J.P. Donleavy

by J. P. Donleavy

  But now night comes. A round moon rises out of the Wicklow mountains and beams down on Dublin. Like the ten thousand others in black tie, I and my lady friend in a cerulean blue gown whose beauty heightened hearts of the undergraduates of my time, stroll through the mild clear night down Dawson Street towards that sparkling jewel in the city’s very centre. Where after nearly four hundred years of the English and the Anglo Irish, the Irish Irish now hold sway in the same ancient splendour polished and glowing as never before. Ah but as one arrives amply on time, the champagne at the champagne reception has already run out. I feel a sentimental twinge of disappointment as Jean-Marc Heidsieck, the brewer of this famed wine being served, was a college companion with whom on many a chill Dublin evening I dined in this hall where we had once actually discussed the growing of grapes in Ireland. And I can’t remember now if Jean-Marc said it could or couldn’t be done. But never mind, on this festive night, I’ve been given a bottle of reconstituted orange to drink.

  One waits to see if out of the migratory massive horde who traipse back and forth across the ancient cobbled front square any of my own old die hard graduates show up. If not from lands across the seas then at least out of the local woodwork. But somehow one feels the past of Trinity is more than just dead and gone, it is abysmally forgotten, overwhelmed by the swarms of these new Irish minds and faces. Out of which not one do I see even vaguely familiar. And it was about this time of night those years ago when the BBC’s anthem blared God save the King and God Save the Queen from open Trinity windows to fade out across Dublin. To incite patriots such as Brendan Behan to come as he did beating fists on the college front gates. And as the college porters held their own, Behan shouting ‘Ireland for the Irish’ predicted what was to be. But tonight instead, to lower the tone, in over the fences and through the barriers, Trinity Ball interlopers and trespassers come. And hard they are to pick out from the invited.

  But don’t you dismay. And let not this nation be held up to ridicule. All’s not gone and lost. Gombeens and their like are not certain to win. There are still champions who fight. And as the fireworks and flame throwers erupt in front square I look out the window of the college common room. Another pair of elbows come to lean next to mine on the sill. It’s a young voice extolling and mourning the greatness and passing of Trinity traditions. He is a Trinity graduate and a young beefy ecclesiastic of the Church of Ireland who has taken holy orders and is a tenor no less in the choir. He’s proud to remain and be what he is. He would like to take up a sinecure where good Protestants still remain in their isolated spots in Ireland. His strangely delicate fingers play with the stem of his glass. It is as if I am for a moment listening to Beefy out of the pages of The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B whose lonely sad story was set in this very place. And for whom it took so much steady emolument for him to traverse his daily life unhindered. And one is reminded now that although the Trinity ghosts are dying, they may not yet be completely dead. Thriving as they are in this romantic young man’s mind. Who dreams this night at the Trinity Ball.

  1992

  The Dublin Ghosts Remembered on Bloomsday

  Look down from the sky and divided by the Liffey and caught in a great loop by the Royal Canal you’ve never seen a better web of neatly woven little streets below. And an item not yet known to be recorded in any record book is that there are more favoured spots in Dublin than anywhere else upon earth upon which one can stand scratching one’s head and from which one can walk in any direction and not have to proceed more than thirty paces to the privacy of a public house, thereby proving the existence of greatest convenience to your thirsty pedestrian the world has ever known. This greatest of all urban assets, where you’d find a stool out of the rain upon which to place your ass and reach your lips to swallow a brew to slake your thirst and between tipples and among cronies coin phrases that would fill as many volumes of The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs that you could shake a black thorn at, is also not alluded to in any record book.

  Now then. Is it any wonder that this island has produced writers and raconteurs galore or that you would have someone like Joyce and his Bloom the tourist envy of nations everywhere. In every Dubliner’s mind, as he steps forth in this city of intimacy, there is also in his mind always awaiting a Dubliner to whom his feet urge to take him. Where he knows may lurk other cronies who’d pretend not to be waiting for his arrival and would utter sotto voce ridicule and would look up as if they weren’t glad to see you. But never mind the rebuff and undisguised rejection, for even the briefest of acquaintanceships in a Dublin pub breeds begrudgement. And a pint or a ball of malt might be the cost of contented companionship and to let them know you’d learned your silently taught lesson in ignominy. Ah but then as Joyce said it’s all in the provocation of intelligence.

