MacNamara, Desmond Joseph (1918–2008), artist, writer and bohemian, was born 10 May 1918 in a private hospital at 29 Upper Mount Street, Dublin, son of Patrick William MacNamara, secretary of Greenslade and Co., ladies' tailors and costumers of 32 Wicklow Street, Dublin (at which address he resided), and his wife Teresa (née Owens). His father, whose family came from Killaloe, Co. Clare, died when Desmond was young. His mother, a Dublin native, who took over the Greenslade couturier business and managed it throughout the 1920s, encouraged his artistic interests. He was educated at University College Dublin (UCD) and at the National College of Art, where he studied sculpture and obtained a diploma.
While he worked in a variety of sculptural media, early in his career (c.1940) MacNamara began making stage props in papier mâché for the New Theatre Group – a progressive, leftist company with which he was involved – and developed a particular proficiency in that material. His work attracted the attention of Hilton Edwards (qv), who engaged him to make props and costume accessories (buttons, buckles, brooches and the like), and also to design sets, for the Gate Theatre, leading to similar work throughout the 1940s with the Abbey Theatre, other Dublin companies, and on movies made in Irish locations; he made props for the battle scene in Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944), shot on the Powerscourt estate, Co. Wicklow. MacNamara's stage sets were often expressionist in design, with minimal painted backdrop and furnishings, but incorporating striking imagery made from inexpensive materials, a visual style that addressed both the aesthetics and economising of the decade. He also employed papier mâché to fabricate masks and puppets for the stage, as well as shop-window displays and costume jewellery, and, latterly, portrait busts, furniture (bookcases, lampstands, bedheads, chandeliers) and domestic architectural fittings (ceiling medallions, window pelmets).
For several years in the 1940s, MacNamara maintained a one-room studio on the top floor of 39 Grafton Street, above a Monument Creameries shop, obtained through his friend and fellow artist John Ryan (qv), who also occupied a studio on the premises and whose family owned the Monument Creameries chain. Endowed with a sparkling wit, nicely judged diplomacy, and a graceful, unstudied charm, MacNamara presided within his studio over an informal, non-stop salon, frequented by Dublin's intellectual bohemia of the period – writers, artists, actors, musicians, along with 'the bizarre, the unorthodox or the innocent visionary' (Ryan, 61) – attracted thither by the general company, the host's genial hospitality, a blazing turf fire, and a perpetually bubbling coffee pot. Though MacNamara lived sometimes at addresses in Ranelagh and Rathgar, for part of the period the studio doubled as his domicile. The assemblage often repaired to McDaid's pub in Harry Street, and thence to the 'Catacombs', the basement warren on Fitzwilliam Place notorious for after-hours drinking and carousing. It was the proximity to MacNamara's studio that established McDaid's as Dublin's first and foremost literary pub.
MacNamara was thus the linchpin of a vast circle that included Ryan, Anthony Cronin (d. 2016), J. P. Donleavy (b. 1926), Gainor Crist (qv), Ernest Gebler (1915–98), Brendan Behan (qv), Dan O'Herlihy (qv), Alan Simpson (qv), Carolyn Swift (qv), E. J. Moeran (qv), Erwin Schrödinger (qv), the British wartime expatriate pacifist writer T. H. White, and many others. Hovering near the circumference were Patrick Kavanagh (qv) and Brian O'Nolan (qv) (Flann O'Brien), with both of whom MacNamara's relations were testy. (Nonetheless, at the author's request, MacNamara in later years designed the jacket of O'Brien's last published novel, The Dalkey archive (1964).) Donleavy identified MacNamara – known within the circle as 'Mac' – and Ryan as the two key figures in the Dublin cultural world of the immediate post-war period: 'These two men were immense, they were the art world of Dublin. Des Mac was a little kind of magnet. He established an artistic ambience where would-be writers and artists could relax and exchange ideas … John and Des are overdue a monument in Dublin' (quoted in Lynch, 8–9). MacNamara was the prototype of the character MacDoon in Donleavy's novel of post-war Dublin bohemia, The ginger man (1955). Brendan Lynch derived the title of his book on the writers and artists of Dublin's 'Baggotonia' district from a remark of MacNamara: 'I was surrounded by prodigals and geniuses!' (Lynch, 2).
Much of MacNamara's sculpture was conceived with a playful whimsy. He fashioned a papier-mâché doorknocker with the appearance and solidity of cast iron shaped as the head of Roger Casement (qv), a visual pun alluding to a poem of W. B. Yeats (qv): 'The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door'. For Gainor Crist, he sculpted a miniature replica of the mummified head of Oliver Plunkett (qv) as displayed in St Peter's church, Drogheda, which Crist kept in a matchbox and carried as a talisman. As an elaborate hoax, MacNamara began sculpting a faux-bronze, papier-mâché statue of 'Monsieur Rabelais' (modelled by the youthful, as-yet-unknown Behan), intending its embellishment with artificial patina and bird droppings to simulate agedness, and its clandestine placement on a faux-stone, plywood plinth on St Stephen's Green, the purpose being to observe how much time would pass before officialdom detected its uncommissioned intrusion; the project was aborted by MacNamara's emigration to London. In the 1970s he sculpted a bronze monument to Kavanagh placed on the exterior of the poet's favourite London pub with the inscription in Irish: 'It's many a time he pissed here'; regarding the plaque's destruction by Kavanagh's irascible brother Peter (qv), MacNamara deadpanned: 'Peter wasn't renowned for a sense of humour' (Lynch, 112).
