recalling his affection for certain actors, but especially Bogey and his father, Walter Huston, calling him “Dad, Dad” with the sentiments of a young man. He talked too of the house in Ireland, St. Clarens, and the Galway hunts, the paintings of Juan Gris, and the first time he saw Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Sometime later he began to reverse his opinion of the script, vehemently and relentlessly. Scenes that he had admired, he now hated. Dialogue that he had said was written “only by a spirit” was now useless. “What is this, honey, what is this half-baked rubbish?” he would ask, and I became so unsure, so certain of my own failure, that I could not tell if “Hello” was a good line or a disastrous line. After he left each day around lunchtime, I would indulge in a bit of weeping. Lupa asked why I was crying. In halting Spanish I said I was crying for home and for my children and for roses. It sounded somewhat pretentious, but my vocabulary was limited. The next morning she arrived with three roses that she had stolen from some garden on her way to work. Three roses, wilting in the heat. We put them in a tumbler of water, and when Huston came for yet another tense session, he noticed them, saw their depleted condition, and asked, “Which of these is you, honey?” I pointed to the most limp of the three, at which he chuckled and said, “Oh my my, you do yourself a disservice, I think you’re that one.” His voice was low and conducive as he picked another rose, only to see the petals fall one by one in his hand with the whiteness o
f milk. Four more blistering weeks to go.

  The film was never made. I learned that the Hollywood moguls were livid when he showed them the script, and I felt ashamed that I had let him down. Yet the last time we talked he was magnanimous. Even though he was ill, he was filled with excitement, preparing to shoot Joyce’s The Dead, for which his son Tony had written the script and which his daughter Anjelica would star in. No longer the White Hunter with the Black Heart, as Peter Viertel had called him, but a Prospero, who had chosen for his last work Joyce’s tender elegy on death.

  It was December 2009 when my play Haunted opened at the 59th Street Theatre in New York. Critics in England had been enthusiastic about it, and I somehow looked forward to the same reception. It was not to be. I had wakened very early in my hotel, waiting for the good news. By eight o’clock and feeling jittery, I rang my friend Marilyn Lownes, who was giving me a birthday party that evening. Upon hearing the first few disappointing and damning adjectives, I asked her to go no further. The newspaper, as I well knew, had been delivered around six, and was on the outside doorknob in a plastic folder, but I felt disinclined to open it. Having heard the verdict, I picked it up, went down the corridor to the quarters where the staff worked, and found the double doors ajar. In there was the hum of various fridges, large vacuum cleaners, and trolleys piled with breakfasts half-eaten that had big white napkins folded over them, as might a corpse. It contrasted lamentably with the neatness of the corridors, the plush carpeting, the tall flowers that had to live in a sort of twilight zone, and the unoffending soulless pictures along the walls. A young man, whom I recognized as the surly one who constantly checked the mini-bar, showed slight offense at my having barged in there and was at a loss when I handed him the folded newspaper, saying, “Burn this.”

  The street where Marilyn and Victor lived led from First Avenue toward Sutton Place and the East River, and still clung to its fond legends, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bobby Short, and Cy Coleman all having lived there. It was in fairy-tale mood, what with real snow and simulated snow, Christmas lights, Hanukkah candles, and doormen in tuxedos, running with a breezy alacrity to get taxis, their whistles shrill and rivalrous in the crisp cold air.

  “It’s Fellini… it’s eclectic,” Marilyn said of the party, which was in full swing when she met me in the front hall. She was wearing a gold brocade dress and gold lace shoes, drawing me into a room that was alive with chatter and Frank Sinatra striking the witchcraft keynote:

  Those fingers in my hair

  That sly come-hither stare

  That strips my conscience bare

  It’s witchcraft

  At a side table presents that I had been sent were stacked, and a bowl of chocolate roses, cream-colored, exactly resembled real roses, even down to a little brown sugared stamen in the center. Robert Downey was telling me that there was no God, no White Light, when one passed over. He could vouch for it, because after being given wrong prescriptions that were almost fatal due to his diabetes, he nearly passed away.

  “You weren’t dead enough, honey,” his wife, Rosemary, said.

  “No God and no White Light,” he repeated.

  “You weren’t certified dead,” Rosemary said, and everybody laughed, and more people arrived, including the three actors from Haunted: Brenda Blethyn, a powerhouse as Mrs. Berry; Niall Buggy, her dreaming deceiver; and Beth Cooke, the waif who unwittingly brings trouble into their threadbare abode in Blackheath, London.

