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Synopsis
Spain in the years before the Armada, and high passion meets high politics. Ana, Princess of Eboli is a remarkable woman. Married at thirteen and losing an eye in a duel a year later, Ana is also heiress of Spain's leading family, widow of Philip II's wisest cousellor and rumoured to be the King's mistress. Unexpectedly - and unwisely - she falls in love with Don Antonio Perez, dandy, adulterer, skilled politician. With her unusual looks, her aristocratic arrogance and the simplicities of her faith, Ana cannot understand why her private life should become entangled with the affairs of state and, finally, incur the terrible vindictiveness of the King himself . . . Kate O'Brien's understanding and love of Spain enhance the beauty of this passionate and intelligent novel.
Release date: June 9, 2016
Publisher: Virago
Print pages: 416
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That Lady
Kate O'Brien
(1897–1974) was born in Limerick, Ireland, the fourth daughter of Catherine Thornhill and Thomas O’Brien. Her mother died when she was five and she was educated at Laurel Hill Convent, Limerick, and at University College, Dublin. Kate O’Brien lived in London for some years where she made her living as a journalist and began to write stories and plays. She also worked in Manchester, on the Guardian, and spent a year as a governess in Spain: a country she was to return to and write about often.
Kate O’Brien originally became known as a playwright, her first plays being Distinguished Villa (1926) and The Bridge (1927). But it was with the publication of her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), that her work became widely acclaimed. Described by J. B. Priestly as a “particularly beautiful and arresting piece of fiction”, it won the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black Prizes of 1931. This was followed by eight more novels: The Ante-Room (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938), The Land of Spices (1942), The Last of Summer (1943), That Lady (1946), The Flower of May (1953) and As Music and Splendour (1958). Two of these novels, Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices, were censored for their “immorality” by the Irish Censorship Board. Kate O’Brien dramatised three of her novels, That Lady also being made into a film starring Olivia De Havilland; she wrote travel books: Farewell Spain (1937), and My Ireland (1962); an autobiography, Presentation Parlour (1963); English Diaries and Journals (1943) and a monograph on Teresa of Avila (1951). Her works have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech and Swedish.
After a brief marriage at the age of twenty-six Kate O’Brien remained single for the rest of her life. In 1947 she was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lived in Roundstone, County Galway until 1961 when she moved to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent, where she died at the age of seventy-six.
Of her work Virago publish Mary Lavelle, That Lady and Farewell Spain
Why did’st thou promise such a beauteous day And make me travel forth without my cloak?
Between her birth in Boru House, Limerick, on 3 December 1897 and her death in the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, Canterbury, in the afternoon of 13 August 1974, Kate O’Brien chose discretion and privacy as a maxim for her life. In her last book, a book of reminiscences, Presentation Parlour (1963), Kate O’Brien piquantly refers to an aunt, a nun, who expressed a desire to read her first novel Without My Cloak (1931) and was only given it with certain sections pinned by safety pins. The nun was amply satisfied with her censored read. In a way when one comes to look at it, unlike like those of many authors, certain sections of Kate O’Brien’s life are closed off from us by safety pins. To know a little more one must construct from the pointers in her fiction, from her few autobiographical writings; one asks her friends, one delicately handles an heirloom of photographs.
My favourite photograph of Kate is one of her in her twenties, about the time of her short-lived marriage, in a shapeless many-coloured jersey. She has a face that resembles someone she quoted in English Diaries and Journals (1943), Katherine Mansfield. A face that is both serene and yet dogged by the fact of exile. It is an image that is premature in a final reckoning with Kate O’Brien because the image of her that seems to survive is that of the author of That Lady; her public portrait was finally completed with the success of That Lady, middle-aged woman still with a twenties-style hair cut, her impressively-boned Limerick face a little solemn, her eyes aristocratic, challenging, but not arrogant. Having spent a while looking at Kate O’Brien’s work my conclusion is that she was incapable of arrogance. Her life, like her work, was a supplication to a God who was partly provincial and partly a global traveller.
In her life Kate O’Brien knew the vicissitudes of poverty and wealth; she encountered international success and in the latter part of her life on The Street, Boughton in Kent, an eclipse from the public eye. In many ways the end of That Lady was prophetic of the end of Kate O’Brien. As Ana de Mendoza forfeits her Mantegna, a lifetime of refinement enshrined in it, so we can presume Kate had to relinquish her own precious works of art on selling her house in Roundstone, Connemara, (a house recently owned and vacated by Sting of the Police) and retiring to Kent. But prior to this fate, as for Ana de Mendoza, the mulberry trees had bloomed for Kate, the world of her time had chattered about her, as in the cases of Rose and Clare in As Music and Splendour she was more than familiar with the “symbols and augurs of total success”.
Kate O’Brien’s grandfather was evicted from a small farm just after the Famine; he headed towards Limerick city where by the 1860s he had established a thriving horse breeding business. In her first novel Without My Cloak, a grand gesture of an Irish novel not unlike Eilís Dillon’s recent Across the Bitter Sea, Kate chronicled the emotional lives of an Irish bourgeois family through the nineteenth century. But Irish bourgeois families, as in the case of Kate’s own, very often have their roots in recent poverty and catatonic acts of transcendance. Insecurity travels like a banshee through such families. In her second novel The Ante-Room (1934), a kind of Lady Chatterly’s Lover without the release of the sexual act, Kate very brilliantly, very toughly denuded such a family of the romance and left us with images of the detritus of the Irish bourgeois family, the gardens, the garden-houses, the guns poised for suicide.
Kate’s much-loved mother died when Kate was a child and she was sent to Laurel Hill Convent, run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, which she left when she was eighteen. Kate loved the school, a school where Mother Thecla and the bishop were wont to converse in Latin in the garden, a school which bordered on the majesterial Shannon, and from it she coaxed the experience for her most perfect novel, The Land of Spices (1941), one of the most important smaller novels of the twentieth century. Youth is set against age. A girl on the threshold of life against a nun about to become Mother General of her order. There is love between nun and girl. But intercepting this love, in the nun’s eyes, is an image of her father making love to a boy student in Brussels, a sight which initially drove her into the convent. The innocence of age and the innocence of youth is intercepted by an image of carnal love. The girl is walking into the world of such images. The nun is quietly withdrawing from the memory of the image. We can take it that Kate, on leaving Laurel Hill in June 1916, was walking into the world of these paradoxes, innocence inaugurated into experience. The nun was based on an English Reverend Mother who was at Laurel Hill in Kate’s time, a woman who never smiled so alienated as she was by this grey city and this to her slovenly river, a woman of “Yorkshire bred and Stonyhurst men”.
