Aidan Beatty: Hello and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. My name is Aidan Beebe, I'm one of the hosts of this channel.
Aidan Beatty: Today, we're talking to Kevin Riley, President Emmerichus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, where he served as president from 2004 to 2013.
Aidan Beatty: Under his leadership at the university, enrollment grew to 182,000, an all-time high.
Aidan Beatty: And sponsored research continued to expand beyond $1 billion annually.
Aidan Beatty: Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his BA at the University of Notre Dame, and his MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota, all in English.
Aidan Beatty: He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, as well as autobiography and biography, and in the field of Irish Studies.
Aidan Beatty: His new book, Gregory Ghosts, Haunting Irishness.
Aidan Beatty: Is the basis of our conversation today.
Aidan Beatty: Professor Riley has taught the James Joyce course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and done interview programs for Wisconsin Public Radio on Joyce, Yates, Lady Gregory, and Seamus Heaney.
Aidan Beatty: In 2009, he was named one of the top Irish-American educators by Irish Voice Weekly.
Aidan Beatty: A committed internationalist, he has served on the Higher Education Working Group on Global Issues for the Council of Foreign Relations… Council on Foreign Relations.
Aidan Beatty: He is currently Senior Fellow with the Association of Governing Bodies of Universities and Colleges, and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Irish American Culture Institute. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.
Kevin Reilly: Happy to be here, Aidan, thank you.
Aidan Beatty: So maybe if we jump straight into talking about this very prestigious background you have, and where your work fits in with this larger thrust of your academic work.
Kevin Reilly: Sure. Well, to go back a little bit, I earned my PhD in 1979 with a dissertation on Irish literary autobiography.
Kevin Reilly: And back then, much like now, I'm afraid, there weren't a lot of wonderful tenure-track positions teaching Irish studies or English at universities, and I was…
Kevin Reilly: determined not to, you know, take a job teaching four, five sections of freshman composition each semester on a one-year contract. So I said, let me look at some other options. So I did go into university administration early on, but all along, I kind of
Kevin Reilly: kept hold of my interest in, in literature and Irish studies, you know, by my fingertips, fingernails, publishing some articles, giving some talks and presentations along the way. And then I did, as you mentioned.
Kevin Reilly: have the opportunity to teach the James Joyce course here at the University of Wisconsin while I was president, with actually one of the original, sort of James Joyce scholars in America, Phil Herring, who was a retired English professor here then, came out of retirement. We taught the
Kevin Reilly: course together. Phil had… has, the title of one of his articles is one of the great titles about, about, Ulysses, which is,
Kevin Reilly: the bedsteadfastness of Molly Bloom. So at any rate, I had a great time teaching that with, with Phil.
Kevin Reilly: And then I started thinking when I was leaving the job of the presidency around 2014 about this book.
Kevin Reilly: And here we are, you know, 11, 12 years later, and it's finally come out. I was doing a lot of other things along the way. But I always felt, while I was an administrator, kind of like I was a displaced faculty member. And so, keeping up with my interest in Irish studies and scholarship let me feel a little displaced.
Kevin Reilly: And as you and other faculty members would know.
Kevin Reilly: my teaching at Joyce course while I was president earned me a little, deposit credit with the faculty senators, so that was a good thing as well.
Aidan Beatty: So maybe if we could talk a little bit about the book itself, then. You describe it as a ghost story,
Aidan Beatty: Can you tell us what you mean by that? Because that's obviously a term that could have multiple different meanings.
Kevin Reilly: Sure, sure. So, the story has, or the book, has, 10 chapters. There are 9 speakers, Lady Augusta Gregory, the main character, her ghost has the first, chapter and the last. They're all interior monologues, by Lady Gregory and her
Kevin Reilly: friends, lovers, colleagues, family members. And they're in a ghostly state. By that, I mean, they can see back over their lives, and they can see forward to what happened after they died.
Kevin Reilly: So they have this sort of preternatural knowledge of what's gone on.
