DAVID MARCUS was “an Edwardian gentleman with the soul of a Romantic poet”, the congregation at his funeral was told yesterday.
“He was that most valued product of a love of reading – a patriotic lover of the world,” continued family friend William Wall in one of many moving tributes in the Victorian chapel at Dublin’s Mount Jerome.
“He discovered writers in the way continents were found. They were always there but he seemed to be the first to find them.”
Aged 84, Mr Marcus died at St James’s Hospital, Dublin, last Saturday. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s. His wife Ita Daly spoke of how over the past five months he had been “very well and tenderly looked after” by staff at St James’s, where he had led “a Beckettian existence”.
“By then all he could say was ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘I love you’, so I used tell him stories he had told me about Cork.”
His daughter Sarah told of how he had chastised her when she was three for painting “a beautiful work of modern art” on the living room wall. It was the only time he was ever angry with her. Usually that anger was directed “at Felix, the Government, and those with bad grammar’’. She paid warm tribute to her mother for showing him “so much love and respect”.
Writer Val Mulkerns recalled the "devout atheist'' she met as a young man in Cork. Marcus's sister Nella read from Ecclesiastesand Niall MacMonagle read what if a much of a which of a windby eecummings. Music was by Fionnuala Gill and Josh Johnston.
The service was prepared by the Marcus family "in order to comply with David's express wishes'', said Unitarian minister the Rev Bridget Spain, who conducted it. In conclusion all in attendance sang The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee.
Chief mourners were Mr Marcus’s wife Ita, his daughter Sarah, her husband Tom, his sister Nella, his brothers Louis, Abraham, and Elkan.
The large attendance included playwrights Frank Murphy and Tom Murphy, actor Jane Brennan, writers Eugene McCabe, Dermot Healy, Neil Jordan, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Ronan Sheehan, Anthony Glavin, Vincent Banville, Leo Cullen, Evelyn Conlon, Mary O’Donnell, Judith Mok and Peter Cunningham.
Also present were poets Brian Lynch, Gerard Smyth, Hugh McFadden, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Peter Sirr and Michael O'Loughlin. Former Irish Pressjournalists present included Tim Pat Coogan, Michael O'Kane, John O'Shea, Noeleen Dowling, and John Brophy.
Others present included Irish TimesLiterary Editor Caroline Walsh, critic Brian Fallon, RTÉ producers Seamus Hosey and Bernadette Comerford, documentary makers Seán Ó Mordha and Louis Lentin, academic Ronit Lentin and psychologist Maureen Gaffney.
Also present were politicians Barry Desmond and Liz McManus TD; agents/publicists Jonathan Williams, Margaret Daly, Vivienne Lavery; trade unionist Manus O’Riordan, publisher Peter Smith, former National College of Art and Design director Colm Ó Briain, and Joe Brennan of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
