I’ve been watching from the other side of the Continent and over the past couple of years the slow steps of Anthony Cronin’s increasing frailty. Today I heard of his death. I’d called the house just before Christmas to see how he was. “Grand,” said a man I didn’t know. “He’s having his dinner.” When I went to call again it was too late.
I first encountered him in newsprint. I’d arrived in Ireland from the United States. It was 1973. I cycled out to Sandymount, drank in Merrion Row, walked routes described in Dubliners, ate Kylemore buns and read The Irish Times. On the front page Henry Kelly was getting lost chasing the Yom Kippur war and on the right, I think it was, was Viewpoint by Anthony Cronin. Erudite, illuminating sentences spilled out through sub-clauses and semi-colons like whole decks of cards from a magician’s palm. It seemed to take only three or four of them to reach from the top of the column all the way to the bottom of the page. What a marvellous country, I thought, to have such people in it and to allow them to occupy the front page of a national newspaper.
I read Dead as Doornails and The Life of Riley and Identity Papers, several poems, more columns. I heard stories about him. He was a link to generations both great and dead. He grew in my mind. I finally saw him live on a wet night in a basement somewhere around Leeson Street at a meeting of the Irish Writers’ Co-op. He was sitting alone on a bench in a trenchcoat listening to drenched poets and story writers making their plans. He was a high figure, I thought, but not above keeping company with the young and striving. This characterised him. He neither feared nor patronised the young. He was lifted by talent, whether it was effervescent or in a minor key. It seemed to touch a national vein in him as well as an aesthetic one. He’d been acolyte and accomplice to Behan, Myles and Kavanagh. He’d learned bohemianism in McDaid’s and Soho and stayed true to it, even when he had “the ear of the Taoiseach”. He felt no loss in giving praise.
I got to know him when he was living with the writer Anne Haverty in London in the 1980s. I used to look forward to meeting him as you might to a spring morning. It was always so fresh and bracing, the sentences rolling out from him as they did in Viewpoint, wandering far and arriving back to the point, so incisive and perfectly formed and telling you something you didn’t know. He talked a lot and it was always interesting.
He was the kind of intellectual you yearned for, never world-weary or superior or stained by academic evasions, but rather curious, open, useful, warm, unafraid, clear, funny and serious. “Intellectual” may not be the right word for him. He was, among other things, a kind of live essayist performing in real time. I’d take what I could remember and quote him. By then he’d lost a daughter, fought drink, tasted penury, ended a marriage. I don’t know if friends of long-standing realised how well he’d landed with Anne. They eventually returned to Dublin and I saw him less, though on visits to London they sometimes slept on the sofa in my living-room. I remember him in the window in the morning light. “I’ve never been happier,” he said.
He wrote the books about his friends Myles and Beckett, both of them fortunate, I thought, to have a writer, someone who knew the strains and ambiguities of facing the page, rather than a journalist or scholar write of their lives. He started a novel, wrote many poems and observations, lived publicly and privately. In time the frailty entered and took hold. I sat with him in his kitchen in Ranelagh. The body was still and the voice small, but the sentences rolled out, sublimely and penetratingly.
On the phone sometimes he spoke of the encroaching limits to his range. I asked him what it was like. “You’ll find out in time, I suppose,” he said. For now, he was interested in writing what he saw and thought rather than about his bones and conduits. I wondered then and do now how Ireland would look on him when he was gone, this man who had thought so intensely and constructively about it over a lifetime. In the coming days, perhaps, this will be seen.
Timothy O’Grady’s works include I Could Read the Sky. His latest is Children of Las Vegas: True Stories about Growing Up in the World’s Playground
