To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Oliver St John Gogarty, poet Eamon Grennanfêtes a great talker still worth talking about.
What a mixed "character" he was. Oliver St John Gogarty: cyclist, surgeon, motorist, aviator; poet, parodist, wit, talker extraordinaire; bohemian and bourgeois, hobnobber with lords, slummer in pubs (as well as, in his student youth, the infamous red light "Kips" quartier of Dublin); committed Irish nationalist, passionate conservative, senator, assassins' target. A legendary denizen of Dublin's clubs and dining rooms, he practised medicine for a time in fashionable London. Surgeon to the rich, he administered gratis to the poor. Living a life of personal and professional privilege, he was a vocal advocate of improved social conditions for the scandalously housed poor of Dublin. Comic blasphemer, irreverent skeptic, praised as Dublin's "arch-mocker and wit", he was the generous friend of priests and nuns. Conservative as he was, and no democrat, he, like Yeats, found himself on the liberal side in many Senate debates, remarking apropos the sexually infantilising censorship bill of 1929, "It is high time the people of this country found some other way of loving God, than by hating women".
The model for Joyce's scatalogical, scabrous, anti-semitic, manically energetic Malachi Mulligan, he was also Yeats's "great lyric poet of the age". A delicate, classically inflected lyricist, he was the best bawdy limerickist of his time, as well as a sharp-tongued satirist, and author of medical papers, novel autobiographies, and autobiographical novels. He was a Big House host, a hotelier, a political exile. A Dubliner by birth (in 1878), he fell in love in 1906 with a small, north-west corner of Connemara, when he married Martha Duane of Moyard and became - from 1917 - a long-term intermittent resident of Renvyle. Committed to the new Ireland, loving and admiring Griffith and Collins, he left the country in disgust when DeValera (whom he loathed as a "sixpenny Savonarola", "a cross between a cormorant and a corpse") came to power. Loving Dublin and Ireland, he lived in the US from 1939, becoming in time a citizen, and visiting home only on a few occasions from 1945. Residing mostly in New York, a city he embraced for its freedom after the constraints of Dublin, he supported himself by writing novels, poems, essays, and by lecturing (doing for money, as he said, what he did for nothing in Dublin - talking). He died there in 1957, and, on his final return to Ireland, was buried not far from his beloved Renvyle.
Given such a multiplicity of selves, it's no wonder Gogarty has been hard to fit into the larger historical and literary picture, and may now seem no more than a dim, dated, slightly unreal, footnote figure. In his own time, though, he was an irrepressible force in the making of modern Ireland - at the centre of the cultural, social, political and literary life of the country as it moved through revolution and civil war to the beginnings of its independent identity as a state. I suspect his dream was to reconcile the various strands of Irish identity - city and country, Protestant and Catholic, Anglo and Gaelic, rich and poor - to make a nation of eclectic natives, to achieve a national identity that would, I suppose, be the equivalent on a grand scale of his own various, bewildering, yet - as far as he must have been concerned - kinetically integrated personality.
Legend has it that Gogarty drove his buttercup-yellow Rolls Royce from his Dublin residence in Ely Place to his country house on the Renvyle peninsula, a distance of 200 miles, in four hours. Whatever the truth of this, and whoever cowered in silent terror beside him, two things are likely: that Gogarty never stopped talking; and that in making this journey he was changing worlds, exchanging the Dublin of dinner tables, pubs, clubs and incessant talk for the stony fields, windswept mountains, gleaming lakes and surrounding sea of the west of Ireland, a place of silence and contemplation where this gregarious man - like the young Yeats dreaming in London of Innisfree - knew he would "have some peace".
IT WAS, HOWEVER, no "small cabin" Gogarty bought from its long-time owners, the Blake family, in 1917. With a history traceable to Grace O'Malley's time, the striking "sea-grey house" of Renvyle was long, low, heavily slated, with many fine-panelled rooms. Among these, the only one with a barred window was reputedly haunted by a "well-authenticated", doleful ghost, who, because he disturbed their honeymoon, was to suffer a chiding from those well-authenticated occult-diviners, Mr and Mrs WB Yeats ("You must cease to moan about the chimneys . . . You must not move furniture . . ." ). Fittingly, maybe, a later haunting was reputedly by the ghost of WB himself.
