ARCHIVE: Manuscripts, correspondence, photographs.
The Joy McSweeney Archive
McSweeney, Joy. Archive.
A collection of typed drafts, letters, journals, poems, photographs, legal papers and other miscellaneous documents belonging to journalist Joy McSweeney.
McSweeney (d. 1979) was a British writer peripherally associated with the Bloomsbury Group as romantic partner to Scottish journalist Evelyn Irons, the “war correspondent who broke Vita [Sackville-West]’s heart” after leaving her for McSweeney in 1932 (The Evening Standard). Irons met Sackville-West in 1931, and the pair had a brief but passionate relationship which resulted in Sackville-West addressing her “Collected Poems” to Irons. There is little published information in existence about McSweeney’s life, but this collection of her papers hints at both her first marriage to a man addressed as “Michael” and her nearly 50-year relationship with Irons, which continued until McSweeney’s death in 1979. After Irons travelled to the United States in 1952 to cover the presidential election, the couple moved from London to Brewster, New York, from which many of McSweeney’s letters and journal entries are addressed.
McSweeney was a prolific writer in a variety of forms: her papers include dozens of her poems, essays, short stories, articles and plays in various states of revision. She enjoyed moderate success in a career as contributor to publications like Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping, as well as a number of columns in daily newspapers (many published under the name Lynn Joyce). Most of her articles, written in a whimsical, conversational tone present in most of her essays, are on topics of travel, housekeeping, diet, and clothing.
She maintained some form of daily journal for years, multiple copies of which are included in this collection of her papers, including her journal from 1979, the year of her death. Over time her form of journaling changed – some year’s entries are filled with multi-page, typed accounts of detailed stories and recalled conversations, revealing fragments of a life that was at times exotic and dotted with adventure (likely due to travel from Irons’s journalistic career). Later journal entries tell nothing but the state of McSweeney’s declining health, which became the subject of much of her writing through the last decade of her life.
Highlights of the collection are detailed below. A summary inventory follows.
A 1954 letter from McSweeney to an unspecified recipient detailing “Evelyn’s exploits in Guatemala.” Her account refers to Irons’s infamously breaking the news of the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, which she discovered by “hiring a mule to take her to Chiquimula while other journalists, forbidden to cross the border, waited in a bar in Honduras. She became the first reporter to reach the headquarters of the Provisional Government” (Lewis, Paul, The New York Times, 2000). McSweeney writes:
It was very gratifying that she got such a wonderful press in the American Press. A little publicity of that kind does no girl any harm. I must say I and all her friends were thankful that the report which went back to the correspondents’ HQ at Tegucigalpa, that she had been killed, did not get into the papers and that these often, to put it mildly, inaccurate Yank reporters, for once checked and found the rumour untrue.
She goes on:
The last few miles of the journey were done in total darkness, through a river bed and up over the knees in water. The river bed had sharp boulders over which she and the men with her at that point stumbled and cut themselves; the most terrifying moments were crossing the raging torrents on semi-rotten alleged bridges made of something that resembled stake and bind fencing of the most fragile nature. She says never again will she cross a bridge without feeling really grateful for it.
Letter or journal entry dated “June 10,” describing Irons’s schedule and lifestyle as a reporter:
Evelyn has still n
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