"Red Wine, Please": Rebellious Drinking in Kate O'Brien's Fiction

Abstract

"Red Wine, Please":Rebellious Drinking in Kate O'Brien's Fiction Jane Davison The novelist Kate O'Brien (1897–1974) had a fondness for alcohol that would, over time, impinge significantly on her frame of mind, health, and finances. As an enthusiastic partygoer and a generous hostess, she spent much of the income from the sales of her books on lavish entertaining and drinking in pubs and hotel bars. The reasons why she drank heavily are debatable, but given that, as her biographer Eibhear Walshe writes, "her sense of self was an unhappy and tormented one and her private life was, at times, lonely, turbulent and chaotic," it seems entirely likely that she used drink as a coping strategy to deal with the problems in her life.1 Alcohol plays an important role in the lives of O'Brien's fictional cohorts and, in two of her novels set in Ireland, Without My Cloak (1931) and The Last of Summer (1943), the central characters choose to drink to provide the courage to confront their inner turmoil and to rebel against their middle-class families. O'Brien's relationship with alcohol reflects her own class consciousness. Born in Limerick in 1897, O'Brien was the daughter of a wealthy Catholic merchant and grew up accustomed to middle-class civility and comfort. In her fiction, she writes from within her own class as an aficionado of its customs and manners. In a 1967 letter to her sister, Anne O'Mara, O'Brien explains that her quest as an author was to provide the reading public with a more balanced view of Ireland: "Its, you'll agree, the passion of all my novels—to present the good, well-bred, real Irish Catholic society."2 O'Brien strove to dispel the myth that the Irish were a nation of feckless, alcoholic peasants and instead, sought to depict a society familiar to her in which "she expected people to be what she called agreeably civilised."3 Accoutrements of bourgeois respectability pervade her work. Alcohol was one of the elements that helped to convey the affluence [End Page 40] and sophistication of her own class: in Without My Cloak (1931), she writes of the character Dr Joe: "he was fond of a good race meeting, a good medical joke, a good glass of brandy and a good run with hounds on a Saturday morning."4 O'Brien's repetitive use of "good" at the start of each clause emphasizes Dr Joe's status as an upright member of Irish society. The activities he partakes necessarily having superior and virtuous qualities. O'Brien assuredly disassociated herself with the "drunken Paddy" stereotype that was portrayed in popular perceptions and cultural representations of the Irish, and widely attributed to late nineteenth-century Irish emigrants to British and American industrial cities. Despite the widespread use of alcohol throughout all social classes in Victorian England, excessive drinking became stigmatized as a distinctly Irish phenomenon. As Perry Curtis notes in his classic study Apes and Angels (1971), the evolutionary thought of the time "tended to polarize Englishmen and Irishmen by providing a scientific basis by assuming that such characteristics as violence, poverty, improvidence, political volatility, and drunkenness were inherently Irish and only Irish."5 The way in which the Irish were reported in the press, and depicted in Punch cartoons, did much to reinforce popular beliefs that these attributes were somehow uniquely Irish and contributed to them being typecast as figures of fun. By the end of the nineteenth century the Stage Irishman—unreliable, hard drinking, and belligerent—was a nearly ubiquitous character in the theaters of London and New York. Although drink and the Irish had become synonymous with each other, statistics suggest that the consumption of beer and spirits in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century was not especially high, by international standards.6 Yet, given that drinking was a popular recreational activity among the Irish and one in which all classes partook, the figures are contradictory. It is true that large sections of the population lacked the means to become reckless binge drinkers—but the statistics fail to take into account that an...