Acclaimed poet, diplomat and Irish language scholar, Máire Cruise O'Brien tells her own story to Deaglán de Bréadún
There is only one statement from my interview with Máire Cruise O'Brien that I don't believe. Speaking of her new autobiography, The Same Age as the State, she says: "I wrote it for the money." Nobody who reads it will be able to believe that. Granted that Samuel Johnson claimed, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money", this is a book suffused with love and respect for family and friends, past and present, living and dead.
Among many other things, it is a celebration of her ancestors. Like all good books, it becomes an instant friend and one is impatient to return to its pages.
She is known in English as Máire Cruise O'Brien, although she is also widely known as the distinguished poet, Máire Mhac an tSaoi. She says she took her husband's name when they married, but "if we were talking Irish I'd call myself Máire Mhac an tSaoi".
Máire learnt the art of storytelling as a child in the Kerry Gaeltacht and she has a special way of getting your attention. In her first sentence, for example, she recalls her grandmother feeding the hens in the farmyard: "I remember her from the waist down." What other way would a small child remember its Granny? "That's absolutely true: I was about the same height as the hens," says Máire, sitting across the kitchen-table in 'Whitewater', her home on the cliffs of Howth, Co Dublin, which she aptly compares to a retired sea-captain's dwelling. In another room, her husband Conor Cruise O'Brien is working away on his latest literary work, a study of George Washington.
Máire comes from no mean people and her book reaches back, further than her own birth, to tell the story of her grandfather, Maurice Browne, a one-armed country schoolmaster. "I never knew him. The photograph I have of him, with a greying full beard, was the only one he ever had taken in his entire life." This photograph is one of many evocative pictures reproduced in this book. Maurice was originally destined for the priesthood but the loss of his arm in a domestic accident diverted him to the classroom: "Only a 'whole' man could be ordained a priest; the family's dreams of social advancement were in ruins." We have already met Maurice in Irish literature. He is the original of "Maurice Fitzgerald", the central character in another memorable book, The Big Sycamore, by Joseph Brady, published in 1958. Indeed, as Máire explains, "Joseph Brady" was actually Maurice Browne junior, one of the teacher's sons, and the book is a fictionalised memoir of their family life on the Tipperary/Kilkenny border in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Maurice Browne had become a priest by the time he wrote the book, which was originally non-fiction. In those days, at least, priests were not meant to write family histories. Even when the names were changed, the book was still held back and only came out when Pope Pius XII died and was succeeded by the more liberal John XXIII. As Paddy, Maurice's brother and himself a priest, put it at the time: "The fashion in family backgrounds at the Vatican has changed." (In fact, three brothers took holy orders: the other, Michael Browne, became a cardinal.) Although Máire is more at home in Irish than English, she has written this volume in the second official language. But the "waist-down" introduction could have come from one of the famous Irish-language autobiographies, such as Tomás Ó Criomhthainn's An tOileánach (The Islandman) or Peig Sayers's account of her life.
The opening to a subsequent chapter describes her parents' wedding at the height of the "Tan War" when almost everyone present, including the groom, was a revolutionary on the run: "My father and mother were married . . . at eight o'clock in the evening of 18 May, 1921, behind 'locked doors', with £50,000 of 'blood money' in the congregation." Her father was, of course, the famous Sean MacEntee, a native of Belfast, who played a leading part in 1916 and the War of Independence and went on to become a founder-member of Fianna Fáil and Minister for Finance in successive de Valera governments. In her childhood, as distinct from later years, Máire says she saw little of her father and it is her mother (born, Margaret Browne) who emerges most vividly from these pages.
Like her husband-to-be, Margaret was an active revolutionary and her flat on Dublin's Parnell Square was used as a "safe house" by various leaders of the independence movement, including a charming and rather boisterous "Mick" Collins.
There are vignettes and insights into the Irish revolutionary leaders which have come down to Máire from her mother and her Uncle Paddy that you will not find in the conventional histories. For example, Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly are addressing a meeting in the Mansion House when an opposition speaker intervenes and is howled down. Pearse appeals for the man to get a hearing, and Máire writes: "This generosity was typical of Pearse." In our interview, she tells me: "He was a very fair-minded person". Then, there is Seán McDermott, executed in 1916 but, in this book, having his engagement ring thrown into the fire by a disillusioned fiancée: "Poor Seán," she writes, "who could have ill-afforded the outlay, went down on his knees and raked the coals to retrieve it." Máire comments in the interview: "They were so young! People forget how young they were." Courtesy of one of her uncles, there is a remarkable description of Bloody Sunday in Croke Park and the character of Michael Hogan, the Tipperary footballer killed on that day.
Máire's parents moved from one rented house to the next, landing eventually in Marlborough Road, Dublin. Máire remembers as a child how the doorbell rang one day and a man came into the house without speaking, ran out to the garden and jumped over the back wall, with the authorities in hot pursuit. When she mentioned the incident later, her mother replied, matter-of-factly, that it was the writer and journalist Peadar O'Donnell.
