Letters to and from his home cost postage of two shillings and nine pence each way until the penny post was introduced in 1840

Dr Patrick Rowan reviews a limited-edition book that chronicles one doctor’s working life in adverse social and medical conditions.

Dr Atthill, in his Recollections, recounts his remarkable medical career and describes the adverse environment in the Dublin in which he was practising.

He qualified as a doctor at the age of 19 and his medical positions included that of working as a dispensary medical officer, as physician to the Adelaide Hospital and finally as Master of the Rotunda Hospital.

This book was originally published in 1911, the year after the author’s death, and is now issued in a limited edition of 750 copies because of its contribution to Irish medical and social history.

Dr Lombe Atthill was born in 1827 and was the son of the Church of England Rector of Drumcree, near Portadown. He spent some time at a school in England. Letters to and from his home cost postage of two shillings and nine pence each way until the penny post was introduced in 1840.

At the age of 16, he came to Dublin to be apprenticed to Dr Maurice Collis, a surgeon at the Meath Hospital, who insisted that the youth also attend Trinity College Medical School.

After qualifying, he worked in the Fleet Street Dispensary. For this he received no pay and was obliged to get donations of a guinea each from two people — or else he had to pay this himself.

He gives graphic descriptions of the appalling conditions of the sick poor in Dublin during and after the Famine. Several families were sharing one room and others were confined to basement rooms without light or heating. Typhoid fever and typhus were rife. He watched Daniel O’Connell walking around the streets and listened to the blind beggar Zosimus recite his rhymes.

When he was offered the position of Dispensary Medical Officer in Geashill, Co Offaly, at £80 per annum, he jumped at the offer.

He found the patients in Offaly “cunning” and there was very little private practice in this rural area, where some of his patients were reduced to eating boiled nettles.

After two years, he returned to Dublin, hoping to build up a private practice but found it was hard going. He toyed with the idea of going to England but he had now married and his wife persuaded him to stay in Dublin. Meanwhile, he had received an MD from Trinity College.

His next big break came when he was appointed physician to the Adelaide Hospital. Here he set up a busy outpatient service and was establishing a good practice when he was offered the post of Assistant Master in the Rotunda Hospital. He had to resign his post in the Adelaide and worked in the Rotunda Hospital for the next 20 years until he was appointed Master in 1878.

Despite much opposition from the Governors, he was successful in establishing an outpatient clinic. He found that the hospital was in need of various improvements and had a lot of trouble trying to persuade people to support the hospital financially.

One big problem he had to tackle was the state of nursing in the hospital. Very few of the nurses were trained and some were even illiterate. He had great trouble in getting them to change from their severe black attire to a nurses’ uniform, but eventually succeeded.

Atthill was friendly with many of the greats of 19th Century Irish medicine, including Graves, Stokes, Crampton and Corrigan. The last was so popular that it is said his servant left more money when he died than did Corrigan because of all the bribes from people who wanted to see the doctor, but Atthill was present once when Corrigan dismissed his servant for taking a bribe.

One-guinea fee
A lady from Cork had given the servant one shilling to be first to see Corrigan and when he had completed his examination and requested his fee, the patient told her she had already paid the servant. The fee at that time was one guinea.

Atthill had various ups and downs during his lifetime.

When leaving the mail steamer at Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), the ship’s Master suddenly moved the ship so the doctor and the gangway dropped into the sea. Despite his heavy clothing, he managed to stay afloat until he was dragged ashore.

He witnessed the enthusiastic reception Queen Victoria received when she visited Dublin in 1849 but her appearance was marred by torrential rain, which left the unpaved streets in a quagmire.

He has the usual grumbles about ungrateful patients and those who choose not to pay — so human nature hasn’t changed much over the years!

Lombe Atthill was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians and President of the Royal Academy of Medicine. In his retirement he spent much of his time yachting.

This book gives a valuable insight into the social and medical conditions during the lifetime of this apparently very pleasant person.

• Recollections of an Irish Doctor by Lombe Atthill. Published by Ballinakella Press.

Aoife Connors reviews a debut novel that gives an honest and entertaining depiction of teenage life in modern Ireland, with just that added twist.

Sixteen-year-old Felicity Costello, known to her family and friends as ‘Flick’, faces many of the same teenage struggles as most of her friends. There’s just one difference that sets her apart; her sexuality.

For a large part of this debut novel by Geraldine Meade, Flick battles mentally and emotionally to get her head around why she likes girls instead of boys, trying everything she can think of to keep the way she feels a secret because of the shame of being ‘different’.

Author Meade — a primary school teacher with six children — narrates teenager Flick’s mindset and actions throughout the novel with authenticity. The reader is given descriptions of the teenager’s attempts to like boys, but soon discovers Flick’s first crush is actually on another girl, when she kisses her brother’s girlfriend Becks.

Not dodging any issues, Meade’s book is aimed primarily at a more mature teenage audience.

In one section she details how Flick is drugged and raped on a night out by a college friend of her brothers.

She also highlights with insight the significance of social media for adolescents today.

When a best friend of Flick’s posts a photo on Facebook of Flick kissing another girl, the vulnerable teen overdoses in an attempt to escape her perceived shame, although thankfully she’s discovered in time by her anxious parents.

While praised as a rare example of an Irish ‘gay coming-of-age’ book, Flick reaches out to a much broader audience.  In depicting life growing up as a young adult in today’s Ireland, the author confronts and discusses many of the issues that most teenagers have to deal with through the life events of Flick, such as peer pressure, smoking, binge drinking, drug abuse, exploring ones sexuality, exam pressures, living up to parents’ expectations, being ‘cool’ and fitting in with friends.

Spanish Inquisition
During one of her ‘hangover sagas’, Meade describes how Flick tells her over-anxious mother, “I don’t need the Spanish Inquisition every time I’ve had a night out,” and declares she does not meet her mother’s expectations at all. The author highlights how differently Flick views everything in comparison to her parents.

