O'BRIEN, Conor Cruise 1917-

(Donat O'Donnell)

PERSONAL: Surname listed in some sources as Cruise O'Brien; born November 3, 1917, in Dublin, Ireland; son of Francis Cruise (a journalist and literary critic) and Katherine (Sheehy) O'Brien; married Christine Foster, 1939 (divorced, 1962); married Maire MacEntee, January 9, 1962; children: Donal, Fedelma, Kathleen, Sean Patrick, Margaret. Education: Trinity College, B.A., 1941, Ph.D., 1953. Hobbies and other interests: Travel.

ADDRESSES: Home—Whitewater, Howth Summit, Dublin, Ireland.

CAREER: Entered Irish Civil Service, 1942; Department of Finance, member of staff, 1942-44; Department of External Affairs, member of staff, 1944-61; Irish News Agency, information and cultural section, department head and managing director, 1948-55; Irish Embassy, Paris, France, counselor, 1955-56; United Nations Irish delegate and head, 1955-61, Department of External Affairs, assistant secretary, 1960, secretariat executive staff member, 1961, Secretary-General's representative in Katanga (now Shaba, Zaire), 1961; Dail Eireann, Labour Party member representing Dublin North-East, 1969-77; minister for posts and telegraphs, 1973-77; Republic of Ireland, member of Senate, 1977-79. University of Ghana, vice-chancellor, 1962-65; New York University, Albert Schweitzer chair in the humanities, 1965-69; Nuffield College, Oxford, visiting fellow, 1973-75; University of Dublin, pro-chancellor, 1973—; Dartmouth College, visiting professor of history and Montgomery fellow, 1984-85. Editor-in-chief, Observer (London) 1979-81, consultant editor, 1981—; The Atlantic, contributing editor, 1986—.

MEMBER: Royal Irish Academy, Royal Society of Literature, Athenaeum Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: D.Litt. from University of Bradford, 1971, University of Ghana, 1974, University of Edinburgh, 1976, University of Nice, 1978, University of Coleraine, 1981, and Queen's University, Belfast, 1984; Valiant for Truth Media Award, 1979.

WRITINGS:

(Under pseudonym Donat O'Donnell) Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1952.

Parnell and His Party: 1880-90, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1957.

To Katanga and Back: A U.N. Case, Hutchinson (London, England), 1962, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1963.

Conflicting Concepts of the United Nations, Leeds University Press (Leeds, England), 1964.

Writers and Politics (essays), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1965.

(With Northrop Frye and Stuart Hampshire) The Morality of Scholarship, edited by Max Black, Cornell University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

The United Nations: Sacred Drama, illustrated by Feliks Topolski, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1968.

Conor Cruise O'Brien Introduces Ireland, edited by Owen Dudley Edwards, Deutsch (London, England), 1969, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1970.

Albert Camus of Europe and Africa, Viking (New York, NY), 1970, published as Camus, Fontana (London, England), 1970.

(With wife, Maire MacEntee O'Brien) The Story of Ireland, Viking (New York, NY), 1972, published as A Concise History of Ireland, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1972.

The Suspecting Glance, Faber and Faber (London, England), 1972.

States of Ireland, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1972.

Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, Hutchinson (London, England), 1978.

(With Cark Bonham Carter) Resolving Racial Conflict in South Africa: Some Outside Views, edited by David Thomas, South African Institute of Race Relations (Johannesburg, South Africa), 1979.

Neighbours: Four Lectures, edited by Thomas Pakenham, Faber and Faber (Boston, MA), 1980.

The Press and the World, Birkbeck College (London, England), 1980.

Edmund Burke: Master of English, English Association, University of Leicester (Leicester, England), 1981.

Religion and Politics, New University of Ulster (Ireland), 1984.

The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1988.

God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1993.

Conor Cruise O'Brien: An Anthology, selections by Donald H. Akenson, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1994.

Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Poolbeg (Dublin, Ireland), 1994, University Press of Chicago (Chicago, IL), 1995.

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason, Free Press (New York, NY), 1995.

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O'Brien, (selected works), edited by Richard English and Joseph Morrison, Poolbeg (Dublin, Ireland), 1998, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2000.

Memoir: My Life and Themes, Poolbeg (Dublin, Ireland), 1998, Cooper Square (New York, NY), 2000.

EDITOR

The Shaping of Modern Ireland, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Canada), 1960.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin (New York, NY), 1969.

(With William Dean Vanech) Power and Consciousness, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1969.

