Wine of Astonishment

Edna O’Brien [photo: Gary Leonard]

I remember the night at ALOUD, in 2006, when the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien read and spoke about her work on the library stage. Edna was divine, in plunging black neckline and mod English clunky shoes. Vulnerable. Delicate. Redhaired. Alert to everyone around her. Gracious. Fierce. When she read, the room fell silent. Filled with her voice.

Mellifluous accent. Gestures. Sensuous language. She’d digested Joyce. Faulkner. Spun her tales out of the landscape of County Clare and fraught mother-daughter love for her novel The Light of Evening.  She spoke of her mother’s opposition to literature, how she wanted Edna to become a pharmacist. Few books in their household; just the Bible.  Literature was the way to sin. She spoke of a phrase she particularly liked from the Book of Genesis, the “wine of astonishment.” Edna O’Brien told us that she lived her life “steeped in that astonishment.” The importance to her daily life of reading, how Virginia Woolf would say she loved to sit by the fire and “steep my mind in the Elizabethans.” Mainly Shakespeare. Mainly Othello. About the Russian dolls that Edna bought from a Russian vendor, who didn’t understand when she exclaimed, “I’ve found the structure for my novel!” She read that night from letters she’d exchanged with her mother, salvaged from old trunks.

These days, I’m also reading letters I wrote to my mother, and the ones she wrote to me, salvaged from old trunks. As if in response to a melancholy dispatch I wrote in my twenties, she replied with a note in her energetic cursive: Louise, Thank God you can love!! Mother

 Thirty-five years since her death, there’s now almost more of my life lived without my mother than with her, though she still lives in me, through me, my siblings, her grandchildren. My amazing irrepressible mother. Today is her yarzheit. The glow of the memorial candle flickers on a b&w photo on the wall.  My young mother looks down at me with such love in her eyes. Such understanding. The depths of her. Oh to have such a mother. So fierce, drinking so deeply of that “wine of astonishment.”

Anne Weiskopf Steinman, photographer unknown, 1950’s