When the road to recovery does begin, Flick’s parents insist on counselling sessions following the overdose. Once again, Flick’s character agonises over feeling the way she does. Determined not to let her guard down, she resolves not to tell ‘Dr Rodge’ about her feelings.

The book deals well with the stresses of trying to ‘fit in’ and appear ‘normal’ around friends and at school. Yet Meade highlights how such peer pressure to conform can easily get on top of a teenager. The pressure to hide her sexuality and the pain of being unable to tell anyone deeply depresses Flick and the author details with subtle emotion her ongoing shame at being different.

Mixed-up emotions
The reader’s interest is maintained throughout the 270-page book with concern and sympathy for Meade’s main character, as Flick struggles through her mixed-up emotions, with the author effectively describing the anxiety and fear that haunts Flick as she struggles with her sexual identity.

Meade clearly identifies the impact social media can have on a teen’s life. Facebook is regularly referenced, highlighting how a contentious photo can damage one’s social status, humiliating the teenager within their peer group.

Referring to every character by nickname could be a bit off-putting for some older readers (i.e. we have Dr Rodge, Fee, Kar and Kev), but perhaps it’s just a reference to how most teenagers actually speak. But frequently, the author chooses the lingua teen to good effect, and peppers the pages with such colourful terms as ‘lezzers’, ‘weirdos’ and ‘freaks’.

As Flick’s mind races constantly with a “whirlwind of emotions”, similarly, chapter by chapter, the book moves from one thought process, emotion, or anxious place to another.

However, in certain chapters there is a tendency to over-analyse situations, drawing things out — but again that’s possibly a reflection of how teenagers like Flick can over-analyse things, especially in panicky situations.

Meade’s first novel is an honest reflection of a teen’s mixed-up thoughts on life in general, and on their sexuality in particular, and a read worth recommending to teenagers, perhaps someone from 14 years onwards, as they will identify with many of the worries and dramas in the protagonist’s life.

• Flick by Geraldine Meade. Little Island. ISBN 978-1-908195-01-2

Dr Charles Daly reviews a new book examining the mysterious disappearance of postman Larry Griffin in Stradbally, Co Waterford, on Christmas Day 1929

Many years ago, on call one Christmas Day, I called into my then-local Garda station to report a sudden death. While there, the member on duty insisted on giving me a Christmas drink and I spent a pleasant half an hour with a glass of brandy and some delicious apple tart and cream.

This was probably not best practice for either party; I was driving and he was manning the station, but after all it was Christmas, and it never occurred to me that it was irregular behaviour.

I later heard that this particular member, because of his fondness for the sauce, may have been given a desk job where he was less likely to cause trouble than on the beat.

I was reminded of this episode reading the sad story of Larry Griffin, the postman who disappeared in Stradbally, Co Waterford, on Christmas Day 1929 in mysterious circumstances.

His body was never found despite searches of local bogland, disused mine shafts and other recently-dug graves.

He may have died accidentally following a drunken altercation in a local public house, or after falling down the stairs in the local Garda station where he may have been taken to sleep off the effects of drink, and his body may have been impulsively dumped in panic. Local folklore has it that he was buried underneath a road that was being resurfaced at the time.

Several people were charged with murder, including four Gardaí, a primary schoolteacher and the local publican and his family. Contemporary Garda reports and court transcripts reveal a shocking amount of lies, half-truths, evasions, U-turns, retractions and statements of frank perjury made by suspects and witnesses in connection with the incident.

The prosecution case collapsed sensationally when the star witness, who had made a detailed and lengthy statement placing the action in the pub, inexplicably retracted his evidence. It is possible somebody close to the defendants may have ‘got at’ him: shortly afterwards, with the help of the Gardaí, he was discreetly relocated to another part of the country.

The collapse of the trial meant the worst possible outcome for nearly all concerned. The defendants, although technically innocent, still carried the whiff of guilt on their shoulders. The schoolteacher remained out of work for over a year before he was reinstated, and for the Griffin family there was no closure, either in terms of a murder or manslaughter conviction or being able to bury their husband and father.

The Gardaí emerged badly from the whole business. The Stradbally members were in breach of regulations, drinking in the barracks on Christmas Day and sneaking in and out of the pub, which was officially closed. All, including the defendants, were dismissed; four other Gardaí, brought in to investigate the disappearance of the postman, were forced to resign because of their heavy-handed treatment of some of the accused, even though the then Commissioner, General Eoin O’Duffy, let it be understood that he wanted what is known in football slang as a ‘result’, regardless of how it was achieved.

Other investigating officers were forced into internal exile by the top brass for perceived incompetence (at that time, a transfer to Donegal was the equivalent of being sent to Siberia!).

The quality of forensic investigation was more reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau than of CSI, and questioning of suspects owed more to the Lugs Brannigan approach than to the subtle probing of Inspector Morse.

It did not help that the Gardaí were also identified with the Free State and the Cumann na nGaedheal government of the time, and were distrusted by large sections of the population who were sympathetic to the disaffected Fianna Fáil/Sinn Féin/Irregular element, and who would be unlikely to co-operate with investigations.

At times this book, written by Fachtna Ó Drisceoil, reads like The Valley of the Squinting Windows meeting Twin Peaks with a bit of Father Ted thrown in, but there is nothing amusing about the death and disappearance of Larry Griffin and the shadow it cast on the area.

The protagonists are long since dead, but it is still a live matter and a touchy subject in Stradbally, where the pub is still run by the same family, and the Griffin family still lives in the area, as do descendants of the teacher and some of the other suspects.

Naturally they are sensitive about a matter they had nothing to do with, but which they have inherited like the mark of Cain from their ancestors. Could there be somebody out there who knows the final resting place of Larry Griffin from a deathbed confession?

The story of Larry Griffin’s disappearance would make a great movie, but the time is not yet right — perhaps in another hundred years?

• Dr Charles Daly is a GP in Dungarvan, Co Waterford.

• Fachtna Ó Drisceoil, The Missing Postman: what really happened to Larry Griffin?, Mercier Press, 2011.

