Oliver St John Gogarty
Gogarty, Oliver St John (1878-1957), writer and surgeon. Born in Dublin, he was educated at Stoneyhurst, the Royal University [see universities], and TCD, where he studied medicine and established his reputation as a wit. He, R. S. Chenevix Trench, and James Joyce, with whom he had a short-lived friendship, figure as Mulligan, Haines, and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Gogarty married in 1906, and in 1907 undertook postgraduate study in otolaryngology in Vienna. He became a well-known figure in Dublin's literary and cultural life. His first work to come before the public was Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin (with Joseph O'Connor, 1917), the first ‘slum play’ to be staged at the Abbey Theatre. He supported the Free State [see Civil War] and was kidnapped by Republicans, from whom he escaped by swimming the Liffey, a feat commemorated in his first substantial collection of poetry, An Offering of Swans (1923). A further collection was Wild Apples (1928). When he became a Senator (1922-6) he had his house, ‘Renvyle’, in Connemara burned down by Republicans. In 1937, after losing a libel action arising from his autobiography As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, he moved to London and then to America in 1939, where he finally abandoned medicine. I Follow St Patrick (1938) and It Isn't This Time of Year at All! (1954) were further volumes of autobiography. Tumbling in the Hay (1939) is a comic work describing a night in Holles Street Hospital. In New York he wrote the novels Going Native (1940), Mad Grandeur (1941), Mr. Petunia (1945), and issued his Collected Poems (1951).
Bibliography
Ulick O'Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1963).
