Maeve Binchy (9 page)

None of UCD’s place in the history of this had been forgotten by the time Maeve arrived. On the contrary, annual marches of hundreds of students were organised to the General Post Office and to the graves of Frank Flood and Kevin Barry in the grounds of Mountjoy Prison. Wreaths were laid by the Students’ Representative Council to mark the fortieth anniversary of the boys’ martyrdom. A Kevin Barry window was even unveiled as a campus memorial and was recently transferred to UCD’s new campus at Belfield in the southern reaches of the city.

Catholicism was, therefore, part of UCD’s identity, and sectarianism found its way into daily life. Your religion
determined
everything, even what newspaper you read and which radio station you listened to. A Catholic would listen only to Radio Athlone and take the
Irish Press,
the newspaper controlled by Éamon de Valera and his family in support of Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party, which de Valera founded. The first editor of the
Press
, Frank Gallagher, had fought for old Ireland
alongside
de Valera during the Irish War of Independence, in which Kevin Barry and Frank Flood were executed. The
Irish Times
, on the other hand, was the Protestant paper. The trust which owned the paper was made up of Protestants. The
Irish Independent
, the third Dublin-based national newspaper, was somewhere in between the two.

Maeve, an insecure fresher from the safe haven of Dalkey
who still had ideas of becoming a saint, was definitely not
political
martyr material and there was no likelihood of her joining a subversive group or participating in any political heroics at all. But at UCD she became aware for the first time of Catholicism, this religion that had dominated her life as a child and still dominated it, not as a way of life to which everyone subscribed, but as a political force.

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).
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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.’
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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’.
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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!’
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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.’