JUDE THE EVANGELIST

Remembering Gerry Keenan, Jude the Obscure

Michael Foley

The more we get to know people, the less we actually know them. Gerry Keenan was a strange, complex man when I first met him, in the early 1970s, and he became ever stranger and more complex over the following four decades. It would take the acuity of Proust, and a Proustian number of words, to do him full justice.

But, regarding the critical essays he wrote for the Honest Ulsterman as Jude the Obscure, I think that the crucial influence was nothing artistic but the early death of his father, an accountant who provided his family with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and status. Unlike most accountants, the father was cultured and well-read, and passed on a love of literature to his son, who would have expected a full education and a professional career, only to have the family suddenly plunged into poverty and be obliged to leave school at the age of fifteen to earn money in menial jobs.

Gerry always refused to be a victim and to make a thing of his lack of formal education (‘I won’t play that card’) but it is what gave him his pseudonym (Hardy’s Jude desperately wants to be educated but never succeeds) and what gave his criticism its unique features – the absolute conviction, the ferocious intensity, the range over almost every art form, the disregard for established reputations and the championing of the neglected and forgotten, the love of art that transforms the tribulations and drudgeries of everyday living, the contempt for any deviation from artistic integrity, through dishonesty, ingratiation, vanity, love of success, prestige or money, and the even greater contempt for the laziness of the artistic professionals, journalistic and academic, who are largely content to follow fashion.

The trauma of the ‘expulsion from paradise’ (a phrase that turns up frequently in the essays) was probably also a factor in his socialism (he was always what is now known as ‘soft left’) but it certainly explains his faith in the arts, which became a form of religion, a way of finding consolation and redemption by ‘bearing witness’ (another favourite phrase), and was, like Christianity, available to everyone, including the disadvantaged and obscure. To practice any of the arts could never be a career or a pastime (‘the only thing worse than an amateur is a professional, the only thing worse than a professional is an amateur’) but was a calling that demanded a lifelong dedication to rendering honestly and accurately personal experience. Any attempt to distort or fabricate, or to please the public or impress critics, was a heresy punishable by execution in the Honest Ulsterman Business Section.

This religious fervour is one of the factors that make the essays so compelling, even when you entirely disagree with them – but there is also the exhaustive research deftly and lightly deployed (to write about anyone he had to be familiar with not just the full oeuvre and the life but also its historical and social context), the lavish use of quotations (always carefully chosen and striking) and the unusual angle of approach (as much via social background, personal circumstances and temperament as the work itself).

The fervour emerged as unassailable conviction. I have never known anyone with such certainty, and it occurs to me now that this impregnable carapace may have been his way of suppressing the insecurity of lacking an education. But the insecurity was apparent in his need not just to know everything about all the arts but to know more about each than any of the specialists (I’m proposing this theory because being Irish in England gives me a similar insecurity and a similar desire to compensate by knowing everything about the arts). Gerry took particular delight in correcting the mistakes of experts and once proudly showed me an exchange of letters with the National Gallery, where his letter pointing out an error in the caption for a painting was acknowledged, with apologies and a promise of immediate correction, by the Gallery’s Keeper of French Painting.

So he praised little-known writers like Elizabeth Hardwick and George Ade and laid into those with inflated reputations, like Nabokov and Borges (both dismissed as ‘powder-puff pastry’). There were no half measures. An artist was either one of the saved or one of the damned, an absolutism that made it difficult for him to acknowledge the grey area of the basically honest who are flawed and compromised – the vain, the cowardly, the partly-corrupt. In his artistic credo, the introduction to his collection of essays, The Professional, the Amateur and the Other Thing, he lists among the ‘many American artists’ who have ‘walked away in contempt from the golden calf’, Terry Southern, indeed a fine prose writer, but one who wholeheartedly embraced the most golden calf of all, Hollywood, and was devoured by it.

The religious fervour was evangelistic. Gerry was essentially a teacher, and  infinitely more effective because he never taught to earn money (for suppressing curiosity and destroying  enthusiasm, teaching professionally is almost as good as being an official student). So our relationship was very much master-disciple – and he took the Zen Master approach of shocking the disciple into enlightenment by thirty blows of the staff. I was a post-grad student when we first met in Belfast (he was on a visit home from London where he had moved in the early 1950s) and he began by describing me as a ‘grant-cushioned quasi-aristocrat’, a ‘pampered mammy’s boy’ and a ‘visually and musically illiterate’ philistine. Then he set about remedying these atrocious defects by plying me from London with long letters accompanied by books, postcards of paintings and tapes of classical music and jazz. I did well on the writers and jazz musicians, and fairly well on the painters, but failed badly on classical music (I still make sporadic efforts to hack Bartok and have got as far as appreciating his piano music). Eventually he invited my wife and me to London and put us up for several months while we looked for a place to rent. With the arrogance of youth I took all this for granted and only later understood the generosity in giving me so much of his valuable time and attention (he was now working as a minor civil servant and writing in the evenings and at weekends).

