One of the more profound prescriptions written by the often-flippant doctor Oliver St John Gogarty is displayed prominently in the grounds of his former home in Renvyle, west Connemara.
“We have not long to live in the sun; and here even the sunlight is not assured. Therefore let us enjoy it while we may”, he advises in words taken directly from his 1937 memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street.
Born in Dublin 147 years ago in August 1878, Gogarty became a surgeon, senator, writer, classicist, raconteur, athlete, archer, aviator, poet and playwright. He owned Renvyle House, near Clifden, for 35 years and his wife Martha ran it as a hotel while he commuted between there and Dublin in a buttercup-coloured Rolls-Royce motorcar, one of the first to be privately owned in Ireland.
“Were it not for the clouds off the Atlantic that break in rain, I would never leave Renvyle with its glimmering islands and its assured faith in the wonders of the deep”, he wrote.
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Gogarty followed three generations of paternal forebears into the medical profession. He studied in Dublin and Vienna to qualify as an ear, nose and throat surgeon. He pledged to treat poor patients gratis by charging wealthy clients high fees. “I am endeavouring to make people pay through their noses”, he told a friend.
His mother, Margaret Oliver, came from a wealthy Galway milling family. She was known in her youth as ‘the Flower of Galway’ – a punning soubriquet that her son took delight in repeating.
Gogarty’s quick wit did not desert him even when he faced almost-certain death after he was abducted by six IRA gunmen during the Civil War because of his membership of the first Irish Free State Seanad. Emerging from the car in which he had been taken from his home in Ely Place to Islandbridge, he turned to his captors and asked: “Can I tip the driver?”
He escaped by diving into the ice-cold River Liffey and swimming until he grabbed a tree branch and crawled up the muddy bank, despite severe hypothermia. Five weeks later the IRA burned Renvyle House to the ground and destroyed all its priceless contents. When he rebuilt the house and opened it as a hotel in 1930, paying guests mingled with his own invited guests.
His friend William Butler Yeats spent part of his honeymoon there. Count John McCormack and his wife were early guests. The artist Augustus John had an extended stay there, painting the proprietor and his wife, as well as many fellow-guests.
Lady Lavery, whose face graced Irish banknotes for decades, and Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express and Sunday Express newspapers, and adviser to more than one British prime minister, also stayed there at different times.
Gogarty also maintained close friendships with Lady Augusta Gregory, Lord Dunsany, Monsignor Pádraig de Brún and the writer George Moore, an Ely Place neighbour. Moore named a troubled Catholic priest Father Oliver Gogarty in his 1905 novel The Lake.
It fell to Dr Gogarty to embalm the bodies of two close friends that he lost during the Civil War in August 1922: Arthur Griffith, who died in hospital, and Michael Collins, who had a key to Gogarty’s Ely Place house in his pocket when he was shot dead at Béal na Bláth.
The courage and swimming prowess that saved Gogarty’s life when he faced execution by the IRA also enabled him at different times to save at least three different men from drowning in the River Liffey and in the Irish Sea.
Earlier, when he was arrested and interrogated by Black and Tans during the War of Independence he invited them to go to the Abbey Theatre to see one of his plays, in which he mocked the British forces occupying Ireland.
Aged 61 when the second World War broke out in 1939, he immediately tried to enlist in the RAF, because of his medical and aviation skills. When he was turned down because of his age, he tried to enlist in the Canadian air force, but he was again rejected on age grounds.
Disillusioned with de Valera’s governance of Free State Ireland and irked by the unflattering portrayals of him in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Gogarty moved to New York in 1939 to concentrate on writing. He died there suddenly in September 1957.
His remains were returned to Ireland for burial in Ballinakill Cemetery, near Renvyle, in what he called “the faery land of Connemara, at the extreme end of Europe”.
[ A literary legend, immortalised by JoyceOpens in new window ]
