Remembering Thomas MacGreevy

A Machine Readable Version

Domhnall Ó Murchadha

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[p.10]

Thomas MacGreevy was one of those all too rare souls in whom a wide appreciation and understanding of many arts seemed innate. Literature, music, painting, poetry, sculpture, all had their part in his life. His own art of poetry he practised throughout his life but his friendships with artists in other media, among them James Joyce, Jack B. Yeats, and the distinguished historian of Italian art, Bernard Berenson, brought him into close touch not only with their works but also with the insights and objectives behind their creative impulses.

For such a man, the comment of the Renaissance artist that there was in reality only one art, manifesting itself in various ways, was surely fundamental. Those of us who shared the friendship of Tom MacGreevy were well aware that such a basic unity underpinned both his approach to the arts and to life itself. Indeed, so did his insistence on the strict formalities of certain occasions — a sort of liturgy unreal to some of his more informal fellow-countrymen.

From his home at Tarbert in County Kerry; where he was born in 1893, he had enjoyed, as he often said, "a view fit for a prince". Evidently memories of a onetime integral society enriched his boyhood. The broken, half-gaelic speech, and the grey ruins of nearby Lios Laichtín, the abbey to which his ancestors had given guardian friars, alerted him to the character of a once-unified culture. Across the lordly Shannon, in an area almost visible from Tarbert, O'Curry had found amongst the fragments of the older culture, the words and music of " Péarla an Bhrollaigh Bháin". George Petrie was later to record this lovely melody as " The Snowy-breasted Pearl".

It was in France, however, that MacGreevy found a model of cultural unity in all its fullness. While recuperating there from wounds received in the First World War, in visits to Rheims, Chartres, and Paris, he was able to study the glories of French art and architecture and to sense a similar logic and measure in the unbroken life and speech of the people. An older poet, whose works underlined the perennial tradition of France, Charles Péguy, was to die in that war in which so many poets perished.

For the young Kerryman the French experience of life and death, past and present, was one living thing. Despite his wanderings then, and his later sojourns in the various capitals of Europe, Tom MacGreevy never lost his love for the quintessential France.

His seven years as lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris did not dim his interest in the traditions of his own land; the yesterdays that were his todays. But these Paris years were fruitful for him: his friendship with Samuel Beckett deepened, he kept in touch with James Joyce and made contact with Arp, Jolas, Françoise Henry, James Johnson Sweeney and others who were to remain his friends.

It was a period of growth and creativity during which he wrote and published literary criticism and his volume of poetry, " Poems". Beckett's review saw in these poems "a radiance without counterpart in the work of contemporary poets writing in English," a poetry rooted in prayer, in recognition. At times a poem hints at what Brian Coffey so aptly called "the aboriginal side of the Pale". MacGreevy's intuitions about the pull of tradition on the Dublin, the Ireland of the twentieth century "passed into song".

In one poem, the poem that everyone knows by heart, we find him searching in Spain for the grave of Red Hugh O'Donnell, who, apart from other reasons must have appealed to him as a sixteenth century field-commander. That exquisitely crafted poem he dedicated to Stephen McKenna, scholar like himself, soldier and European wanderer, who gloried too in the Rising of 1916. I can recall how happy he was one day in the sixties when an unknown hand linked him across a busy Dublin street, reciting the while: And out to Simancas all knew
Where they buried Red Hugh.

Later it was discovered that the reciter was the Carmelite Gaelic scholar, Father Benedict.

It was one of my regrets that I have never been able to fulfil a desire of Tom's to walk with me the battlefield of Crossbarry. He understood and appreciated the skill of General Tom Barry and the heroism of his West Cork Flying Column. It was perhaps natural that the heroic would appeal to a man almost completely without materialistic preoccupations. It was an aspect of art, perhaps. And he felt tenderly for the brave.

As might be expected, the recurrent weakness of provincialism as it affected the arts was to him anathema. During his first years as Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, the term "Georgian" for 18th century art and architecture in Ireland was becoming current. That period he would perhaps have defined as Irish 18th century classical revival and naming it otherwise, seemed not only provincial but also evocative of the sadness of Dublin in an era when "the Irish people. . . were excluded from its cultural. . . life".

