. . . My heart rouses
……………………….thinking to bring you news
……………………………………………….of something
that concerns you
……………………….and concerns many men. Look at
……………………………………………….what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
……………………….despised poems.
……………………………………………….It is difficult
to get the news from poems
……………………….yet men die miserably every day
……………………………………………….for lack
of what is found there.
……………………….Hear me out
……………………………………………….for I too am concerned
and every man
……………………….who wants to die at peace in his bed
……………………………………………….besides.

(William Carlos Williams, 1962)

*

Seriously? Eibhear Walshe has – left us? Died? How can this be, I ask myself on a bright, dappled-with-light-and-shade July day in 2024 when news filters through. Eibhear, bright asphodel, mentor to so many of us, enthusiastic and talented academic, but above all as far as I’m concerned, writer, novelist, has departed our company and vanished out of this material existence for the Elysian fields. I cannot absorb it.

In the months since his death, I still cannot believe it, possibly because we met only three or four times a year and I wouldn’t expect to see him very often. I’m never again going to say, oh I must call Eibhear, I’m never again going to meet him in the café of the National Library, where we shared conversations, ranging from the serious to the seriously wicked and amusing. Eibhear was – and I say this with care – an excellent purveyor of news, in the best possible sense of that word. He was discreet, but he also knew how to reveal in confidence the various levels of human foible that sometimes go unspoken. He rarely spoke ill of anybody, and his news and responses were graced with kindness and understanding. Yet the time has come to face my thoughts and consider (in some small way) the fine life of one I’ve known for thirty-four years.

To begin. I first meet Eibhear Walshe in 1991 at the Kate O’Brien Literary Festival in Limerick. We are both giving papers. The theme of the festival is “The Writer as Storyteller”. From the start, I know we are going to get along well, and conversation is effortless and good-humoured. We exchange pleasantries, some of them to do with Kate O’Brien and her background, but some of them much more pedestrian and quite funny, concerning the German garment manufacturer Schiesser, and which may not be repeated here.

At that moment, I’m just recovering from a migraine, thanks to the Solpedeine given to me by Maeve Binchy that morning at the festival, and I’m quite conscious of Eibhear’s specialist knowledge of Kate O’Brien, whereas I have been largely a reader of her work. We trade views and opinions, some of them of a biographical nature regarding her background. I tell him the anecdote of me being a child sitting in Switzer’s Restaurant in Dublin, where my mother once pointed out Kate O’Brien to me. She was sitting at another table, brown-hatted and solitary.

All I know at that stage is that her novels had once been banned in the dark Ireland of the nineteen thirties and forties and beyond, and it quickly becomes my goal to check out and read the work of authors such as she, that long chain linked by one miserable objective: the need of the authorities to mute the voices of Irish writers who expose the workings of the human heart, especially the Irish heart. Later, Eibhear Walshe will go on to publish a telling biography of Kate O’Brien.[1]

Eibhear is well versed in the matter of censorship of one kind or another and the workings of the human heart at odds with tradition that are later to become, to a large extent, his primary novelistic theme. At this point he is still a young academic. He is enthusiastic, curious, and open-minded. Not long after the festival in Limerick, he sends me an early short story of his for me to read and comment on. Although I no longer recall the details of this short story, my instinct tells me that this is a writer who will be a writer. I recall recognising that his story ought not to be contained within that form, that it is more suited to the novelistic genre he later explores.

What I find very harsh to this day is the fact that Eibhear was in the closing stages of revising a new, and in his own view, his most audacious novel. It had two titles and I’m uncertain which he was to settle on. I read it in an advanced draft form. The book – to be called either “The Girl from Hangman’s Wood” or “Nymph Hall” – is a fascinating account of the things we do to conceal what is truly in our soul, the easy and the difficult deceptions, the subterfuge, the avoidance of honest confrontation. It is partly set in what resembles south Waterford, possibly Dunmore East, and partly in New York. He is excited about this book, in the process of acquiring a new agent and seeking a new publisher. In my reading of the draft I advise him to expand the book by a further 20,000 words approximately, and to lean into certain parts and develop them. As I write then in an email dated 27 October, 2023, “What a great scandale of a story! Yet I’m in turmoil, actually. There are so many exquisite elements to it, including the atmosphere and place setting, both in Ireland and in NYC etc. It is compelling. My impression of the narrative though is that you have written it with insufficient time to slow things up”.