Already the duality of Ireland and England was established in Kate’s personality. An American writers’ directory of the 1940’s tells us that on Kate’s visit to the United States in the late forties she was without an Irish accent. I imagine those pinched “Stonyhurst” eyes looking with trepidation after Kate from a convent gate in 1916. Kate’s father died in 1916. His business had already been in decline. In Dublin in her mackintosh “half starved by the holy men and the holy women” Kate walked among the ruins of an English-built city. An uncle of hers, Uncle Hickey, had wept when Queen Victoria, “our great little queen”, had died. But Kate befriended many young and radiant revolutionaries at University College, a great number of whom, she tells us, had only a few years to live though that could not be suspected in a world which dazzled with ideas. Within a few years Kate had taken some of these ideas to Washington, working indirectly on behalf on the newly-declared Irish Free State, her American sojourn giving an authority to the final section of Without My Cloak in which Denis Considine hopelessly looks for his fugitive beloved in the half-lit late nineteenth-century world of port-side New York, a section where Kate, like some maverick folk-song writer, seems to have trapped all the acumen of an archetypal experience.
But before Washington Kate worked briefly on the Manchester Guardian, living in Manchester, and taught two terms at a London school. An incident there prepares us for the heroine of Mary Lavelle (1936). Kate’s beauty and graciousness made such an impact on the girls she was teaching that a mother traipsed to the convent to see what was astir, to be met at the door by a nun who declared “Well the fact is the beloved is very beautiful.” 1922–23 Kate was in another country. Spain. Which was to be the love of her life, a country from which she was barred from 1937 to 1957 for expressed Republican sympathies (Farewell Spain, 1937). In Bilbao in the rainy winter of 1922–23 Kate was acquainted with an Englishman who when she encountered him years later could only disdainfully recall the mud. Kate loved the mud for it reminded her of Ireland. In the Middle Ages there was constant commercial traffic between Spain and the West Coast of Ireland. A dark people on the West Coast of Ireland, the street names of certain Irish towns—in Galway there are names like Madeira Street, Velasquez de Palmeira Boulevard—bear witness to this.
In 1922 Ireland had a new link with Spain. It exported governesses. Kate joined the misses, the “legions of the lost ones, the cohorts of the damned”, the women who spoke English imperfectly and bided their time in cafés, hoping for the consummation of marriage. In Mary Lavelle there is a gesture of renunciation of Ireland, less publicised than Joyce’s, but, for me, more tender, more universal. A young, already-betrothed, Irish governess, naked in the night, after seducing a young married Spaniard, realises she has sold “the orthodox code of her life”, she has burnt her boats. “She would answer it, taking the consequences.” Like Agnes in The Ante-Room, Clare in As Music and Splendour, Ana in That Lady. She accepts the lifelong totality of a single choice. In a way the night of lost virginity in Mary Lavelle dawns into the burning days under the Guadarramas in That Lady; Ana, older than Mary, still carries the struggle ensuing from the same choice. She knows she must let the consequences of her choice run their full gamut before she can connect again with her immortal soul. The landscape of Castile itself, eternal, unyielding, becomes a foil to the consternation within her. Mary in Mary Lavelle visits Castile for the first time and perceives it as “meeting place of Moor and monk”, a land where the miracles of the New Testament could comfortably have taken place. Her persona as it is developed in the character of Ana de Mendoza is destined to seek the miracle of salvation here in spite of an adulterous affair she regards as a mortal sin.
In 1923 Kate married a young Dutch journalist in a registry office, cohabiting with him in a confined space in Belsize Park; often, Kate would recollect, the two would stroll in state into London, pretending it was for exercise, whereas in fact the real reason for these promenades was lack of money. The marriage lasted a year. Distinguished Villa, Kate’s first play, produced in 1926, a study of the middle classes of Brixton, was very nearly a tremendous success but its run was ended by the General Strike. The British papers in 1932 were describing a remarkably comely Irish woman, whom many thought was just over from Limerick, going to collect the Hawthornden Prize. As long as English was so beautifully used by Irish people one paper gushed Ireland and England could never really be enemies. Kate’s age was given as either thirty or thirty-one. In fact Kate’s first novel Without My Cloak was published on her thirty-fourth brithday in December 1931. Kate’s second two novels, The Ante-Room and Mary Lavelle are each a giddy leap ahead of the last. The first wavering of quality is her fourth novel Pray for the Wanderer (1938). But there is a remark that seems to have gathered force with the development of Kate’s life. The hero, an expatriate Irish writer, briefly home on a visit to a grey, Southern, river-side city, reflects that “a life of absence predicates a life of absence”.
Kate chose England for the war. During the war she published The Land of Spices and The Last of Summer (1943). Among the flying bombs she wrote her most structured novel, a novel which reveals itself like the panels of a painting, That Lady. Among the dramatic consternation of her time everything in the novel impels towards the inner life of Ana de Mendoza. She is a woman of middle age, the one-eyed, a little ridiculous looking, but to those who are intimate with her, magnetically sensual and emotionally calming. The post-war reading public loved her and That Lady sold more than half a million copies in its first few years of publication. The book was filmed. “I went to see it one afternoon” Kate says, “and there were lots of little boys in the cinema. They were booing and whistling and, of course, were absolutely right. I agreed with them and left the cinema.”