With the recent publication of Prof Declan Kiberd’s commentary on Ulysses, Dr John Wallace reflects on the development of the book that revolutionised the modern novel

James Joyce had little time for middle-class thrift. Because of financial hardship, he wrote Ulysses in over twenty different flats, located in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. However, though he may have been poverty-stricken and living in a garret, James Joyce did not have Bohemian qualities.
He preferred, where possible, to lead a measured and bourgeois life. He hated Bohemian cafes and while he might write four-lettered words, he would never, ever, voice them.
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle feels that many passages of Ulysses are in need of a good editor. The work has always been associated with obscenity and obscurity. Yet Joyce’s book is about the wisdom of the ordinary, middle range of human experience. He wanted the familiar and the ordinary to instruct and entertain. He wished to give ‘the charm of novelty to the things of every day’.
Reading Ulysses has always been challenging. The book is regarded as the peak of literary experimentalism and does not defer to prevailing values. It was written from 18 different points of view and so has a succession of differing styles. The main theme however, is consistent, and addresses the central place of emotion in human experience.
The plot of Ulysses is also straightforward: it deals with 18 hours in the life of an ordinary man. The book describes the events of a single day in Dublin. It documents the adventures of two quite different characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, throughout Thursday, June 16, 1904.
Bloom is Joyce’s greatest and most enduring creation. While he is very ordinary, there is a ‘god within him’. He is multi-dimensional, and like Ulysses of old, he is subject to many trials that with wisdom, he manages to overcome.
Joyce’s book is the work of a storyteller drawing on a wide range of European literature, much of it derived from Catholic sources. The book is a masterpiece of modernism, like In Search of Time Lost by Proust, and first editions continue to attract high prices.
Nora Barnacle
The author of Ulysses, James Joyce was born on February 5, 1882, the year his father’s name appeared in Stubb’s Gazette. His mother, ‘crippled-with-children’, had endured 15 pregnancies. The downward financial spiral of Joyce’s father led the family through a variety of addresses from Mountjoy Square to Cabra.
Despite his uneven early life, James was the best-read pupil in his class in UCD in 1899. But he was already becoming suspicious of conventional ideas and wisdom.
Joyce’s aim now was to become a recognised writer and he later put what he had learned in UCD to good use.
Lacked motivation
On completion of his studies, Joyce followed a number of his college friends into the Cecilia Street Medical School in Dublin. Then, in November 1902, he applied to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. By early December however, he realised that he lacked the necessary qualifications, and more importantly, the motivation, for the life of a medical student.
By now his relationship with his wife, Nora, involved periods of intense literary activity, interspersed with spates of high living that he could ill-afford. In Trieste, his wife was forced to take in washing. Joyce was hospitalised with rheumatic fever when Nora gave birth to their daughter, Lucia, in the pauper’s ward of the same hospital.
At this time Joyce’s usual garb was a second-hand, ill-fitting overcoat tied with a military belt that ‘had an incongruously dapper effect’.
Irregular living also led to attacks of iritis. He liked to drink absinthe and, in 1915, he was diagnosed with glaucoma. Though in great pain and requiring an iridectomy on his right eye, he kept writing.
A defiantly uncommercial work, the plot of Ulysses began to take shape in his mind in 1912. He made notes on the back of advertisements and on his shirt cuffs. Using these, he began the tentative process of composition, drawing especially on his childhood memories of Dublin.
He wrote much of Ulysses while lying in bed, dressed in a white suit. The resulting work is testimony to the ‘continual affirmation’ of the human spirit.
He confided, “I am almost afraid to treat such a theme.” Ulysses is pivotal to the history of the novel and Joyce was aged just 38 when he finished it. With Ulysses, Joyce believed that he had exhausted the English language and that now there could be no going back.
Proust
Ulysses was published on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Like Proust, Joyce was a publisher’s nightmare. The Irish writer was still sending in corrections a week before the publication date. He had spent 16 years thinking about the book and seven writing it.
Joyce started the work in Trieste but composed much of it in Zurich. He wrote it surrounded by activity and ‘immersed in the chaos of the real world’. The English language, he discovered, was not sufficient to his purpose; it had enough words, but not the right ones. Despite this, in Paris, aged 38, he completed the final three episodes.
Ulysses was a major advance for fiction, but, at the time, it provoked a violent reaction. Cambridge University was told that any student found with a copy would be prosecuted. With its cobalt blue cover and white lettering, 1,000 of the 2,500 copies printed were quickly confiscated. Nobody could accept his stylistic experimentalism. And his life-long supporters fell away.
In May 1922, after he underwent a sphincterectomy of his left eye, his physician noted that James Joyce was living in ‘considerable squalour’ in his Paris flat. He wrote Ulysses despite these eye problems, the alarming mental distress of his daughter and the alienation of his friends. He confided to his family that he doubted if ‘anything lies ahead of us, except ruin’.
Richard Ellmann
Professor Declan Kiberd maintains that Ulysses is not an elitist work. It is about an ordinary form of wisdom found on the streets of Dublin. Joyce drew on all the detail of the Irish capital for his book. But the work went beyond the personal adversity that he had experienced in his lifetime.
According to the biographer, Richard Ellmann, Joyce joined the best English words to express the best Irish subject. In the Italian restaurant where Joyce unwrapped the first copy of his newly published work, the waiters proudly asked if they could show the book to the other customers.
‘An abominable writer’
The day before Ulysses was published, a stranger on the street bumped into Joyce and mumbled, “You are an abominable writer.” Virginia Woolfe felt that the book finally proved that the James Joyce was ‘low bred’. Others however felt that, with the publication of the book, Ireland made a sensational return to the best world literature.
James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, exiled and alone, died of a perforated ulcer and generalised peritonitis in the early hours of January 13, 1941. He was aged 58.
Ulysses and Us: A Guide to Everyday Living (2009) by Declan Kiberd, is published by Faber and Faber.

