IN MEMORY OF CAROLINE WALSH:MANY YEARS AGO, at a literary reception in, of all places, the Allied Irish Banks headquarters in Ballsbridge, I found myself in conversation with the writer Mary Lavin. She was a formidiable figure, dressed in black and with her hair untidily tied back in that inveterate bun that she wore.
She spoke with extraordinary rapidity, darting from one topic to the next with the speed and vehemence of a blackbird searching under dead leaves for a tasty morsel. Getting a word in edgeways, I made a facetious remark about something or other, at which Miss Lavin frowned.
Thinking she had misheard or misunderstood me, I hastened to say that I had been making a joke. “Yes,” she said quickly, with a quick, bright smile, “but not a good one.” Instant collapse of youthful party.
Well, like mother like daughter. Caroline Walsh inherited Mary Lavin’s sceptical, sardonic but not unkind sense of humour.
Caroline loved to laugh, and did so frequently, and startlingly, and at a deafeningly high pitch. If ever anyone could have been said to whoop, it was she. In the features department of The Irish Times, in the soporific longueurs of a weekday afternoon – the Hollywood image of newspaper offices as places of noise and frantic bustle is seldom accurate – one would hear from the desk in the corner a cry of delight that told us Caroline had chanced on another one of those instances of human folly, pretence or wickedness that delighted her. "Oh, listen to this!" she would call out. "Just listen to this!"
She was, in other words, great fun, one of those people who loved to be alive and in the thick of it. When I heard of her death, the first thing I thought of was that unforgettable scene in Henry James's great novel T he Ambassadorswhen the ageing Lambert Strether advises Little Bilham to "live, live all you can! It's a mistake not to."
Who could have lived more fully than Caroline did? She was a splendid journalist, and one of The Irish Times's finest literary editors. She succeeded me in that position, and I remember vividly, with a renewed stab of mortification, at the end of her first week in the job opening the Weekend section and being dazzled by the blaze of energy, inventiveness and imagination that her pages gave off. A new star had arrived in the literary firmament.
And she never flagged. She stood up with vigour and fortitude to cutbacks and belt-tightening and all the rest of the woes of the new Age of Austerity.
In one of her last messages to me she bemoaned the fact that because of budget restrictions she would have to reduce the fees paid for book reviews. I wrote back a casual line saying that, in my case at least, she was not to worry about such things. Her instant reply, which had in the subject line the legend “I know this email is over the top, but . . .” (when did Caroline ever write an email that was under the top?), was entirely typical in its warmth, effusiveness and rueful humour. She wrote: “What did Joyce say when he got that letter from Ibsen as a student in Dublin: ‘The words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life.’ I can’t help it but that was what came to mind overnight as I mulled over your lovely message; it put things in context and whatever way you put it about these tough times we live in . . . Love, Caro.”
Ah, dear Caro, I do miss you.
