IRISH STUDIES:IT IS EASY to recognise that Conor Cruise O'Brien was a considerable and persistent presence in the Irish cultural and political spheres over the past 50 years. The rather harder task of coming to a serious assessment of what his impact has been is the project Diarmuid Whelan sets himself in this interesting but uneven study, writes CONOR McCARTHY
Doubtless it is a sign of the grip the Cruiser still has on sections of the Irish intelligentsia that the back of this volume should feature five blurbs that attest to the alleged importance of its subject, rather than endorsing the book in hand. Sadly, this is not the only anomaly in the book’s presentation. It is marked by a sorry standard of writing and editing, which hardly befits an academic author or press. Errors and anomalies include misuse of the apostrophe, a frequently clotted syntax, confusions around use of names (Cruise O’Brien, O’Brien), and a distinctly breezy, sometimes vulgar style.
The reader who fights through the bemusement that these infelicities may bring on nevertheless encounters a series of increasingly effective and stimulating treatments of O’Brien’s work. The book is divided into two sections: “Conor Cruise O’Brien: The Man” and “The Mind of Conor Cruise O’Brien”. The title of the first section is a misnomer, as it is primarily concerned with influences on O’Brien: his parents, his cousin Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, and the writers Sean O’Faolain and Albert Camus, on whom O’Brien produced some of his finest work. The second and more valuable section of the book looks at O’Brien’s favoured themes and motifs: the “siege”, church and State in Ireland, historical knowledge, legitimacy of both established power and opposition to it, religion and nationalism.
Whelan’s book is not a biography, though it makes use of biographical context and speculation. This is both inevitable and understandable, on one hand, and problematic on the other. It is inevitable, in that the formative influences on any writer are familial. It is problematic in that it is vulnerable to the illusions of retrospection. This is doubly the case with O’Brien, so much of whose work is prefaced or suffused with accounts of his own family history. It becomes imperative that Whelan distinguish as carefully as possible at the level of his own narrative between the evidential status of O’Brien’s papers, the autobiographical elements in his books, his Memoir (1999), and the work of other scholars such as Donald Akenson, whose massive authorised biography Conor appeared in 1994. It is not always clear that he succeeds in so doing.
FOR THIS REASON, this reader finds himself much more comfortable once the book moves on to a discussion of O'Brien's texts, which, after all, are the principal vehicle of his persistence and influence. The discussion of O'Brien's response to O'Faolain's "parnellism" – that thematic nexus in his fiction of political, spiritual and sexual rebellion – which comes in the study of Catholic writers Maria Cross(1953), is brisk and intelligent, and rightly fingers O'Brien's inconsistency in requiring of O'Faolain's fiction an aspiration to universality while cheerfully historicising it amidst O'Faolain's other writings. The chapter, and the book as a whole, however, would gain much if consideration had been given to O'Brien's critical method.
Another chapter figures Camus as an influence on O’Brien. The two have often been compared: the independent left-liberalism, the anti-anti-Communism of their early careers, their riven attitudes in late colonial crises. But it was Camus who famously announced that he would always defend his mother over and above the claims of justice, and Whelan shows very effectively that though O’Brien could castigate Camus for his failure to represent native Algerian life and agency in his fiction, he also took much of his vocabulary for his later critique of Irish nationalism and republicanism from the French writer.
The latter half of the book is the most interesting and important, though it remains uneven. Whelan elects to discuss a peculiar range of O'Brien's writings: States of Ireland, Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, a brilliant essay on Michelet. But of O'Brien's experiences in the Congo and Ghana, his preoccupation with Burke, his still- controversial essay on Yeats's fascism, his uncritical support for Israel and his status as an "expert" on terrorism – of these matters there is very little, and these choices should perhaps be explained. Yet it also must be admitted that Whelan intelligently traces the motif of "siege" – the cyclopean lens through which he argues Ulster Protestants view the world – through States of Ireland, 16 years before it would appear in The Siege, O'Brien's endorsement of Israel as an unblemished Sparta of the Middle East. Indeed, Whelan suggests in passing that O'Brien's uncritical support for Zionism turned him into a kind of neoconservative in the eyes of his right-wing American admirers. Whelan teases out the ideological and interpretative implications of the "siege" motif very well. O'Brien's admiration for Michelet's "history-as-art" would suggest a radical historical consciousness, as against the "revisionism" of which he is so often held to be the most (in)famous and polemically effective representative. Yet the "siege" has the effect of making O'Brien's historiography always more responsive to what Christopher Hitchens once called the "agonies of the potentates" than to the truly oppressed. O'Brien's inclination to apocalyptic vision – his predictions of Irish civil war are matched by his willingness to trace a causal line between the mysticism of Dostoyevsky and the Great War – is seen as a product of the zero-sum nature of the siege metaphor, whether the "siege" is of Protestant Ulster, Zionist Israel, or of the legitimacy and authority of the Irish Republic.
IN THE END, O'Brien appears as sui generis: subjective, methodologically and philosophically cavalier, given (according to Ernest Gellner) to "intellectual autism", but rarely less than interesting. Diarmuid Whelan has given us a valuable thematic agenda for further work to come.
Conor McCarthy teaches English literature and intellectual history at NUI Maynooth. His Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said is forthcoming from CUP