Dr Charles Dupont offers some helpful hints that you should bear in mind, if you are considering recording your memoirs for posterity.
When a reporter once asked Noel Coward, ‘Is it true that you drink champagne for breakfast?’, he replied, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’

If somebody enquires as to whether you intend to write your life story – answer similarly. So, just how should you meet this challenge?
h4. The title
It is crucial, of course, to have an eye-catching title. In my own case, as a consultant dermatologist, I would select something like Warts and All or Skins and Sins – with the latter reflecting the past symbiosis between dermatology and venereology.
A chronological sequence is needed.
Your school days can be glossed over, unless there was some outstanding academic or sporting prowess.
h4. Early professional struggles
Describe your struggles against nepotism and prejudice on your pathway to success! This can be combined conveniently with mentors who inspired you and recognised your inherent genius.
This is your opportunity to express your undying thankfulness to them, while remembering the old French proverb, ‘Gratitude is the hope of further favours’.
h4. Achievements
These should be delineated subtly, bearing in mind the advice of that great medical writer Richard Asher to ‘hide your light under a transparent bushel’. You can, however, overdo the modesty bit and thus risk being branded as somebody with much to be modest about.
h4. Photographs
The addition of photographs can certainly relieve the tedium of plain text and they will inevitably add greatly to the price of your book, particularly if they are in colour.
A few fairly recent flattering ones may be included, but having botox beforehand is an over-reaction.
h4. Sex
This undoubtedly sells, but it is probably unsuitable for your medical autobiography. Your irresistibility, however, can be hinted at.
h4. Timing
This also can be difficult, but ensuring that your book appears just before Christmas is generally a good idea. If a storm is brewing in your own particular specialty, this may also be helpful.
h4. Length of epistle
No publisher will accept a manuscript of 10 A4 pages and an attempt to pad this out to 200 pages will inevitably lead to rejection.
h4. Legal advice
Vitriolic comments should be minimised in our litigious society. The publisher would inevitably get risky comments weeded out.
h4. Advertising
With the Medical Council hovering in the background, do not give the impression that you have unique skills.
h4. Acknowledgments
To acknowledge every single person who has even been vaguely involved in the whole process is very tiresome. This is, in fact, reminiscent of modern films, where at least 200 people are mentioned in the credits.
h4. Television and film possibilities
The great medical writer Archibald Joseph, or AJ, Cronin was a Scottish writer who wrote the million-selling novel The Citadel in 1937 (which was a thinly disguised autobiography) and the authentic version of his life, Adventures in Two Worlds, in 1952.
The former was made into a very successful film in 1938 and the latter was adapted into ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’, which was a very popular television series.
It is unlikely, however, that you will possess such talent.
h4. Sales
This is the most important consideration of all – who is likely to buy the book? A few sympathetic colleagues will never be enough, and it must have a general medical appeal and, if possible, one for the lay reader.
From the above comments, it is easy to deduce that a mammoth task could be on hand when attempting to write one’s medical autobiography – one which I personally would never attempt.
To me, it seems, it just goes to prove the old adage, that ‘the onlooker sees most of the game’.
* Dr Charles Dupont is a Consultant Dermatologist.

Kealan Flynn writes that a new book outlines Barack Obama’s vision for America and his plans to fix a broken country.
Every US presidency brings a mixture of hope and trepidation — and the traditional avalanche of books about the candidate, the campaign, and the potential — as well as the perils (real or imagined) — of the new presidency. For President Barack Obama, the traffic is all one-way for now. Where Bush was lambasted and lampooned, Obama is simply lauded.

There are books by the president himself; any number about his roots, his religion and his route to high office; and a few that give a glimpse of how he may handle the Herculean task of trying to stop his country slipping beneath the waves.
h4. A real page-turner
Into this latter category falls the slim hardback, Change We Can Believe In. At 293 pages, it is almost three times longer than the cut-and-paste Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal, which was launched by the Government with great fanfare in Dublin Castle last December. But it is still a real page-turner.
Even if you can still find the downloadable pamphlet that appeared originally on the campaign website, the book is still worth the money, and all of the proceeds go to charity. It has two parts: the plan to fix a broken country and a selection of speeches from the stump.
h4. Offensive to none
This book seeks to connect with citizens in a way that many politicians have long forgotten. There’s none of the jaded jargon of the traditional manifesto and none of the careful crafting that political parties default to in their desire to be all things to all and offensive to none.
The language is communitarian in its origin and focus; the tone simple, direct and engaging. Only time will tell if this is the end of, or just a bump along, the old road of jaded politics. Obama’s success on the campaign trail lay in his ability to walk the tightrope that connects people’s deepest fears and their highest hopes with such consummate ease.
That is why this book, which covers all of the ground that any manifesto seeking to respond to the pressures and problems of a particular time would do, reads more like an honest conversation than the skilled pitch of a snake-oil salesman.That such a plan could have been written by anyone with an ounce of sense about the extent to which America has been diminished within and in the eyes of the world over the last eight years, is a testament both to the extent to which the currency of the country’s politics has been debased, and to how much its leaders have been disconnected from people because of their arrogance and complacency.
h4. Fine speeches
There is, of course, much more to this story than a big plan and fine speeches. Both were necessary, but not sufficient for success.
Political anoraks and party apparatchiks here were dispatched to study, at close quarters, the grassroots movement which was built from scratch for this campaign, and which now runs parallel to the party’s mainstream, hoping they may be able to learn something for future election campaigns in Ireland.
But if they have learned anything, it will be that message, messenger and medium together are the measure of success. If any is missing, all is lost.
* Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise (Canongate Books, €15.60).

This recent, short book focuses on one of the least-known periods of Samuel Beckett’s life. The Irish writer had just returned from Paris to teach in Dublin, but had not yet written his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
Rachael Burrows, then aged nineteen, was a student in Beckett’s class when he lectured on French literature in Trinity College Dublin in 1931. Luckily, she kept her lecture notes which recently were discovered in the TCD archives. The manuscript gives us a new insight into Beckett’s thinking and helps us to understand the path he would take later as a writer. On his return from studying in Paris in 1930, Beckett was made a lecturer in TCD. He had a three-year contract, at £200 per year, while proceeding to his PhD with the French Department.