CONTRIBUTOR

Irving Howe, editor, The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Arthur I. Blaustein and R. R. Woock, editors, Man against Poverty: World War III, introduction by John W. Gardner, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

George A. White and C. H. Newman, editors, Literature in Revolution, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 1972.

Teilhard de Chardin: In Quest of the Perfection of Man, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, NJ), 1973.

Speeches Delivered at the 35th Annual Dinner of the Anglo-Israel Association, Anglo-Israel Association (London, England), 1983.

(Author of foreword) Andrew Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

PLAYS

King Herod Explains, produced in Dublin, Ireland, 1969.

Murderous Angels: A Political Tragedy and Comedy in Black and White (produced in Los Angeles and New York City, 1970), Little, Brown (Boston MA), 1968.

OTHER

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Atlantic, Nation, New Statesman, and Saturday Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Conor Cruise O'Brien is a distinguished and controversial literary critic, diplomat, dramatist, biographer, historian, and politician. He rose to world prominence as Irish delegate to the United Nations (U.N.) and as special representative of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. A New Statesman writer stated that "In so far as a civil servant can, [O'Brien] became a minor national hero; the Irish independent, asserting his country's independence along with his own." The article went on to describe O'Brien as "a modern version of that nineteenth-century radical phenomenon, the Only White Man the Natives Trust."

It has been suggested that Hammarskjold's knowledge of and admiration for Maria Cross, a volume of critical essays that O'Brien published in 1952 under the pseudonym of Donat O'Donnell, was influential in his decision to ask O'Brien to serve on his executive staff. Under Hammarskjold, O'Brien was assigned to over-see U.N. operations at Katanga in the Congo in 1961, a time of violent political upheavals. Later that year he was relieved of these duties at his own request and resigned from the foreign service altogether. Following his resignation, O'Brien made public his intention to publish a book about the difficulties he had encountered in the service of the U.N. in the Congo. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from then acting Secretary-General U Thant advising him that unauthorized disclosure of U.N. affairs was prohibited by regulation. Thant's letter serves as the preface of To Katanga and Back, an autobiographical narrative of the crisis in the Congo, which O'Brien published in 1963 despite U.N. censure.

Although his ties with the U.N. were officially broken, O'Brien remained concerned with the intricate workings of the organization. In The United Nations: Sacred Drama, O'Brien portrays the U.N. as both temple and stage, with the U.N. Secretary-General serving as a kind of high priest with a spiritual authority. As John Osborne explained in the New Republic, "A profanation occurs . . . when [the Secretary-General] 'steps down from the religious level of politics, to the level of applied politics.'" Critic Albert Bremel commented favorably on O'Brien's conception of the dramatic aspects of the U.N. "Theater is an art. If it is to be good theater, it requires the exercise of imagination," he noted in the New York Times Book Review. "That is what Mr. O'Brien is really concerned with. Imaginative participants will recognize (some have already recognized) the U.N. as a superb arena for dramatizing the threats to survival."

As an extension of his conception of the U.N. as drama, O'Brien drew on his experiences in Katanga to write the play Murderous Angels: A Political Tragedy and Comedy in Black and White. The play provoked controversy even before it was staged due to O'Brien's reworking of historical events in the Congo. The author did not intend Murderous Angels to be viewed as a documentary drama or as 'theatre of fact,' but rather as a tragedy, as its subtitle implies. "While the historian must hesitate, lacking absolute proof, the dramatist may present the hypothesis which he finds most convincing," O'Brien writes as an introduction to his work, justifying his dramatic license.

In States of Ireland, O'Brien again courts controversy through his views on the Irish conflict in which he was actively involved as a left-wing Irish Labour Party deputy. Wrote Vivian Mercier in the Nation, "The most unpopular statement in the whole book is probably this: 'While two communities are as bitterly antagonistic as are Catholics and Protestants [in Northern Ireland] now, it is not merely futile but actually mischievous to talk about uniting Ireland.' What he means is that in a united Ireland Catholics would outnumber Protestants by at least three to one." In States of Ireland, O'Brien argues that the two distinct Catholic and Protestant communities are a reality, the existence of which makes any goal of Irish unification impractical, if not impossible. O'Brien, whose maternal ancestors were Catholic and whose first wife, Christine Foster, was a Protestant, examines the situation from both a historical and an autobiographical perspective. "To Conor," Mercier observed, "Irish history came first of all as the history of his family."