On the proceeds from the book, film version, stage version Kate moved to Ireland; she was possessed by the old Celtic dream that one should die in Ireland; for her prospective burial she picked out a hill overlooking a beach near Roundstone. She purchased a house in Round-stone, one occasionally plagued by rats whom some local shop proprietors muttered were the Tuatha de Danann in disguise. But in spite of the magic of white beaches and mystic rats The Flower of May (1953), shows a diminishing of tension. Her next and last novel As Music and Splendour (1958), was not a success and though marred by languor it is iridescently memorable for its depiction of “complicated dusts and civilisations” and of lesbian love. Clare, a young Irish opera singer in Rome at the end of the last century, brings a Catholic sense of fidelity to a lesbian relationship only to be shattered to find that others are not inured to the same sense of fidelity even in something as extreme and as, to her, soul-risking as lesbian love. The end of Kate O’Brien’s life in fiction is Clare walking into an uncertain and lonely life. A sense of sin, chosen and clung to, has a say in the last paragraph of As Music and Splendour.
Having sold her house in Roundstone in 1961 Kate moved to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent, where she secured a little house. In The Ante-Room an English doctor, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe, who realises that Dublin has at least a few good wine cellars in its favour, ventures into “the murderous and stormy South” to be taken aback by the elegance of the Mulqueen family. Sir Godfrey would have been equally surprised to find a member of such a family living in the South-East corner of England in the 1960s. Kate’s family was always haunted by the fear of declining fortunes. Aunt Hickey, of Mespil Road Dublin, used to shopping in Switzers, on bankruptcy, trained her parrot to say “Damn Switzers” on which she would approve him “Good boy, Sam.”
I don’t know what Kate’s attitude to her new relative obscurity was. Her books were following one another out of print. But she maintained a distinguished and acerbic poise in her column in The Irish Times. In English Diaries and Journals she quoted Katherine Mansfield “And when I say ‘I fear’ don’t let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other.” One is reminded of the stolid devotion of Bernardina to Ana at the end, and of Ana’s final isolation, from the world of glamour she was accustomed to, from the world of company, her last and only contact being her daughter. One is reminded of the anguish of Kate’s last months in a hospital ward, deprived of her classical music and her Radio Four quiz programmes, forced to listen to the clatter of Radio One and Two. Two weeks after having a leg amputated she died. On her gravestone in Faversham cemetery is a simple epitaph from a childhood hymn of Kate’s. ‘Pray for the Wanderer.’ In The Flower of May is a paragraph that compels with relevance.
Fanny looked about the beautiful wide table, at the gleaming glass and heavy silver, at the Sevres plates and dishes; she smelt and appraised the radiant fruits; she tasted her golden wine and looked with attention at the many splendid faces, ageing and young and very young, about her in the gentle lamplight. “It is a lovely scene,” she thought, “all this civilisation, generosity and peace; all this blind, easy grace, this taking for granted of perfection in small things; all these radiant eyes, all this well-mannered affection, all this assurance, this polish, physical and even mental. But I belong to another place. I have dallied, I have dawdled. None of this is either mine or what I want. Mother, I am coming home.
Kate never finally got home or wanted to go home.
New Year 1969 Kate put these words in The Irish Times. “Private life remains—and cannot be taken away, except by death. Though, as Marvell reminded us very truly ‘The grave’s a fine and private place.’ ” That Lady, her most commercially successful novel, is about private life, Ana de Mendoza’s attempt to preserve private emotions against the carnivorous demands of her society and her time and her attempt to preserve a knowledge of her soul against a passionate and very physical love affair. In Teresa of Avila (1951), Kate makes reference to a follower of Teresa, who after her death left his Carmelite order, and spent the rest of his life wandering as a tramp in North Africa. Ana de Mendoza is another such character. Her life a side-show of history. She stumbled out of “The Letters of Saint Teresa” for Kate, Teresa having had a run in with the princess. It is not the organisation of historical events and characters, the arabesque of place names that finally impresses but the imaginative totality Kate brings to the emotional life of Ana de Mendoza. Philip is the other character that is wholly palpable but despite his tangibility he is a wraithe-like character; time, the Nazis, what you will. Ana de Mendoza realises that once an action has begun—her affair—she must see it through against all other principles and when it has run its course she can connect again with the journey of her salvation. Not before. Kate O’Brien’s theme can be summed up in two words. “Nunc Dimittis”. The life of experience chosen and lived to the point you can say “Now I’ve lived; now experience has come to its logical conclusion and now I can tend again to the acreage of spiritual life within me and that alone.”
Ana de Mendoza is a woman pitted against a time of manifold danger and much chaos; her reservoir of emotions is filled by the world her emotions must fight against; her triumph, and the book’s, is that her persona transcends its time, its enemies, and time itself with the magnitude of its sensitivity and the depths of its intuitions. Ana is a child of any time when the idea of individuality is attacked, when inner life is under fire, when individuals must square up to the notions of their monomaniac kings. Ana’s struggle against the king is, apart from anything else, a wonderful story; the king’s final punishment a birth for her and a revelation for the reader. And the fact that Ana happens to be a sixteenth-century Spanish princess points Kate in the direction of lines by Marina Tsvetayeva:
Back to the land of Dreams and Loneliness—Where we—are Majesties, and Highnesses.
Desmond Hogan, London, 1984
ANA did not wait for the king in the porch of her house. She stood above it, in her drawing-room, on the threshold of the central, balconied window. From there she could overlook the market-place, which was outside the open forecourt of her house, and she was spared the courtier-fuss of her son, Rodrigo. Her youngest child, a little girl of three, stood at the window with her and held her hand.
The October evening was brilliant and cool. Philip should have enjoyed the drive from Alcala, especially perhaps the last few miles, through lands to which her husband’s care had brought so much contentment. He had always cherished the humaneness of Ruy Gomez, and Ana had sometimes heard him muse enviously on what he called the latter’s “curiously practical application of goodwill to life”. She had teased him then about his adverb “curiously”, pointing out that his own goodwill often took practical shape. And he had said that it pleased him to hear that from her, who was “no courtier”. “No courtier, sir; only a subject who admires her king.”
How long since she had said that to him? Seven, eight years ago? At least; because she had said it in the queen’s presence. She remembered Isabel de Valois’ soft, appreciative smile—and it was eight years now since that lovely creature’s death. If she were alive still and on the throne, instead of this dull poor girl from Austria—why she would be thirty, incredible as it seemed. And perhaps even beginning to look something like a match for her middle-aged husband.
