I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. There had been a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was running late, so I put up my hand for a taxi and a rumbling black cab drew to a halt. The door swung open and Edna stepped on to the pavement like Ophelia out of the weedy brook. She was a vision in black velvet and volumised hair. She paid at the window, clearly irked after some altercation with the driver, and when she turned she immediately took my hand and offered a Joycean, or possibly a Glaswegian, effusion.
“I fucking hate the English. Do you?”
“Not unceasingly,” I said, smiling.
“You’re that Scottish boy,” she said.
“And you’re that country girl.”
I made a move towards the cab. “How about I invite you to dinner on Tuesday?” I said to Edna.
“Where?” she said.
“The Wolseley?”
“Perfect. Ask for the corner table. Lucian Freud’s table. If he’s not there, they always give it to me.”
And so began a friendship founded on laughter. On the appointed Tuesday, Edna arrived wearing even more of her weed-like garments than before, and as we sat down (at the famous painter’s table) she asked for Sancerre. We were immediately into it: childhood, love, Ireland and Scotland, publishing, Harold Pinter. The waiter, who I think was Portuguese, kept being waved away by Edna when he tried to take our order, but eventually I held him by the sleeve and forced her to choose something. “We’ll have the small potato.”
“Sorry, madam?”
“The small potato. You have them. Delicious.”
The man was totally baffled. “What about steak tartare?” I suggested. “A soufflé, maybe?”
For 15 years, we called upon each other to complete thoughts we were unable to have alone
“There was a terrible famine,” she said to the waiter. “In Ireland, Scotland. It’s all the same. And these small potatoes make all the difference.”
After some negotiation, a purvey was agreed. I’m sure it involved herrings and small toasts and red meat and the small potato. By the time it was finished, Edna and I were fast friends and professional soulmates. She wanted to change publishers. She wanted to change agents. She wanted me to read something. She wanted more wine. But the stories flowed from her with the kind of talent you can’t fake. Edna was a pathbreaker, a brave artist, a brilliant diviner of human nature and folly, and from that night on, for the next 15 years, we called upon each other to complete thoughts we were unable to have alone.
There was comedy at all times. Edna was anxious to a degree that could sometimes scupper any possibility of success. She often said that friendship was a benison, but just as often she feared – with some well-wisher, some visitor – that it might be a curse, and it made me laugh to see how intolerant she could be. She had what you might call the underdog’s sense of being done over, and had cause to think that way as her struggle had always been real.
Her sense of outrage was a kind of energy. At the Duchess theatre, we once attended a production of Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s morbidly funny little masterpiece, and she made us climb 90 steps to look in on the actors. One of them, Mark Rylance, was perfectly nice though in a bit of a hurry, and the other immediately buttonholed Edna and suggested she write to Michael Billington, the Guardian theatre critic, to complain about his review of the play. “As if I don’t have enough to worry about,” Edna said as we thudded back down the stairs. “And not as much as a thimble of wine either!” Day in and day out for years, Edna would come on the phone speaking of “my present harassed condition”. She seemed to enjoy the fact of two writers bobbing separately and together towards their goals, but her instinct for friendship showed her when to go deeper. “We have to draw blood,” she would say, her face a mask of worry, as we sat down in her kitchen, below Jane Bown’s famous photograph of Beckett. “He would get lonely sometimes and call me late at night,” she said of him. “Oh, Andrew. Beware of the man who calls you late at night, that’s all I can say.”
“She’s a great part of the world, isn’t she?” Philip Roth said. The occasion was the off-Broadway opening of a play Edna had written, Haunted. She and Roth had been friends since the 1960s and she swore by his standards, by his industry, if not always by his editorial suggestions, over which she once threatened to excommunicate him. But that night their friendship was in full flower and he appeared at the theatre, proud, as he said, to know this tenacious Irishwoman with the bold prose style. She liked to say, of some of these older friends, that the friendship had survived many tests, but I was never sure if the testing had come from them or from her. (From them, she implied.) She was never reticent about sex or the part it had sometimes played in complicating a friendship. (There had been a fling with Roth but it had faded very quickly.) She liked men, but what she liked most in men who were also writers was their dedication to the task. She liked conversation with other writers, she wanted clues, and most of all she wanted an accompanying spirit to help as she moved things along.
