Life
1906-1999 [later Mary Howe, and later again Adams]; b. 30 June in Dublin;
related to the Bartons and Childers; knew Samuel Beckett in childhood;
ed. Morehampton House Sch., and Alexandra College, Dublin; studied at
Abbey Acting School; played small parts with Irish Players in England,
and at Abbey Theatre; joined Gate Theatre as publicity manager, and formed
the marginal group known as "the Anomalies"; wrote Youth’s the
Season ...? (Longford Co. [Gate Th.] 1931; Westminster Th., London,
1937); brief affair and longer correspondence with Samuel Beckett; edited
Motley, a Gate Theatre miscellany, contributors incl. Frank O’Connor,
Seán Ó Faoláin Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum, Francis
Stuart, Niall Montgomery, Niall Sheridan, and the Gate directors MacLiammóir
and Edwards; her third play Happy Family (Gate 1934), directed
by Denis Johnston; served as Irish Times columnist; issued The
Voice of Shem (1955), her play based on Joyce's Finnegans Wake,
was produced by Mary O’Malley at the Poet’s Theatre, Cambridge,
with advice from Denis Johnston; moved to America 1935; m. Mark deWolf
Howe, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard; and settled in Boston, where she
studied art; novels Mount Venus (1938) and Lovely People
(1953); a founder of Cambridge Poets' Theatre, which gave fist production
of her adaptation of Finnegans Wake, April 1955; returned to live
in Waltham Tce., Blackrock, Co. Dublin at husband's death, 1967; adapted
Frank O’Connor’s The Saint and Mary Kate (Abbey 1968);
wrote play reviews for Hibernia magazine during the 1970s; became
doyen of Cambridge cultural life with hospitable apartment overlooking
the Charles River; issued The Last Chronicles of Ballyfungus (1978),
a satirical romp; her account of MacLiammóir’s death-bed conversation
recorded by Gabriel Fallon; remarried one of the Adams family in advanced
years; dgs. Fanny, who author of a successful novel, O’Clock (1995)
and a Pulitzer winner as well as a study of her mother; also the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Susan Howe and
a younger dg. Helen (m. Christopher Braider); she sold her Beckett letters to TCD Library.
DIW DIL/2 ATT
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Works
Drama, Youth’s the Season ...?, in Curtis Canfield,
ed., Plays of Changing Ireland (NY: Macmillan 1936), pp.322-404;
Storm over Wicklow and Happy Family (1934); Passages
from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce [adapted from James Joyce’s
Tales of Shem and Shaun] (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1955) [also pub.
as The Voice of Shem]; Frank O’Connor’s The Saint
and Mary Kate (Newark: Proscenium 1970); also, Ah Well It Won’t
Be Long Now (1972).
Novels, Mount Venus (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1938); Lovely People (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1953).
Short fiction, The Last Chronicles of Ballyfungus (London: Routledge; Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1978) [connected stories].
Miscellaneous, Passages from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP 1957); ‘I Remember It Well’, in Journal of Irish Literature, 15 (Sept. 1986), pp.17-41.
Criticism
Mícheál Mac Liammóir, Enter Certain Players (Dublin:
Dolmen 1978).
Gabriel Fallon, The Abbey and the Actor (Dublin 1969).
Mary Rose Callaghan, ‘Let's Be Dublin’, in Journal of Irish Literature, 15 (Sept. 1986), pp.3-17 [interview]; Obituary, The Irish Times (8 Jluly 1999).
Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (2002), for an account of the film Guests of the Nation which she scripted after Frank O’Connor’s story (pp.131-32), and other details of her plays and activities with the Gate.
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Notes
Motley: The title of her Gate magazine is taken from Hamlet,
viz., ‘Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there and made
myself a motley to the view’, but possibly also with an eye on Yeats’s
line, ‘here where motley is worn’ in the poem "Easter 1916".
Pullitzer: Susan Howe, Mary Manning’s daughter, is a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of O’Clock (1995) and other works incl. O’Clock, London: Reality St. 1995, 104pp. Susan claims to be the dg. of Mary Manning by Samuel Beckett.
Corrig: Rory Johnston advises that a note formerly under criticism listing Denis Johnston, Nine Rivers from Jordan (London: Derek Verschoyle 1953), espec. pp.49-52 is without grounds and should be disregarded.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)