Learning One's Letters

When talking of poverty rarely do we think of words; the torn rags of a poor phrase, the rickets of a beggarly sentence. What are the effects of such a deficiency? Here, Edna O’Brien explores the envy of the verbal poor when confronted with the wealth of the linguistically rich. It’s there in the title - Girl with Green Eyes. Such a jealous woman.

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Too young. Not a case of sexual but intellectual abuse. Caithleen Brady lacks the sophistication to love such a cultivated man. His friends especially annoy her. It hurts being in the same space as such clever souls. She cannot keep up with their sarcasm, is wounded by their cutting wit. Kate still an amateur in this middle-class play; the others, of course, professionals, to the stage born. She has read some books, for sure. And she can quote Joyce. Poor girl! Yet to cotton on that you're not meant to read novels in this life but live them; these class acts a fiction of the highest literary quality. Kate lacks acuity and has no flair. She feels ashamed. When Eugene’s friends come around, she hides in the garden or sulks in their bedroom. This love business doesn't help. Strong feelings exaggerate the adolescent gaucherie: like most working class youth Kate’s emotions are younger than her age. Oh Kate! You do not have a cool temperament; while irony is a trick you have yet to learn, and that sparkling superficiality…they open champagne, while you…you pour out flat cider. It’ll take years to become an articulate non-entity. Better, perhaps, if you were Baba, who has mastered the fisticuffs of ridicule, that hard talk of the street. She knows how to treat them.

‘That moron! Says everything is “cute and moving”. You telling me she was good-looking. Jesus, she’s only in the halfpenny place next to us; all she has is her underwear and a necklace down to her stomach. I cut her dead,’ Baba said.

‘Where is she? Is she gone home with him?’

‘She’s a right lookin’ eejit, she got the collywobbles, and that spy with the beard had to take her home. “Wow,” he says to me. ‘Bow-Wow, says I back to him. You’re too soft with sharks like him!’

Baba’s an interesting case. Should the working classes be educated to become bad copies of the bourgeoisie? There are the well-known dangers, not least the feeling of inferiority, with the resentment that it breeds. Good for the bosses though. Unsure of ourselves, always we're at the mercy of others, who control us at their will. So easy to subdue. Better, surely, to be Baba, and stick to one’s own background and become mistress there? Don’t you envy that sass….

Kate is not so sharp. And anyway she is in love. Of course her mental machinery isn’t going to function well. Her emotions out of control they swing vehemently from drug-like ecstasy to bi-polar despair; mad jealousy cuddling up in between. This girl has not been trained properly. Still a wild animal, but here, expected to purr like a cat when manhandled by strangers. This lack of sophistication initially attracted the older, cooler, weightily experienced Eugene Gaillard. He liked Kate’s innocence and her simple fire. It cannot last. Soon these emotional fireworks become tiresome: they require so much effort, and demand acquiescence to their overpowering display; an innocent in love is a tyrannical egotist: pay attention to me! A catechism repeated like a rosary. Love’s emotions a magnet drawing the other person in….

Eugene is too independent to be pulled into another person's orbit for very long. And at his age, does he really want to be managing a schoolgirl? Too dull.

Life outside the lovers’ bed spotlights their differences; an intelligent but undereducated country girl speaks a different language from the urban intellectual. Then there are those damned feelings. Eugene tries to educate her. Explains the difference between a friend and an acquaintance; most middle class ‘friends’ little more than colleagues, the reason there’s plenty about. And all that talk? These verbals are childish pyrotechnics not deadly weapons. Kate, are you listening to me? They can’t harm anyone. Even flirting is allowed, because those smiles never get past the drawing-room door. Kate doesn’t grasp the obvious. A friend is a good, nice person; someone like oneself. It’s all about the feelings. No, Kate, no. It is about those verbals. Simon might be obnoxious, but he is interesting; he is a poet, a rare find in these parts. But he’s horrible….. Kate. Kate. Kate. In this place, people are to be collected, not hugged, stroked or kissed. You're simply not getting it, my girl.

