BOOKS
315
An Irish Statesman and Writer
MEMOIR: My LIFE
AND
THEMES. By Conor Cruise O'Brien. Cooper
Square Press.
$3°.00.
CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN has had a life with a variety of themes, includ–
ing public service (the Irish Foreign Ministry and the United Nations)
and the academic world (in the United States and Ghana); he is the
author, among other books, of a respected biography of Edmund Burke;
he had a career in politics as an Irish member of parliament and in jour–
nalism, as editor for
The London Observer.
The most fascinating part
of his autobiography, however, deals with his early days in Ireland.
He came from a well-known and well-connected but not well-to-do
family in Dublin, divided, like most Irish families, by the great political
issues of the day: Home rule, the Easter Rising of
1916
(O'Brien was
born one year after), and, later on, the civil war and the IRA. One uncle,
Francis Sheehy Skeffington, though a pacifist, became a member of the
insurgents' war council and was killed by the British on Easter Monday;
another uncle, Tom Kettle, died in British uniform fighting on the West–
ern front in World War
I.
The family was poor and O'Brien lost his par–
ents while he was still quite young. He attended good schools and won
scholarships to Trinity College, Dublin. His early recollections include
Yeats and the O'Casey controversy. O'Casey was a famous playwright
but his plays, notably "The Plough and the Stars" deeply offended
Republican sensibilities, debunking some of the Easter Rising mytholo–
gies; like many other leading Irish writers he left his native country.
Conor grew up a nationalist like most of those around him, but his
relationship to Irish nationalism (and,
a fortiori,
to the Catholic Church)
was dented early on by a variety of circumstances: Protestant neighbors,
attending a Protestant school (Sandford Park), and, above all, no doubt
an innate spirit of rebellion against established authority. As a student
he drifted into the orbit of Kingsley Martin's weekly
New Statesman
and
Nation,
a major intellectual influence at the time, radical, fellow–
traveling, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist but at the same time pacifist.
O'Brien's reputation as a young man was that of a fiery left-winger
but this did not preclude his being employed by the Irish Foreign min–
istry, or Department of External Affairs as it was then called-which
consisted of a very few people at the time. Ireland was a small place,
almost a face-to-face community, in which everyone knew everyone else
and O'Brien came to know intimately the leading figures of the day such
