The literary crowd recalls a gift to American letters

Thomas Flanagan was one of Irish-America’s — one of the literary world’s — great treasures. He wrote in flowing, baroque sentences that defied literary conventions born of minimalism and the modern attention span. His novels had texture and context, and were — astonishingly — critical successes and popular bestsellers.
In his lesser-known but equally important role as a literary critic, he was an influential voice whose essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara were masterpieces of their own.
Tom died of a heart attack three years ago, and on Feb. 2, the New York Review of Books and the American Irish Historical Society paid tribute to him and to his wife, Jean, who died not long before her husband. The crowd on hand hardly needed an excuse to celebrate the lives of their dear friends the Flanagans, but the occasion coincided with the republication of Tom’s first novel, “The Year of the French,” and the posthumous publication of a book of Flanagan essays called “There You Are.”
A succession of speakers paid tribute to Tom in their own words or in his, none more movingly than the superb Colum McCann. The young novelist briefly recalled a Flanagan moment in his life, when he was a reporter in Westport, Co. Mayo, and was spending a long night in the pub with an editor. The county was, of course, the setting for Flanagan’s “The Year of the French.” As the hours grew smaller and the pints kept arriving as if by magic, McCann’s editor friend was called to the telephone several times by an inquiring wife. As he sheepishly, and finally, headed home, McCann’s friend announced that he was going to write a novel of his own. He even had a title picked out: “The Fear of the Wench.”
Not very politically correct, but funny all the same.
McCann went on to read from the last two pages of “The Year of the French,” and if you are an admirer of Tom Flanagan, as I am, and you are not native Irish, you must someday hear Colum McCann read aloud from this book. In this way, you will appreciate what I did not when I read the words printed on a page, for while even a dolt like myself could see the beauty of the words, I could not hear them until I heard McCann’s interpretation. McCann’s selection included dialogue between a character called Sean McKenna and a drover he meets as he examines the gutted shell of a fine old home, a casualty of the rising of 1798:
” ‘It is a shocking wreck,’ I said. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘but there is good stone in it.’ ‘How was it burned?’ I asked him. ‘It was burned last year,’ he said, ‘in the time of the French.’ “
As McCann’s reading demonstrated, Tom even got the cadence right.
Other speakers shared their memories: Christopher Cahill, who now holds a title Flanagan once held — historiographer of the American Irish Historical Society — recalled that Tom was “adrift” for a while after his beloved Jean died, but was back at work even hours before he died. Cahill, incidentally, edited the new collection of Flanagan’s essays, and pored through Tom’s papers to find previously unpublished work.
William Kennedy recalled being with Tom at various writers conferences, where, he said, Flanagan vented about the political machine of Boston’s James Michael Curley while Kennedy lamented the O’Connell machine of Albany. Barbara Epstein of the New York Review of Books read one of Tom’s essays about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and novelist/NYPD Detective Edward Conlon read a Flanagan essay on the tortured life and career of John O’Hara.
Flanagan’s life and work clearly had left their mark on all of these remarkable talents, and even on a lesser light here and there. I have my own variation on the theme of “How Tom Flanagan Changed My Life,” and I was delighted to share it with him a few years ago in San Francisco.
In front of an audience put together by the great Dan Cassidy, head of the Irish Studies program at the New College of California, I told Tom that reading “The Year of the French” was truly a life-changing moment for me as a kid just out of college in 1979. I learned two lessons: First, and most important, though I might make a living one day as a writer I would never create anything approaching the grandeur of “The Year of the French.” This was good to realize at a young age, as it prevented future disillusion.
Secondly, in Tom’s descriptions of Irish, er, conviviality, I learned of the existence of a particular kind of refreshment known as whiskey, which burned your throat and then “spread its warmth.” Tom, in the voice of the poet Owen MacCarthy, called it “imprisoned fire.”
That I can now taste and describe the differences among Jameson, Bushmill, Paddy, Tulamore Dew, Middleton and John Power I owe to Tom Flanagan and his lovely descriptions of whiskey drinking. No doubt others have read his words and been inspired to write beautiful sentences, but I knew my limits. Instead, I chose to become a more-discriminating drinker. Tom seemed to find this amusing, or at least he was gracious enough to pretend that he did.
Tom Flanagan was a gift to American letters, and on a night in early February, New York offered its thanks.