‘Trespassers: A Memoir’, by Julia O¹Faolain

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.