The spirit of Oliver St John Gogarty is alive and well and living posthumously, and rather riotously, in the annual winter weekend festival which takes place in Connemara's Renvyle House Hotel. This was once the old home in the West of the lyric poet, writer, surgeon, sportsman, wit and friend of James Joyce - at least until immortalised, or immoralised, in Ulysses as "stately, plump Buck Mulligan".
The latest Gogarty Octoberfest, the fifth, attracted all the usual suspects, supplemented by a number of enthusiastic Americans with an interest in things theatrical. There's usually a good deal of unplanned drama, mostly of the comic and mock-heroic variety, during the Gogarty weekend, but on this occasion the theatrical highlight was From Castle to Abbey, a dramatised history of Kylemore Abbey written and directed by Barbara A. Knowland. Sponsored by Brian Deane and John Dalton of Trilog.ie Ltd, this was energetically performed by the local two-person troupe Hobnailed Boots, namely Sean Coyne and Ros Knowland.
Kylemore Abbey
The appropriate setting was the beautifully-restored Gothic Chapel of Kylemore Abbey itself, and the skilful re-creation of the Abbey's remarkable history was given a rapturous reception by a full house of local people, Gogarty enthusiasts, Kylemore Abbey schoolgirls and the Benedictine nuns who run the institution. Hobnailed Boots hopes to put on this show on a regular basis for the many tourists who throng each summer to see Kylemore Abbey in its magical Connemara setting. Other highlights of the weekend included spirited talks on Gogarty's life and times by Anthony Cronin and Professor J.B. Lyons, plus a scholarly address on Gogarty's letters by young American, Andrew Goodspeed, a post-graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin. For many, the outdoor highlight was the magic of sitting outside the excellent Valden's pub in Letterfrack, enjoying lunch on a brilliant October afternoon. This was our just reward for the morning's exertions, a vigorous uphill tour of nearby Muillin, led by Connemara's leading archaeologist, wit, hill-climber, historian and raconteur, Michael Gibbons. Jim MacAleese also launched his first novel, The Kilbeggan Touch (Fieldgate Press, paperback £8.95), a romantic comedy about a young Englishman who inherits an Irish castle. And Guy St John Williams simultaneously launched his latest book, A Year in Connemara. Guy is the grandson of Oliver St John Gogarty, and his book tells the tale of how he and his bemused family "exchanged an idyllic, pampered and salaried existence [in Macau] for a dilapidated ancestral holiday house on an island in Tully Lake."
Mock-heroic tale
That's only the half of it, or indeed a considerably lesser fraction. The book is a hugely entertaining mock-heroic tale of how Guy took on the task of renovating his eminent grandfather's once-beautiful hideaway home on Freilaun, otherwise known as Heather Island. Gogarty - at one time a collector of houses and castles - had used the house only occasionally, and it fell into a state of considerable disrepair after his death in 1957.
Guy tells how, when he first took on this daunting project, he dreamt one night he was in court, "charged with the crime of rendering my family homeless". He tells the court the history of the house, dating back to 1668, but is then forced to admit that it has not been continuously inhabited since the Duke of Leinster lived there during the war years.
"Are you telling the court", he is asked, that what you call home is a semi-derelict house on an island in Connemara, unlived-in since being abandoned by a thrice-divorced, undischarged bankrupt 50 years ago?"
Of course, this was precisely the case. And to Guy's wife, the inimitable Anne Williams, referred to throughout the story as "Milady", the unrestored Heather Island house was simply "the rookery". But A Year In Connemara is also an evocation of a charmed way of life in the far West of Ireland, of its local politics (and how to avoid becoming embroiled in them), its irresistible charm, its difficulties, its history and its incomparable beauty. As for its people, "Some of the names in this narrative may be fictitious, but then many of the characters are surreal."
Incidentally, the book is published by Daletta Press, and racing aficionados will recall that Daletta, trained by Guy himself, was the horse that won the Irish Grand National on Easter Monday, 1980. Now available for £9.95 at all good bookshops - the book, not the horse.
Jockey Club
Guy St John Williams's own history is intriguing. "Born into a large family business in the Irish midlands, its fortunes founded and dissipated in whiskey, I had forsaken a marketing career for the roller-coaster of racehorse training." Later he worked for the Jockey Club in England, and subsequently the Macau Jockey Club, then a hotbed of corruption: "It was only the unpredictability of the horses themselves that preserved any element of chance".
And then Connemara and "the rookery" beckoned. Guy quotes George Moore: "A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it." It seems that Guy and his family found it in his famous grandfather's old home on Heather Island. "My house," wrote Gogarty, "stands on a lake, but it stands also on the sea - waterlilies meet the golden seaweed. It is as if, in the faery land of Connemara, at the extreme end of Europe, the incongruous flowed together at last, and the sweet and bitter blended. Behind me, islands and mountainous mainland share in a final reconciliation, at this, the world's end."