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('St John' is pronounced 'sinjin'.)
"He had a defect that prevented him being a companionable man: he had no reserve in speaking about people, even those he had cause to admire, even those who were close to him. If they had some pitiful disability or shortcoming, he brought it right out. It was an incontinence of speech... The result was that people gave him license and kept a distance from him." --Padraic Colum [ofjj67]
Sources: Ulick O'Connor's The Times I've Seen [uoc]; James F Carens has an essay on OG and JAJ in Joyce: New Light from the Dublin Symposium (1972)
sw = Carens' Surpassing Wit (Gogarty litcrit) [Bibliofind] [ABE]
bio: online
1878: born in Dublin 17 August (son of a wealthy Irish family. cf? 1850 listings)
educated at Stonyhurst (Jesuit boardingschool in Lancashire, for 5 yrs, hated it: website), Clongowes (just one year, c1895), the Royal University (1896-98, underachiever, cycling), Trinity College, Dublin (1898-1903), Oxford (1904)
father a brilliant 3rd-generation doctor, houses in Rutland square and Glasnevin, died in 1887 [ofjj66, uoc2]
mother the daughter of prosperous Galway miller, lastname Oliver
two younger brothers, one younger sister (Henry, Mary, Richard)
1895: remembered at Clongowes for blasphemous poetic account of cricket match between Heaven and Hell [uoc6]
1895, 1898, 1899, and 1901: OG saves many men from drowning [SL94, uoc66]
height: 5 foot 9, 154 lbs in 1901
fearless; passion for speed: cycling, autos, airplane
1899: starts writing for Griffith's 'United Irishman' [uoc98] lifelong friendship
June 1900: writes acrostic 'Ode of Welcome':
The Gallant Irish yeoman
Home from the war has come
Each victory gained o'er foeman
Why should our bards be dumb.How shall we sing their praises
Our glory in their deeds
Renowned their worth amazes
Empire their prowess needs.So to Old Ireland's hearts and homes
We welcome now our own brave boys
In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes
Love's heroes share once more our joys.Love is the Lord of all just now
Be he the husband, lover, son,
Each dauntless soul recalls the vow
By which not fame, but love was won.United now in fond embrace
Salute with joy each well-loved face
Yeoman: in women's hearts you hold the place.
1901: banned from cycling for swearing during race
enthusiastically embraced by Trinity literati (eg Mahaffy), and Dublin literati (Yeats, Moore, AE, Eglinton, Best)
1901-3: consecutive gold medals for poetry at Trinity
Xmas 1902: meets Joyce (nicknames: Cadet Rouselle, Dante, Kinch) [uoc70]
1903: OG wins UC poetry medal with poem whose last line Joyce contributed (supposedly) [uoc66]
c1903? long, long, long ballad of Sinbad [sw26]
Oh what a wondrous paradox!
A sailor who escaped the rocks
Was wrecked by going down to the docks
When safe ashore
And brought to light a hidden pox
And Hunter's sore.
c1903: "Song of Medical Dick and Medical Davy"
The first was Medical Dick
The second was Medical Davy
The first had a Bloody Big Prick
The second had Buckets of Gravy
To show-- to show-- to show what medicals are.Then out spoke Medical Dick
To his comrade Medical Davy
'I'd swap my Bloody Big Prick
For you with your buckets of Gravy'
To show etc.'Steady Medical Dick'
Said Sturdy Medical Davy
'There's very little value in a prick
When you haven't got the passage of the gravy.'
To show etc.'Every bullock were a bull
But for the little matter of a ballocks
If your prick can keep the women full
You'll find they never grumble at its small looks.'
To show etc.
1904: 25Jan: OG to Oxford for two terms, with sole intention of winning Newdigate poetry prize (finished second) [uoc70]
1904: 24 June rented Martello Tower, occupied w/Samuel Chenevix Trench [article] [museum]
1904: Sept: Joyce shares Tower for a week [breakup theory]
1904-07: letters now collected [Az]
Xmas 1904 (or 1905?): "The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jesus" [e206]
I'm the queerest young fellow that ever was heard.
My mother's a Jew; my father's a Bird
With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree
So 'Here's to Disciples and Calvary.'If anyone thinks that I amn't divine,
He gets no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.My methods are new and are causing surprise:
To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes
To signify merely there must be a cod
If the Commons will enter the Kingdom of GoodNow you know I don't swim and you know I don't skate
I came down to the ferry one day and was late.
So I walked on the water and all cried, in faith!
For a Jewman it's better than having to bathe.Whenever I enter in triumph and pass
You will find that my triumph is due to an ass
(And public support is a grand sinecure
When you once get the public to pity the poor.)Then give up your cabin and ask them for bread
And they'll give you a stone habitation instead
With fine grounds to walk in and raincoat to wear
And the Sheep will be naked before you'll go bare.The more men are wretched the more you will rule
But thunder out 'Sinner' to each bloody fool;
For the Kingdom of God (that's within you) begins
When you once make a fellow acknowledge he sins.Rebellion anticipates timely by 'Hope,'
And stories of Judas and Peter the Pope
And you'll find that you'll never be left in the lurch
By children of Sorrows and Mother the ChurchGoodbye, now, goodbye, you are sure to be fed
You will come on My Grave when I rise from the Dead
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy-- Goodbye now Goodbye.
uoc109: Swinburne was G's idol. Twice he had made a pilgrimage to Putney...
