At first, I thought it was a practical joke, or that perhaps there were two Edna O’Briens: one was the greatest living woman writing in English (as Philip Roth described her), while the other was someone who happened to have the same name. An email arrived out of the blue from “Edna O’Brien”, wanting to meet and discuss a book with which she thought I might be able to help. I replied, delighted to oblige, trying to ask discreetly whether or not this was “the” Edna O’Brien, whose work I had admired for decades.
It was. And so began an adventure I would be shy to call “friendship”, but among the more important acquaintances of its kind.
We met at a restaurant in Chelsea we both enjoyed: San Lorenzo, run by a former partisan from Tuscany, whose initially humble trattoria became a gathering place for stars and footballers after Sophia Loren tasted his mozzarella while filming in Britain. I used to like chatting to the waiters in Italian, mostly about football. Edna was having none of that: “Champagne, please – and not prosecco.”
We talked about her idea to take a character based on the genocidaire Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, set him on the run in rural Ireland and pair him up with a complicated Irishwoman whose downfall he would bring.
A series of meetings ensued, at the restaurant and at Edna’s home in Chelsea. I had met Karadžić on three occasions, one of which was across the courtroom for the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ITCY), testifying against him, and tried as best I could to paint a portrait of the man whose madness would be pathetic were it not so murderous.
Edna too went to the ITCY in The Hague to study Karadžić at close range, from the front row of the public gallery. She stared at him with those hawk eyes of hers that missed nothing and could flick from beautiful to melancholy to unforgiving in a micro-moment – and took a few notes. We now went over them together, and I was honoured to read passages of the resulting book, The Little Red Chairs (named after an installation in Sarajevo to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege), as they happened: witness to the creation of a novel by one of the greatest ever practitioners of the art form. I was never sure whether Edna’s professed nervousness in committing to the page was a sign of estimably high self-expectation (the best writers, like the best musicians, are usually, rightly nervous in pursuit of excellence), or a way to dress profound and deserved self-confidence – probably both.
The denouement scene was shocking not just in itself as literature, but for Edna’s genius in mind-reading and depicting Karadžić’s cruel, crazy narcissism, his twisted vanity, stone-cold heart and a soul damned even before death. Many journalists have interviewed and tried to portray Karadžić, but none come anywhere near the scalpel edge of Edna’s psychological perception and mastery of language with which to convey what she finds not so much on the far side of appearances, but beneath them.
To have The Little Red Chairs co-dedicated to me, along with the Bosnian journalist Zrinka Bralo and a then six-year-old Mary Martin, was the honour of a lifetime. There was a publication dinner and I sat next to Ian McKellen, who (in that way that distinguishes great from good) preferred to talk about the pleasures of running a pub rather than theatre or Shakespeare. I had to make a speech, and what I said then is what I want to say now: we need to see Edna O’Brien in the context of that disproportionate presence of Irish writers in the English language, since the Celtic revival and WB Yeats, via the pantheon of Joyce, Shaw, Stoker, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, Butler, Flann O’Brien, Beckett, Heaney, McGahern – on a continuum to Banville, Tóibín, Enright, Mahon, Durcan and others. A remarkable presence – given the island’s tiny population, relative to the anglosphere – that borders on domination in some quarters; Edna is part of that.
So that was The Little Red Chairs. Edna and I had talked about little else for that year or so. But we had got on too well to leave it at that. There was too much else left undiscussed, not least the fact that I had begun my career in Ireland and been a devoted fan since barely past childhood; who had read The Country Girls at the age of 13 and, like many of my generation, had Cait Brady for my virginal first love. Edna was interested, I think, in the pity of war, and the resilience of good people stretched to the mind’s limits – beyond Bosnia. We had a lot of books and paintings in common, worth talking about; she was also puckishly curious about the lives of others we knew mutually – to call her a gossip would be vulgar, but she did not suffer a fool or hypocrite and loved a good laugh.
Edna’s house in Chelsea is, at first glance, like the only rotten tooth in an otherwise perfectly white row. I climbed those little steps to her front door a score of times or more, to hear and heed her sagacity. Sometimes we sat in her kitchen at the back, which admitted little light even in summer. On most occasions, we ascended the creaky stairs to her magnificent sitting room, study and library. Before 6pm, she served tea from a pot. Between 6pm and 8pm, white wine, except in deep winter – usually montrachet. Edna loved white roses: there was often a vase of them, sometimes a little tired, and they needed bringing, from a florist by South Kensington station.
