Desmond Fennell (Irish writer)
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Desmond Fennell is an Irish writer and thinker, specialising in the essay and the reflective travel narrative, who lives in Maynooth, near Dublin.
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[edit] Life
Born in Belfast in 1929, he grew up in Dublin, attending O'Connell School and Belvedere College. First place in Ireland in French and German in the Leaving Certificate was followed by a scholarship in Classical Languages for University College Dublin, which he entered in 1947. While completing a BA there in History and Economics, he studied English and Spanish in Trinity College, Dublin. During the two years, 1950-52, devoted to an MA in Modern History from UCD, he found inspiration in the teaching of Desmond Williams, and spent two semesters at Bonn University, Germany.
While still a student, Fennell contributed a column in Irish to The Sunday Press. There he befriended Douglas Gageby who, later, as editor of The Irish Times, was to give him free rein in that newspaper. Back in Germany in 1955 as an English newsreader on Die Deutsche Welle (German overseas radio), he contributed articles to Comhar and The Irish Times; radio talks to writer Francis McManus at Radio Éireann; and theatre criticism to The Times, London.
Immersion in German culture had aroused in Fennell an interest in the human condition. This in part explains a feature of his early writing – it would surface again in the 1990s – which differed from the practice of Irish Catholics generally. He investigated and wrote about “alien” - non-Irish, non-Catholic - lands and peoples. His first book Mainly in Wonder (1959), published by Hutchinson, London, was a reflective account of a year’s travel mainly in the Far East. After a year as first Aer Lingus sales manager for Germany, he spent 1960 researching a book in what was then avant-garde “pagan” Sweden, and contributed to The Irish Times the first direct reportage from the Soviet Union (15 articles) to appear in an Irish newspaper. He returned to Ireland in 1961 and summarised his Swedish experience in an essay `Goodbye to Summer' (The Spectator, London, 9 February 1962), which caused an international stir.
Painting in Dublin was going through a lively period, with different schools contending. Fennell, for whom painting was always a central passion, made a mark as an art critic in several Dublin publications. At the same time, partly influenced by the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, he read deeply in the literature of the Irish Revolution and fused its humanism with his own. Significant essays of this time were `The Failure of the Irish Revolution - and Its Success', `Cuireadh chun na Tríú Réabhlóide' and `Irish Catholics and Freedom since 1916'. The completion of the Revolution’s aims of Irish intellectual autonomy and democratic self-government became a guiding motivation and theme of his writing for the next thirty years.
In 1964 he moved with wife and son to Freiburg, Germany, as assistant editor of Herder Correspondence, the English-language version of Herder-Korrespondenz; a Catholic journal of theology, philosophy and politics which played a leading ‘progressive’ role during the Second Vatican Council. In 1966, as editor, Fennell returned to Dublin. Two years later he resigned and moved with his family to Maoinis, Connemara.
During his period living in Irish-speaking Connemara (1968-1979) Fennell’s principal themes were the “revolution” of the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking districts (in which he participated); the pursuit of a settlement in Northern Ireland at war; decentralisation of Irish government to regions and districts; and criticism of the cultural thrust of the new-style liberalism, including historical revisionism, which was rising to ascendancy in the Dublin media and the universities.
Mainly in The Irish Times, The Sunday Press and several pamphlets, he modified the nationalist position on the North in two respects which would prove fundamental as that problem moved towards a solution in the 1990s. While pioneering recognition of the Northern unionists as ethnically British, he urged a settlement in some form of London-Dublin joint rule.
From 1976 to 1982, Fennell lectured in Political Science and tutored in Modern History at University College Galway. In 1982 he returned to Dublin as lecturer in English Writing in the Dublin Institute of Technology. From the following year, and through the 1990s, a succession of books appeared, gradually shifting focus from mainly Irish themes to the contemporary West and European history (see titles below). In 1990, the National University of Ireland awarded him its DLitt (Doctor of Literature) degree for his published work.
In that same year he had begun his second “abroad” period with a visit to East Germany to record the last days of that Communist state in Dreams of Oranges. In 1993, when he retired from his lecturing post, a month in Minsk, Bielorussia, was followed by a six-weeks holiday in the USA. That sojourn, followed by 15 months in Seattle, led to Fennell’s perception of the contemporary West as “postwestern” and to a related revised view of European history, themes which he has developed in his books since 1996. Some of these were written in Anguillara Sabazia near Rome, where Fennell resided from 1997-2007. For information on these, see www.desmondfennell.com
[edit] References
- Quinn, Toner, ed., Desmond Fennell: His Life and Works, Veritas, Dublin, 2001.
- Deane, Seamus, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. III, Faber and Faber, 1991, pp, 586-90, 677.
- Share, Bernard, ed., Far Green Fields: Fifteen Hundred Years of Irish Travel Writing, Blackstaff, Belfast, 1992, pp. 71-80.
[edit] Publications
[edit] Books
- Mainly in Wonder (1959)
- The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland (1968)
- The State of the Nation: Ireland since the 60s (1983)
- Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provincialism in the Modern World (1985)
- Nice People and Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s (1986)
- A Connacht Journey (1987)
- The Revision of Irish Nationalism (1989)
- Bloomsway: A Day in the Life of Dublin (1990)
- Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland (1993)
- Dreams of Oranges: An Eyewitness Account of the Fall of Communist East Germany (1996)
- Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Postwestern Civilisation (1996)
- The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation (1999)
- The Turning Point: My Sweden Year and After (2001)
- The Revision of European History (2003)
- Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections 1994-2003 (2003)
- About Behaving Normally in Abnormal Circumstances (2007)
[edit] Pamphlets
- The Northern Catholic (1958)
- Art for the Irish (1961)
- The British Problem (1963)
- Iarchonnacht Began (1969)
- A New Nationalism for the New Ireland (1972)
- Take the Faroes for Example (1972)
- Build the Third Republic (1972)
- Sketches of the New Ireland (1973)
- Towards a Greater Ulster (1973)
- Irish Catholics and Freedom since 1916 (1984)
- Cuireadh chun na Tríú Réabhlóide (1984)
- Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney Is No.1 (1991)
- Savvy and the Preaching of the Gospel (2003)
