THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: MURIEL McCARTHY: IN MARSH'S Library, there are literally thousands of books that all predate 1700, yet the one that I cannot get out of my head during the afternoon I spend there was published in 1967 – Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Or rather, the famous lines in it that read:
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.”
Muriel McCarthy, the Keeper of Marsh’s, is so intertwined with the unique place where she has worked for 40 years, and lived in for 24 years, that if you apply Flann O’Brien’s theory to her, she is half-person, half-library. It’s difficult to know where the job ends and the person starts.
The place that has occupied so much of McCarthy’s working life, her consciousness, and her energy is Ireland’s first public library, built in 1701 by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh. It stands on St Patrick’s Close, off Kevin Street. McCarthy is dead keen to show me every corner and book and bookcase in the place she loves and knows so intimately. “Isn’t this something?” she declares eagerly, gesturing in several directions at once, short impatient hair brushed back from her animated face like a confused halo that doesn’t know whether to hover or sit.
Something? Marsh’s is a portal to the past: one of the few 18th century buildings in central Dublin that is still used for its original purpose. It contains 25,000 books, most of them printed between 1600 and 1700, on a variety of topics that include liturgy, music, maths, law, science, travel, witchcraft and history. It is fantastically atmospheric. Slabs of leather-bound books lean against each other in exactly the same oak bookcases, and in the same places in which they were originally catalogued and shelved, over 300 years ago; the sepia ochres and siennas and taupes of the plain leather volumes fading like dark stains into majestically stern oak bookcases.
If Marsh's is a time capsule, McCarthy is living history, a unique conduit to it. There is no other person with her knowledge of the library. She first came to work here in 1969, for two mornings a week: a friend had told her the library, where she had never visited previously, always needed volunteer help. Then she worked for 10 years, all of them unpaid, as librarian. In 1980, she published her history of Marsh's, Marsh's Library: All Graduates and Gentlemen, which was republished for the tercentenary in 2001. Since 1985, she has lived here in the same beautiful, chilly, 300-year-old rooms under the library that were built for the first Keeper. In 1990, she was appointed the first female Keeper. "I was so proud. I was so thrilled." She's still thrilled. She can't stop the smile, which has a mischievous, conspiratorial twist to it, as if she's admitting something she shouldn't.
Today, the Keeper is dressed in her best. Pale-yellow embroidered jacket, trimmed with navy. A little gold brooch with three castles she received in 1994 – a Lord Mayor’s Award from Tomás Mac Giolla. Matching navy skirt. I know this is her best outfit because the exact same clothes and brooch repeat like a motif in several framed photographs downstairs; photographs of her with senior politicians opening the annual summer exhibitions she has curated for many years. This June, Martin Mansergh came to open “Beware the Jabberwock! Books on the Animal Kingdom in Marsh’s Library.” There’s something very unworldly about the fact that McCarthy chooses to wear the same suit for the multi-annual occasions that require a formal photograph. It says prudence. That she is not much interested in change for the sake of it. That she recognises when something is right for her, whether a suit of clothes or a job, and she tends to value that recognition by holding onto it for a long time.
We are upstairs, in the reader’s room between the two L-shaped bays of the library, where visiting scholars sit to consult rare books and manuscripts. She gets cross when she hears people describe the library as a museum, as I do now, comparing it to the temporarily-closed Natural History Museum, which is as famous for its perfectly-preserved Victorian interior as it is for the dead zoo it showcases. “Marsh’s is a public library and continues to be so. It’s a working library, not a museum,” she scolds.
ONE OF THE PEOPLEwho came here to work was James Joyce, over two days in October 1902. He sat at the reading room table we're at now, the much-scrubbed grain of its wood standing out like anxious veins. McCarthy shows me the visitor's book he signed – a small black hard-covered ledger that records the names of the scholars who came to Marsh's between 1897 and 1935.
