Rosita Sweetman
Beautiful Tony is gone. Tony, who was both a maker and a doer.
Poet and writer, champion of artists, writers and poets, who, passionately believing a civilised State should ensure they didn’t starve, didn’t just blow on about it but set about setting up Aosdána with Charles Haughey as an exemplar to the world.
Tony who wrote and, terrifyingly, lived Dead as Doornails when poverty, alcoholism and societal disdain for "artists" were the norm. Tony who enacted the first Bloomsday gig with Myles na gCopaleen, Patrick Kavanagh and John Ryan, in 1954.
Tony who wrote 14 collections of poetry, two important biographies – his Samuel Beckett, The Last of the Modernists, considered one of the outstanding biographies of the 20th century, two novels, including the brilliantly comic The Life of Riley, as well as a play The Shame of It, the masterly A Question of Modernity, and hundreds of philosophical critiques and literary reviews.
Tony who knew everyone from Padraic Colum to Dylan Thomas to Elizabeth Smart to Lucian Freud to Robert Graves to Stevie Smith to Aidan Higgins to Anne Madden and Louis le Brocquy, to Samuel Beckett – Tony was one of the first people to write seriously about Beckett. Tony who had the weekly much loved Sunday Poem in the Sunday Independent. Tony who sang The Croppy Boy, Hail Queen of Heaven, Leonard Cohen's Master Song, Elvis Presley's Wooden Heart, at the drop of one of his famous hats. For Tony a party wasn't a party without songs.
Tony who was a lifelong radical; his long poem, The End of the Modern World, fiercely and lyrically interrogating capitalism, was updated and republished only months ago.
And he was Tony who was married to Anne. Wonderful Anne who refused the role of carer/martyr as he got older, choosing to hold fast to the roles of lover and equal. It was her lack of fuss kept him alive; if there was an opening, a launch, an event in his honour, Tony, perched on the narrow seat of his walker, was whizzed through Dublin's cobbled night streets, red scarf wound round his neck, cap on, comprehensively trusting Anne's instincts and speed.
Before Anne he was married to Therese. Their 20-year-old daughter Iseult was tragically killed in a car smash; his younger daughter Sarah, the living image of his own younger self, survives, with husband Owen and three beautiful children.
The last months have not been easy with Tony in hospital beset by advancing frailty and recurring infections. He wasn’t afraid of death, but for Anne his decline was akin to being torn in half. Miraculously, two weeks before he died she managed to get him home. They were both euphoric.
When the end came there was no A&E, no hospital ward. No tubes or machines or paraphernalia. Just Tony and Anne and their love, in the home they had made together over many years. Among his last words to her were: “Anna, will we leave this place?”
“Where will we go?” she asked. As she told us in her funeral eulogy, his answer was characteristically exact and decisive. “The land of certainty, truth and love.”
Soon he slipped away. A master, casting off his skin like an old overcoat. Floating out, lighter than a leaf.
Oh, oh, oh. He will be missed.
Joseph O’Connor
Every Irish writer and artist owes Tony Cronin. We always will. Through his immense work on establishing and promoting Aosdána, and other measures, he materially altered the lives of hundreds of creative people in Ireland for the better. A brilliant critic and commentator, he was warm, very witty and mischievous company, peerlessly generous to younger writers, and his memoir Dead as Doornails is a true classic, one of the funniest and saddest books I've ever read. No understanding of the literary life, if the term might be used, of postwar Dublin could be complete without it. His novel The Life of Riley, recently reissued by New Island Books, is also laugh-out-loud hilarious, beautifully written, and oddly touching, too, but it's as a fine poet that Tony will be best remembered. The End of the Modern World is a statuesque achievement, shot through with elegant lines, passionate insight and shrewd observation. He was a gracious and gifted writer, a gentleman through and through, and he will be deeply missed by his many friends and admirers.
