Sir, - Anthony Cronin has written a very readable biography of Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett the Last Modernist. As with other biographers of Beckett he finds it necessary to refer very frequently to the letters of Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy. In his book Cronin credits the undersigned with having donated these letters to Trinity College. This is not true. Thomas MacGreevy bequeathed them (with certain provisos) to the College.
Cronin's research on MacCreevy (to whom he makes many allusions) appears to be inadequate and results in many inaccuracies, though space permits us to name but a few.
Thomas MacGreevy never lived in Fitzwilliam Square.
During the First World War he was a Second Lieutenant in the British Army, later Lieutenant, but not a Captain.
His degree at TCD was taken in Political Science and History, not French as Cronin suggests.
MacGreevy's Poems were not published by Chatto & Windus in 1934, but by Heinemann.
Anthony Cronin refers to a passage from what he claims to be MacGreevy's unpublished Memoirs. These Memoirs are in our possession and he had no access to them. There is, however, the beginnings of a novel in typescript incorrectly filed with some autobiographical pages among MacGreevy's papers at TCD. The passage referred to by Cronin actually comes from this draft novel and is certainly not a "detached and broken off fragment" but is an integral part of the story.
We were not asked for permission to publish the photograph of MacGreevy and Beckett. Cronin most likely copied this photograph from Deirdre's Bair's biography.
Cronin seems preoccupied with investigating the sexual orientation of Thomas MacGreevy who remained a bachelor. In this connection he refers lo MacGreevy's years in the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in the late 1920s. He assumes that MacGreevy was influenced by the alleged homosexual tendencies of some "of his best friends in Ecole circles". Many of his closest friends would be much surprised by this, including Joan Junyer, the well known Catalan painter, who married in 1936, and Jean Coulomb, who married in 1928, and later became president of the French Academy of Sciences. Both remained happily married. During the late 1920s, MacGreevy himself was very much in love with Dolly Travers Smith, and was devastated when she married the playwright Lennox Robinson, as many letters in the correspondence attest to.
It is a pity that in what has been described as "a definitive biography" we have noticed so many errors of a factual nature. - Yours, etc.,
16 Merton Drive,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6
66 Lower Dodder Road,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 14.
Nieces of Thomas MacGreevy and Literary Executors of his estate.