The late Desmond O’Grady’s account of the influence of Limerick City Library,
(and its librarian, Bob Herbert,) on his writing life.
Once I settled into the routine of boarding school life at Cistercian College Roscrea, Co.
Tipperary, during my Intermediate
Examination year of 1951-52, when I turned sixteen years of age, I
apprehended and began to appreciate and enjoy reading the required poems
on my English course.
That in
turn bloomed out to the stimulation and getting of personal satisfaction
from writing such pieces as regular class assignments and short essays
of appreciation on poetic content and form, along with the personal
effect on me of individual poems. With time all this would extend into my study of Gaelic poems in my Irish classes. Both
epiphanical illuminations were unknowingly due to my lay teachers in a
monastery school communicating and connecting with a still ignorant
sixteen year old me. The
resulting experiences gave life to the poem that was in part myself, so
it decided my personal identity, my choice of life and my future. That induced me to try to write poems for myself during our long study hall hours.
During
the 1952-53 school year my English teacher who would also teach me
physiology, chemistry and art was Mr. Thomas Cole, whose own son was a
day pupil with us boarders. In
class when introducing a new poet we were going to study that day he
would be glancing out the high windows towards the tall trees and
undulating fields of the monastery, pensively making some vague comments
about the life and times and friends of the poet whose poem we were
going to read, analyse and appreciate. That's when I first heard the then unfamiliar names such as, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. The more recognisably commonplace James Joyce was obviously an Irish name. And then we focused on dissecting and analysing the poem on the page in the book before us. On some occasions he dropped foreign names like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Leopardi. He also mentioned painters and sculptors with foreign names. Of course I had never heard of these poets and artists not to say read or seen their work.
Because
I was surrounded by our school library during study hours, I first
asked the monk who looked after the books if we had these poets and
writers. No, we did not. When I went home to
Limerick
City
for my holidays
I went to the Public Library on
Perry Square . Never
having been in a public library before, I spoke to a man behind a low
counter with books on it and a desk and filing cabinets behind it. Yes, he was the librarian. When
I asked him if he had books by the writers on my list he seemed
surprised that a young schoolboy would be looking for such names. He asked me whom I wanted them for. When I answered that I wanted to read them myself he looked cautiously doubtful. So
I added that my English teacher often mentioned these names in class
and I had made the list, but we did not have their books in my school
library. He accepted that as
plausible and half smiling approvingly at me directed me towards the
shelves and numbers where I would find books of poets he had in the
public library. Now, for the first time, I saw the holy rosary of the modern, the twentieth century poets. Of
course W. B. Yeats was there and John M Synge and Austin Clarke but no
Patrick Kavanagh because, as I was told later, he was banned by the
Catholic Church in
Ireland
. There was also some W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas and George Barker. T. S. Eliot was there but no Ezra Pound. Then I moved to the Irish novelists to look for James Joyce and found what I was looking for by him.
Book in hand I returned to the librarian, Mr. Herbert, at his counter. He was stamping the books other readers ahead of me were taking out and chatting amicably to one or two he obviously knew well. When my turn came I asked him what I must do next to join the library and take books home to read. Congratulating
me on discovering the public library system and finding the writers
that interested me he explained the payment system for membership and
the time limit for borrowing the books. The
payment for children up to the age of sixteen was one penny, for
grownups over the age of sixteen the payment was one shilling. As an embarrassed schoolboy of seventeen I told him I would have to wait until I got my Sunday pocket money. He went silent, looked serious. Then
he smiled, said he understood and then, after a brief pause added that
because I wanted to read the modern poets and writers he trusted me and
made me a free member while I was on school holidays and allowed me to
take home one book at a time. When he saw my grateful delight at his
decision he asked me which of the books I had seen would be my first
book to take home to read. Because
at school I had secretly begun to write my own poems and because my
English teacher Mr. Cole had casually said to us in class that we might
find the book interesting, my reply to my Limerick librarian was James
Joyce, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
The librarian, Mr Herbert nodded his approval with a hum and made out my official library ticket. Then he stamped the date on the first most important book I would read in my life. After
I tucked it under my arm to leave, he said that after I read the book
and brought it back he would like to hear what I thought of it.
Read and absorbed with fascinated absorption I
returned my first James Joyce book read to the public library one
evening as it was closing. Mr. Herbert the librarian was tidying his papers but seemed pleased to see me. He told me to get my next book quickly because he had to leave. My
next choice was the poems of T. S. Eliot because I had heard his poem
‘The Waste Land’ mentioned by my English Teacher Mr. Cole as the most
important modern poem to read.
