Straight From the Irish Wound : THE GREAT MELODY: Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke, <i> By Conor Cruise O’Brien University of Chicago Press: $34.95; 692 pp.)</i>

Twenty years ago Conor Cruise O’Brien tried to write a conventional chronological biography of Edmund Burke, the 18th-Century writer and statesman, and found he couldn’t. His subject kept going flat on him. The problem, he tells us, is that the Burke he was trying to re-create--the calmly penetrating, supremely rational conservative thinker and orator--was history’s, and O’Brien’s, misapprehension. A line from Yeats, which he had never understood, came back to him:

American colonies, Ireland, France and India

Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.

“Great Melody”? The phrase recurs obsessively in this odd and brilliant work. O’Brien calls it a “thematic” biography, but that only begins to give an idea of it. It is a voyage of exploration. He is after the dark “Irish level” that underlay, sometimes undermined, and ultimately gave fiery immortality to Burke’s polished paradoxes. He is after the wounded, grieving Irishman who made his political career in London as an urbane Anglo-Irish Whig. And he is after himself, O’Brien. “The Great Melody” is, above all, an autobiographical biography. If that sounds original and perhaps nerve-racking, so is the book. Any first-rate biographer imagines himself into his subject; O’Brien imagines his subject into himself.

The parallels are far more than anecdotal. O’Brien never once mentions them, but they resonate continually. The author, whose heritage lies on both sides of the Irish divide, has, like Burke, written about his country with passionate rationality and gained little thanks from either side. Years ago, as United Nations representative in the war-torn Congo, he quit spectacularly after denouncing Britain’s and France’s manipulative interference. A hero, accordingly, to the anti-colonialists, he became a leading figure in Ireland’s left-of-center Labor Party. Then, as minister in charge of press matters in a coalition government, he infuriated journalists and disappointed many liberals by restricting television coverage of the IRA. He has been attacked for changeableness, for ostensibly winging from left to right; for favoring intervention in the Gulf and opposing it in Yugoslavia.

Burke, too, had a complex relationship to the conflicting claims in his Ireland; they warred inside him. Changeableness was the charge leveled by his critics at the time, and by some historians since. He eloquently opposed British repression of America’s pre-Revolutionary claims, and was a fierce dove after war broke out. Yet he opposed the independent impulses of the Irish Parliament and the armed Irish Volunteers. He defended the East India Company against government attempts to supervise it; later he led a passionate and ultimately successful campaign against its oppressive and corrupt rule in the subcontinent. And the Burke who defended the American Revolution became the Burke who assailed the French Revolution so violently and perceptively that he found himself abandoning his lifelong political allies--the Whigs of Charles James Fox--and joining with William Pitt.

O’Brien, who avoids much of what one would expect to find in a biography--of Jane, Burke’s wife, we hear virtually nothing except that she was loyal, devoted and a practicing Catholic--follows his subject’s stormy passage through the Irish, American, Indian and French issues. He does it in concentrated detail and in a style that is by turns emotional and dry, pedantic and inspired. He is never understated, and though he can be objective he is not detached. He joins Burke’s battles with his political enemies, and makes his own murderous sideswipes at the anti-Burke historian, the late Sir Lewis Namier. He shares his subject’s political insight as well as his touchiness.

It is exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, and repetitious even beyond the requirements of a method that has him follow each of Burke’s four major causes for a while, and then double back. But the details are not the point. The Great Melody is. And it is a fascinating point even if the author’s need to establish it sometimes has him instructing us to fit one particular speech or stance into the Melody rubric, and leave another out. There is power and originality in O’Brien’s passionate method, and silliness as well.

His theme, or Melody, has two leading motifs. One is his thesis that Burke’s fire, which made his words something far more memorable and permanent than simple cleverness, came from his Irish wound. At the start he uses evidence and argument to show that Burke was the son of not one but two Catholics. His father, the author believes, was not a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, as has been suggested. The elder Burke formally became an Anglican only so that he could practice law and escape the heavy anti-Catholic restrictions.

Burke himself was raised as an Anglican, and took pains to present himself as a virtually English Whig, and to downplay his Irish connection. His anger and guilt at this species of concealment ignited the ferocity with which he pursued his causes: his attack on the injustices done to the American colonies, the Indian populace, the Catholic majority in Ireland, and the victims of the French Revolution.

Of course there is a fundamental nuance in all this, and that is the second theme in the Melody. Burke’s passion for justice was matched by an equal passion against passion; against any single idea whose single-minded pursuit would result in a new oppression. The penalties against Irish Catholics were the wounding remnant of Cromwell’s zeal. Wounded, Burke was startlingly prophetic about the excesses the French Revolution would lead to. He even predicted, years ahead, the emergence of a Napoleon.

No idea, he said, was worth overturning a government for. Only extreme and concrete oppression justified revolution. The English constitution, with its pragmatic blend of democracy, royal prerogative and aristocratic power, was about as good as could be expected. Where his formidable denunciatory voice shifted from conservation to revolt, it was because he saw the English failing to live up to their own standards: denying the rights of Englishmen to Americans, to Indians, to the Catholics in Ireland.

O’Brien’s achievement is to suggest that Burke’s alleged shifts of principle were in fact loyalty to another principle: that discriminations must be made. Ideas were good but none was so good as to be granted absolute power--not in the face of actual life. Ideologists regard history as something to be lectured and improved on; Burke regarded it with “awe and horror.” His lurches, his refusal to tie himself to any party--though he remained loyal to the liberal Whigs for two decades--seemed like trimming to some. But trimming is what you do to a sail if you want to hold a course.

“The Great Melody,” which includes extensive excerpts of speeches and writings, argues the underlying consistency in Burke’s life. That it is, as I believe, an equivalent argument for the author’s life gives the book a particular richness and intensity. It can also make it seem strained and arbitrary. To Burke’s melody it is O’Brien’s counterpoint, resonant and occasionally astray.