In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’
Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter when they leave home. Julia O’Faolain certainly left home geographically. Over a long life she has lived in London, Dublin, Rome, Florence, Paris, Los Angeles, Portland, New York and Venice. Yet on the evidence of this succinct memoir, she remains the daughter. There is as much about her father in this book as there is about herself, as she mulls over his career, his character, his political opinions, and the things he said to her. She ponders too on his extramarital affairs, notably with the writers Elizabeth Bowen and Honor Tracy. I have it at first hand that over lunch at the Kildare Street Club in Dublin he compared making love to one of these two great women to making love to a double-decker bus. Fortunately I cannot remember which.
Her parents, both from Cork, were romantic Gaelic-speaking Irish nationalists. Her father gaelicised his name, John Whelan, to Seán O Faoláin and saw active service with the IRA. Later, disillusion set in, as one kind of tyranny replaced another. He was bravely outspoken against the literary censorship, prudery, humbug and cultural isolationism of the new state, and against the domination of the Catholic church.
Julia was born in London in the early 1930s and never acquired much Gaelic. Yet Seán sent his daughter to the Sacred Heart nuns to be educated, and wanted a Catholic wedding for her. These tensions contributed to his literary talent; he remains one of the half-dozen most significant figures of 20th-century Irish writing and culture, and a lynchpin of Irish writers’ reputation as masters of the short story.
Her mother Eileen broadcast and published Irish folktales and legends. The title Trespassers comes from the scary expeditions on which she took her little daughter, prowling around the overgrown grounds of abandoned Anglo-Irish big houses. Eileen had wild ways. On exam days at the convent, she would arrange to meet Julia in the shrubbery ‘to give me a few swigs’ from a pocket-flask of brandy. Julia passed all her exams.
Nuns make good copy. ‘ “You will all have to be unmade and remade,” said our Mistress of Studies, as coolly as if we had been so many jumpers whose kinked wool she needed to unpick.’ That image will resonate with readers of a certain age. In the austerity of those days our outgrown jumpers were unravelled, and the permanently kinked wool knitted up again into something else. Trespassers elicits many such flashes of recall, and O’Faolain sustains throughout her fine turns of phrase — ‘the reckless tolerance’ of the Church of England; the ‘hungry jungle’ of malicious literary Dublin.
She made her first foray abroad in 1947, to stay with a family in France. From university, she won a scholarship to Perugia, three years running, and then another to Rome. Studentships and scholarships and fellowships accrued in magical succession. Those were the days. The beds she found herself in — in Dublin, Paris and Rome — were those of artists and writers. She was intimate with Ignazio Silone and had a fierce encounter in the lavatories of Les Deux Magots with Lucian Freud. Edna O’Brien she is not (a cool, impeccable blonde, not that she describes herself that way or at all), labelled ‘a tight little virgin’ when she wasn’t, though in her own words puritan and prim. To all appearances she was a fille bien, as they said of her in France, though for two years she had an affair with a strenuous Algerian Jew ‘who wouldn’t have known a fille bien if she had had the words branded on her’.
Her early stories were taken by the New Yorker and American Vogue. She worked as a translator at Strasbourg and taught languages — it took a decade, she thinks, to get into her stride as a writer. She married the historian Lauro Martines, and again there were grants — this time his — for four years, in the 1960s, to the high-end Florence of I Tatti, Harold Acton and Violet Trefusis. And then, years of shuttling between London and USA.
Her novel No Country for Young Men was shortlisted for the Booker, though to my mind Woman in the Wall is her best. OK, so we still don’t know the ‘inner Julia’; but this is a valuable and entertaining book, which ends, inevitably and touchingly, with the decline and deaths of Seán and Eileen.
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