Review

 Adrian Frazier is a graduate of Pomona College (BA 1971), Trinity College Dublin (Diploma in Anglo Irish Literature, 1973), and Washington University in St. Louis (MA 1976; Ph.D 1979). He has been on the faculty at Nanjing Teachers University (1979-81), Union College in New York (1981-2000), and the National University of Ireland at Galway (2000-), where he teaches at the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies and the MA in Writing. He has published on Irish poetry, drama, and fiction of the 20th century. Adrian Frazier’s current teaching at NUI Galway includes courses in the history of the sonnet, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Irish literary revival, Irish drama, creative nonfiction, and reviewing. His research interests take in biography, nonfiction, literary history, the teaching of writing, 20 th century literature, Irish fiction, poetry, and drama, contemporary poetry, movies of ’Golden Age of Cinema,’ John Ford, W. B. Yeats, George Moore, J. M. Synge, and critical approaches rooted in Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin.

Men and Beauty

By Prof. Adrian Frazier

Pat Sheeran was a writer, filmmaker, and teacher at the National University of Ireland, Galway.  In September 2001 he died of a heart attack.  Four years earlier, not long after I arrived in Galway on a research fellowship, I found out what his other friends already knew.  He had a wild genius for sincerity.  (Indeed, as Kevin Barry remarked after his passing, Pat was so “boyishly sincere” he was sometimes baffled by university bureaucracy and its forms of politesse; “he had no other way than sincerity; he flew in under your radar.” )

The evening began in this way: Pat Sheeran caught me by the arm in the crowds on Shop Street in Galway, and pulled me into a pub.  The drinks were not yet drawn when he said that he was shattered; his mother had died.  He had come into money and wanted to spend it as fast as possible.  We should go eat the most expensive meal it was possible to eat in Galway, and drink until everything that had recently passed had been forgotten.  Was I game?

I was game.  As the waiter landed in front of us two saucers with a dozen oysters each, he told me about the film, “The Fifth Province.”  It was set in a place both within and supplementary to the FourProvinces of Ireland, a place in which the impossible always happens.  Pat Sheeran explained that through transcendental meditation he had learned to travel to this other province, striding out of his body while his body slept.  There was such a gleam in his eye as Yeats possibly had when he spoke of talking with the dead.

–So where do you go when you have these out-of-the-body experiences—rooms where ladies are lonely?  But then you would wish you’d brought your body with you, wouldn’t you?More…