Maeve Binchy, page 8
How different this all was to the Catholicism of the Holy Child Killiney, the teaching of which had always been based on the love of God for each one of the girls and appeared to carry no political baggage at all. As an undergraduate she remained a Catholic, but her beliefs did not inspire her to action on behalf of the Republican Party. Rather, the movement of the following years was away from received dogma and institutions that would dictate what she should be thinking. Liberation was to be the theme.
‘Free love’ was part of the liberation movement, a 1950s phrase not free of fear until the pill became available in 1961, and a constant topic of conversation. Of course ‘free love’ in Ireland in the 1950s was a much more revolutionary proposition than in Britain or America. It was, after all, along with contraception, divorce and abortion, forbidden by the Catholic Church on pain of everlasting damnation. And the government was at one with the Church on this, so that if you bought an English newspaper in Dublin in those days, it would invariably have a blank space where an advertisement for condoms had been erased from the printing plate. The edition would otherwise have been impounded at Customs.
Yet when Maeve wrote in her novels about the conversation of student girls at this time, it was invariably about sex. In The Glass Lake (1994), Clio asks her girlfriend Kit whether she should sleep with Michael O’Connor, a fairly unattractive student from a well-off family who has told Clio that everyone is doing it and that she is provincial and out of step with the way the world is moving for not agreeing to do it with him. Clio is afraid that she will lose Michael if she holds out any longer. Kit tells her that he will hang around if he really likes her. Clio, who is convent educated, says she sounds like Mother Bernard. Kit tries to find out what Clio likes about Michael. Is there a special understanding between them? Does he surprise her and make her laugh? No, Clio just likes being his girl. It’s a style thing, she likes the Clio and Michael scenario; so typical of student relationships. It then emerges that Michael will leave Clio if she doesn’t acquiesce. And Kit uses the word ‘blackmail’.
At UCD the romantic focus in Maeve’s circle seems to have been on the men in the university’s rugby club, as in the novels: in Echoes, Clare O’Brien tells Valerie and other friends about her near-miss experience with Ian and compares it to rugby tackles she’d seen earlier in a student rugby game. Valerie produces vermouth to calm them all down and Mary Catherine wonders how far you can go before it is deemed unfair to boys not to go the whole way. Later Clare will have sex with David Power and rue the day, because she becomes pregnant and the baby comes early, causing Clare, a scholarship girl, to miss taking her finals, which had been the purpose of her life since a very young girl.
Suddenly, in the 1950s and ’60s, talk between young people was all about feelings, as were films, music and women’s magazines. Before the 1940s nobody spoke much about any of their feelings. Brothers and sisters used to talk sometimes. But generally it was thought unseemly to say how you felt, ‘like selling yourself’. You would lose respect if you did.
The new science of psychology had opened the door. With the advent of psychology, what was done quietly before was done openly now. Psychiatrists made people talk. In the clinical context in the 1930s, for example, psychiatrists for the first time encouraged workhouse inmates to talk to one another and tell each other how they felt – they became much more difficult to handle afterwards, apparently. In 1939, when Freud died, his daughter Anna took over the world psychoanalytical movement and set up psychological guidance centres all over America to encourage people to discuss their sensibilities.
But the really big change happened earlier, when psychology was harnessed by big business actually to trade in people’s feelings. Edward Bernays, having devised America’s propaganda machine in the First World War, took the teachings of his uncle Sigmund Freud to advise businessmen how to link mass-produced goods to people’s unconscious feelings and make them buy things that would make them feel good, whether or not they needed them. For the first time sexual imagery was used by the automobile industry to advertise cars, for example. The policy kick-started the consumer society, became the key to economic progress and became the cornerstone of the American Dream.
In 1946 the feelings of women were for the first time researched in ‘focus groups’ by the psychiatrist Ernest Dichter, as it was realised that women were the principal target for the new consumerism.
By the 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were operating in every corner of society, sometimes aggressively in marketing, but also therapeutically, a development that influenced relationships and in particular discipline within the family and elsewhere. It was a change consistent with the enlightened approach of Mother St Dominic at the Holy Child, her little chats in the room downstairs so different to the harsh dictatorial approach of the religious institution of the Catholic Church which had produced the Jesuit schools that Maeve’s father and uncles knew.
It is clear how this development also influenced the working lives of Maeve, and her sister Renie, who became a psychiatrist. Ultimately, the change made it possible for Maeve to write whole books about people sharing their feelings, particularly women, who had only recently begun to talk openly about how they felt. It was on this tsunami of emotion that Maeve’s novels rode to international success from the early 1980s.
In the meantime, in 1957, Maeve was a nervous undergraduate about to undertake her own personal revolution which would place her mid-current in this sea change. She was nervous because everything was new. But there was much that was new in the late 1950s for all undergraduates everywhere.