Ana, thirty-six herself, smiled on the word ‘middle-aged’, and let her glance pass over the market-place to the roof of the Colegiata church, where her husband slept, with round him the small bones of four of their ten children. Life was moving on indeed. They were dim now, the vivid, hopeful days when she and the princess from France were brides together. Spain had seemed impregnable then, the king was gay and self-confident, and the tragedy of Don Carlos had not advanced its shadow very far. Now there were many graves; much blundering, war and trouble; the king worked like a mole, people said, and court life appeared to have degenerated into a cryptic, stuffy routine, directed by a few fanatical canons from Sevilla, and some upstart clerks from no one knew where.
Ana had not visited Madrid or opened her house there since her husband’s death. Nothing tempted her thither, and she had learnt to love, with a constancy which sometimes amused her, the exhalation of bright peace which rose to her morning, noon and evening from this landscape of Pastrana, which was both her home and her charge. It was indeed an oasis in the proud poverty of Castile.
And she, very Castilian, had mocked the first efforts to make it so.
“You Portuguese peasant,” she used to say to her husband, “would you mind telling me why two blades of grass are so certainly better than one?”
But Ruy insisted that to starve was not essential to Castilian character, and pointed out to her that she had grown into a very true example of her own race on a lifetime of good meals.
So the land which Philip gave them had been irrigated, manured and planted. A colony of persecuted ‘Moriscos’ had been immigrated from Valencia and established in Pastrana, to teach the people their good farming methods, and in particular how to cultivate the mulberry tree and make silk. Here they and their children still were, happy, tolerant and tolerated. Pastrana was prosperous.
This was a commendable state of affairs, and sufficiently remarkable in a Castilian village; and although Ana had jibed in her time at its bringing about, yet now that Ruy, the good landlord, was dead and that his king’s new policies were making waste of his statesman-like work for Spain, she thought with pleasure sometimes that here at least in his own village the first Duke of Pastrana would be remembered for a generation or two as a man of goodwill.
Philip might be thinking similar thoughts as he drove past the stripped mulberry farms and the weavers’ sheds. For the king was a faithful friend. She knew better than most how faithful. And knowing, wondered now what especial whim of avuncular fuss brought him all this way to-day to visit her. True, his happening to be the guest, near-by at Alcala, of the Marqués de los Velez, would appear to the court to minimise the great honour done to Ruy Gomez’s widow—and Philip would undoubtedly think of that, for no one was more careful of appearances. Nevertheless, busy and tired as he was, to make this journey and risk the gossip of Madrid, meant that some aspect of her affairs must now have been worrying him for many months. For on principle he never examined any anxiety when it first arose to him. But having always held himself as, after Ruy, the guardian of her and her children, he kept informed about her, and during the early months of her widowhood had written her many fussy letters about this and that. And Ana, being herself incapable of fuss and unsympathetic to it, yet marvelled, as she read these letters, at his kind-heartedness, and his gusto for detail. She had once observed to Ruy that surely this latter peculiarity of Philip’s must be ultimately destructive to him as a king, but they had agreed that it made him oddly endearing as a man and a companion.
It would be pleasant to Ana, even stimulating, to see Philip again after so long a time. His admiration of her was constant, and had always pleased her. Thinking of that, she glanced back over her shoulder towards the bad Dutch portrait of her husband which hung in the room. In the flat, conventional painting she could find no hint of the urbane grace and friendliness of the man who had so surprisingly commanded her life in thirteen years. She sighed a little and cupped her fingers over the black silk patch that covered her right eye. She reflected that, in regard to his marriage, Ruy had lived exactly long enough for the completion of his own devoted purpose—which had simply been, she used to tell him, to train her out of being herself. He had known, it seemed, when to dismiss himself, known exactly how much imposition of time and habit was needed to lacquer a wild heart.
Yes, you sleep in peace, she mused ironically to the portrait now, you sleep in peace because you know your Tuerta is growing old, and soon will be quite old, a very old woman in charge of a very tidy parish. You kept me safe, Ruy—you insisted on that—and now you know that even a King of Spain can do nothing against the attrition of the years——
Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli and Duchess of Pastrana, was the only child of the Prince of Mélito, and therefore heiress in her own right to the estates, privileges and titles of one of the greatest lines of the house of Mendoza, the leading family of Spain. This family, Viscayan in origin and now holding lands all over the peninsula, had nevertheless, at the time of Ana’s birth in 1540, been Castilian in root and spirit for over three hundred years.
She was physically the expression of what that implied. Her beauty, for those who found her beautiful, was, paradoxically, of exaggeration and restraint. She was taller and thinner than is averagely considered seductive in a woman; her bones were narrow, and every feature, nose, chin, hand and foot, was a little longer than it should be. Her skin was thinly white, with blue veins showing on her temples and her hands. Her left eye was full of light, but over the socket of the right one she wore, as has been said, a black silk eye-shade, cut in diamond shape. She had worn this since she was fourteen. At that age she fought a duel with a page in her father’s house, and lost her right eye.
So when Ruy Gomez de Silva returned from England and Flanders in 1559 to consummate the marriage which he had contracted six years before with the child-heiress of the Mendozas, he found her tuerta, one-eyed.
She made no drama of this. Her husband and her mother were allowed to call her Tuerta, as a caress, in private; but she preferred the disfigurement ignored as a rule, and no one had ever heard that it troubled her. She seemed to wear her black silk patch as naturally as her shoes.
Her husband had always thought her extraordinarily beautiful, and had understood well that many men envied him and thought his luck fantastic. For he was forty-two and she was nineteen when they first slept together, and yet the fourteen years of married life which he enjoyed with her had been warm and happy, in spite of a courtier-world which did not spare them spatterings of dishonour.
For Ana was not merely too rich and important to escape slander. She was, even under Ruy’s guardianship, too careless. Also her husband was the king’s favourite minister of state and, all through his life, was given every privilege and kindness in Philip’s power. Therefore Madrid said again and again that Ana was the king’s mistress, and by her husband’s will. And Ana often smiled at the awkward perspicacity of gossips, who will often locate accurately enough what they might call a situation, but can seldom manage to interpret its truth.