In London the teacher was revealed to be also a great entertainer. Gerry professed to despise those who told anecdotes but over a bottle of wine (always French) was himself a great teller - no, actor – of anecdotes. It turned out that he had been an amateur actor in his youth and he deployed this talent to the full. I particularly relished his account - no, re-enactment - of visiting the novelist Henry Green (one of the literary heroes he wrote so well about). The shock was discovering that Green was a hopeless drunk, lying on the stairs almost comatose when Gerry arrived, though the appearance of a young fan perked him up enough to start drinking again. At this point in the story Gerry would become both characters in turn, the prim ingénue and the slurry drunk lolling sideways with hair falling over his face.

The ingénue is anxious for literary guidance. ‘What do you think of Philip Toynbee, Mr Green.’

Lots of swaying and hair flopping. ‘A cunt.’

‘And what about Cyril Connolly, Mr Green?’

More swaying and flopping. ‘A cunt.’

‘Graham Green, Mr Green?’

This time the swaying and hair flopping go on longer, and he seems to be searching for a different response, but it turns out to be the same, and that he has been mustering his resources only to add even greater emphasis, in fact rising up out of his seat to roar it, ‘A CUNT.’ Exhausted, he falls back and holds up his glass. ‘Get another bottle. From the cupboard over there.’

‘Mr Green, there’s no gin, only whisky.’

‘That’ll do.’

‘But, Mr Green, there’s still gin in your glass.’

Extreme swaying, flopping and grunting. ‘Throw it in anyway for fuck’s sake.’

The master-disciple relationship was largely one way. Arguing with Gerry was like trying to convert the Pope to Islam. And recommending was almost as futile. When I discovered Alice Munro in the 70s I was violently excited and sure that Gerry would love a writer who so exactly matched his prescription. She was fiercely intelligent (Gerry loved intelligent women and worshipped Hannah Arendt in the way that other men worship Marilyn Monroe), wrote with unflinching honesty about her own experience (the early Munro books were obviously autobiographical) and came from a desperately impoverished background (in the depths of rural Canada). How could he fail to like her? It was indeed a challenge – but he was up to it. With great reluctance he agreed to read Lives of Girls and Women, and reported back with a familiar grim look of tolerance just about holding down severe disapproval. ‘Yes,’ he said, and the tolerance was unable to suppress a grimace, ‘I can see why you would like her … but she’s too interesting.’

The purpose of the master-disciple relationship is to make the disciple independent – but the form of the independence rarely pleases the master. Our beliefs and tastes began to diverge – and a particular problem was that Gerry, who had been a humanist throughout most of the four decades I had known him, now became a staunch Roman Catholic, and denied that he had ever been a humanist. The need was for a certainty that was not only absolute but eternal and he could not acknowledge that his beliefs had changed.  He also wanted to convert the disciple, and so the man who had once recommended Rimbaud as ‘marvellously vile’ because he cultivated lice in his hair to throw at priests in the street, now tried to get me to read The Tablet. The last straw was probably my publishing a non-fiction book (itself a heretical deviation from autobiographical fiction and poetry) that not only dabbled in philosophy (Gerry had the Irish contempt for philosophy) but was openly atheistic.

When I phoned him one evening, he said, ‘What do you want?’ I explained that I was phoning to arrange to meet for coffee, as agreed the previous week, and there was a silence. ‘Michael, I’ve been thinking,’ he said at last, ‘and I want shot of you’. There was an even longer silence, and eventually he added, ‘You’ve been impertinent to me, you see.’

