John V. Kelleher, emeritus professor of Irish studies at Harvard University, has died at the age of 88.
Born in 1916 at Lawrence, Massachusetts, to a family whose roots went back to late 19th-century Cork, he became interested in Ireland at an early age through contact with family members.
Educated at Dartmouth College, he became a junior fellow at Harvard from 1941 to 1947, a position that gave him freedom to pursue his own intellectual interests.
For a brief spell during the war he worked at the Pentagon cracking enemy codes, good training he said later for reading Finnegans Wake.
At Harvard he advanced quickly through the ranks to become professor of modern Irish history and literature.
He came to Ireland first in 1946 in the company of Richard Ellmann and met several writers: Seán O'Faolain whose intellectual engagement with Irish life he relished, Frank O'Connor whose lively observations he enjoyed, and Patrick Kavanagh who insulted him.
He had been preparing for the visit for years, teaching, reading, studying maps, buying books. He cycled about Co Cork in search of relatives, went to Sligo with Ellmann to see the Yeats country, stood reverently on Knockarea, and climbed bare Ben Bulben's back.
In 1946 after three heady months in Ireland he returned to his wife Helen (née Caffrey) whom he had married in 1941. He had not intended to marry a girl from Lawrence, but married "the only one I liked". They had four daughters, Brigid, Peggy, Anne and Nora, whom he loved, although he did remark that when a baby girl looks up from her crib and sees her father, she thinks "Sucker!" It was a family trait.
When they got married his aunt Grace warned Helen: "You have to watch out. The Kelleher men steal the children."
At Harvard he was an influential teacher. For him, the combination of literature and history was central. When he discussed Frank O'Connor's Peasants, the references to long-tailed families led him to explain the old Irish fine system of regal succession. When he discussed James Joyce's The Dead, he clarified its historical contexts, Dublin geography, the architecture of the Gresham Hotel, and the thematic relevance of the Irish saga The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel.
In his hands, literature became human. When he read O'Connor's version of the Old Woman of Beare, her lament acquired an almost unbearable feeling. When he discussed Austin Clarke's Night and Morning, the conflict between religion and personal freedom became painfully clear. His lectures on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man demonstrated the imaginal and thematic patterns that gave the book coherence and unity.
His classes exemplified the scholarly calling. He had done the reading, had command of the material and responded to it with intellectual rigour and imaginative depth.
He was a creative force for the establishment of Irish studies in north America. His address to the inaugural meeting of the American Committee for Irish Studies, Early Irish History and Pseudo-History, argued for an interdisciplinary approach. Young scholars like Emmet Larkin and Lawrence McCaffrey, founders of the ACIS, were encouraged by his support. They were just two of a growing number of academics - Don Akenson, Helen Vendler, Maurice Harmon, Charles Fanning - who emerged under his direction and defined their own particular areas of investigation.
His Selected Writings (2002) show the range of his learning: assessments of the Irish Literary Revival, interpretations of post-revolutionary writing, witty observations on Irish America, essays on Early Irish History and Literature, and translations from Early Irish poetry.
His enduring legacy, according to Seán Ó Coileáin, is found in his exhaustive work on Irish annals and genealogies. In 1999 at the conferring of an honorary degree on him at the National University of Ireland, Cork, Prof Ó Coileáin declared: "John Kelleher's many charts and notebooks contain our most complete census of the population of early Ireland, in the form of an elaborate construct that, however deconstructed in the future, will always remain as a monument to Irish learning, early and late."
In 1946 on that memorable first visit he cycled from Cork over the high land by Watergrasshill to Fermoy and as he went down the hill towards the town he had a powerful feeling of déja-vu. He was in the landscape his grandmother had described to him as a child - pines, stone houses, the Nagles mountains, the little town, the valley of the Blackwater. It was a kind of homecoming, a confirmation of his affinity with the land of his ancestors. At the beginning of this year he came to the end of his long, fruitful journey through Irish history and culture.
He was a warm-hearted, generous man, a good companion, a loyal friend, a dedicated and creative teacher and scholar.
John Vincent Kelleher: born March 8th, 1916; died January 1st, 2004