  Philip Roth is already there. Known to be a hermit, he sometimes comes out and is invariably the magus in any gathering. Unyieldingly scrupulous about the written word, and with a knife-edged intelligence, he is also, when in jocular mood, the funniest person on earth. I have seen him spin a story to such a dizzying height that it is like witnessing a mind in excess of itself. At his encouragement, Jake LaMotta is reenacting the fights he had fought and survived, the good fights, the great fights, the crummy fights, the besmirched fights, the bites, the close-in, the speed, the crouch, the combinations, the failures, the comebacks, building this narrative to the massacre in Chicago, on St. Valentine’s Day, thirteen rounds with his nemesis Sugar Ray Robinson, when he was beaten to a pulp. To Philip, as he told me afterward, it was like a page out of fiction, to meet his boyhood hero, whose career he had assiduously followed by subscribing to Ring magazine. He said that, sitting opposite Jake in his twilight years, he could scarcely imagine the violence that body had taken and the violence it had inflicted.

  “Thirteen rounds and he never got me down once,” Jake is saying, and everyone applauds because it is well known and was often written that LaMotta’s “courage in defeat had made the early Spartans seem cowardly.”

  A speaker was being set up in the hall, and we were ushered out for the surprise event. As guest of honor I was seated on the one high chair, the throne, men ranged at the back, women in front, the flicker of expectation in their eyes—Patricia Harty, Brenda Blethyn, Beth Cooke, Kim Cattrall, Alexandra Schlesinger, Rosemary Downey, Mary Downe, and many more. Marilyn and her tango teacher were gliding under the light of the dimmed chandelier, like two dreamers miraculously caught up in the yearning of the tango music, close and yet strangely detached, all the while their feet, as it were, painting pictures on the floor, and now and then, as he turned her round and round, the pictures were peeled off with a kick, then a second, higher, triumphant kick, as she separated from him, only to merge with him again. The young man who operated the lift was so spellbound that he kept coming up and down, drawing back the gates, just to look, to fill his eyes.

  “Either it grabs you or it doesn’t,” Marilyn said, suddenly detaching herself from her teacher’s arms, and shy now as we filed back into the room, she saying there was no way in this world that she would make a speech. Women surrounded the tango teacher, all wanting lessons, wanting his secret, to which he replied with enigmatic courtesy, “The tango is a beautiful excuse for living.”

  It was my turn to sit with Jake LaMotta. He was wearing a brown Stetson hat, identical to the one his young wife was wearing, which Victor had just presented her with. He watched his wife’s movements with a keen interest, calling across to say she was spending too much time with that barman. His face bore no mark of the bashings it had had, except for a small clod of flesh above the nose, and his hands were smooth and white and pampered.

  “You have the hands of a concert pianist,” I heard myself idiotically say, to which he said, “When you break bones, they come back stronger.” We had nothing in common, so that a stony silence ensued. Marilyn came and knelt by us, telling him about Haunted and the injustice done, and he looked from her to me and back again and asked, “Is she able to hit the spot?”

  “She’s able to hit the spot,” Marilyn said, and he gave me a look, a little grin of acknowledgment.

  It was time for music, and it was mainly left to Niall Buggy to draw on his great repertoire of Irish songs, giving them such a heft of emotion that the mood in the room changed, the faces looked softer, and eyes welled up with tears. Soon it would be the parting glass. Already I had arrived at my hotel, and walking down the long corridor and hearing the sound of the wind from the lift shaft, replicating the winds that blew in from the Atlantic, I thought of travelers who, when they hear those winds, far out at sea, know them to be a hearkening toward home.

  PART FOUR

  Donegal

  It was to Donegal, in the most northwestern tip of Ireland, that in the 1990s I headed, in order to build a house. The very place-names so rough and musical, the country dotted with lakes and hemmed in by the mountains of Errigal, Muckish, Blue Stack, Doonish West, and Snaght.

  Stephen Rea and his wife, Dolours, were the ones who led me there, Stephen in his wry Belfast way saying, “It’s the best of the north and the best of the south without the fuck-up of either.” In this he was gloriously mistaken.

  The venture would have its excitements and its obstacles, dramas and melodramas, and the getting of a site at all necessitated a wil
iness to interpret that no might possibly mean yes and that any yes was equivocal. Overnight a site that might have been promised would next day be withdrawn, because of a phone call to a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister, in England or America or Australia, who opposed it.

  In my ongoing search my solicitor Paddy Sweeney and the contractor Phil Ward trudged with me, often sinking into mire and quagmire, only to arrive on a spit of land that might, just might, be for sale. In Bloody Foreland, the gales were such that we were literally flung together and torn apart, like flaps of old newspaper. On another occasion Sasha, as future architect, was directed from the airport to where we stood on another bit of isolated barony, the waves hammering the headland across the way and more waves rolling ponderously around our feet. He pointed out to me that it was not only the shifting sands that were an obstacle but the hidden channels of water under the sands, so that, as in “Kublai Khan,” I would end up with a house that first floated and then literally was carried out to sea.