I’ll Drop You A Line: A Life With David Marcus
by Ita Daly
(Londubh Books. €14.99)
David Marcus was literary editor of the Irish Press during the paper’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most influential figures in Irish culture, he gave a start to many young writers.
After offering advice and encouragement over coffee he would take his leave of his latest discovery with a favourite phrase of his, reproduced in the title of this affecting memoir by his wife, the writer Ita Daly.
He arranged to meet the young teacher after she sent him her first finished short story. He seems to have fallen for her at first sight. The lapsed Jewish man and lapsed Catholic woman courted and wed in a city she describes as little changed since the time of Joyce, one in which Catholics, Protestants and Jews stuck with their own.
‘Marrying-out’ was unusual in those days: Daly’s mother didn’t reach for the Bristol Cream when her daughter announced her plans. But she soon warmed to Marcus, as most did, for he was a gentle and polite man, generous with his time and advice, concerned above all not to give offence.
A sense of his mortality haunted Marcus after he lost a dear cousin during his teens. At the time the Nazis were advancing everywhere. In Ireland Jews would go to bed, suitcases packed and plans made for the day the invader landed – in 1940 a very real threat.
Marcus would barely have been into his twenties when he heard or read terrifying confirmation of the macabre rumours that had been circulating for years about the mass-killing of his people.
His awareness of the proximity of death may have accounted for his long pensive silences, and his solitary nature. For him the world was a place of ‘danger and pain’.
Garrulous, argumentative and intelligent, Daly provided much of the scant pleasure he found in life, and bore him his beloved daughter Sarah. Persuading him that they should bring a child into the world took no little effort on her part.
She did not intend to write a ‘cosy’ book. As almost 20 years separated them, she knew from the beginning that they would not grow old together. With almost unbearable candour she recalls his decline, as dementia closed the mind and coarsened the personality of her ‘poor, depleted husband’.
Daly’s slim book is dense with detail and emotion; it is beautifully written: she has more than confirmed David Marcus’ belief in her literary abilities.