| Oliver
St. John Gogarty (b. Dublin 17th August 1878 –
d. New York 22nd September
1957) was an Irish physician and ear, nose and throat surgeon. He was also a poet and writer, one of the most prominent
Dublin wits, and for some time, a political figure of the Irish Free State. He is perhaps now best known as the inspiration
for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Gogarty was
a medical student at Trinity College, Dublin where he established his reputation as a wit and raconteur. Having won university
prizes for poetry at TCD, he went to Oxford in 1904 for a term. He was acquainted with R.S. Chenevix Trench there, who
later stayed with him in the Martello Tower at Sandycove in Dublin, which he rented. James Joyce also shared the tower
with the two friends. The characters Mulligan, Haines and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses were based on these three men from this time.
| 
| Oliver
St. John Gogarty married Martha Duane of Moyard, Connemara in 1906. He had a large and successful medical practice in
Dublin and lived at Ely Place. He was in the Senate of the Irish Free State and was kidnapped by the Republicans but escaped
by swimming the Liffey. This feat was commemorated in his first collection of poetry An Offering of Swans in 1923. Renvyle House, which
he had bought in 1917, was burnt by the Republicans in 1992. He rebuilt it as an hotel. Gogarty became increasingly disillusioned
with contemporary Ireland after losing a libel action arising from his book As I Was Going Down Sackville Street. He moved to London and then
to New York in 1939. He lived there until his death in 1957. He is buried at Ballinakill Cemetery in
Connemara near his beloved Renvyle.
Gogarty wrote the first ‘slum play’, entitled Blight, for the Abbey Theatre. He belonged to the literary set who masterminded
the Irish Literary Renaissance. As I Was Going Down Sackville Street chronicles that period.
“When Yeats was on his honeymoon he came to stay with us at Renvyle, a lovely sea-gray
house in Connemara on the edge of the Atlantic on the extreme edge of Europe” - a memoir by Oliver St. John Gogarty
|