Kevin Reilly: after their lives, and they're all movers and shakers in one way or another in the development of modern Ireland, and they don't speak directly to each other, because these are interior, ghostly interior monologues, as they call them, but they certainly mention each other and are wondering about each other's influences on
Kevin Reilly: on all of this. So this was kind of a fun way to think about, doing this. They're, they're…
Kevin Reilly: sort of competing and complementary voices, maybe not entirely creditable, but they're sort of chatty Irish ghosts that get to have some fun thinking about
Kevin Reilly: what happened and what didn't happen after they died based on what they did in their own lives and on their relationships with each other. So…
Kevin Reilly: you know, I hope…
Kevin Reilly: that kind of a… I guess you could describe it as a creative non-fiction approach, let's say. I hope…
Kevin Reilly: That kind of gets the reader into the inside of what these interesting figures in the develop of modern… development of modern Ireland were thinking. And also.
Kevin Reilly: Gives readers a good sense of how this was a complicated communal effort with fits and starts all along the way, and with
Kevin Reilly: you know, major tensions among them, one of them being, we'll talk about all this later, I know the Anglo-Irish versus the
Kevin Reilly: Celtic-Catholic-Irish distinction. The class distinctions that were certainly very apparent between a large estate Irish, Anglo-Irish Protestant landholder like Lady Gregory and the Catholic tenant farmers who
Kevin Reilly: Work that estate.
Kevin Reilly: So, a lot of that I can fool around with, and kind of…
Kevin Reilly: recreating what I'll call the cast of mind of these characters, as I see it. I didn't make anything up here about them, it's all based on what they wrote or credible sources
Kevin Reilly: wrote about them. So it's a little bit like a portrait gallery, in a way, that you might see in an art gallery of people who are all involved in a movement at the same
Kevin Reilly: time, and
Kevin Reilly: thinking… you're looking at them, but also thinking about what would they… what's inside their heads, what would they say about each other if they had the opportunity to do that. So that was kind of the basis for my fooling with this. Admittedly.
Kevin Reilly: Different kind of genre related to scholarship, but certainly not scholarship, in that classic sense.
Aidan Beatty: Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask you a little bit about that. Even the way you're describing it now, it seems almost similar to something like…
Aidan Beatty: Martin O'Kayan's famous book, Crane A Killer, where, you know, dead people under the ground are basically narrating their anger at the living world, or even there's a… I remember once reading a transcript of a broadcast that George Orwell made during World War II, where he imagines himself talking to Jonathan Swift.
Kevin Reilly: Haha!
Aidan Beatty: talking about satire, basically, and about the rules of English literature and things like that, and there's obviously things that that does for you, like taking that approach
Aidan Beatty: It allows you to ask questions that a conventional academic book
Aidan Beatty: wouldn't allow you to ask. So, do you see this as non-academic, academic adjacent? You use the phrase creative non-fiction?
Aidan Beatty: Where would you position this as a work, basically, as a literary piece?
Kevin Reilly: Yeah, well, I think academic adjacent is a good phrase. I hadn't thought of that, but I think that's what it is. Interestingly, you know, it's published by Peter Lang as part of their Reimagining Ireland series. It's actually
Kevin Reilly: to my astonishment, when I saw it, the 147th book that Lang has published in that Reimagining Ireland series. But when you look back over the titles of the 146 previous ones, or read some of them, they tend to be pretty
Kevin Reilly: pretty well classic Irish scholarship. So this really is a different, kind of way at getting at, reimagining Ireland, right?
Aidan Beatty: Yeah, I like the idea of not just reimagining Ireland, but reimagining what a book about Ireland could or should look like.
Kevin Reilly: True.
Aidan Beatty: So, you know, as a historian, obviously, I'm relatively aware of Augusta Gregory. She's almost an inescapable person if you write about the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Kevin Reilly: Yes.
Aidan Beatty: I sort of have the knowledge about her that I think a lot of Irish studies people would have.
Aidan Beatty: And then I'll have to admit, I knew very little about her family, and her family members, who obviously feature quite a lot here. Could you tell us a little bit about them, and why they matter to you?