And so it is with Eibhear. One could be honest with him, and he valued honesty, especially when it came to his writing practice. The demands of a full time academic career make it difficult for him to secure the blocks of time that are essential to novel writing. That he produces the beautiful memoir Cissie’s Abattoir (2009), and the Sommerville Press published novels The Diary of Mary Travers (2014), The Trumpet Shall Sound (2019), and The Last Day at Bowen’s Court (2020) is impressive and demonstrates the talent and ambition of one who dearly, dearly wished to make that transfer from the purely academic to the purely literary, and to be recognised as the talented literary author he is. I know that he immediately sets to revising and expanding the manuscript, is optimistic about its prospects and I have no doubt but that I will re-read it before it goes to print. That is not to happen, of course, and I have no idea where the manuscript now lies.

Looking back at the three novels of his that I read in the last ten years – which is also the time during which he becomes my supervisor for a PhD in Creative Writing at UCC – I perceive the heartache he is so alert and sensitive to in these historical fictions. This features in many of his primary characters, especially in Mary Travers, the fictionalised heroine and the subject of an amorous episode from the life of Oscar Wilde’s father Sir William Wilde. That sensitivity to the doomed love affair is also present in The Trumpet Shall Sound, his novel on the composer Handel, whose first love affair in Italy is suggested in a manner that has not, to my knowledge, been previously explored. The research which the writing of this novel clearly involved invigorates the pages as the reader is transported to Venice, Halle, Hanover, and Dublin as the life and career of the musical genius Handel unfold. Ideas on genius and imagination are embedded in this work, in which Walshe acknowledges and honours the genius and imagination of the homosexual artist.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

————–Mary O’Donnell and Eibhear Walshe, Handel House, London, February 2018.

On a more personal note, I fly over to attend the London launch of The Trumpet Shall Sound, along with other friends of Eibhear. It takes place in the Handel House on Brook Street in Mayfair, in the borough of Westminster, an actual museum dedicated to the lives of Handel and of Jimi Hendrix, both of whom lived there. That evening, we celebrate the book and the author in this particular location, in the presence of the actual instruments on which Georg Friedrich Handel composed, including a harpsichord and clavichord. Photographs are taken that evening, joyful photos with friends, including close friend Heather Bryant from Wellesley in the US, and which record what I believe is a fabulously fulfilled episode in Eibhear’s life.

So many things about Eibhear radiated an essential goodness of mind and character, qualities inherited, I imagine, from his family, especially his mother, who loved and supported him throughout his life. That he was in a permanent relationship in the last years of his life is widely known, and his Spanish partner Saul brought happiness and companionship on a new level. His presence in Eibhear’s life can never be underestimated.

That Eibhear writes a chapter on my fiction in the book edited by María Elena Jaime de Pablos (Univ. of Almería)[2] makes a significant contribution to the range of essays included there. He has thoroughly read my work, he knows it and understands it, although at that time we don’t communicate all that regularly. But any time we do, a conversation unfolds. I imagine that to be the case with other writer friends of his, among them Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.

An important thing occurs in my life when the 90^th birthday of the great Irish soprano and teacher Veronica Dunne is celebrated at Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It is August 3^rd, 2017 and I am mounting the steps towards the foyer, not really concentrating on anything in particular when I hear a voice. “I was just talking about you recently!” it exclaims. And off we go. It is a quick, snappy, and funny exchange in which a) we both speak rapidly about various works in progress, and b) he asks ever so casually, “You wouldn’t by any chance think about doing a PhD in Cork?” (I have occasionally entertained that possibility, but having received no response when I enquired from one other university, had more or less shelved the idea indefinitely).