Rachael Burrows scribbled notes quickly into a little notebook during his lectures and they give a unique insight into Beckett’s view of literature, when he was just twenty-five. The notes reveal Beckett’s understanding of French writing and he would never again reveal his tastes so openly.
h4. Paris
Though always an ardent reader, the young Beckett did not display an interest in French drama until he arrived in Trinity as an undergraduate aged seventeen. After TCD, he went to Paris to study from 1928 until 1930. He did not realise when he got to Paris that his life was to change forever.
Two years later, when he returned to Dublin, he had evolved into a brilliant independent thinker who did not like superficial conformity.
While lecturing in TCD in 1931, he came across as a shy, but brilliant thinker. While he liked reading authors like Rimbaud, he did not enjoy talking about them. He was a tall, courteous but self-effacing teacher. Burrows decided to write down Beckett’s lectures as fully as possible. She felt that he was creating as he went along and that, in front of the students, he ‘gave the best of himself’.
Beckett taught his class how to write essays with headings. The first sentence, he advised, must contain all the arguments to be developed. He lectured without notes, in a mixture of English and French. The French writers he covered included Balzac, Proust and Flaubert.
h4. French writers
Balzac was much loved by Irish readers. But not by Beckett who, according to Rachael Burrows, preferred Flaubert and Proust. Beckett liked Flaubert’s impersonality and he saw the French writer as the real ancestor of the modern novel, not Balzac.
In his lectures, Beckett aligned himself with the ‘Modern’ writers and distanced himself from his Irish contemporaries. Beckett loved absence of purpose as he felt that this best expresses the human condition. For him, Balzac was too predictable.
The Dubliner also liked Proust because he preserved ‘complexity’. The three attributes of a good writer, according to Beckett, were originality, genius and unpredictability.
h4. European tradition
Samuel Beckett always saw himself as drawing on a wider European tradition. Rachael Burrows believed that Beckett’s tastes were already formed by the time that she was taught by him. The classes that Beckett lectured to were thirty-strong and were composed mainly of women.
Always punctual, he spoke with his back to the window gazing upward and without expression. However, the teacher was deeply unhappy. At night he would sit in his rooms and drink Jameson, and occasionally eat a scrambled egg. He had no desire to be in Dublin or excel in his job. He had little social life and found his situation intolerable.
According to Anthony Cronin, he saw life lecturing as a life of misery. He was gloomy and withdrawn and in dress he became increasingly dishevelled.
He also suffered from panic attacks. His doctor told him to smoke fewer of the Wills’ Woodbines that he bought in a green cardboard packet of twenty, at eight pence a packet. Before the end of the summer term, he had suffered a bout of pleurisy.
Later, his friend Dr Geoffrey Thompson, of Baggott Street Hospital, would try to help him deal with his increasing health worries. Geoffrey’s brother, Allen, of the Richmond Hospital, would later help Beckett get back to France as a member of the Irish Red Cross.
Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, told Beckett that he ‘should accept the world and go to parties’. But when he went out now, it was to the less frequented haunts on Pearse Street or Westland Row where Kennedy’s, in Lincoln Place, was his favourite.
h4. Dr Ethna McCarthy
Beckett did not go abroad during the summer holidays of 1931. At this time, he was still occasionally seeing Ethna McCarthy, later to study medicine and specialise in paediatrics. By Christmas, he had finally slipped away to Germany and, from there, sent his letter of resignation to the College, causing consternation.
His former students remember a distressed Trinity professor telling them that he had just received a letter from Beckett informing him that he would not be back for the spring term of 1932.
The professor added that Beckett did not say what he was doing or where he was going.
h4. James Joyce
Other students of Samuel Beckett in the French Department were contacted by Beckett’s biographer, Professor Knowlson. One student remembers the lecturer never spoke of James Joyce. Another knew that she ‘was in the presence of someone outstanding’. Yet another student remembered ‘our Sam’ as ‘a tall, thin streak of misery’. When Beckett disappeared, she was told that he ‘had gone to Paris to commit suicide’. Another student confided that she had ‘thoughts of a romantic kind’ about the tall, blue-eyed lecturer.
Some of his former students, however, worried that they were so bad at French that they had caused him to leave. When interviewed later about her notes, Rachael Burrows said, “When you see him, tell him I have always had a great sadness in my heart that this brilliant man still thinks he was a bad lecturer.”
h4. Prof Eoin O’Brien
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which was written just after Beckett’s brief teaching stint, failed to find a publisher in his lifetime. The book, edited by Professor Eoin O’Brien, was published in 1992.
Beckett saw Joyce as heroic and epic, but when he first met the ‘Master’ he did not intend to be a writer. This came about when he realised in Dublin, in 1931, that he could never be teacher. At just seventy pages, this book sheds light on a shadowy period of the life of one of the greatest writers of all time. The reluctant lecturer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This newly-published, short book gives us an important insight into Beckett before Beckett. Through the recently discovered lecture notes, the young writer’s voice reaches us today.
* Beckett before Beckett (2008) by Brigitte Le Juez, is published by Souvenir Press, London. The famous Gate Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, with Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy, has been touring 40 venues across Ireland until the end of October.
* Dr John Wallace contributed to Centenary Shadows of Samuel Beckett, published by David Hale, London.

Dr John Wallace looks at a new book on the distinguished and flamboyant don, Prof R.B. McDowell, and his charmed existence within the halls and squares of Trinity College Dublin.
Born in 1913, Robert Brendan McDowell entered Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate in 1932. Trinity was then an academic enclave, with few people passing through its gates. Initially, he was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the buildings in the college and also by its customs.