Kevin Reilly: I will. So, there are 3 of her family members who have their own chapters in this book. Her husband, Sir, William Gregory, her nephew, Hugh Lane, and her son, Robert Gregory. So, let's look at each of them in that succession. So,
Kevin Reilly: William Gregory was Augusta Gregory's much older husband. There are great photos of him, one of which
Kevin Reilly: I have in the book. He was a grandly, mutton-chopped 19th century man, very imposing-looking guy, and she was his second wife. When they married, he was 63, and she was 27.
Kevin Reilly: So, a big difference in their ages. He died at age 75, leaving her as a young widow at 39 to manage the cool park estate that was his family estate.
Kevin Reilly: His family had arrived in Ireland with Cromwell.
Kevin Reilly: His grandfather and his namesake, another William Gregory, was the British Under Secretary for Ireland in the early 19th century. And he, interestingly, was a gambling addict early in his life. Horse racing was his thing, and it took his marriage to his wealthy first wife, Lizzie.
Kevin Reilly: To relieve him of his, gambling debt, his debilitating gambling debt.
Kevin Reilly: So, over the course of his life, he traveled very widely. He served two stints in the British Parliament. He was governor of British Ceylon from 1872 to 1877, and that was
Kevin Reilly: where actually his first wife, Lizzie, died, so he became a widower while he was still in that post in Ceylon. And interestingly, Augusta had the last say on him, because she edited and then published his autobiography after his death, so I don't know if that's a fair thing for a wife to do to a husband, but she did do it to him.
Kevin Reilly: And, this is a little interesting sidelight. So, Daniel O'Connell, great liberator, Catholic emancipator, was serving in the British Parliament at the same time as Sir William Gregory, and,
Kevin Reilly: at this point, O'Connell was established and older than Sir William Gregory, and… but they kind of struck up a relationship, and I… this is in the book,
Kevin Reilly: O'Connell would occasionally call Gregory over to sit next to him and get involved in these animated conversations, and part of it was O'Connell just wanted to get the Tories
Kevin Reilly: the party that, that Sir William was all upset about this young, up-and-coming Tory politician talking to, in an intimate way, to Daniel O'Connell in Parliament.
Kevin Reilly: One final thing about Sir William Gregory, so, he said that…
Kevin Reilly: he knew that Irish nationalism was rising, and the days of the Anglo-Irish Protestant's ascendancy beginning to wane when
Kevin Reilly: The tenants, the workers on his estate would not any longer tip their hats to him when he spoke to them.
Kevin Reilly: knowing detail.
Kevin Reilly: So that's, her husband. Let me talk a little bit about her nephew, Hugh Lane, who's an interesting, art dealer, and
Kevin Reilly: was somebody who, sort of preoccupied Augusta Gregory throughout her life. So, she was… his… Hugh Lane was her nephew, son of her older sister, Adelaide, who's beautiful… notoriously beautiful. And by the way, Lady Augusta Gregory was…
Kevin Reilly: The 12th of 16 children.
Kevin Reilly: Of her father's… her father's second… her father had two wives, she was a child of the second wife. And, her mother…
Kevin Reilly: liked to tell her that she was nowhere near as good-looking as her older sisters, one of which was Hugh Lane's mother. So, again, he's an art dealer, impresario, his collection would, his art collection would preoccupy Augusta for much of her adult life.
Kevin Reilly: Hugh Lane died young.
Kevin Reilly: in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the German U-boat attack, famous attack on the Lusitania. He was raised in England, and he always kind of felt out of place when his mother
Kevin Reilly: would take him back to the family, the Peirce family home in Roxborough.
Kevin Reilly: County Galway. That was, that was where,
Kevin Reilly: Augusta Gregory grew up, but his mother would bring him back, her sister would bring him back occasionally, and his cousins would be out chasing across the grounds and riding horses. He preferred to stay in and look at the pictures and the clothing and the artwork in the home.
Kevin Reilly: He, after his death.