There is Joyce's distinctive, slanted cramped writing, on the dates for October 22nd and 23rd, with an address at 7 St Peter's Terrace, Cabra. The volume he wanted to see was a Latin book of prophecies by Joachim Abbas. "He would have been very familiar with Latin because of his Jesuit education," McCarthy explains. In Ulysses, Joyce writes of "the stagnant bay of Marsh's Library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas". The book he consulted is still in the library, still in the same place on the same shelf. I turn the stiff pages carefully, 107 years later.
This is only one of the many storied books here, 10,000 of which formed a collection so famous, the Stillingfleet, that when Marsh bought it in 1705, it was known as "The Golden Fleece". There is the ruined book that took a stray bullet from a British gun in 1916, when shots came in through the window. There are polyglot bibles, books signed by the metaphysical poet John Donne, a set of 11 folio volumes of Blaeu's Grand Atlas, published in 1662. There are literally thousands of rare books, 80 of which are "incunabula"– published before 1501.
Muriel McCarthy, and her twin Mairéad, were born in Clontarf quite a few years ago. She has never given her age in an interview, and she doesn’t tell me either, but I figure it out. She tells me when she got married, how long she was married for, and that her late husband Charles has been dead 23 years. The point is, she doesn’t want to tell me, and really, why does it matter? What matters is that she would prefer people not to know, so they can’t pigeonhole her. “There’s such a thing about age in our society,” she groans. “If I gave my age, people would be expecting me to be on crutches.”
When Muriel and Mairéad were eight, and their brothers Seán and Liam were 11 and three respectively, their father Liam died of stomach cancer. He was 40. It was the defining event of her childhood.
“The death of my father was the most overwhelming thing in my childhood, really. I think that leaves a mark on children, the fact of their father’s death. But you know, when we went back to school, after my father’s death, we were met by the head nun, at the Holy Faith in Clontarf, and she came down to meet us and welcome us back. I’ll never forget what she said. She said, ‘It’s very sad about your father’s death, but it would have been worse if it was your mother’. And she was absolutely right.”
When McCarthy talks, she has an occasional unselfconscious habit of folding her right hand back against her face, knuckles against her mouth, eyes narrowed. It’s a type of meditative gesture, which also looks defensive. She does it now.
Their mother, Christina, was left to raise four small children on her own. She had to go out to work. McCarthy has already said that her father was a civil servant, who had previously been one of the early members of the Air Corps. What did her mother do? There’s a short pause, which turns into a longer pause. “Eh, she was a housekeeper,” McCarthy reveals eventually, sounding agonised and suddenly self-conscious. Her hand is tight as a fist against her face. “I don’t know why, but I’m a bit embarrassed about that.”
After school, she went to work in Pilkington’s, an antique shop on Kildare Street. She loved the job, but didn’t stay there long. She married Charles McCarthy when she was 19 and then was busy raising their three children, Paula, Justin and Martina.
Her husband successfully juggled several diverse careers: actor, chairman of the Abbey, members of many public boards, president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, university professor of industrial relations at Trinity College. McCarthy can't praise him enough. "He was the most articulate and clever man I ever met in my life. He was brilliant. He was tiny, just five feet. But what a voice. What an orator. And he was clever. He was so clever." They were living in the rooms beneath the library when he died suddenly, aged 62.
“He died beside me without any warning. No. Warning. Whatsoever.” Her words suddenly come out so heavily, plummeting like stones falling from the great height of a cliff. “He died of a massive heart attack. With no warning whatsoever. He thought he had indigestion, and he went to take some medicine. He came back in and he got into bed and a few minutes later, I heard this terrible sound which I was told afterwards was air leaving the lungs and he died, I think, within five minutes. With no warning.” For a moment, she looks simultaneously stricken, bewildered, and utterly furious.
They had been married 35 years, and their three children were grown up and long gone. After his death, the library became even more important in her life. She was appointed Keeper four years later, and she continued to raise funds for a variety of projects, and to try and increase the public profile of the library. A large private donation paid for a new bindery and paper conservation room, which Charlie Haughey was scheduled to open, “but then an Arab prince arrived in town, and he couldn’t come”.