Fast friends … Edna O’Brien and Andrew O’Hagan. Photograph: Bill Heaney
Late in her life, we went together for a week’s tour in the County Clare of her childhood. More than once on that drive, she grew fearful, I think, that the present-day was pulling away from her, and pulling apart her mastery of her own biography. At our hotel in Limerick, Edna told me she used to come here and look over all the churches and steeples, full of dread for her boys and her hopeless marriage. Some writers were rude to her back then. “Elizabeth Bowen,” she said, “was so condescending. She looked at me and said, with a stutter: ‘You are quite mad. Quite mad.’ She was right.”
We’d arranged a visit to her childhood home, Drewsborough House. It was changed utterly, as Edna said, and I could see she was taking the house’s flexibility as an affront. “I couldn’t write about it now,” she said. “I could be drawn back into it, but I’ve done it.”
We got back in the car and drove to the lough. “There’s going to be rain soon, I’ll tell you that now,” Edna said. Looking out at the fields, she played with phrases, just working with the sound of them, “the milk of the cow”, “the feel of the rain”, before rendering them into Irish. After a stop-off, she had “a little complain”, as she said, about some of the local men, their insistence and their clarion call of “listen now to me”. She felt there was some perpetual disquiet about her. She felt certain people had never forgiven her for her writing, which caused some of them to object to her plan of being buried on Holy Island (Inis Cealtra). We were headed there to look across from the bank of the Shannon at her final resting place.
“Why do you want to be there?“ I asked.
“Oh, because it’s beautiful. It’s isolated. And it’s full of birds. And trees all around it that are not cut down, and it’s wild. It has an old monastery covered in white lichen. And there are very few people buried there, so, if the dead commune, I won’t have much to worry about. I feel I could be buried in Tuamgraney where my mother is, but I want this house of splendid isolation.”
We passed near the Bow River.
“I used to love this little bit of road,” she said, “where the trees met.” I was driving but she put her hand over my hand. “I’m glad we came together. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way and that’s the truth.”
After a few moments, we dipped down a bank to the Shannon and we could see Holy Island through the slanting rain. “Oh, Andrew,” she said. “That is a very, very final thing. I have said I’m not afraid of it but I’m beginning to alter the script.”
“What frightens you?”
“The unknown. The nothing maybe.”
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Inside Saturday
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
It was the last day of our visit. “You see these waves, they’re walking into you,” she said, “and they’re grey. I’d better organise my demise in a sensible manner.” Looking over the sound to Inis Cealtra, it was hard to think about her demise. I saw images in my head from that decade and a half we had been friends. All the suppers, all the appearances together on stage, all the travels. But here we were, looking through the wild squall towards something on the other side of words, and she was ready for it. “I cherish our friendship and thank God for it,” she said. I took a photograph of her at the water’s edge. And at that point she turned and pushed her headscarf aside. “Shall I do a Virginia Woolf?” she said.
Edna O’Brien on her trip to Ireland with O’Hagan, with her last resting place in the background. Photograph: Andrew O’Hagan
Edna slowly declined over the next few years but something burned in her – a kind of determination, I suppose. One May evening in 2023, she asked me to come over and bring a few things from Melrose & Mortgage, as we jokingly called it, an extortionate delicatessen in Primrose Hill. “Oh, Andrew, what’s going to happen?” she said. “I’m dying.”
I suggested we open a bottle of Laurent-Perrier, which somebody said was Oscar Wilde’s favourite champagne. That made her smile. On the table there was a copy of her novel The Country Girls. She opened the book and read a sentence or two, beginning to weep as she did so. “There are some things in this world you cannot ask,” she read. “Oh, Agnus Dei. There are some things in this world you cannot.”
“Give me your hand,” I said.
She cheered up then. We spoke about a new play at the National Theatre. “I knew Richard Burton very well,” she said. “He courted me. He used to come to my house at midnight with roses. I always used to say the same thing: ‘Where did you get a shop open at this time?’ He sat and talked with me. I never went to bed with him. I was attracted to him and I liked his personality when he wasn’t too drunk – too drunk, he was a gangster. He loved a story of mine, The Love Object, and he used to read it aloud to Elizabeth when they were having sex. He told me that. I said I’d rather not know, if you don’t mind.”
