It is early evening on a September Saturday and a friendly, family atmosphere prevails at the pub in Hollywood, Co Wicklow. The locals here tend not to subject strangers to intimidatingly silent scrutiny. James Lydon, former Lecky Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, wearing a tweed jacket, stands at the bar with pint in hand, part of the scene. Comfortable and at ease, to a casual observer Lydon could be a vet or the local GP. He knows the village, having spent much time here during the past 25 years.
Until quite recently he had a house up in the mountains as well as his Fellows rooms in Trinity. Hollywood has been a second home but no one could mistake Lydon for being anything other than the Galway man he is.
Small children are playing hide and seek, shrieking and asking for drinks, but the games stop when the television high on the wall announces The Simpsons. Silence descends and adult conversation briefly asserts itself. Lydon is a Simpsons fan. An energetic, lively character favouring epithets such as "fantastic" and "wonderful" and phrases such as "I have a pet aversion" and the intriguing deflector "for various reasons which I won't go into", Lydon - in common with the early Irish poet, Sedulius, of whom he writes in his new book The Making of Ireland that he "wore his learning lightly" - is busily relaxed and does not feel compelled to conform to the role of professional academic. Nor does he strike one as a typical academic. He queries this observation: "Trinity has been very important to me, it has been my home for 40 years. It helped to give me a more liberal outlook. It is very tolerant." Most academics, he points out, are practical, down-to-earth people.
Quick-witted and ever on the alert, he is opinionated but his jauntiness is often countered by diplomacy and caution. Lydon says: "I spent 40 years at Trinity, but I'm an NUI man, I studied in Galway. It's where I'm from. I spent all my youth and maturing years there. Not just the college but in the town itself and I never lost it. I still feel very Galway, it's part of me." His book is intended as a general survey of Irish history, updating Edmund Curtis's classic, A History of Ireland (1950), and it reads as a dramatic narrative of political and cultural shifts. Methuen, which has since become part of Routledge publishers, approached him to write it. Curtis was still selling well but the publishers, realising it had become out of date, were embarrassed and aware of the need to update. "`What impressed me was that they wanted another medievalist," Lydon says.
As a historian, Lydon possesses an overview which enhances rather than diminishes his specialist interest. Glancing at the finished copy on the table, Lydon remarks that he was working on it for a long time. His wide reading is reflected in a book which offers a continuity so often absent from such projects. Lydon the medievalist not only brings a depth of scholarship to the middle periods but also has a fresh approach to the story of ancient Ireland, from Newgrange and the abstract designs decorating the great stones - "which can still set the imagination alight" - to the modern era, extending now to the present. While most obviously a political history, the book, which was launched by his best friend, poet and fellow Trinity academic Brendan Kennelly, also achieves a sense of the evolving cultural complexities of Ireland. Most assuredly, this is not a revisionist text.
Bracing himself for a predictable attack from that quarter, he says: "History is revisionist by its nature. The story of history is revisionist, I'm already being revised by my former students." He believes the revisionists are attacking the nationalist interpretation of Ireland's past and, he adds cautiously, "in a sense, they were right to do that".
"We have to free ourselves of that burden. But at the same time, we can't entirely divorce ourselves from that nationalist past. One must take into account any view of how Ireland came into being." Balance, he points out, is essential when studying history.
The romance of early Ireland, with its tribes and battles, has not been lost on Lydon who began his academic career with a strong love for Old and Middle English literature. As a young undergraduate in 1950 he met J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth and an outstanding Old and Middle English scholar. Lydon admits to being fascinated by Tolkien the scholar, "although I tried to read his dreadful fiction - those terrible books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - and couldn't. No, of course they're not dreadful, they just didn't appeal to me".
Now 70, he has floppy white hair and shrewd, grey-green eyes and is vaguely dapper. He seems younger than his years, yet admits to being preoccupied by death. "I've got to the age when my friends are all dying off. It stops being an abstract and becomes a reality." Of his immediate family, only his sister Margaret, the eldest, and he survive. "I am a religious man, a daily Mass-goer - when I was younger I went through all that business of doubt but, having recovered from it, I have a strong faith, I believe in Christianity."
As a college student he was a good rower - "I had two loves, rowing and drama" - and has always been active although now he admits to taking shorter walks because of sporadic pains in his joints. He has come also to love opera. When recalling his involvement with the drama society he mentions its daring decision to perform Synge's The Tinker's Wedding - after it had been denounced by the local bishop. "I came out on the stage before each performance and introduced it, adding it had been banned by the bishop." The society also became the first outside Broadway to produce Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
During his career, the academic world has changed dramatically. "The atmosphere is completely different, it is far more competitive, a lot less fun than it was." Technology's relentless advance and the relative overshadowing of the humanities does concern him. "As an educator it worries me. I think it's interesting to see the way the respect for the humanities is being kept alive in America. Education is about training the mind and that's where I think history is so important. It is based on original sources and teaches a student how to assess and interpret material and, above all, how to argue from evidence."
Born in Galway city in 1928, and reared just off Eyre Square, Lydon is the second youngest of a family of 11 children born within a 19-year span - "there was also a couple who died". His father was a baker, born into a family business begun several generations earlier. "The bakeries are still there. Lydon is a Galway name and the family came from Connemara. People thought it was a Dutch name - but it is Irish, the old Irish is Liodain." His mother was a Hogan from an Irish-speaking place outside the city. Lydon remembers walking around Galway with his father. "He took myself and my younger brother by the hand and introduced us to the various people he met on the way. Even then, my father was an old man."
