Marianne McDonald is truly grateful for the slew of prestigious awards she has received in recognition of her scholarship and philanthropy; but what gives her the most satisfaction is not the receiving, but the giving that warranted those awards. And she gets the greatest kick of all from sharing—not what she was born into—but what she has created for herself, a scholarly familiarity with the Greek classics and a lifelong commitment to writing about them and teaching.

Ireland and its people, are among the chief beneficiaries of that dedication. Indeed, according to Seamus Deane, the general editor of the five-volume “Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing” for which McDonald provided a substantial amount of seed money, Ireland owes her a unique debt of gratitude. “A whole raft of Irish artists, most of them writers, is in her debt and recognizes her as that rare combination of a patron of the arts who is also an intellectual and a practitioner,” he said.

Marianne’s father, Eugene Francis McDonald, was the founder of the Zenith Radio Corporation and when he died in 1958 he left her heir to a fortune estimated at the time to be worth $100 million. The money, of course, was not everything. A collection of priceless gifts that included a thirst for learning, an identification with the underdog, a love of Ireland, and a relentless spirit of generosity comprised the better part of her inheritance, she said.

“My father grew up in a slum in New York and became the sole support of the family at the age of 12,” McDonald said in a recent interview. “He had to struggle; he didn’t finish high school, and yet he founded Zenith. He would always say “It’s not what you know, but knowing where to find what you want to know that’s most important.’”
Her father loved tinkering, she said, and after going deaf when a car engine he was working on blew up, he invented the Zenith hearing aid—“the cheapest and best on the market… because he wanted the people to have it.”

To this day, she said, it’s his creative genius and generous heart that drives her compulsion to learn and share her discoveries with others. “I had the example of my father and I saw him giving and the people he helped,” she said, “and I just admired him enormously.”

The American Ireland Fund, which she said she discovered by chance, provides her with the opportunity to share both her wisdom and good fortune with the people of Ireland. “I think the Fund managers are absolutely brilliant in the way they first find where the real needs are and then find a way of doing something about them,” she said, “and I really admire their non-sectarian approach.” She has been a member of the Fund’s board since 1994 and does not know how much money she has contributed to it over the years, but estimates “it’s pretty much over a million. I particularly appreciate that I meet regularly with the Funds’ representative in the US, Kingsley Aikins, who keeps me up to date with developments in Ireland and reports back on the various projects with which I am involved.”

Born in 1937, McDonald’s appetite for scholarship was first whetted at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Chicago, where she picked up a love for Latin, which led to a greater love for Greek, and that got her into the classics. She completed her secondary education at the Chicago Latin School, received a bachelor of arts degree majoring in the classics and music from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, a master’s from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from the University of California, Irvine. She is fluent in English, French, German, Latin, ancient and modern Greek; she has a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese and knows a bit of Hebrew. She can read Italian and Spanish and has begun to learn Afrikaans and Irish.

“I really am trying to learn Irish,” she said. “I take lessons every time I go over, and that’s at least once a year.” The pronunciation she can manage she said, but it becomes a problem because “it’s different depending on wherever you go.

In 1990, McDonald joined the Department of Theatre at University of California, San Diego and is now a full professor of theatre and the classics. Over the past decade, in Ireland alone, she has also been a visiting professor of classics at Trinity College, Dublin, University College Dublin, University College Cork, Dublin City University and the University of Ulster in Coleraine.

Over the years, she has produced almost 200 books, plays, reviews, research papers, and learned articles for professional journals. She also raised six children, earned a black belt in karate, learned to play the classical piano and the medieval harp, and became a competitive skier, a formidable swimmer and a licensed scuba diver.

Recent operations to replace both her hips may have cramped her style somewhat, but her energy remains boundless and her mind is as agile as ever. She exercises for an hour every day and keeps her social life to a minimum. “I am 67 and I still teach every year, and I’ve no intention of retiring,” she said.

McDonald rises before six every morning, meditates, eats breakfast, and by seven o’clock she’s at her desk doing what she does best—studying and writing—until noon. That’s the key to the good life, she said, quoting Aristotle, who defined happiness as “an activity of the soul in accordance with the highest excellence,” which in her case means doing what you can do best as well as you can.

Having discovered a facility for languages and a love of the classics at an early age, she decided to dedicate her life to scholarship and teaching, again under the influence of her father. “My father, by not having an education, instilled in me that this was one of the greatest gifts I could give to people—to help with their education,” she said. “And this is what I’ve tried to do with my plays, my translations, my teaching and the books I’ve written throughout my whole life.”

Her scholarship has won worldwide recognition. For her contributions to Greek drama, Prime Minster Andreas Papandreou made her a commander of the Order of the Phoenix, one of Greece’s highest awards, with the rank of commander, in 1994; she was inducted into the Royal Irish Academy that same year; in 1999, along with Senator Hilary Clinton who was U.S. First Lady at the time, Supreme Court Justice William Renquist and astronaut John Glenn, she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for distinguished achievements as an American. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland (2001) and University College Dublin (1994); the American College of Greece (1988) and the Universities of Athens (1994) and Thessalonika (1997). The American Ireland Fund gave her the Heritage Award in 1994 and this year was also honored for her contribution to the Hope and History Campaign. RTE, the Irish national TV and radio broadcaster has chosen her as keynote speaker for an upcoming series of the prestigious and decades-running Thomas Davis Lectures.

