Niall Montgomery: An Early Irish Champion Of Joyce

Niall Montgomery was among the few eminent early Irish champions of James Joyce. A biographical synopsis shows a man of many talents and interesting contacts and sketches a context for his reading and an understanding of the great writer.¹

Niall Montgomery was born in Dublin in 1915 and died in 1987, after a short illness. He attended school at the Irish College in Ring, Co Waterford, and Belvedere College, Dublin, and graduated in architecture from University College Dublin in 1938. Niall's father, James Montgomery, was the Free State's first film censor and a close friend of Arthur Griffith and Oliver St. John Gogarty, both of whom Niall Montgomery remembered clearly.

From 1946, Montgomery worked as an architect in private practice in Dublin; until his death, he ran this office from 1974 onwards in partnership with his son, James. In the late 1930s, while working at the Office of Public Works, he was associated with Professor Desmond Fitzgerald in the award-winning design of the airport buildings at Collinstown. Montgomery's best-known work includes the conversion of the Ormonde castle stables in 1963 to house the Kilkenny Design Centre, a project for which he was awarded the Conservation Medal of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, and the conversion of the marquess of Kildare's house, Kilkea castle, for use as a hotel in 1966. He was a regular contributor to architectural journals and published many technical articles. Montgomery was passionately interested in Dublin and its preservation and restoration, and in this connection, he lectured, wrote, and appeared on television. From 1951, he served on the Council of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland for an unprecedented thirty-one consecutive years and was its president in 1976-7.

While studying architecture, Niall Montgomery had some art training, and later he took art classes privately. He showed considerable artistic talent as a sculptor and painter and had paintings, drawings, and installations accepted and exhibited at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art for six shows between 1964 and 1978. Montgomery had a one-man exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 1972, and another one at the same venue in 1980 entitled 'Niall Montgomery: Etchings, Drawings, Inventions'. He was at various times a member of the National Monuments Advisory Council (1951-7), the Arts Council (1956-8), and the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs (1973-6).

Montgomery's first love, however, was literature. He was fortunate to be part of an unusually lively generation while at University College Dublin where he befriended Brian O'Nolan, Denis Devlin, Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh, Cyril Cusack, and Charlie Donnelly. Together they ran the Literary and Historical Society and the Dramatic Society of the college. His lifelong friendship with Samuel Beckett began around this time; other friends considerably older than himself included the painter Jack Yeats (1871-1957), and C.P. Curran (1883-1972), barrister, Registrar of the Supreme Court (from 1946), and author of James Joyce Remembered (1968).

Montgomery wrote verse, plays, and criticism. His poems were published in magazines and anthologies, notably in transition in 1938where he appeared in the illustrious company of Hans Arp, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Wassily Kandinsky, and Le Corbusier.² Some of Montgomery's poems were included in a book called Irish Poetry: The Thirties Generation, published in Dublin in 1983.³ He was much concerned with tone, speed, and the quality of the voice such as whispering, chanting, singing, and shouting. At his own poetry readings and in his recordings Montgomery would pay minute attention to these modes; and some poems he would recite in conjunction with slides.⁴ Two of his plays, The Real Deirdre (from the Sons of Usnach) and The Winter Man (based on the medieval saga of the madness of Sweeney), were given dramatic readings in Washington, D.C., in 1985, and The Winter Man had a show-case production there.

Montgomery undertook an assessment of Samuel Beckett's works, entitling it 'No Symbols Where None Intended'. The correspondence...