Memoir: My Life and Times by Conor Cruise O'Brien Poolbeg 460pp, £20
Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O'Brien edited by Richard English and Joseph Morrison Skelly Poolbeg 410pp, £12.99
Many of Conor Cruise O'Brien's fiercest contemporary critics know little or nothing of the life he led before he entered the Dail in 1969. Much of it deserves honouring: his service to Ireland at the UN and to that organisation itself, even as it was defeated by the colonial powers in the Congo; his lapidary scholarship; his teaching and protesting in New York; his bravery in challenging sloppy political thinking and crude emotionalism, as a TD and minister; and his sure-footed duel with Nkrumah in Ghana.
Other aspects of it are less attractive: the sacking of Mary Holland from the Observer, a classic example of overkill; the near-schism inflicted on the Anti-Apartheid Movement over Sinn Fein (not alluded to); his views on Israeli state terrorism (equally absent); his flouting of the academic embargo on pre-Mandela South Africa, which was quixotic at best; and some of his recent, rapidly unravelling, prophesies. There are times, indeed, when he appears like a Cassandra in reverse - his predictions, though unfulfilled, fated to be believed.
In a memoir in full spate, he leads us deftly through a sequence of careers that would tax the energies of two or three ordinary mortals: civil servant, diplomat, UN envoy, literary critic, university provice-chancellor, academic, politician, editor-in-chief, journalist, and troublemaker extraordinaire. He couldn't write an inelegant sentence if he tried; and such is his witchery with words that the reader occasionally has to pinch himself to remember that there are other points of view, and questions to be asked.
It would be wrong, however, to depict him as some kind of maverick, or loner, which is how some of his critics try to undermine his arguments. For all his willingness to take an unpopular stance, he is also gregarious, and his friendships are a monument to constancy. His loyalties are political, too: to his Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, in 1973-77; and to his party leaders, Brendan Corish and Frank Cluskey, even when the latter, that master of ringcraft, manoeuvred Conor into a position from which there was only one exit. This story of his life is, among other things, a working out of many questions, both public and private. Why did his mother, in Rathmines, prevent Conor from consorting with their Protestant neighbours? Why did de Valera visit the German legation on Hitler's death? Why did Hammarskjold's plane crash? Some of the answers - particularly the personal ones - are more convincing than others. The theory, for example, that Dev's action was part of a ploy calculated to win the 1945 Presidential election for Sean T. O'Kelly, by deliberately fomenting anti-Irish criticism in Britain, seems designed to evoke hilarity rather than agreement - but then, who ever knew the mind of Dev?
It is also a story of ghosts. Some of them are benign, like the gentle figure of Owen Sheehy Skeffington, who died in 1970 (not 1969, as O'Brien says here), and who is enlisted by Conor as a posthumous ally. I knew Owen briefly as a contributor to The Irish Times and in the Seanad - nothing like as well as Conor knew him, it is true - and I wonder whether that brave and thoughtful man, had he remained alive, might not have taken Conor aside from time to time for a quiet word? Others are less friendly: Conor's aunt, the "terrible Hanna" (Owen's mother), who roams through these pages breathing Republican fire and smoke. Conor recounts one episode from early in his first marriage when Hanna's tongue left him "unmanned and struck dumb". As you read his description, the wound opens again. Half a century or more later, has the dragon finally been slain, and is this memoir the bloodied lance?
Some of the portraits are drawn so deftly that one wishes he had turned to novel-writing rather than to drama. There are four coruscating, Swiftian pages on Sean MacBride, drawn from a piece Conor contributed anonymously to the Leader after MacBride's fall from power. Considering that his career had flowered under MacBride, he now finds himself "a bit ashamed" of this piece - but not ashamed enough to deny himself the pleasure of re-publishing it. This is pure Conor, to be savoured drop by drop, like strong liquor. Other individuals are rescued from undeserved obscurity with deft touches: Noel Hartnett, Roger Greene, and (as will surprise some) Frank Aiken. For much of this stuff, a compelling mixture of observation, gossip, and canny navigation through the back channels of political and administrative power, historians will be in his debt.
Ironies abound. He was not an unwilling participant in anti-partition propaganda. He wrote phrases for MacBride which still, after fifty years, stick in his gullet. His gut-reaction to Bloody Sunday was that of the majority. It is instructive to be reminded, too, that The Irish Times huffily attacked him, in two separate editorials, for his suggestion during the 1969 election campaign that land deals by C.J. Haughey, then Minister for Finance, were a legitimate matter for public concern. This, The Irish Times said, was no more than "the politics of envy".
A chapter later, dealing with the end of his job as Editor-in-Chief of the Observer, Conor notes that the effects of this career move on his finances were ameliorated because the columns which he continued to write for the paper "were then tax free under Irish law". The onlie begetter of that particular legislative provision - Charles Haughey - might have been given some credit, though the scheme was administered by others. It would be fascinating to know, even at this remove in time, how many, and which other journalists were beneficiaries of such an extraordinarily munificent regime.
But how does he, or anyone, reconcile his opposition to "an Irish Catholic imperialist enterprise" with his final chapter, 320 pages later, in which he argues that in certain circumstances a united Ireland may be the only way "to safeguard the vital interests of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland"? Part of the answer may be found in his methodology, which habitually combines principles and predictions: as the hypotheses multiply, the utility of the analysis recedes. More significant, however, is possibly his dual recognition, in the same chapter, that Ireland, and with it the Irish nationalist project, has changed mightily; and that the Unionist project is, in his words, "perhaps a political abstraction which was . . . synonymous with civil and religious liberty". In these observations - part speculation, part amende honorable? - lies the germ of an important debate about the relationship between political structures and human rights which we all need to address.
In the fluid dynamic of history, the picture suggested by this narrative is that of the author as salmon, battling his way upstream against the torrent. But now that the mighty fish turns for home, the scars of the anglers' hooks visible on its side, there is still something unbeaten about it that commands attention.
There is little space to comment on Ideas Matter beyond to underline the truth of its central thesis. I should mention in particular Owen Dudley Edwards's essay on "Donat O'Donnell", O'Brien's neglected pseudonymous alter ego; John A. Murphy's frank account of battles lost and won; and Daire Keogh's nuanced essay on Burke. One could wish, though, that the contents reflected, more than they do, the interests and character of its dedicatee, Maire Mac an tSaoi. Anyone who reads the Memoir will understand at once why this luminously gifted woman, and their extraordinary partnership, are also worthy of celebration.
John Horgan is the author of Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot; he teaches at Dublin City University