Kevin Reilly: Lady Augusta Gregory worked very, very hard for a long time to get his painting collections back from England, where they were, to Ireland. Interestingly, Hugh Lane had left a codicil to his will.
Kevin Reilly: which had left the paintings to the National Gallery in Dublin, saying he wanted them… no, he wanted them now to be at the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, not in London.
Kevin Reilly: So there's this long back and forth of Augusta Gregory ferociously berating the English government about needing to respect
Kevin Reilly: that codicil, even though it wasn't legally incorporated into the will. And finally, there was an agreement reached that the paintings would spend half the year at the National Gallery in Dublin and half of the year in… at the National Gallery in London, I'm sorry, and then the other half of the year at
Kevin Reilly: the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, which
Kevin Reilly: in 1975 was renamed the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery to, I'm sure, the great excitement and happiness of Lady Augusta Gregory's ghost at the time, because she had worked so hard to do that.
Kevin Reilly: So, that was Hugh Lane, and then finally, her son, Robert Gregory.
Kevin Reilly: So, this was her only child, the only child of Augusta and Sir William Gregory, and he was killed while flying in the Royal Air Force over Italy in World War I. And he became really an iconic presence in Ireland's literary landscape.
Kevin Reilly: by virtue of Yeats eulogizing him in two major poems Yeats wrote. An Irish airman
Kevin Reilly: foresees his death, and in memory of Major Robert Gregory.
Kevin Reilly: And those poems were written by Yates, after Lady Gregory twisted Yates's arm way up high, behind his back, a number of times to get him to write something that would praise, praise her son. Yates was not
Kevin Reilly: all that enamored of Robert Gregory. He thought he wasn't really a fit heir to everything Lady Gregory was doing, but she was able to convince him to write these poems, and he was a
Kevin Reilly: handsome guy, great athlete, he… he loved playing cricket, at Cool Park. He'd get all the… a lot of the workers on the…
Kevin Reilly: domain there to play cricket with him. He loved horse riding. But as he got older, the responsibilities of overseeing the estate as he took some of them on, he found
Kevin Reilly: annoying. His cosmopolitan wife, Margaret, was not really comfortable at, way out in Western Ireland there at Gorton, where Cool Park is. And they were both artists and, painters, and they loved a kind of bohemian life. They were able to live with their artist friends in Paris and London, spent a lot of time
Kevin Reilly: away from Ireland, which…
Kevin Reilly: then, interestingly, resulted in their three children spending a lot of time at Cool Park with Lady Gregory, happily there.
Kevin Reilly: And he… he had a somewhat troubled life. He felt he was kind of a grand posseur. He was…
Kevin Reilly: kind of good at a lot of things, but not really notably good in any one thing. He had a very messy, affair that caused great trouble in the family, and he finally decided at a relatively older age, he was in his 30s, I believe, to sign up, to go into the war in World War I, and he was going to establish himself
Kevin Reilly: That way, as a sort of national hero, and I think he liked to think of himself being.
Kevin Reilly: But he was always uncomfortable with his mother's literary circle. He sort of…
Kevin Reilly: Saw them as sort of, you know,
Kevin Reilly: preening, phony Irish professionals, I guess I might say. And he was no nationalist, and of course, he died, ironically, defending the British Empire in World War… World War I. There's a famous
Kevin Reilly: sad but celebratory thought about Robert in Yeats's poem in memory of Major Robert Gregory. It's the one that says, what made us dream that he could comb gray hair? Which…
Kevin Reilly: interestingly, was used by Senator Edward Kennedy when he delivered the eulogy at his nephew, John Kennedy's funeral. And then, in his poem, An Irish Airman Forese His Death, Yeats has Robert think this.
Kevin Reilly: Those that I fight, I do not hate. Those that I guard, I do not love. So Robert was always a very uneasy Anglo-Irishman in that regard.
Kevin Reilly: So those are the three family members who appear in the book.
Aidan Beatty: In the way that you kind of survey across all three, both in the book and in just what you said just now.
