An Irishwoman’s Diary: The New York life of Mary Maguire Colum

In the Family Immigration Centre on Ellis Island I trawled through the manifest of the SS Celtic. It had sailed from Liverpool to the Port of New York in September 1914. I was looking for an entry for Mary Maguire Colum, and there it was. Squashed in under the name of her husband, Padraic, it noted "Mary Colum, wife". Mollie, as she was known, would have been delighted. She was very much in love with her new husband, but I felt cheated. This was a meagre entry for a woman who was WB Yeats's "ideal of a youthful nihilist".

When they left their rented house on Belmont Avenue, Donnybrook, Padraic and Mary Colum, playwright and literary critic respectively, did not plan to emigrate to America. They were literary adventurers, seeking new horizons. Mollie was also a teacher in Patrick Pearse’s progressive school in Rathfarnham and she had a lot to offer a land of conquering physical adventure.

They rented a walk-up apartment on the fifth floor of Beekman Tower, looking down on the east river. Not far away, in a boarding house on West 29th street, John Butler Yeats, father of the poet, was enjoying an Indian summer of the mind. Writing to his daughter Lily, who was back in Dundrum in Dublin, he declared “I do love the Colums” and he was just getting into the habit of having afternoon tea with them at Beekman Tower when Kuno Meyer, the Celtic scholar, began to show up. Meyer was an Irish nationalist, born in Hamburg and believed, by many, to be working in the German cause in New York in 1915. Yeats didn’t like him. The Colums were also radical nationalists, but the old man continued to love them. Nevertheless, he stopped going to tea at their apartment for fear of who he might meet. This fear did not extend to Nora Connolly who came to stay with the Colums in 1915 while on a secret mission for the Irish Volunteers.

Mollie got lonely. They moved out of Beekman Tower and lived for a time in lodgings in lower Manhattan. Here, they occasionally shared their supper table with Leon Trotsky and, it was here they got news of the Easter Rising in Dublin. A little over a week later Mollie saw the report of the subsequent executions on a billboard on Grand Central station. She stumbled into the waiting room where she sat all day. Among the dead were some of her dearest friends.

For a while thinking was too hard. She stopped "playing house and making her own frocks" and got a job on Women's Wear Daily translating articles on fashion from French and German magazines. She had been given the job "in two minutes flat despite the fact that she barely knew the difference between a hat and a shoe". When she pointed this out to her interviewer he explained how it worked: "sure, if you don't make good we'll fire you".

She didn't wait to be fired. She began to write the sort of literary criticism that she had been known for in Dublin when she was critic-in-chief on The Irish Review.

Finding her niche

After the war, educational theorist and social critic Albert J Nock and Francis Neilson, a prolific writer and member of the British parliament, founded a journal,

The Freeman

, and Mollie, a true Jeffersonian liberal, found her niche.

She had been writing criticism for most "journals of opinion" on the east coast of America but The Freeman proved to be a wonderful school for all associated with it. It had no ideological boundaries and certainly no political programme. The things that were valued were the individual's right and responsibility to make his or her life as creative as possible.

Readers were told that “the instincts for freedom, for beauty, for a graceful social life are true primary instincts and it’s our business to follow them”.

For this journal she wrote long critical essays from which extracts were taken by newspapers all over the United States. Hence, she was educating America long before she became a professor of poetry at Columbia University, had published her books, was a Pulitzer Prize judge for drama, or had become one of the founders of the National Book Award.

When she and her colleagues did the latter and gave the inaugural prize to Nelson Algren for The Man with the Golden Arm the furore was deafening. The reading public did not think it was "literature". She took the flak but, with her usual impatience she brought the debate to a close when she told her critics that, far from being entered in to the competition, most of the books her team had been obliged to read should never have been written, let alone published.