YouSaid · the spoken record

Edna O'Brien

lines on the record: 30
first: 2007-01-14
most recent: 2007-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My last record almost parallels or coincides with what I've just said. There was Edith P, frail, defiant, no longer young, singing, as it were, her own epitaph, and the audience rising up to sing it with her, to affirm it for her. It's Edith Pierf singing Jeanne Regret Riet.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it has to be otherwise I would have shrivelled and to write, you know You have to feel the sort of eminence if not the actuality of love you have to”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do The choice has to be made because both are very hard task masters, but also If I were to fall in love again before I die, and this is boastful, but why not be a little boastful? I would hope for an extraordinary man who was a great poet, as well as a great journey man on the earth.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the disposition. Some people are able to put love even while they are in the thick of it, if you like, into a compartment. I lacked that gene in my life because love, as you have quoted me as saying, was like some of that music in a way it's so overwhelming.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bit of a gap, yes I believe I probably was in love or something. I certainly wasn't able to work or didn't work every day, and when you stop writing for whatever reason, you lose that habit. I was a little foolish to myself, because by not working I lost some of my lost my house actually by just not being practical. And it was a lesson to me never to let a day pass without I don't keep with my vocation.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could not imagine not being able to listen to some part of Mulch Requium. I can understand it, some of it, and yet it remains like the universe a total mystery. That's an amazing thing.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I had my children soon after that you would blanch at the degree of prejudice, male prejudice that was wrought against me. The school teacher said I didn't love my children, in fact I collected them every day, but he gave evidence. The local doctor on grounds that still are a mystery to me, gave evidence that I was an infamaniac, and I will never forget this one thing so I don't think I've ever mentioned before. I went into that court for custody of my children, and the cards were very, very strongly and trenchantly stacked against me, and there was a judge, a man, and he heard all these And he said, And what have you to say for yourself? And I said If I did not love them so much. I would not fight so hard against all this opposition. and he gave me the custody of the children.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yes, so there was that and my becoming different, and also I think had I remained living in Ireland, I wouldn't have walked out that door as I did, which is what I did. I walked out the door and never went back.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean when it's encapsulated like that it seems very as if that's not the whole story which of course it's not. I I think that that was very central to it, but secondly, and this I take the responsibility and some of the blame for, between the age of nineteen or twenty and twenty nine or thirty, I was a very different person, and it was very easy to bring up my children and write. A husband is harder to manage than children, and I used to write in a kind of hut here in England, and Saturday when I'd be writing a bit, and they were there the children, there were blackmailing me, they'd put notes through the door which said we are missing you, you know, waving through the window we are sick, we have a temperature, and so on, so on.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my next one it's Africa throughout that whole continent African music that against all the odds is so life affirming and my next choice there are many but today I will say Ole Tangi's drums of passion”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it cold? Oh, it hurts me very much because deep down you have a question with yourself, you feel have I betrayed them? Have I done something wrong as they have said I have? And being a little prone to that kind of self examination, I was defiant or semi defiant on the outside, but I was also made very nervous.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no shortage of hearing it. My mother conveyed to me You know how people do they want to tell you something and they will say somebody else said you know and somebody else said to your father I should be kicked naked through the town and I didn't question her just to show you what a coward I am I should have questioned the naked But I didn't. Charles Hawthy, who was then Minister for Culture in the Archbishop McQuaid, saying it should not be in the hands of any decent family, and it was a smear on Irish womanhood, and people, you know, cutting me and sending me anonymous letters and all that.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the country girls remains in my personal life my little what shall we call it hold all of experiences a little miracle for me up to then I had been writing scattered bits and pieces, and suddenly I sat down and I began I waken quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I wake an evening And I knew that I was there. I could write it. I have to tell you they don't come as easily now. But that was like it was like a lucid trance, if you know what I mean, and it was finished in three weeks.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I wouldn't say so'twas too much of the master and slave. It was very hurried, as I have said, and also I didn't know my husband. He was a very complex man. He was a graver man and a more severe man, and he also was a writer, and I think he probably did love me, I would say that, but he did not wish me to be a writer. So it was my husband replicated by my mother in one sense. My mother did not want me to be a writer, and now I landed myself in the same cell of someone not wanting me to be a writer.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we had gone away to the Isle of Man, and this family and some clergymen, actually a bishop coming, and I was put in a motor car. My brother was with me in the motor car and was, you know, interrogating me in a very, as you can imagine, detailed way about what had gone on. I got out of the car and the man I was thin duty bound to marry had been roughed up a bit by some of them, not actually the bishop or my father, but some of the henchmen, and therefore my fate was sealed.