Although he did find peace in Renvyle, Gogarty also filled his Connemara house with talkative friends such as J P Mahaffy, Augustus John, Yeats and many others. After it had been destroyed by IRA action in the Civil War (in February 1923, when Gogarty was a Free State Senator), it was rebuilt, and re-opened in 1930. To meet some of the rebuilding costs, it was opened as a hotel. Gogarty, who had daringly escaped a Civil War assassination attempt by swimming across the Liffey, records his own characteristically fearless response to the destruction of Renvyle House in his peculiarly put together, but compelling autobiography, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street: "Why should they burn my house? Because I am not an Irishman? . . . I will not conform to type".
In fact, as "mercurial" as Malachi Mulligan, Gogarty spent his whole life not conforming to type, leading an entirely independent existence that indifferently combined convention and radical eccentricity, and which, with all its flaws and shortcomings is marked by many kinds of courage. In addition, brimming with self-confidence, he was unflinchingly self-aware and blessedly free of self-regard. When Yeats included a ridiculously generous selection of his poems in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Gogarty's dry response suggests he wasn't over-dazzled by his poetic coronation. "What right have I to figure so bulkily? None from a poetical point of view."
Gogarty's love of Renvyle sets him among that generation of lrish Romantics and Revivalists for whom the west was the site of authentic Irishness - of magic, mystery, beguiling landscapes, a "fairyland". His relationship with it is more topographical than sociological. He was well known in the area: he fished the lake, boated and seal-hunted on the sea, employed local people, attended some in his medical capacity (including some of the boys incarcerated in the awful "industrial school" of Letterfrack). But his class bias was pronounced, and the fact that he referred to the local people as "peasants", while it need suggest no disrespect, does imply a kind of detachment of feeling that locks the natives of the place into a certain fixed (lower) social role. In this he typifies a problem at the heart of aspects of the Literary Revival itself, and one affecting, to one degree or another, its major representatives. In Gogarty's case, though, it can seem odd, since his poems dealing with Dublin's poor are sociologically alert, humane and sympathetic.
When it comes to his sincere love for the west, then, it is almost exclusively for its beauties of landscape, seascape and mountainscape that he cherished the place, as well as for a few of its inhabitant "characters". The shifts of light, the sudden changes of weather, the mutations of colour and shape on sea and stone and in the dramatic or melodramatic action of the clouds; how the islands of Inishark, Bofin, Achill and Clare can be besieged by huge waves, or ghosted by mist, or lie like great green-humped beasts on a glassy sea; the way light plays on his "plum-blue" Letter Hill or on the Bens, or how Croagh Patrick, Mweelrea, and the Mayo coast appear and disappear in haze; all implied (as they still do) a constancy at the heart of perpetual change, and must have spoken to him of something in his own elaborate, endlessly mobile diversity of being. Always interested in the "reconciliation" of differences, the place became a metaphor for that possibility "at the extreme end of Europe", where "the incongruities flow together at last, and the sweet and the bitter blended".
IN ADDITION, AND maybe most importantly, the place signified for him a kind of personal freedom impossible in his Dublin life. As well as a locale in which to entertain his friends, it was his refuge and lyric inspiration, prompting a number of stylish if conventional poems of praise and celebration, as well as some fine passages of descriptive prose. I suspect, too, that some of that real love for what, while living in New York, he nostalgically called "the loveliest spot on earth", was unspoken; that what he felt about himself when he was living there never actually achieved speech. The place, that is, for this extraordinarily articulate man - an incessant talker, formulator, opinionator, one who lived in language - represented the limits of the sayable. He repeats on a number of occasions his love of the "blessed silence" there, where "you wouldn't have to talk at all".
