The one that got away
For some years, during my visits to Dublin, I have been a visitor to a crestfallen little premises off Grafton Street called McDaid’s.
Mostly men were there, and betimes a couple of broad biddies with tongues that would curl a poker, and sometimes that great woman Kathleen Behan would come in looking for her son Brendan and stay to sing a score or so of old ballads in her liquid soprano.
But the heart and soul of the place was a man who should have been dead of lung cancer for seven years or so, but didn’t have the wit to stiffen or the resignation to quiet his tongue, which was the most eloquent of Ireland since the death of Yeats in 1939.
This was Paddy Kavanagh, now gathered, but then grunting and groaning and being terribly funny about the middle-classness of the middle class, to the infuriation of the same class. He wore two pairs of glasses hanging by cords over his shoulder onto a vest holding the detritus of hundreds of hasty dinners. He was forever on the phone, usually telling the “Irish Times” what he thought of their effort of the morning.
I often thought of writing about Paddy, the finest poet in this country, but one thing or another got in the way of the effort, as it will.
Then one day, Jimmy Breslin, the former New York columnist, caught him and the McDaid milieu in a brilliant eyewitness account, which has since been printed many a time in anthologies. It was a grand job. I envied him for it and excoriated myself ever so slightly. Only today, from my friend Ulick O’Connor, I learned the story of its writing. Here is Ulick, starting with Breslin’s notorious habit of being late for dates:
“In 1964, on five successive occasions in New York, he let me down. Each time afterward, he would put his arm around me with the com- forting gesture of a wardheeling politician, and say:
“‘I swear I’ll be on the dot next time. God bless yeh.’
“I figured after a while that the ‘God bless yeh’ was Jimmy’s kiss of death. It was as if some inner voice had told him that he was not going to turn up and he was imploring divine assistance to compensate the stricken person in advance.
“He did turn up once, though. He was in Dublin on a story, and he wanted information quickly for a column. He had left it too late to write. Over a meal, I gave him a bunch of stories about Dublin poets, painters and characters.
“Later, Jimmy showed me the piece before he dispatched it. He watched me with worried cocker spaniel eyes as I read it. It was brilliant. But he had told MY stories as if he had met the people himself. I didn’t get a word of credit for what I had told him. I was flabbergasted. It must have shown in my face. The arm slipped around my shoulder:
“‘I’ll fix it upstairs, God bless yeh.’
“This was said with the awful sincerity of a Tammany boss promising a mother a job for her son that he knew in advance he couldn’t get. Jimmy shuffled off to his hotel room to send off the story exactly as he had shown it to me.
“A couple of years later, I met Jimmy in a coffee house in Lexington avenue, New York. Before he put his arm around me in greeting, I said:
“‘Jimmy, do me a favor. Leave out the kiss of death. Don’t say “God bless yeh” when I am leaving.’
“Bobby Kennedy, he told me, was mad to meet me. He had talked to him about me, and we were just naturals for each other. He’d fix an appointment tomorrow and ring me at six. I said good-by. Jimmy’s lips formed in the familiar farewell: “‘God …” “I put a finger to my lips in a gesture of silence. It nearly choked him, but he didn’t say it.
“I haven’t heard from him since.”
I saw it all, and heard it, and didn’t either tell it or write it. Ulick saw it and heard it, and told it, but didn’t write it. Breslin neither saw it nor heard it, except when recounted, but he wrote it. Which should tell us all something about something or other.