This was an institution encrusted with tradition, where liveried porters in hunting caps attended to an undergraduate population of about 1,500, of whom just 350 were women. Founded by Elizabeth I in 1592, at night the squares and ancient buildings of the college were steeped in romantic darkness and after ‘night-roll’ at nine o’clock, you could not leave the campus.
h4. Edwardian Belfast
On moving from his comfortable home in Edwardian Belfast, in Trinity the young ‘R.B.’ encountered living conditions that could best be described as ‘Spartan’. And the situation stayed that way, at least until the bath-house was built in one of the squares known as Botany Bay.
A senior don was overheard to remark that he could not understand why washing facilities were needed in the college. After all, the academic term was just eight weeks long and then the students were free to avail of the necessary amenities in their parents’ homes. Looking on the bright side, the college did have electricity and many of the student rooms had gas rings on which to cook. In R.B.’s room, however, the primus stove still reigned supreme. He was often quite cold in the college buildings where the Dining Hall was regarded as one of the coldest rooms in Europe. However, he found that after a time, he was no longer conscious of the weather when crossing the wind-swept squares.
The young R.B. always knew that he wanted to go to one of the older universities, so he chose Trinity as it was nearer than Oxford but not as close as Queen’s, which would have been too near to his parents’ Belfast home.
Initially, he had intended ‘to take orders’ but instead decided to study history. He believes that he was one of the last young men to whom the Victorian career of the ‘scholarly parson’ had been suggested.
In a world of clubs, dining halls and libraries, R.B. progressed through TCD as a history undergraduate, lecturer, PhD student and finally, a distinguished don. The primary focus of his academic work was 18th-century Ireland, its buildings, politics and people.
R.B. was Junior Dean in Trinity from 1956 until 1969. As ‘the visible embodiment of college authority’, the position compelled him to become ‘a man of action on a small scale’. It was a welcome change to his habitual reading and writing.
His job as Junior Dean was to enforce college regulations on a largely willing student population. However, it was not all plain sailing and, as he was told by a Fellow of the college, an important part of the job was sometimes not to see things.
In dealing with misbehaviour by a student, he had a number of options. The penalties could be a warning, ‘gating’ or confinement to college, or just a fine. However, he soon discovered that some individuals were actually proud of being punished.
h4. Variety of activities
His permission as Junior Dean had to be sought for a whole variety of activities on the college premises. He needed to be consulted in order to have a party in rooms. One student wanted permission to play his bagpipes in college.
On another occasion, the Junior Dean allowed a student in Botany Bay to keep snakes in his room, provided they were confined to their elaborate containers. He also gave permission so that a ‘deferential’ monkey could stay overnight in the college before proceeding to the zoo the next day.
As Dean, R.B. often had to deal with the Victorian and Edwardian pastimes of practical joking. However, by the late sixties ‘the times they were a changing’ and a more serious challenge to college authority was about to surface on the grounds of the venerable College of the Holy Trinity.
h4. The Internationalists
The undergraduate body did not have much time for institutional politics until the Internationalists, a small, but energetic group of Maoists, arrived in the college. They believed that Mao, in his Little Red Book, had provided a Utopian blueprint for Ireland’s future. The Internationalists came together in Trinity in 1967 and numbered roughly about forty energetic souls. When the Junior Dean was asked by them what he would do when Trinity College had been extinguished, he replied, like an exiled Russian Guards officer, that he would ‘drive a taxi in Paris’.
In the late sixties, the Internationalists launched a campaign against a visit to Dublin by the King and Queen of the Belgians. They protested against the Belgian government’s African policy in the Congo. The protest culminated in a riot in front square.
The following day, after a scuffle involving R.B. on the Dining Hall steps, two of the leading Internationalists were ‘sent down’. For a short time, the Internationalists were a source of drama and colour for the whole college population, including this columnist, but they soon faded away to be replaced by other forces.
The student union (SU) took over from where the Internationalists had left off. Some of the new students were ‘anti-deferential’ to the Junior Dean in whom college authority was embodied. In the late 1970s, the SU clashed with the College Board over the use of the student common room.
h4. A council of war
After a noisy meeting with the students in the boardroom, the college authorities were forced to abandon the room and retire to the nearby Provost’s house. In the elegant salon of the 18th century mansion, McDowell declared to the remaining board members, ‘We can now see ourselves as a council of war.’
R.B. had plenty of time for travel and he was in Paris in 1968 where he witnessed the police attempt to take back the college of art, the Ecole des Beaux Art, from the protesting students. The students had shut down the medical school on the adjacent Boulevard St Germain.
The Pasteur Theatre in the medical building had been renamed the ‘Che Guevara Theatre’. If the police stormed the building, with the Junior Dean still in it, he had decided that he would simply tell them that he was ‘a visitor from Ireland’.
Later, when he was faced with a charging police cordon on the Boulevard St Germain, R.B. naturally took refuge in the expensive Deux Magots café nearby. And his short flirtation with revolution was over.
R.B. McDowell remembers people running onto the streets to see an airplane in 1920. He went on to work for forty years in Trinity where he lived life from one week to the next.
h4. Inherent conservatism
He witnessed TCD in ‘splendid isolation’. With his inherent conservatism, at the end, he felt that somehow he had ‘failed to see life as a whole’. The former professor of history thoughtfully adds that autobiography ‘induces humility’.
* McDowell on McDowell, A Memoir [2008] is published by Lilliput Press.
* Dr John Wallace is a medical doctor with an interest in biography.

Dr John Wallace looks at the spectacular but short-lived political career of Donogh O’Malley —the Minister who introduced free secondary education to Ireland in the 1960s.
Donogh O’Malley died suddenly, aged 47, on 10 March 1968. Historian Roy Foster regards him as perhaps the most energetic and charismatic Minister for Education that Ireland has ever encountered. Interestingly, Donogh had married Dr Hilda Moriarty, the inspiration for Patrick Kavanagh’s best-loved poem, On Raglan Road, which was composed in 1945 when Hilda was still a medical student.

