Death Becomes Them

Edited by Charles Lysaght
Great Irish Lives: An Era in Obituaries  ★★★★★
Deepest regrets

The earliest of these obituaries of Irish people, taken from the Times, is Henry Grattan’s, who died in 1820, and the latest is Nuala O’Faolain’s, who died in May this year. The longest is Daniel O’Connell’s, who gets 16 (vituperative) pages and the shortest is Evie Hone, who gets three (admiring) paragraphs. Oscar Wilde gets just over a page, but considering his ignominy at the time of his death, is treated generously: “A man of far greater originality and power of mind than many of the apostles of aestheticism” – although his plays are judged to have “a paradoxical but perverted outlook on life.” The untimeliness of his demise is adverted to with wonderful Victorian pathos: “Death has soon ended what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret.”

Editor Charles Lysaght – himself a distinguished Times obituarist, and presumably author of some of these obituaries, although all are anonymous – confesses, in the introduction, to having been guided in his choice, by those entries “that betray contemporary attitudes and prejudices.”

Obituarists and historians always strenuously deny displaying ‘contemporary attitudes and prejudices’ and contemporary readers generally don’t notice them. But they are glaringly obvious to later generations. I have written numerous biographies for the forthcoming Dictionary of Irish Biography – including five of the people included here – and am convinced that they are all models of objectivity, wonderfully free of attitude or prejudice. But perhaps future readers will find my early 21st-century sensibility all too obvious – and risible. The anonymous obituarist of O’Connell saw no problem in passing this judgment on the man and his religion: “It is difficult to imagine anyone more incapable than he was of maintaining even those outward signs of holiness which are generally observed by the ecclesiastics of his persuasion.” And Parnell’s obituary ends on the tremendously sour note: “It is not surprising that such a feeble constitution should have broken down under such a load of obloquy and disappointment.”

However the Times, as Lysaght explains, was no imperialist rag. Although anti-nationalist, it supported Catholic emancipation, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the extension of the Irish franchise, and tenant rights. So John Redmond and Cardinal Cullen are applauded, while Lord Brookeborough – prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1943 to 1963 – gets it in the eye. His “political sense” is “seriously found wanting by the intransigence with which he excluded the Roman Catholic minority from responsibility and participation.” On the other hand the arch unionist, Edward Carson – at least as divisive a figure as O’Connell – gets an uncomplicated eulogy, ending with the complacent observation that his son is at Eton. However, that was presumably down to the individual writer. The Times did not impose on its obituarists; Sean MacBride gets an admiring notice, with small mention of his IRA activities (although it was followed a couple of days later by an editorial headed ‘His infamous career’).

As a rule of thumb though, the radicals – political and cultural – get short shrift. Joyce gets less than two pages and while I applaud the observation that “Ulysses has many repellent or merely boring passages,” the following is totally fatuous: “It would seem however that the appreciation of the higher sides of human character was not granted to Mr Joyce.” What higher sides would those be? As granted to Paulo Coelho perhaps?

The later obits have less of the amusing ‘contemporary attitudes and prejudices’ – perhaps because, since I share those prejudices, I don’t notice them – but the entry on the radical IRA leader, Joe Cahill, has this classic Times-ism: “Like many hardened Republicans, he was educated by the Christian Brothers.”
It is also nice to know that when Frances Moran, Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College, attended parties at Trinity Week, “she was always adorned in a very gay, but never unsuitable hat.” Will the same be said of her successors as Trinity professors of law, Mary Robinson and Ivana Bacik? (And what exactly does an ‘unsuitable hat’ look like? Like a Philip Treacy?)

At this time of the year, publishers and reviewers are on the lookout for the ‘Schott factor’ – the unexpected book that will mop up Christmas sales. This I hope is it, for the Irish market, at least.

Comments

[Alison Armstrong]

As a writer and editor of exquisite skill, Charles Lysaght deserves high praise for this unique example of social history. In realizing that attitudes and prejudices contemporary with the lives and deaths of all individuals listed herein tell perhaps more about the context of their passing than of what history would later make of their accomplishments, Mr Lysaght provides a great service. James Joyce was not the only Irish writer to 'fret in the shadow' of the English language. And yet, like Wilde, O'Connell, Yeats, indeed like Nuala O'Faolain, what wonderful things they have made of it. Deep appreciation and recognition of accomplishment evolve over time, of course; one's memory sometimes transcends even the honour of being written up in The Times. The humour of Mr Lysaght's insight is to be applauded, for he invents nothing but rather lets the times reveal themselves with each passing.