Edna O’Brien in her own words – archive, November 1962

Roughly half an hour after the appointed time, I met, under the blue ceilings and plastic chandeliers of the New Arts Theatre Club (where her first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, opens tonight), a country girl, born and brought up in Clare, with a scrubbed face, shiny nose, and longish brown hair. We settled down to tea and madeira cake, and Miss O’Brien, sloughing the man’s sheepskin overcoat that she had been clutching about her, spoke to me in a soft Irish voice more or less as follows:

I often wonder why, when Cromwell said “To hell or to Connaught” he didn’t include Clare. I left it and went to Dublin to study pharmacy and became a qualified pharmacist after four years. Here they’d call it a chemist. I had no interest in it at all and I married a novelist called Ernest Gébler who lived just outside Dublin. We have two sons, not really small any longer, one nine and one seven, and we lived in Dublin until we came here to live four years ago. I had written bits and pieces for Irish newspapers and Iain Hamilton advised me to write a novel and I actually began it during the first month after our arrival in London. That was The Country Girls . London was strange to me. I hate strangeness. It sort of frightens me. That’s why I don’t want to travel. Scenery bores me. Even furniture is only important to me for its associations. I didn’t realise I would miss Ireland so much, and in a way the book was a private recreation of my early life. Both my novels are about things I’ve done myself, or wish I’d done myself, or imagine I’ve done myself. When I’m actually writing, if I was consciously aware that anyone was ever going to read what I was writing I could never write a line. Most people I know who write have certain fixed ambitions that they’ve always had and this astonishes me: I’ve never set out and never do set out to do anything.

Related: Edna O’Brien: ‘A writer’s imaginative life commences in childhood’

I couldn’t write two paragraphs in Ireland. I’m not sure why. They say it’s because of all this talk that goes on there but I think it’s atmospheric. Ireland has become, to a great extent, a fantasy country, cut off from the main course of life in Europe or Cuba or anywhere else. I suppose this is partly what my play is about: the mother in it set out to make a revolution and turn Ireland into a socialist country and all that in fact has happened as a result of Ireland’s getting her freedom is that the lavatories have “ fir ” and “ mná ” over them and the buses changed colour. The director told me yesterday the play shows my contempt for Irishmen. Both The Country Girls and my other novel, The Lonely Girl, are banned in Ireland. I sent the play to Brendan Smith, the man in charge of the Dublin Theatre festival because I’d have liked it to have had its first performance there, but he rejected it. It was a different draft but basically the same play.

I don’t think I’ll discuss my soul. You remember Holden Caulfield says something about playing tennis with a Catholic and the fact that he’s a Catholic makes all the difference how he plays tennis with you? That’s very true. I know all about the Catholics. I’ve had plenty of annoyance and botheration both from the clergy and from the laity, and they never seem to notice how that kind of thing contradicts their professed Christianity. If you write with honesty they pounce on you. I can’t stand the way they blackmail you or try to blackmail you into behaving the way they want you to behave. I can’t stand their righteousness and egomania. The need for and the search for a god or God is too much painful and personal for these kind of people to be allowed to muddy it up. The whole system of the Catholic church is one of thorough and continuous brainwashing, and that’s why it and communism are so frightening. Even Catholic children could be brought up in a less barbarous atmosphere, with less emphasis on the Crown of Thorns and the crucifix. It maims them: look at Joyce. Children should be taught the basis of Christianity and goodness and be given a breathing space when they’re older in which to find things out for themselves. Oh, I know you don’t agree with a word of this. I was born and brought up a Catholic, and now I’m a sort of Catholic. There’s a lot in Catholicism that’s absolutely marvellous and fills me with awe.

Writing the play came much more easily than either of the novels. The material, of course, dictates the form; some things are novels, some are plays and some are short stories. One feels the need to put down the life or the world of a certain set of people who obsess you in one or other of these forms. If that life is strong enough, if the thing is alive, everything else follows. I don’t believe in a “social realist play” or a “religious play” or a “sexual play”: people’s lives are made up of elements of all these things and if you write about people you write about them all. That’s why I’m against rules. The only rule is that the thing should be well written. The best contemporary play, I think, is The Fire Raisers, by Max Frisch. And Death of a Salesman is marvellous. I loved Roots and The Kitchen. Look Back in Anger , too. The great theatrical renaissance of the fifties was a big exaggeration. You had a marvellous assortment of talent all concerned with, at the most, two colours of the spectrum, and there are so many more colours than that. There is no really great playwright or even writer in England at the moment: the people who are writing plays and doing it well have a very small and intense and narrow experience that they put down and the result is praised out of all proportion.

Related: Edna O’Brien obituary

Brecht was a marvellous writer, a world visionary. He wrote the only way he could write. I’m not as keen on him as on Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard says as much as Brecht has ever said and says it much better. Brecht, like Conrad, seems to me to be a man’s writer: what I miss in Brecht’s plays is the same thing I miss in Eisenstein’s films: the intimate personal moment that counterpoints the panoramic action that goes on in the world all round it. But these are marvellous men, of course, all the same.

Geraldine Fitzgerald bought the film rights of The Country Girls and has sold them to Sam Spiegel; she herself has written the script, but that’s as far as the film has got yet, as far as I know. The Lonely Girl is being made into a film by Woodfall and I’m writing the script with my husband or he’s doing it with me, whichever you prefer.