Clodagh Finn: Don’t forget the power of tenacious, ordinary people

I was all ears.

His search, prompted by a query from Charmain Brinson, a specialist in German literature in London, was “as convoluted as any novel”, we were told, though sadly it did not reveal why a “presumably prim” young Irishwoman would be bothered with the likes of Schnitzler.

Howe did do some impressive digging all the same, winkling out a pamphlet, Rebel Ireland, which May wrote with Sylvia Pankhurst of the famous suffrage family, and Cork writer Patricia Lynch. He also tracked down fellow Ballinesker woman Christine Harding, aged 96, who knew May.

Christine described herself “as the last rose of summer” and she was photographed with her son Jack Harding and his wife (no first name supplied). She was “very alert and interesting”, Howe told us before quoting her evocative memory of May O’Callaghan: She “was a very great scholar and travelled a lot, she went to France, Vienna… She spoke real grand … she was living in England and she had the accent.”

There was, however, an awful lot more to the story. And in a twist of fate worthy of a novel, the person who would eventually bring May back to vivid life came into the world in Clonmel Hospital, Co Tipperary, just days after the article appeared.

Maurice J Casey was born on May 31, 1993 and, nearly three decades later, he would become consumed by the question first posed by this newspaper.

His “feverish curiosity”, as he delightfully describes it, was inflamed after reading a reference to “a clever Irish woman” who ran a translation team and hosted a literary salon in the Hotel Lux in 1920s Moscow.

In the early part of the 20th century, the famous hotel on Tverskaya Street was home to a young Tito and Ho Chi Minh, along with a host of other idealists with revolutionary dreams of creating a better world. It was also the headquarters of Comintern, the association established in 1919 to promote global revolution.

How on earth did an Irishwoman find herself not only present, but at the centre of the “living quarters of the world revolution”?

The question propelled Casey headlong into a journey that led him into attics, garden sheds, and storage cupboards in several countries as well as to archives in Ireland, the UK, the US, Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia.

The result is Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, a book that not only brings May back to vivid life but also retrieves the lost world she and her fellow revolutionaries inhabited. Since it was published in the early autumn, it has garnered much richly deserved praise and it has just been shortlisted for the An Post Book Awards.

Historian Maurice J Casey has a novelist’s eye and a detective’s instinct; talents that transform what might seem like a niche story into a compelling thriller.

The sweep of his research and his discoveries are breathtaking, but let’s just keep our focus on May O’Callaghan. Chapter one opens with a photo of her, taken about 1925. It is creased and worn; the edges of it have clearly been folded back to fit into a smaller frame. When it came into Casey’s possession, he smoothed it out, allowing the full extent of this image to breathe again.

It is a fitting metaphor for what he has done in the book. He has succeeded in restoring May O’Callaghan to a version of herself that is so complete we can feel her charisma, her barbed wit, and her energy.

To fill in the blanks of her life in broad brushstrokes: Julia Mary ‘May’ O’Callaghan was born on August 14, 1881, the youngest of Jane O’Callaghan (née Boland) and RIC head constable Patrick O'Callaghan’s four children. Her family, middle-class and Catholic, moved to Ballinesker and as a young woman, May went to Vienna in Austria.

She tutored in English at the University of Vienna and became involved in the city’s literary circles. (No doubt, developing an interest in Arthur Schnitzler’s work in the process). When the first World War broke out, she moved to London where she worked as a journalist and became active in the suffrage movement.

It was there she developed an interest in Communism and she learned Russian in London’s East End. She already spoke fluent German and French which meant she was an accomplished linguist by the time she arrived in Moscow in 1924. She quickly established herself as a senior translator working in the Kremlin Palace and the Communist International.

She would go on to occupy a ringside seat in history as head of one of the translation teams working during the final Kremlin Palace debates between Stalin and Trotsky in the late 1920s.

And that’s not anywhere near all of it. Pick up a copy of Hotel Lux to find out more; research like this deserves to be supported and encouraged.

As well as uncovering a fascinating story and answering the question printed in these pages over 30 years ago, Maurice J Casey has also done something that is all too rare — he has given us a woman-focused history that illuminates the ordinary people who did the grunt work of “keeping the lights on” in the world of revolution before it all went terribly wrong.

Looking back on Stalinist purges and Communist repression now, it is easy to dismiss the ideals underpinning revolution.

As Casey writes in an epilogue entitled 'Impossible desires': “Some suggest that the record of 20th-century socialism reveals how greed will always triumph over desires for equality. But things look different from the perspective of the ordinary yet tenacious people who encountered that experiment in its many forms. In so many lives, we see a less considered through line: the recurring dream of a freer and more equal world and the conviction that ordinary people acting together can bring it into existence. If self-interest remains a theme of the human story, then so too does the counterpoint: solidarity.”

It seems like a pertinent message for our times.

And a final note. Just like Roger Howe, Casey travelled to Ballinesker in Co Wexford to retrace May O’Callaghan’s footsteps. With glorious Irish serendipity, one of the first people he chanced upon was none other than Jack Harding’s niece. Soon, he was sitting in Jack’s kitchen with a hearty mug of tea and a plate of biscuits, right back in the place where the story began.