Courtney McGrailBy the Books Editor
Political memories and biographies
In his review of Brendan O’Donoghue’s biography of Sir Henry Augustus Robinson, our reviewer noted how the author reveals a man who was almost lost to history, making the new book a remarkable feat of research.
Robinson’s own two volumes of memoirs are in a very different mode. Aside from some better swipes at the fate that cast him out of the country in 1923, Robinson emphasised the amusing and the comic.
The books remind me not of the often abused stories of Somerville and Ross (which are often written from acute observation), so much as the comic novels of George Bermingham, the pen name of Canon Hannay of Westport, a controversial figure in his time, particularly of Spanish Gold (1908) and The Experiences of Dr Whitty (1913), both of which contain satiric allusion to the Irish Secretary.
But Robinson’s failure to do himself full justice, set me thinking about Irish political memoirs and biographies. These are on the whole a disappointing lot. The only one which can be said to have achieved a classic status, largely with older generations it is true, is The Autobiography of Wolf Tone.
Some, of course, appeared in Irish, such as Trasna na Bóinne (1957) by Ernest Blyth, and his memoir of the Rising, Sean T. (1966) by President O’Kelly are of some distinction. But historians never seem to quote them. They have enough Irish it seems to put them in their bibliographies, but not to read them.
Peculiar matter
Then there was the peculiar matter of the official biography of Eamon De Valera. One sees this always quoted from in the shorter version in English prepared by T. P. O’Neill on to which the name of Lord Pakenham was imposed to achieve sales in Britain, I suspect. The original form, much longer, in two volumes was in Irish. It contains a great deal of material that vanished from the English version: the account of the death of Cathal Brugha during the fighting in O’Connell Street during the first days of the Civil War is more even handed than the English version.
What can one say about other memoirs? Many people were impressed with the memoirs of Noel Brown. But then that too avoided one stark fact. That he waited until his ministerial pension had come through before he brought down the First Interparty Government, by taking the documents relating to the Mother and Child scheme to the Irish Times in a midnight visit – the pension safely secured by minutes, so to speak. Need I go on? If I have missed a masterpiece, readers will tell me, I suspect.
I am of the opinion that persons who have served long years in public office should not retire without giving some literary account of what they had hoped for and wheat they achieved, or more likely failed to achieve.
There again we seem to have nothing from bystanders to match the memoirs of St Simon, or the diaries of Thomas Creevey. Nor indeed anything like the diaries of Lord Moran, describing the last years of Winston Churchill as seen by his personal doctor.
Things are different in the US. I am not thinking so much of the distinguished biographies of Kennedy; no, something like the poet Carl Sandburg’s immense biography of Abraham Lincoln is more what I had in mind.
Perhaps it does not matter that public servants are indifferent to the claims of literature. When Conor Cruise O’Brien, already a distinguished historian of Parnell and his party, was appointed to the staff of Dag Hammarskjöld this was because the Permanent Secretary, himself a literary man, had recently read Marie Cross (1952), Cruise O’Brien’s study of a set of Catholic novelists published under the pen name of Donat O’Donnell.
O’Brien feared it might be said that a bookish man had appointed another bookish man to a sensitive post. Certainly his many critics thought so on reading To Katanga and Back (1963). But that book is still a very readable account of a man’s public service.
It is more or less the sort of book I had in mind for others to write. But I suppose that is asking too much of those we pay such generous salaries and pensions to that have literary talents too.