In Paris, you can visit the homes of Hugo and Balzac. But in Dublin, offices will soon occupy the last home of W.B. Yeats Rosita Boland reports
In Dublin, we tend to send tourists who are looking for links with our literary past off to the public houses that were frequented by writers instead of to the houses they lived in. Dublin has popular literary pub crawls, but pitifully few writers' houses where you can go to get a sense of the writer in the context of the home where they once lived and worked.
In other cities around the world, such as Paris, Prague, London, St Petersburg and Wellington, the past homes of national writers are preserved, open to the public, and taken seriously as cultural landmarks. For instance, in Paris you can visit the Victor Hugo museum, where Hugo lived for 26 years, and which first opened to the public as long ago as 1903; in St Petersburg, you can see Dostoyevsky's last apartment, which is still filled with memorabilia relating to his life; in Wellington, the house where Katherine Mansfield spent her early years is closed only one day of the year. There are very many others throughout the world. However, in Dublin, the nearest a tourist gets to most of our literary heritage is by having a pint in a pub.
Within the month, Riversdale estate, the Rathfarnham last home of poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, will see developers moving in. The 18th-century farmhouse off Ballyboden Road where Yeats lived and worked from 1932 until his death in 1939, will be converted into 10 office spaces, overlooking a new car-park. New houses will be built on the site, some between the road and the existing house, others behind the house.
In the second volume of Roy Foster's biography of Yeats, The Arch Poet, he describes in detail the estate of Riversdale, "picturesque, but without pretension". George Yeats painted her husband's ground-floor study in lemon yellow. The study's French windows opened on to what was then 13 acres of grounds; rose gardens, orchards of apples and cherries, a croquet lawn, bowling green, tennis court, and conservatory. The family kept hens. They installed a phone. Michael Yeats went to school in nearby St Columba's. It was, quite simply, their home.
It was at Riversdale that Yeats' 70th birthday was celebrated by his family. Here he kept a weekly salon, where writers and politicians of the day came to talk and discuss ideas. Here he wrote some of his famous last poems in the morning times. Here he had his last meeting with Maud Gonne, the woman who had always haunted both his life and work.
It was in Riversdale that Yeats wrote the poem, What Then?
All his happier dreams came true -
A small, old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'
What then, indeed. In 1999, developers Roy Begley and Gerard Clarke bought the three-acre Riversdale estate for £1.53 million (€1.95 million).
Their original planning application was to demolish the period house - still occupied, and in good order to this day - and build 28 apartments in its place. There was protest at the proposal from a number of quarters, including An Taisce, a group of academics and writers, and members of the public.
The original planning application to demolish Riversdale was refused. The house was deemed a protected structure by the State; it was the first case under the 1999 Planning Act, where revised legislation made provision for architectural heritage.
Last summer, permission was finally granted for the construction of three substantial detached houses, three mews houses, a car-park, the conversion of Riversdale House into office spaces, and demolition of derelict outbuildings. Niall Clarke, for the developers, confirmed to The Irish Times that work on the site will start in March, and is projected to finish in September.
Riversdale House itself has been preserved - albeit for functional and soulless office space - but the context, setting, and atmosphere of the house will change totally once the site is built on. The developers are merely doing what developers are entitled to do; trying to turn as much profit on the site as possible. The responsibility for preserving Riversdale as a cultural centre has never lain with them. The true shame is that the land was ever bought by developers at all.
While it would clearly be impractical to buy and preserve every house with cultural associations that comes up for sale in the country, we appear to be going in exactly the opposite direction - preserving nothing at all. The only conclusion to be drawn from our continuing national apathy about such houses as Coole Park, Bowenscourt, and now Riversdale, is that unlike other countries, we actually don't care at all about our literary and cultural heritage.
"After the loss of Coole, you'd think we would have learned by now," says Roy Foster.
"It's a great shame that something wasn't done for Riversdale: it would have made an excellent Yeats museum." Foster says the interest in Yeats is already solid and consistent, with Sligo getting "an enormous wave of Yeats tourism".
Sligo - where there is no former Yeats home open to the public - attracts tourists on an annual basis; to his burial place at Drumcliff, to the Sligo landscape he wrote about, and to the Yeats Summer School. "The development of Riversdale is very symbolic as an example of profit being valued above cultural identity," says Foster.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a poet, TCD lecturer and a member of Aosdána. "To turn Riversdale into offices - it's a very obtuse way of using a building which has heritage value. People don't have ownership of offices, or any access to them."
Terence Brown, author of W.B. Yeats, A Critical Biography, says, "It seems to me that there is not much sense of an overall commitment and policy to exploit creatively our literary inheritance." Brown says that protests to developments such as Riversdale tend to be left to local action groups, rather than being attended to at a more influential level.
Gerald Dawe, poet and director of TCD's Oscar Wilde Centre of Creative Writing, says: "This isn't just about Riversdale. In a way, Riversdale is symptomatic of what has been going on for years and years. It's the entire attitude we have here to our cultural legacy. There is very little interest in preserving or promoting Irish culture.
"You go to Prague or Paris - you name any city - and you can visit a writer's house. There is a real commitment to preservation abroad.
"This would have been a perfect opportunity for us to use Riversdale, as a house with literary connections, as a residence for visiting writers. They could have stayed and worked there, met other writers. That won't happen now."
Yeats's poem, An Acre of Grass, is also about Riversdale. It opens:
Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.
The acre of green grass will shortly be no more. And from September, the only mouse that stirs in Riversdale House will have a computer firmly attached to it.