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, where many Irish people meet funnily enough in a public house True to my romantic leanings, let alone learnings I eloped in the manner of the heroines that I, you know, had espoused, I eloped because once again there was a mediate uproar from my family, because my mother claimed to have received an anonymous letter that I was going out with, as is the phrase, a divorce man who was also, it said, a communist, scandal of every kind, you know, and I eloped with this man who was to become my husband, Ernest Gabler. And I suppose I was in love”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next record is complete will be delighted to hear antidote or antithesis to the heroics of the foggy dew. And it's a little parable of down and outs of bums in New York City, and it's called a fairy tale of New York.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't It's funny people sometimes think it does and they use the word cepartic You know that you get it out of your system I think what it does is to bring you deeper within and inside the experience and I think as well that it gives one you know we all would love to think that we can live that we know life I feel I am separated from life by many of my own fears and my own handicaps and my own isolatedness and I feel that maybe each book has made me that little bit more able to say yes I am living life but I will never say fully I know how to live I only know how to write”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It began in Dublin it was I got a half day once a month, and on that half day I would go to the bookshop and I picked up this little book which I still have and treasure called Introducing James Joyce by TS Elliot. So that became my and I mean it genuinely my Bible.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or straight away, I mean I went from the convent to Dublin. Right. To my parents and my brother decide it. Again I was very ruled by people. This is why I love a bit of freedom. They decided that I would become a pharmacist. But inside was the secret and rebellious mission to break out of that, to go against their wishes and become a writer.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History was very much part of my schooling, and naturally the history of the invasion of Ireland, of the occupation, and down the years there were always rebellions, and they failed, and then we come Easter morning nineteen sixteen, a handful of men not very well equipped, a revolution that failed, and yet didn't fail, because it broke the chain the nine hundred year yoke of English sovereignty. So my song, sung by my friend Shenad O'Connor, is the most rousing and haunting, and I think a terrific song The Foggy Jew.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes she thought the country girls was disgraceful, and she had erased as a character baba in the country girls who has the odd swear word every other minute actually my mother had erased them with good deep black ink”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should have loved if I ran a hotel something nice, something away from cows and calves and this, that and the other I think or certainly she might have liked that for herself and my rage at her wanting, if you like, to put the harness on my imagination and that's not fully dead.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They hated it they often teachers do not like a certain wildness or reverie in a child pupil. They like a pupil to toe the lion so they didn't recognise it or I think welcome it”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I want her to be a nun, of course. I fell in love with nuns. It was a very stern place, there was a high stone wall around it, gates were locked. So what the convent did was to give me a bit of a hodgepodge education.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm preoccupied with it it doesn't end with death and it's never fully finished. My mother gave me a The realization that she, no matter what, Was, and I am afraid, still is, watching over my shoulder.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can listen to Bark when I'm writing, not to anybody else, no other piece of piece of music. And then of course you add to that the great Glengold And his notes for the Goldberg variations, he said like Baudelaire's lovers that they rest lightly on the winds of the unchecked wind so it's the checked and unchecked Goldberg variations by Glengold.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a fear of women and men tell you the truth. Yes, you live on the edge, but living on the edge doesn't dispose one very easily for ongoing life. As for going out into the world, my inner experience of men was all got from the odd bit of reading that I picked up here and there along the way you know Heathcliff Mr Rochester all that so they were demon men that they were savable so I went into the world with really the most daft kind of inner mythology. To this day I regret the fact I don't think I know or have ever learnt the game of men and women. It's like a dance that I cannot learn.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a bad way, yes, of course, because that anger, that wildness, and that wishing to tame something, he did love horses, let me add, but that his spirit was stronger than the spirit of the horse, that's part of it he was a very impatient man, he had great gifts, and my mother had great gifts of different kind. My mother hated the written word. She thought it was not only an occasion of sin but an avalanche of sin, and she did not want me to be a writer, and from her I developed by being rebellious in a secretive way, I developed a greater avidity for words and the written word, even though I loved my mother and believed that her existence and mine were together if she died I would die, and yet I defied her.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, it was a big house, stone house with trees all around it, a loved nature from the first breath I feel indoors was different there was indeed strife, I don't know the house or the family that there isn't strife those who say there isn't are talking Alder Dash My father broke in horses breaking in horses very dramatic, very dangerous and a very wild enterprise and he loved doing that and he loved and had no fear of horses.”
2007-01-14 · Desert Island Discs · Edna O'Brien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source