The consumer revolution was discovering teenagers. Style was now the official idiom of the marketplace. ‘Look at the style,’ Benny says wistfully in Circle of Friends, scanning the UCD campus. Hairstyles for college girls were ‘ponytails, little beat fringes, devil horns on the forehead, kiss curls in front of the ears or little chignons on the back of the head, possibly French pleats’. Daywear was jeans and baggy sweaters, previously made as shapeless as possible by your boyfriend, or brightly coloured skirts over suspender belts and nylon stockings (if you could afford the 18 shillings a pair).29
Of great interest to the mass media, particularly to magazines aimed at women, style was what the consumer society was all about, but Maeve was finding keeping up with anyone else’s style extremely problematic.
Seeing the mass of students milling about St Stephen’s Green, the confidence of the girls with their little ponytails and college scarves laughing and talking with boys as they walked up and down the paths to Earlsfort Terrace, made her feel hopelessly inadequate. Life had begun to seem like a beauty contest she could never win. On campus she felt more desperate than ever before. Since adolescence, she said later, she had been a foot taller than Napoleon and twice the weight of Twiggy. ‘There I was, a fat, insecure young woman who thought that the race was won by the small, the pretty and the slim.’30
She clung to her childhood culture for support, stopping off at Westland Row church on the way up to campus from the train each morning and lighting a penny candle. Here she had recourse to Sermon-on-the-Mount theology, which taught that those who are dealt a poor hand in this world will be blessed in the world to come. At Killiney she had embraced this, but it was hard, very hard, to embrace it in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of UCD.
Daywear for Maeve was ‘dreadful Fair Isle jumpers’ not made roomy by boyfriends, owing to the fact that she didn’t have any, and a beige coat with a brown velvet collar, which was really her old school coat from the Holy Child.
The really cool thing to be in those days was a beatnik – one of that section of the young who had come out against the power-mad consumer ideology. In some quarters a certain cynicism was brewing as to the political motivation and purpose of consumerism. Bernays, it seems, had won government support for his project by persuading politicians that by satisfying the deepest longings of the masses they would have them in the palms of their hands, happy and docile. The vision had evolved of a lobotomised society, tranquil, content, under control, conforming to a model dictated by an elite political body using consumerism as the palliative, the feel-good medication – a vision which came to be satirised in the film The Stepford Wives and Ken Kesey’s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even as consumerism was discovering the new teenage market, the call was out to liberate people from what the playwright Arthur Miller was referring to as ‘the whole ideology of this Age, which is power mad’.
‘Beatnik’ was a word that followed the phrase ‘Beat Generation’, which spoke of the syncopated rhythms of jazz that was so popular then, and which was a reaction against the Establishment and its consumer ideology. It was a word coined by the American writer and spiritual adventurer Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl & Other Poems, 1956), who defined the offbeat, non-conformist nature of artistic bohemia in the late 1950s. The movement, following two world wars and 150 years of industrial revolution which had brought little but suffering to the working classes, would be one of disenchantment with the political, social and religious institutions which the Establishment had used to control people, and of strides towards individual freedom, emancipation and personal responsibility.
On campus, the duffel coat was the symbol of beatnik dissent, and although as yet she lacked the philosophy that it represented, Maeve knew instinctively that what she wanted more than anything was a duffel coat. And all the time she was worrying about being an also-ran in the game of life, and considering how her chastity would be sorely tested by the blue version of the duffel coat as opposed to the fawn, she was lightly reading a French essay that had to be studied that week for Professor Louis Roche in the hope that he wouldn’t somehow single her out in class.
She could remember exactly where she was sitting – on a bench in St Stephen’s Green, the big park by the university – self-consciously worrying about what people were thinking about the fact that she was sitting there on her own, about what conclusions they would draw from how she looked, worrying that her coat didn’t look scruffy enough. Should she perhaps lie on the grass and roll about on it for a bit? You had to look scruffy if you were a bohemian student in those days.
Then, all of a sudden, something hit her between the eyes. The letters of the sentence she was reading caught fire. The line she was reading was something about a woman who spent her time trying to impress people, and hardly any time actually living her life. It was like she was always wishing away the present and living in anticipation of some dreadful possibility which rarely, if ever, materialised.
Maeve saw herself, at that moment, for the very first time. It was ‘as if I had had a vision, that my whole twenty years had been spent running a futile race’.31
She recalled later that it had been a lovely day on the green. The sun was shining. Students were massing. As she put down the book she was reading she said to herself, ‘Nobody is looking at me – it does not matter what I’m wearing. All these people walking through St Stephen’s Green are not looking at me, they are wondering how they look!’32 Life was not some kind of competition with everyone examining you. She knew she would never worry about what people were thinking ever again. Nor did she.
She described it as an incredible liberation. It was the first step towards taking control of her life and making it her own. ‘The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives,’ she said years later. For years her mother had been saying to her that she was special, unique, that nobody had her personality, her mind, her history. Now she understood the responsibility that conferred: ‘My life is up to me alone. No one is going to ride in over the hill and change things for me.’
