Thomas Flanagan, 78; Wrote 3 Esteemed Irish Historical Novels

Thomas Flanagan, an eminent literary critic, essayist and former UC Berkeley English literature professor who became one of the foremost historical novelists of our time, has died. He was 78.

Flanagan died March 21 of a heart attack at his home in Berkeley.

A Connecticut-born Irish American, Flanagan’s three critically acclaimed Irish historical novels provide what many consider to be the definitive fictional representation of Ireland’s struggle for independence.

His first novel, “The Year of the French,” which portrays Ireland’s ill-fated rebellion against British rule in 1798, was published in 1979, when Flanagan was 55. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle award as the outstanding work of American fiction.

“Mr. Flanagan may not belong with Yeats and Joyce, but he loiters agreeably in their vicinity,” wrote critic John Leonard in the New York Times.

More critical acclaim greeted Flanagan’s next two novels, “The Tenants of Time” (1988) and “The End of the Hunt” (1994).

“What is extraordinary about Tom is that in the framework of apparently conventional historical novels, he wrote books of absolutely dazzling technical virtuosity,” writer John Gregory Dunne told the Los Angeles Times this week.

“The End of the Hunt” is about the Troubles--Ireland’s battle for independence and the internecine conflicts it caused. It has the historical personages of Winston Churchill, Lloyd George and others, but, more important, five distinct, individual fictional voices that he created, and he has them speak in the third and the first person. Each one is indelible.

“It is a book that makes you glad you are a writer.”

Flanagan said working in a historical setting helped his process as a writer.

“I think I discovered myself as a writer by getting away from my own time and my own place,” Flanagan told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994. “The present, I have a hard time dealing with. Writing about Ireland in the past allowed me to find voices I could hide behind.”

The son of an oral surgeon, Flanagan was born in Greenwich, Conn., where he first learned about Ireland from his Irish grandmother.

He was a freshman at Amherst College in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next day he enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacific.

After the war, he returned to Amherst, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He received his master’s and PhD at Columbia University, where he taught and wrote his doctoral dissertation on 19th-century Anglo Irish novelists under the direction of Lionel Trilling.

The dissertation became Flanagan’s first book, “The Irish Novelists: 1800-1890,” a critical work published by Columbia University Press in 1959.

Flanagan had written an unpublished historical novel about China when he was 21, and from the late ‘40s to the late ‘50s he had mystery stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines. He won Ellery Queen’s best story of the year award in 1957.

But after arriving at UC Berkeley to teach in 1960, he devoted his time to scholarly writing.

A year later, Flanagan and his wife, Jean--and their two young daughters--began spending summers and sabbaticals in Dublin, where Flanagan astonished the locals with his knowledge of Irish writers and topography.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but it was all research for the books,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994.

In 1974, the research began to pay off.

Flanagan, who never learned to drive, depended on his wife to drive him to and from the Berkeley campus.

“One day,” he recalled, “she phoned to say she would be a couple of hours late. On impulse, I picked up a pad of blue interoffice paper and began writing. It was a description of a man walking along a strand on the west coast of Ireland. He was wearing a frock coat, a very torn frock coat, so I knew it was in the past. But I didn’t know why I was writing it.”

Flanagan continued writing after he got home, his pages turning into what became the “virtually unchanged” first chapter of “The Year of the French.”

“I began writing novels that irrationally,” he said.

“The amazing thing is that he got started,” said Dick Bridgman, a retired UC Berkeley English professor and longtime friend. “It’s almost unparalleled for someone to start a creative or fictional career when you’re in your 50s, but he was just absolutely saturated in Irish history.”

“The thing about Tom that was the most amazing was his memory,” said Frederick Crews, another retired UC Berkeley English professor. “He never forgot anything. Off the top of his head, he could go back into history and re-create incidents with incredible vividness.

“Everything in the past that had ever come to his notice remained vivid to him, and this was true not only of historical events but also of personal anecdotes. So he was a great raconteur, and a man of dry wit that was quite delicious.”

Over the years, Flanagan wrote numerous book reviews and essays for various publications, including the Los Angeles Times. For the last 15 years, he wrote regularly for the New York Review of Books, primarily on Irish books, writers and other creative artists.

“His prose was absolutely elegant,” said Barbara Epstein, Flanagan’s editor at the New York Review of Books. “There’s a wonderful piece he did recently on [director] John Ford that was just absolutely brilliant.”

New York Review Books, a subsidiary of the New York Review of Books, will publish a collection of Flanagan’s essays--mostly on Irish writers--within a year.

Flanagan left Berkeley to teach at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978. After retiring in 1996, Flanagan and his wife moved back to Berkeley, where they lived in the hills about a mile north of the UC Berkeley campus.

Jean Flanagan died in January 2001.

Flanagan is survived by daughters Caitlin Flanagan of Los Angeles and Ellen Klavan of Montecito, and four grandchildren.