Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin
If ghosts exist, they surely hover amid the swirling mists in Dublin's Mount Jerome Cemetery. Here, among ancient headstones, one wrestles with a literary past so shrouded in anonymity as to be all but forgotten. While Glasnevin Cemetery is a Catholic nationalist pantheon and the final resting place of political figures such as O'Connell, Parnell and de Valera, Mount Jerome in Harold's Cross is our equivalent of Montparnasse and e Pere Lachaise cemeteries in Paris, with an underground cast-list headed by the playwright John Millington Synge and man of letters, George Russell (AE).
And yet, despite the grandeur of its many fine granite memorials with tombs in the shape of temples, angels draped across panels carved in Carrara marble and outstanding statuary, Mount Jerome also symbolises gentility in discreet decline as the passage of time gives way to erosion and neglect. The Victorian graveyard isn't short of atmosphere. It was established by an Act of Parliament in 1834 on lands belonging to the Earl of Meath. It became the traditional resting place for the Protestant merchant classes of the 19th century, with the names of the Guinnesses, Jamesons, Bewleys and Ingrams resounding among the monuments. It was saved from closure in the mid-1980s and is privately owned by the General Cemetery Company of Dublin, which opened a crematorium there earlier this year, ironically giving it a new lease of life.
The weather didn't help the dank autumn day I chose to pay respects, with squally showers and heavy clay underfoot. Although many of the laurels, yews and hawthorns which once lined the old estate are long gone, cedars and cypresses remain defiantly dominant across the 47 acres. Finding a particular plot from among 48,000 graves isn't easy without a search of old records. No sign leads even to Synge's grave, off the Long Walk. He died in 1909, aged 38. The neglect of his final resting place is a sorry reflection on us all, with the earth above him scuffed and sinking, no kerbing, the headstone weather-beaten and not entirely legible, and no reference whatsoever to his literary genius. Are we mad?
AE fares a bit better: having lain off Consecration Way since 1935, he has a clearly decipherable headstone depicting a poem, which reflects his preoccupation with the occult. The memory of the Abbey playwright, George Fitzmaurice, who died in 1963, has been partly salvaged by the Duagh Historical Society in Kerry. His image has been carved on to his headstone, which lies beneath a fine chestnut tree off the North Walk.
The remains of the eminent Trinity historian W. H. Lecky were cremated, and his ashes returned for burial not far from the Low Walk in Mount Jerome in 1903. He and his widow Catharina share a raised tomb with a wrought-iron surround which is desperately in need of touching up. The writer William Carleton (1794-1869) had a memorial off the Main Avenue restored in his honour in 1989. It's a fine tribute to the writer who reflected on the hidden Gaelic world and its rural traditions. Nearby, since 1866, lies George Petrie, who devoted his life to the study of Irish antiquities. He is supposedly honoured by a flat Celtic memorial slab - which I couldn't find. More accessible is the grave of Oscar Wilde's father, the eye surgeon Sir William Wilde. His headstone is just across from the recently-restored chapel.
Also buried in Mount Jerome is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), a writer preoccupied with the macabre; finding his grave, too, defeated me. Journalist and patriot Thomas Davis has a statue, while other notables include Jack B. Yeats, the poet John Kells Ingram, artist Sarah Purser, sculptor Jerome Connor and more recently, the writer and actor, O. Z. Whitehead.
James Joyce referred a number of times to Mount Jerome in Ulysses, but the final words must go to J. M. Synge, who concluded The Oaks of Glencree with:
There'll come a season when you'll stretch
black boards to cover me.
Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch,
with worms eternally.