A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement described the contents of States of Ireland as sometimes confusing because of the breadth of O'Brien's under-taking: "some general history, fragments of literary criticism, spasms of autobiography, an extract from Dr. Cruise O'Brien's political diary for the ominous summer of 1970, an extended account of the developing situation in Northern Ireland and, by way of appendix, a splendid diatribe against Sinn Fein which was intended to flatten the President of that organization . . . in public debate and by all accounts did just that." In the New York Review of Books, John Horgan summed up a widely held view of what States of Ireland achieved: "Dr. O'Brien's great contribution to the Irish situation can be easily and quickly stated: he has forced people to face up to the fact that the tradition of the majority of people living in Ireland is a sectarian and a nationalist one, and that the link between its sectarian and its nationalist aspects will not be dissolved simply by wishful thinking."

Several reviewers of The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism have echoed the same question: Why would an Irish historian choose to write the history of Zionism, from its pre-Herzl days to the state of Israel in the post-Begin era? "The answer," noted Walter Reich in the Washington Post Book World, "lies in [O'Brien's] past—in his identity as a member of a nationality, Irish Catholic, that has experienced stigmatization, and in his identity as the son of a lapsed Catholic growing up in a southern Irish sea of disapproving believers. These identities, he says, helped him form a bond with the story of a people whose stigmatization has been profound and whose experience with disapproval has been catastrophic."

At least one reviewer was less convinced about O'Brien's qualifications for the task. Milton Viorst, writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World, complained that "O'Brien is an Irishman, which scarcely disqualifies him from writing about Jews, but he comes to the subject as a researcher, with no discernible 'feel.'" On the other hand, in the New Republic Walter Laqueur argued that O'Brien's critical distance proves an advantage. He noted, "But his vantage point—he is the detached but friendly outsider—gives his work a freshness lacking in most of the committed literature on the subject." Although Patrick Seale in the Spectator disagreed with O'Brien's position, he praised O'Brien's ability as a writer: "He is almost incapable of writing a dull sentence. He is also an immensely persuasive advocate, clear, master of his sources, able to marshall his arguments, skilled at demolishing his adversaries with slur and innuendo." And Abba Eban, who reviewed The Siege in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noted that the strengths of the work reflect well on its author. The book, Eban observed, "bears the mark of a restless, original idiosyncratic mind and—more surprisingly—a talent for the patient toil required by meticulous research."

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason, is a collection of twenty-two lectures given at the University of Toronto's Massey College and broadcast by Canadian radio in 1994. These lectures address religion, spirituality, diversity, nationalism, and cultural and political concerns from influential individuals such as Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, Ivan Illich, Pierre Trudeau, Daniel Boorstin, David Rockefeller, Nelson Mandella, Francois Mitterrand, and Shimon Peres.

Conor Cruise O'Brien: An Anthology begins with an in-depth account from Donald Harman Akenson of O'Brien's ancestral heritage, "searching for reasons why his subject is the most unusual yet most appropriate critic of Irish life," explained Gerard J. Russello in Commonweal. "O'Brien's roots lie deep in Irish history," continued Russello. "An eighteenth-century ancestor, Father Nicholas Sheehy, was martyred for the cause of an independent Ireland, and later O'Brien's maternal grandfather broke with a disgraced Parnell in the 'Committee Room 15.'" On a literary note—as James Carroll noted in his New York Times review of Memoir: My Life and Themes—James Joyce often frequented the Sheehy household, memorializing O'Brien's mother, Kathleen Sheehy, in The Dead, and giving O'Brien's grandmother a mention in Ulysses. Also, O'Brien's father knew Yeats. In all, his familial background gave him a firm foundation for his political and literary careers. Carroll commented, "In Memoir: My Life and Themes, Conor Cruise O'Brien retraces what must rank as one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century. A man of eccentric brilliance . . . And each manifestation [of his career] was marked by a contentiousness that seems to have resulted partly from his commitment to principle and partly from a personality rooted in the contradictions of Irish history."

From an interview with Harry Kreisler that appears on the University of California at Berkeley Web site, one gets a brief glimpse at those contradictions and its effect on O'Brien's career. His mother was a strong Irish Catholic; his father (whom O'Brien—at the age of ten—watched die) was an agnostic who disapproved of Catholic education. Thus, O'Brien (himself an agnostic) attended a Protestant school. "One third of the pupils were people of Catholic origin like myself, but somewhat detached from that background," O'Brien commented to Kreisler. "One third were Protestants, somewhat disoriented in the new Catholic-dominated state and feeling nervous. And one third were Jews who had their own sensitivities there. So we were all a bit disoriented, a bit hypertensive, which I think is good in some ways, because it stimulates thought. When we are educated in an entirely homogeneous background, we simply inhale a comprehensive but possibly deceptive body of thought, but in the kind of [school] I was brought up in you have to start thinking for yourself, and we all did in different ways."

During the interview, Kreisler asked if, as a politician and a writer, O'Brien were ever torn between rationality and emotions about specific issues. O'Brien replied, "I would take that as a constant in people who write at all about social and political issues. You have to think about the issues, but the feelings precede the thoughts as it were, and then, of course, are qualified by the thoughts. There's a dialectic process going on the whole time. I'm very conscious about that. I'm not someone who could claim that I've been consistent in all things in my life, but I think I've been consistent in trying to think things through and then qualify the thinking in light of experience and moving along from there."

When asked by Kreisler about his thoughts on the appropriate role of intellectuals in the political arena, O'Brien commented, "I think the intellectual [to function honestly] either will have to be on the margin of actual practical politics or, having been in practical politics, as is my case, will have to move to the margin or beyond it. Because if you're immersed in politics you can't, as I found, tell the truth without hesitation.... [The function of the intellectual should be] to think as best they can and say what they think they find, and modify that when they find the need to do it, not because of pressure but because of their own view of developing events. I think the intellectual in relation to politics is something like the Greek chorus, outside the action but telling you quite a lot about the action."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hughes, Catherine, Plays, Politics, and Polemics, Drama Book Specialist Publications (New York, NY), 1973.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise, Murderous Angels: A Political Tragedy and Comedy in Black and White, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1968.

Weightman, John, The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism, Library Press (La Salle, IL), 1973.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 1, 1995, Mary Carroll, review of On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason, p. 606.

Chicago Tribune Book World, March 9, 1986, p. 39.

Christianity Today, April 29, 1996, Bruce Barron, review of On the Eve of the Millennium, p. 34.

Commentary, September, 1965.

Commonweal, December 2, 1988; March 24, 1995, Gerard J. Russello, review of Conor Cruise O'Brien: An Anthology, p. 23.

Economist, December 6, 1997, "A War of Myth and Memory," review of The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, p. 95.

Guardian Weekly, April 27, 1986; March 27, 1988, p. 28; December 4, 1988.

History Today, May, 1997, Stuart Andrews, review of The Long Affair, p. 53.

Listener, May 30, 1968.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 16, 1986.

Nation, December 20, 1965, p. 502; February 23, 1970; March 27, 1972; March 12, 1973; May 26, 1997, Benjamin Schwartz, review of The Long Affair, p. 29.

National Review, April 8, 1996, John Gray, review of On the Eve of the Millennium, p. 53.

New Republic, September 11, 1965; September 7, 1968; March 3, 1986; September 12, 1988; March 10, 1997, Sean Wilentz, review of The Long Affair, p. 32.

New Statesman, December 6, 1968.

Newsweek, October 17, 1966; March 24, 1986.

New York Review of Books, September 8, 1966; July 31, 1969; May 3, 1973.

New York Times, September 15, 1961; February 25, 1986; May 13, 1986; February 22, 1991; November 12, 1995, Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Slouching toward the Apocalypse," review of On the Eve of the Millennium; December 31, 1995, Colm Toibin, "The Blood of Martyrs," review of Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland; September 10, 2000, James Carroll, "Against the Tide," review of Memoir: My Life and Themes, p. 45.

New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1965; August 4, 1968; February 11, 1973; March 2, 1986; February 15, 1987, p. 38; July 24, 1988.

Observer (London), January 26, 1969; June 1, 1986; July 20, 1986; November 30, 1986; February 28, 1988, p. 26; March 13, 1988, p. 42; February 2, 1990.

Partisan Review, number 2, 1988.

Spectator, June 17, 1978; January 3, 1981; June 14, 1986; December 6, 1986, p. 32; March 12, 1988; May 7, 1988.

Time, April 21, 1986.

Times Educational Supplement, June 10, 1988.

Times Literary Supplement, December 23, 1965; June 27, 1968; July 17, 1969; January 29, 1970; July 7, 1972; November 10, 1972; August 11, 1978; November 14, 1980; October 10, 1986; March 18, 1988, p. 298; August 5, 1988; April 13, 1990.

Washington Post Book World, February 16, 1986, p. 1; October 23, 1988, p. 13; February 25, 1990.

ONLINE

University of California at Berkeley Web site,http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/ (April 4, 2000), Harry Kreisler, "The Power of Ideas: Conversation with Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish Statesman and Writer." ^*