"NICE and soothin', nice and soothin," Dick would smile wryly as he quoted this assessment of his singing style uttered by a fan of his radio programmes in the 1960s. A passionate, complex and often troubled man, it was puzzling to him to be perceived by many people as a gentle giant, as though the fire which he experienced as burning him up appeared to others only as an encouraging light.
And yet this perception on the part of others was perhaps not as inaccurate as all that. All his life he was beset unfashionably with the problems of love and goodness, finding them to be uncomfortably far removed from the deadening placidities in which such concepts are ordinarily embalmed. As a result, he was paradoxically ill at ease with himself, but attuned to others. It was the intensity of this preoccupation which made of Dick, not necessarily a good man but an exceptional one, one of those who avoid succumbing to what Adrienne Rich has called "the worst thing of all the failure to want our freedom passionately enough".
Perhaps it was this that a dear friend saluted, writing from his own hospital bed, when he called Dick the noblest man and friend he had ever known.
That said, what most people will remember is the great warmth, the unfailing hospitality, the irrepressibly dreadful puns. He was, as another friend remarked, a true master of those key arts of civilisation: food, wine and song. An abiding image is of the unabashed and beaming pride with which he would uncork one of his excellent homemade wines for the company. Many circles of friends from many different areas in his life will recognise this picture.
Born in Massachusetts in 1929, the third of five children, and son of a professor of church history in Boston University, as a young adult, Dick, following the pacifist and nonconformist tradition of his family, refused conscription to the US army and was sentenced to serve a year and a day in a federal prison. After his release, he eventually came to Ireland in the mid 1950s and pursued two careers here. First he became a folk singer, then he became a psychoanalyst.
His first impressions of Ireland echo Thackeray's surprise a century earlier at the content of Irish newspapers. In the mid 1950s, as in the 19th century, the newcomer's eye, scanning the headlines for world news, found pride of place accorded to information such as "Bishop confirms 26 children in Mullingar". Dublin too offered serious opposition to Dick's enthusiasm for good food. Only the Jewish shops in Clanbrassil Street provided interest, and even then he had to go to Belfast for spaghetti which came in long blue packages and was mistaken for gel ignite by suspicious Border guards. Not an easy country to adapt to.
Luckily, there was music. Dick was already aware that much of his own huge repertoire of American folk songs had Irish roots and the very first Irish person he met, the owner of the B & B in Gardiner Street where he put up, pointed him in the direction of Radio Eireann. This was the beginning of a fecund 15 year stint as a folk singer, which RTE plans to commemorate later this summer in a tribute devised by his friend and fellow broadcaster, David Hammond.
Eventually his second career that of psychoanalyst, claimed a degree of commitment which left no time for professional singing, but Dick was a very fine singer, with a voice described by an early reviewer as one that he/she would stand in the snow to hear.
Of his career as a psychoanalyst, it is not possible to say very much, since it is a form of work which offers little purchase to public commentary. Those who worked with him know his worth.
During the last months of his life, living in the strange space between fatal diagnosis and death, Dick listened more and more to Irish music, saying that here, as in Beethoven's late quartets, one could touch "the hard flint of the soul". In his reading too, he was exigent, returning over and over to Shakespeare, to Donne and to Beckett. Death when it came was sudden. Oddly, his last words caught him in that gesture he could never recognise in himself, that warmth which caused people to describe him as gentle. He had just conveyed to me something of his mental distress and his great difficulty in speaking when a young nurse appeared at the end of the bed, clearly worried at her inability to help. Seeing this, Dick rallied his strength and, partly to reassure her, partly to protect the privacy of his own suffering, managed to form a calming sentence: "All is well."
May it be so now for you, my love.