Aidan Beatty: in certain different… in different ways, they all seem to exemplify a certain kind of aristocratic background, either serving in the empire and going on to become an MP, or having a kind of a bohemian lifestyle and serving in the early RAF, or being an art collector.
Aidan Beatty: And then elsewhere in the book, you explore what you call the middle-class iconoclasm of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, so I'm wondering how… how much does class matter for your work, and in what ways, or does it matter at all?
Kevin Reilly: I think it, it matters, mightily, and
Kevin Reilly: A little anecdote, a friend of mine, after reading the book, was thinking about all of this, and thinking about the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, and saying, well, you know, they were a part of this
Kevin Reilly: dominance and repression of Irish culture for 800 years that Ireland was part of the British Empire, and then in the late 19th, early 20th century, when the Empire was beginning to come apart a bit, they kind of rediscovered it and took credit for rediscovering it and repropomulating it, so that's…
Kevin Reilly: that's how those Irish Anglo-Irish Protestant work, which I just thought was kind of a funny, interesting way of looking at it.
Kevin Reilly: But, I think, you know, the class distinctions are important, partly because they had their own religious and ethnic
Kevin Reilly: dimensions, right? The Anglo-Irish Protestants largely in the upper class, the Celtic-Irish Catholics below them, some of them far below them. And there's… there's an interesting instance of this if we go back…
Kevin Reilly: for a moment to the relationship between Daniel O'Connell and Robert Gregory, or Sir William Gregory, Daniel O'Connell and Sir William Gregory that I mentioned earlier, when they were, together in Parliament, and let me,
Kevin Reilly: Give you a snippet of that conversation.
Kevin Reilly: So this is, Robert Gregory's ghost thinking about all this. He, meaning Daniel O'Connell, told me he had heard we were fair landlords, enjoying an attachment between our tenants and ourselves.
Kevin Reilly: I responded that I could not escape such an attachment, thinking of them as I do the most lovable and loving people in the world. Then he had me.
Kevin Reilly: Well, said he, has it not often happened to you to see on a Sunday morning this lovable and loving people kneeling outside a miserable chapel while the rain poured on them, there being no room within, and they themselves being too poor to make it a commonly decent house of God?
Kevin Reilly: I have seen such sights, I replied. And when you have gone to your own parish church on a Sunday, have you found it crowded with worshippers, and the rain coming through the roof, and no means of making it decent?
Kevin Reilly: And do you think a population treated with such unfairness in a matter that goes home to their hearts is loved by those who rule it and can be loving to them?
Kevin Reilly: So you get some sense of the sharpness and the importance of the class divide there between the people O'Connell felt he was representing and the people that Sir William Gregory was, in fact, representing in the British Parliament.
Aidan Beatty: So, as you were reading that, I was thinking how, you know, you have this, like, very intimate depiction of someone like William Gregory, and of his potential inner thoughts, or his intimate-most thoughts, but also these much larger questions about…
Aidan Beatty: the decline of the empire in Ireland, about class, about religion, and in my own work, you know, I've written one fairly conventional biography, and then a couple of papers that are
Aidan Beatty: quasi-biographical
Aidan Beatty: And I've always found that to be one of the hardest things to grapple with, about how do you… how do you tell this intimate story
Aidan Beatty: It's also this much larger story about… about society in general, about thousands, if not millions of individuals, as well as this one individual within it all.
Aidan Beatty: And early in the book, in your introduction, you quote Barbara Kingsolver and her view that literature translates massive society-wide and even global events into what she called the intimate language of human experience. So I'm telling… I wanted to ask you about
Aidan Beatty: In your own work, writing a sort of an autobiographical work, but
Aidan Beatty: Taking a quite unconventional approach to it.
Aidan Beatty: how did you grapple with these much larger macro-level events? Like, how did you tell an intimate story that's also a big…
Aidan Beatty: Macro-level story.
Kevin Reilly: Yeah, it's a good question, and I think because all of the people in the book were public people, public figures in one way or another.
Kevin Reilly: Who were, personally and…
Kevin Reilly: communally grappling with where Irish society and culture were going. How would Ireland fit into this wider, developing, modern world?