Donogh O’Malley was born on 1 January 1921 into a secure, professional, Limerick family. His father was a county surveyor and his mother was from an equally prosperous background in the Shannon-side city.
A new book, Unfulfilled Promise, outlines how Donogh was educated by the Jesuits in the Crescent School in Limerick and also Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare. He was both a bright student and a talented rugby player and he went on to play rugby for Connaught, Ulster and Munster before qualifying as a civil engineer at UCG.
h4. Charles Haughey
Donogh’s first romantic encounter was with Audrey Harris, sister of Limerick-born actor Richard Harris. Sadly, Audrey died aged just 21, as a result of intestinal cancer and she was buried with the engagement ring that Donogh had given her.
The same year, 1946, a downcast Donogh met Hilda Moriarty. Hilda was the daughter of Dr Paddy Moriarty who worked as a GP in Dingle, County Kerry. Fellow Kerryman, Con Houlihan, describes Paddy Moriarty as ‘a good doctor and a brave man’. Stormy seas would not deter him from visiting sick patients on the Blaskets or Valentia Island.
Hilda was a qualified doctor and Dr Patrick Hillery, who preceded Donogh O’Malley as Minister for Education, was in her class in UCD. Hilda’s sister, Dorothy O’Neill, was also a doctor and her brother, Cyril Moriarty, was a pilot with the Royal Air Force.
In 1947, Hilda and Donogh married in Adare, County Limerick and lived with their two children, Daragh and Suzanne, in Sunville — a substantial, animated house overlooking the river Shannon. Eamon de Valera often stayed there, as did Charles Haughey, Brian Lenihan and Neil Blaney.
h4. Eamon de Valera
Donogh entered the Dail in 1954 and spent ten frustrating years on the back benches before becoming a Minister. His family background would have been in the Irish Parliamentary tradition of Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond. The family switched their allegiance to Fianna Fáil in the 1930s.
Seán Lemass, who became Taoiseach in 1959, liked O’Malley and promoted him. Donogh took over the Ministry of Health from the older Seán MacEntee in a Cabinet reshuffle in 1965. O’Malley, an immaculate dresser, was a vibrant Health Minister and a ‘showdown’ with the medical profession was averted when he was switched from Health to Education later that year in an inspired and astute move.
O’Malley had a long-time interest in education, though education was not high on the political agenda of the time and the role of the Education Minister was largely that of a figurehead.
However, he quickly moved the political emphasis in education from a concentration on the past to a definite, sustained emphasis on the future.
h4. Patrick Hillery
Paddy Hillery gave up his day-to-day practice of medicine during the 1951 election in order to help de Valera in County Clare and he went on to hold a number of major ministerial posts in his long political career.
The foundations for O’Malley’s educational achievement were laid by Patrick Hillery, a medical doctor, and a Minister for Education from 1959 until 1965. Dr Hillery wanted free post-primary education but the Department of Finance naturally feared the potential expense. In the face of significant political opposition, Hillery was successful in instigating a more committed Government approach to second-level education. In doing this, he created a platform for major political change.
h4. Jack Lynch
Donogh O’Malley took over Education from George Colley in July 1966. He had a genuine interest in schools and intellectual development.
Always seeing the bigger picture, on 10 September 1966 he introduced free post-primary education for all. Strategically, he made the announcement to a group of journalists at the beginning of a weekend. The effect of his speech was immediate.
The move was seen as visionary as it significantly helped poorer families to access secondary education for their children. Free education made headlines and the important legislation was duly implemented in September 1967. Of course Jack Lynch, as Minister for Finance, had to fund the unexpected change.
It was felt that Donogh was ‘running wild’. However, the Minister for Education contended that they ‘were not going to defeat’ him on this. He was unyielding in pursuit of what he believed was both necessary and deserved, and he showed great foresight and tenacity.
The opening up of free post-primary education to all and the introduction of the free rural school bus service were major accomplishments. And he was only Education Minister for 14 months.
h4. Brian Lenihan
During the 1968 election, O’Malley had stepped in to give a speech in the place of Kevin Boland while on the campaign trail in Sixmilebridge, County Clare. During the address, he suffered a cardiac arrest and subsequently died while being rushed to St John’s Hospital in Limerick. Brian Lenihan, unexpectedly, had to take over from him and O’Malley’s death, at just 47, was an unanticipated and dreadful loss to national life. His family were equally devastated.
His wife, Hilda, was the favorite to run in his place in the days immediately after his death. Hilda, a very forward-thinking doctor, had encouraged her husband in his various political projects and she had always seen medicine in a wider social and political context. She had been taken aback by the deprivation that she had witnessed while campaigning for her husband in Limerick.
Dr O’Malley would have been a good choice, however, grief-stricken and uncertain, she initially declined to run.
Later, she campaigned as a self-financing, independent candidate in the 1969 general election in an intense contest for the seat. Following her defeat, Hilda returned to work as a medical doctor. She told this columnist that she always regretted stopping work after she married. She loved dealing with patients and mixing with hospital staff.
Her conversation was always about political issues, poetry, and the medical world. In a way, all three had uniquely intersected in her personal life.
Dr Hilda O’Malley died in 1991 at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin. Nonetheless, she epitomised a cosmopolitan corner of Dublin life and the spirit of a long-gone era. Her life was a rich overlap of three diverse worlds: politics, medicine and literature.
Her husband, Donogh O’Malley, had died before fulfilling his true political potential. However, his inspirational changes in the field of education paved the way for subsequent economic success.
Though from a wealthy family, for whatever reason, he appears to have found his greatest satisfaction working on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged.
“And I said let grief be like a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day”
On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh.
* Unfulfilled Promise, Memories of Donogh O’Malley [2008] by PJ Browne, is published by Currach Press, Dublin
* Dr John Wallace worked for the Mid-Western Health Board with Dr Hilda O’Malley from 1977 until 1982