In his biography of Gogarty, Ulick O'Connor remarks that he "was one of a small group who created the literature of modern Ireland". Celebratory, satiric, bawdy or lyrically descriptive, what his poems share is an able sense of form, an energy of expression, a good musical ear, a lively allusive intelligence. What they lack is any real sense of risk, of bending convention into new ways of thinking. For him, poetry was a means of saying what was already known, not an agent of discovery in itself. Pleasant and pleasing, with their own instinctive facility, pouring lively thoughts and feelings and descriptions into "the mould of rhyme", striking recognisable notes of love, melancholy, and natural description, they seldom agitate as strong poems do. They have, however, their own worldly, skilfully executed life as performances: the poet plays on metrical language like a good pianist playing known melodies.
Aside from some fine lyrics, and a few bracing poems of stoical affirmation, the best of the poems for me are those where he takes himself least seriously, writing expert and effective light verse. His sprightly, ballad-like version of Leda and the Swan, his exuberant, irreverent urban pastoral, Ringsend, his almost Yeatsian The Old Woman of Beare (cousin to Crazy Jane), or his pieces of colloquial ventriloquism - all have pith and lilt and sprezzatura. There are, too, a few that deal revealingly with serious subjects, such as his uneven elegy for Yeats or his socially engaged, angry Angels - about a Liffey-side Italian stone carver working in the midst of a squalid Dublin, the appalling conditions of which, in Ulysses, outraged the normally cynical Buck Mulligan.
AS TO THE prose: certainly Tumbling in the Hay and As I Was Going Down Sackville Street should be in print, in full. Minor as they are, and incoherently plotted (Gogarty is an arch digressionist, unable to resist a pun, a joke, or an anecdote), both deserve to be placed on a shelf not only beside O'Casey and Flann O'Brien, but beside Ulysses - for the way they cross the style of the seanachaí with that of the sophisticated wit; for the impeccable ear they have for Dublin patois; for their exuberant, often hilarious portraits of the young men of Dublin at the beginning of the last century, and the grown men who talked and fought their way to an independent Ireland.
Predictably, of course - aside from a few extravagantly portrayed women of Nighttown and the various female objects of his praise in the poems - it's an almost exclusively male world Gogarty creates.
More generally, a selective "Gogarty Reader" would be a worthwhile publishing venture, containing extracts of the longer works, some essays, maybe even a sample scene from Blight, his "slum play" (the first of its kind), and a good gathering of his best poems. (A large annotated volume, The Poems and Plays of OSJG, was in fact published in 2001.) Such a compendium would reveal an impressive literary energy, a fascinating voice, and would open another window - at once idiosyncratic and conventional - into a time only available to us now in the writings of poets, novelists, and historians.
Properly condensed and understood, Gogarty may be seen as the clown prince of the Irish Literary Revival. His life - including its darker elements: his class bias, casual racism, and his anti-Semitism, for which he was punished in a famous libel case - reads like a picaresque novel orchestrated by what Yeats called "confused exuberance", and if its ending seems to us a little sad and deracinated (exiled in Manhattan and planning a final return to Ireland), the whole life and its productions remain, for all their flawed elements, something that, in their zest, variety, and boundless, idiosyncratic energy, their being courageously, optimistically and essentially on the side of life, are worth keeping in the public mind. In many ways a genuinely gallant spirit, his life-long motto was "the best of times is now". The manner of his life, the headlong speed at which he negotiated its twists and turns, made it unlikely he'd produce work as deep or as important as his major contemporaries. But, for his quicksilver, astonishingly mixed qualities both as writer and man, he is surely (and this may be his proper epitaph) worth talking about.
The Gogarty commemoration runs from Thursday to Sunday in
Renvyle, Co Galway.
A field trip of the writer's Connemara, led by Eamon Grennan
and including a visit to Gogarty's grave at Ballinakill, takes
place on Friday, starting at 2.30pm. Tel: 095-43511.
www.gogartysociety.com