50th anniversary of Kate O'Brien's death
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kate O'Brien's death and some of you may wonder who that nice lady was. It is natural because I did not know of her existence until I arrived in Ireland as ambassador of Spain. There I got to know this writer, who was a relevant exponent of Anglo-Irish literature in the first half of the 20th century, and I was able to read her works, many of them inspired by Spanish motifs. At the age of 25 she went to Portugalete (Bilbao) to work as a governess in the house of the Areilza family, where she taught English to José María, Count of Motrico, who would become Spanish Ambassador and Minister of Foreign Affairs.
In love with Spain
The young Kate fell in love with Spain, which she adopted as her second homeland. As Benedict Kiely has pointed out, "O'Brien adopted a single country and not the whole world, and thus avoided becoming a cosmopolitan writer, because of this deep sense of the mystical significance of the arrival and departure of death, which was the end of the departure and the prelude to the final arrival. Spain influenced her so powerfully, not only because she was there when she was very young, but because in the mold of her mind there was something close to the land of Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross." The writer herself confessed in her travel book "Farewell, Spain" (1937) - "Adiós, España"- that she felt "pleased and content with the unexpected Spain I found -although for years I was not aware of it- for having met a country I came to love so much". There was the Spain she imagined and the one she found, which caused her many surprises, shocks and longings, spaces of time that seemed as out of place as if she were at home. He returned to Spain year after year, until he came to know it as well as he did any other country.
As Daniel Pastor has written in his article "Kate O'Brien: an Irish writer in Avila", Spain was her obligatory destination from 1931 to 1936, where she spent her summers. Sitting in the cafes of Avila, she observed the people and engaged them in conversation. She loved its monuments, its streets, its historical past, its simplicity and human warmth, the feeling of not feeling strange and, of course, the personality of its most illustrious daughter, Saint Teresa, whose works, which she began to read in 1934 -despite not being a practicing Catholic-, completely captured her heart. It was her favorite city because it represented the very essence of the Spanish spirit: "Castile in its purest state, the land of the great mystics and writers, and the austere landscape, the immaculate blue sky, like a dream, and the sobriety of its buildings and monuments, of an intense golden color, were expressed in the qualities of abnegation, simplicity, nobility of feeling and scrupulous sense of tradition, with which, in the end, she fully identified".
O'Brien's free spirit, pacifism and republicanism were not to the liking of the Franco regime, which prohibited her from entering the country until 1957. Nevertheless, she continued to be linked to Spain through her works. In 1936 she published "Mary Lavelle" - "Broken Passions", which has autobiographical features. The author set the action in Spain to describe situations that she could not do in Ireland, described by Lorna Reynolds as "Jansenistic, puritanical and Manichean". Since he could not use Ireland to show the development of the free spirit of the protagonist - an investigation into the psycho-sexual development of a young Irish girl, Catholic and raised in Mellick - he chose Spain, which allowed him to represent the difficulties and tragedies of life, since it was a good reference point for Ireland, both countries being "Catholic, materially underdeveloped, tenacious in their old customs, politically troubled, anarchic in spirit and akin to the cult of death."
In 1946 his best-loved novel "That Lady" was published, a story that mixed history and fiction, describing the relationship between Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, and King Philip II, who came out of the affair badly. The central theme was "the corrupting influence of absolute political power, the way it vitiates private relationships, and the heroic resistance of a private person - in this case a woman - in the face of the despotism of the ruler". But his most appreciated work was "Teresa of Avila" (1951), a brief and very personal biography of a saint with whom he felt great affinity and whom he described as "a genius of enormous and immeasurable character of which there have been very few, and only one woman". When she died in 1974, O'Brien was writing another book with a Spanish background.
In addition to her affinity with Spain and the quality of her works, I was drawn to the writer by the fact that she was born in Limerick, the city from which my great-great-grandmother Magdalena Clancy came. In 1989, the organizers of the "Kate O'Brien Weekend" invited me to give the inaugural lecture of a conference dedicated to "Ireland and Spain". I invited the Count of Motrico, who gave the closing lecture on "Kate O'Brien: A Personal and Literary Portrait". Now, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her death, a Literary Festival is to be held in Limerick in her honor. I find it regrettable that neither the Spanish Embassy nor the Instituto Cervantes are participating.
The former cultural attaché of the Spanish Embassy in Dublin, José Antonio Sierra, a native of Avila, has proposed to the City Council of Avila to name posthumously Adopted Daughter of the city to the writer, who already has a street near the Station. It seems to me a fair and appropriate tribute to a person who loved Spain and especially Avila, and I think it will help to improve relations between her two beloved homelands.