Dr John Wallace looks at the background to the epic film Doctor Zhivago, which was adapted from the eponymous book about the surgeon and poet, written by banned Russian writer Boris Pasternak.
Told in flashback by Alec Guinness, the intimate yet epic film Doctor Zhivago tells the story of surgeon-writer Yuri Zhivago, played by Omar Sharif. Director David Lean’s blockbuster is a three-hour film that covers fifty years of Russian history.
The story is told through the lens of the relationship between the protagonist Yuri Zhivago – a humanist, medical doctor and poet – and Lara, played in the film by Julie Christie.
Produced by Carlo Ponti, with music by Maurice Jarre and a screenplay by Robert Bolt, the central character is a doctor and his medical role is used as a device through which we get to view a nation’s history. Though a vast, epic tale, the film remains psychologically intimate. Lean’s attention to detail and the stunning set pieces made the film a huge success.
Doctor Zhivago’s war-disrupted existence alters the lives of many people, including the numerous injured soldiers and civilians that he treats. Filmed in a sweeping, lyrical style, this is epic film-making at its best.
h4. Omar Sharif
Omar Sharif was cast in the title role. Born in Egypt, Sharif studied physics at Cairo University. Already a star in Egypt, he played in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. As well as being the world’s most renowned Franco-Arabic actor, he was better known as a professional bridge player and wrote several books on the subject. He would postpone any film shooting that coincided with a major bridge game. Fluent in Arabic, English, Greek, and French, he was a fifty-cigarette-a-day man until he had triple bypass surgery in 1992.
His muse in the film, Lara, was played by Julie Christie. Born on her father’s tea plantation in India, Christie was a blonde and blue-eyed beauty, a versatile leading lady and a welcome screen presence in Zhivago. She was also superb with Donald Sutherland in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now set in Venice. Looking back on her career she said, “adulation is terribly corroding”. Zhivago’s wife was played by Geraldine Chaplin, the granddaughter of writer Eugene O’Neill.
Ralph Richardson played Zhivago’s father-in-law. A wise man with an abstracted charm, Richardson had become an actor instead of a priest and did not give much consideration to his film work. Only a few films, such as Zhivago, do him justice. He was also excellent as the aristocratic grandfather and moving old earl, in the Tarzan tale Greystoke in 1984, where he slid down the staircase on a silver tray.
Rod Steiger played a complex brute in Zhivago. A method actor with a dramatic screen presence, his big movie breakthrough was in the famous taxi-ride scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront in 1954. Steiger suffered from recurrent depressive disorder and gave public lectures on mental health.
The film was narrated by Alec Guinness, who played a policeman. Guinness’s career spanned more than 60 years. He is most famous for having captured a subtly unhinged Britishness in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957.
Irish actors Jack MacGowran, who was a friend of Samuel Beckett, and Siobhan McKenna also contributed to Zhivago’s success.
h4. Boris Pasternak
The film Doctor Zhivago, based on the banned novel by Boris Pasternak, was made in 1965, five years before David Lean went on to make Ryan’s Daughter in Ireland. In total, Lean directed five international blockbusters that won some 23 Academy Awards.
The novel’s author, Boris Pasternak, was bought up in a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere. He was born in 1890 in Moscow, to a father who printed and illustrated the works of Leo Tolstoy. He first studied law, then music, before going on to read philosophy in Germany.
In WWI he worked in a factory in the Urals. Unlike his friends, he did not leave Russia after the Revolution but worked in the library of the Education Ministry in Moscow. Under Stalin, he became an official translator. This work was highly valued and for ten years he published little else.
In the 1930s, Pasternak’s position became increasingly difficult though Stalin, luckily, had ordered the secret police not to touch the ‘cloud dweller’.
In the last decade of his life, despite his declining health, Pasternak worked feverishly on the novel he intended to be his testament. This manuscript was meant to witness the experience of the Russian intelligentsia before, during and after the Revolution: Doctor Zhivago.
h4. Medical school
The book is poetic and fragmentary and depicts the plight of a man more concerned with the individual than the State. Zhivago, the doctor, is poetic to the point of mysticism. In medical school, one of his professors reminds Zhivago that while bacteria are beautiful under the microscope, they also can do ugly things to people.
The book describes, with intense feeling, the Russian Revolution as it impinged on one individual who was both a surgeon and a poet. The novel is a tragedy that spans the last period of Tsarist Russia, the Russian Revolution and the civil war. Zhivago’s journey through Siberia is epic. A major theme in the work is how the doctor’s idealism is destroyed by the Bolsheviks and then the White Army. Even Lara is eventually taken from him.
The book is not anti-Marxist but is the view of a Communist disappointed that history has not confirmed his vision. With Khrushchev, Pasternak mistakenly believed that there was a ‘political thaw’. While still despairing of publication in the USSR, he ill-advisedly allowed publication of the book in Italy in 1957. Dr Zhivago caused an immediate political earthquake and was promptly banned in Russia. An instant sensation outside the USSR, the novel went to the top of the American bestseller list.
h4. The Nobel Prize
Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Initially, he accepted he prize but four days later he refused it. A vehement campaign was waged against him, with the Soviet Government asking the Nobel Committee not to award him the prize. As a result, he was never formally presented with the honour. He feared that if he travelled to Stockholm to accept it, he might lose his citizenship and that he would not be allowed to re-enter Russia. The companion of his last years, Olga Ivinskaya, on whom Lara the heroine of Doctor Zhivago is based, was arrested and imprisoned.
Doctor Zhivago, on which Pasternak’s international reputation is founded, was not published in Russia until 1987. Lean’s film was not released in Russia until the fall of the USSR. Pasternak wrote the most influential collection of poetry published in the Russian language in the 20th century. Despite this, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. And he had to take the unprecedented step of refusing the Nobel Prize.
Boris Pasternak died from lung cancer in May 1960. Prior to his death, in his poetry, he became concerned with universal questions such as love, immortality, and most importantly, the possibility of man’s reconciliation with God.
* The novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is published by Penguin. The DVD is available courtesy of Warner Brothers.
* Dr John Wallace is a medical doctor with an interest in biography.