My mother, the star

Anne Enright’s new novel, centred on a famous actress and her daughter, explores the complexities of a ‘life seen from the wings’.

‘There was no getting over the moment when she stepped into the light’

Actress is an interesting word to use as a title, one that slippery in implication. Shorn of the usual definite article “the”, denoting uniqueness, it dangles in solitude, suggesting something generic, casually dismissive. We all know an actress to be a woman who performs in a play or on film and TV. But the informal meaning of the word hearkens back to a time when it implied something more ambiguous, even salacious: a woman who puts on a false manner in order to deceive others.

Anne Enright’s seventh novel, yet another bravura literary performance by a writer possessed of uncommon stylistic verve, caustic wit and daring intelligence, operates in the space between strict and off-the-record meanings of the word. The whole story unfolds from this semantic gap like some miracle of narrative ­geometry.

The actress of the title is Katherine O’Dell, a former star of stage and screen who never quite made it into the international pantheon, though she appeared in one unforgettable Hollywood role and became a local legend in her native ­Ireland as a peerless reader of WB Yeats, performer of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, and a woman whose wider public presence ignominiously survived on the back of a TV butter commercial.

But it was her voice that cleaved Ireland to her. “Over time, it became a national statement, or national lullaby’’.

Her mature stage voice was highly achieved and very beautiful; deliberately, almost wilfully melodic, with consonants both soft and slender; she worked in tiny dragging delays, and each word or running phrase was inflected for ­wildness or ironic effect. All this happened off the beat, so though it was a mannered style, you fell into it.”

O’Dell’s voice has been long silent by the time the novel hits the ground. Instead we meet the actress’s daughter, Norah Fitzmaurice, now a moderately successful writer in late middle age with two grown children of her own.

She is a woman both ennobled and embittered by the experience of growing up in the shadow of such a super-sized presence,. She has inherited from her mother’s depthless pool of talent and beauty only a pair of famous green eyes, the kind that once drove journalists to cliched ­paeans about shades of “bog and field”.

Actress by Anne Enright

Norah invites the reader in as an intimate. As she gazes at old photographs and yellowing press clippings, allowing old memories to effervesce, we are led to understand that Katherine O’Dell was first and foremost a consummate performer. She fooled everyone from an ­adoring public to her private confessor, a tame Jesuit priest.

The only partial exceptions are Katherine’s long-suffering housekeeper, Kitty, who daily empties ashtrays and vanishes discarded bottles, and her single child, raised solo and immoderately doted upon, but from whom she insists on guarding significant secrets, chief among them the identity of Norah’s father.

Whether it is out of a desire to know her mother, those authentic truths behind the impeccable public facade that might shed light on her own self, or merely irritation at the efforts of scholars, fans and biographers to co-opt O’Dell for their own purposes, either as a political radical or proto-feminist, Norah settles on a course she has long evaded: to research and write her mother’s life story.

Actress is not the text of that biography. It lies closer to that mess of scribbled notes on pub beer coasters, garbled interview transcriptions, lists of details too domestic or trivial to matter from which such official documents eventually emerge, blurbed and footnoted, tidy and trim.

This is the mode Enright likes best and, indeed, has made her own over 30 years: the skitter and swerve of a character’s thoughts narrated from the inside, consciousness overheard arguing with itself.

That Norah loved and loves her mother still is not in doubt. She describes a childhood and young adulthood in many regards idyllic: well-heeled, bohemian and insulated from the most brutal facts of poverty, provincialism and violent factional politics that marked Ireland in the late 20th century.

But she is also brimful of vitriol, though whether that sense of anger and betrayal should be directed at her mother or towards the men who made or unmade Katherine throughout her life and career, is where the novel’s sympathies swing most wildly.

The first salient fact readers learn from Nora — the lie on which all the others are founded — is that she was English-born.

As the daughter, dutiful detective, returns to the middling southern suburbs of London where Katherine spent her childhood, she tells the story of a family of itinerant Irish thespians: her handsome, mild-mannered, ultimately feckless grandfather and her sweetly absent grandmother, who made a career of playing Chinese courtesans in eminently forgettable musicals.

Their daughter Katherine is another matter. She possesses that mysterious quality that lets her move, invisible as a mouse, through the streets by day but bursts into an unignorable presence once on the stage:

No matter how often she did it, there was no getting over the moment when she stepped into the light. The play was waiting for her, just over that line. It was in the gestures and declamations, it was in the words as they rolled. Her real and destined self was there, space she could step into, or that stepped into her. Each time. Or nearly each time.

The journey of Katherine Anne Fitzmaurice from travelling player in Ireland and England in the immediate postwar period to the manufactured Irish redhead named Katherine O’Dell who made Hollywood her own after a series of Broadway triumphs is told with droll economy and second-hand wonder that such a thing could happen at all.

The question of why Katherine should have returned to Ireland after such success is doled out in a series of bitter retrospective discoveries, culled from university archives, recovered notebooks and meetings with old friends, colleagues and retainers.

Her pregnancy with Norah marks a point of rupture. Katherine continued to work and wow her audiences, but within a narrowing compass. The high water of her fame only recedes from this point on.

Norah realises that she was both her mother’s miracle and mistake — an adored other whose genesis was the cause of her fall. As this knowledge comes into clearer focus, Norah is obliged to reconfigure the reasons for the faltering of their relationship, as well as the increasing psychological disorder her mother displayed, after she grew into adulthood and began making her own mistakes with men.

Norah’s depiction of the masculine circle that surrounded Katherine — the drunken scholars and ambitious theatre directors, the priests and the doctors, the lovers and hangers-on — is both fondly recollected and quietly devastating in critique. She nails the lecherous, entitled, secretly fearful qualities that marked even the most progressive blokes in that patriarchal world:

Of course they were sometimes horrible to each other, that goes without saying, but when I think about how they treated my mother, under the elaborate courtesy I saw something truly unpleasant. Envy, perhaps, a need to possess or stain, not her sexuality but her talent, her life’s beautiful, foolish flame.

But what surprises in these pages is Norah’s own experience of love and marriage. She describes, almost as an aside to the daily quest to understand what broke her mother and smothered her flame, a long, imperfect but immensely durable marriage with a man to whom she is ­devoted. A novel that sets out as the angry, perplexed quest of a woman with long unresolved daddy issues evolves into a wholly unexpected poem of domestic felicity.

That contentment reaches into even the saddest places. Here is Norah, describing the final days of her mother’s life, when the younger woman’s days were consumed with care, tending to a body from which all power and beauty had drained:

None of it felt pleasant, so I was surprised by the gratitude I felt. The fact that I loved her was important, as I mopped and sorted and soothed, but some people do this for strangers, and they do it well. I expected aversion and found ­simplicity.

When I tried to put a word on it,” she concludes, “I settled, in some surprise, on ‘piety’. As I put cream on her legs, or lifted her out and on to the commode, or worse, I felt at peace.

While Norah’s “life seen from the wings” account of Katherine furnishes her with more than ample material for condemnation — the violence men may bring, the betrayals of which they are capable — the real victory of her account is its refusal of vengeance. Norah does not confuse old hurts with new ones. She does not use the futile power of the writer to murder with the pen.

Norah’s marital relationship (the novel’s ­intimate tone turns out to be directed only ­towards one person: the “you” with which she has lived with longer than she has lived without) allows her to slip the bonds that tightened around her mother and eventually destroyed her. The less favoured woman turns out to have been the more fortunate — or not fortunate so much as wiser in appreciation of those gifts she had been given.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.

Actress

By Anne Enright

Jonathan Cape, 272pp, $29.99

Available from February 18