I WAS CYCLING along Upper Clanbrassil Street a year ago this month, bound for Mt Jerome Cemetery, when a plaque on No 52 caught my eye, and brought me back for a look. It referred, of course, to how Leopold Bloom, anti-hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, had once resided, after a fashion, at that very address. Back on my bike, I told myself how you could be forgiven for thinking, on this morning anyhow, that Joyce was one of the few 20th-century Irish writers not to have been first published by David Marcus, Ireland’s foremost literary editor, to whose funeral I was en route.
Indeed, it would be hard to overstate what David Marcus achieved on behalf of Irish writing, not least for that literary stepchild, the short story, which he especially championed, and for which he provided a world-class home in the weekly New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press, and in more than two-dozen short story anthologies that he edited over the course of his lifetime. Founded by Marcus in 1969, New Irish Writing for two decades offered younger Irish writers 52 chances a year to publish their work alongside the likes of William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Benedict Kiely and John McGahern, whose New Yorker-published stories almost invariably had their second outing in the Irish Press.
That literary fiction could find a comfortable home in a daily newspaper speaks to both Marcus's vision and to its Irish readership, seeing how a similar and exceedingly short-lived attempt by the Boston Globeto publish short fiction prefaced its first story with an advisory along the lines of "Estimated Reading Time: four minutes and 53 seconds". But the anthologies edited by Marcus also played an important role, given that one does not write a book of short stories so much as see a collection gradually accrete via publication of individual stories in magazines, journals, and anthologies.
It’s a truism that what we do, and how we get on in the world, comes out of our character, but it seemed especially true with David, whose editorial gifts – the insight, care, honesty, and positivism he brought to your writing - were but part and parcel of his nature. Quiet, warm, and Old World courteous, he had a lovely habit of shutting his eyes as he smiled, and was, without doubt, the last of our literary gents.
A Cork Jew in Dublin, David was catholic with a lower-case C in his tastes, and an utter lack of any literary agenda underpinned his editorial work. What mattered most were the lines on the page, and his precise and enthusiastic feedback when he liked those words was worth its weight in gold to the scores of writers he fostered, including the novelist and short-story writer, Ita Daly, who later became his wife. At the same time, he was absolutely forthright in telling you if he felt something you’d written hadn’t cleared the bar, as happened with the first story I sent him back in 1975, which he, correctly, diagnosed as “lacking in narrative grip”.
I remember responding once to his suggestion that I avoid a rhythmic repetition of some words in a story he did accept with a tongue-in-cheek observation that Joyce, too, had favoured that sort of thing. "Yes," David smiled, "but he shouldn't have always been allowed," speaking as if Joyce might yet be within earshot of that Irish Pressbuilding beside the Liffey, and bringing home to me how a literary life such as David lived to the hilt doesn't especially distinguish between the work itself and the wider world – whether of copyrights or mortality – which it inhabits.
Which is to say, stories, be they short or long, mattered hugely to David. Writing to him from Massachusetts in 1994, where I had met the son of Irish novelist Vivian Connell, I got back a neatly typed aerogramme describing the huge impact that Connell's The Chinese Roomhad had on him at age 19, a novel which, after it was banned in Ireland, went on to sell over three million copies worldwide. And rueing how he had not yet encountered the magisterial storytelling of Portuguese Nobel Laureate novelist, José Saramago, I took a copy of Saramago's All the Namesinto the hospital to read a bit of it aloud to David some months before his death.
However, it was that conjurer of coincidence, the German writer, WG Sebald, who had previously bequeathed us both a plu-perfect instance of those vanishing boundaries that can operate between a book and a life. On this occasion, Friday, December 14th, 2001, I had posted David a copy of Sebald's first novel, The Emigrants, only to receive another of his neatly typed letters, written the following Monday, which told of "What a morning it was: to read in The Irish Timesof Sebald's terrible death [in an auto accident that previous Friday] and then an hour later to get his book from you". It read entirely, eerily, like something out Sebald's fiction itself – another letter and memory that I treasure together with its sender: editor extraordinaire, generous mentor, dear friend.