David Marcus’s commitment to Irish literature began early. In 1946, when he was just 22, he brought out a magazine called Irish Writing, and from this point on there was no stopping him.
This first undertaking (co-founded with his friend Terence Smith) ran to 28 issues, and acquired a supplement, Poetry Ireland, somewhere along the way. When the first issue appeared, its list of contributors stood as a testimony to the young editor’s temerity and flair. It included Seán O’Faoláin, Louis MacNeice and Myles na gCopaleen, among others. Only one writer said no to David Marcus’s request – George Bernard Shaw, whose famous refusal came in the form of that one word, NO, printed on a postcard in capital letters.
Marcus was not too discomposed by Shaw’s rebuff: after all, he’d secured a contribution to his magazine from one of his most revered authors, Edith Somerville, who was then nearly 90 and something of a recluse. Before the deal was settled, he received an invitation to Drishane House to meet the surviving partner of the Somerville-and-Ross duo of Irish RM fame.
The occasion, when it happened, was filled with social anxiety bordering on panic, along with culinary pitfalls. At one point the well-brought-up Jewish boy found himself seated before a plate of non-kosher meat, and – what was worse – a full tumbler of whiskey. Throwing orthodoxy to the winds, he ate and drank the lot. He was fortunate, he felt, not to pass out beneath the table, though he dimly registered some curious glances cast in his direction by his host, the Oxford don (and Edith Somerville’s nephew), Nevill Coghill.
It was his first and only encounter with strong drink. Marcus tells the story in his autobiography, the playfully titled Oughtobiography of 2001, and it’s reproduced in Paul Delaney and Deirdre Madden’s valuable and exhilarating centenary tribute, Editing Ireland.
Marcus was of course an editor par excellence, and many other things besides: a poet, novelist, translator, anthologist, man of letters and indefatigable spotter of emerging Irish talent.
He was born in Cork in 1924, into a family of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants (though both his parents were Irish-born), and grew up in a small Jewish community in the city.
He was lucky in his upbringing. The Marcus household was bookish and musical, and not excessively religious. All five children received a Catholic secondary education, and David learned enough Irish at school to enable him to get to grips, some years later, with Brian Merriman’s rumbustious 18th-century masterpiece, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court). This extraordinary and alluring long poem has held an irresistible attraction for a whole range of translators from Arland Ussher and Frank O’Connor to Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson, and the Marcus version of 1953 can hold its own with the best of them:
Fat chance there was of a night’s high jinks,
With such a fossilized old sphinx.
What passion could a girl entice,
From thighs as stiff and as cold as ice ...
The poem in its uproarious entirety was published by the Dolmen Press, and how it escaped the ire of the censor remains a mystery. Perhaps, as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin suggests, Marcus’s reputation for “a certain sobriety of manner and mind” (the Drishane House episode notwithstanding) had something to do with it; or perhaps it simply slipped through the killjoy’s net. (Frank O’Connor, whose version did fall foul of the censor, took its suppression as a compliment to himself.)
A fine poem by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin appears in Editing Ireland. It places David Marcus on a bridge in Cork – an actual bridge in this instance, though the bridge-as-metaphor has a resonance for others, including Marcus himself, who wrote about his “hyphenated” identity (ie Jewish-Irish), and the ways he found of reconciling opposites by building bridges.
Translation, as George O’Brien points out in another essay, makes an obvious way of bridging a gap between two languages, and Marcus’s hyphen (he goes on), though it might signify division, can also serve “to connect, to conciliate, and to show a way forward”.
The Delaney/Madden compilation is a rich miscellany of poems, stories and reminiscences. The stories were originally published in David Marcus’s renowned New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press – and how that page came into existence is a story in itself. (It’s recounted here by several contributors.)
The year was 1968, and Marcus was back in Ireland after a 13-year stint working in London away from his proper metier. Still at the business of promoting literature, he had it in mind to launch a weekly New Irish Writing page in a national newspaper, and he was on his way to The Irish Times with his revolutionary proposal (a whole page devoted to fiction and poetry) when he got waylaid, and ended up at the Irish Press instead.
It was a fortuitous diversion. The editor, Tim Pat Coogan, leapt at the idea, and the page got off to a flying start with a short story by John McGahern. But Marcus, though his central criterion was literary excellence, wanted to provide a platform for new and aspiring writers; and by publishing them in tandem with certain luminaries of the day, he gave a boost to their careers.
