'It's fear like I've never known'
Alcoholic father, insecurity of the child, anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression – sublimated in work, panic attack, mental breakdown, drinking, alcoholism, blackouts, fear, vision of death. These are just some of the notes I scribbled to myself as I read Fergal Keane’s newly published memoir, All Of These People. Distinguished BBC foreign correspondents, bestriding a broken world, are surely not supposed to show such vulnerability. Keane is either very brave or very foolish – or perhaps both.
The central revelation in the book is that throughout the 1990s, when he was winning awards for his coverage of South Africa, Rwanda and a dozen other conflicts, he was fighting an intense personal battle of his own – against booze. The news has come as a shock to the hardened news-gatherers with whom he worked.
“I met Mark Austin from ITN the other night at an awards ceremony,” says Keane, “and he came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ He was based in Asia while I was there. The truth is that it’s a tribute to my powers of concealment. I worked very hard at it, but I was getting to the point where it wasn’t working. I remember at the end of the Kosovo business, I woke up in a flat there feeling so ill – physically more sick than I can ever remember being. Luckily, I was due to fly out that day. Had I not been, there is no way I would have been able to function. That made me start to panic.
A combination of fear that he would be found out and lose his job and worries about the effect on his family – his son Daniel was born in 1996 – forced him to seek help and he quit drinking in June 1999. “I only told the Beeb when the crunch point came,” he recalls. “I came back from a trip to Spain and I rang my direct boss and said words to the effect of ‘I’m in real, real trouble, I need some some time off.’ It was a year before I was comfortable with being sober, not feeling edgy around booze. But I haven’t touched a drop since. I wouldn’t be here if I had, let me tell you.”
At 44, Keane is having a mid-life rethink. “It’s an age at which you buy a Porsche and take up with a Jennifer, or you write a memoir,” he says with a laugh. The book is a very public coming to terms with his late father’s alcoholism, which led to his parents splitting up when he was 11, and his own battles with the bottle. But the re-evaluation goes wider: he and his wife Anne recently adopted an 18-month-old girl called Holly Mei from an orphanage in southern China, and Keane has now decided that he will no longer report “hot wars”.
“I’ve had to really confront the issue in the past week,” he says. “I’m making a film about the west and the UN security council and Darfur. In doing that, one of the things that I might have had to do was to go behind rebel lines. I’ve spoken to the producer and said I’m not willing to do that. I just can’t now. I’m too scared. It’s fear like I’ve never known it. I was terrified in Iraq. I don’t want to lose my life and I regard it as an increasing possibility if I keep doing those kinds of things. At the awards dinner I went to the other night, they did a roll-call of journalists killed in the past year and there were more than 100 names.
“I just have a feeling that sooner or later it’ll happen to me if I keep doing it; and secondly I now have kids and I can’t morally satisfy myself that it’s the right thing to do to go to places where I could be killed and leave them without a father. How can someone who experienced the absence of a father so deeply do that? And why did it take me so long to bloody well wake up to it?
How do the BBC feel about their “special correspondent” forgoing wars? “They’re OK. I can still do the Darfur story. I can go to Khartoum, I can go to New York to talk to people in the security council.” But even if they were less understanding, he doesn’t see that he has a choice. “If it means taking a hit career-wise, then I’m willing to do it.”
Keane’s book is refreshingly (at times brutally) honest, and so is he. He has received an extremely bad press in some quarters – one critic dubbed him the “soulful-eyed, honey-voiced monster of mawkishness”; another said that “no matter which country Fergal Keane is reporting from, it always turns out to be Keania.” But he takes it in surprisingly good heart; he even accepts that some of it is true.
“After the Rwandan genocide, I was so shaken that there was emotional bleed-through into my work and I was coming closer to the story than I needed to,” he says. “For example, I went to Sudan in the late-90s and I was like a stereotype of myself. I remember talking to Mike Robinson, the editor of Panorama, about it, and he said ‘stand back a bit’. There’s a great line of Yeats where he talks about being ‘as cold and passionate as the dawn’. I always try to keep that in my mind.”
He accepts that A Stranger’s Eye, his series in 2000 about the underclass in Britain, was a failure. “I don’t think I really knew the country enough to make that journey. It’s one of those concepts that seems like a good idea at the time – a foreign correspondent’s view of Britain – but I don’t think it worked. There are some great moments but the narrative isn’t there, because I didn’t know enough to be able to speak about Britain with conviction and real intelligence.”
Keane is a Dubliner, one of four children (his siblings are oddly absent from the book). His father Eamonn was an actor, successful but dogged by a lifelong love of drink that wrecked his marriage and caused a 20-year separation from his son. The book is the extended, compassion-filled conversation Keane feels he missed out on while his father was alive – he died in 1990. His mother Maura, a retired teacher, is still alive. The other key figure in his life was his uncle John B Keane, a playwright and surrogate father.
As a good Dubliner, Keane reveres books and writers. He dismisses today’s “broadcasting clones” for their lack of literacy and failure to engage with life beyond the immediate story on which they are working. “I spent a lot of time in the US last summer,” he says, “and was exposed to American broadcast news, and if that kind of thing gets root here, it’s scary. At the risk of sounding like the old fogey, if you sit down over dinner and talk through the story and then you want to talk about something else, whether it’s movies or books, there’s just a kind of blankness.”
Behind all the criticism of Keane is the blanket complaint that he trades on emotion. He tells me to resist seeing him as an Irish romantic, but it is difficult. When I remind him of a story he tells in the book of seeing his father from the top of a bus in Dublin, his father walking along as if he owned this street he would have known all his life, tears well up in his eyes and he is almost unable to speak. At one point in the book, he quotes war photographer Don McCullin’s dictum that “you can’t focus the camera with a tear in your eye”, but more than most Keane would struggle with that balance between objectivity and emotional involvement. He wants so much to be a good man as well as a good journalist.
He believes, of course, that you can be both. “There’s a particular view of journalism, which is usually held by certain Englishmen who work for the Spectator, that says you can’t show any emotion. But I don’t hold to that. The best correspondents for me are those who haven’t been afraid to be human.”
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