Culture That Made Me: Fergal Keane of the BBC on Cork, Keats, and Vietnam
Fergal Keane will speak at symposium at UCC to mark a century of Cork University Press. Picture: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty
Fergal Keane, 64, grew up in Dublin and later Cork. In 1979, he began his journalist career with the Limerick Leader. In 1989, he joined the BBC, covering several conflicts, including the genocide in Rwanda. In 1997, he won a BAFTA for his Rwanda documentary, He has published several books, among them He’s a speaker at a symposium celebrating a century of Cork University Press, Thursday, September 11, at University College Cork.
I loved the Ladybird book of David Livingstone. It was about Africa and exploration. Viewed now, it's a book totally out of its time – a way of seeing the world we wouldn't imagine now, the white man as saviour in Africa, a very colonial narrative – but at the time I loved the idea of adventure and escape. It definitely planted something in me.
In my teens, growing up in Cork, the landscape of Frank O'Connor’s short stories was all around me. My mother used to point out the church, near the railway station, from to me. is probably my favourite short story. It moves me deeply. It talks about a love affair that went on long after the two people involved in it ever saw each other again. It’s a beautiful story. It has remarkable lines where he talks about “the poetry of change”, going back to Cork as a grown-up, walking around the place where so many people he knew had gone. It’s something I do when I go home – I love to walk and lose myself in reminiscence. I loved living in Cork. I love the people that were close to me there. It's a sweet reminiscence when I walk there.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s was on my Leaving Cert course. I was drawn to the preoccupations of Fitzgerald – this doomed outlook he had on life. I remember first reading it and if you love poetry, the language of Gatsby is captivating. I still read the book every couple of years for the beauty of the language. It’s sublime. I’ve read everything he wrote, losing myself in his romantic, bittersweet dreamland.
I was a martyr for Keats. At school, I remember us doing “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, and the fret…”. It’s such beautiful poetry. It's still in my head. This magnificent writing, coupled with the fact that you know he's going to die young. He died in Rome. Later, I went to his grave in Rome. The headstone reads: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Michael Herr’s his book about Vietnam, had a huge impact on me. I was passionate about history. I wanted to be a war correspondent. Writing in revolutionary prose for the time, it took you into the heart of the war. It reeled you in. He referenced rock'n'roll music throughout it – Hendrix, The Doors, and wrote in a way, as a 17-year-old, that got home to me, the images of what war was like. I remember reading it, and saying, “I want to emulate this.”
My father [Eamonn Keane] was a professional actor and my mother [Maura Hassett] also acted. I remember seeing my mother in Cork’s Everyman Theatre in Christopher Hampton’s play about the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. I was maybe 13, 14. I was captivated, not least because my mother was on stage. These were characters, two men living by different rules, outside of “the normal” in their own society, and probably even in Cork society of the 1970s when I saw it. As a young person in Catholic Ireland, it captured my imagination.
At Presentation Brothers College, we had a band called The Streets. The Beatles and Stones were at the core of our repertoire. It was great fun. There is nothing like being on stage with a rock'n'roll band – the energy. I was the lead singer. I wasn't great. Everybody else were far better musicians, but I gave it everything. We played at different places, but one of the best nights of all was at a school, charity disco – the Rag Ball, I think – in Pres.
I love Tom Waits. When I listen to him, he brings me back to that period of growing up in Cork when you had Sir Henry’s opening, opposite the Beamish & Crawford Brewery, and people like
I remember him playing a cover of Tom Waits’ song Martha, a song I still listen to.
the collected poems of Raymond Carver, has been a lifesaver to me in difficult times and moments of depression and breakdown. Carver was an alcoholic for many years and went into recovery. In recovery, he wrote a corpus of magnificent short stories and poetry that spoke to my experiences of alcoholism, depression, inadequacy, the feelings that go with addiction. He has one poem called Late Fragment: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.” He died young, in his forties. He wrote that as he was dying, knowing the end was near.
One of the most remarkable documentaries I've seen is Joshua Oppenheimer’s It won an Oscar. It’s centred around the mass slaughter which took place in Indonesia during the great crackdown against 'communists', basically everybody the regime didn't like. The filmmaker managed to persuade a lot of the killers to describe and act out what they had done, as if they were appearing in a movie. Its conception, the way it was realised, the truth he managed to get from these people, blew me away.
I love epic morality, the performances, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Brando, of course, the script, the staging, the camera work. It's a film I watch at least once a year. There’s a great moment where Michael Corleone embraces his brother Fredo, who has betrayed him, kissing him, he says: “You broke my heart, Fredo.” It sends shivers up my spine.
I'm Still Here is a beautiful film about the Brazilian dictatorship. With films like that, I just weep. It's about a mother’s struggle to hold her family together after her husband is disappeared by the military junta, and her pursuit of justice. It's so human. If readers haven’t watched it, look out for the scene where they get ice cream, one of the most powerful cinema scenes I’ve seen.
My favourite podcast is on BBC with Melvyn Bragg, who’s sadly stepping down as host. He brings in scholars and each week they discuss a different topic. It could be the Great Famine in Ireland or the idea of civility. It's wonderfully eclectic, but always full of intellectual nourishment.
I love Esther Perel’s podcast She’s a fascinating character. Every week, she discusses issues around relationships or love in the modern world with people, a thing we don't talk half enough about. I'm fascinated listening to it.
