Amongst friends: Ringing and e-mailing writers and critics around the world on Thursday to tell them of the death of John McGahern (pictured below) and seek tributes from them for the paper, it was noteworthy how - though the seriousness of his illness was known - the end still came as such a shock. There is an enormous difference between life and death.
"I am shocked to think that we will not hear any more from this passionate, fine, and searching writer," said that other great pathfinder of the short story genre, the Canadian writer Alice Munro.
Nuala O'Faolain, friend of his youth, also used the word shocked; shocked and very lonely. "He looked like a typical nobody of that hard time, come up to Dublin to teach in a National School, living in digs, trudging everywhere at a countryman's pace," she said.
"He blushed very easily. He spoke as if he was learning to speak. Yet inside he hadn't the least doubt that he belonged in the glorious company of writers; it only remained to write the books. For a while I trudged awkwardly beside him, up and down and across Dublin and out along the seafront to Clontarf, learning from him - about the reading that had delivered him from the terrible forge of his childhood experience, and about what a vocation is like.
"If his gift had never been recognised by the people who helped him - at that time, Mary Lavin in Dublin and TS Eliot in London - he would still have been sure and certain of it. I knew even then there was an almost comic difference between what he seemed and what he was, and that when I looked at him I was looking at a portrait of the artist as a young man."
To critic and biographer Hermione Lee, this year's chair of the Man Booker Prize, he was the towering presence in contemporary Irish fiction, who she would place with Beckett. In the tradition of the short story that one instantly associated with Ireland, he took his place alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. "He was one of the great short story writers - even his novels were like long short stories."
My own first thought went instantly back more than 40 years to the 1960s when he was a friend of my mother Mary Lavin and a regular visitor to our home on Dublin's Lad Lane. While my sisters Valentine and Elizabeth were old enough to be downstairs, I seemed always to have been put to bed when exciting people like Frank O'Connor, Tom Kilroy, Tom McIntyre and Nuala O'Faolain were downstairs. John was the one who came upstairs to talk to me and read me Rupert Bear, conveying the impression that he was as fascinated by Rupert in his checked yellow trousers, red jumper and trademark scarf as I was.
Rereading his letters yesterday, I saw they covered many things. Discussion about pieces by him for these book pages on Ernie O'Malley, the writer John Williams who he championed on this side of the Atlantic and the Canadian novelist and short story writer Alistair MacLeod. One letter was accompanied by his copy of MacLeod's short stories containing the MacLeod classic The Tuning of Perfect which he loved - covered in McGahern's own annotations that he'd made when preparing classes on the work - with apologies for those marks which were of course the best part of the gift!
There were comments on Nashville, which he visited in 2000, "more a series of neighbourhoods than a city, and the motor car was king," but then there were also the great trees coming into leaf and the cajun cooking while "New York was just New York". And Poland, visited in 2001, was enjoyable - "except for a dreadful evening in an 'ethnic' Irish pub owned by a Californian."
But virtually every letter, which inevitably conveyed greetings from Madeline too, contained something else: inquiries about the family; the hope "that all the house is well", with addendums like "The children must be advancing well into their own lives by now", and "How are the kids? Though it's more Lady and Gentleman now." Another great constant was the weather. "We were snowed in at Christmas, with all the trees around the lake frosted," or, "The fields are like porridge here."
He communicated by e-mail too, but in these high-tech days there was huge excitement attached to a letter arriving through the letterbox in his distinct hand. It is sad to think that they, and the other books he might have written, won't be coming now.
Beannacht Dé ar a anam dhílis.