A neglected figure in the history of the arts in Ireland

Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant Garde

by Francis Hutton-Williams (Cork University Press, €39.00)

I have long thought highly of Thomas MacGreevy, who managed to be both a Catholic poet, a Parisian friend of James Joyce, an apostle of modernism in Ireland – indeed in Europe – as well as head of our national gallery and leading authority on art in general. In a then conservative country he was eager to embrace and praise the new while preserving the past.

I discussed his poetry at length in my study of the literature (and hence the psychology) of the revolution appearance in my book The Heart Grown Brutal, and from time to time lines and images from his poems still come into my memory on appropriate occasions (the current search for the grave of Red Hugh O’Donnell in Valladolid, for instance).

Aware

But though I was aware in a general way of the later stages of his life, the connecting tissue needed more teasing out than I was able to give it. So I suspect that I am not the only one who will be delighted to see this book by a careful young scholar which manages to pull together into a unity not only the patriot, the poetry, the Parisian literary man, but also the art expert critic and administrator, as well as the deep background of Catholic culture. He fills in countless aspects of art and culture in the years down to the advent of the Arts Council and the Government’s discovery of not only the cultural but also the economic value of the arts in Ireland. Perhaps that is an era the author might now turn to.

Francis Hutton-Williams having studied in Ireland, Cambridge and Oxford now teaches English at Dulwich College. His book is dense with new information of all kinds, but one would have liked it to have been imbued with a bit more personal warmth by the author. In some books these days one longs for something more than the scholarship. But that is probably a personal taste, for the book fills out much that one would like to have known in the past and which will prove of immense value to others now and in the future.

Revives

In a hundred pages or so he revives a man, a poet, and an art lover of determined views, which is a great achievement.(Alas the price, at €2.50 for every page of narrative, seems a little steep. These days readers and reviewers feel that about so many academic books: they are aware, of course, that the volume is aimed at the libraries and not the private shelf; ultimately the taxpayer meets the bill.)

I would think there are many who would love to read this book, but the price places it beyond the reach of many. It is a puzzle to me that Cork University Press, has no wish to reissue classics of our culture – either literary or critical – but only new books that will all too often be seen only in college libraries.

In McGreevy’s case his collected poems, even in the annotated academic edition from the Catholic University Press of America, have long passed out of print. So as MacGreevy grows in critical esteem, his poetry withers away in the memory of his country.

From Homage to Jack B. Yeats

I meditated,

Feared,

The thought experience sent,

That the gold years of

Limerick life

Might be but consecrated 

Lie,

Heroic lives

So often meant

The brave stupidity of soldiers,

The proud stupidity of soldiers wives.

– Thomas MacGreevy