THE novelist and playwright Mervyn Wall died yesterday in St Michael's Hospital, Dun Laoghaire, after a short illness. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, he was born in Dublin in 1908. His wife, the music critic Fanny Feehan, died just eight months ago.
Mervyn Wall was probably the last survivor of the remarkably gifted generation which emerged from UCD in the 1930s. It included Brian O'Nolan, Donagh MacDonagh, Cyril Cusack, Liam Redmond, Denis Devlin, Niall Sheridan, and the shortlived poet Charles Donnelly who died in the Spanish Civil War. Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim TwoBirds contains portraits of many of these people, under fictitious names, and evokes the whole ambience of intellectual student life in Dublin at the time.
Wall spent most of his life as a civil servant, though like other literary civil servants of the period, he often took a satirical view of bureaucracy. Unlike Brian O'Nolan, however, he could play the bureaucrats at their own game and by most accounts he was a highly efficient public servant in his own right. His late novel Hermitage (1982) has some sharp sidelights on the world of Green Tape.
Wall made his mark mainly as a novelist, but he began as a play wright and had at least two works performed in the Abbey Theatre. His first real success came in 1946 with The Unfortunate Fursey, in which he created a mythical monk who is tormented by the Devil; the picaresque humour and fantasy of the story were enjoyed by the public as essentially goodnatured farce, but it is possible that Wall also intended it as oblique satire on the Irish clergy in general, at a time when any open criticism of them might invite trouble. (Fergus Linehan later turned it into a successful musical.)
The first Fursey book had successors, and all of them were published in a single volume in 1985, entitled The Complete Fursey. During the 1950s Wall wrote two "serious" novels of social criticism, Leaves for the Burning and No Trophies Raise, in which his satirical sense took a more direct route. They were praised at the time by respected critics and are still well worth rereading.
Apart from his writing, Mervyn Wall had a distinguished career in Radio Eireann, where he and his colleagues, the novelist Francis MacManus and the poet Roibeard O Farachain, made up a literary and administrative trio nicknamed "Frank, Incense and Mer" by a staff wit. He later became secretary of the Arts Council, a sometimes difficult job which he handled with tact and fairness.
Wall was himself a witty, observant, sometimes catty man in a generation famous for its wit. He and his wife Fanny, who was known as a leading music critic, were for decades an almost indispensable duo in Dublin cultural and social life, although Wall, in spite of his various public roles, was at heart a home loving and industrious man who never sought publicity.
If and when a fullscale cultural history of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s comes to be written, his place in it should be assured. As a successful, long term civil servant, he learned how to work the system in favour of literature and the arts in an age when patronage of them was thin on the ground.