while the prestigious Albert Schweitzer chair at New York University, a
career in British journalism and eventually in Irish politics.
O'Brien's views shifted a great deal from his early
New Statesman
days and the neutralism of the early sixties. His African experience and,
above all, the exposure to Irish politics and the IRA helped in shaping
his learning process. He had always been a little skeptical about Irish
nationalism in its most extreme form and now realized that beneath the
surface of a progressive, even Marxist-Leninist, ideology there had
always been a hard anti-democratic, anti-liberal, even para-fascist ker–
nel. While the IRA had never been very popular in the Republic it took
courage to be an outspoken critic of the men of the gun in the seventies
and eighties.
Though O'Brien has spent much of his life outside his native country
this well-written autobiography with its shrewd observations and excel–
lent vignettes of contemporaries and colleagues is most revealing about
Ireland, which remains the main focus . With all the setbacks and per–
sonal tragedies suffered it is not a sad book, the ebullient spirit of his
early Dublin days keeps O'Brien going.
Walter Laqueur
In
the Key of
Q
Q UARREL
&
QUANDARY: ESSAYS.
By Cynthia Ozick. Alfred A. Knopf.
$25.
00.
HERE, THEN, AFTER the contrapuntal pleasures of
Art
&
Ardor,
Metaphor
&
Memory,
and
Fame
&
Folly,
is Cynthia Ozick in the key
of
Q.
But quarrel, in the Yeats line that introduces this, her fourth vol–
ume of essays, is engaged, under the name of poetry, more particularly
with oneself. So the essays here included seem dominated above all by a
sense of quandary or "mazy indecision," the exploratory tentativeness
that, since Montaigne, has been a touchstone of the genre.
The book is in some ways an inspired miscell any-Ozick in
Q
major
and
Q
minor, as it were. Readers will find essays on James and Forster,
to whom Ozick has frequently turned in earlier volumes, but also on
