IN MEMORY OF CAROLINE WALSH:EVERY AUGUST, as she departed on annual leave, leaving me the privilege and pleasure of looking after her beloved books pages, Caroline Walsh's parting instruction was always the same: "Have some surprises for me when I come back."
Her briefings involved the sharing of her precious lists, and they became something of an office ritual. Coming up to her holiday I would be required to sit down with her – always on the side of her good ear – and go over those lists: books out for review and with a deadline, proof copies, advance copies to look out for in her absence. Potential reviewers for upcoming books would be suggested, but the surprise she wanted was the introduction of a new name, the presence of which on her pages would excite her, and that name could then, of course, be added to her distinguished panel of reviewers.
Being clever with the choice of reviewers was of paramount importance to her. And those reviewers whose names became familiar on her pages – authors, academics, historians, politicians, judges, journalists – were always happy to get that call or email from Caroline. They loved working with her and the almost Jamesian precision she required, with her attention to detail and the sharing of her own considerable writing skills in shaping a review.
For Caroline the thrill of receiving a book hot off the press never diminished over the years. Her eagerness often meant that she herself would hotfoot it out of the office to put the book straight into the hands of a reviewer. But she knew too the impact a reviewer’s response might have, and took that responsibility to heart, as I learned in many conversations, either before or after publication of a review.
While she took great pride in having those heavyweights on her pages and in the loyalty they showed to her as Literary Editor, she was also the most generous of nurturers when it came to reviewers of promise, often using the weekly paperbacks column to try out the novice critic and identify nascent talent. Both the seasoned and aspiring critic cherished the feedback she gave them.
Caroline’s respect for the effort it had taken an author to create a new work was one of her great attributes. This, of course, is no big surprise given the milieu surrounding her in childhood: as Mary Lavin’s daughter, she grew up in a household of literary visitors and saw the creative process close up. A child of one of our greatest short-story writers, she zealously championed this art form throughout her life. One of my happiest memories is the occasion in the 1990s when she first came face to face with one of her literary heroines, another genius of the short story, Alice Munro, who had come to Dublin for the Irish Times Literature Prizes, a project on which we shared the best of times for more than 10 years.
She was, I believe, born to become the Literary Editor of this newspaper, a role to which she brought her deep, but modestly worn, learning and passionate commitment to literature, as well as her acute sense of what deserved to be singled out for the critic’s eye from the never-ending abundance of books that piled on to her desk. Above all, her keen instincts in matching a book with its reviewer made her Saturday pages among the best in any newspaper in the world. She made something aesthetic out of those pages.
She had a deeply embedded sense of the paper and its traditions and was, I think, probably its most avid and curious reader. She would breeze into the office each morning with the entire edition usually read and, with instincts developed during her time in the newsroom, point out stories that had more life in them for the next day’s paper.
She delighted in sharing her cultural experiences beyond the written word – an Easter choral recital, a foreign movie (she nagged me until I made the effort to go and see Of Gods and Men) – and she could never, I think, quite understand my lack of nostalgia for the showband era and a certain type of country-and-western tune.
In an inscription she once wrote for me in a copy of her own book, The Homes of Irish Writers, she needlessly marvelled at "how great Fergus Pyle and Donal Foley" – two of her journalistic mentors – "were to have faith in me and give me the regular column from which this book grew".
No one was as equal to the task as she – and that goes too for every role she played at the paper, and especially as its Literary Editor.
I will ever be grateful for her company and presence during my long working life at The Irish Timesbut, above all, for those moments when she would pop her head into my office, often out of the blue, to clear away the trivial concerns of the day and remind me of the things that truly matter in this life: family above all, friendship and the consolations of a good book.