Although the family was never wealthy, there was a great emphasis on education: all the children went on to university. "I went to St Joseph's College - better known as `The Bish'. You know, I think there were people who wouldn't know what school you were referring to if you said St Joseph's - it was `The Bish', and was run by the Patrician Brothers.
As a boy he was interested in science, particularly maths. "My brothers all did engineering or medicine - I was lined up to do science. But what happened was when we lined up on the first day, the science queue was very long. A fellow I knew was standing in another one and he said, `come on and join this one' " - for a BA in maths. It was 1940 and Lydon's first-year subjects were logic, English, maths, Irish and Latin - no history. He was soon involved in rowing, first with fours and later with eights. "I always rowed at 7 or 3." A problem soon emerged. Latin lectures clashed with rowing training. "It was quite odd, the Latin lectures took place in the afternoon, the same time as our rowing sessions. I dropped Latin so I could row." Lydon's relationship with history began after Christmas of his first year. "I liked history, but English was my number one subject. I dropped philosophy. The maths didn't work out." Anglo-Saxon was an exciting discovery. "Part of what we were doing in Galway at that time was translating English into Anglo-Saxon." He began tracing and classifying the imagery of early English poetry and on securing a double first in English and history he wanted to research this imagery. His supervisor's lack of interest in the proposal led him to the history department instead, where he worked under Dr Mary D. O'Sullivan. "She was wonderful and one of the most impressive historians I have known." He also praises his predecessor, Jocelyn Otway-Ruthben.
Co-editor with Margaret MacCurtain of the 11-volume Gill History of Ireland (19721975), Lydon prefers not to select a list of favourite historians.
Meanwhile, away from the relative shelter of university, Lydon was discovering the real world by working as a porter at St Pancreas Station in London. "That was a real eye-opener," he says, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "My colleagues at the station were interested in two subjects - soccer and sex. Of the latter, they didn't believe in sparing us the gory details. It certainly opened my eyes. They were men, I was a boy from Galway. London was fantastic, it was a different world."
By day, he studied at the Institute of Historical Research - during this time he met the famous Welsh historian J.G. Edwards - by night he became part of the system devised by the station night-porters. "I slept most of the time. In those days British Rail was fantastic. It employed about 10 times too many porters so most of us had very little to do. It meant I was able to do a lot of sleeping, while some of the others made money by carrying bags for tipping customers. The tips were later shared out. It worked well."
Having impressed as a research student, Lydon was offered a fellowship at the institute and completed a Ph.D in London on the subject of Ireland and England and the King's wars during the 13th and 14th centuries. This led to a travelling scholarship offered by the NUI which he was advised to avail of as an opportunity to educate himself not by haunting archives, but by experiencing European cultural and architecture. "I spent five months in Rome, it was fantastic." His father's illness brought him home. Soon he was back working at his old university, this time as a lecturer.
From 1956 until 1959, when he moved to Trinity, Lydon lectured in history at Galway, through Irish. "I was as happy as Larry in Galway, I loved - and love - the place." He also loved Trinity - even though being on the board of the college meant constant pressure. At the time, however, he was not quite aware just how much tension he was being subjected to. There were many crises. On retiring five years ago he fell victim to serious depression. Did he miss university life? "No, the depression had nothing to do with that. I ended up talking with this marvellous doctor in St Pat's and she told me depression is a common reaction to dealing with pressure after it has been removed."
Did the 40 years go by quickly? "Like a flash," he says cheerfully. Nostalgia is a sensation he appears to keep under control. "I've had a great life, it's been wonderful. But I don't regret the end of my university career. In fact, I still have graduate students. There is a lot to be done." He never married, he has no children. He refers to two close relationships - "but I was very absorbed in my work and they had sense and married other people," he says. His many nephews and nieces have given him some insight into parenting: "I'm particularly close to the children of one of my brothers." Cheerful but direct, he says of depression, "I'd never take tablets, except for a sleeping pills. When I feel lonely, I have a few pints."
He has brought immense objectivity to his opinionated, fair-minded writing of history and quotes Eoin MacNeill's remark about neither antipathy nor apathy being capable of bringing out the truth in history. Writing a general history naturally presents the entire story before one's mind. It is also a brave deed for a specialist to attempt - and to execute so well. Was he struck by either a sense of heroism or sentimentalism? "I think people do sentimentalise history," he says. He agrees we tend to remember the brutalities committed against us rather than those we perpetrate ourselves.
Commenting on the opportunistic behaviour of many Dublin citizens during the 1916 Easter Rising, he says "it was not a heroic episode, but it had heroic elements". As opinionated as he is, Lydon has never lost sight of the historian's responsibility to history.
Through writing the book he came to revise his long-held, negative view of Daniel O'Connell and agrees there are many heroes such as Tone and particularly Robert Emmet - "a great patriot and certainly a man ahead of his time". Lydon's study of Irish history has also left him convinced of Ireland's closeness to England rather than Europe.
Of his own heroes, Lydon (not a man given to flamboyant statements or generalisations) mentions none other than the great Victorian historian William (W.E.H.) Lecky (1838-1903) and praises the way the latter opened up the study of 18th-century Ireland. "He wrote a number of volumes on the 18thcentury and went into meticulous detail which is still of value. As well as that, he placed Ireland into the wider context of England and Europe. He also challenged the rather narrow view of Froude which was very Anglo-Saxon." Much of the praise afforded Lecky could equally be said of Lydon's deft, intelligent and fair-minded treatment of that most contentious of stories, the history of Ireland.
As for the holding of the Chair which Lecky endowed by the sale of his lands, Jim Lydon says: "It was a very great privilege."
The Making of Ireland - from Ancient Times to the Present by James Lydon is published by Routledge, price £16.99
