The Radiant Life of Nuala O’Faolain
Books are doorways into other times, places, and lives. Nuala O’Faolain was born only a decade before I was, which makes us approximate contemporaries. In our youth, women lived under constraints that were invisible to us. I remember the feeling of amazement — looking back years later and realizing how oblivious I’d been while the society busily molded not only my behaviour, but my thoughts and ambitions.
In the parochial Catholic Ireland where Nuala grew up, strictures on women were overt and powerful. Religious options were good Catholic or bad Catholic. Her memoir describes an astonishing brush with “Catholic vigilantes.” These men spied on her, followed her, and urged her to go to Confession.
By describing her life in the city during the sixties, Nuala unveils Dublin’s persistent conservatism in the face of widespread demands for women’s rrights. A poignant summary of a failed relationship reveals her insight into how society constrains its members. The affair, she reports, was “too embedded in the old culture.” Unable to adapt to changing times, it “came crashing down” and left the couple “wandering among its ruins.”
Such vignettes afford readers glimpses into Nuala’s mind and soul. Almost by chance, this former Irish Times journalist wrote two memoirs in mid-life, after her early years as a university lecturer and a television producer for BBC and RTE. Reading her republished columns from The Irish Times and recalling the history we’d both witnessed at first hand in our different places, I became completely absorbed in her world.
Riveted by A Radiant Life, I felt compelled to seek out her memoirs. The first, Are You Somebody: the Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, was an international sensation. It also generated a flood of letters from around the world, all of which she answered. I enjoyed Almost There: the Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman just as much. I too majored in English — though, unlike Nuala, not on a scholarship to Cambridge. The following lines caused me to chuckle with recognition. “I don’t have any objection to the art made by dead white males. Far from it: the thought that I might have missed this literature – that I might have been born later, when it was decided it was too difficult for young people – fills me with horror. I never think of gender when I’m reading.”
Reading Nuala’s works, I was struck by her preoccupation with living a good life. In addition to turning her sharply perceptive lens on misogyny, hypocrisy, xenophobia and other human ills, she penned a fascinating and thoughtful essay entitled “The Mystery of the General Good.”
It seems to me a central concern of both memoirs is the conscious act of looking back on the family and culture she grew up in with variations of this question in mind. What shadows of my past must I overcome in order to suffer less and become a better person?
The eponymous column of The Radiant Life expresses the author’s admiration for an Irishwoman called Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran, who followed Zen to Japan, where a statue was later erected to honour her. A truism applies here: what we like or dislike in others are characteristics and behaviours we fail to perceive in ourselves. It is obvious to the reader that Nuala shares abundantly the qualities she admires in O’Halloran. Though she is far too modest to claim such a thing, she lived a radiant life.
Her range is wide. The columns she wrote cover a vast array of subjects, and reveal some astonishing bits of recent Irish history. In “About Justice,” she alludes to the “fear and contempt implicit” in this tiny detail: “The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin instructed the government of the day to ban Tampax when it first came in.” In “Gross Bigotry,” she talks about a court case challenging Irish courts to formally recognize a marriage between two women that took place in Canada. This, she says, is one of “a series of speakings-out which over the last 20 years or so have challenged the silences that held the old Ireland together.”
Designer Poverty relates how after paying big bucks to see Les Miserables, she leaves the theatre bothered by a sense that the the show has “ripped off…the human capacity to feel real pity, and to be dynamically outraged on behalf of the oppressed.” Then she switches out of the first person. The second person is notoriously difficult to use well, but Nuala deploys it brilliantly, describing how “you” come out of the show “high on barricades and red flags and justified revolution and the unstoppable power of the people…You come out excited by…the wretched of the earth striking out for liberty, the masses marching forward toward the light, the hopeless but beautiful protests of people who have nothing to lose. Then you get in your car, and pausing only to avoid running over the odd tramp or beggar, you go to your comfortable home.” She goes on implicating the reader by relating the conversation “you” have with yourself, arguing that it is “only entertainment” after all.
Your Cheatin’ Heart discusses the great popularity of the movie Walk the Line in Ireland. Tongue in cheek, Nuala hilariously praises country music. “Couples don’t talk,” she tells us, but they do sing along as if “everyone, irrespective of gender, age, or circumstance, can fully identify with the tough but lovable bad guy who killed a man in Reno or the golden-hearted poker player or the long-married couple who…haven’t lost the desire to fool around on a blanket on the ground.”
She then surprises us by claiming that Irish people “who under torture would not be able to remember the words to the National Anthem or Danny Boy” will know the “less demanding” lyrics of country songs. Those lines rhyme, and “are repeated over and over.” The problem is “trying to get them out of, not into your head.” Such songs “are chronicles of a simple world, where good is good and bad is bad and men are men and women are sweet and helpful angels whose main task here on earth is to stand by their man and help him through the night.” Though ladies can still “display a certain feistiness,” it’s really all about the man, who has been working so hard “at shoveling 16 tons, killing guys, doing time, playing poker with a broken heart…that he has enough on his plate without having to treat women as equals.” At the end of the piece, she explains that the movie’s plot “relied on the audience believing certain things about the operations of love and the miraculous responsiveness of people to believing they love and are loved.” The film about Johnny Cash and June Carter, she concludes, is a parable.
Love — in its myriad forms — is a recurring theme. In Sex Matters, she quotes a survey that reports that 70 per cent of Irish women and 57 percent of Irish men are satisfied with their sex lives, but finds this hard to believe. Suspicion arises because these numbers “are probably more than are satisfied with the performance of the Ireland soccer team or Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach.” The other reason is ostensibly personal. “I’ve always associated sex with difficulty…it is hard to find the right partner, and then difficult to reach a happy intimacy with them and…keep the intimacy going through all the many of events of a busy life.” Besides which, “literature could hardly exist without “unwise passion…and tragic misalliance.”
In the memoirs, she also writes a great deal about love, including the child’s need for parental love, and the tragic consequences that come about when emotionally damaged or overwhelmed or uncaring parents fail to show their children they are loved. The second of nine children, born to a charming but distant father and a depressed alcoholic mother, Nuala continues to struggle with, and write about the human yearning to love and be loved.
Writing in 2007 about Northern Ireland, she comments that “The control of hatred is a separate thing from social justice” and “the basic social contract has to be secured before anything else.” Pointing out that “quite a few people on this island…burned or bombed or shot at or tortured other people.” Many of these “don’t regret they did it, and if circumstances reverted to what they were, would do it again.” A great many lives “have been completely deformed by that violence and hatred,” and “Northern Ireland…is full of people who don’t forgive…[and] people who can’t be forgiven.” Such conditions exist not only in Ireland, but in many other places in the world. Thus, the job for politicians “is to construct a political entity that works, not to build a society in which people are good.”
A feminist with a powerful intellect, Nuala responds with hollow laughter when the Archbishop of Dublin suggests a debate on embryos. This relates to a court case in which a couple who had one child and are now divorced are arguing over whether the woman can use their other viable embryos to try for another baby. The husband “for reasons that seem to him compelling”…”does not want a child of his to be born by this woman. He wants to prevent the development of the viable, independent life of such a child.” But, Nuala points out, this is “exactly the position of women who seek abortions: they have reasons which seem good to them not to proceed with a pregnancy.” Now the questions raised by abortion have become “unisex,” she hopes the subject will be “somewhat freed of the element of fundamental contempt for women and disgust at their bodies.” In reference to a different court case, she unmasks another cleric’s comments as revealing his unconscious enmity toward women.
In “Islam and the West,” the journalist looks beneath the shallow stereotyping of a magazine article she read claiming that feminists support Hezbollah. “There is no feminist party line on a conflict like the one…in South Lebanon [2006].” She points out that “it’s ridiculous to pretend that there’s a whole body of women out there — of all ages, from all cultures, having had all kinds of life experience — who all believe the same thing.” The essay concludes with an exhortation: “Let attacks on the misogyny of Islam continue. But let there be self-criticism too. The fact has to be acknowledged that human beings have failed in the project of living together, and they’ve failed everywhere…our failure is different from theirs. But we too have failed.”
Alas, Nuala — I use her first name because reading her work has made me feel as if I know her — was not on my radar when Eleanor Wachtel interviewed her for Writers and Company in Victoria in 2003. Five years before her death, Nuala is still her funny, clear-eyed and wise self. In that interview, which can be heard here, she refers to Ireland as “a woman-hating country, a country that you want to change, that can drive you nuts. But you can still love it.”
Three years after Nuala’s death, Fintan O’Toole wrote an Afterword to the 2011 edition of A Radiant Life, in which he characterizes Nuala O’Faolain “one of the greatest columnists to inhabit the English language.”
For my part, I enjoyed the privilege of what felt like a conversation with a woman who is no longer alive. It was fascinating to learn what it was like to live through the sixties in Dublin, and it delighted me how Nuala articulated the challenges posed by the cultures that shaped — and warped us. I felt our sensibilities meshed on various matters, including the fun fact of sharing a love for Egyptian cotton sheets.