But now she was forgotten by the chatterers of Madrid. And Philip, the once-handsome and scandal-giving king, was an over-worked and over-worried middle-aged man, concerned to breed a male heir who might be hoped to grow to manhood, and otherwise tortured by the repercussions from his own obstinate conception of kingship.
Such news as Ana heard in these days, from visiting relations, or from the echoes of Alcala University, picked up by her son Rodrigo, made it seem that Spain was facing grave trouble, at
Kate O’Brien originally became known as a playwright, her first plays being Distinguished Villa (1926) and The Bridge (1927). But it was with the publication of her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), that her work became widely acclaimed. Described by J. B. Priestly as a “particularly beautiful and arresting piece of fiction”, it won the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black Prizes of 1931. This was followed by eight more novels: The Ante-Room (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938), The Land of Spices (1942), The Last of Summer (1943), That Lady (1946), The Flower of May (1953) and As Music and Splendour (1958). Two of these novels, Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices, were censored for their “immorality” by the Irish Censorship Board. Kate O’Brien dramatised three of her novels, That Lady also being made into a film starring Olivia De Havilland; she wrote travel books: Farewell Spain (1937), and My Ireland (1962); an autobiography, Presentation Parlour (1963); English Diaries and Journals (1943) and a monograph on Teresa of Avila (1951). Her works have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech and Swedish.
After a brief marriage at the age of twenty-six Kate O’Brien remained single for the rest of her life. In 1947 she was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lived in Roundstone, County Galway until 1961 when she moved to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent, where she died at the age of seventy-six.
Of her work Virago publish Mary Lavelle, That Lady and Farewell Spain
Why did’st thou promise such a beauteous day And make me travel forth without my cloak?
Between her birth in Boru House, Limerick, on 3 December 1897 and her death in the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, Canterbury, in the afternoon of 13 August 1974, Kate O’Brien chose discretion and privacy as a maxim for her life. In her last book, a book of reminiscences, Presentation Parlour (1963), Kate O’Brien piquantly refers to an aunt, a nun, who expressed a desire to read her first novel Without My Cloak (1931) and was only given it with certain sections pinned by safety pins. The nun was amply satisfied with her censored read. In a way when one comes to look at it, unlike like those of many authors, certain sections of Kate O’Brien’s life are closed off from us by safety pins. To know a little more one must construct from the pointers in her fiction, from her few autobiographical writings; one asks her friends, one delicately handles an heirloom of photographs.
My favourite photograph of Kate is one of her in her twenties, about the time of her short-lived marriage, in a shapeless many-coloured jersey. She has a face that resembles someone she quoted in English Diaries and Journals (1943), Katherine Mansfield. A face that is both serene and yet dogged by the fact of exile. It is an image that is premature in a final reckoning with Kate O’Brien because the image of her that seems to survive is that of the author of That Lady; her public portrait was finally completed with the success of That Lady, middle-aged woman still with a twenties-style hair cut, her impressively-boned Limerick face a little solemn, her eyes aristocratic, challenging, but not arrogant. Having spent a while looking at Kate O’Brien’s work my conclusion is that she was incapable of arrogance. Her life, like her work, was a supplication to a God who was partly provincial and partly a global traveller.
In her life Kate O’Brien knew the vicissitudes of poverty and wealth; she encountered international success and in the latter part of her life on The Street, Boughton in Kent, an eclipse from the public eye. In many ways the end of That Lady was prophetic of the end of Kate O’Brien. As Ana de Mendoza forfeits her Mantegna, a lifetime of refinement enshrined in it, so we can presume Kate had to relinquish her own precious works of art on selling her house in Roundstone, Connemara, (a house recently owned and vacated by Sting of the Police) and retiring to Kent. But prior to this fate, as for Ana de Mendoza, the mulberry trees had bloomed for Kate, the world of her time had chattered about her, as in the cases of Rose and Clare in As Music and Splendour she was more than familiar with the “symbols and augurs of total success”.
Kate O’Brien’s grandfather was evicted from a small farm just after the Famine; he headed towards Limerick city where by the 1860s he had established a thriving horse breeding business. In her first novel Without My Cloak, a grand gesture of an Irish novel not unlike Eilís Dillon’s recent Across the Bitter Sea, Kate chronicled the emotional lives of an Irish bourgeois family through the nineteenth century. But Irish bourgeois families, as in the case of Kate’s own, very often have their roots in recent poverty and catatonic acts of transcendance. Insecurity travels like a banshee through such families. In her second novel The Ante-Room (1934), a kind of Lady Chatterly’s Lover without the release of the sexual act, Kate very brilliantly, very toughly denuded such a family of the romance and left us with images of the detritus of the Irish bourgeois family, the gardens, the garden-houses, the guns poised for suicide.
Kate’s much-loved mother died when Kate was a child and she was sent to Laurel Hill Convent, run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, which she left when she was eighteen. Kate loved the school, a school where Mother Thecla and the bishop were wont to converse in Latin in the garden, a school which bordered on the majesterial Shannon, and from it she coaxed the experience for her most perfect novel, The Land of Spices (1941), one of the most important smaller novels of the twentieth century. Youth is set against age. A girl on the threshold of life against a nun about to become Mother General of her order. There is love between nun and girl. But intercepting this love, in the nun’s eyes, is an image of her father making love to a boy student in Brussels, a sight which initially drove her into the convent. The innocence of age and the innocence of youth is intercepted by an image of carnal love. The girl is walking into the world of such images. The nun is quietly withdrawing from the memory of the image. We can take it that Kate, on leaving Laurel Hill in June 1916, was walking into the world of these paradoxes, innocence inaugurated into experience. The nun was based on an English Reverend Mother who was at Laurel Hill in Kate’s time, a woman who never smiled so alienated as she was by this grey city and this to her slovenly river, a woman of “Yorkshire bred and Stonyhurst men”.
