John Coyle

This photograph taken by Davy Cunningham shows the office of John Coyle at 5 University Gardens, Glasgow. This was the home for many years of the Glasgow Finnegans Wake Reading group, which John led from 2007 until his sudden death on 19 March this year.

Photo of John from the Glasgow Library blog

Like a lot of reading groups, the Glasgow Wakeans went onto Zoom during the Covid lockdown. Invited by Davy Cunningham, who I'd met at a Wake reading in Sweny's in Dublin, I joined in April 2020. The group was on page 67. Over the next six years, we read 225 pages together, with John as a perfect host.

Four years ago, John also started a Ulysses zoom reading group on Monday evenings. By March, we had just reached 'The Oxen of the Sun', a chapter John said he was really looking forward to. I'd have loved to have heard him talk about so many of these literary parodies - his PhD was partly on Ruskin.

At our first Wake meeting following his death, Davy read us this moving poem he'd written:

Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me doornail?

Good morning and welcome to my Wake,
(One moment while I press record)
Today we will be looking at everything from Homer to the last syllable of recorded time,
With particular reference to Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Shakespeare and Wagner,
And occasional references to Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Olivier Messiaen and John Cage.
Your contributions will be welcomed and examined in detail.
Foolishness will be tolerated but gently mocked.
There will be long periods of silence while we try to figure out what it all means.
When we get to the end we will resume from the beginning, obviously.
We’d better get started, because life is…

I think that, for all of us, these Wednesday mornings grappling with Finnegans Wake were a welcome escape from the insanity of the news cycle, and the dark period we've all been going through since 2019.

John was a wonderfully witty man with a great turn of phrase.  We would spend a lot of our time  laughing, usually at something John had said. Here are a few screengrabs I took over the years. 

Nicholas Hayward from the group made a collection of John's pithy sayings, 'John-isms',which he shared on WhatsApp.e.g. 'He's having fun, in the sense of inflicting miseries upon us.' 

We'd been reading the children's games chapter, which John summed up as 'the parasexuial dynamics of teasing and guessing'. At one point, describing the rivalry of Glugg (Shem) and Chuff (Shaun), Joyce writes, 'never cleaner of lamps frowned fiercelier on anointer of hinges' 252.17

John said, 'Why does someone who cleans a lamp have a particular beef against someone who anoints a hinge?'

In February 2025, when the Fweet website disappeared for two weeks,  John wondered if Donald Trump, who'd been threatening TikTok, was behind it. 'They meant to close TikTok and shut Fweet down instead. Finnegans Woke....

I wouldn't joke! The British Library was crippled by cyberattack last year by bad actors. Do you think Musk really wants universities and arts courses to succeed?'

Sometimes John's dog Izzy would join us.

Calum Weir, who is in the centre above, posted this tribute on the group's What'sApp page:

John ran the Glasgow Finnegans Wake Reading Group from 2008. I joined in 2012 as an undergraduate on Glasgow's Joyce course, back when the Wake was held in John's smoky office, where only a handful of students dared go. Before long, in a series of events involving an anonymous artist that we never got to the bottom of, John somehow had found jobs for himself, myself and another undergraduate Sophie, reading Finnegans Wake aloud an hour a day every day at lunch for a month at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow's city centre. Members of the public would wander in and look on, puzzled and bemused. We were each paid £10 for the hour, and would quickly spend it in the Horseshoe Bar afterwards. We managed to get through the whole text in the 30 hours, and it was truly amazing hearing/reading it aloud like that. Looking back, what strikes me isn't just that John did that for a couple of students, but that he was head of department at the time - I find it hard to imagine another department head who would sneak off work every day at lunch for a month, to read Finnegans Wake with a couple of undergraduates. He was such a rare, special person.

There's an online memorial page, where Calum posted another tribute:

'John supervised my undergraduate dissertation on Proust in 2012, and then my M.Litt one on Proust and Adorno in 2013. The supervisions were held on his balcony, looking out across the West End. John had been in Trieste and, at that point, had discovered Campari Spritz with a slice of orange. He'd pick up the oranges in Tesco or wherever, and would cut them with a small penknife he had in his office. And so, for the first or second supervision, out I went to the balcony, Campari Spritz in hand. I had been reading Adorno on music - there's a huge collection of Adorno's essays on music, edited by Richard Lepperd, and I was into the late Beethoven essay at the time, which is only about 4 pages. I was very unsure if reading Adorno on music alongside Proust was a sensible idea at all. I asked John if he'd read the Adorno, and he shook his head. So I produced this massive volume of Adorno's formidable prose and I handed it over to him to read. He immediately snapped into that spotlight-like focus of his, close read the four pages, and softly said, 'It's like he's describing Finnegans Wake'. We went on talk about the other aspects of the essay - the Hegelian polarities, etc. - but in that moment it was like I'd gotten a green light from him, that this was a indeed path worth traversing. I went on to spend ten years writing a PhD with John on Beethoven and modernism. I have no doubt John would laugh at me for wondering whether that came down to a single moment or afternoon but, beginning with those sunny afternoons, John transformed my life. He gave me Proust, Joyce, Rilke, Beckett, music, cycling, a trip to Trieste, a trip to Berlin, countless dinners, and his old Linn speakers, on which I still listen to music. John transformed my life, and it all seemed effortless to him. He was such a rare, special person. My deepest condolences to Anne and the family, but also my deepest thanks - to Anne for her incredible generosity over the years, and to John, for some of the happiest times of my life.'

In 2019, Victoria Miguel organised the Glasgow Mewantamooseicday, a day-long city-wide celebration of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, which included a Wake reading. She shared this memory of John:

'I met him in 2019 when I was organising the John Cage event in Glasgow. Because Cage also organised Wake readings I got in touch with John to be part of the event. I discovered the gap in Cage scholarship that became my PhD during this too and, having met John at the same time, it seemed like perfect timing. I remember asking him if he'd be my superviser and he said that he couldn't think of a better way to spend the last few years until his retirement. I can't think of a better way to say yes to someone. '

Another project John took part in was Radio Benjamin in 2015,  a recreation of Walter Benjamin's lost 1930s radio shows.  

'Supported by the Goethe Institut and the University of Glasgow these seven 23 minute experimental radio documentaries reanimate Benjamin’s scripts by asking expert speakers to read and discuss them in special locations around, over and under Glasgow accompanied by sound compositions from sonic artists Niall Morris and Kyle Stewart.'

John was recorded in Glasgow's Lansdowne church, and you can hear him giving his beautiful reading of Benjamin's novella 'Sketched in Mobile Dust' on soundcloud. 

Here's a lovely elegy, which Adam Piette read at his funeral.

Glasgow, what a man you've lost. Everyone here, what a great good man is gone.

John Coyle was born and raised in Govanhill by parents Eileen and John, with siblings Margaret, Stephen and James. He went to school at Holy Cross Primary, then Holyrood Secondary School, where, typically, he was Dux, but didn't tell his mother; she only learnt it from another kid's ma. He told Nigel Leask that he got through the often tough days in the 1960s and 1970s by getting into French modernism, reading tough books by Joyce & co. He always had a book under his arm, his family remembers, but enjoyed life's pleasures to the full, relishing music (Dylan, Zappa, Steely Dan), had a strange talent for pitch & putt (to rival Beckett and Joyce), and for football at Queens Park (a joyful rowdiness accompanied by encyclopaedic knowledge of Celtic FC). His reading made him choose to study English and French at Uni of Glasgow in 1973, where fellow students remember him as chieftain of the intricacies of knowledge, famously taking over from a befuddled lecturer at a loss as to how to explain Descartes's philosophy, fielding questions with panache and quiet erudition. His year abroad in France he spent as a 'chef de train', railway porter crossed with a guard, and travelled everywhere across France: good model for the mobility and scope of his deep love of the language and culture, for the strength of his train of thought, its digressive powers, laced always with good craic in the carriage at the back. His hunger for books, arts, music blossomed, and he developed lifelong, deep passions for the Irish modernists, Beckett, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, for European modernists, Nabokov, Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, as well as his beloved Proust. Found time to become an expert in American Lit too, his knowledge of Pynchon, DeLillo et al just outstanding. He did his PhD on the relations between Ruskin and Proust, just one beautiful book there, which pondered the weird struggle of both writers with the unknowability of nature and other people, and on 'euphorically intense' moments of creation and vision, the importance too of their important failures to follow through on the 'felt drama of aesthetic discovery'.
After some time teaching English at an FE college in London (Naomi Campbell one of his students) as well as in prisons, he secured a lectureship at Glasgow in 1991, and there began an astonishing 30-year career as lecturer and teacher, seven years as Head of Department (2007-2013). His seminars were witty, demanding, mind-blowing, always taxing students towards passion for the text, towards accuracy, integrity, rich thoughtfulness in their engagements. His teaching was animated and fuelled by daring intellectual theory, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou, but the insights were his own, the zoom-in intimate proximities of his attention, the scope and depth of his reference and knowledge, the colour and wit of his thinking made everything thrill, buzz with living spirit of enquiry and discovery. His lectures were legendary, 'epiphanic moments in the careers of undergraduates', recalls Rob Maslen. They were delivered ex tempore: Adrian Hunter remembered a 1994 lecture on American fiction: 'it is not the subject of the lecture that I especially remember. It is the fact its display of fluency and mordant euphony, served up in a self-effacing Glaswegian ground bass, was wholly unscripted'. The readiness of his wit, the trenchancy and depth of his reading and thinking about art, the warmth of his company made him a treasured and brilliant supervisor of PhDs, giving them privileged access, Adrian writes, 'to a walking, chain-smoking library of modern European thought'. The learning he displayed was inclusive, generous, astonishing, demonstrating through a loving intricate feeling-through of his mind, always with that surprising witty beautiful turn of phrase, a joyful passion for reading, for the arts as interconnecting, as shrewd ways in to the mental struggles, gorgeousnesses and wit of text and cultural event.
John occupied rooms at the top of a winding staircase in Gilmorehill off the quad, and then at the top of no 5 Uni Gdns: I bumped once into Vassiliki Kolokotroni on the Gilmorehill staircase, asked where she was going: 'I'm going to consult the oracle', there in his den of books at the top of his tower like Montaigne, Rilke, Yeats, Beckford. His wisdom, shrewd knowledge of people, exemplary judgment, were resources for us all teaching alongside him: you always knew when a student had drunk deep at John's seminar, they were bolder, more daring, more passionate about things. His books were rare & fine: the Joyce volume, the editions of Ford and Eddie Morgan, the articles on modernism, AmLit, French and European culture, succinct and refreshing, opening up avenues, rich in surmise. His innovations in teaching sponsored the amazing reading groups, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, Proust, Adorno, which gave John the pleasure of listening to a hive mind think, and only a hive mind really could match his! But also it was exemplary of his communitarian sponsoring of loving wicked and probing explorations of writing and the arts in others. One of the joys of those groups was the sudden pause as a thought struck John: we'd all lean in, even on zoom, as he chewed his little finger or tapped his lips, the dimple would appear, the eyebrows crease up, the deep chuckle would sound, and he'd deliver the epic one-liner, the salty, crusty anecdote, the perfect witty rejoinder. As Head of Dept it was his sanity, level-headedness and multi-storey jokes that kept the house of cards from toppling. As Nigel remembers: 'As one of our sanest Heads of Department, John kept us in order during meetings, like the Piranha brothers, by the use of sarcasm, irony, bathos, even litotes': leadership through incandescent wit.
The making of him, absolutely, was his partnership with Anne: they met [ ...] and their home in Clarkston with the wonderdog Izzy, brought back with such extraordinary zeal from Portugal, was a haven, a quiet space bristling with their bright and sprightly talk, plans, sketch-portraits of people and story. Their loving togetherness, and the way they both weathered the trials and tribulations of health and work together, in tender concert, their bond was and remains a thing of beauty for all who knew and loved John. Apart from their pleasure-seeking trips to Portugal and Lanzarote, Anne accompanied John to the Trieste summer school, and I was lucky enough to be there one summer: I remember an evening after a day at the conference, we gathered at Brian Doherty's palatial hotel room, Brian nudged me, said this is going to be good. I knew what he meant: we were about to enjoy the full unrestricted display of John's wit, there on the enormous terrace-balcony overlooking Joyce's city, looking along the coast to Duino, our glasses charged, but more importantly our hearts charged with love of the man and of his grace, elegance, robustness of mind. acerbic turn and twist of tongue. Later, I was with him on another balcony, this time at Duino Castle where Rilke wrote his elegies, one of which we've heard today. Swifts whistled and screeched around us in the mild Italian air overlooking the Adriatic: 'ah, Rilke's angels', John murmured, making a sudden deep intuitive leap of understanding of the poetry he loved, changing my sense of those strange and beguiling poems forever.
Covid robbed poor John of the love of his sporting life, cycling, but before it did, it did such wonders for him. His accounts of his solitary 100-mile trips, his companionate runs with other cyclists, Adrian, Rob and others, and the stories that emerged, all paid tribute to his vital connection to Scotland and its byways and landscapes, but also to his love of story-telling and good talk. Nigel remembers an epic journey when JC stopped off at his house in Morvern: 'He'd cycled all the way up through Appin from Oban, over the Corran Ferry to Loch Sunart, and then heaving uphill from Loch Sunart to Beach, before the rewarding downward glide through the White Glen to Lochaline'. John told Adrian in 2013 that he'd managed the Bleach na Ba, the twisting stupidly steep Western Ross road, amazingly: 'Only got off for 30 yards', he wrote, 'after a revving Porsche forced me to stop and I couldn't get the bike to move again except in a skittery downward spiral'. 'Skittery downward spiral' - the language has lost a mighty wordsmith. The love of cycling was matched by his love of music, especially Beethoven, Wagner, Messiaen, Berg, Mahler, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Janacek. 2013 he enjoyed the Ring conducted by his favourite conductor, Daniel Barenboim. The arts, too: he'd often invite colleagues to sneak off to the Hunterian before a class. And he made connections: Calum Weir remembers him securing payment for himself, Calum and Sophie to read Finnegans Wake at the Transmission Gallery every lunchtime for a month: and this while Head! He and Anne relished life, relished good food and wine, a fine film, or TV sitcom (Gary:Tank Commander was one he particularly enjoyed). the conferences he organised and those he most enjoyed were ones with maximum conviviality, chances to enjoy good talks and good talk at tables after the good talks.
John was that rare thing, a mighty good man. A good man is hard to find? I didn't find that to be true. He was always to be found, at Clarkston, with Anne and Issy, or in the French Horn in the West End in good company. He was always there as an extraordinarily generous, inspirational, witty, charming fount of wisdom, good cheer, warm and unbounded goodness of heart. A matchless companion, a loving husband, amazing uncle, son, brother, he was above all things a good friend to us all: always there as powerfully good great man. Let's celebrate that goodness, its robust and uncompromisingly ethical kindness, warmth and advocacy of all things good in the world, yes let's celebrate the matchlessly great and good John Coyle, in our minds and in our hearts.

There is also a tribute to John from the Ford Madox Ford Society which you can read here.