Loose Leaves/Caroline Walsh:It's always sad when someone whose byline has graced the pages of The Irish Times dies and their name must be erased from the contacts book . . . and the late Anthony Clare was a very bright star in the constellation of that contacts book.
He once said that journalism had made him a better psychiatrist and, whatever about that, his journalistic contributions were always worth reading. Scrolling back over them since news came last weekend of his sudden death in Paris offered a reminder of how vibrant a voice his was. Reviewing An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks in 1995 he made this point: "In this century much of what doctors write is unintelligible to all save their peers and even then to many of them," he said, putting Sacks in a different league. "It is a measure of the elegance and the simplicity of his prose that everything he writes can be read with profit by all."
Cloaking issues in professional jargon was anathema to the way Clare himself wrote. Reviewing Peter Gay's Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments in 1990 he welcomed the useful job the book did in letting Freud emerge once again as a human being rather than as an icon beset by an army of historians and analysts who subjected to meticulous scrutiny "every cigarette-end and loose jotting belonging to the great man".
But, with wide ranging interests, he didn't write just within his own field and a review in 1999 of Donal McCartney's UCD: A National Idea turned into a lament for how Dublin might have developed had the university not moved to the suburbs but stayed on Earlsfort Terrace, amalgamated with Trinity and become "a truly great university" both colleges of which "would now embrace St Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, the very heart of the modern city of Dublin".
The same review touched on the famous Literary & Historical Society meeting in January 1900 at which the young James Joyce delivered his paper, Drama and Life, an event recounted in Stephen Hero. Just weeks after writing that review Clare and other alumni members of the L & H staged a re-enactment, scripted by Gerry Stembridge, of the original event in the old physics theatre of Newman House, 100 years to the day after Joyce had addressed the society. Clare was one of the narrators and while everyone present probably wished they'd been there a century before to hear Joyce deliver the script himself, the re-creation was riveting.
As well as occasionally reviewing, he was also reviewed, and while psychologist Maureen Gaffney had certain criticisms when reviewing (in 1992) his book, In The Psychiatrist's Chair, which emanated from his BBC radio programmes, she also saluted him as, at best, "a champion duellist; articulate, insightful, well informed. His use of psychiatry is always imaginative, sometimes brilliant".
In recent years he hadn't reviewed much for these pages. With his retirement from St Edmundsbury's hospital in Lucan, Co Dublin, coming up next month he might have done more - sadly now that's not to be.
Keegan classes
The Irish Short Story: A Reading and Appreciation Course is being run at New Ross Library in Co Wexford this month and next taught by Claire Keegan (left), whose second collection of stories, Walk the Blue Fields (Faber) came out earlier this year. As Keegan, who grew up on a farm in Clonegal on the Wicklow/ Wexford border, is a master of the genre, she will have much to pass on. Attendance is free but booking is necessary. It starts on November 5th and runs until December 17th on Monday afternoons, 3-5pm. See www.wexford.ie/library
Gogarty celebrations
While next weekend will see celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Oliver St John Gogarty at his former home in Renvyle, Co Galway, today in Dublin, where the author of As I Was Going Down Sackville Street was once such a central player in the society of his time, there will be a reading of The Tower, a play by Joe Joyce about James Joyce and Gogarty, in the Dublin Writers' Museum at 18 Parnell Square at 1pm. Tom Hickey and Bosco Hogan read, under the direction of Caroline Fitzgerald. In the play, set in the tower where the opening scenes of Joyce's Ulysses take place, the two writers reflect on their lives, relationship and careers. Admission is €7, including coffee and pastries.
Hogan reads
Neil Jordan once described old friend and fellow writer Desmond Hogan as the real thing - a writer who "remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper" . Hogan doesn't read in public often but will this afternoon at 3pm in Galway City Museum.