Strangely, the best parts of the book are Máire's recollections of other people's reminiscences, especially her mother's. One senses, despite all her achievements, a certain diffidence and modesty when it comes to writing about herself.
She quotes an old saying, , "A too perfect childhood unfits you for life", but has no regrets about her wonderful summers in the Kerry Gaeltacht at the court of her learned and humane Uncle Paddy, known to the world as Monsignor Pádraig de Brún, professor of mathematical physics at Maynooth College and later president of University College Galway. As with the revolutionary movement, she shows the language revivalists of the 1930s as quite different from the narrow-minded bigots portrayed by Myles na Gopaleen and Brendan Behan. Their approach of "plain living and high thinking" was absorbed by the young Máire. "For us," she writes, "proficiency in Irish was the gateway to the wider life of the mind."
Back home in Dublin, Fianna Fáil had come to power, her father was now a government minister and the house was under 24-hour protection. Máire conveys vividly the tense atmosphere of the time and the low-intensity civil war between constitutional and physical-force republicans. She was brought on holiday to Austria and Germany: "If anyone said Heil Hitler to me, I was to say Dia's Muire dhuit (Standard Irish greeting: God and Mary be with you) to them." For that particular post-revolutionary generation there was a sense of anti-climax and a feeling that their lives could not compare with the dramatic careers of their predecessors. As a student at University College Dublin, Máire wrote:
Friend, when we die, it shall be in our beds
And, having found no purchase worth the price,
We'll part from life perforce and
grudgingly,
For us no trumpets and no sacrifice.
Máire was writing verse in both English and Irish then, but did not consider herself a "poet". As she writes: "In my parents' generation, all educated people wrote verse. Hardly anyone saw it as a livelihood." As Máire Mhac an tSaoi, the name she uses when writing in Irish, she is now one of our most distinguished living poets.
Her departure for France on a "Travelling Studentship" was delayed by the war and, in 1945, she found herself coping with the heady and near-anarchic atmosphere of Paris after the Liberation. A man called Samuel Beckett ("I had tried to read Molloy when my father had brought it home, but I had got stuck") drove Máire and a friend all over the "strange, almost deserted city" in a Red Cross car.
No wonder she began to suffer from "a kind of indigestion of adventure". A family connection at the Vatican helped to ensure, during a side-visit to Rome, that she and her sister Barbara met Pope Pius XII, who belied his sombre image by winking at them playfully.
Returning to Dublin, she joined the the Department of External (now Foreign) Affairs, which comes across as a type of literary refuge at the time, peopled by fun-loving poets and intellectuals like herself.
"At one time the place became such a minefield of practical jokes that one was afraid to pick up the telephone." Over lunch the French ambassador advised her sagely: "A good diplomatist never lies. You anticipate the occasion for falsehood, and you avoid it." Posted to Madrid, she was received by Franco and developed a taste for bullfights that was at odds with her otherwise liberal views. Then it was back to Dublin where, then aged 30, she fell into a passionate affair with an unnamed academic who had other women in his life.
Perhaps inevitably this ended in tears and, close to breaking-point, she wrote a series of poems in Irish about it. One of them features in the book, powerfully translated as For Your Sake by a Donegal poet, Aidan Hayes:
For your sake I kept love dark
But here I declare an end.
Enough of this dance.
I've had my fill of the slave's part . . .
. . . Hard being beside you,
Worse being without you:
My intimacy with you was
A bad bargain either way.
Her life had become "an emotional waste" but was soon to be transformed by a new relationship with her departmental colleague, Conor Cruise O'Brien. So full of energy that he clicked his fingers as he walked the corridors of Iveagh House, he threw open the door of her office in the dead days after Christmas and said, "What exemplary industry! Chuck it and come and have a drink." The rest of the story is quite well-known. Conor's divorce and subsequent remarriage to Máire made headlines, since he had played a leading role in the highly-controversial United Nations peace mission to the Congo at the time. Although the term "feeding frenzy" was not used about the press at the time, that is what took place when Máire, still single at that stage, decided to go and stand by her man in Central Africa.
Back home, her father was bemused. "Why," he asked, "did she have to go to the Congo?" Irrepressible as ever, her mother replied: "When I was young and I loved you, I would have followed you to the ends of the earth." Máire's life was now intertwined with that of Conor Cruise O'Brien - who gave his version of the story in an autobiography published four years ago.
The door is open to the other room in 'Whitewater' as I venture that I always thought she was more nationalist than her husband. She responds: "I am a nationalist and a republican: I am also a pacifist."
Thankfully, Conor doesn't come charging into the kitchen to denounce me for stirring up trouble in the house. Instead, he puts on the kettle to make me a cup of tea.
"Are you coming to our party?" he asks. A big bash is planned for the launch of the book tomorrow, with Seamus Heaney doing the honours. Naturally I said I was. It's not every day one gets to attend the birth of a little jewel.
The Same Age as the State is published by The O'Brien Press, €24.95, available from tomorrow