Kevin Reilly: It was really quite easy to connect, the autobiography with the wider social, historical trends, because they were always, as individuals, as in a group.
Kevin Reilly: thinking about those, and talking to each other about them, and writing to each other about them.
Kevin Reilly: And I was thinking as you were talking, Aiden, of,
Kevin Reilly: Molly Bloom's question in Ulysses, you know, who's he when he's at home? And these folks in the book were always, I think, asking themselves at some level, who am I when I'm out there in this tumultuous moment of Irish history I happen?
Kevin Reilly: to be living in. That was kind of always on their mind in one way or another.
Kevin Reilly: And I think it's fair to say that autobiography as a genre, Constructs and embodies identity.
Kevin Reilly: Right? That's… that's what that genre really does. And you can argue over whether it's… how factual those identities are that people construct and say embodies them or not, but that's… that's what that genre does. And these folks were always trying to construct and embody, in one way or another, a new identity.
Kevin Reilly: For Ireland, based in many ways, on the older identities that Lady Gregory especially was,
Kevin Reilly: very involved in, in terms of folklore and the tales, going out to the Aran Islands and talking to the native speakers there about all that, and trying to capture that in what she wrote. And then.
Kevin Reilly: really bringing all that into the politics of the moment, and hoping it would have a kind of liberating effect on the Irish psyche, because part of any colonial, as you know, colonial occupation is a repression of the native culture and identity.
Kevin Reilly: in some ways successful in Ireland, certainly with the language, but in other ways not successful in Ireland.
Kevin Reilly: there are, throughout all these connections between the autobiographical cells and the new identity of the country as it was developing. So I found it…
Kevin Reilly: I found that it worked fairly easily for me in that sense to connect those big social sweeping developments with people's individual lives, at least of these people at this time in Ireland.
Aidan Beatty: The subtitle of your book is Haunting Irishness, so is it something specifically autobiographical about
Aidan Beatty: Augusta Gregory and the other members of her family that is haunting us today, or is it something bigger that the people like her represented, whether that was…
Aidan Beatty: you know, the disappearance of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, or female agency, perhaps even?
Kevin Reilly: Yeah, yes. Well, I think a couple things, clearly, that the relationship of Ireland.
Kevin Reilly: with England is an ongoing relationship that has changed mildly, but also has some elements that continue to cause tension. The Brexit matter and what would happen with the border in Northern Ireland is a good contemporary example of that. It's still royals.
Kevin Reilly: And of course, the whole place of the Anglo-Irish, who were, you know, brought over and placed in control of
Kevin Reilly: a lot of land and wealth, and the native Irish at that time displaced from all that by the implanting of the Anglo-Irish, and…
Kevin Reilly: and their identity, and how that still plays out now, who's really Irish, in what terms, haunts both islands, in that sense, you could… you could say. So that's certainly true.
Kevin Reilly: And then, you know, I think of the Ireland that existed in Lady Gregory's time, when women, for instance, could not own property.
Kevin Reilly: could not vote, could not own property, so that when, when her husband died, Sir William Gregory, she…
Kevin Reilly: would and would say this, she was, was… was preserving, developing Cool Park.
Kevin Reilly: for her son, and then when he died, for his son, her grandson, because women were legally not able to actually own the property. You think of what's gone on in Ireland.
Kevin Reilly: from that time to, in terms of women's rights, to, for instance, the not all that long ago now, change in the abortion law in Ireland. I mean, huge.
Kevin Reilly: changes. And somebody like Augusta Gregory was one of the first Irish women To really make…
Kevin Reilly: her presence felt nationally, right? And I mean, this is a really interesting character. Like I said, a young…
Kevin Reilly: A widow at a young age, is managing this huge estate, in terms of the business skills that took.
Kevin Reilly: And managing the tensions that were developing with the Catholic Irish tenants who worked the land, and, you know, she was dependent on their work to produce the income to maintain this fancy estate in Western Ireland.