This is too much.

When is this film scheduled for and are you going to South America first, or here first? Let me know by return, I want to have everything nice for you. I have painted the walls a powder blue and the ceiling dove grey. You’ll adore it. I’m having an exhibition later on and I’ve just finished a darling picture which I think is IT. It expresses everything I have to say about life, the soul, neuroses, love, and death…

Boo sleeps on the right side with her hand under her cheek and she is a doll.

Love and kisses,

Laura

P.S. The thing that worries me is that Mom and Ricki and Jason and everyone thinks we were made for one another.

This is a complex letter to interpret, and the intelligent reader will have to gauge the balance of sentiments: how much clever wordplay, how little the emotional substance? Clearly it is not going to be easy. Kate, alas, is in no position to read such a letter, and easily assumes the worst: Eugene will leave her for his wife. It is possible. But Kate needs to carefully calibrate the different temperatures of the two relationships before she can predict this future. She has forgotten the detachment of her technician, and how he thermostatically controls his own feelings. Relationships are not all about fucking; especially amongst the bourgeoisie, who generate more excitement between the sexes when not under the sheets; the thrust of repartee and a grinding dialectic usually enough to spark the odd sigh and force a sweaty cry. A penetrating witticism better than any finger on some clit. So much of this social circle is talk. In part Kate knows this. It is the intimacy of the shared language she misses; she chafes at her own inability to reach its virtuosic heights. Her own incompetence excludes her; no fun dropping the ball when your opponent spins it beautifully. That said, Kate, being callow, assumes the relations between the sexes are all or nothing: no close friendships between a man and woman unless they share a bed. You shouldn’t be here, Caithleen Brady.

Kate has lost fifteen years, stuck in the country with yokels. To stay in this company she is going to have to learn very fast. She knows it.

‘We all leave one another. We die, we change - it’s mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable…’ he said.

Even Baba notices I’m changing, and she says if I don’t give up this learning at night, I’ll end up as a right drip, wearing flat shoes and glasses. What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, or so very far away from the world he tried to draw me into, too soon.

Kate tells us she is going to university, in London…. Wow! This is quick learning. Good on you Kate. Far smarter and far older - therefore far luckier - than those boys of The Working Class Highbrow. No mother to hold her back; while father is hopeless; a loser. No influence here, for there is no respect, the emotional connection fatally weakened. To keep his daughter Mr Brady resorts to kidnap. I’ll let you read the book for the details…. Curiously, such a father is an advantage for a girl like Kate: it makes the leaving of home easy. Kidnap! No 18th-century novel this.1 Our heroine soon finds a way back to Dublin. Ok, the old man comes after her with a few locals. And there’s some thuggish behaviour. But they are amateurs. Stupid. Sentimental. Weak. Of course Brady will be repulsed. This father has no chance of keeping young Kate from Gaillard’s ageing cock. 

If only he knew. By now Eugene isn’t so hot on Kate. Too immature for his mature tastes. At the start there was the excitement of something new, and the illusion of young, rural innocence. Perhaps, like so many of these sophisticated types, he dreams of a pure, authentic Ireland, deep out in the West. Fools! There is nothing interesting about cow pats…the manure of the country best left to rot in fields. They won’t listen. Ok, Mr Gaillard, if you want the stuff in the city put it in the municipal beds, to flourish the flowers. Joyce. Yeats. Edna O’Brien herself. Listening are you my good fellow? These country characters must escape the farmyard if they are to find themselves. Kate goes further. Like the great Dubliner himself, she is to exile herself from her own land, where she will grow at an exponential rate.

This second volume in the trilogy is less a simple tale of the coming of age of a country girl than the beginnings of a Bildung. We are watching an artist being born. No. I must be exact here. Cultivated.

(Review: Girl with Green Eyes)

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1.  Or a 19th-century pastiche - Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon.