Essays: Librarians, Poets and Scholars: A Festschrift for Dónall Ó Luanaigh Edited by Felix M Larkin Four Courts Press, 367pp. €55Light is an appropriate metaphor for a library, particularly one of our great cultural institutions. The National Library has been a place of enlightenment for many.
Readers have included struggling undergraduates, poor scholars and writers - the most famous was James Joyce. Mary Lavin set her short story A Lucky Pair in the library and its environs.
This book honours Dónall Ó Luanaigh, who has retired after 43 years as a professional librarian. His dedicated, unobtrusive public service epitomises the National Library staff.
Many of the essays in this volume are revised versions of papers read to the National Library of Ireland Society. They vary in quality but the book is worth acquiring for the contribution of Owen Dudley Edwards alone. His lecture performance is now buttressed by an array of sparkling footnotes. With idiosyncratic brilliance, Edwards argues that Shaw rejected, not Christ's teaching, but the mindset that dismisses the Sermon on the Mount as "tosh". He goes further than Chesterton and Joyce, who agreed that Shaw was an unworldly preacher, insisting the playwright loved Christ: "And in the best tradition of love, he will accept no substitutes".
Edwards sees the popularity of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ in the pre-war years (33 translations published between 1901 and 1914) as relevant to the "sacrificial yearnings" of the generation up to 1916. Although the emphasis on humility in the 15th-century spiritual classic contradicts the theory of Jesus as exemplar, "à Kempis was as reckless as any would-be imitator; but like many another great writer, including Shaw and Pearse, he knew his reader's place". Incidentally, what other scholar has acknowledged Pearse as a great writer?
Further insights follow: Wilde's Selfish Giant presages Pearse's Íosagán; while An Rí, culminating in a child's martyrdom to save his country, "is eerily similar" to Shaw's Saint Joan; and Androcles as holy fool is akin to Pearse as self-depicted in his poem The Fool, written shortly before the Rising. Shaw's preface to Androcles and the Lion, proclaiming the wisdom of Jesus, won him execration from Christian and anti-Christian alike. But time has deepened the message of the play, published as it was amidst wartime hysteria. Edwards hails Shaw "as an evangelist for the Christianity of the future", when men will worship the God of love and not Mars, the god of war.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS IN this treasure-trove of a book include editor Felix Larkin's essay about Caroline Gray and the Freeman's Journal. The daughter of a woman characterised by Dickens in Bleak House, she became the daughter-in-law of Sir John Gray, whose statue stands in O'Connell Street, Dublin. She inherited the Freeman's Journal on the death of her husband in 1888. That great newspaper went into decline when she switched sides and abandoned Parnell after the split.
In a beautiful reflection on poems by Yeats, Clarke, Kavanagh, Montague and himself, Maurice Harmon concludes that most "elegiac occasions" contain the idea of unfulfilled potential. Fergus Gillespie documents Irish-Spanish links and the extraordinary success of émigrés in Spain. Philip III made no distinction between the Irish and Spaniards. Nonetheless, determined that there would be no renewal of hostilities with England, he diverted the Ulster chiefs from La Corunna 400 years ago. Monica Henchy writes on the Irish college at Salamanca. Gerard Long reviews what has been written about the National Library,while Adrian Hardiman contributes a forensic evaluation of Joyce's presentation in Ulysses of the trial of Samuel Childs for the murder of his brother.
Brendan O'Donoghue writes about the Local Government Act of 1898 (which marked a decisive shift in power from the landlord class towards farmers and shopkeepers); Ian d'Alton disclaims the notion that the travails of southern Irish Protestants in 1921-1923 can be compared to the Armenian genocide; and, on a happier note, Dennis O'Driscoll recalls his own reading adventures and those of his precocious brother, Proinsias.
Pace Gerry Lyne's affectionate chronicle of Dónall Ó Luanaigh's career, The Irish Times obituary of NLI former director Patrick Henchy was written, not by Ó Luanaigh, but the present writer. Even Homer nodded. As someone who has spent a significant portion of his life seeking historical truth (and congenial company) in the National Library, this review is a welcome opportunity to add my tribute to that "sacred space".
Brendan Ó Cathaoir is a historian and journalist