I knew immediately that that was the end of it. Gerry was not one to reconsider. It was a bizarre end to a forty-year friendship – but there was an even more bizarre final scene. Gerry developed dementia - the early stages of this may have been a factor in his growing intolerance - and forgot that he had wanted shot of me. So it was safe to visit him in his care home – and indeed he seemed glad to see me, turning to cry with delight to my wife: ‘He’s shrunk. He’s shrunk. He’s a fucking gnome.’ He had another long look at me and found no reason to change his description. ‘He’s a fucking gnome. Let’s put him in the garden and throw tomatoes at him.’ Then he pointed through the window to a suitable spot and we all three shook with helpless laughter. For a moment it was just like old times.

Michael Foley was born in 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland, and educated at St Columb’s College and Queens University, Belfast, where he took degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science and did research in Computer Science. In 1972 he moved to London, where he still lives, and a career in teaching, culminating in twenty three years at the University of Westminster lecturing in Information Technology. He retired in 2007 to devote himself to writing. His first poems were published in 1969 in The Honest Ulsterman, a magazine he went on to edit with Frank Ormsby, and his first prose in a satirical column in the magazine Fortnight, which also serialised his first novel, The Passion of Jamesie Coyle. After retirement from teaching he wrote his first non-fiction book, The Age of Absurdity, and has since written two more non-fiction books. He is married, with one daughter. michael-foley.net 

In Memory of Gerry Keenan

by Robert Johnstone

The first time I met Gerry Keenan, he called me a fool. Frank Ormsby had asked me to become co-editor of The Honest Ulsterman, and we went to the bar of the Regency Hotel on Botanic Avenue to meet Gerry, who was back in Belfast visiting his relations. As Jude the Obscure, Gerry wrote a substantial “Business Section” in every issue. His was the most consistent and most prolific voice over the decades of the Ulsterman as a printed magazine.

The way he put it was something like, “I was worried when Frank told me you were a journalist, but now I see you’re just a fool.” The encounter had been so that Gerry could vet me as a future co-editor. The problem was that he had a strong conviction (all Gerry’s convictions were strong) that journalism was incompatible with literature. Indeed, for someone who had started off working on the Irish News and then in Fleet Street on the Daily Express and the Daily Herald, he had something of a phobia about journalists. To remind him that Ernest Hemingway was a journalist might only have drawn a dismissive sneer. Gerry worked in the circulation departments, not as a reporter. In one of his unpublished novels, he records a conversation between two characters: the hero (surely a self-portrait) tells a figure who seems to be based on Brendan Behan that he’s still working in newspapers, “but never journalism”.

The next day, he phoned me to apologise. He explained his theory about journalists and how the true vocation of literature should not be sullied by writing for money. Once he saw me, of course, he had realised that my “journalistic career” in the tiny Fortnight magazine could not by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as “writing for money”. He had described me as a “fool” because I didn’t have a proper job.

I later had the consolation of learning that Gerry had also insulted John Hewitt back in the mists of time, when Hewitt was curator of the art collection in the Ulster Museum. At a public meeting Gerry asked why he wasn’t buying more paintings by local artists. Hewitt’s wife Ruby never forgave him, but John and he had a cordial friendship when Ruby wasn’t around. I wonder if this incident occurred when Gerry was “Northern Correspondent” for Kavanagh’s Weekly, the quixotic and short-lived paper published by Patrick Kavanagh.

Gerry didn’t have a Bohemian lifestyle. I sometimes thought of him as a sort of Hampstead Magritte, putting on his suit and tie every morning (though probably not the bowler hat) and setting off to his nine to five job. (When he left Fleet Street he joined the Civil Service, where he worked in the Cabinet Office.) I suspected that his experience of losing his father at an early age and growing up Catholic in wartime Belfast had instilled in him a determination to provide for himself.

Despite this unpromising start to our acquaintance, I continued to find his contributions to the magazine fascinating and informative. He always researched his subjects to within an inch of their lives, and his range of interests was bracingly wide and refreshingly free of social deference (if not always completely independent of the more advanced critical opinion). He had a deep knowledge of French literature, and wrote numerous weighty essays on Rabelais, Henry de Montherlant and Proust. But he also wrote about art, jazz, comic strips and movies, as well as Irish writers like Joyce.

