Life
1945- ; b. 14 Feb., Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford; brought up by a paternal
grandmother in Lismore, Co. Waterford after early death of his mother;
ed. St. Augustine College, Dungarvan; moved to Dublin, living with his
father and stepmother, 1962; ed. Kevin St., grad. in electronic engineering,
1962-64; apprentice photographer; worked in London as barman, clerk and
encyclopaedia salesman, 1965; schol. to Ruskin College, Oxford, 1968;
moved to Warwick Univ., 1970; grad. BA in English and American Lit, 1973;
Ph.D. (‘Life on the Land: Identity and Community in Three Nineteenth-Century
Irish novelists’), 1980; taught at Univ. of Birmingham, 1974, and
Clare College, Cambridge, 1975; lect., Warwick, 1976-80; visiting asst.
Prof., Vassar, 1980-84; assoc. Prof., Georgetown (Washington), 1984; admired
memoirist recounting dawning awareness of a modern world beyond Lismore
and student days in works such as Dancehall Days (1988), The
Village of Longing (1993), and Out of Our Minds (1995). DIL2
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Works
Memoir, The Village of Longing: An Irish Boyhood in the Fifties
(Dublin: Lilliput Press), 151pp., and Do. [rep. edn.] (Sixth
Chamber Press 1987; Belfast: Blackstaff 1993); Dancehall Days, or Love
in Dublin (Dublin: Lilliput 1988), and Do. [rep. edn.] (Belfast: Blackstaff
1994), 166pp.; Out of Our Minds (Belfast: Blackstaff 1995), 220pp.
[0 85640 541 8]; Village of Longing [and] Dancehall Days
(London: Viking 1989), 325pp., and Do. (Harmondsworth: Penguin;
NY: Viking 1990). Also, ‘The Absurdist’, in Irish Review
(Winter 1992/93), pp.87-92 [reminiscence of London youth].
Journalism incl. ‘Culture rock’, review of Edna Longley, The Living Stream, Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, in Irish Times (30 Dec. 1994), Weekend, p.8; review of Aidan Higgins, Donkey’s Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told, in The Irish Times (10 May 1995).
Also, George O’Brien, ed., Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport (Dublin: New Island Press 2000), 159pp.
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Notes
Denis Sampson, ‘Down and Out in London’, review of Out
of Our Minds (Blackstaff), quotes, ‘Pop gave me a pleasure that
was as strong as knowledge. Thanks to it, I felt, I could dream of inventing
a life of my own’; centrally concerned with the pain and challenge
of exile (‘there is either home or nothing’), and with the ‘village
of belonging’, it encompasses marriage to Pam with its promise of
‘improvised unorthodoxies’ heading on the ‘road to Hinksey,
Swinden, Cumnor, Kingston Bagpuize’; called a post-modernist project
without parallel since Ulysses in its exhuberant celebration of
the textures of popular and literary culture [...] intimately personal
and historically accurate examination of Irish male identity in the past
half-century.’ (Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1995, p.25).
Aubrey Malone, omnibus review, Books Ireland (Summer 1995), calls Out of Our Minds, a writer’s writer rather than a reader’s one (p.167).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)