Search Results for 'Augustus John'

THE SECOND annual Oliver St John Gogarty Literary Festival will be held in Renvyle House - the former house of the writer - in Renvyle, Connemara, and will run from Thursday November 6 to Sunday 9.

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory’s home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory’s typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O’Casey to come out of the library for God’s sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

I brought her a bag of apples on our first ‘date’. Not very romantic, I hear you say. True. And not very generous. Also true (Tesco special offer – one pound for a ‘family bag’). I was merely continuing a tradition. She was Anne Gregory and during her childhood at Coole Park, “every year John Quinn, Grandma’s great friend in New York, used to send a great case of apples to us.” So it is recorded in Anne’s beautiful book Me and Nu, Childhood at Coole. ‘Nu’ was Anne’s sister, Catherine. If you haven’t read Me and Nu, treat yourself to a copy for the New Year. It is still in print after nearly 40 years.

Many years ago I found the courage to ask the late Lady Molly Cusack -Smith whether she had posed nude for the famous artist Augustus John during his many sorties into Galway and the west. She looked at me very hard for some time. Then said in a very cross voice: “How dare you, HOW DARE YOU ask such a impertinent question!”