Irish History: Oliver St. John Gogarty, Perennial, 1st ed SIGNED NUMBERED 1/50

Perennial: A New Volume of Poetry by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Published by Contemporary Poetry, Baltimore, MD in 1944. Hardcover, with dust jacket. First edition. 48 pages. Volume One of the Distinguished Poets Series of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Mary Owings Miller.

The first edition of Perennial was LIMITED to 1000 copies, of which only 50 were numbered and signed by the author. THIS COPY IS ONE OF THE 50. It is signed by Oliver St. John Gogarty on the blank page facing the half-title page, and is numbered "No. 39." The signature is nice and bold, as shown. This copy also contains a handwritten correction, apparently by the author: on page 48, the word "hardness" is changed to "harness."

The dust jacket was made of cheap paper -- remember, this book was published during World War II -- and has deteriorated, especially along the spine. There are tape repairs on the inside of the dust jacket as shown. The dust jacket also has some staining. The book itself is in nice condition. There are no bookplates or pen/pencil notations, aside from the author's signature, numbering, and text correction noted above.

Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty (1878 – 1957) was a fascinating character: an Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and well-known conversationalist. He served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Gogarty became interested in Irish nationalism after meeting Arthur Griffith in 1899, and contributed propaganda pieces to The United Irishman over subsequent years. In 1905 Gogarty became one of the founding members of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, a non-violent political movement with a plan for Irish autonomy modelled after the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

As a Sinn Féiner during the Irish War of Independence, Gogarty participated in a variety of anti-Black and Tan schemes, allowing his home to be used as a safe house and transporting disguised IRA volunteers in his car. Following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Gogarty sided with the pro-Treaty government (headed by his close friend Arthur Griffith) and was made a Free State Senator.

When Griffith fell ill during the summer of 1922, Gogarty frequently attended his bedside. His death on 12 August 1922 had a profound effect on Gogarty; W.T. Cosgrave later observed that "he was almost mortally wounded when Griffith died, he was so very, very much attached to him." Gogarty carried out Griffith's official autopsy and embalmment, and went on to perform the same offices for Michael Collins, another close friend whom Gogarty had often sheltered in his Ely Place home prior to his assassination. It was rumoured that Griffith had been planning to make Gogarty the new Governor-General of the Irish Free State, but in his absence the post went to Tim Healy.

In November 1922, anti-Treaty IRA commander Liam Lynch issued a general order to his forces to shoot Free State Senators. Two months later, Gogarty was kidnapped by a group of anti-Treaty militants, who lured him out of his house and into a waiting car under the pretext of bringing him to visit a sick patient. Gogarty was subsequently driven to an empty house near Chapelizod and held under armed guard.

Aware that he might be in imminent danger of execution, Gogarty contrived to have himself led out into the garden (purportedly by claiming to be suffering from diarrhoea), where he broke free from his captors and flung himself into the Liffey; he then swam to shore and delivered himself to the protection of the police barracks in Phoenix Park. In February of that same year, Renvyle was burnt to the ground by anti-Treaty forces. Following these incidents, Gogarty relocated his family and practice to London, where he resided until February 1924. Upon returning to Ireland, he famously released two swans into the River Liffey in gratitude for his life.[25]

Gogarty remained a senator until the abolition of the Seanad in 1936, during which time he identified with none of the existing political parties and voted according to his own whims. He believed that Ireland should retain its dominion status in the British Commonwealth so as to "keep with nations who understand that the first principle of freedom is a freedom that does not permit interference with the personal liberties of the citizen." He supported rural electrification schemes, road improvement, reforestation and conservation, prevention of livestock cruelty, and educational reform. His views on controversial issues such as censorship and birth control were ambiguous; after expressing initial support for the Censorship Bill, he eventually went on to denounce it in scathing terms ("I think it is high time the men of this country found some other way of loving God than by hating women"), and while generally professing to oppose the sale of prophylactics, he voiced support for their usage in certain cases.

He was most passionate on the subject of sanitation in schools and in urban and rural housing, about which he spoke frequently. His speeches frequently contained puns, wordplays, and extended poetic quotations, and were sometimes given in favour of facetious schemes, such as his attempt to have the phoenix statue in Phoenix Park included in the 1929 Wild Birds Protection Bill. He was notoriously scornful of the government's attempts to reinstate the Irish language (which he referred to as "Woolworth's Irish"), proposing that funding be used instead for housing and school health services, and remained perpetually suspicious of Éamon de Valera, against whose economic policies, character, and personal appearance he often hurled invectives during Seanad proceedings. De Valera eventually dissolved the Seanad when it persisted in obstructing Government proposals, effectively ending Gogarty's political career.

Gogarty maintained close friendships with W. B. Yeats, AE, George Moore, Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, Seamus O'Sullivan, and other Dublin literati, and continued to write poetry in the midst of his political and professional duties.

A highly visible and distinctive Dublin character during his lifetime, Gogarty appears in a number of memoirs penned by his contemporaries, notably George Moore's Hail and Farewell, where he goes both by his own name and by the pseudonym "Conan". His most famous literary incarnation, however, is as Buck Mulligan, the irrepressible roommate of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. Mulligan quotes a number of songs and poems known to have been written by Gogarty, the most famous of which, "The Song of the Cheerful (But Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus", was originally sent to Joyce as a belated Christmas peace offering after their quarrels of 1904.

Other details, such as Mulligan's Hellenism, his status as a medical student, his history of saving men from drowning, his friendship with George Moore, and the metrical arrangement of his full name (Malachi Roland St. John Mulligan) parallel Gogarty's biography. Due to his influence on Joyce (he is also sometimes cited as an inspiration for Dubliners character Ignatius Gallaher and Exiles antagonist Robert Hand), Gogarty's name often comes up in Joyce scholarship,

With the onset of World War II, Gogarty, who was an enthusiastic and talented amateur aviator, attempted to enlist in the RAF and the RAMC as a doctor. He was denied on grounds of age. He then departed in September 1939 for an extended lecture tour in the United States, leaving his wife to manage Renvyle House, which had since been rebuilt as a hotel.

When his return to Ireland was delayed by the war, Gogarty applied for American citizenship, and eventually decided to reside permanently in the United States. Though he regularly sent letters, funds, and care-packages to his family and returned home for occasional holiday visits, he never again lived in Ireland for any extended length of time. His primary American residence was in New York, where he was known to frequent bars on Third Avenue.

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