Act of contrition
By Eoghan MacCormaic
Memoir: My Life and Themes.
By Conor Cruise O Brien
Published by Poolbeg Press
I'm worried that if I wait any longer to review Conor Cruise O
Brien's latest book - My Life and Themes - that he might have another
one ready for the printers and I'd be landed with the task of
reviewing it too. That would be painful, wearing me down by
attrition.
Mind you, a sequel just might give the Bashful One an opportunity to
undo some of the more outlandish claims, allegations, and hypotheses
in the present book. The trouble with biographers like O'Brien is
that they often believe that they know their subject matter well. We
know otherwise. There is an authentic autobiography in there
somewhere if we could only find an honest autobiographer to write it.
The Cruiser's book actually begins before his life - but such is the
importance of the man, that obviously God would have been a meanie to
have simply allowed the stork to drop Conor into an off the shelf
world. No, Conor's family had to be shakers and movers of their time,
although sadly for Conor, they shook the wrong way. O Brien's
description of his maternal grandfather's political demise, when the
scoundrel Shinners decimated the Irish Parliamentary Party makes sad
reading. Pathetic reading, really.
Words like `moderate' `constitutional', `tolerant' are scattered
about this section of the book, setting his family apart from the
rest of the pack and the reader can almost hear O'Brien wheezing out
the words `Sinn Féin-IRA' in his apportioning of blame for his less
well-heeled upbringing. The label may be 1990s, but Conor writes it
into the period of the Tan war with the consummate ease of a
revisionist. The Republicans cost Conor a more esteemed position in
life:
``If Home Rule had been achieved by the parliamentary route David
Sheehy (his grandfather) would certainly have had a seat in the Irish
Cabinet. Our whole family would have been part of the establishment
of the new Home Rule Ireland. As it was, we were out in the cold,
superseded by a new republican elite...'' If only, if only.
It's easy to understand the passion of his later life in engaging in
an anti-Republican crusade, the pinnacle of which came last week with
his `elevation' by his party to Honorary Life Membership. Indeed, he
is one of life's great Friends of the UKUP. I won't bother you with
the acronym.
So, having woken to the sound of the shelling of the Four Courts at
the age of four, and being able to correctly identify the calibre of
ordinance being used; travelling on through a journey of thought, and
clever replies and answers he was, as they used to say at home, `as
aul' fashioned as a porter bottle'. He tells us, however, that his
childhood was wracked with the moral dilemma as to who was right:
Uncle Frank (Sheehy Skeffington) for being a militant Republican
pacifist, murdered by the Crown, or Uncle Tom Kettle, MP and soldier
of the Crown, killed in action in the first World War. Years were
wasted hankering after lost opportunity, and no doubt he was the sort
of child only a mother could love.
O'Brien the child prodigy became a genius. I know. I read it in the
book. Passing exams with ease, winning scholarships with a carefree
abandon. Tackling tests that smarter cookies would have balked at.
Beating others into second place... and, the guts of sixty year
later, remembering with spiteful glee his ill treatment of less
fortunate colleagues, teaching staff and anyone else who stood in his
way.
One side of O'Brien is saying `look at me, I'm honest enough to admit
what I did, while another side smugly flaunts and relishes, a
lifetime later, acts of humiliation and breaking the will of others
such as the deaf teacher to whom he took a dislike, and on whose
disability he played havoc. The basis of contrition is remorse but
this book contains none of that quality of weakness. This is boastful
O'Brien in full flight.
The book is one series of bragging incident after another. From the
cradle to the Congo everyone else in the world from boyhood butties
to UN officials and Foreign Ambassadors is conspiring to deprive
O'Brien of greatness, yet in one great leap after another our hero
always manages to break free from his bonds. This is the Secret Diary
of Adrian Mole aged 791/2.
Some people might mistakenly pick up this book in the belief that
they'll find a rational explanation for O'Brien's shifts in life.
Save your money. Twenty five years of censorship and political
strangulation through Section 31 earns a mere half page, his switches
are all tactical, his earlier `guise' of being a republican (for
example his time in The Irish News Agency) merely a device, a task
carried out unwillingly and subtly corrupted - arsa sé - when he
could find the opportunity. And like most of the opportunities we
find recorded in this book, Conor is successful, Conor is astute,
Conor is craftier than the rest. Conor is, indeed, the bee's knees.
And lucky for Conor, he got to write his very own autobiography and
allow dotage to pass for memoir.
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)