Cut down in her prime
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do”
— Philip Larkin
THE English poet could well have been writing about Nuala O’Faolain.
“When your parents are not capable of putting the child’s needs before themselves, which God knows my parents were not capable of, it meant that Nuala was kind of lost,” says a younger sister of O’Faolain’s at one point during Nuala: A Life, A Death, a 90-minute documentary which will be screened as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival tomorrow.
The neglect left O’Faolain prone to self-destruction and destined to repeat the failure in love of her mother. Born in 1940, she was the second eldest of nine children. From outside the curtains, it looked as if she was part of a bustling, well-to-do family. Inside the front door, there was nothing romantic about their bohemian squalor.
O’Faolain’s father was a fiction writer but drew his income under the pen name, Terry O’Sullivan, as the social columnist for the Evening Press. “He was a dapper, clever, reticent man and he treated the family as if he had met them at a cocktail party,” she wrote. A chauffeur-driven car would often pull up outside the house to collect him for a night on the town togged out in a tuxedo.
Although he earned the same income as the paper’s editor, all his money seemed to go on socialising. Jam jars had to be used as drinking vessels in the absence of glasses at home. The family kept moving from house to house under a cloud of rent arrears.
Neighbours were warned by their parents not to play with the wild O’Faolain children. The kids, living in houses with “doors that were dead flimsy”, were exposed to their parents’ fighting, which was often violent, and their sex. O’Faolain’s mother endured 13 pregnancies and her husband’s extramarital affairs.
He had a long-running relationship with his wife’s sister. At one point the O’Faolains moved into the house of one of his mistresses, an affair O’Faolain’s mother became aware of when the woman attacked her one night with a bedside lamp. “It would have been funny,” wrote O’Faolain, “if the two women were not so desperately unhappy.”
Her mother took refuge in reading novels, while a concoction of gin, lager and sleeping tablets that had her falling-down drunk by 4pm. She was drunk when she saw off one of her sons who left on the boat for England. The boy’s father missed the send-off. The brother later died, along with another brother, of alcoholism in the UK. “How do you forgive these things?” asked O’Faolain.
O’Faolain, who was cavorting late at night around the streets of her town with married men at barely 14, was dispatched to boarding school at St Louis’s, Monaghan. It was the saving of her, she confided to Marian Finucane, who narrates the documentary. It gave her a focus for her love of books and music.
In 1957, she started in UCD, but her carousing and “omnivorous” promiscuous ways in McDaid’s and Dublin’s other famous literary pubs of the era, led to withdrawal of her scholarship. She floundered in London for a spell, before returning to UCD and a gilded academic career that concluded with a postgraduate degree in Oxford University.
After lecturing for a time in UCD, she left again for London, where she worked making documentaries for the BBC. Affairs with some of the leading intellectuals of her milieu, including John Berger and the American art critic Clement Greenberg, ensued.
O’Faolain also had a 10-year, on/off affair with another art critic, Tim Hilton. She broke off an engagement with him the day before their intended wedding day, haunted by the spectre of marrying a philanderer like her father.
“Another side of Nuala was trying to fulfil her mother’s side of romantic love with a man of her dreams,” says Finucane. “There was a bit of her that kind of had this happy-ever-after yearning.”
After years of so many destructive relationships (one lover who beat her used to take the light bulbs out of their flat so she couldn’t read), O’Faolain found sanctuary with a woman — Nell McCafferty. It was “the most life-giving relationship” of her life, she once said, which lasted almost 15 years.
Having moved back to Ireland in 1977, her career flourished. She won a Jacob’s award for her work on the documentary series, Plain Tales, about the lives of ordinary women. O’Faolain had come late to feminism, but took to it with gusto. A year later, she won Ireland’s journalist of the year award.
Her life changed dramatically in 1996 with the publication of her memoir, Are You Somebody?. It sold a million copies and spent almost two months at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It prompted a move to New York, and the publication of two novels and a sequel to her memoir, Almost There, in 2003.
“Nuala had an interesting life,” says Colm Tóibín, a close friend since the late 1970s, “in that she was always prepared to start again, which was what was so sad about her dying. She imagined that she had two more lives left, or three.
“She was always ready to throw up jobs or to change cities and to completely re-invent herself. I was around when she became a celebrity in America and I watched that happening. She took enormous pleasure from it. She loved being in New York.”
The actor Gabriel Byrne mentions in the documentary that he came upon her one day in the city while she was out on her bike. He said the image came into his head was of “those women I used to see in the country peddling back from the shops into the wind”.
Her decision to go on air in a radio interview with Finucane a month before she died, knowing that she had terminal cancer, captivated the nation in April 2008. It was particularly poignant in that O’Faolain was godmother to Finucane’s daughter, Sinéad, who had died of leukaemia. The interview was an elemental wail, tearful but devoid of sentimentality. “As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life,” she said. “I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me, the world said to me, ‘That’s enough of you now and what’s more we’re not going to give you any little treats at the end’.”
“She was in some way one of the most private people I knew,” says Tóibín. “There were things about herself that nobody knew anything about, but then she was one of the most candid.
“At the time when the diagnosis came, she simply thought it was worth talking about, and very severely, something other people were not prepared to do.
“After such a diagnosis, time was very short. She wasn’t inclined to say, ‘Oh, I’ve had my innings. I’m uplifted and resigned’. She felt that she had to say that she wasn’t. She said things nobody had said as clearly before, especially in Ireland.”
* Nuala: A Life, A Death is on at the Light House Cinema. See: www.jdiff.com
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