Modernist man

In his lifetime, Thomas McGreevy managed to be both at the heart of Irish cultural life and to stand slightly apart from it. Rather than pursuing one career he had several, abortive careers, like different potential versions of himself: poet, literary and art critic, art historian, administrator, bon viveur. The pattern of his life is one of recurrent exile, in London and Paris, until he settled in Ireland after the outbreak of the second World War, eventually becoming director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Anthony Cronin described him as "the first Irish Modernist", an almost paradoxical entity at the time. McGreevy, a devout, traditional Irish Catholic and a cosmopolitan sophisticate, certainly embodied the paradox.

He was born in Tarbert, the north Kerry ferry port on the Shannon Estuary, in 1893, into a bookish, musical family of farmers and school teachers. Early contact with the renowned Listowel bookseller D.J. Flavin encouraged his reverence for the printed word. His first job when he left Co Kerry, still in his teens, was as a fledgling civil servant with the Land Commission in Dublin, but he was soon transferred to London, where he ended up working for Admiralty Intelligence. Throughout this time he took little interest in politics and didn't harbour nationalist sympathies. His ambitions centred on writing.

Then, in 1917 he was moved from the civil service and commissioned as a junior officer in the Royal Field Artillery. After training he was dispatched to France. Though he was based at the Ypres salient, he was, by good fortune, on leave when the German offensive was launched in March. His luck didn't last, however. He was no sooner back at the front than he was caught in the blast of a direct hit by a German shell and badly wounded.

During his recovery he took the opportunity to visit Chartres and the major cultural centres of Paris. With demobilisation in 1919, he qualified for a grant to go to Trinity, where he studied history. Now, political events which had previously passed him by began to make an impact. He was sympathetic to the nationalist cause in the War of Independence. Ernie O'Malley describes a strange encounter with him when, on the run, he and Sean MacBride were sheltered by McGreevy and Lennox Robinson. When his friend Robinson was employed by the Carnegie UK Trust, then setting up its libraries, he was taken on as his assistant - though he resigned in sympathy when Robinson lost his job after publishing what was considered a blasphemous story.

Money was a persistent problem. For most of his life McGreevy seems to have been relatively hard up. While his writing earned him considerable prestige, it brought in little in the way of financial return. Unemployed in Ireland, he decided to move to London. He went armed with a letter of introduction to T.S. Eliot, who gave him work reviewing for Criterion. In London he lodged with a woman called Hester Travers Smith. The story goes that he became friendly with and eventually fell in love with her daughter, Dorothy. And he is said to have been devastated when Dorothy eventually married Lennox Robinson in 1931.

By 1927 he was on the editorial staff of Connoisseur magazine, but when he was offered a job as an English lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure of the University of Paris, he jumped at the chance. It was not a lucrative position, despite the fact that he also wrote for the art magazine Formes, and during this time he is known to have benefited from the renowned generosity of Sarah Purser, whom he had befriended in Dublin. She often dispensed loans, which she was slow to reclaim, to needy friends.

McGreevy was good company and, a fluent French speaker, he thrived in the lively cafe culture of bohemian Paris, crowded with artists and writers and exiles of every description. He was a social animal, and he knew everybody. If you wanted to meet someone, it was more than likely that he could effect an introduction. He became close to James Joyce and, when he arrived from Ireland, Samuel Beckett. Then he met the English writer Richard Aldington, another veteran of the trenches, with whom he got on particularly well.

Aldington, a novelist and poet, was living in the south of France. He had become quite famous on the strength of a book he published in 1929, Death of a Hero, a war novel that was intensely critical of pre-war society. He was a champion of D.H. Lawrence and, later, a controversial, prescient critic of the other Lawrence, T. E.. He encouraged McGreevy to the extent that he housed and subsidised him while he worked on a projected novel. In fact McGreevy spent a lot of time vainly trying to complete the book, which turned out to be a costly cul-de-sac for his talents. More successfully, he published critical studies of Aldington and T.S. Eliot. But shortage of money apparently drove him back to Tarbert before he set off again for London.

His poems, published in 1934, garnered considerable praise, including Beckett's, but, as the decade progressed, he earned his living by writing not poetry but art criticism, for The Studio magazine, and by lecturing at the National Gallery in London. The outbreak of the second World War was disastrous for these tenuous sources of income. He found himself helping to evacuate the very pictures he had been lecturing about at the National Gallery, consigning them to secure storage for the duration of the war. Again he was driven back to Ireland.

In Dublin, he wrote about art for the The Irish Times and the Capuchin Annual The Annual was a remarkable institution, with a role it is now difficult to imagine in Irish cultural life. Launched by Father Senan Moynihan - another Kerryman - in 1930, it had a clear nationalist allegiance, minimal religious content and a high cultural profile. As Brian Kennedy put it, "To be the subject of a series of tributes in the Capuchin Annual was to enter the pantheon of acclaimed Irish artists." The editorial offices of this esteemed journal were located above a draper's shop in Capel Street. Benedict Kiely recalls wandering in there one day to find Maud Gonne MacBride, John McCormack, Jack Butler Yeats, McGreevy and Michael O'Higgins, "who all seem to have dropped in casually at the same time". Father Moynihan's secretary, Molly Baxter, described by Kiely as "one of the great secretaries of all time, not excluding Machiavelli", provided them all with tea.

Another clerical contact, Monsignor Shine, an art collector, supported McGreevy in securing the position of director of the National Gallery of Ireland. While he served as director from 1950, the post became full-time only in 1956 from when, ironically, he was increasingly beset by health problems. But he was a good director. On the plus side, he immediately recognised the need for expansion and began lobbying for resources that only materialised when his successor, the gifted James White, had taken over the helm. He began producing publications on the collection and he set up the restoration department. He had an innate sympathy for Irish art and, like White, was a vocal supporter of Jack B. Yeats - though he couldn't purchase his work for the gallery until after the artist's death. Behind the scenes he was an advocate of State support for the arts.

Less positively, to judge by the purchases he made for the National Gallery, he seems to have shared with Monsignor Shine a taste for devout Italian and other religious art that we would now say verges on the camp, though later in his tenure, when the Shaw Bequest funds came on-stream, he made some notable purchases, including Tintoretto's allegorical representation of Venice, and a good Yeats, The Double Jockey Act.

McGreevy himself admitted that he was too interested in living life to be a full-time writer, or perhaps to be a full-time anything. Despite his real abilities and achievements, some people regarded him primarily as a social butterfly. Tony Gray, a fellow critic, gives some indication of this when he writes that McGreevy "was moderately serious about being Director of the National Gallery, but never very serious, I believe, on the subject of art criticism . . ." He never felt the need, Gray recalls rather waspishly, "to do any more than be there and be charming, in French and English, to anybody of importance."

Two heart attacks presaged his eventual retirement from the National Gallery in 1963. In the meantime, he had overseen the presentation of Jack B. Yeats's paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1962. He died in the same nursing home in Portobello where the painter had spent his last years. In 1967, McGreevy was admitted for what should have been a minor operation, but he suffered a fatal heart attack.

A documentary about Thomas McGreevy, Rivers of Words, will be screened on RTE 1, on Tuesday at 10.10 p.m.