On the Town: Marilyn Monroe, who couldn't cook; Sir Philip Sidney en route to meet Granuaile; the British soldier found dead by the River Suck; the autumn the teddy boy drowned . . .
"An enthralling stream of consciousness," was how one member of the audience described a public reading by author Desmond Hogan in Galway City Library last Wednesday night at an event hosted by the Western Writers' Centre. Hogan, originally from Ballinasloe, had travelled up by bus from Ballybunion, Co Kerry, where Fred Johnston of the Western Writers' Centre had tracked him down through the local post office.
Johnston knew how lucky he was to get him. Only last month, the Observer's literary editor, Robert McCrum, had written about the author who had been "about as hot as they come" in the early 1980s after publication of his short story collection, The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea, and who had "disappeared" in the 1990s. "What happened to the man once ranked alongside Rushdie and Ishiguro?" his article had asked.
In fact, Hogan is still writing, and Wednesday's gathering was treated to a selection of recent work, as well as extracts from A Curious Street, published in 1984. At least, Fred Johnston presumed the typed manuscripts were "recent", for Hogan, shy as ever, moved from one sequence to the next with minimal introduction.
Among those present in the children's library to hear him were former schoolmate Ollie Jennings, who manages The Saw Doctors; poet Michael Gorman, from Barna; and Tommy Donnellan, an anti-war activist who knew Hogan slightly in the Ballinasloe days and who said he always felt a great empathy with the writer.
"And I can spell Portiuncula too," Donnellan quipped afterwards to Fred Johnston, who earlier confessed that he'd had a blind spot about the Ballinasloe hospital's name during the editing of Hogan's first novel, The Ikon Maker.
"When Peter Sheridan, Neil Jordan and myself founded the Irish Writers' Co-Op over a hamburger in Captain America's in Dublin in the 1970s, this was the first manuscript we had - and we were delighted to get it," Johnston recalled.
A collection by Hogan, called Winter Swimmers: New and Selected Stories, is due to be published by Lilliput Press next year, but the writer didn't stay around to promote it. Anything but.
Having almost fainted before photographer Joe O'Shaughnessy's camera early on, Hogan was on his marks when the clock struck 8 p.m. As the audience savoured his prose, he picked up his papers, slung his bag over his shoulder, and ran - literally - out of the library door. The disappearing man melted into the darkness of Galway's St Augustine Street.