It would be an exaggeration to call Niall Montgomery the forgotten man of 20th-century Irish art and letters – the field of candidates may be too crowded for that. But considering how he helped illuminate the fame of other main protagonists, his neglect does seem at least a little unjust. He was probably Ireland’s greatest Joycean critic of his era. He introduced Beckett (a long-time friend) to an American readership. And he was an actual collaborator with Brian O’Nolan, aka Myles na gCopaleen, at a time when, as the great satirist himself would have said, it was neither profitable nor popular.
Like O’Nolan, he had a day job. Unlike O’Nolan, Montgomery enjoyed his, remaining an architect all his working life. In that sense at least, his monuments survive. But he was also a poet, a playwright, a portraitist, and what would now be called an installation artist, none of which was well-enough known even at the time of his death in 1987.
Voluminous records
Happily, his centenary (it passed in June) has not gone unnoticed beyond friends and family. This is largely thanks to Christine O’Neill (née Bernhard), a Swiss-born former student of his who, years in advance of the anniversary, took it upon herself to mine his voluminous records and turn them into a new book,
Niall Montgomery – Dublinman
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As her introduction explains, Montgomery was himself the product of a celebrated Dublin wit, his father James. When the latter died, Oliver St John Gogarty – a family friend – lamented him as the “soul of the city”.
And a measure of the rarified childhood he had given his son was the latter’s literary debut, a prize-winning school essay, written at age 12 (and included in the book), arguing in favour of Arthur Griffith as the greatest-ever Irishman.
Griffith had been another friend – so close that, before attending a public meeting in Sligo in 1922 at which he expected to be assassinated, he left a farewell statement with Montgomery snr (and after surviving Sligo, told him to keep it – he’d need it soon enough).
Architecture
The younger Montgomery studied architecture in UCD, and among his early projects post-graduation was helping create Ireland’s first modernist masterpiece, the Dublin Airport terminal.
Later he would win awards in his own right for such work as transforming the old Ormond Castle Stables into the Kilkenny Design Centre. And when he wasn’t practising architecture, he was writing about it– often to defend Georgian Dublin against the Philistines.
But literature was as real to him as buildings. His grasp of Joyce's work so thorough that, when he wrote a long, enormously detailed essay on Finnegans Wake for a US journal, Myles na gCopaleen quipped that the book would henceforth be seen as an introduction to the critique.
In similar vein, after Montgomery completed another epic (“a three-month job”) on Beckett, and sent the draft to Paris for the subject’s approval, Beckett praised it warmly and claimed: “I learned a lot about myself I didn’t know and hadn’t suspected.”
In the case of Myles, of course, the relationship went well beyond criticism. If O’Nolan was both father and son of the Cruiskeen Lawn column, two Nialls (Montgomery and Sheridan) combined as an occasional unholy ghost in a trinity of authorship.
Shared interests
Their similar humour aside, Montgomery and O’Nolan shared many interests, including a love of Irish, fierce pedantry, and a vocation to defend Dublin against “turnip-snaggers” (O’Nolan’s term) and “mad gurriers from Kerry” (Montgomery’s). So who wrote which columns, exactly, remains uncertain, but O’Neill’s book includes two that she says were definitely Montgomery’s.
It wasn’t always a happy arrangement. When in 1964, Montgomery began his own column, as “Rosemary Lane”, O’Nolan – a sick man by then – wrote to him in a rage against what he saw as both plagiarism and treachery. The column was suspended, then resumed, and finally abandoned during their epistolary civil war.
Gentle word
But even amid the bitterness, Montgomery had a gentle word. It was the last word too – being an advance obituary for O’Nolan that the paper, in standard practice, had quietly commissioned, just in case. When it was published, two years later, O’Nolan’s widow considered it the finest of all the tributes.
It was the obit writer's turn for praise at the Irish Architectural Archive on Wednesday night, when Niall Montgomery – Dublinman was launched. He received a suitably witty eulogy from another former friend, Edward McParland, who summed him with a line Montgomery himself had used of O'Nolan: "There was nothing noticeably ordinary about him".
O’Neill’s handsome book, complete with colour reproductions of art and architecture, illustrates the point well.