National Post (National Edition)
IRISH splendour
No one celebrates Irish literature like the Irish, and for good reason: Whatever the medium — drama, prose, verse — the country’s masterpieces exhibit a peerless facility for the English language and its written word Calum Marsh
Kennedy’s Pub behind Trinity College in Dublin has an intriguing claim to history. Formerly Conway’s, it’s stood at the corner of Fenian and Westland Row since 1850, right across the street from Sweny’s Pharmacy. In this capacity it was immortalized by James Joyce in Ulysses, at the end of the Lotus Eaters chapter, after Leopold Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap at the chemist’s and inadvertently gives a friend a tip on a racehorse: “Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread sheets back on Mr Bloom’s arms. —I’ll risk it, he said. Here, thanks. He sped off towards Conway’s corner. God speed scut.” A few pages earlier M’Coy has reported to Bloom that he was “just down there in Conway’s” with Bantam. Bloom never goes. These two remarks represent the pub’s unforgettable role in Ulysses in its entirety.
The proprietors of Kennedy’s do not take this distinction lightly. Photographs and paintings of Joyce grace the walls of the establishment. The menu reprints excerpts of the relevant passages. The waitress will tell you all about the pub’s centrality to the novel, though she confesses she hasn’t read it. (“I’ve been meaning to…”) And on Bloomsday, the annual June holiday commemorating the adventures undertaken by Stephen Dedalus and Bloom, the pub offers free breakfast, live music and performances of the text. It’s enough to make you think that Kennedy’s is a Ulyssesthemed pub. Until you walk around the city, and it dawns on you that every pub in Dublin is Ulysses-themed — along with every park, bank, post office, auction house and street corner similarly enshrined in glory by a passing mention in the book.
It isn’t only Joyce who is accorded such respect. The great mundane furniture of Dublin, its inns and restaurants, its cafés and colleges, shimmers with the eminence of proximity to literary fame: throughout its history the city has been close to genius, and it continues to enjoy a contact high. You have never seen so many statues and busts erected in tribute to writers: Brendan Behan on the banks of the Royal Canal, W.B. Yeats in Sandymount Green, George Bernard Shaw outside the National Gallery, Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square. Bram Stoker has a whole park named after him. Jonathan Swift has a monument at St Patrick’s Cathedral, which also houses his grave. And everywhere you look, plaques herald unassuming landmarks: here marks the spot where Bloom helped the blind man cross the road, and so forth.
In most parts of the world, writers write of home with affection, and those places live on for us, inflected by the voice of the author, in the popular imagination, even while the places themselves remain largely undisturbed. Saul Bellow’s Chicago may be eternal on the page, but as far as I can tell there’s no Augie March sightseeing tour, no bronze likeness of Herzog in Hyde Park — the homage runs one way. In Ireland, it runs in both directions. When an Irish novelist or poet fixes some detail about the country between hard covers, the country responds as though there’s been a consecration, and rushes to revere that which has been so exalted. Indeed the mere patronage of a writer is enough to confer a bar or restaurant lustre. Samuel Beckett favoured Kehoe’s. Toner’s was the only place Yeats ever drank. At the Palace Bar they keep a bounced cheque from Patrick Kavanagh behind glass.
Such gestures are a testament to how seriously the Irish take their literature — would that we all held our nation’s writers in such esteem. This may be attributed in part to civic pride, as the constituents of the country share in the rewards of its achievements; or it may be attributed to the achievements, which are considerable. With Swift and Laurence Stern, in the mid-18th century, the Irish helped determine the shape of the novel; with Joyce, in the early 20th, the Irish redefined it single- handedly. Between Shaw and Beckett, they modernized the theatre (the latter from France); Yeats, a colossus of poetry, led a 19th-century literary renaissance. Iris Murdoch maintained she was Irish until the day she died, though she moved to London when she was three weeks old: another coup, if she counts.
All in all it’s pretty good, the Irish corpus — and doubly so when you consider they’ve only been speaking English for about a quarter of a millennium. Though perhaps, in the way that Vladimir Nabokov’s mastery of English surpassed that of even its finest native speakers, the Irish gained something in coming to the language late, a sensitivity learned rather than inherited. It’s idle to speculate about the character of a national literature — Kavanagh is as different from Yeats, whose work he felt did “not touch life deeply,” as Finnegans Wake is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — but if there is an affinity, a hallmark of literary Irishness, it must be in the splendour of the writing, the clear blazing brilliance of the voice. Drama, prose, verse: whatever the medium, Irish writers seem to have a peerless facility for the written word.
It emerges that among Irish writers the English language is of the utmost concern. Many of the country’s masterpieces are expressly about language — about how it is used or abused, about its traditions and informing history, about its limitations and its unexplored frontiers. You can see this as far back as 1729, when Swift published his satirical Modest Proposal, demonstrating such supreme command of rhetoric that he weaponized it. The pamphlet, which recommended that the children of Ireland’s poor be “offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune” as “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,” derived its power from Swift’s precision, the ferocity restrained and the irony scrupulously rendered. “Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flea the carcass,” he wrote. “The skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.”
Wit of a lighter air was perfected by Oscar Wilde, who could surprise with language, and could make the most mundane words or expressions funny simply by paying them attention. Consider this wonderful exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest. At the end of the second act, Jack and Algernon have been exposed, and sit in Jack’s garden, lamenting their ruin. But in the face of this calamity, Algernon finds time for a quick repast.
JACK: How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins, when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me perfectly heartless. ALGERNON: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them. JACK: I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all under the circumstances. ALGERNON: When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
He is particularly fond of muffins. How to explain why this is one of the funniest sentences ever written for the stage? It has something to do with the soundness of Algernon’s reasoning — that eating muffins does seem a sensible course of relief during times