THE big news at the Kate O’Brien Weekend in Limerick was that the writer’s birthplace, Boru House, is to be saved for posterity. Well, maybe the fact that more than 500 people turned up at a poetry reading (albeit by Seamus Heaney) was also worth a headline. But first the house.
A bricks-and-mortar metaphor of O’Brien’s literary legacy, it had been long derelict before an unknown party bought it for a modest price last month. Since when, the writer’s admirers – who, through the annual weekend, had already done for her reputation what it was hoped somebody would do for the birthplace – have held their breaths.
The identity of the purchaser remains officially a secret. But as described by Limerick Lord Mayor Jim Long, the man in question is a successful local businessman who intends to turn it into a Kate O’Brien museum and writers’ centre.
Already, an architect has been nominated to oversee the job.
And perhaps the only cloud on the horizon, for now, is that Limerick’s record in conserving old buildings is not exactly confidence-inducing.
Thus, some O’Brien admirers may be holding their breaths a little longer.
IN THE MEANTIME,informed speculation appears to be unanimous in hinting that the mystery philanthropist is a wealthy local bookmaker ("but not JP McManus"). And if this is so, anyone familiar with the writer's master-work, The Land of Spices, may see a pleasantly amusing turn of events.
The setting of that book is a thinly disguised Laurel Hill Convent, the exclusive Limerick school to which a six-year-old Kate O’Brien was sent in 1903. Late in life, the writer recalled the school being attacked by a nationalist newspaper of the era for educating girls to be the wives of “bank managers and British colonial governors”.
As she went on to suggest mischievously, it was the reference to “bank managers” that might have made the Mother Superior wince, they being a bit lower on the scale than the ideal.
But the Land of Spicesalso describes an incident in which a Dublin boarder at the school, Molly Redmond, is revealed – amid great shock – to be the daughter of a bookmaker. The news emerges from a scandalous court case ("it all came out in The Irish Timesthe other day") involving her estranged parents.
And amid other salacious details, the students find themselves grappling with the terrible question with what exactly a bookmaker is: “Ursula says he’s a man who takes your money at the races when you bet – and that he stands on a chair at the racecourse, and shouts and roars. She says it’s an impossible thing to be. Worse than having a public house, even.” The nuns have to grapple too. Fighting off stiff competition to be the school’s most snobbish parent, Lady De La Pole threatens to withdraw both her daughters unless the contaminating influence is expelled. But in the event, the Reverend Mother stands by Molly, with a mixture of morality and economics.
We learn that the De La Poles, as established gentry, have negotiated half-fees, whereas the Redmonds – whose daughter is the first generation of her family to reach the heights of Laurel Hill – is paying full whack for the privilege. “At the risk of being mistaken for a shop-keeper,” the head nun explains to a colleague, “I must mention that, as between losing two De La Poles and one Redmond, the school accounts will not register any difference.”
CLEARLY,O'Brien's sympathies were with the bookie's daughter. After all, as she wrote elsewhere, her own forebears were recent arrivals in Limerick's upper middle classes, and they too owed their wealth to horses.
Boru House was built (circa 1880) to house not just a family but a huge equestrian dealership whose customers included the Prussian army.
Indeed, both the nature of the business and its location in the Limerick liberties – outside the then city boundaries – to some extent compromised O’Brien’s ability to write about the social milieu of which her family were ostensibly members.
In a way, this only adds to the perfect symmetry that her restored former home could now provide the city. Because since last summer, Limerick has also hosted another museum dedicated to a local writer, but from a completely different milieu: Frank McCourt. His museum is not, of course, located in the family home – long destroyed: instead, it’s in his old school on Hartstonge Street, where the actual classroom and a recreation of the home are among the exhibits.
Even now, the possibility that McCourt exaggerated the abjectness of his family’s poverty remains a subject for debate in Limerick. In any case, the two museums – existing and planned – could be a complementary set, representing the opposite ends of the city’s social spectrum, but with each writer’s exact status open to discussion by literary critics and begrudgers alike.
Mind you, O’Brien experienced vagaries of fortune even in her own life.
Having been both wealthy and famous at the height of her career, she died poor, somewhat forgotten and – apart from an Irish Timescolumn – out of print.
A refurbished Boru House would continue the posthumous revival in public interest, championed for 28 years now by the annual weekend. One of Ireland’s lesser-sung literary festivals, it drew big attendances again this year – no small feat in Limerick on what was also a Six Nations weekend – including the Heaney sell-out. If the new owners treat O’Brien’s birthplace as well as the weekend organisers treat her legacy, we can expect it to be sympathetically restored.