Already the duality of Ireland and England was established in Kate’s personality. An American writers’ directory of the 1940’s tells us that on Kate’s visit to the United States in the late forties she was without an Irish accent. I imagine those pinched “Stonyhurst” eyes looking with trepidation after Kate from a convent gate in 1916. Kate’s father died in 1916. His business had already been in decline. In Dublin in her mackintosh “half starved by the holy men and the holy women” Kate walked among the ruins of an English-built city. An uncle of hers, Uncle Hickey, had wept when Queen Victoria, “our great little queen”, had died. But Kate befriended many young and radiant revolutionaries at University College, a great number of whom, she tells us, had only a few years to live though that could not be suspected in a world which dazzled with ideas. Within a few years Kate had taken some of these ideas to Washington, working indirectly on behalf on the newly-declared Irish Free State, her American sojourn giving an authority to the final section of Without My Cloak in which Denis Considine hopelessly looks for his fugitive beloved in the half-lit late nineteenth-century world of port-side New York, a section where Kate, like some maverick folk-song writer, seems to have trapped all the acumen of an archetypal experience.
But before Washington Kate worked briefly on the Manchester Guardian, living in Manchester, and taught two terms at a London school. An incident there prepares us for the heroine of Mary Lavelle (1936). Kate’s beauty and graciousness made such an impact on the girls she was teaching that a mother traipsed to the convent to see what was astir, to be met at the door by a nun who declared “Well the fact is the beloved is very beautiful.” 1922–23 Kate was in another country. Spain. Which was to be the love of her life, a country from which she was barred from 1937 to 1957 for expressed Republican sympathies (Farewell Spain, 1937). In Bilbao in the rainy winter of 1922–23 Kate was acquainted with an Englishman who when she encountered him years later could only disdainfully recall the mud. Kate loved the mud for it reminded her of Ireland. In the Middle Ages there was constant commercial traffic between Spain and the West Coast of Ireland. A dark people on the West Coast of Ireland, the street names of certain Irish towns—in Galway there are names like Madeira Street, Velasquez de Palmeira Boulevard—bear witness to this.
In 1922 Ireland had a new link with Spain. It exported governesses. Kate joined the misses, the “legions of the lost ones, the cohorts of the damned”, the women who spoke English imperfectly and bided their time in cafés, hoping for the consummation of marriage. In Mary Lavelle there is a gesture of renunciation of Ireland, less publicised than Joyce’s, but, for me, more tender, more universal. A young, already-betrothed, Irish governess, naked in the night, after seducing a young married Spaniard, realises she has sold “the orthodox code of her life”, she has burnt her boats. “She would answer it, taking the consequences.” Like Agnes in The Ante-Room, Clare in As Music and Splendour, Ana in That Lady. She accepts the lifelong totality of a single choice. In a way the night of lost virginity in Mary Lavelle dawns into the burning days under the Guadarramas in That Lady; Ana, older than Mary, still carries the struggle ensuing from the same choice. She knows she must let the consequences of her choice run their full gamut before she can connect again with her immortal soul. The landscape of Castile itself, eternal, unyielding, becomes a foil to the consternation within her. Mary in Mary Lavelle visits Castile for the first time and perceives it as “meeting place of Moor and monk”, a land where the miracles of the New Testament could comfortably have taken place. Her persona as it is developed in the character of Ana de Mendoza is destined to seek the miracle of salvation here in spite of an adulterous affair she regards as a mortal sin.
In 1923 Kate married a young Dutch journalist in a registry office, cohabiting with him in a confined space in Belsize Park; often, Kate would recollect, the two would stroll in state into London, pretending it was for exercise, whereas in fact the real reason for these promenades was lack of money. The marriage lasted a year. Distinguished Villa, Kate’s first play, produced in 1926, a study of the middle classes of Brixton, was very nearly a tremendous success but its run was ended by the General Strike. The British papers in 1932 were describing a remarkably comely Irish woman, whom many thought was just over from Limerick, going to collect the Hawthornden Prize. As long as English was so beautifully used by Irish people one paper gushed Ireland and England could never really be enemies. Kate’s age was given as either thirty or thirty-one. In fact Kate’s first novel Without My Cloak was published on her thirty-fourth brithday in December 1931. Kate’s second two novels, The Ante-Room and Mary Lavelle are each a giddy leap ahead of the last. The first wavering of quality is her fourth novel Pray for the Wanderer (1938). But there is a remark that seems to have gathered force with the development of Kate’s life. The hero, an expatriate Irish writer, briefly home on a visit to a grey, Southern, river-side city, reflects that “a life of absence predicates a life of absence”.
Kate chose England for the war. During the war she published The Land of Spices and The Last of Summer (1943). Among the flying bombs she wrote her most structured novel, a novel which reveals itself like the panels of a painting, That Lady. Among the dramatic consternation of her time everything in the novel impels towards the inner life of Ana de Mendoza. She is a woman of middle age, the one-eyed, a little ridiculous looking, but to those who are intimate with her, magnetically sensual and emotionally calming. The post-war reading public loved her and That Lady sold more than half a million copies in its first few years of publication. The book was filmed. “I went to see it one afternoon” Kate says, “and there were lots of little boys in the cinema. They were booing and whistling and, of course, were absolutely right. I agreed with them and left the cinema.”
On the proceeds from the book, film version, stage version Kate moved to Ireland; she was possessed by the old Celtic dream that one should die in Ireland; for her prospective burial she picked out a hill overlooking a beach near Roundstone. She purchased a house in Round-stone, one occasionally plagued by rats whom some local shop proprietors muttered were the Tuatha de Danann in disguise. But in spite of the magic of white beaches and mystic rats The Flower of May (1953), shows a diminishing of tension. Her next and last novel As Music and Splendour (1958), was not a success and though marred by languor it is iridescently memorable for its depiction of “complicated dusts and civilisations” and of lesbian love. Clare, a young Irish opera singer in Rome at the end of the last century, brings a Catholic sense of fidelity to a lesbian relationship only to be shattered to find that others are not inured to the same sense of fidelity even in something as extreme and as, to her, soul-risking as lesbian love. The end of Kate O’Brien’s life in fiction is Clare walking into an uncertain and lonely life. A sense of sin, chosen and clung to, has a say in the last paragraph of As Music and Splendour.
