Dead WRITERS’ Society
Walk in the footsteps of literary greats in Dublin, Ireland.
DO NOT DISMISS me as loony if I tell you I want to dig the Black Pool and find what’s underneath. Cannot be stout rocks and dreary clay. My wild guess is there are words under it. See, this is no ordinary black pool. It is Dublin (from Gaelic ‘dubh linn’ meaning ‘black pool’). Surely, the alphabet has been kneaded in the city’s loam. How else does one explain four Nobel Literature laureates springing out of one city—William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1926), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995). In the UNESCO City of Literature, let’s walk around and retrace the Nobel Laureates’ footprints. The usual first stop is 5 Sandymount Avenue where Yeats was born. One cannot hear the baby Yeats’ bawl there, but stories abound about his love for Maud Gonne, his fiery speeches as senator in the Irish Parliament, his zeal to set up Abbey Theatre in 1904, and Toners Pub (Baggot Street); the city’s only snug he would step in for an occasional tipple. Yeats still stands tall with a thick patina as a Henry Moore statue in St Stephen’s Green and his slanted scribbles on typescripts and page proofs are stashed in the National Library, the world’s largest repository of Yeats’s papers. “Author of Many Plays” reads the plaque outside Bernard Shaw’s (he hated to be called George and later dropped the given first name) birthplace in Synge Street. The tribute is strangely understated but the life-size bronze statue at the Clare Street entrance to the National Gallery of Ireland more than compensates for that birthplace euphemism. A pub named after the playwright served its last pint on October 31 but the George Bernard Shaw Cookbook can still be picked off Dublin’s book shelves.
MARSH’S LIBRARY IS IRELAND’S FIRST PUBLIC LIBRARY; HERE BRAM STOKER ONCE STUDIED, JAMES JOYCE RESEARCHED, AND JONATHAN SWIFT WAS A REGULAR. FIND BRAM STOKER’S (AUTHOR OF DRACULA) SIGNATURE IN THE GUEST BOOK.
Bridges are not where Nobel Laureates’ names are often etched. But a white harpbridge reaching out to the blue sky is named after Samuel Beckett, the man who wrote Waiting for Godot. A scene from this play is always the opening act of the famed Dublin Literary Pub Crawl and many head to Trinity College where he taught French and lived in House 40. His bust sits on a pedestal in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral ‘Literary Parade’ and his eyebrows are arched in his waxed version in the city’s National Wax Museum Plus. Story is that Seamus Heaney and his son Mick hauled boxes containing 10,000 pieces of the poet/songwriter’s works to Dublin’s National Library and everyone is now listening to him again. In the exhibition (on until 2021) titled Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again at the Bank of Ireland headquarters in College Green directly opposite Trinity College. His ‘elegant’ statue stands at Sandymount Green, where the family lived for many years. The Blackrock Clinic still remembers the moment when Heaney breathed his last on August 30, 2013. His last words were: Noli timere (don’t be afraid). Dublin’s loam kneaded with alphabet has not dried yet. Writers and poets are still thriving in the city where the air is thick with iambic pentameters and well-crafted sentences.