Properly to review this volume would require the skills of a medical historian, a literary critic, a biographer and a doctor; one would need, in fact, to be J.B. Lyons. Most festschrifts are single-issue affairs, honouring a scholar who has made a mark in a particular field: in Lyons's case such a production would be quite inadequate, for his interests are multifarious and cross many disciplines, writes Terence Killeen
Born in Co Mayo 80 years ago, he is the most distinguished living practitioner of a remarkable Irish tradition: the literary medical man (the genre, for sadly obvious historical reasons, is almost exclusively male). Oliver St John Gogarty, whose biography Lyons has written, is perhaps its most famous incarnation. This book, published to mark Lyons's 80th birthday, reflects the diversity of his interests in the range of writers and subjects chosen.
Many of the essays have to do with Irish medical history in various forms: there is an account of the role of some highly determined women in the fight against tuberculosis; of the life of an army surgeon in India and an exposé by W.J. McCormack of Dr W.J. Maloney, one of the principal exponents of the forged Casement diaries theory.
But for many who do not pretend to share the breadth of J.B. Lyons's interests, the chief attraction of this volume will lie in its literary contributions. And foremost of these is the essay by A. Norman Jeffares on Iseult Gonne. This piece is an offshoot of Jeffares's work on editing Iseult's letters to Yeats and Ezra Pound (with whom she had an affair) and focuses mainly on her relationship with Yeats and on her troubled marriage to Francis Stuart.
It has been very difficult up to now to obtain a sense of Iseult as a person in her own right, as distinct from her extraordinary role as muse and inspirer; Jeffares's work will do much to redress this. The photograph of Maud Gonne with her son Sean MacBride in her arms and her daughter Iseult by her side is alone worth the price of the volume - so much Irish literary and political history is encapsulated in that image.
Also of considerable interest is Terence Brown's discussion of the case (and it is indeed a case) of James Clarence Mangan. Brown takes mild issue with readings of Mangan that would situate his melancholia exclusively in social or familial factors. Instead, he has the temerity to suggest that Mangan's condition may have been primarily simple clinical depression, an indigenous illness which needed no external factors to abet it or instigate it.
This may well be the case, but it does not negate the fact that, as Terry Eagleton has recently pointed out, Mangan's appearance on the Irish literary scene was historically entirely apt: just when Ireland needed a poète maudit, it got one, whatever the roots of poor Mangan's many troubles.
Another inheritor of the tradition of the Irish literary medical man, Eoin O'Brien, writes with sensitivity of the role of compassion in Beckett's work. He cites, very aptly, Beckett's experience in the Irish Red Cross hospital in St Lô as a crucial moment in this regard and there is considerable astuteness in his remark, à propos the vexed relation between Beckett and his mother, that "Ireland is a land where . . . affection often masquerades under the guise of derision".
This volume is a worthy tribute to a remarkable man - a tribute not just of admiration but also of affection. It would have been even more welcome had it included a proper biographical sketch of Lyons's long and interesting life, and, even more importantly, a checklist of his many publications. (We learn, for instance, that he published three novels under a pseudonym but the information is all rather patchy.)
It would also have been nice if something could have been included on James Joyce, a writer to whom Lyons has devoted such sustained and fruitful attention.
Terence Killeen is a literary critic and an Irish Times journalist
Borderlands: Essays on Literature and Medicine in honour of J.B. Lyons. Edited by Davis Coakley and Mary O'Doherty. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, 151pp. €25