Lives and the Dream: Writing the Biography of Mary and Padraic Colum

My project during this wonderful Parnell Fellowship is a biography of two Irish writers: Mary Maguire Colum (1884–1957) and Padraic Colum (1881–1972). The works and lives of these writers are now unjustly forgotten, even within Ireland: though older Irish people remember lines from poems by Padraic which they learnt at school, such as ‘An Old Woman of the Roads’.

Mary Maguire Colum is mentioned in passing in a handful of studies and her excellent memoir Life and the Dream (1947) is a well-kept secret, but can be stumbled upon in second-hand bookshops. The memoir details her childhood and young adult life in Ireland, and the first decades of the Colums’ lives in America (where they moved in 1914). In a welcome recognition of its value – especially as a portrait of the Irish Literary Revival – it has been recently translated into Japanese.

Mary’s review of Ulysses in 1922 was one of the three liked by James Joyce. In 1931, Amy Loveman (founder of the American weekly magazine Saturday Review of Literature) described Mary as ‘the most brilliant of our women critics’. And in an especially memorable indication of her contemporary status as critic, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his editor Max Perkins on the publication day of Great Gatsby (1925), wrote of Mary Colum, ‘I’d like her to like it’.

Padraic Colum was wittily described by fellow writer Frank O’Connor as ‘the only sane man in Irish literature’; his death in January 1972 made front-page news of the New York Times (Mary’s did not). The following lines from his obituary provide a useful summary of his life and point to some of the challenges facing my biography:

“Colum was an acquaintance and admirer of all, a confidant of some, a perceptive critic and revealing biographer of many. In his own right, he was a gentle, lyrical poet, a whimsical teller of tales for children, an able historian and essayist, a founder of the Abbey Theatre and, potentially, a fine dramatist. But the Irish Renaissance was filled with so many towering figures that Padraic Colum was sometimes over shadowed when many thought he should not have been. His times were flamboyant times, and he was mild, modest and inconspicuous….. Mr. Colum was a devoted friend of Joyce, and many called him Joyce’s Boswell”.

In summary, I am telling the narrative of two lives, lives that are largely unknown; and the recurring tendency or temptation (or need?) is to render them significant or interesting through the lives of those they knew, or more precisely the now more famous people by whom they were known. Instead, my aim is to recover the ‘dream’ as well as their lives: to explore within their very unusual emigrant narrative their specific hopes of literary success, the fate of such hopes, the graph of their personal fortunes and happiness as individuals and as a married couple. Given their deep involvement in early twentiethcentury cultural and political movements in Dublin, what led them to emigrate and what did it mean, and require, to stay?

I am hugely fortunate in having encountered many archival materials previously unmined, that can enable the rich and complex biographies – both personal and professional – of Mary and Padraic to be revealed. These include extensive holdings at the New York Public Library where a recent fellowship at the NYPL’s Cullman Centre enabled months of research, and the recent discovery of some 500 early love letters exchanged between Padraic and Mary prior to their marriage. I am currently spending many happy hours in the magnificent Magdalene New Library perusing that correspondence.

The photo reproduced here was first published in Life Magazine on 23 August 1948, as part of photographer Robert W. Kelley’s feature on the MacDowell Colony for artists at New Hampshire, which Mary and Padraic frequently visited. They are busily at work on their jointly authored biography, Our Friend James Joyce, which was published soon after Mary’s death in 1957.

To cast a personal light on this snapshot of professional collaboration, by way of conclusion (for now), I draw lines from one of Padraic’s last poems, called ‘Images of Departure’ and written in the late 1960s. It was inspired by a trip to Ireland, alone, during which he viewed John Hughes’ sculpture of Orpheus and Euridice, still to be seen today in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. In the poem, the speaker refuses a narrative of age and loss for the pair of lovers, choosing instead an emblem that defies change:

‘They have not aged, this pair, they well remember
The eagerness of first companionship,
The dreams, the ardors, and the prophecies’
‘Images of Departure’, 1969.

by Professor Margaret Kelleher (2023), Parnell Fellow

Professor Margaret Kelleher is Parnell Fellow at Magdalene 2023–2024. She is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, board member of the Museum of Literature Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

This article was first published in Magdalene Matters Spring/Summer 2022 Issue 54.