Kevin Reilly: So, yeah, yes, that whole,
Kevin Reilly: issue of Irish feminism is haunted to some extent, I think, in a positive way, I'd say, by Lady Gregory's life and continued influence. And, you know, another way I think we can think about this haunting is just,
Kevin Reilly: her view of the potential of Ireland as a literary powerhouse, let me… let me put it that way. And you'll know that the image that,
Kevin Reilly: the Irish poet Richard Ryan gave us around in one of his poems as a ragged, leaking raft, quote-unquote, a ragged, leaking raft with all of those sharp edges around it, if you think of how it appears, and then the
Kevin Reilly: the, the water bubbling up in the bogs in the middle of the country, a ragged, leaking raft. And who would have thought that, you know, that ragged, leaking raft could produce,
Kevin Reilly: Joyce, a Yates, a Beckett, you know, arguably… arguably the most notable writers in English as… as a novelist in Joyce in a potent
Kevin Reilly: Yeats and a… and a dramatist in Beckett. Well, Augusta Gregory thought it could do that, and she was part of making it happen, and
Kevin Reilly: you know, she, in a way, foresaw the incredible continued explosion of literary talent in Ireland, and, you know, I was just thinking of some of the contemporary writers that are still so prominent.
Kevin Reilly: You mentioned Seamus Heaney earlier.
Kevin Reilly: Cullum Tobine, novelist, and by the way, I should have mentioned this, so Cullum Tobine wrote a book a good number of years ago called, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush.
Kevin Reilly: And this is back to the class question. So, after one of the attacks on, her company at the Abbey theater because of the… they're putting on Sings, a Playboy of the Western World, which some found offensive,
Kevin Reilly: She wrote to Yeats that, well, it's just the old battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.
Kevin Reilly: So, you know, she was saying, we're the upper class, you're the lower class, and the lower class doesn't understand what we're trying to do. So she… she lived with that tension all along. But at any rate, I just read Emma Donahue's The Paris Express, a great book, and she's, you know, a contemporary Irish writer who is also a screenwriter, right? Avon Boland and poetry, Martin
Kevin Reilly: McDonough in
Kevin Reilly: drama. Again, that tradition continues of the place producing such literary talent, and at the end of the book, I wanted to sort of
Kevin Reilly: Grab a hold of this issue of how
Kevin Reilly: how she continues, and she and these other people continue to haunt Ireland, or at least the Irish literary landscape. And, let me,
Kevin Reilly: let me read you a little bit of how she's… how her ghost is thinking about this at the very end of the book, actually.
Kevin Reilly: So she's thinking, this.
Kevin Reilly: Lady Gregory is. Cool Lake… Coolpar, Cool Lake is a Turlock from the Irish Tor, meaning dry, and of course, Loch meaning lake. A dry lake, a contradiction in terms, rather like being Anglo-Irish.
Kevin Reilly: The lake empties in the summer through swallowhose in its lake bed, cracks in the karstic limestone.
Kevin Reilly: The water makes its way from cool northwest via an alternating series of other turlocks and underground pathways to reach the Atlantic, finally at Kinvara.
Kevin Reilly: The lake levels will fluctuate more in Cool Lake than any other Turlock in Ireland, in excess of 10 meters, refilling itself for the winter. These kinds of seasonal lakes are found in Ireland more commonly than in any other place in the world.
Kevin Reilly: It was my favorite place at Cool Park. It seems to me a natural model of what I wanted Cool to be.
Kevin Reilly: My home would summon from across Ireland the best thinking and writing about its past, present, and future.
Kevin Reilly: From there, it would, flow back out across the Irish landscape and onto the rest of the world.
Kevin Reilly: Gradually, the world's reaction to it would refill and reshape our own Irish creative energies, with us now as players on the big world's cultural stage, with the world wondering how this divided little island
Kevin Reilly: floating out in the daunting Atlantic could have produced such marvels. So that's the way she thought about her haunting at the end of this book.
Aidan Beatty: So, it's obvious that she still haunts Irishness, and haunts, maybe, the Irish nation, the Irish people.