MacNamara's encouragement and promotion helped launch Behan's literary career. They first met at anti-Franco demonstrations in Dublin (late 1930s), maintained contact in the intervals between Behan's incarcerations for Irish Republican Army (IRA) activities (early 1940s), and forged a close friendship when Behan became a habitué of MacNamara's salon. The respect that Behan was accorded therein as an equal member of an intellectual community instilled confidence in his own talent. Through MacNamara, Behan met Ryan, who published his work in the literary magazine Envoy, and also met Simpson and Swift, who in their Pike Theatre produced Behan's first staged play, 'The quare fellow' (1954). MacNamara was among the few of Behan's erstwhile friends who did not abandon him during his last years of alcohol-fuelled, embarrassingly exhibitionist self-parody, hosting him during his many London visits, and once bailing him out of a police station after a drunken spree during the 1959 West End run of 'The hostage'.
Likewise close and loyally enduring was MacNamara's friendship with Gebler, an internationally best-selling author of the 1940s–60s. Pre-dating Gebler's celebrity, and continuing throughout its height, the friendship persisted through the traumas of Gebler's highly publicised divorce and pursuant spell of depressive reclusiveness, the scandal of his stormy relationship with writer Edna O'Brien, and his affliction with Alzheimer's disease in later life. Addressing the controversy around Gebler's claim to have written O'Brien's early novels, MacNamara opined that the writing was definitely O'Brien's, while Gebler had advised her on such technical matters as character development and narrative structure.
Forced by rising rents to vacate the Grafton Street studio (1948/9), MacNamara moved to a mews off Fitzwilliam Place. His livelihood seriously impaired by the Abbey Theatre fire (1951), he increasingly secured work in London, where, after several years of toing and froing, he settled (1957) in a flat on Woodchurch Road, West Hampstead, his home till his death. He taught art at Marylebone Institute and at Quinton Kynaston School, St John's Wood, retiring in 1984, and wrote three arts-and-crafts manuals. A new art of papier mâché (1963), comprising an historical introduction and a practical guide to the execution of sculpture and craftwork, illuminates his own working methods in the medium, and includes photographs of his work. The other manuals are Puppetry (1965) and Picture framing: a practical guide from basic to baroque (1994). He wrote a biography of Éamon de Valera (qv) for young readers (1988). His first novel, The book of intrusions (1994), is a metafiction highly indebted to Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The third policeman (1967); the plot concerns several refugees from the literary Limbo inhabited by characters in unpublished works, who become corporeal by invading the brain of a scribe and forcing him to record their exploits; they form a company to publish lost works and thereby allow the characters therein to ascend to Parnassus, but, beguiled by their own newly corporeal existence, conspire to forestall their own ascent by preventing publication of their story. The book was well reviewed and has attracted scholarly critical analysis. MacNamara's second novel was Confessions of an Irish werewolf (2006). He reviewed books for the New Statesman, the Tablet, Studies and Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.
With deep republican roots in his family – his maternal grandfather, a bespoke shoemaker who specialised in riding and livery boots, was a Fenian who was out at Tallaght during the 1867 rising – MacNamara's politics were influenced from his youth by the social republicanism of Peadar O'Donnell (qv) and George Gilmore (qv), both of whom he knew. A long-time member of the British Labour party, in the 1970s he sculpted the party's medal for outstanding merit, bearing an image of James Keir Hardie, and subsequently remained 'proudly old Labour' in his thinking. The Dublin Writers' Museum displays his bronze bust of Behan (on extended loan from the National Gallery of Ireland), and in its own collection holds portrait heads of Kavanagh and Donleavy, and specimens of MacNamara's crafted, three-dimensional Christmas cards depicting Irish writers.
MacNamara married firstly (23 December 1942) Beverlie Hooberman, who shared his bohemian life in 1940s Dublin; a daughter, Panicilla (b. 18 Mar. 1944), is not mentioned in secondary sources. He married secondly in London (1952) Skylla Novy, an English-born publisher's editor and film-studio script reader; they had two sons, Oengus, an actor, and Oisín, an academic. His prodigious memory and incisive wit intact into advanced old age, MacNamara was an inexhaustible raconteur with a bounty of tales and idiosyncratic assessments of the many folk he had known, and a rich treasury of poems, songs and recitations at ready recall. On a visit to America in 1986 he was interviewed on Chicago radio by Studs Terkel. A regular visitor to Dublin till his death, after the demise of McDaid's as a literary pub MacNamara frequented Grogan's Castle Lounge. In his latter years he suffered from late-diagnosed glaucoma, which obviated his artwork but not his writing. After a short illness he died 8 January 2008 in his London home. His ashes were scattered on Dalkey Island, Co. Dublin.