Daniel Binchy in Berlin. Photo credit: Ullstein Bild/ Getty Images The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual
by Tom Garvin
(Irish Academic Press, €24.99 pb / €70.00 hb)
W. J. McCormack
Biography in Ireland is generally restricted to great writers, lesser politicians and showbiz. Scientists and intellectuals attract little attention. Tom Garvin bids well to upset the applecart.
Daniel Binchy was born in 1899. By the time he died in 1989, his name was synonymous (for those who cared about these things) with Celtic studies. Yet during his 90 years, he provoked the ire of continental dictators, taught in UCD, did research in Oxford, served in External Affairs and was recruited (Garvin’s term) by the British Foreign Office to write Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford, 1941).
For this long book, he prepared by arranging an audience with Leo XIII, holding that democracy and Catholicism were natural allies in the era of totalitarianism. In 1950, he became a professor at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. His magnum opus, Corpus Juri Hibernici, was published in 1978.
Garvin’s problem and triumph lie in handling the several lives; the political and the scholarly. In the first connection, Binchy had early acquired friends among American and British diplomats during his stint (1929 to early 1932) as Irish Minister in Berlin. The latter included Harold Nicholson; the habit hardly commended him to the incoming anti-treaty Dublin government.
Personality
Garvin neatly encapsulates his subject’s capacity to look both ways in a chapter called ‘Between Past and Present’. When Frank MacDermot TD denounced Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, Binchy wrote to congratulate him, while immersing himself in a legal wrangle over fishing rights at Killorglin. There is an aspect of his personality which meets Theodore Roethke’s definition of a good poet – somebody incapable of doing one thing at a time.
A language-centred account of Binchy’s personality draws attention to the Corpus and many other, shorter publications. His life’s work was devoted to translation and commentary, with particular attention to the old Irish law tracts. In this endeavour – pursued without total avoidance of a passing elbow in a fellow-Celtist’s face – he favoured “scientific enquiry”, which Garvin relates to a “scientific history” as developed for Ireland by Theo Moody and R. Dudley Edwards. The last proposition may deserve a re-count, though Binchy as traditionalist and revisionist in unum cuts an attractive figure.
The Lives of Daniel Binchy makes new connections, and poses new challenges for the up-and-going-forward generation. Its author even succeeds in finding entry to the emotional life – beyond the abrasive rebukes to lesser scholars.
Revelation
Significantly, the revelation comes through Binchy’s relationship with Frank O’Connor. The fellow-Corkonian, writer and translator from Gaelic impulsively asked a middle-aged Binchy why he had never married. Unexpectedly, Binchy replied with tearful details of a tragic love affair, then begged the story-teller not to divulge a hint of the truth until he and O’Connor had passed 70 (an age O’Connor never reached). It is no denigration of Binchy’s inner trauma to add that this confiding was made possible by his admiration for O’Connor’s untutored ability to handle early Irish verse, its intricacies and poise.
A political scientist fluent in French, German and modern Irish, Garvin quotes generously from letters and acknowledges the advice of specialists, notably Liam Breatnach.
There are suggestive surprises. For example, he cites the elusive W. J. Maloney on drafts or proofs of Binchy’s late work. Maloney, a polyglot and close friend of the young James Joyce and Frank Skeffington, deserves a biography, as does E. H. Synge (died 1957). The playwright’s nephew, Hutchie’s work in mathematical physics was only recognised in the space age and space industry.