She spoke about Burton’s old habit of shouting verse into the trees in Wales. She said that the trees we’d seen at Drewsborough House had actually spoken back to her in childhood. I was intrigued and I don’t find such things alarming. “My mind isn’t gone,” she said. “My mind is the same as it was when I was a young girl. I’m crying. I’m sad. But I was sad then.” We burst out laughing.
I told her I was directing a play about Truman Capote , alone in a room at the Plaza hotel. “I met him, by the way,” she said. “Truman. He was so drunk. There was a dead, Black poet called Edna and he thought I was her. I was standing in full flesh beside him at a party of Senator Javits’ s in New York.”
We then turned to a question she’d raised several times about me writing about her once she was gone. “You have a free hand,” she said. “You could talk about things nobody else could. People have a very mistaken version of me. I’m like a child, a very gifted child … intelligent, but with unmitigated foolishness. I overspent. I have put it in my books and I don’t talk phoney talk like Blanche DuBois, but if they opened my brain and picked out the alphabet of my life – very painful – always been worried, managing, managing, nightmare father, nightmare upbringing, nightmare mother, nightmare husband, getting custody of children … dirt and ugliness you could not muster.”
I poured her another glass. Ten years previously, Edna had asked me to record some of her final wishes on to tape. “Make sure it isn’t taken over by neanderthals,” she said. Her voice is strong on the recording, making jokes, making judgments, reaching out to posterity. Later that week, with the question of her afterlife still very much on her mind, she sent me a letter in the post, which I put into a file containing all her letters to me, but this one I never opened. I suppose I couldn’t face the end of our friendship: I believed it would be the final word from her, though of course the letter was not the last one, and it wasn’t the last recording either. But the letter sat unopened in the file.
She levelled a powerful look at me and took a sip, saying: I think we can finally say that the great enemy is prosecco
Close to her death, she moved into a flat in Belgravia, and I went to see her for the last time with the usual cargo of champagne. She wasn’t really drinking by then, and she lay on the bed, beautiful as ever. “Let’s have a glass,” she said. I opened it and we toasted each other. She levelled a powerful look at me and took a sip. “I think we can finally say, Andrew, that the great enemy is prosecco.”
We reminisced about that trip to Ireland. She recalled her time at the water’s edge across from Holy Island, in the midst of all that rain. But it was to Drewsborough House that her mind turned during that last visit. “You would not think there are so many words for ‘hope’,” she said. “I wish I could do more, but I won’t.”
I read to her from Keats, her favourite.
“O for a beaker full of the warm South.”
Edna was 93. She spoke of the old house and the trees surrounding it, giving her the setting for The Country Girls, published more than 60 years ago, eight years before I was born. She drifted back to her childhood and told me how she had loved the natural world. She expected to be back in that garden in the next life.
The sun was beating down the day we brought her remains over the Shannon to Inis Cealtra, which felt all in all like the Lake Isle of Innisfree, that magical world conjured by another of her favourites, WB Yeats. There was a man who understood the ascending power of friendship. “Thank you,” was all I could say to Edna as I dropped two shovels of earth into her grave and turned away. “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,” wrote the man himself, “And say my glory was I had such friends.”
“The real secret is loving,” Edna had said that last afternoon in Belgravia. “So I would love to meet Chekhov on a train.”
“Do you think you will meet people?”
“He will be in a higher place. But I hope he won’t be near Putin. Oh God, Andrew, the world has gone mad, do you know that?”
After writing the last sentence, I walked through to my filing cabinet and brought out the unopened letter Edna had sent me 10 years ago. I fancied it still smelled a little of the tuberose that swirled about her papers. I took a wooden letter opener that I once believed had belonged to the family of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stamped along the side, it says: “1850. To my Sweetheart.” Edna’s letter was pristine. Neatly folded. Carefully dated, it is written in her characteristic hand, full of her usual curlicues and anxieties, pleading for acts of friendship that I hope will never end.
This is an extract from On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan, published by Faber on 9 October. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
