Padraic Colum

• 1. Introduction

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  Padraic Colum was born Patrick Columb in a County Longford workhouse, where his father held a job. That was the 8th of December 1881. He died on the 11th of January 1972, aged 90. By then he had published 61 books, not counting his plays. He wrote poems, novels, plays and biographies, produced children's stories, and gathered folklore. He ranks among the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival. How did a child of the workhouse find his way into that circle? What did a railway office, a Dublin library and a children's publisher each give him? And who really wrote the words of one of Ireland's best-loved songs?

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• 2. Railway Clerk

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  In 1889 Padraic's father lost his job and went to the United States to join the Colorado gold rush. Padraic was the first of eight children born to Patrick and Susan Columb. While their father was away, Padraic, his mother and his siblings moved in with his grandmother in County Cavan.

  In 1892 the father came home, and the family settled in Glasthule, near Dublin. He found work as assistant manager at the Sandycove and Glasthule railway station. Padraic attended the local national school.

  Susan Columb died in 1897, and the family was split for a time. Padraic and one brother stayed in Dublin, while their father and the other children went back to Longford. The following year Colum finished school. At seventeen he passed an exam and won a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House. He held that post until 1903. Those years behind a desk were also the years when he began to write, and when he began to meet the writers who would shape him.

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• 3. Revival Circle

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  W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ were among the leading Irish writers Colum came to know during his clerking years. He joined the Gaelic League. He also sat on the first board of the Abbey Theatre. Much of his reading happened at the National Library of Ireland, and it was there that he met James Joyce. The two men became lifelong friends.

  The Abbey's production of The Playboy of the Western World set off riots. Among the protesters was Colum's own father, Patrick Columb. Padraic took no part in the demonstrations, though he did pay his father's fine afterwards.

  A wealthy American benefactor, Thomas Hughes Kelly, awarded the young writer a scholarship that ran for five years. It arrived just as Colum's own plays were reaching the stage.

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• 4. Stage and Page

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  The Saxon Shillin' earned Colum a prize from Cumann na nGaedheal. It was an anti-enlistment play. Through his plays he became involved with the National Theatre Society and with the founding of the Abbey Theatre, and he wrote several of its early productions.

  Broken Soil, his first play, was staged in 1903 by W. G. Fay's Irish National Dramatic Company. He later revised it as The Fiddler's House. The Land followed in 1905 and became one of that theatre's first great public successes. Thomas Muskerry, another important play for the Abbey, came in 1910.

  Colum's earliest poems appeared in The United Irishman, a paper edited by Arthur Griffith. One of them, The Poor Scholar, brought him to the attention of Yeats. His first book, Wild Earth, collected many of these poems in 1907 and was dedicated to Æ. In 1908 he wrote the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery & Imagination.

  Alongside the verse and drama, Colum collected Irish folk songs, and one of them would stir an argument in 1970.

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• 5. A Disputed Song

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  In April 1970, Colum wrote to the Irish Times about the song "She Moved Through the Fair." He claimed to be the author of its words. The music was composed by Herbert Hughes. By his account, he had taken just a single verse from an old County Donegal folk song.

  Another music collector, Proinsias Ó Conluain, replied in the same correspondence. He had recorded a "very old" song from Glenavy. Its words matched the other three verses of "She Moved Through the Fair."

  By Ó Conluain's account, then, most of the song belonged to a far older source than Colum's pen.

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• 6. A Shared Literary Life

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  In 1911 Colum founded a literary journal, The Irish Review, with Mary Gunning Maguire, David Houston and Thomas MacDonagh. Maguire was then a student at University College Dublin. The journal was short-lived. It still published work by Yeats, George Moore, Oliver St John Gogarty and many other leading Revival figures.

  Colum married Maguire in 1912. He taught at Pádraig Pearse's experimental school, Scoil Éanna, in Rathfarnham, County Dublin. Mary taught at the girls' school Scoil Íde, also called St. Ita's. It was set up in Cullenswood House in Ranelagh, Dublin, once Scoil Éanna had moved out to Rathfarnham.

  At first the couple lived in the Dublin suburb of Donnybrook, where they held a regular Tuesday literary salon. They then moved to Howth, a small fishing village just north of the capital. In 1914 they travelled to the United States for what was meant to be a visit of a few months. It lasted most of the rest of their lives.

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• 7. Stories for Children

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  The King of Ireland's Son appeared in 1916, and it began as an act of memory. Colum had started translating an Irish folk tale from Gaelic because he did not want to forget the language. After the translation ran in the New York Tribune, the Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany suggested working together on a book. Colum then wove the folktale into a long, epic story.

  Children's writing became his path in America. Three of his children's books later received retrospective citations for the Newbery Honor. A contract for children's literature with Macmillan Publishers made him financially secure for the rest of his life. The Adventure of Odysseus came out in 1918 and The Children of Odin in 1920. These books brought classical literature to young readers.

  In 1922 Colum was commissioned to write versions of Hawaiian folklore for young people. The result was three volumes of tales from the islands. A first edition of the first volume, At the Gateways of the Day, was handed to US president Barack Obama by Taoiseach Enda Kenny on the 23rd of May 2011. The gift marked Obama's visit to Dublin.

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• 8. Joyce and Later Years

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  From 1930 to 1933 Colum lived in Paris and Nice, where he renewed his friendship with James Joyce. He became involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake. His novels included Castle Conquer, published in 1923, and The Flying Swans.

  After France, the couple settled in New York City and taught at Columbia University and CCNY. Colum had also contributed to Emma Goldman's Mother Earth. In his later plays he adopted the form of Noh drama. In 1954 he wrote the screenplay for the stop-motion animated film Hansel and Gretel. It was the only screenplay he ever wrote.

  Mary died in 1957. Padraic finished Our Friend James Joyce, the memoir they had worked on together, and it was published in 1958. In 1961 the Catholic Library Association awarded him the Regina Medal. He divided his last years between the United States and Ireland.

  In 1965 Colum sold the notebooks, manuscripts, galley proofs and letters from his apartments in New York and Dublin to the Binghamton University Libraries. He wanted to make whatever resources he could available to scholars of Irish literature and history. That same year Folkways Records issued an album of him reading his Irish tales and poems. He died in Enfield, Connecticut, and was buried in St. Fintan's Cemetery, Sutton.

  Asked how to say his name, Colum told The Literary Digest that the last name was the same as the word column. Of the first name he said: "In my first name, the first a has the sound of au. The ordinary pronunciation in Irish is pau'drig."

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