Again the librarian was surprised yet approving as he stamped the date on it and catalogued my card. Handing
it to me he said he was going out close by for his regular late
afternoon aperitif, (adding in case I did not understand his French,
appetiser) before his evening meal and invited me to join him as his
guest for a chat about reading. Complimented
and delighted at the promise of the reality of experience I thanked him
and accepted his invitation. Library doors locked, off we strode across
Perry Square . He led us to his pub around the corner from Tates tall public clock ticking time high in the sky.
His local pub, as he called it, was almost unnoticeable on
Upper Catherine Street
but as we walked towards it I could not help noticing its name. This was the first time in my life going in to a pub for a drink and ironically this one was called ‘The Desmond’. Making no comment I followed my librarian into this small, and at that hour of the late afternoon, almost empty hide-away. He asked me what I would have to drink. Never
having been in a pub and therefore not knowing what to answer, but my
mind immediately asking itself what Stephen Dedalus would answer, I said
I would have whatever he was having himself. He said no, he would not get me what he was having, always had at this hour. He
was having ‘uisce beatha’, the Irish words for water of life in English
or whiskey as the English pronounced ‘uisce’, water in Irish. No, he would not give me that because it would not be good for my brain. I
may have Twoomey's lemonade or, if I preferred, a glass of Guinness
stout which, he added would be good for me in moderation to build me up
to play better rugby at school. Thinking
of Stephen Dedalus writing in his diary at the end of ‘A Portrait of
the Artist’ that, as a young poet, he must "encounter the reality of
experience" if he was going to write poems about human life, I politely
told Mr. Herbert I would have a glass of stout. When our drinks arrived he toasted literature in general and I added poetry in particular. He told me I could now call him Bob. Thus
I was initiated into the public temple of the Irish pub and its various
holy waters of life that priests and acolytes drink ceremoniously by a
librarian
He asked me if I knew about the
Limerick Poetry Circle . No, I did not. He explained that it was a group of
Limerick
people mostly adult women and a few men who used the
Library and who met one evening every week to talk about a chosen poet
and to read the poems aloud to each other. Arthur
O'Leary, who was manager of ‘O'Mahony's’, the only bookshop in Limerick
city, used his home opposite St. Joseph's church as their meeting place
and sometimes they used the flat of Kitty Bredin who was also involved
in theatre in her spare time. He
added that he occasionally went to their meetings and said I should ask
Arthur O'Leary about it in the morning when I was in the shop. Excited at this I took his advice and became the youngest member of the
Poetry Circle
and from there the
Classical Music Circle . However
Robert's mention of the morning reminded him that it was time for him
to go home for his evening meal, adding that I should do so too, and
then I could read my new library book for the rest of the evening. We would meet again.
The next time we met was as I walked in the door of the Library to change my book. He
was just going from the library entrance hall upstairs to his home on
the next and top floor and he invited me along with him. I went, thinking this would be an extra and new dimension to the library and museum on the ground floor. And it certainly was. This
was where he and his wife lived and he introduced me to her saying I
was the schoolboy he had told her about who played rugby by day and read
and wrote modern poetry by night. She welcomed me. Robert had come upstairs for some practical purpose so he waved his personal library at me and vanished. His home looked a lovely place in a grand setting. Here was a broad and long apartment that stretched the length and width of the whole Library - Museum two storey building. On
one side it overlooked the large and quietly un-peopled, (because
professionally residential with medical doctors,) Perry Square and on
the other side the grandly large and queenly lovely People's Park. A
boyish imagination like mine could easily imagine great writers living
and writing their great books in a building and home like this. I
went straight to the bookshelves to see who he had and found all the
poets and novelists who were not downstairs in the Public Library. Some of the names I had heard mentioned in passing by my English teacher but had never seen in libraries or our
Limerick
bookshop. For
example an Irish poet called Patrick Kavanagh who had written a long
poem called ‘The Great Hunger’ published by Yeats --? Press
Dublin
, in 1942 as well as his first book ‘A Soul for
Sale
’ published in
London
in 1947, both banned in
Ireland
by the Catholic Church’s Archbishop McQuaid and his friend Prime Minister Eamon de Valera’s censorship. There were several French writers in English translation and many other foreign names I had never heard of.
All
the books he bought were for our Limerick Public Library but he did not
put all of them on the shelves on the ground floor shelves of the
library. Many special books were here, upstairs, on his own library shelves at home. Now that I knew this I too could read them. Who did I wish to begin with? For
now, to follow up on Stephen Dedalus and ‘The Portrait of the Artist as
Young Man’, I chose the selected poems of Arthur Rimbaud translated
into English with an account of his life by Enid Starkie. He gave it to me.