Aidan Beatty: Will she continue to haunt you, or will you work in other areas, or…
Kevin Reilly: What do you think?
Aidan Beatty: Timing is your next project?
Kevin Reilly: Well, thanks. I'm thinking about that.
Kevin Reilly: There's an incident that does appear in the book that I think might be worth some more thinking about, and maybe writing about. So, it's, it's May of 1921.
Kevin Reilly: So she is still alive. Her son, Robert, is dead. He was killed in 1918 in the war.
Kevin Reilly: And Margaret, his now-widow, Robert's widow, her daughter-in-law, is going over to, for an afternoon of tennis to Bally Turin, the Baggett family.
Kevin Reilly: And riding in the car with her is the district inspector for the Royal Irish Constabulary, the RIC, and he happens to be an English native, not born in Ireland, but he's in the RIC. He has two of his officers with him, and his pregnant wife, and Margaret Gregory. So they go over to the baggots, and they have a
Kevin Reilly: Nice afternoon playing tennis and Toward the end of the afternoon there.
Kevin Reilly: coming back out the long driveway, and the car, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, Inspector Blake is driving it, and the gate is closed at the end of the long driveway, and one of the officers gets out.
Kevin Reilly: to open the gate, and immediately, they're fired upon. So this was an IRA ambush.
Kevin Reilly: carefully planned at a time when the black and tans and the IRA were constantly shooting at each other, and lots of ambushes and reprisals and blaming of one side or the other.
Kevin Reilly: But in this particular ambush.
Kevin Reilly: Everybody was killed but Margaret Gregory, including the Constabulary, the Royal Irish Constabulary inspector's wife, who happened to be pregnant. So, he was killed, his pregnant wife and the two officers were killed.
Kevin Reilly: the IRA shooters got Margaret Gregory out of the car and walked her back up the driveway to put her in the hands of the baggots who were running down from their house, having heard the shots being fired. So, in my mind, this is kind of an iconic
Kevin Reilly: incident that has a lot to say about the conflict between the Irishness and the Englishness.
Kevin Reilly: that particular moment of the Anglo-Irish aristocracies waning, the beginning of the end, that, you know, the War of Independence, the truce, was kind of struck later in 21, and then the Civil War
Kevin Reilly: of course, began.
Kevin Reilly: Margaret Gregory's an interesting character. She went on to marry a Guy Guff of a old, very Unionist family in Ireland, and they actually bought and lived in Selbridge Abbey.
Kevin Reilly: which was the place where Yates or Swift's famous friend Vanessa, lived. So, there's all sorts of interesting things that could be brought out, I think, about
Kevin Reilly: Ireland past, present, and future, if I fooled around with that a little more. So I'm thinking about that. I'll continue my work in, you know, in higher education. I've got an article
Kevin Reilly: coming out in the next issue of Trusteeship Magazine, aimed at the 50,000 or so people who are trustees of colleges and universities in the United States on…
Kevin Reilly: government censorship in higher education. So, I may be censored myself after this gets out, but we'll see what happens. I'm doing some work on defending democracy with a group called
Kevin Reilly: keep our republic. So, and I also have,
Kevin Reilly: six grandchildren who live in the area around Madison, Wisconsin now, so I have a lot of distractions from Irish literary and American political issues.
Kevin Reilly: But no, I'd like to do something, I think, that would pick up on the work I've done here. Whether I do it in this creative nonfiction mode or not is something I'm thinking about, but I did enjoy
Kevin Reilly: Using this mode, because it lets you…
Kevin Reilly: Do things with the characters that you can't in traditional scholarship, which we've talked pretty extensively about already.
Aidan Beatty: Well, as you've been discussing this, I think as you've shown in your discussion, you are able to ask questions and probe areas that a conventional academic book wouldn't.
Aidan Beatty: Gregory Ghost's Haunting Irishness is out now with Peter Lang as part of their Reimagining Ireland series. It's definitely worth reading. Kevin Riley, thanks for joining us.
Kevin Reilly: It's been my pleasure.