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Kate O’Brien’s Life and work
Kate O’Brien (3rd December 1897), the last of four girls in a family of nine, was born into a hospitable place, Limerick, and into an Ireland enjoying a period of comparative prosperity. Her father’s business in horse-breeding, well known in both Ireland and England, enabled them to live in ease and comfort. Unfortunately, Kate O’Brien’s mother died when she was only five and this is when she became the youngest boarder, the school pet, in the Laurel Hill convent in Limerick. The not unhappy association with the nuns of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, lasting from 1903 to 1916, was going to shape her spiritual life and sharpen her naturally imperious temperament as well as her intellectual independence. She liked school and was already at that time an omnivorous reader.
Throughout her childhood ad adolescence Kate O’Brien developed a hyper-sensitiveness to family feeling, which remained strong all her life. Her loving generous father wanted her to have every advantage and grow well-versed in the middle-class conventions; her protective elder sisters as well as her anxious aunts expected her to be happy and behave as befitted well-bred Catholic Irish girls. Her father’s death in June 1916 left her bereft and uncertain about her future. Though her family wanted her to look for a safe job until her “Prince Charming” appeared, she won a county-council scholarship, which allowed her to leave in the autumn of 1916 and take a B.A. in English and French at University College, Dublin . This decision in favour of university education and away from family and social constrictions was, no doubt, triggered by the independent spirit which was to characterize all her young heroines, by a craving for the freedom in which to grow and develop as well as by a growing sense within her of yet undefined talent.
After taking her degree in 1919, she worked in journalism in London and Manchester for a while; then worked as a teacher but found she had hardly the temperament for teaching. After a short stay in the United States in the Autumn of 1922, as she did not feel ready to marry Dutchman Gustaaf Renier whom she had met in London the previous year, she decided to come to Portugalete on the Biscayan coast outside Bilbao as a governess to the children of the wealthy de Areilza family. She fell immediately in love with the Basque Country and was to love it -indeed was to love Spain in general- for the rest of her life (even after Franco’s Government banned her from it in 1937). However, after a few months in Portugalete, she went back to London (Spring 1923) to marry Gustaaf, a marriage which was to last only for a year.
It seems evident at this point that Kate O’Brien’s greatest faith was personal liberty and that all this travelling and moving around meant that she had not yet discovered her place in life. She was observing, registering and storing information for future use. In an opinion article published in El País in 1985 ( 13th August), Don José María de Areilza, pupil of Kate O’Brien in Bilbao in 1922, writes the following:
Le gustaba pasear y hacer pequeñas excursiones por los alrededores. Subíamos a las laderas del Serantes; llegábamos a la cuenca minera; a San Salvador del Valle y al monte de Umbe; y un par de veces a la semana recorría ella minuciosamente las empinadas calles de Portugalete, entrando en las tiendas para escuchar el habla de las gentes. Iba al mercado y a contemplar la llegada de los barcos de pesca en la pequeña rada de Santurce y se quedaba fascinada ante el jolgorio de voces y griterío que acompañaba la llegada de la carga plateada y deslizante de la sardina y de la anchoa y su traslado posterior, en toneles y cestas, a la sala de contratación. Le gustaba presenciar los bailes del domingo en la plaza en torno al quiosco, en el que alternaban la banda y los chistulares, es decir, el agarrao y el suelto. Decía que no había visto nada tan alegre como esas danzas concurridas y populares.
She wanted to be a writer, she told the thirteen-year-old José María de Areilza confidently, and she was going to become a successful one, indeed, in the following decades, a writer who was even banned in both Ireland (for Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices ) and Spain (for Farewell, Spain ). Her major novels include Without My Cloak (1931), The Ante-Room (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), The Land of Spices (1941), The Last of Summer (1943) and That Lady (1946). She also wrote a number of non-fiction works including Teresa of Avila (1951), and travel volumes on Ireland and Spain such as Farewell Spain (1937). A less known side of O’Brien’s career is her work as a critic, a journalist, a TV and Radio collaborator and as a popular lecturer.
Kate O’Brien’s problems with the censor
Kate O’Brien’s novels were innovative and subversive in terms of their subject matter. Feminist issues such as women’s struggle for individual and intellectual freedom, as well as freedom of love, were not readily accepted by the bourgeois Catholic Irish society of her time. In Mary Lavelle (1936) she is concerned with the psycho-sexual development of Mary, a young Irish “Miss” who works as a governess in Basque Spain and who has a love affair with a married man. In The Land of Spices (1941) there is allusion to homosexuality. Both novels were banned in Ireland as indecent. We, however, feel that the way in which Kate O’Brien explores family, social and religious structures in Ireland is also behind the censor’s decision to include her novels in the list of banned publications.