After that I borrowed from both his public and
private libraries for the rest of my school holidays, and during all my
school holidays every year after that until I went to
Dublin
and then left for
Paris
and the wide world outside that he had helped me read about. The one book I did not attempt to read was Joyce's Ulysses. That book I put on a promise to myself until I had decided to create a life for myself in
Paris
, and George Whitman handed it to me again to read in
his private library there, which was his public bookstore now called
‘Shakespeare and Company’.
Of
the Irish poets before Yeats that I borrowed from Bob's public library I
began with James Clarence Mangan because we had read him a little in
school. Now I could read an account of Mangan's life, which introduced his collected poems and translations. His
life fascinated me as much as Arthur Rimbaud's did and the real or
imagined poems he had translated from far away obscure languages like
Persian and Arabic, corresponded shortly after with what I would read of
Ezra Pound's life, poems and translations from Bob's private library.
Because Mangan had translated some Irish poems I compared them with the
originals, which I could read. That,
because Irish was the only other language I could speak and read with
confidence at school level, encouraged me to begin making my own
translation of the Irish Gaelic poems I had learned by heart as a
younger boy and was now studying and would continue to study for
Intermediate and Leaving Certificate examinations to get into
University. Entranced by
Mangan's and Pound's translations of poems as far apart as Chinese and
Gaelic, my own efforts at translating Irish Gaelic poems helped me find
the beginnings of a personal rhythm in the English language and crafted
my sense of rhyme for the better. In that way both poets revealed an inspiringly new and satisfying discipline of the poet to me. Ever
since that summer my left hand has been translating the poems of other
poets past and present, while my right hand makes my own poems. Both
creative activities are balancing creative disciplines that compliment,
teach and improve each other like the strophe and antistrophe of music
and dance.
Now
when I joined Bob Herbert to continue learning how to read along with
the pleasure of drinking Irish stout in the Desmond Hotel pub he would
ask me how my reading and my writing of poems was progressing, and would
encourage my efforts with his praise. We also talked of our pastimes outside the library and my boarding school study hall. Mine
were obviously sports but he surprised me when he said he liked to go
fishing along the Shannon River in Limerick city and when he could get
out of town he fished the streams in the countryside. Knowing
nothing of the pleasure and satisfaction of fishing I preferred to tell
him of my fascination with the life and writing of the French poet
Arthur Rimbaud and his friends. Yes, I assured him, I enjoyed my evenings at the
Limerick Poetry Circle
and was learning to read poems aloud there. The
classical music circle evenings I also went to, organised by a priest,
were good too because I did not have expensive records of that kind of
music at home and I was learning to like and enjoy it. At
the same time however I wanted to find out more about the real lives of
the poets and the composers I liked such as Ezra Pound, Beethoven,
Rimbaud and Mozart. He assured me he had the books about all of them and would let me have them one at a time.
In
that way over the next few years Bob Herbert, the only librarian I
knew, nurtured my personal holiday reading of the modern great poets and
writers, both Irish and international, who would shape my life with my
required school reading, for examinations, for my pleasure and, to my
advantage as I slowly educated myself. That,
together with my own poems appearing regularly in my school magazine
and the Poets' Corner in the ‘Limerick Weekly Echo’ Newspaper and once,
while still a senior school boy in the University Literary Magazine,
helped me keep my faith in my teenage vocation to be a poet in Paris
when I left school rather than enter our Cistercian monastery to become a
monk writing poems in Tipperary. And the day did come when I took my final exams, left school and went to
Paris
to teach as James Joyce did in the Berlitz School of
Languages, to write poems and to assemble the best of them into a
structured collection that would be my first published book. ‘Chords and Orchestrations’ was published for Christmas 1956 in
Limerick
and took its place on the shelves of
Limerick
City
and Limerick County Libraries. It is kept company today by all the other books I have published since that year.
After I left
Limerick
and
Ireland
in 1955 to teach, live and write abroad in
Europe
,
Egypt
and
America
I kept in touch with him and when I occasionally got back to
Limerick
I went to see him. Ironically when he died (?in a drowning accident while fishing in 1973?) I was living as a teacher in
Rome
and doing personal research in the
Vatican
library. That was not an easy one for a layman to get
Vatican
permission to work in the library, but then, being an old Jesuit boy from
Limerick
city,
Ireland
, helped open Roman doors. One of my poems of 2001 might get Bob's approval. It is called The Library and it ends:
'To evaluate people, look at their libraries.'
