Connor Cruise O'Brien's Summer Uproar
BERNSTEIN, DAVID
WRITERS & WRITING Connor Cruise O'Brien's Summer Uproar By David Bernstein Dublin According to the tradition of the Abbey Theater, any play that creates trouble when first performed is bound to...
...O'Brien is merely continuing a hoary tradition, made all the more appealing because this clever, prolific controversialist comes from such Establishment occupations as diplomacy and politics...
...The late UN Secretary General is portrayed as a homosexual who conspires in the assassination of the Congo leader and later goes knowingly to his own death...
...But a correspondent in the west country sent him a letter saying: "You are wrong to describe Mr...
...I took the trouble to check with this neighbor, as a matter of fact, without saying who I was...
...Indeed, this summer at least some of the trouble in Dublin has been about a book—Connor Cruise O'Brien Introduces Ireland (Andre Deutch...
...It is to please not the tourist really, but the stranger who is inclined to take a good look at this small, curious country and the people living in it...
...it gave her a good color, kept her spirits up, brought her out in the open air and provided her with plenty of exercise...
...She used to go around burning our books you know, but she doesn't do that any more—not that it makes any difference because we don't read the books anyway...
...We don't hear so much about that any more either...
...But sometimes, you know, we miss the old days of ranting and roaring and Up the Republic...
...As a matter of fact, since she got the tv, Mother herself doesn't go on nearly so much about the whole business...
...If she went hungry it was her own fault, for not eating...
...Now she's much more gentle and sensible of course but, with being indoors all the time watching tv, she seems to have faded somehow...
...This year he won election to the Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, as a member of the Labor party, smallest and most nearly socialist of his country's political parties...
...O'Brien thereupon settled in Ghana for three years, as chancellor of the university there...
...At any rate, the operative passage consists of a single long paragraph, describing Ireland as a lady of venerable age and wide, though mixed, reputation: "I should like you to meet Mother...
...A few of the pieces arc a bit pedantic, but most are exceedingly well written...
...The book O'Brien introduces may be such an unfulfilled promise...
...A tireless essayist on matters historical, political, liturgical, polemical, and rhetorical, O'Brien recently published a play, Murderous Angels, in which Dag Hammarskjold and Patrice Lumumba are principal characters...
...It is a collection of essays on Ireland's history, antiquities, languages, religions, economic problems, politics, foreign policy, literature, theater, education, places of interest, tourism, architecture, racing, cooking, and fishing—a mixed bag of sundry contributors, edited not by O'Brien but by historian-journalist Owen Dudley Edwards...
...The other day one of us said something about Cathleen ni Houlihan's Four Beautiful Green Fields—you know, Yeats—and she said she supposed so, but she couldn't get color on her set...
...45 shillings...
...Some of those who worry about the tourist trade wondered whether innocent visitors should be exposed to such talk at all...
...It wasn't very reasonable and it didn't, as you say, get us anywhere, except, of course, where we are, however you interpret that...
...Fennell's second letter, I agree to this amendment...
...He seems to have acted rather possessively and—according to her—he used to beat her and often let her go hungry...
...Ireland has achieved the revolution political and industrial...
...inside there are many full-color photographs of the country...
...At first glance, it appears to be packaged for the casual tourist...
...But the Abbey, even in its handsome new home, is not quite the locus of theatrical excitement it once was and perhaps the tradition must now devolve upon books...
...He says he hardly knows the woman, but that she has a bad reputation in the neighborhood for brawling and untruthfulness...
...To which O'Brien, like a true parliamentarian, replied, "Having considered Mr...
...O'Brien's major contribution is an excellent essay on "Ireland in International Affairs," but the title is justified by an eight-page introduction he wrote—and this is what has caused the uproar in Dublin...
...O'Brien's volume is being touted as the latest word on what Ireland and the Irish are all about these days...
...He's a big fellow, getting on in years now, a bit pompous perhaps...
...We all believe in what Mother calls the echo-mechanical movement and so on...
...Makes life a bit easier on the younger kids—though a lot of them still run away from home as soon as they can...
...She is quite an ignorant woman, I'm afraid, and very superstitious-in fact that has been her most marked characteristic, apart from the bottle to which she is also, as you can sec for yourselves, much given...
...And yet, somehow, it worries us all...
...There is, of course, a vast difference between the work produced by the creator of James Bond and that attributed to the diplomat-scholar-critic-playwright-intellectual-politician...
...Quite a change that...
...perhaps that is its charm...
