THOMAS FLANAGAN: The author and critic Thomas James Bonner Flanagan, who died on March 21st aged 78, is best known for his novel, The Year of the French (1979).
He was born on November 5th, 1923, in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Owen, an oral surgeon, and Mary Helen (née Bonner) Flanagan. His grandparents, on both sides, were from Co Fermanagh where the Bonners had Fenian connections.
His maternal grandmother, Ellen Treacy Bonner, was an accomplished storyteller, and she clearly had a deep influence on his early youth, and he was to make storytelling and the analysis of it his life's work.
Following high school in Greenwich he enrolled at Amherst College in New England. His studies were interrupted by the second World War in which he served in the US navy's Pacific fleet.
After the war he went to Columbia University in New York, where he was taught by and worked under the great humanist Lionel Trilling and the literary historian Jacques Barzun.
Literary sensibility, cultural history, and a keen awareness of how political circumstance impinges upon stories and narratives were intellectual qualities he developed at Columbia and applied to his research on the Irish novel of the first half of the 19th century. This study resulted in Thomas Flanagan's first sustained published work, The Irish Novelists 1800-1850 (1959).
This is, by any standards, a remarkable achievement. Unlike most doctoral theses, which cagily confine themselves to fairly delimited ground, this study takes on an entire body of fiction from Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, John Banim, Gerald Griffin, and William Carleton, and gives it order by identifying themes and contexts which shape the voices and forms these novelists deploy.
It is, truly, groundbreaking and pioneering work. There had been, of course, some considerable attention accorded to Edgeworth, but until Thomas Flanagan deliberately linked her to such unlikely associates as Banim and Griffin, she had been perceived as an interesting, if minor, exemplar of the English regional novel.
Through Thomas Flanagan she begins to emerge as a much more complex and enigmatic figure, an intelligence and sensibility divided against itself. And because he placed her in the turbulent political contexts of post-Union Ireland, she, in Thomas Flanagan's interpretation, emerges as a writer who, like Carleton, is driven into her depths by tensions and anxieties that are connected to issues of governance, authority and language.
Thomas Flanagan's mind speedily identifies narrative as a business that, when it is compelling it is so because it tries to tell difficult, and problematic things: the telling can be (and often is in Banim, Carleton, Griffin) bizarre, hilarious, sentimental, but what gives a story drive (whether in a novel or in oral form) is the unresolved issues it tries to negotiate.
The burden of Thomas Flanagan's great study of the Irish novelists is that they were trying to deal with unresolved issues in the political, emotional and psychological spheres, and that these were all related. His analysis uncovers for the first time in a sustained way how issues of identity trouble the narratives of the 19th century Irish novel and that this is what gives that, up to then neglected, tradition of Irish writing its (sometimes uncomfortable) energy.
This book was published by Columbia University Press and won the Clarke F. Ansley award. After Thomas Flanagan's challenge, Irish literary studies could never again neglect the way in which literary forms reflect feelings about authority, politics, control, and language.
In 1960, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was able to enjoy the congenial company of colleagues such as Robert Tracy, Brendan O'Hehir, and Thomas Parkinson. In that year, also, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to visit and work in Ireland, and he was to return most years, lecturing at summer schools, conferences, and visiting his many friends, among them Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney.
He set to work on a sequel to the 1959 volume, but that was not to appear, other than in dispersed essays in various journals on a variety of topics. He turned instead to fiction. The Year of the French began almost by accident in his office at Berkeley when his wife, Jean, rang to say she would be late picking him up. He started, not quite sure what he was doing, describing a man in a torn frock coat walking along a strand, and this was to be the opening of the novel.
The novel, which famously deals with the belated French invasion at Killala after insurrections in Wexford and the North were put down, won major awards on publication and was made into a highly successful TV series by RTÉ and the French state television company.
By this time Thomas Flanagan had moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he wrote two further novels, The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). The former deals with the Land War and its aftermath and is set in Co Cork, while the latter takes what is a massive historical trilogy up to the period of the Anglo-Irish and civil wars, 1919-'21.
These are big novels, big in scope, range of characters, and vision. While clearly appreciative of the factors that drove the Irish struggle for self-government, his is a balanced and humane appraisal of the often unappeasable emotions and hurts that drive historical change in Ireland.
The historian Owen Dudley Edwards has said, memorably, of Thomas Flanagan's historical words that they "should not be missed by anyone prepared to learn history".
In 1948, he married Jean Parker, a nurse from Lexington, New York, who died last year. They had two daughters, Ellen and Kate, who survive him.
Thomas Flanagan: born 1923; died, March 2002