“It’s important that we tell the story,” said Bro Vincent when interviewed at the Brothers’ quarters in St. Michael’s Institution in Ipoh where this Irishman, who will be 86 in November, has lived most of his life since his arrival in Malaya in 1948.
The existence of the slender biographical volumes written by Bro Vincent — some 50 of them and each a gem of concision in the way it summarises the essentials of the lives under spotlight — are known to very few and appreciated by even fewer.
This is sad not only because Malaysians do not have an affinity for reading, except perhaps for sensational stuff, but also because they are not drawn to the lives of celibate men who are devoted to moulding young minds.
What can be duller than the chronicles of individuals who live semi-cloistered lives largely focused on the education of the young for the civic duties of citizenship?
In Bro Vincent’s hands, however, these lives are given a luminosity that can make appraisers sit up and take notice.
Call it the Irish touch — brother belongs to the race that gave the literary world James Joyce, W.B. Yeats and Bernard Shaw — or something more mundane, but the annals of several members of the valiant band that processed something like two million students through the portals of some 52 La Sallian schools in Malaysia since 1852, attest to the efficacy of teaching methods that are the subtext of the biographies.
Thus when Bro Vincent came down three years ago with a series of illnesses that signalled the onset of mortality, the occasion opened a deep furrow in the brow of former students who had to mull the question of who would write Bro Vincent’s biography when he passed on.
There was simply no one who could tell it the way he has told it for the others.
So it transpired that the prolific biographer had to do the work himself. The upshot: an autobiography entitled Life Ever Dawning, a quick-paced narrative of Bro Vincent’s life, written with the elegant concision that has marked his oeuvre.
“My purpose was to keep telling the story,” said the author matter-of-factly when drawn on his autobiography at his authorial digs at St Michael’s earlier this week.
The ‘story’ is, of course, the cumulative narratives of the lives of various members of the valiant band that laboured in the cause of educating the young in top-name schools in Malaysia and Singapore.
Life Ever Dawning was published in March by the St. Michael’s Institution Alumni Association Klang Valley, the group of ex-students of the school who live and work in the country’s industrial heart.
The former students must have had some difficulty in persuading Bro Vincent to attempt the task of self-description of his life — “I’m a little allergic to publicity,” the modest author says of himself — but they succeeded and in the process resolved a dilemma that loomed as questions mounted over the author’s health: Who was going to write the life of the prolific narrator of his confreres’ lives?
One would think that with his own life written about, Bro Vincent would finally retire from his writing labours as he had from his teaching ones in 1988 when he turned 60. Not a chance — the writer in him must be emulating Rene Descartes, the Frenchman who inaugurated the age of modern consciousness with his contention: “I think therefore I am.”
Bro Vincent Corkery writes therefore he lives.