Thanks to Eibhear, I do follow through. I apply and am accepted. For the next two years I discover to my pleasure that the work of a PhD student proves to be relatively painless, interesting, and enlightening. For one thing, Eibhear Walshe is a miracle supervisor who always knows always – always – how to suggest something, or how something might be improved. He is not given to the negative. In what I can only call the Socratic style, he trusts the student to do their own learning, simply by dropping the correct suggestion into a seminar. He knows how to wind a student up to a point of anticipation and excitement about what’s ahead, and to let them go off on the great journey that is academic learning, intellectuality, and the possibility that accompanies this. My work on the PhD becomes an exploration based on my 1999 novel The Elysium Testament, a PhD by Prior Publication, eventually titled “Lost Elysium: Space as a Metaphor for the Liminal in a Post-Catholic World”.

I feel that my subject suits Eibhear very well as supervisor. He understands the question of how humans live and survive in the context of space, belief and the irrational. The so-called “irrational” comes to have agency in most lives at one time or another. It may indeed signal that all is healthy, even wholesomely human. It is valid.

I believe that Eibhear quests for agency throughout his life and that he secures it in various ways, both in terms of personal friendship, intimate relationships, and in terms of his own professional creative oeuvre. His long-standing interest in Elizabeth Bowen’s writings and in the demise of her home produce a subtle and highly compelling work, and according to John Banville “a detailed reimagining of one of the great enduring love affairs of the literary twentieth century. Eibhear Walshe has brought a vanished time back to life”. There he goes again. Love. His subject. And here is my response to a reading of that marvellous work in an email from July 1, 2020, which contains a comment about my favourite imagined character in those pages:

“[…] this is a long overdue letter […] because I finished the novel a week or so ago and have simply been simmering in its effect since. It is quite beautiful and achieved. As ever with your work, I loved the atmosphere, its elegance and gentleness and beauty […] but also the savage semi-aristocracy of Elizabeth Bowen herself. When I say savage, she belongs to that class that was half-in and half-out of true Irish society, and as you portray her during this particular part of her life and experience, I must say she often seemed remote from Ireland – which she would have been, I expect. I loved the depiction and development of Arthur throughout the book, by the way. He is one of the imagined characters, I take it, and really works very very well. Through him, we see the gradual eclipsing of that other society as the Catholic, educated class begins to develop and rise.

I find – as always – the demise of Bowen’s Court heart-breaking […] and you evoked this more destructive aspect of the new order extremely well. But mostly, this is a passionate love affair and a very passionate woman. I love her energy and her undaunted ability to just WRITE, regardless of what was going on around her.

It is a book which will contribute even more understanding to the character of EB and to the period, obviously, and I think the richness of achievement will bring you a great deal of further recognition. Congratulations, dear Eibhear, on such a success.

I hope you’re managing okay. I’m getting quite cheesed off by Covid, of course, and find I’m a little more fearful of it as time goes on. But I’m careful about it and I guess we just have to adjust everything in our way of thinking about existence – when you think about it! […]”

So I now leave Eibhear Walshe, his life and work, to the welcoming pages of Estudios Irlandeses, and the safe hands of AEDEI. It is all so premature and unimagined. His many friends in Iberia, who loved, respected, and admired him are also enmired in this great loss from the world of Irish literature, but mainly from the world. It remains to some intrepid person now to perhaps understand where his papers lie, perhaps even – if I may be so bold – to discover where the final manuscript he called provisionally “The Girl from Hangman’s Wood” or “Nymph Hall” now lies, and if it is possible to provide it with a careful reading that might lead to something more.

Maynooth, January 13, 2025.

Notes

[1] Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life. (Irish Academic Press, 2006).

[2] Giving Shape to the Moment. The Art of Mary O’Donnell: Poet, Novelist and Short Story Writer. Ed. Maria Elena Jaime de Pablos. Reimagining Ireland, (Peter Lang. 2018).