...One newspaper critic attacked the passage so bitterly that he somehow gave his readers the impression O'Brien was writing not about Mother Ireland, but about the Irish mother—a kind of Dublin-esque Philip Roth getting rid of his boyhood aggressions...
...It is true that she has had a hard life...
...What this often means in practice," says Edwards, "is that the interlocutor is to be charmed, even to the point of one's making promises while knowing full well they will not, and probably cannot, be fulfilled...
...My own opinion is that neither of them is telling the whole truth, but I cannot see that it matters very much now...
...Those kind win no war...
...she does hardly any work and her housekeeping is both incompetent and extravagant...
...Luckily she still goes to Mass in the morning, and the pub in the evening: if she didn't we'd hardly know it was still Mother...
...In response, O'Brien called this man "a bit of a cod...
...Everyone's too busy watching tv...
...The book is the second of a series in which various celebrities "introduce" various places...
...Another critic, John McCann, writing in the Sunday Press of Dublin, said: "O'Brien admits that he spends most of the year abroad and the summer in Ireland...
...Then there was that language she'd forgotten herself, but insisted on teaching to all of us...
...Fennell as a bit of a cod...
...240 pp...
...It seems she had some kind of affair with her nextdoor neighbor...
...No, this is a collection for those whose interests go beyond leprechauns to trying to understand how a people emerges from its own lurid past...
...Her exiles helped, but only the ones who loved her, not the vituperous detractors...
...Some wondered about the political future of a man who could, in a single, though admittedly long paragraph, shatter every icon in Ireland...
...Some of his compatriots would have preferred O'Brien to moon over Mother Machree, while others wanted him to concentrate on industrial development and the "sacrifices made by a determined people...
...She's changed a lot these last few years...
...She hardly ever talks any more about that property she used to say she had in the North and that's a relief too...
...In the context he says 'Shaw's Ireland is a place of futility, failure and endless, pointless talk.' He seems to make no note of the fact that since George Barnard [sic] Shaw's Ireland of more than half-a-century ago, a new Ireland has emerged out of the sacrifices of a determined people...
...Since the manufacture of uproars is part of the Irish writer's craft...
...That would seem to be the purpose of this book...
...She says this went on for seven hundred years but of course this is just her exaggerated way of talking—another of her characteristics...
...He served for many years in the small Irish foreign service...
...The futile, pointless and endless talkers are still, and will be always be, there...
...The latter, in fact, is not tourist-bait at all...
...He denied that he used to beat her, but adds that if he did, it was for her own good...
...He chose instead to summarize his country for a public consisting largely, in his view, of foreign, ex-Protestant agnostics...
...So the writers brood over the country in a quiet, sophisticated way utterly out of tune with what the tourists want as they rush about in the great glassy motor coaches, thumbing the standard guidebooks and wondering what they'll have for dinner in the evening...
...The facts are hard to make out...
...The difference in sophistication between the author and his critics is a measure of Ireland's current intellectual dilemma, and the book itself is a reflection of the same dilemma...
...Loaned to the United Nations at the time of the Congo crisis, he took charge of the Katanga mission in 1961 and began to attract attention beyond his immediate circle when, as someone later suggested, it became apparent that he considered his functions in the province to be those of an anti-imperial proconsul...
...An attractive though not particularly Gaelic-looking girl, with a lift to her eyebrow and the wind in her hair, dominates the jacket...
...He seems to have lost touch...
...WRITERS & WRITING Connor Cruise O'Brien's Summer Uproar By David Bernstein Dublin According to the tradition of the Abbey Theater, any play that creates trouble when first performed is bound to be a lasting success...
...The Irish, as O'Brien once observed, are brooders, whereas more confident people like the English are gloaters...
...In 1965 he went to New York University as Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities...
...The first was Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica, and the publisher promises similar volumes on Australia, India and Israel...
...Oh, there's been an improvement, I agree...
...The introduction that has become the talk of Dublin was written last year, when O'Brien perhaps had no idea he would be a member of Parliament with visions of ministerial plums dancing in his head...
...And we can't help worrying about that because, you see, she is our Mother, and we love her very much...
...Owen Dudley Edwards, in a chapter on "The Burden of Irish History," feels that the Irish have acquired not so much a capacity for double-dealing (though some of that is around), but a belief that in social matters one should follow the dictates of one's "desire to please," to use Harold Nicolson's phrase...
...Obviously this introduction to Ireland was bound to stir the sensitive...
...But it seemed to suit Mother...
...Mellowed, you might say, I suppose...
...Her slatternly appearance is in no way misleading...
...He also denies her story that he still has some property of hers...
...He is an absolute cod...
Vol. 52 • September 1969 • No. 16