When I moved to London I continued to co-edit The Honest Ulsterman, and I got to know Gerry as a friend. He had retired, was a widower, and was living in a bed-sit on the ground floor of the house in Hampstead in which he had once occupied the top floor with his wife and son. It seemed a monkish existence. Apart from the kitchen area and his single bed, the room was dominated by his artistic passions. One wall, floor to ceiling, held his books and records. There was a record player, on which he played classical and jazz music, and a television on which he watched DVDs of his favourite movies. At a large desk in the window bay he typed his articles and novels. The other furniture consisted of two armchairs and a small table. He didn’t use this table for meals – he told me he ate standing up at the counter of the kitchenette. The table was always covered with books and exhibition catalogues – either things he was currently reading or had picked out specially for one’s visit, about which he would have one of his strong opinions and often an anecdote, and which he might offer to lend. There was a beautiful painting by Gerard Dillon on the wall. Gerry had been a close friend of Dillon and his sister when he moved to London in the 1950s.

We would talk about literature and the arts in general – he was always interested in Irish, British, American and of course French writers, and was not averse to gossip about their private lives. I used to hold the purist view that the only thing that matters is the work, not the writer’s life. Despite this, I suspect that Gerry hoped my visits would bring up to date his store of gossip about the literary “crowd”, as he put it, back in Belfast and surrounding The Honest Ulsterman. This tended to be a diminishing asset the longer I lived in London, and after I retired as editor. I felt he had a categorical way of thinking about the arts – if I mentioned a writer or a painter, he would almost immediately place them in a line of tradition, and often a hierarchy. I was both impressed and puzzled by this: in comparison, my ideas about artists, and about schools and movements, seemed very wishy-washy, my conclusions were much fewer, much more tentative and qualified, while he seemed to have worked out what he thought about everything he wished to discuss.

To be fair, there were large areas of the arts that Gerry declined to engage with. He loved jazz, but only a certain type of jazz. He knew all about Billie Holiday, Bud Powell and Sarah Vaughan, but when I suggested that he might enjoy Oscar Peterson, he rejected the idea out of hand. I wondered if it was because of a theory he had about “authentic” jazz players having to come from the USA, and preferably having roots in a specific area of the southern states. As a Canadian free, as far as I’m aware, of any addiction, Oscar Petersen didn’t seem to be worth consideration.

 Gerry was a thorough Francophile. He liked to say that he came from the very small French-speaking part of Belfast. His relaxation of an evening was to read policiers– detective stories – in French. When, as editor of The Honest Ulsterman, I received a letter from the President (I think it was) of the Académie Française seeking a subscription to the magazine, I thought it would be nice if we replied in French. I asked Gerry if he would either check my attempt or write one himself. He refused, appalled at the idea that he might make a mistake in a letter to the President of les immortels. At the time we sent The Honest Ulsterman to most corners of the English-speaking world, and a few other places besides, but now it occurs to me that it might have been Gerry’s Business Sections, so often about French writers, along with our occasional translations of French poetry, that might have attracted the letter from the Académie.

He was as selective about literature as he was about jazz. He had a theory about the great writer having to have some deep problem that would alienate them from society, thus clarifying and demystifying their ideas. The more “normal” a writer appeared to be, the less interesting he became. Gerry idolised Henry Green, but had little time for Graham Greene. One such problem, which he explored at length in his long considerations of Marcel Proust and Henry de Montherlant, was the way in which society marginalised homosexuals. He pointed out the transgendered nature of those two writers: it seems likely that Albertine was, at some level in Proust’s head, really Albert, even though towards the end of that very long novel a certain pretence is dropped and the hitherto anonymous narrator reveals that he is “Marcel”, in a way that both simplifies and complicates.

Gerry, though absolutely heterosexual, sometimes seemed fascinated with homosexuality. I guessed this arose from his close friendship with Gerard Dillon and the circles he and his sister moved in. His attitude was impeccably enlightened – at least a century ahead of the teaching of even the current Pope Francis. For example he was always keen to insist that homosexuality and pederasty were completely separate phenomena – despite the unfortunate linguistic blurring that can occur in French speech.

He gave the impression that he was incapable of understanding why anyone might be gay, even though he seemed to have an affection and care for any gay or lesbian. He was equally politically correct when it came to feminism – possibly encouraged by his dear wife Peggy, about whom he never ceased to talk with affection. Again, I think he regarded women writers as a disadvantaged and alienated group who therefore had more penetrating things to say. One of the figures he revered most – along with Shakespeare – was George Eliot.

Despite his erudition, his careful scholarly studies and his rejection of sentimentality, I often felt that his attitudes - interest in the life of the artist, in artistic movements and cliques, the value he placed on the marginalised artist (always remembering that as a puritanical Ulsterman he utterly rejected Bohemianism) – tended to the romantic. An autodidact who never had the opportunity to go to university, he certainly had a naïve faith in the learning that comes with a B.A. (Hons.) I also think he overestimated the glamour of the artistic life, and he was always alert – perhaps over-sensitive – to the social, ideological and sexual connections between artists.

