Tony Cronin was always suspicious of what he called “the Kerry schoolmaster” genre of Irish literary writing, which prized rootedness, authenticity and tweed.
His fine novel The Life of Reilly (1964), a kind of cousin to Dead as Doornails, has a lot of fun mocking the subspecies of word-smithing Celt that haunted 1950s BBC Radio in London, hanging out in the pubs near Broadcasting House, talking wistfully of turf and the mammy to attractive young people while assembling scripts full of marketable Synge-Song.
This isn’t the only sort of author to whom Tony’s prose was, and is, an implied rebuke. Auden and Cyril Connolly were among his touchstones; he liked clarity, exactitude. The mid-century era of Dead as Doornails was one in which many an Irish writer, flailing in the slipstream of the great ocean liner that was Joyce, piled up the adjectives as though trying to assemble them into a raft, but Tony’s sentences have an almost Augustan classical elegance even when they describe sitting in McDaid’s in wet socks and wondering where the next crust is going to come from.
This tension bet
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