The Lovesong of Brigid J. O'Donovan

"I have heard the mermaids sing..."

A cousin of mine fell in love with T.S. Eliot. All I know is that her name was Brigid J. O’Donovan and she loved him at first sight when she walked into the office of Faber and Faber to become his secretary. He was, she said, always neatly dressed with short back and sides and he told the writer Rose McCauley that he gave Brigid the job because he liked her black hat.

Brigid’s father, a great uncle of mine, Gerald O’Donovan, was a priest who defrocked, became a novelist. The Church saw in him an autocratic, deviant man negligent of his pastoral duties in the poor parish of Loughrea, Co. Galway. He kept the company of Lady Gregory and others in the Celtic Revivial and Bishop O'Dea, a ferocious cleric, might have been the catalyst for his flight. Father Gerald O’Donovan fled his diocese in 1904, the same year Joyce went into exile.

Portrait of Father Gerald O’Donovan by Dermod O’Brien. His eyes used to follow me around the room as a child. This portrait is now in the Portrait Collection in the National Gallery, Ireland

He went on to have a lifelong affair with his true love, Rose McCauley. And yet he was married to someone else. Rose was Brigid’s godmother and it was she who got my cousin the job in October 1934.

Family lore has it that Virginia Woolf scoffed at my Great Uncle’s novels, said they were ‘second rate.’ You can read about him here.

By 1908, he was penniless and living in London. He had married Beryl Verschoyle, a Fermanagh Protestant in 1910. Their first child was Bridget, who told my father many years later that she had always believed her father’s tale- that he had one brother who had drowned at sea. Later she discovered Gerald came from a family of six, including, I think, my grandfather. (I say I think because he may have been my grandfather’s uncle, therefore my great uncle. In any case, Gerald was banished for the shame he brought on the family.)

Father Ralph was published by Macmillan in 1913. It dealt with rebellion and exile from family, church and country three years before Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. A review in the Times Literary Supplement praised it as evidence of a rebellion by a minority of educated lay people against the bulwark of the Catholic Church. The Church of Ireland Gazette saw it as a great Irish novel which powerfully depicted the Irish clergy and congregation. The Freeman's Journal deemed it a mocking libel on the Irish clergy and people.

When my great grandfather read a review of his autobiographical Gerald’s novel, Father Ralph, his son asked him: "Is that a relation of ours?" "Give me that!" he , grabbing the Catholic Times it was in, and hurled it into the burning grate. That tale came to me from my father, who got the tale from his father. It is reminiscent of what happened to Edna O’Brien, when her mother burned copies of The Country Girls in Tuamgraney.

Photo by Yevhen Buzuk on Unsplash

Gerald O’Donovan, ca. 1930

Father Ralph was published by Macmillan in 1913, a story (his own) of rebellion and exile from family, church and country three years before Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. A review in the Times Literary Supplement praised its rebelliousness against the bulwark of the Catholic Church. The Church of Ireland Gazette saw it as a great Irish novel which powerfully depicted the Irish clergy and congregation. The Freeman's Journal deemed it a mocking libel on the Irish clergy and people.

It was his long-term affair with the Bloomsbury novelist, Rose Macaulay, that inspired the last of his six novels, The Holy Tree, a book of love:

"Boni and Liveright (of New York), the publishers, tell me all they know about Gerald O'Donovan is that he was an Irish priest who had a various and adventurous life and later worked for Lord Northcliffe in London . . . " - Frank Harris

He met Rose Macauley while working as Head of British Propagana in Italy in 1918, where she worked in the Italian department. Their affair lasted until his death in 1942. Rose was ‘overwhelmed by his searching mind, his power of sympathy and his sardonic wit. ‘ (Jane Emery, biographer of Rose McAuley). She did the crossword daily by telephone with Gerald, went on long holidays with him and because she was an appalling driver was the cause of his severe head injuries , sustained in a motar accident on the Lake District in 1937.

Rose McAuley

Years later, it was my mother Jenny who found Brigid in London. She’d just retired as manager of the Design Centre. Brigid told my mother how she walked into the office of Faber and Faber after her father got her in, and clapped eyes on old T.S.Eliot.

Brigid was astounded that her father came from a family of six, having always believed that he had only one sibling, a brother who had died at sea, or some such tall story. She only found out about all the other siblings of her father’s when she met my father in the 1970s.

Eliot’s wife Vivienne was schizophrenic, and separated from T.S., stormily. He used to tell Brigid to tell Vivienne he wasn’t there in the office. The usual stuff. At this time, he was working on Murder in the Cathedral, and was also dictating a lot of fairly personal letters to Brigid along with the Critierion magazine.

He didn’t really notice my cousin Brigid. Her memoirs, ‘The Lovesong of T.S.Eliot’ (Confrontation, Long Island University, Fall/ Winter 1975 reported in Times Literary Supplment in 1975) must have a lot more to say on the matter, but I can’t find them and if anybody happens to read this and knows where I can, please get in touch!

Family Lore has it that she wrote a poem to T.S.Eliot called ‘The Lovesong of Brigid J. O’Donovan.’

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

-T.S.Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Pocock

The Eliot Hale Letters in which there is a little information about Brigid O’Donovan https://tseliot.com/the-eliot-hale-letters/bio/brigid-o-donovan

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

-T.S.Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot smoking a fag

Eliot would slip out of the building when Vivienne showed up, and return nervous and twitchy. Brigid found the whole two years at Faber and Faber an awful strain, handed in her notice and tore off to America. On 27th January 1976, Anne Ridler wrote to Valerie Eliot that Brigid never gave any inkling about being in love with T.S. See here, extracts from letters about the whole scenario, in the Valerie- Hayle letters.

Eliot wrote Brigid a reference in 1940:

“Ms. O’Donovan is decidedly a lady, and I believe her to have a high character, an alert social concsience and even a religious temperament. My relations with her were always most satisfactory and I have pleasure in recommending her for any post she wishes to obtain.”

Not exactly the words of a man in love. She knew she had done the right thing, fleeing off out of Faber and Faber.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

-T.S.Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Brigid visited us in Bray, Co. Wicklow in 1975, and I was tiny but I remember her. I think she wore pearls but when I see the photo my father took of her, I don’t think she did. My father was very excited by her visit and talked to her for hours on end. He must have been very happy that my mother had found her in London. I was only a child, I could not have known anything other than that she was the daughter of the spooky priest in the drawing room.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

-T.S.Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Pocock

Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

-T.S.Eliot TheLovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

In Honour of Gerald O’Donovan and his daughter Brigid O’Donovan.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, BRIGID AND HAPPY BRIGID’S DAY, VALENTINE!

Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash