from www.salon.com

Recently, Irish novelist Edna O'Brien appeared onstage in San Francisco at an event sponsored by City Arts & Lectures, where she read from her new novel-in-progress, "Down By The River." The author of 14 novels and five collections of short stories, O'Brien also talked about who and what drives her to live in exile (in London), to write about war, and to throw herself so exultantly into the rhythm of language.

You come from a country that many writers seem to leave. Is it better or easier to write about Ireland from outside?
My first book, "The Country Girls," was a simple little tale of two girls who were trying to burst out of their gym frocks and their convent, and their own lives in their own houses, to make it to the big city. It angered a lot of people, including my own family. It was banned; it was called a smear on Irish womanhood. A priest in our parish asked from the altar if anyone who had bought copies would bring them to the chapel grounds. That evening there was a little burning. My mother said women fainted, and I said maybe it was the smoke. When I wrote my second book ("The Lonely Girls"), the opinion was the first was a prayer book by comparison. My mother had gone though the book and inked out any offending words.

So I was made to feel ashamed, made to feel I had done something wrong. It's hard enough to write a book at all; you have to dig and dig and dig into your unconscious, come up with some kind of story, and language, emotion, music. And you'd like a small amount of support from someone you knew. So if you have any degree of self-protection at all, you get out of that place, if you're going to keep writing.

James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have. I don't rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place, where I would have silence and privacy. It's important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you're throttled. You can't do it.

You write a lot about war -- war in the house, war in the land, war in the heart. Are the Irish more prone to that particular pastime?
I certainly think they're more turbulent. They're more turbulent by disposition and by language. And their history has made them suffer a hell of a lot. I have written about strife between mother and child, between husband and wife, and, in "House of Splendid Isolation," between two parts of the same country.

An IRA man told me once, "When you're shooting, you don't feel. But when you've shot him, you do feel, because half of you hopes you got him, and the other half hopes you didn't. Because we're all Irish under the skin." That to me was a story about war.

War, whether it's between man and woman, or different parts of a country, or different nations, is always, always more complicated than just the two sides. It is that I want to write about. It's the dilemma and conflict within the obvious dilemma that matters. It would be impossible for a writer with any awareness at all about the human psyche and the human condition not to write about wars, whatever locale they are. Because people do disagree with each other; they do sometimes forgive one another, and then they re-disagree with one another. Life is not a placid pool, it's a raging, storming sea, which we're all in. And maybe I, being from the race I am, pay more attention to that than to the gentler aspects. But then, that's my fate.

Is that the purpose, or the message of your writing?
I'm not sure I have a message -- Edvard Munch's "The Scream," perhaps. Purpose? It's a very hard question to answer. First and foremost for me is language. One of my greatest excitements in life is to hear a piece of language, a strip of a poem, like Wallace Stevens: "I don't know which to prefer more,/ the beauty of inflection or the beauty of innuendo,/ the blackbird whistling, or just after." I can't tell what the "purpose" of Wallace Stevens, of those three great lines, is. All I know is, when I heard them, they bestirred me.

Language is an extraordinary thing. It is more extraordinary than any nuclear weapon. You can do anything with it. James Joyce did. You can turn it inside out. You can twist it, you can make a galaxy with it, and bring out in the reader emotion and excitement and an ecstasy the reader did not know he or she was capable of. I love even the vague possibility that I can be engaged in that trade or vocation.

Which writers bestir you, influence you, the most?
It has to be James Joyce. It's not out of national feelings that I say such a thing. It is that simply that when I was working in Dublin in a chemist's shop, I one day bought a book for four pennies called "Introducing James Joyce," by T.S. Eliot, and I opened it to a section from "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue flame over the Christmas pudding. Up to then, I had been writing rather fancifully, with a lot of adjectives. When I read that, I realized one thing: that I need go no further than my own interior, my own experience, for whatever I wanted to write. It was truly, without sounding like St. Paul, an utter revelation to me.

The other is William Faulkner. If there are two men in heaven, as I hope they are -- though Joyce would not want me to mention such a place -- if they are in the ether out there together, I hope they are drinking, and I drink to their greatness, to what they have given. It is massive what they have given to life. There are writers and writers. But there is Joyce and Faulkner, for me.