Making Up the New Hibernia Review

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Making Up the New Hibernia Review Thomas Dillon Redshaw i used to complain that my elderly father would always start any explanation or story with the Book of Genesis, and here, in telling of my role in New Hibernia Review, I fear I will start in, well, not with Genesis, but with my exodus from Ireland in the early years of the rise of Irish Studies in North America. My path toward New Hibernia Review may be said to have its beginnings in June 1971, when the new Dolmen poet Richard Ryan hauled John McKiernan around to my bedsit in Oakley Road, Ranelagh, Dublin. The Dutch landlord accorded me one large back room on the first floor above a feisty couple from Yorkshire. I had just finished swanning about in felt slippers invigilating examinations in the Aula Magna of University College Dublin in Earlsfort Terrace. My year of part-time graduate teaching for Roger McHugh, UCD’s first professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, had ended. Only later did I discover that he had paid me out of his back pocket—possibly out of his healthy winnings at the Leopardstown track. So I was casting about for ways to pursue my tyro literary career in newly decimalized Dublin. Ryan introduced me to McKiernan. I manufactured cups of bad instant coffee and produced some chocolate digestive biscuits. Ryan had persuaded McKiernan that I should replace him at the College (now University) of St. Thomas. With two books from Dolmen Press, and a dissertation on Liam O’Flaherty on the way, Ryan had been serving as poet-in-residence in McKiernan’s English department. McKiernan seemed interested in what I had to say about my teaching, my work with John Montague, my research in the National Library, and my reviews in John Mulcahy’s Hibernia, Dublin’s answer to the New York Review of Books. He quizzed me closely about what I was up to in an article on Thomas Kinsella’s [End Page 8] Wormwood, which McKiernan published in Éire-Ireland—an article that now seems to me fussy and overly complicated. Ryan joined in by helpfully mentioning John Montague, which gave me a chance to plug my prolegomena to The Rough Field (1972), scheduled for the Jesuit journal Studies owing to the Reverend Burke Savage’s patient fondness for the poet. McKiernan invited me to come, travel expenses paid, to St. Thomas at the end of the summer. Driven by his daughter Ethna, McKiernan picked me up at the almost new, and then much smaller, Minneapolis–St. Paul airport late in August, and shortly I found myself scheduled for three sections of English 101, an interview with the Reverend Dean O’Donnell, and an introduction to a surprised Department of English. The landscape at St. Thomas had shifted. McKiernan not only had changed his Christian name to the Gaelic Eóin, he had resigned from the department in order to work full-time at the programs of the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI), which soon moved from Aquinas Hall to be housed in the college’s paint shop. With his wife Jeanette and St. Paul philanthropist Patrick Butler, McKiernan had founded the IACI in 1962—the heyday of Irish America’s rise to prosperity and prominence. McKiernan’s aim was to rescue Ireland’s artistic, literary, and learned accomplishments from the predations of American popular culture. It was goal that only a man of his charm, learning, and force of will could reasonably expect to accomplish. Two innovative ongoing projects of the institute established the prominence of the IACI just in advance of the rise of Irish Studies in the 1970s—a rise undergirded by the moral urgency posed by the Troubles in Northern Ireland that had started in 1968. One project was the “Irish Fortnight,” begun in 1974: a freewheeling annual lecture and performance series that brought prominent members of the Irish intelligentsias north and south to the IACI’s chapters in the United States. In the same years, but in the academy, came the formation of the Conference (then Committee) for Irish Studies and its annual regional and national meetings. The second project began, really, in McKiernan’s fifty...