Having sold her house in Roundstone in 1961 Kate moved to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent, where she secured a little house. In The Ante-Room an English doctor, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe, who realises that Dublin has at least a few good wine cellars in its favour, ventures into “the murderous and stormy South” to be taken aback by the elegance of the Mulqueen family. Sir Godfrey would have been equally surprised to find a member of such a family living in the South-East corner of England in the 1960s. Kate’s family was always haunted by the fear of declining fortunes. Aunt Hickey, of Mespil Road Dublin, used to shopping in Switzers, on bankruptcy, trained her parrot to say “Damn Switzers” on which she would approve him “Good boy, Sam.”
I don’t know what Kate’s attitude to her new relative obscurity was. Her books were following one another out of print. But she maintained a distinguished and acerbic poise in her column in The Irish Times. In English Diaries and Journals she quoted Katherine Mansfield “And when I say ‘I fear’ don’t let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other.” One is reminded of the stolid devotion of Bernardina to Ana at the end, and of Ana’s final isolation, from the world of glamour she was accustomed to, from the world of company, her last and only contact being her daughter. One is reminded of the anguish of Kate’s last months in a hospital ward, deprived of her classical music and her Radio Four quiz programmes, forced to listen to the clatter of Radio One and Two. Two weeks after having a leg amputated she died. On her gravestone in Faversham cemetery is a simple epitaph from a childhood hymn of Kate’s. ‘Pray for the Wanderer.’ In The Flower of May is a paragraph that compels with relevance.
Fanny looked about the beautiful wide table, at the gleaming glass and heavy silver, at the Sevres plates and dishes; she smelt and appraised the radiant fruits; she tasted her golden wine and looked with attention at the many splendid faces, ageing and young and very young, about her in the gentle lamplight. “It is a lovely scene,” she thought, “all this civilisation, generosity and peace; all this blind, easy grace, this taking for granted of perfection in small things; all these radiant eyes, all this well-mannered affection, all this assurance, this polish, physical and even mental. But I belong to another place. I have dallied, I have dawdled. None of this is either mine or what I want. Mother, I am coming home.
Kate never finally got home or wanted to go home.
New Year 1969 Kate put these words in The Irish Times. “Private life remains—and cannot be taken away, except by death. Though, as Marvell reminded us very truly ‘The grave’s a fine and private place.’ ” That Lady, her most commercially successful novel, is about private life, Ana de Mendoza’s attempt to preserve private emotions against the carnivorous demands of her society and her time and her attempt to preserve a knowledge of her soul against a passionate and very physical love affair. In Teresa of Avila (1951), Kate makes reference to a follower of Teresa, who after her death left his Carmelite order, and spent the rest of his life wandering as a tramp in North Africa. Ana de Mendoza is another such character. Her life a side-show of history. She stumbled out of “The Letters of Saint Teresa” for Kate, Teresa having had a run in with the princess. It is not the organisation of historical events and characters, the arabesque of place names that finally impresses but the imaginative totality Kate brings to the emotional life of Ana de Mendoza. Philip is the other character that is wholly palpable but despite his tangibility he is a wraithe-like character; time, the Nazis, what you will. Ana de Mendoza realises that once an action has begun—her affair—she must see it through against all other principles and when it has run its course she can connect again with the journey of her salvation. Not before. Kate O’Brien’s theme can be summed up in two words. “Nunc Dimittis”. The life of experience chosen and lived to the point you can say “Now I’ve lived; now experience has come to its logical conclusion and now I can tend again to the acreage of spiritual life within me and that alone.”
Ana de Mendoza is a woman pitted against a time of manifold danger and much chaos; her reservoir of emotions is filled by the world her emotions must fight against; her triumph, and the book’s, is that her persona transcends its time, its enemies, and time itself with the magnitude of its sensitivity and the depths of its intuitions. Ana is a child of any time when the idea of individuality is attacked, when inner life is under fire, when individuals must square up to the notions of their monomaniac kings. Ana’s struggle against the king is, apart from anything else, a wonderful story; the king’s final punishment a birth for her and a revelation for the reader. And the fact that Ana happens to be a sixteenth-century Spanish princess points Kate in the direction of lines by Marina Tsvetayeva:
Back to the land of Dreams and Loneliness—Where we—are Majesties, and Highnesses.
Desmond Hogan, London, 1984
ANA did not wait for the king in the porch of her house. She stood above it, in her drawing-room, on the threshold of the central, balconied window. From there she could overlook the market-place, which was outside the open forecourt of her house, and she was spared the courtier-fuss of her son, Rodrigo. Her youngest child, a little girl of three, stood at the window with her and held her hand.
The October evening was brilliant and cool. Philip should have enjoyed the drive from Alcala, especially perhaps the last few miles, through lands to which her husband’s care had brought so much contentment. He had always cherished the humaneness of Ruy Gomez, and Ana had sometimes heard him muse enviously on what he called the latter’s “curiously practical application of goodwill to life”. She had teased him then about his adverb “curiously”, pointing out that his own goodwill often took practical shape. And he had said that it pleased him to hear that from her, who was “no courtier”. “No courtier, sir; only a subject who admires her king.”
How long since she had said that to him? Seven, eight years ago? At least; because she had said it in the queen’s presence. She remembered Isabel de Valois’ soft, appreciative smile—and it was eight years now since that lovely creature’s death. If she were alive still and on the throne, instead of this dull poor girl from Austria—why she would be thirty, incredible as it seemed. And perhaps even beginning to look something like a match for her middle-aged husband.
Ana, thirty-six herself, smiled on the word ‘middle-aged’, and let her glance pass over the market-place to the roof of the Colegiata church, where her husband slept, with round him the small bones of four of their ten children. Life was moving on indeed. They were dim now, the vivid, hopeful days when she and the princess from France were brides together. Spain had seemed impregnable then, the king was gay and self-confident, and the tragedy of Don Carlos had not advanced its shadow very far. Now there were many graves; much blundering, war and trouble; the king worked like a mole, people said, and court life appeared to have degenerated into a cryptic, stuffy routine, directed by a few fanatical canons from Sevilla, and some upstart clerks from no one knew where.