But he was a little saddened too by chauvinistic claims to cultural achievement here that could not be sustained by depth of feeling and meaning. He was naturally proud of works done in Ireland, like those of the great 18th century sculptor Edward Smyth, who, despite suggestions that the art of sculpture in Ireland only recommenced with the influx of English craftsmen following Catholic Emancipation, was indeed a traditional carver from County Meath trained in the Dublin schools. He was proud that the a figure like the " Commerce" on the Bank of Ireland was as accomplished as the work of François Rude, who led the beginnings of modern French sculpture about the same time.

Tom MacGreevy's far-reaching changes when he became Director of the National Gallery proved to be a major break-through, bringing the Gallery "out of the catacombs" and into line with similar institutions abroad. Without academic or secretarial staff, he yet made the place come alive. He took up duty in 1950. By 1952 he had set up a panel of lecturers to give free public lectures to the general public and to schoolchildren on the Gallery collections. On the first Sunday of each month, the public lecture was delivered in Gaelic. He built up the collection judiciously. Perhaps it was his good luck that the exhibitions of the Beit pictures, the gifts and loans of Sir Chester Beatty, and the Shaw Bequest coincided with his period. Eventually he succeeded in obtaining a personal secretary and an assistant director.

The problem of sending works abroad for cleaning and restoration troubled him. The restoration department, now an accepted part of the Gallery's activities, was his great dream. It began with his planning, as did the new wing with its lecture theatre and the new galleries planned to house the many paintings not adequately displayed. One can understand his deep satisfaction at the practical achievements of his successor, Dr. James White, who steered these schemes and others of his own planning through to successful completion.

As Director of the National Gallery, Tom MacGreevy worked with total dedication, making himself available to staff and public with great unselfishness. But he was almost super-sensitive to the remotest criticism of the institution under his care. When that criticism amounted to questioning the attribution of a soundly authenticated picture, it drew him to his full stature. The professor from the English Midlands who queried the attribution of an Italian portrait received courteous thanks for his interest but there followed, sharply: "the peoples of the countries that have produced great art know, our own people know, and that is all that matters."

As Director he was naturally much more than an administrator. He produced the first work written and published here on an important continental master. His "Nicolas Poussin" came from the Dolmen Press in 1960. This work is far removed from the great bulk of art historical writing in that it treats lovingly of the spiritual quality of the nobly ordered mind of this great seventeenth century French master.

Despite his attachment to the classical past, MacGreevy was at all times conscious of the living continuity of European artistic expression. When a mountain in an Irish landscape painter's work seemed unstable, devoid of form, he commented: "Cézanne told them how to look at nature".

One felt his regret as he reflected on our isolation from the genuinely innovatory European movements of the twentieth century. In this context his sympathy with brave souls like Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone was intense. True, their contact had been with artists of a late Cubism but they had made a vital contact. To this vision of a European tradition we owe the Cézanne watercolour, "Mont Sainte-Victoire", the only work of the master in Ireland; Sir Chester Beatty gave this watercolour from his collection as an outright gift to the National Gallery of Ireland in response to Dr. MacGreevy's appreciation of its quality.

I have never known anyone less interested in personal gain than MacGreevy, but he was generous with both his time and his money. As chairman of AICA — the International Association of Art Critics — one recalls how even before he could convene a meeting of that body, he had already forwarded personally his generous donation to the Arno flood disaster fund in Florence. That sort of spontaneous magnanimity was typical of a man to whom material things meant little. His generosity of spirit is remembered by all who served under him at the National Gallery. Ever concerned for the welfare of his staff, he would inquire diligently about each. He was quick, too, in arranging some little celebration of a friend's success.

His was a formative influence, a humanity shared — in letters, in conversations and of course, in a special way in his poetry. Perhaps the most acutely penetrating tribute to him was paid by that gentle scholar Dr. Tom Wall. At the time of Tom MacGreevy's death on the Eve of Saint Patrick's Day, 1967, Dr. Wall wrote: 'Detached, unworldly, most generous of men, it was not difficult for him to disengage himself from the trammels of the world — he had never really been quite enmeshed in them."

These and other memories came crowding back to me when I answered the telephone to a young American scholar planning a doctoral thesis on the work of Thomas MacGreevy . . . the poet, the integral Irishman.