1905: Feb: mother makes OG take (painful) retreat in monastery [uoc105]
1905? Cosgrave to JAJ: "Gogarty has his M.B. at last and is now up for the Fellowship of the Surgeons" [e205]
1905: passes anatomy exam
'Under the Dublin system of medical teaching, G had had to spend six months of his student career living in hospital...' [uoc119]
1905 Tower guests: Griffith, Colum, Starkey, Stephens [uoc102]
1906: Mar: name 'Oliver Gogarty' affixed to disappointed priest in George Moore's novel The Lake [French essay]
Aug: marries Martha Duane of Galway after swift courtship [uoc119]
Mary Colum, wrt JAJ and Nora: "...unlike a boon companion of his who had brazenly married for money" [ofjj14, cf also Little Cloud]
1906: summer in USA
1906: Joyce predicts to Stannie that OG will betray the Fenian movement [uoc63]
1907: Jun: passes final exam
1907: 23Jul: son born, Oliver Duane Odysseus Gogarty
1907-08: Vienna for post-grad: eye, nose and throat specialist
[uoc87] JAJ agrees to help OG publish 'Ditties of No Tone' or 'Cockcrows' in Trieste; Stannie dissuades JAJ from visiting OG in Vienna at OG's expense
1908: Mar: returns to Dublin, buys Ely Place house
1908: Jul: chauffeur kills child in Bray accident
1908: son Dermot born
1909: 29Jul: JAJ to Nora: "The first thing I saw on the pier at Kingstown was Gogarty's fat back but I avoided him." [SL156]
31Jul: OG letter to JAJ "I am looking forward to seeing you with pleasure." [uoc88]
04Aug, JAJ to Stannie: [SL157]
"Gogarty met me on Merrion Sq. I passed him. He ran after me and took me by the arm and made a long speech and was very confused. He asked me to go to his house. I went. He made me go in and rambled on. To everything I said 'You have your life. Leave me to mine.' He invited me to go down to Enniskerry in his motor and lunch with him and wife. I declined. I was very quiet and sober. He offered me wine, coffee, tea: but I took nothing. In the end he said, blushing 'Well do you really want me to go to hell and be damned'. I said 'I bear you no illwill. I believe you have some points of good nature. You and I of 6 years ago are both dead. But I must write as I have felt'. He said 'I don't care a damn what you say of me so long as it is literature'. I said 'Do you mean that?' He said 'I do. Honest to Jaysus. Now will you shake hands with me at least?' I said 'I will: on that understanding.'"
1909: JAJ finds his Ely Place house 'too clean' [aiwgdss34] "Is this your revenge on the public?" [uoc89]
1911-39: staff of Meath Hospital [cite]
brilliant surgeon, fast, dextrous, kept up patter as he worked, tossed tonsils (etc) to others at end; good diagnostician
1912: buys buttercup-yellow Rolls-Royce
1912: daughter Brenda born
1912: sells Glasnevin house, 'Fairfield'
1913: didactic play Blight about Dublin poverty
1917: 'Blight' opens at Abbey
1916: 25 copies of 'Hyperthuleana' with 31 poems [sw31]
1917: bought Renvyle in Galway [homepage] [ad] [book] [ghost]
1918: anthology of poems by OG and others: 'Secret Springs of Dublin Song' [sw31]
1919: two plays under pseudonym Gideon Ouseley, 'A Serious Thing' and 'The Enchanted Trousers' [sw45]
buys Dungaire Castle on Galway Bay [history]
friends: W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, George Moore, William Orpen, Lady Lavery, AE, Augustus John, and Arthur Griffith, Tim Healy and Michael Collins
surgeon to Arthur Griffith, hid Michael Collins, dressed Collins for death
1920: commisions memorial bust of dying Terence MacSwiney [cite]
1920: Irish Blue Terrier Club [history]
1920: Poems and Plays
1922-36: senator of Irish Free State
1922: "That bloody Joyce whom I kept in my youth has writtn a book you can read on all the lavatory walls of Dublin" [uoc61-- 'furious']
1922: December escape from his executioners during Civil War by plunging into Liffey under a shower of bullets [info]
1923: poems: An Offering of Swans [Az] etext of prizewinner
1923: Renvyle House burns incl JAJ-letters; Heather Island house built [homepage]
"exile to London because of difficulties in Dublin" [cite]
pilot
Kylemore House [ad]
1924: Olympic medal for poetry [article]
1925: plans play [cite]
1928: poems: Wild Apples [Az]
1928: 20Sep: JAJ to HSW: [e605]
"Buck Mulligan fell out of aeroplane with or after or before a Lady Martin. One may joke a little about it because fortunately neither the air man nor the airmaid seems to be any the worse. In fact they fell into a very shallow sea and I suppose are now merman and mermaid. The story seems rather curious but there is a comic poem about it in a Galway paper and the information comes from an allusion in a letter from my mother-in-law whose method of writing is often as cryptic as my own. The plane must have been very low but I am glad they are both uninjured."