The Ulsterman collected a number of his Business Sections and published them as The Professional, The Amateur, And The Other Thing. The point of the title was his theory that there is a type of true artist who cannot be characterised as either amateur or professional. The amateur is a mere dilettante, probably with a steady job or private income that allows him to dabble in superficial fripperies. The professional is a hack who would sell his talent for money. For Gerry the only artist worth considering was the one compelled to write, paint or play by some inner demon, some deep hurt, and willing to risk everything for their art.

There’s a lot to be said for this, but when it comes to cases things become more complicated. One could not pretend that Charles Dickens didn’t write for a living, though he must have had some inner demon urging him on to ever greater endeavours. Shakespeare, like Dickens another member of Gerry’s pantheon, is an even more dubious case. Gerry revered the Swan of Avon partly for the very reason that snobs like Enoch Powell refused to believe he could have written what he did. For the snob, only an upper-class person, such as the Earl of Oxford, could possibly be considered as England’s greatest writer. For Gerry (and myself) it is delightful that Shakespeare’s education stopped at grammar school, earlier than it would today, that he never got to university, like Christopher Marlowe, or that his dad was a glove-maker or dodgy wool-merchant, as the latest discoveries suggest. On the other hand, Shakespeare was extremely canny when it came to making money from his pen, and was not above writing the odd scene for someone else’s play, or indeed collaborating on a whole play in a way that would be familiar today to the teams of writers employed on American TV shows.

None of that diminished Gerry’s reverence for Shakespeare or for Dickens. And some of our most memorable encounters involved pilgrimages around London to the traces left behind by those giants or by Ben Jonson, John Keats and numerous other authors, critics and painters.

I think what Gerry loved above all was research, because he always paid one the compliment of preparing any excursion meticulously. He would read around his subject, prepare an itinerary, find extraordinary remnants that would link the present to the past, and of course always have a provocative theory about, for example, how Ben Jonson, son of a bricklayer, was able to go to Westminster School, or why Shakespeare might have struck up a partnership with a brothel-keeper in writing one of his plays.

He greatly enhanced my enjoyment of stravaiging around London, so I’m always aware now that there may be wonders to be found in any nook or corner of the metropolis, whether it be the entrance of John Betjeman’s flat, the house that Rimbaud and Verlaine lodged in, the pub where Cyril Connolly held court, or the spot where Patrick Kavanagh’s brother applied a sledgehammer to remove a plaque that commemorated the great poet urinating against a wall.

Hampstead and Chelsea, where I lived for a while, both provided lots of opportunities for guided tours, though my efforts to emulate Gerry were nowhere near as organised. When I moved to Richmond, the arty places were thinner on the ground, but I was able to show him the street where his heroine George Eliot lived. And Virginia Woolf had occupied two houses, one which is now the goods entrance to Boots, and the other where she and Leonard ran the Hogarth Press. He might have respected Woolf – as a modernist, a feminist and a woman – rather than revered her as he did George Eliot: she was a toff after all.

He loved the walk along the towpath from Kew Bridge to Richmond. The view across the river of Syon House reminded him, he said, of Swann’s Way (Du Côté de Chez Swann), especially when the May blossom was out. Knowing this, I took him one day to do the tour of Syon House itself – designed by Adam, it is much more impressive inside than out. Gerry took a look around the extraordinary entrance hall, with its marble, its colonnade and life-size gilt classical statuary, and cried out in disgust, “Who do these people think they are?” To which the answer was, the Dukes of Northumberland. I was relieved that we managed to do the tour and leave under our own steam, without being forcibly ejected by some of the terribly nice but starstruck ladies who acted as guides.

One of my best coups was to show him a cottage  in Petersham where Dickens lived. Gerry loved to hear stories like that of how Dickens would dive into the Thames and swim to Richmond Bridge for breakfast. From there we could look up to Richmond Hill and see the Star and Garter home for ex-servicemen (currently being converted into that London phenomenon, “luxury flats”, but once the home of George Buchanan, the Ulster novelist), and imagine the original Star and Garter Hotel, where Dickens celebrated the publication of Nicholas Nickelby with a dinner that included Thackeray and Wilkie Collins.

