Mercier's Irish Comic Tradition as a Touchstone of Irish Studies

It does not seem accidental that Vivian Mercier's classic book The Irish Comic Tradition was published by Oxford University Press in hardback in 1962, the same year that ACIS, the American Committee (now Conference) for Irish Studies was founded—and in paperback for a wider audience in 1969, the same year that IASIL, the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature (now Irish Literatures) was founded. No less influential an authority than Declan Kiberd has asserted that, with The Irish Comic Tradition, "without ever quite announcing it as such, Mercier had launched the movement that now goes by the name of 'Irish Studies'."¹ Kiberd befriended Mercier in the early 1980s and then replaced him during 1987-88 at the University of California-Santa Barbara after Mercier fell ill. Indeed, Kiberd can now been seen as Mercier's closest successor in Irish Studies, as well as a central leading light in his own right; his comments on Mercier shed significant light on his predecessor as well as on our field in general.

Mercier, as an Irishman teaching in New York City was, in fact, known to the historians and literary critics who linked up to found the ACIS in that same year as his great book. Mercier (who died in 1989) lectured as late as 1985 at the national ACIS conference in Washington State, where he spoke on Shaw. His study of Shaw had begun when, as a mere schoolboy, he struck up a correspondence with the Nobel Prize winner.² As for the international phenomenon of IASIL, Mercier was—in the words of his author's blurb on his 1964 sequel to The Irish Comic Tradition, the Dell anthology Great Irish Short Stories—an "Irishman with a French name who teaches English to Americans at the City College of the City University of New York."³ Later, Richard Ellmann wanted Mercier to succeed him at Northwestern; instead, this peripatetic Irishman journeyed in 1965 to teach at the University of Colorado, for the sake of the health of his first wife, Gina (who died in 1971), before he moved on to Santa Barbara in 1974 and then retired to Dublin in 1987. It was my own honor to be able to correspond with Eilís Dillon, the accomplished novelist whom Mercier married in 1974, and to meet them both in Tacoma in 1985.

Vivian Mercier went way back before ACIS and IASIL. His lofty pedigree is suggested by the striking similarities between Mercier and his fellow internationalized Protestant Irishman, Samuel Beckett. As Mercier himself indicated at the beginning of his long-awaited 1977 book on Beckett, "I entered Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, in September 1928, just over five years after Beckett's departure."⁴ He entered Trinity in 1936, where his roommate was Conor Cruise O'Brien, "at the same age as Beckett had done and was accepted by the same tutor, Dr. A. A. Luce. Like Beckett, I read Honors French with Professor T. B. Rudmose-Brown."⁵ Before Waiting for Godot had even entered Beckett's mind, Mercier had already cleared the path for an appreciation of Beckett's fiction—and pioneered the study of modern Irish fiction in general—in his 1945 Trinity College dissertation, "Realism in Anglo-Irish Fiction, 1916-1940." When Godot did appear, Mercier wrote the description of it that is not only the most famous statement ever uttered about Beckett, but also possibly the most quoted phrase from any critical review by anyone on any subject: It is the "play in which nothing happens, twice."⁶ Deirdre Bair notes that Beckett wrote to Mercier in 1956 after they met in Paris, and Anthony Cronin claims that Beckett named Mercier et Camier (1970) after him.⁷

Mercier remained devoted to Beckett all of his life. Both of them died at the end of 1989. Mercier himself explained at...