1933: Selected Poems
1937: autobiography, partly dictated: As I was Going Down Sackville Street [Az] [reprinted] (target of successful libel action) [sample]
no-date: play 'Wave Lengths' about an eavesdropping machine used for blackmail by (?) a transvestite (?) adman named Leopold, making 'a show of some poor silly mortal whose youth or whose tongue ran away with him' [sw48]
1938: poems: Others to Adorn
1939: poems: Elbow Room [Az]
1938: sues Patrick Kavanagh successfully [story] passim
1938: tells Philip Toynbee "James Joyce was not a gentleman" [uoc62]
1939: reviews Finnegans Wake
[paraphrase:] ...claims Joyce's resentment against European civilization and life itself is self-evident: "This arch-mocker in his rage would extract the Logos, the Divine word or Reason from its tabernacle, and turn it muttering and maudlin into the street." [cite]
1939: memoirs: Tumbling in the Hay [Az] [reprinted]
this includes a great deal about Gogarty, Elwood, and Cosgrave re-told with 'Kinch' marginalised [sw152]
1939: moved to USA, where he wrote and lectured
1940: Going Native
1941: Mad Grandeur
1945: Mr Petunia
1946: Perennial
1948: Mourning Became Mrs Spendlove
1950: poems: Rolling Down the Lea
1950: history: I Follow St Patrick
1950: essays: Intimations
1953: epilogue for Idris Scharmel's Bread Out of Stone [cite]
1954: fellowship from Acad of Amer Poets [table]
1954: memoirs: It Isn't This Time of Year at All! [deflates JAJ] [Gorey cover- no pic] [Az] [reprinted]
1957: died in New York 22 Sept; buried in Galway [info]
Epitaph:
Our friends go with us as we go
Down the long path where beauty wends
Where all we love foregathers, so
Why should we fear to join our friends?
1958? essays: A Week End in the Middle of the Week
1960: subject of Chatterton Lecture [cite]
1963? William Butler Yeats: a memoir
1998? seminar: [article] [story]
Poems: [Az]
Plays: [Az]
Etc: [Az]
two poems The Plum Tree by the House, The Image-maker
Earth and Sea: etext
Time Gentlemen, Time: etext
On WB Yeats:
What a pity it is that Miss Horniman
When she wants to secure or suborn a man
Should choose Willie Yeats
Who still masturbates
And at any rate isn't a horny man. [cite]
"I will live in Ringsend with a red headed whore / with the fanlight gone in where it lights the hall door" [cite]
"There is no such thing as a large Irish" [cite]
"His spiritual life has been exaggerated by a chronic attack of mental gallstones." [cite]
"A country without village idiots is not worth living in. Without them there is no way of knowing who are sane." [cite]
On Finnegans Wake: "the most colossal leg pull in literature." [cite]
"And the gold-dust coming up/ From the trampled butter-cup." [cite]
Joke: lame
poem "Thrush in Ash" [cite]
poems: After Galen, Colophon, Leda and the Swan, Marcus Curtius, To Peronius Arbiter [cite]
from the August 1904 poem 'The Holy Office': [etext]
Or him whose conduct 'seems to own'
His preference for a man of 'tone'
1905 letter to Stannie: "Gogarty would jump into the Liffey to save a man's life but he seems to have little hesitation in condemning generations to servitude." [e197]
from the 1908 Trieste notebook, under 'Gogarty':
He speaks fluently in two jargons, that of the paddock and that of the science of medicine.The most casual scenes appear to his mind as the theatres of so many violent sexual episodes and casual objects as gross sexual symbols.
He addresses lifeless objects and hits them smartly with his cane: the naturalism of the Celtic mind.
His money smells bad.
His coarseness of speech is not the blasphemy of a romantic.
His coarseness is the mask of his cowardice of spirit.
He was in quest of a cupric woman or a clean old man.
Heaven and earth shall pass away but his false spirit shall not pass away.
He talked of writing from right to left when I told him Leonardo da Vinci did so in his notebooks and an instant after swore that, damn him, he would write like the Greeks and not like the Sheenies.
He called himself a patriot of the solar system.
Finnegans Wake notes:
OG kicks down backdoor as greeting
Eglinton: "One morning, just as the National Library opened, Joyce was announced; he seemed to wish for somebody to talk to, and related quite ingenuously how in the early hours of the morning he had been thrown out of the tower, and had walked into town from Sandycove."
Boston; Stony Brook; S. Ill., more; PRONI; Georgetown, more, more; Delaware; Cornell (Joyce)
Eponymous Dublin bar [menu] (Martello Tower special = lobster), [bio page] [review] ditto, German, passim; [vacation pic]
grandson: Guy St. John Williams [author] [pic] [rave]
2nd cousin, friend, same name?, [Gaelic story]
Passim: Heffernan name, translator
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