Ana had not visited Madrid or opened her house there since her husband’s death. Nothing tempted her thither, and she had learnt to love, with a constancy which sometimes amused her, the exhalation of bright peace which rose to her morning, noon and evening from this landscape of Pastrana, which was both her home and her charge. It was indeed an oasis in the proud poverty of Castile.
And she, very Castilian, had mocked the first efforts to make it so.
“You Portuguese peasant,” she used to say to her husband, “would you mind telling me why two blades of grass are so certainly better than one?”
But Ruy insisted that to starve was not essential to Castilian character, and pointed out to her that she had grown into a very true example of her own race on a lifetime of good meals.
So the land which Philip gave them had been irrigated, manured and planted. A colony of persecuted ‘Moriscos’ had been immigrated from Valencia and established in Pastrana, to teach the people their good farming methods, and in particular how to cultivate the mulberry tree and make silk. Here they and their children still were, happy, tolerant and tolerated. Pastrana was prosperous.
This was a commendable state of affairs, and sufficiently remarkable in a Castilian village; and although Ana had jibed in her time at its bringing about, yet now that Ruy, the good landlord, was dead and that his king’s new policies were making waste of his statesman-like work for Spain, she thought with pleasure sometimes that here at least in his own village the first Duke of Pastrana would be remembered for a generation or two as a man of goodwill.
Philip might be thinking similar thoughts as he drove past the stripped mulberry farms and the weavers’ sheds. For the king was a faithful friend. She knew better than most how faithful. And knowing, wondered now what especial whim of avuncular fuss brought him all this way to-day to visit her. True, his happening to be the guest, near-by at Alcala, of the Marqués de los Velez, would appear to the court to minimise the great honour done to Ruy Gomez’s widow—and Philip would undoubtedly think of that, for no one was more careful of appearances. Nevertheless, busy and tired as he was, to make this journey and risk the gossip of Madrid, meant that some aspect of her affairs must now have been worrying him for many months. For on principle he never examined any anxiety when it first arose to him. But having always held himself as, after Ruy, the guardian of her and her children, he kept informed about her, and during the early months of her widowhood had written her many fussy letters about this and that. And Ana, being herself incapable of fuss and unsympathetic to it, yet marvelled, as she read these letters, at his kind-heartedness, and his gusto for detail. She had once observed to Ruy that surely this latter peculiarity of Philip’s must be ultimately destructive to him as a king, but they had agreed that it made him oddly endearing as a man and a companion.
It would be pleasant to Ana, even stimulating, to see Philip again after so long a time. His admiration of her was constant, and had always pleased her. Thinking of that, she glanced back over her shoulder towards the bad Dutch portrait of her husband which hung in the room. In the flat, conventional painting she could find no hint of the urbane grace and friendliness of the man who had so surprisingly commanded her life in thirteen years. She sighed a little and cupped her fingers over the black silk patch that covered her right eye. She reflected that, in regard to his marriage, Ruy had lived exactly long enough for the completion of his own devoted purpose—which had simply been, she used to tell him, to train her out of being herself. He had known, it seemed, when to dismiss himself, known exactly how much imposition of time and habit was needed to lacquer a wild heart.
Yes, you sleep in peace, she mused ironically to the portrait now, you sleep in peace because you know your Tuerta is growing old, and soon will be quite old, a very old woman in charge of a very tidy parish. You kept me safe, Ruy—you insisted on that—and now you know that even a King of Spain can do nothing against the attrition of the years——
Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli and Duchess of Pastrana, was the only child of the Prince of Mélito, and therefore heiress in her own right to the estates, privileges and titles of one of the greatest lines of the house of Mendoza, the leading family of Spain. This family, Viscayan in origin and now holding lands all over the peninsula, had nevertheless, at the time of Ana’s birth in 1540, been Castilian in root and spirit for over three hundred years.
She was physically the expression of what that implied. Her beauty, for those who found her beautiful, was, paradoxically, of exaggeration and restraint. She was taller and thinner than is averagely considered seductive in a woman; her bones were narrow, and every feature, nose, chin, hand and foot, was a little longer than it should be. Her skin was thinly white, with blue veins showing on her temples and her hands. Her left eye was full of light, but over the socket of the right one she wore, as has been said, a black silk eye-shade, cut in diamond shape. She had worn this since she was fourteen. At that age she fought a duel with a page in her father’s house, and lost her right eye.
So when Ruy Gomez de Silva returned from England and Flanders in 1559 to consummate the marriage which he had contracted six years before with the child-heiress of the Mendozas, he found her tuerta, one-eyed.
She made no drama of this. Her husband and her mother were allowed to call her Tuerta, as a caress, in private; but she preferred the disfigurement ignored as a rule, and no one had ever heard that it troubled her. She seemed to wear her black silk patch as naturally as her shoes.
Her husband had always thought her extraordinarily beautiful, and had understood well that many men envied him and thought his luck fantastic. For he was forty-two and she was nineteen when they first slept together, and yet the fourteen years of married life which he enjoyed with her had been warm and happy, in spite of a courtier-world which did not spare them spatterings of dishonour.
For Ana was not merely too rich and important to escape slander. She was, even under Ruy’s guardianship, too careless. Also her husband was the king’s favourite minister of state and, all through his life, was given every privilege and kindness in Philip’s power. Therefore Madrid said again and again that Ana was the king’s mistress, and by her husband’s will. And Ana often smiled at the awkward perspicacity of gossips, who will often locate accurately enough what they might call a situation, but can seldom manage to interpret its truth.
But now she was forgotten by the chatterers of Madrid. And Philip, the once-handsome and scandal-giving king, was an over-worked and over-worried middle-aged man, concerned to breed a male heir who might be hoped to grow to manhood, and otherwise tortured by the repercussions from his own obstinate conception of kingship.
Such news as Ana heard in these days, from visiting relations, or from the echoes of Alcala University, picked up by her son Rodrigo, made it seem that Spain was facing grave trouble, at
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