As we strolled around he would be full of stories, of the flat he shared with Aidan Higgins (which I think confirmed his opinion of Bohemianism), of the cognac he bought for Samuel Beckett near the Royal Court, where Waiting For Godot was having its first London run, of his great friend Bill Naughton, playwright of Alfie, Spring And Port Wine and The Family Way. And we would puzzle over some curious incidents in the lives of the artists – why did George Eliot’s new husband jump out of the window into a Venetian canal, what was T.S. Eliot up to in the “bachelor flat” he maintained, and how odd it was that he set off to get married to his second wife without mentioning the fact to the man he was sharing a house with. Quite frequently Gerry would come to a halt in the middle of the pavement, grab one’s arm and, “while the whole population of London looked on”, act out some extraordinary event in a way that reminded me that as a young man in Belfast he had been an amateur, though avant-garde, actor. (One of the plays he appeared in was, I believe, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute.)

All his life Gerry was a member of the Labour Party. When he left Belfast, Northern Ireland had a branch of the British Labour Party, but it later immolated itself in what seems the most idiotic way, over the sectarian ramifications of whether a playground should be closed on Sundays. He was a collectivist, who saw that the disadvantaged need the power of organisation to achieve change. He embraced socialist internationalism, and therefore rejected both the narrow sectarianism of Unionists and the narrow Irishism of Nationalists. For him, the Irish language movement had a tinge of obscurantism and sentimentality. Amongst his coevals in Belfast would have been Communists or fellow-travellers, but Gerry was a mainstream Labour member. He supported Tony Blair.

For most of the time I knew him, Gerry was an atheist, or arguably agnostic, and would delightedly tell me the latest anti-papal joke (possibly derived from his brother, a Jesuit priest). For example: a pious old priest is praying one day when God unexpectedly makes an appearance and says, “Is there anything I can do for you, my son?” The priest says, “Yes, Lord, can you answer three questions?” “Of course, my son, what are they?” “Lord, will there ever be married priests?” God gives a little smile. “Not in your lifetime, my son.” “Lord, will there ever be women priests?” God gives a little laugh. “Not in your lifetime, my son.” “Lord, will there ever be another Polish Pope?” God snaps, “Not in my lifetime, my son!”

As he grew older, he became more of a believer, and towards the end of his life regularly bought The Tablet. I made the mistake of loaning him my copy of The Authentic Gospel of Jesus by Geza Vermes: at one time he would have found fascinating its perspective on what we can reasonably reconstruct and infer about what Jesus actually said, considering the Jewish milieu in which he lived and the motives, omissions and emphases of what was written about him. But I had not realised that by the time I lent him the book his thinking was becoming rigid, and this alternative view of Jesus was confusing and upsetting to him. He was particularly annoyed that Vermes mentioned Jesus’s siblings, a difficulty that needs to be explained if one takes the maximalist view of Mary’s virginity, but which seems unexceptional (to this atheist at least) if one reads the Gospels without an agenda.

Was that rigidity of thinking an early sign of the dementia that finally killed him? I suspect these things can start happening long before they are diagnosed. The last few times we met our excursions were somewhat curtailed. A problem with his leg meant he was less mobile, and we could only manage to make it to one of the museums or galleries he loved – the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, the Museum of London – eventually only for a meal at one of those, or in the little Hungarian café on the Finchley Road not far from his flat.

Gerry was very different from me. I disagreed with almost all of his opinions about art, literature and music. His thinking became more rigid as he grew older. He started off by insulting me, and he could often be rude or dismissive. But he was also kind, soft-hearted despite his professed hatred of sentimentality, unfailingly stimulating, and great fun to be with. I find I miss his company a lot. If I find a curious fact about London, or some literary connection to a place, I wish Gerry was still around to share it with. He has left me with that eternal mystery: how can a creature so vivid and full of life just disappear and be no more?

Robert Johnstone  was born in Belfast in 1951. He worked for 12 years on Fortnight magazine as film and book critic and deputy editor, and for ten years as co-editor of The Honest Ulsterman. His poetry books are Breakfast in a Bright Room and Eden to Edenderry. His prose books are Images of Belfast (with Bill Kirk) and Belfast: Portraits of a City. He edited All Shy Wildness, an anthology of animal poems, and Selected Short Stories of Thailand by William Peskett, and co-edited Troubled Times. He has won the Walter Allen Prize, Beck’s and Arts Council bursaries, and Eden to Edenderry was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He now lives in London, where he studies jazz.

Cartoon: Gerald Mangan