Over tea or wine – never snacks – one realised that one was touching that deep Irish literary tradition, at close range. Rather naughtily perhaps, I would ask for stories about Beckett (she had many editions signed for her) and Edna told them gladly: about the time Beckett “sat in my hotel room in Paris, going through miniatures in the minibar. I told him: ‘Samuel, that’s an expensive way to get drunk, I hope you’re going to pay.’”
Edna was born in 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare, to parents from backgrounds so different that she wrote: “I sometimes attribute my two conflicting selves to my contrasting grandparents, the one a lady, the other a peasant.” She fled to Dublin to become enthralled by the world of the Abbey theatre, at odds with the prevailing piety. For writing The Country Girls, and giving expression to Ireland’s secret lives of repressed joy and sex beyond the church’s shadow cast, she was reviled and in effect exiled to Britain. We talked about her days feted by swinging London’s arty anti-establishment: knowing Paul McCartney, taking LSD with RD Laing. Of which she said: “I was excited by this galaxy of visitors, but I was never carried away.” And later, something unforgettable: “I didn’t last very long as an attraction. People in England will love you as an outsider, and some will mean it. But England will never really take you to its bosom – and that, of course, is an Irish matter. We know who we are, and so do they.”
After Brexit, we joked that Edna had fled a myopic, backward- and inward-looking land of the green letterboxes for the breezy cosmopolitanism of the red ones. “But the situation is rather reversed,” she noted with her inimitable flash of smile, as young Ireland looks to its future as a European republic. We pulled up a photo of grotesque Boris Johnson trying to lord it over Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s half-Indian, gay taoiseach, and Edna laughed out loud: “Behold the ancien regime!”
* * *
Like millions before her, Edna left Ireland, yet didn’t. She was as much a child of Erin when she died last week as the day she was born. She felt Irish, she thought with an Irish diagonal intelligence, she had that inimitably droll Irish sense of humour and she wrote in the Irish tradition. She refused to distance herself from the Troubles: in House of Splendid Isolation (1994), an IRA volunteer called McGreevey laments the republic’s betrayal of its cause. McGreevey is based partly on the Provo (later Irish National Liberation Army) leader Dominic McGlinchey, whom Edna visited in jail. The book was received with outrage, wonderfully defended by Edna when she told the literary critic Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado: “I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about.”
Edna told me, oddly, of the Provos: “Those poor boys, doing what they thought was the right thing.”
But would she ever return, especially after being honoured as a Saoi of Aosdána, Ireland’s highest literary accolade, in 2015? “I’m a little old for an adventure,” she said. How wrong she was.
A decade ago, I described Edna on these pages as “elegant and radiant, mischievous and passionate”, possessed of “electrifying charisma, apparently frail but indomitable”. That vain attempt to describe the living writer is as good as any I can muster for the one lost last week. But little did I know then: it was the “indomitable” that knew no bounds. Edna was 84 when she published The Little Red Chairs, only to then embark on the most extraordinary endeavour of them all: Girl.
In 2016 and 2017, in her mid-late 80s, Edna made two trips to Nigeria, having read a newspaper report about a girl who had escaped the brutalities and violations of Boko Haram, found wandering around the Sambisa forest. I asked (in an email) whether she really had to do this. “Yes”, came the single-word reply. “Every day the newspapers are full of novels waiting to be written, but this small item resonated in my inner mind,” she told my Observer colleague Sean O’Hagan in a 2019 interview.
“You hear these terrible stories and you absorb them,” she said. “They haunt me still. I wake sometimes thinking of the girls and the horrors they experienced.”
We met once, post-pandemic, during the winter of 2021. Girl and the summer of Covid-19 had “exhausted me”, she confided. She was now more frail than indomitable.
At that last of our encounters, she asked rhetorically: “I wonder which was my worst work.” I replied that she knew I was not going to have that conversation. All right then (with an infectious giggle): “My best?” Again, there’s no sensible answer, but that which left the deepest scar was Down By the River. The macabre intimacy of violence in Edna’s books is something I knew from my own work and which we discussed often – but her fascination with human evil, and ability to convey it on the page, has a haunting scariness. That’s where she comes closer to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King than her compatriots.
Corresponding last week with friends who knew or admired Edna, one missive stuck out from the rest for its insight – from our mutual friend the American biographer and essayist Judith Thurman. She remarked: “However old you are, you are still a Romantic youth and she was a Romantic heroine.” Capital “R”. No wonder Edna loved Delacroix; she was in her way a writer and great woman in the grand tradition of European and specifically Irish Romanticism and vision. I can still smell the romance of all that dust, on all those books that were her ancestry, now her legacy.
When Words Fail by Ed Vulliamy (Granta Books, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