Among those who would thank him for their start in literature are Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Sebastian Barry, Mary Dorcey, Carlo Gebler, Frank McGuinness, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Kevin Barry and many others who are now justly celebrated. It wasn’t wholly a one-way street, however. There were reciprocal benefits: the “New Writing” page made Marcus’s name, and, indeed, gained him a wife, the novelist and short-story writer Ita Daly.
Inevitably, some work submitted to the Irish Press had to be turned down – but Marcus, according to more than one contributor here, “had honed and refined the art of rejection” (Mary Morrissy): mainly by exhorting the writer to try again, and try harder. He had high standards, always seeking work that reflected the spirit of the age, along with an individual approach. At the same time, and although he had a good deal of a free hand, he had to operate under certain constraints: the Irish Press (founded by Éamon de Valera) was a family newspaper with a large circulation, and the Catholic ethos prevailing in mid-20th-century Ireland had not yet dissipated.
But an end to censorship (actual or psychological) was in sight. The 1970s was an eventful time for Irish writers, and for women writers in particular; and David Marcus, again, had a pivotal role in promoting the work of such diverse and spirited newcomers as Deirdre Madden, Kate Cruise O’Brien, Ita Daly, Maeve Kelly and Emma Cooke (much later, the talented Claire Keegan came into his orbit).
But he wasn’t selecting stories with a particular agenda in mind. Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, in an insightful essay in the current book (“David Marcus the Feminist?”), concludes that feminism as such didn’t come into it as far as Marcus was concerned; it simply happened that his “nose for literature” (his wife Ita Daly’s phrase) pointed him in the direction of a whole host of outstanding literary women.
The New Irish Writing page was not the only Marcus project that thrived and created a stir. In 1976 he co-founded the Poolbeg Press as another indigenous habitat for pungent and incisive writing, mostly short-story writing, and it’s still going strong. And into the bargain (and indicative of his unstoppable drive and determination) his enthusiasm for the story found a further outlet in the many anthologies he edited over the years, culminating in the Faber books of Best New Irish Short Stories of 2005 and 2007.
These initiated a series of Faber anthologies of which the latest to date, writes Lucy Caldwell in an essay included towards the end of Editing Ireland, is her own Being Various (2019), for which she drew inspiration from David Marcus’s devotion to innovation and variety. She never met him, being too young to be one of his proteges, but nevertheless remains conscious of the ways in which his influence is persisting, and applauds what she calls “the David Marcus sensibility … which searches for new ways of telling old stories, and for stories entirely new”.
All, or almost all the contributors to Editing Ireland have pertinent and interesting things to say about David Marcus, his activities and achievements.
They have praise for his integrity, his old-fashioned courtesy, his urbane demeanour, his humour, courage, energy and efficiency. There are eloquent tributes here from his wife and daughter, and general agreement about the outcome of David Marcus’s mission to enhance and uphold the national literary culture.
Further reading
Oughtobiography: Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew (Gill and McMillan, 2001), by David Marcus. The title came about because people kept telling him he “ought to” write his life story: and so he did, with his customary verve and aplomb. The book is notable for providing a distinctive “insider-outsider” perspective on Irish affairs, with the author’s astute exploration of what it meant to come from a Jewish background in mid-20th-century Cork and Dublin. It also evokes the literary life he embraced so thoroughly and productively.
I’ll Drop You a Line: a Life with David Marcus (Londubh Books, 2016), by Ita Daly. This is a stylishly written account of a marriage – a literary partnership - and ultimate bereavement, charged with poignancy tempered by a kind of forthright humour. It has fascinating details about its subject’s home life, along with his editorial expertise.
Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber & Faber, 2019), edited by Lucy Caldwell. This assembly of 24 stories shows how flexible the concept of “Irishness” has become, with contributions from Chinese-Irish, Finnish-Irish writers, and so on. The stories are generally assured and innovative, with the whole anthology very much in the David Marcus tradition.
Patricia Craig’s latest book is Kilclief & Other Essays. David Marcus: Editing Ireland, with Deirdre Madden, Dermot Bolger, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Declan Meade, takes place on Sunday, November 9th, at 3.30pm, in the Printworks, Dublin Castle.