Like Shakespeare she was concerned with human passions. Like the Romantics -Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats- she was a rebel, concerned with individual freedom and the exploration of the individual mind as it is engaged in the process of artistic creation. José María de Areilza’s words are revealing of her concerns:
Llenaba páginas y más páginas, cotidianamente, en unos largos blocks que traía consigo en la maleta. Su escritura inglesa era enérgica, bella y ordenada, casi varonil. Me contaba el proceso lento y difícil de la elaboración creativa. El punto de partida y el de llegada, (de cada uno de aquellos essays - como los llamaba. ... Ella me hizo leer y declamar a Keats y Tennyson y Wordsworth, en el Oxford poético. Y finalmente me dio a probar a Shakespeare con unos comentarios suyos iluminadores. A partir de entonces descubrí esos textos magistrales de quien miró al mundo y analizó las pasiones humanas de forma distinta. “Shakespeare es un lenguaje diferente", me solía repetir.
The Basque Country and Kate O’Brien
As already pointed out above, she fell in love immediately with the Basque Country, with the land of hard-working men and women and a climate very much like that of Ireland. Later on she fell in love with the Spain of austere Castile, the land of Teresa of Avila with whom she felt a deep affinity. In her short biographical monograph of the saint, published in 1951, she described her as a “genius of the large and immeasurable kind of which there has been very few, and the only one woman.” S ixteenth-century Spain is the context for her most successful novel That Lady, which deals with the manner in which absolute political power vitiates private relations between Philip II and Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli. But the novel focuses primarily on Ana, the woman, and her heroic resistance to the despotism of the ruler.
But coming back to The Basque Country, it figures prominently in her autobiographical novel Mary Lavelle, which, as pointed out before, deals with the psychosexual development of a young girl, Mary Lavelle, who comes to Bilbao to work as a governess in Don Pablo’s house. The impossible, unwelcome but irresistible love between the heir of the house, Juanito, trained to become one of “ Spain ’s great men”, and the governess-girl forms the nub of the book. Bilbao and its surroundings were chosen as the background for this development. Mary learns about herself by contrast and comparison as well as by self-analysis. She was engaged to be married, but did not love the young man who was to be her husband. She understood nothing about the nature of love. She thought it was a manageable feeling, by means of which one made life pleasant for other people. But she learns in northern Spain, in circumstances which have no happy conventional outcome, that it is “the freely bestowed gift of one’s self to another”.
Since Kate O’Brien could not use Ireland to show this development, she chose Basque Spain, and it is not surprising that it was banned in Ireland. What shocked the moral guardians was not so much that Mary has sex outside marriage and that she loses her virginity to Juanito, but that she was the one to choose:
Listen, it’s been fantastic, my time in Spain. It’s been a mad, impossible thing dropped into my ordinary life. Tomorrow it will be over, and although it has changed all my plans, life will have to be ordinary again in some way that I know nothing about now. So, before it’s over, finish it for me, Juanito. I can’t see how I can ever care for anyone again - I love you so mucho I suppose I will - when I’m old and ugly. But I want you to have me first - just for this one time, up here where you used to play when you were a little boy. Nothing else will content me, however long I live, if you refuse me this. [1]
Shocking, it must have been, to read this at the time. Mary, indeed, breaks all the rules of her upbringing. It is in Bilbao, during a bullfight, that Mary has the first revelation of the possible pain of love and life but also of its possible control through attitude, through the formalization, the distancing and patterning of art. As Lorna Reynolds suggests, “her experience of the bullfight becomes a symbolic representation of the advent in her life, of the mysterious pain and ecstasy of love” [2]. The great matador kills his bull with masterly skill. Mary is carried outside of herself; she sees the bullfight as savage, inexcusable, fantastic, but at the same time as more
vivid with beauty and beauty’s anguish, more full of news of life’s possible pain and senselessness and quixotic and barbarism and glory than ever before encountered by her, more real and exacting ... more symbolic, more dramatic, a more personal and searching arrow to the heart than ever she dreamed of ... Here was art in its less decent form, the least explainable or bearable. But art unconcerned and lawless. [3]
In Mary Lavelle, Kate O’Brien uses the Basque Country analogically. Bilbao becomes Altorno and Portugalete, Cabantes . In Torcal and Playa Blanca we recognize Algorta and las Arenas . Allera is the sanctuary of Begoña where Mary Lavelle, a fervent Catholic, lights a candle and prays to the saint. But the Basque Country in this novel is not just a geographical place: it is an interior landscape which provides crucial experiences in the development of an lrish girl. Kate O’Brien makes no moral issue out of the behaviour of her heroine; she remains detached, but behind it lies a question: is it better for Mary Lavelle to learn the real nature of love, even though she sins against her Catholic training in so doing, than to sleep-walk into a marriage, agreed to but not desired by her? The answer was clear to the moral guardians.
The novel emerges from her time on the Biscayan coast outside Bilbao and her tribute to this city comes in a chapter in Farewell Spain a travel-book, written after the outbreak of the Spanish war in 1937. In 1963 in a paper which she read to the Spanish Society in UCD, she had still Bilbao in mind:
Bilbao was and is a dark formidable town - full of frowning banks and counting houses, with a great dirty river, and terrible poverty, terrible slums. A centre of great concentrated wealth, and also indeed the heart of the Basque nationalist movement. A city of strong individuals and much character.[4]
It was in Portugalete [País Basco] as a “Miss” that she began to attempt to write.
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