Sidelong Looks
LIFE AND THE DREAM (454 pp.)--Mary Colum--Doubleday ($3.50).
Once upon a time Mary Colum was Mary Maguire, Irish, red-haired and 18. "I got on the Dublin train," she says, "in my new blue ankle-length dress, my dead mother's watch fastened to a long chain and stuck in my belt. Attached to the chain was a silver Child of Mary medal and a ... silver cross, and nobody, not even a native of central Africa, could have failed to recognize in me the typical product of a convent school."
Bound for four university years, she stepped off the train "right into the Irish Revival." Bernard Shaw, to be sure, was no longer walking Dublin's streets, and the face & figure of Oscar Wilde were almost forgotten ("Poor Oscar," said one old lady, "the English put him in gaol for something--I never did know what"). But Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde were still there, and James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, George Moore, "AE," Lord Dunsany and Poet-Playwright Padraic Colum, whom Mary married.
Life and the Dream mixes warm, fond Irish reminiscence with some pretty cranky anecdotes about life & letters in the U.S., to which the Colums emigrated in 1914. Mrs. Colum is still angry at people who "misunderstood" her critical volume, From These Roots (1937). She is none too sure of the merits of various others, from Amy Lowell and Hart Crane to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Yeats is Mrs. Colum's great admiration: "the most remarkable person I have ever known--by many, many degrees. ..."
As a newcomer to Dublin, Mary treasured a cigaret butt Yeats had thrown away, went to every performance of his plays, watched awestruck as he passed on the street, "strange looking, with dark, sorcerer's eyes." Later, when they became acquainted, she found him rather a snob, affecting the "grand air of a Renaissance prince" and sometimes even failing in "ordinary good manners." But "I never knew a greater mind or a greater man, one with such all-round endowments."
When in Sorrow, Sing. The Colums saw Joyce most often in Paris, after Ulysses had appeared and he was working on Finnegans Wake. Already half-blind and often down on his luck, he expected "a lot of attention and help of all kinds from his friends." Now & then he would stalk unannounced into the Colums' apartment, sit down at the piano and begin to sing. "When anything hit him hard, Joyce had relief in singing, and all his songs were sad."
Deep down he was "a very lonely man who paid dearly .for his fame," says Mrs. Colum. "His voice would be so charged with emotion, so full of ... yearning for a life he could never have . . . that one saw there were whole regions of his mind that could only be expressed in music. . . . He had no such large voice as John McCormack, who had won the competition they both had entered.* But for emotional expressiveness Joyce was the most effective singer I have ever heard."
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