A Note about Joe

Dave Alvey

I became a friend of Joe’s over twenty years ago when he had given up both alcohol and tobacco. At the time he was editing the Heresiarch, “a journal of anti-theology”, and developing the Athol Books website. He introduced me to subjects I knew nothing about: US crime fiction, French cinema, Bob Dylan, the art of Amedeo Modigliani. Interesting as these topics were, our most animated conversations happened, invariably, when we got to talking about our experiences in the British and Irish Communist Organisation.

Once when he was staying in Dublin, he came with me to my mother’s house in Clontarf. She had a paying guest at the time, a French academic. As the evening wore on Joe and the guest fell into conversation about French poetry. I remember being surprised at the reverence with which the Frenchman began treating Joe. He told me he had never encountered anyone with such knowledge, even in France.

Joe was a thorough Francophile and could recite the poetry of Apollinaire in very passable French, even if it had a strong Belfast twang. He was also familiar with Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and other figures in French literature whose names I don’t recall, although the artistic milieu inhabited by Apollinaire in the Quartier Latin district of Paris in the early nineteen-hundreds remained the chief focus of his Francophilia. In any case he talked about it a lot.

On another occasion Joe and I went for a walk to Bullock Harbour in Dalkey in south Dublin. At the time the small harbour was presided over by Peter O’Halloran, then chairman of the Bullock Harbour Association—whenever Peter was there the tricolour flew from a flagstaff. I knew Peter from having made videos of the “blessing of the boats” celebrations, the previous year, and he invited us into his quarters for tea and a chat. It started to rain hard, so a few of the fishermen joined us, and a sing-song ensued. What surprised me that day was the number of old ballads Joe had and how good a singer he was. He had a poet’s appreciation for the traditional songs.

There are many other stories I could tell of times spent in Joe’s company: he had that sort of character. In endless variations, he and I engaged in the same conversation over about twenty years. He thought me delusional because I tend to be optimistic about the influence that Athol Books literature is having, and I made no bones about telling him he had lost his way politically. He could knock a lot of fun out of those arguments.

Being, in his own words, a “respiratory cripple”, the pandemic represented an occasion of dread for Joe. It is very sad that a series of malign infections prevented him from coming out the other side of it.

Dave Alvey