Hubert Marshall Butler (1900–1991) was an Anglo-Irish essayist who wrote on a wide-range of topics, from local history and archaeology to the politics of pre-war Eastern Europe. Throughout his writings was a thread of radical ideas that the convention of the time found unsettling.
Born at the family home Maidenhall outside the village of Bennettsbridge in County Kilkenny, Ireland, Butler graduated from St John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics, in 1922. After being recruited by Sir Horace Plunkett to work for the Irish County Libraries from graduation until 1926, Butler later traveled extensively in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro, before working with the Quakers in Vienna expediting the escape of Jews after the Anschluss.
Among other topics on the former Yugoslavia, Butler wrote about the involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustaša regime
Upon the death of his father in 1941, Butler inherited Maidenhall and returned to live with his family in the house on the banks of the River Nore with until his death in 1991. His wife, Susan Margaret — usually referred to as Peggy — was sister of theater director Tyrone Guthrie and the moving force behind foundation of the Kilkenny Arts Gallery Society.
Hubert Butler believed that his greatest contribution was in promoting the value and importance of the value of local history, or, more precisely, a study of social and political history from a study of the land, the people and the primary source materials. He was a co-founder of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, and was energetic in promoting the study of local history. Much of his writing is extraordinarily subtle, and uses local events as parables for the politics and pressures that accompanied the emergence of the Irish state.
His book, 'Ten Thousand Saints', is a virtuoso performance, written in an easy, almost conversational style, yet concluding with a theory that the apparently absurd legends of Irish Prehistory and Theology could actually provide real evidence of the migration of Iron-age tribes around Europe. He then illustrates the point by reference to local history as well as scholarship. Having proved that the saints of Ireland were disguised personifications of the tribes and political factions of Iron Age Ireland, he drops the mischievous but fascinating idea that the Old Testament could, similarly, be the same for Jewish prehistory. His literary output was to have a profound influence on the course of modern Irish literature.
Hubert was a keen market gardener as well as a writer. He also had a wide range of friends including the novelist Pamela Travers, journalist Claud Cockburn, and the poet Padraic Colum. He believed strongly in the importance of the family and, as well as playing an active role in keeping his own extended family in touch, he was the founder of the Butler Society.
He is buried a mile from the family home at Ennisnag.
Books
- Ten Thousand Saints: A Study in Irish and European Origins, Wellbrook Press (1972)
Translations
- Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard. Intro. Tyrone Guthrie. London: H.F.W. Dane & Sons Ltd; Boston.: Baker’s Plays (1934)
- Leonid Leonov, The Thief. London: Martin Warburg (1931) New York: Vintage (1960)
Collected essays
Published by the Lilliput Press of Dublin
- Escape from the Anthill (1985)
- The Children of Drancy (1988)
- Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990)
- In the Land of Nod (1996).
Published in US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Independent Spirit (1997)
Published in France by Editions Anatolia
- L'Envahisseur est venu en Pantoufles (1995) with introduction by Joseph Brodsky
Published works about Hubert Butler
- Doctoral thesis by Robert B. Tobin, Oxford D.Phil, 2004: The minority voice: Hubert Butler, southern Protestantism and intellectual dissent, 1930-72.