We do not know the book of French essays she was reading, but the message is that of the existentialists. In the 1950s and 1960s much of the philosophy that was underwriting the great change in attitudes was coming out of France, and from one couple in particular.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the principal exponent of existentialism in France and exercised a considerable influence on the thinking of students and the ‘beat’ movement after the Second World War, in particular on the student rebellions of the 1960s. In 1953, Sartre’s wife, Simone de Beauvoir, kick-started the feminist revolution with The Second Sex, the book in which the phrase ‘women’s liberation’ was used for the first time.
If Maeve was reading French at UCD in the late 1950s there is no doubt that she would have been studying existential philosophy. Existentialism was in any case in the ether at this time and Maeve’s ‘return to self’ was precisely what existentialism is all about. Later I would have it confirmed that Sartre was indeed Maeve’s mentor and life guide.33
His is a philosophy to which she would have taken naturally, for it holds that decisions important to the individual are not solved by painstaking intellectual exploration and dissection of the facts and the laws of thinking about them, but by action. It called upon Maeve’s passionate, intuitive side. Actions, not words. The motto of the Holy Child, no less!
To become liberated we have to be able to cut ourselves free from the systems that control our thinking, which in her case put Catholicism directly into the target area. There will inevitably be a chaotic period when everything is up in the air (which for Maeve and others of her generation delineated the 1960s), before the pieces of the jigsaw settle down into a true picture of who we are. No one can simply be told how to live; you have to discard what you are born to and find out for yourself; you have to recreate your own essence, and then invent projects to meet your purpose and thereby confer meaning on your existence. This is exactly what Maeve set out to do.
What she referred to as ‘my revelation on the park bench’ was far more than a moment of recognition that crippling self-consciousness was wasting her life away: it was a statement that she did not intend to be a victim of other people’s perceptions or live on the periphery of someone else’s idea of what was an acceptable style. The implication was that hers would truly be a meaningful existence, not wasted by being a follower of fashion, nor would she seek reassurance about life’s finite nature by worshipping idols such as humanity, science or some divinity. The Sermon on the Mount, which promised her and other woebegone people a great life in Heaven, was not going to be enough. Sartre was about now.
Maeve’s temple would become her self. Her revelation brought her to self-belief, put her on the track to authenticity, wary of affectation, hostile to pretension and fiercely loyal to those who were her friends because of who she was rather than how she measured up to fashionable criteria. The important thing immediately was that she now accepted the hand that Nature had dealt her. It was like she already knew who she was and had suddenly been given permission to be that person. Once the veil of self-consciousness fell away she let her real self express itself, intellectually, emotionally, even physically. ‘From then onwards I was never afraid. I wore miniskirts in the days when no fat girl should have, and with total delight…’34 Not being self-conscious opened a door to other things – such as travel and to other cultures and traditions outside the Catholic Church. She became ‘more interested in listening to other people talking, and hearing their stories’. Perhaps most important, it gave her the courage eventually not only to be herself but to write about these new principles for others.
Meanwhile, her decision to relinquish the idea of the duffel coat had a surprise piece of irony attached to it. A duffel coat was always reckoned to be highly appropriate attire for the budding 1950s existentialist. A few years later, Jack Kerouac revealed that the syllable ‘beat’, enshrined in ‘beatnik’, had in fact been chosen as a shortened form of the Catholic word ‘beatitude’ and was a hidden reference to the fact that he was a Catholic.
It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it … Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?35
Maeve would have very much liked the image of the universe as a vast sea of compassion, but having laid aside the duffel coat she had unwittingly also laid down the apparel of Roman Catholicism, which was the principal institution that controlled her thinking. Eventually, although she didn’t realise it yet, her Catholicism would indeed have to go, if she was truly to stand alone.
From this moment, ‘Maeve blossomed,’ remembers Geraldine MacCarthy. ‘She became the centre of a crowd.’ Now, lectures took second place and she would be seen more often than not in the Annexe, a smiling bubbly figure amidst her circle of friends, mostly giggling female students, hanging on her every word. There developed what later came to be identified as Maeve’s unique style – a rapid-flow delivery of stories, anecdotes and observations on life. Said Patricia Hamilton, ‘She became larger than life, very good sense of humour, a good wit. She was very popular. Much more popular than she ever was at school.’ From being someone ‘not very obvious’, she was suddenly noticeable even to people who weren’t her friends.
Maeve no longer lived life on anybody else’s terms. In particular she stopped worrying about not having a boyfriend. ‘It was a freeing thing for her,’ Valerie said. ‘She could say, I’m not competing with you for men, so I’m free to be myself.’ Her crowd now, ‘the people who wanted to have coffee and cakes with me, or dance with me, did it because they liked me’.36 She didn’t care if a guy had spots, or lank hair falling into his eyes, if he was nice and interested in things.
Her crowning glory was being invited by Myles McSwiney, the President of the Literary and Historical Society (which had, by now, become the UCD student union), to serve on his committee. This was a massive endorsement and made a welcome impact on her social life. Maeve once said that it was the best day of her life until 1976, when her husband asked her to marry him, because L&H organised the dances every Saturday night. There was a huge frisson about who you were going to meet at the Saturday-night dance, even if the Cinderella hour for Maeve was the 11.07 bus to Dalkey.
