When the Kissing Had to Stop

Robert Louis Constantine Lee-Dillon Fitzgibbon (Massachusetts 8 June 1919 - Dublin 25 March 1983) was a historian, translator and novelist.

Constantine FitzGibbon was born in the United States in 1919, the youngest of four children. He was half-brother of Louis FitzGibbon, author of a number of works about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940, by Soviet troops. His father, Commander Francis Lee-Dillon FitzGibbon, RN, was Irish, and his mother, Georgette Folsom, an American from Lenox, Massachusetts, USA. He was related to, but not descended from, John 'Black Jack' FitzGibbon, the 1st Earl of Clare, who was Lord Chancellor of Ireland and effected the Act of Union between Ireland and England in 1800, but in the following century the family faded into obscurity and the title died out. FitzGibbon was proud of his Irish ancestry, while ambivalent about his famous kinsman.

He was brought up in the USA and France before moving to England with his mother, his having parents divorced when he was very young. His first brief marriage was to a Burmese woman, Margaret Aye-Moung, but during World War II he met Theodora FitzGibbon, to whom he was married until 1960. They lived at Sacombs Ash in Hertfordshire, north of London, from 1951 to 1959, but had no children. His good friend, the journalist Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) wrote of their turbulent marriage in his books The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil. Theodora also wrote of their time together in her (partly fictional) memoirs With Love (1982), and Love Lies a Loss (1985). Their lives were Bohemian. One of his greatest friends was the poet Dylan Thomas whose biography he wrote (The Life of Dylan Thomas,1965), followed by an edition of Thomas's Selected Letters (1966). Henry Moore was another close friend, and a neighbour in Hertfordshire.

The marriage to Theodora ended in divorce, and he then married Marion (née Gutmann) in 1960, with whom he had a son, Francis, born in 1961. Their marriage ended in 1965, and he moved to Ireland and married Marjorie (née Steele) in 1967. They had a daughter, Oonagh, born in 1968, for whom he wrote Teddy in the Tree (1977). He also adopted Marjorie's son, Peter FitzGibbon, from a former marriage. After a short spell in west Cork, the family lived in Killiney in south County Dublin, and then in the city.

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