`My house . . . stands on a lake, but it stands also on the sea - waterlilies meet the golden seaweed. It is as if, in the faery land of Connemara at the extreme end of Europe, the incongruous flowed together at last, and the sweet and the bitter blended. Behind me, islands and mountainous mainland share in a final reconciliation, at this, the world's end."
This was how Oliver St John Gogarty described his new summer residence, Ren vyle House, purchased in 1917 for the sum of £3,095 ("out of the proceeds of my teetotalism") by the surgeon, poet, aviator, sometime friend of James Joyce, and famous wit: the long, low, "sea-gray house" became his beloved Western retreat for many years.
Renvyle House, on the Atlantic coast, a few miles from Clifden, is now a well-appointed hotel - but in fact it was a hotel long before Gogarty acquired it, and was run as such by the formidable Caroline Blake as far back as 1883. Among its guests (around 1890) were Edith Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin, otherwise known as Martin Ross, who were utterly charmed with Renvyle, and left a highly favourable account of their stay at the hotel in Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, where they recalled arriving at "a long, grey, two-storey house, with low Elizabethan windows, and pale weather slated walls, wholly unexpected, and altogether unique, as far, at all events, as this part of Ireland is concerned."
The Blake fortunes took a downturn with the troubles in Ireland and elsewhere during the first World War, and Oliver Gogarty became the new owner of Renvyle House in 1917. His love affair with the West had begun when he married Martha Duane of Moyard in 1906, and visited Connemara for the first time after his honeymoon in Oxford and Paris. There were to be many subsequent visits to Renvyle in Gogarty's buttercup-coloured Rolls Royce - and many distinguished visitors over the years, including Augustus John, Lady Lavery, W.B. Yeats and his wife.
Oliver Gogarty became a member of the Irish Free State Senate in 1922, and remained a strong critic of the Anti-Treaty forces: his hatred of De Valera is well documented. In 1923 he survived an assassination attempt and the following year his beloved Renvyle was burned to the ground. The losses included paintings by Augustus John and J.B. Yeats, but for Gogarty, the saddest personal loss was that of a selfportrait of his mother at 16, "with her auburn hair divided in the middle, her plain blue dress, and an all-pervading air of sweetness and simplicity."
With modest State compensation, Gogarty and his wife rebuilt Renvyle as a hotel. The new Renvyle House Hotel opened in 1930, and prospered for many years, the long list of famous guests including Count John McCormack, James Stephens and, once again, Augustus John, who visited in order to work on his most famous portrait of Yeats - and indeed his seduction techniques: one model at the time, Hope Scott, noted that "though I was sitting, I did not lack exercise. Most of Augustus's models found themselves doing a good bit of sprinting round the studio..."
The publication in 1937 of Gogarty's As I Was Going down Sackville Street resulted in a costly libel action, and Gogarty decided to pursue his literary fortunes in the US. Martha was left to run the hotel, which survived the war years, but its fortunes gradually declined, and the hotel was sold in 1952. Trade picked up over the next few years: the hotel added a new wing and once again became a thriving business.
Renvyle's magical location, adjoining lake and sea, is perhaps its greatest attraction, yet the hotel itself retains its own understated charm. Its foyer is warmed by a huge open turf fire and dominated by John Coll's bronze bust of the man whose spirit pervades the place, Oliver St John Gogarty himself. Mementoes - letters, telegrams and pictures - line the corridor, and include an uncashed cheque dated 1942 made out to Gogarty from the Readers' Digest, for the sum of £1, for quoting "seven words from your works."
Gogarty died in New York in 1952 at the age of 79. His body was returned to Ireland and he now lies buried with his wife Martha (who died the following year) near his beloved Renvyle House in Ballinakill cemetery. On his gravestone are carved four lines from his poem Non Dolet (Grieve Not):
Our friends go with us as we go
Down the long path where Beauty wends.
Where all we love foregather, so
Why should we fear to join our friends?
A detailed history of Renvyle House is provided in A Sea-Gray House by Oliver Gogarty's grandson, Guy St John Williams, published by Renvyle House (1995), £12. Also see The Renvyle Letters, the Gogarty family correspondence 1939 to 1957, edited by the same author, published last October by Daletta Press, £25.