AN AVERAGE OF750 people now visit the library each month, and it receives a consistent flow of scholars and academics. "There's no comparison to when I came here first. If I saw 25 people between November and March, that would be it. Nowadays, there isn't a day that there aren't people in." She sounds both proud and also a little nostalgic.
However, very few Irish people seem to be in that number. Of the 171 addresses recorded in the visitor’s book so far for July on the day I visit, only 15 addresses listed are Irish. The other 156 visitors came from Finland, the US, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, Italy, Denmark, Papua New Guinea, and Canada.
McCarthy thinks she knows why there are so few Irish visitors. “People put things on the long finger when it’s their own institutions. They say, sure, we’ll go there next year.”
Downstairs, she shows me around the lovely rooms she lives in, under the ancient eyrie of paper, scholarship and history. When Frank McDonald, for The Irish Times, went to visit in 1986, after the library had carried out a $150,000 restoration following a grant from the American Irish foundation, he reported that the main objective of the restoration programme had been "to refurbish the fabric of the library and install much-needed new facilities without damaging its integrity in any way. In the past, for example, Marsh's had only an outside toilet in the side yard." It's still there, in the shed opposite her rooms, but isn't in use now.
Although open fires were once the only heating source for her fellow keepers in these high-ceilinged rooms, the fireplaces have long-since been blocked up. Even with storage heating, “it’s a very cold building”, she confesses. A corridor of orchid-filled windows overlooks a walled garden, and all the rooms overlook the nearby graveyard of St Patrick’s. “As someone said to me one day,” she laughs, looking out the window of her sitting room at the nearby headstones, not at all troubled by them, “all your friends are sleeping”.
She has never kept a diary, something she now regrets, but mostly because it would have been a contribution to Marsh's records. "Working here has opened so many opportunities to me, and opened my mindto so many things." Among the many honours she has received over the years has been an invitation from former Archbishop Robin Eames to be an honorary lay canon of St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh. "Something I am very, very proud of. Oh, and Trinity gave me an honorary MA and the National University gave me a doctorate."
She admits she doesn’t know if she would have got the job today without the formal third-level education qualifications that now appear to be a standard requirement for many positions. She has learned almost everything about the job by doing it, with the supplement of classes in Bolton Street in paper conservation. “But I’ll tell you who was an enormous help to me, my late husband. He was so encouraging to me. I don’t think I could have done the things I did without his encouragement.” She twists Charles McCarthy’s gold signet ring while she speaks. She has worn it on her wedding finger since the day he died.
“Education does help, if you’re from the middle classes and go into an automatic kind of stream, but I think you pick up so much experience through life.” She explains how she thinks that real education comes from within, and from where one’s interests, passions and determination in life lead you. “I think people who have been to university are very privileged and very lucky, but if you yourself are interested in something, no matter what your background is, and if you are determined and want to know more about something, then you’ll do it.”
In 1981, McCarthy told this newspaper that working in Marsh’s had “enriched my life more than I can say. It’s difficult to put into words without sounding too silly, but each day I know I’m coming to Marsh’s, I feel happy about it”.
"That was true," she confirms now, almost two decades later, when she hears the words read back to her. "And it's stilltrue. Being here makes me happy." Does she have any plans to retire? "I don't. Actually, it's a lifetime appointment, but that doesn't mean you can't retire from the job. You can retire at any time. I don't have any plans to retire, but man proposes and God disposes."
FAMILY:Married to the late Charles McCarthy. Three children, Paula, Justin and Martina.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Successfully raised funds for an on-site bindery for Marsh's, opened in 1988.
Appointed in 1990 the first female Keeper of Marsh’s Library, founded 1701. Oversaw tercentenary celebrations of Marsh’s in 2001.
PUBLICATIONS:Marsh's Library: All Graduates and Gentlemen, a history of the library, first published 1980, republished
in 2003
