Conor, by Donald Harman Akenson/Conor Cruise O'Brien, edited by Donald Harman Akenson
Russello, Gerald J
CONOR CRUISE CONTROL A Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien Donald Harman Akenson Cornell University Press, $35, 563 pp. CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN An Anthology Edited by Donald Harman Akenson Cornell...
...The marks of his African experience were evident even a decade later, as O'Brien searched for meaning in Hammerskjold's death, as well as in his long campaign against terrorism in Ireland during the 1970s...
...nor could O'Brien's contemporaries understand his insistence that Ireland could not and should not be united without the consent of the Protestants in the North...
...This intellectual heritage provides the background for O'Brien's lifelong interest in both literature and politics...
...The striking thing about both Burke and his contemporary cousin is their ability to cut through political and intellectual dissimulation and propaganda...
...An eighteenthcentury ancestor, Father Nicholas Sheehy, was martyred for the cause of an independent Ireland, and later O'Brien's maternal grandfather broke with a disgraced Parnell in the famous "Committee Room 15...
...O'Brien revealed to a largely resentful and uncomprehending Ireland that, for all the South' s anticolonialist posturing, their approach to the North resembled British colonialism...
...CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN An Anthology Edited by Donald Harman Akenson Cornell University Press, $39.95, 351 pp...
...Burke's contemporaries could not understand his sympathies with Irish and Indian subjects as they chafed under British rule...
...His resignation ended O'Brien's period of surreptitious essay writing under the pseudonym "Donat O'Donnell...
...The Congo remained for O'Brien a vivid reminder of what can befall a nation rent by violent secessionist impulses...
...Akenson deals with the intimate details of this period with grace and tact, while not sparing any information that bears on the evolution of O'Brien's thought, especially about the Protestants in the North...
...Donald Harman Akenson, in his biography of the Irish writer, critic, newspaper editor, politician, and diplomat, uses these deaths to mark the development of O'Brien both as a writer and as a man...
...She was from the North, of a strongly Protestant family, though (like O'Brien) an agnostic...
...His defense of academic freedom while serving as chancellor of the University of Ghana gave him a new understanding of the social anarchy that lay below any society's veneer of civilization...
...Reason and the written word must be the tools used to keep barbarism as bay...
...While in the Congo representing the United Nations many years later, he was a major player in the events surrounding the death of his hero Dag Hammerskjold...
...Power, he wrote in 1966, "needs the stimulus and correction of criticism," lest it become depraved, and O'Brien has spent his life providing such corrective to a jaded world...
...O'Brien's father knew Yeats...
...About the same time, Christine also remarried...
...First, however, Akenson begins with a thorough account of O'Brien's heritage, searching for reasons why his subject is the most unusual yet most appropriate critic of Irish life...
...He now was free to use his own name and to create a public persona independent of the foreign service...
...His first marriage, to Christine Foster, whom he had met and married during college, was another personal casualty of the Congo, although the couple had been distant for some time before the divorce...
...Gerald J. Russello When Conor Cruise O'Brien was ten years old, his father died before his eyes...
...In 1961 he publicly resigned from the Irish foreign service and the United Nations with a two-part apologia published in the New York Times and London Observer, thereby breaking all rules of diplomatic confidentiality...
...The Irish Republic's disregard for the opinions of the Northern Protestants was the moral equivalent of Protestant oppression of Catholics in the North...
...The agnosticism and pacifism of certain of O'Brien's immediate relatives, given the Ireland of the time, are even more conspicuous...
...O'Brien subsequently learned to rely on his wits, and used that self-confidence and talent to support himself through Trinity College by obtaining an astounding series of awards, fellowships, and prizes...
...The Sheehy house was home to a literary club for their children, where James Joyce was a frequent guest...
...And as O'Brien himself has pointed out, there is a familial relationship between this same Father Sheehy and the Burke family, whose most prominent member watched the corrupt Sheehy trial from afar...
...Conor began to change his definition of colonialism, from a characteristic of the British to something inherent in Western cultures...
...His father's death in 1927 put his widow, Kathleen nee" Sheehy, and young son at the mercy of the family creditors...
...The writer cannot be separated from politics, as O'Brien demonstrated in his examination of Yeats' s fascism and in his own confrontations with the CIA-supported magazine, Encounter...
...The attempts of the UN to make him a scapegoat for its failures in Africa and the inexplicable death of another father-figure changed his life...
...O'Brien subsequently married the poet and fellow Irish diplomat Maire MacEntee in 1962, soon after leaving Africa...
...Before Hammerskjold's death, O'Brien had been merely a clever career Irish diplomat...
...Indeed, Akenson credits O'Brien with averting a war between the Irish Republic and the North in the early 1970s, as a result of his unceasing crusade-which Akenson more than once calls "Pauline"- against the use of violence to solve the problem of unification, a stand that earned him great enmity in some quarters...
...T]his was the first stage in his developing realization that imperialism is a set of behaviors that can emerge in any country," Akenson writes...
...O'Brien's insight, as he developed it throughout the sixties, was that a colonial system not only results in physical violence, but is itself a form of psychological violence directed at weaker peoples by stronger ones...
...In later years, after he had started a family of his own, O'Brien rarely tempered his opinions to keep himself employed, for he believed he could always find something else-and usually did...
...In his youth, O'Brien was part of the Southern propaganda machine encouraging unity at any price...
...O' Brien' s writings on the twin problems of colonialism and terrorism are an expression of his understanding of the writer's political role...
...O'Brien's roots lie deep in Irish history: the Sheehys were strong in both their Catholicism and their commitment to Irish nationalism...
...His view changed in the mid-1950s, when he was assigned to the Irish embassy in France, which at the time was going through its own colonialist troubles in Algeria...
...The Burkes were cousins to the Sheehys, and so relations, though distant, to O'Brien himself, a fact that makes his 1992 study of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody, all the more revealing...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 6
