This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy.
In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it through a Joycean friend. The work is Beyond the Pale, an immersion into the mind of a character not unlike its author, Patrick Healy, who was an Irish critic and philosopher who spent much of his life in Amsterdam. The whole heavy volume of Beyond the Pale sits before him. It is a little daunting.
Who is Patrick Healy? The Japanese scholar has been finding out, bit by bit. Reliable information is hard to find.
Some of this is by design. Some of it because of the cruelty (or at least indifference) of the writer’s early fate. Healy was a gifted child, but born to an unmarried mother in postwar Ireland, and thus was sent to foster families and to the care of various “Sisters” of the church.
The Japanese scholar has been able to locate a separate, early text published by Healy back in 1985, called Up in the Air and Down. It is a short novella, a stream of consciousness spoken from the point of view of a child living through such a reality. Near the start of this work he reads:
I didn’t have a mummy or daddy because they died just like one of the cats who was Snowy’s mammy and now I remember I cried because the cat would never come back (p.10).
The Japanese scholar likes this detail of the cat. However, he already knows this account of the parents may be an untruth told to the boy narrator, if the character can be said to closely match the real Healy. He finds more of this apparent attempt to placate and to steer the boy’s thinking on the next page:
Sister was my mammy now and so were all the big girls and I was lucky because I had lots of mammies and daddies and Sister said that some little boys and girls have only one and I had lots and I should be very happy and that these two nice people who were going to be my mummy and daddy are waiting for their new boy and I wasn’t to be afraid and they lived far away but we would see them soon, but I wanted to go back and play and why was Sister taking me away and not being my mammy anymore, maybe Sister was going to heaven too, and I was afraid. (ps. 10-11)
The short book ends with the boy narrator affirming his existence in the celestial terms of his day, showing his need for play and exploration:
I am not a secret because God knows who I am even when I play with the yo-yo that goes Up in the Air and Down. (p.55)
All of this is important because the huge, late-life opus the Japanese Joycean will now begin to study is likewise framed around a life in 20th century Ireland. A growing up given form by a dislocation of parenthood, and an attempt to seize upon a renewed existence in young adulthood, through language and music and sensation.
The Japanese scholar knows that the Irish cultural output of books and films addressing the plight of “fallen” women who were separated from their offspring and often pressed into misery and forced labour in laundries and convents has been substantial. Yet here it is: a little-known testament by someone who emerged from such circumstances and sought to form his own mind, rather than let it be formed negatively by them. Not directly concerned with the young boy’s voice, it instead forms an internal, semi-conscious portrait of the man who emerged, grasping life through an adoration of words and ideas.
The Japanese scholar begins to read Beyond the Pale, and he can hear the melodies of Healy’s voice, which he already knows from his epic recording of Finnegan’s Wake. It thrills him that this Joyce-evoking book begins with an unexpected burst of Japanese words: as the “story” (if it is a story) meanders out into existence, we encounter a young Irish lad being tutored in Japanese by a “Viscount Taffe”, who seems to be simultaneously preparing a beef consommé; a consommé “devoutly to be wished.”
Unlike this hypothetical Japanese scholar, in the summer of 2024 I had the opportunity to meet Patrick Healy, in Amsterdam, where he was completing work on Beyond the Pale in a cavernous apartment looking like the workshop of an ancient Egyptian priest. Confined there during Amsterdam’s hard lockdowns, he had begun to submerge more deeply in his memories. This was something of an intimidating foray into his world for me, at first. I had heard stories, including from my own father, and other intellectually-minded people of their generation, about this brilliant and erudite figure. Perhaps more than a little rogueish, he would sit in Bewley’s in 1980s Dublin and mesmerise them all with his sophistry. The reputation for seduction and for cunning behaviour was reinforced for the Healy of that long ago time by many. Yet his life in the meantime, hard to unwind and with very little detail available, made more sense through the encounter with him and with his work. He had invented a career for himself unlike those of his peers: as a scholar he spent significant time in Germany and German archives, mastering that language, eventually settling in Holland where he taught at the university of Delft. HIs links to Ireland were kept in tenuous health over the years. He was a very close friend of the barrister and historian Frank Callanan, also a personal friend, who had sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2021.
Healy—who once performed a read through and recording of Finnegan’s Wake in the early 90s, getting through the whole thing in four days—has a famously fine voice.
Selections from our affable 3-day conversation in Amsterdam follow here. After, you may access the bonus episode to hear more of Patrick reading at length from Beyond the Pale. Don’t worry about the Ariadne’s thread of the story, if there is one. Just try to hear the Irish soul that is alive in his voice. This is, I feel, the best way to savor the hidden currents and magical word play that Healy has worked into his text.
My Mother (at the Time) – Bonus Episode
Available to all our Patreon supporters.https://t.co/5yBxikDm7w— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 31, 2025
Here below are two testimonials from writer and journalist Bridget Hourican and human rights lawyer David Langwallner
Bridget Hourican
I’ve been haunted by a poem of Patrick Healy’s called ‘Stoic Fire’ since I read it maybe ten years ago. The title, and as I recall it, the poem itself, is a kind of oxymoron because fire is passionate, a conflagration, and stoicism is dispassionate, quietly enduring. I think stoic fire describes Patrick.
He is poet, visual artist, art critic, translator, philosopher of aesthetics and novelist. Before he was all those, he was – I’m told reliably by everyone who was there then – the best debater in UCD and Trinity (he attended both). His heckles were legendary, his voice astonishing. Reviewing his translation of Karl Kraus’s epic play ‘Last Days of Mankind’, Eileen Battersby shrewdly noted that ‘Healy’s musicality and feel for the rhythms of speech… possibly explains why his Kraus is so vibrant’. Perhaps the greatest use of his voice is his recording of Finnegans Wake, which my late husband, Frank Callanan told me, he listened to right through one night with Margaret O’Callaghan, and it left them shattered, delirious, in tears, ecstatic. I believe this was one of the things that spurred Frank to write his book on Joyce.
Luke Sheehan introduced me to podcasts, more or less. Before he (or anyone) was making podcasts, he was seeking out unusual and arcane material and people. He would come back and recount his findings in ways that were unanticipated, circuitous, marvellously detailed (by marvellous I mean the detail was not where you would expect it) and funny, always very funny. Luke is also poet, critic and short-story writer but I’ve always thought his great gift was for oral narratives (or as we now call them, podcasts).
Although I know both of them, I’m not quite sure how Luke tracked Patrick down and got him on the record, but what a fabulous thing that he has done this, and that we have Patrick’s voice telling his story and exploring his ideas, in this immensely subtle and moving curation by Luke. I noticed, very early on when I was with Frank, that every time he mentioned Patrick’s name, someone would whip round and demand with fierce urgency ‘Patrick Healy? where is he?’ It is like Luke to have acted on his own fierce urgency and brought us this.
David Langwallner