Much as McDonald relishes all her awards, especially the honorary doctorates, it’s her Irish citizenship, which she was granted earlier this year, that she’s most proud of. Her great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland at the time of the famine, but not one of her grandparents was born there, so she did not qualify automatically for Irish citizenship. To make up for that, a group of Irish scholars, writers and arts heavyweights that included Trinity Provost John Hegarty and Classics Professor John Dillon, the two famous Seamus poets, Deane and Heaney, and the playwright Brian Friel wrote testimonials to her fitness to become a citizen. “I really wanted Irish citizenship, and the government gave it to me on the basis of what I had done for Ireland,” she said, “They are saying that this may be the very first time that anybody has received it on this basis.” She still holds dearly and appreciates as much as ever her American passport and citizenship.

The Thesaurus Linguarum Hiberniae, a digital compilation of all Irish literature regardless of the language in which it was written is one of McDonald’s pet projects. Modeled on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae that she had already funded at the University of California, Irvine, the Irish endeavor—an enormous undertaking—was begun under the direction of the Royal Irish Academy. Now it is shared by Patricia Kelly of UCD who is compiling a Thesaurus Linguae Hiberniae of all literature written in the Irish language, and Donnchadh O’Corrain of UCC who is developing CELT, (a Corpus of Electronic Texts) to create an online database of the wealth of Irish literature—be it written in Irish, Latin, Hiberno-Norman French, Old Norse, Spanish, Italian, modern French, Provencal, Dutch, Danish or English. Each of these endeavors is backed by a $500,000 gift from McDonald.

“Marianne's visionary donation introduced to Ireland the concept of digital texts and brought Celtic Studies to the forefront of computer applications in the humanities in this country,” Kelly said. “Early Irish scholars are in her debt for revolutionising their work, ensuring the safety of our literary heritage for posterity, and opening up exciting new dimensions in teaching and research.”

For the past 15 years McDonald has also been making substantial contributions to the classics programs at Trinity College. “Marianne McDonald has been a sort of guardian angel for the School of Classics in Trinity, helping us with a regular yearly donation which originally more than equaled our entire budget from all other sources, and which is even now a very significant supplement to it,” Dillon said. “These discretionary funds have, in my view, been a major factor in making Classics at Trinity the first-class (and happy!) department that it now is.”

Just like everybody else, the classical Greeks used myth to explain the world around them, its history, and its people and their behavior. When the fifth century B.C.E. dramatists came along they presented these myths as theatre, not just to represent and explain, but to explore—and sometimes mock—the very same issues as the myths addressed: birth, life, disease, death, murder, government, lies, corruption and war. Ethics played a leading role in Greek drama and being drama—probably “the best way to articulate problems,” McDonald said—they made a powerful impression on their audiences.

Airing ethical linen in public for the whole world to gawk at is still one of those functions, that theatre can perform best, she said. “And Ireland with its incomparable wealth of poets and playwrights is better adapted than most to the task,” she said. “That’s one of the things we Irish can do better than most: We can sing, and as a result, I think we have a duty to do just that.”

What makes Greek drama particularly applicable to Ireland is the fact that the history of Ireland, ancient and modern, is riddled with examples of the very same questions that intrigued the Greeks. The Great Famine and the mass emigration that followed it for more than a century, is a case in point, McDonald said. “That you just don’t go into other people’s lands and take them over is something the Greeks articulated so well,” she said. Then there’s the issue of civil war—no stranger to Greek or Irish history: “Look at the two sons of Oedipus, one bringing war on his own city,” she said.

The steady stream of Irish writing with Greek overtones demonstrates the natural affinity of Irish literature with Greek drama. “In the last century, there seem to be more translations and versions of Greek tragedy coming from Ireland than any country in the English-speaking world,” McDonald has written. “In many ways Ireland was constructing its identity through representations offered by Greek tragedy.”

According to Deane, McDonald deserves a huge amount of credit for the modern surge. “Marianne has inspired and encouraged a number of Irish dramatists to think of adapting Greek plays to contemporary Irish circumstances,” he said, “and she also encouraged and edited the writing of interpretive essays on these plays and on the political and social significance of the various adaptations of Greek drama that have appeared on the Irish stage in the last 25 years.” Seamus Heaney dedicated his recent adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” titled “The Burial at Thebes” to her

Today, not just Ireland, but the whole world needs the classics as much as ever, McDonald said, because ethics and truth need to addressed as much today as they were in ancient Greece. So getting young people interested and exposing them to those timeless and universal issues as addressed in the classics has become McDonald’s personal cause celebre. Her hope is that “when they find themselves in positions of authority they can make decisions that are going to benefit all of humanity. I just really want them to benefit humanity.”

Her wish may be coming true. Before UCSD clamped down on the number of students in one class, as many as 500 would sign up for her courses. This fall 100 lined up for a course that could accommodate just 25.

Looking into her crystal ball her wish would be that more people in the US with an affection for Ireland would do what she has done—translate interest and affection into concrete support for great organizations and people in Ireland and use The American Ireland Fund as a mechanism for learning of existing projects, for advising and monitoring involvement and for reporting back on the results of the investments.

Denys Horgan interviewed Marianne McDonald.
He is a freelance writer in San Diego and can be reached at dhorgan230@earthlink.net