  Now all this gossipy turmoil of insult and spiritual injury was before the neon light came to Dublin and when the principle of chauvinism was exalted and thriving. And the world of Bloom had hardly faded then in the first year of peace just after the Second World War. The pub life in those days was a sea battle of withering witticisms, blasting maxims and wounding epigrams sinking your dream boats dreamt the night before and if your shyness weren’t to forever make you shut your gob, you’d let fly with your own bright and droll thoughts tersely and ingeniously expressed, which would have the fists and bottles flying in a trice. Pubs were as a bank, a chapel or a church, sacred places as if one were making some slightly sacrilegious stations of the cross, where a man’s elbows hunched him over the bar and he prayed for deliverance from his own daily despair and borrowed a little peace while he hoped for better days. But indeed I exaggerate a smidgeon. There was now and again in the diatribes, as it was in Bloom’s time, even a mild fondness to be found lurking among the combatants. And if the scandal mongering was good enough there were the guffaws erupting aplenty, and backslaps on the back to choke you on your beer. And an invitation to have another.

  Now Bloomsday, I do believe, was inaugurated in a pub. And don’t you all rise up as one to tell me I am wrong. The inventor was to best accounts Brian O’Nolan, that quiet citizen who reflectively sipping his whiskey matriculated in the interior of the Scotch House on the Quays and became more famed as Myles Na Gopaleen spoken as his name across the world. It was in taking such reverie, and pleasantly getting deeper in his cups, that Mr O’Nolan first thought of Bloom and to go step in this Joyce’s character’s footsteps. In going thus forth he went accompanied by the legendary poets Kavanagh and Cronin, for poets’ company automatically brings you good luck. And last and most certainly not least there was John Ryan the inimitable, who was every bit the Bloom of his day, albeit an awfully affluent one.

  Now it was Ryan whom one suspects paid to rent the Broughams taken on this, the very first Bloomsday. His early Dublin life was located out in Stillorgan environs living on his mother’s estate and in her sumptuous house of fifteen bedrooms and as many bathrooms. John always giving gentle advice to his staying guests to enjoy the early morning ambience of pucks to eat of rashers and eggs but to be ever just that little bit cautious to stay out of the way of the mother. And approaching noonday, to achieve that, he’d always gently suggest to come with him forth in his Vauxhall along with the swarms of cycles into Dublin. Where he would make his way to his bohemian destinations each one more bizarrely unbelievable than the last, and it was to be my first ever to know of a Bloom wandering. And would be as variable as the likes of the quiet neutrality found in Kehoe’s pub, to the noisy Hibernian Hotel’s basement Buttery. The latter much populated by your nattily dressed and la di da accented chancers and plenty of Blooms at large among them. But always following such whole days’ wanderings, past midnight would bring us to the last port of call which were the dungeons of the Catacombs where the ultimate in philosophy reigned.

  These my own Bloom like peregrinations with Ryan were strange enough. But when alone, and coming as I did out of chill chambers of 38 Trinity College and looking, not for compa
nionship but for the nearest central heating, I went straight up Dame Street and would then enter the loneliest bereft outpost Dublin has ever known. And as it would conversely be, also the most beautiful pub in all of Ireland. Tucked into the side of the old Jury’s Hotel, you’d never know it was there. Admittance made up steps from the narrow darkness of Anglesea Street. Living glamour no where to be seen. But plenty of lonely gloom in the cold shadows and the fabulosity of the colourful tiles. But there to be found indeed, as if to contradict all that is Dublin, was often the one and only Gainor Stephen Crist, in meditation and holding fast as it were, at his post. And here, too, it was one strange afternoon that Crist said to me.

  ‘Mike, even if one day you hear I’m dead, and you await patiently to be advised of further and better particulars, be prepared for later and contradictory news. For on some summer’s eve when the lark is everywhere singing in the clear air, and when all but you are gone, I’ll be there back in Dublin for Bloomsday. I’ll be walking down to the end of Grafton Street. And if you see me thus, tell no one but believe it’s me.’

  And I upon this June and but one day or two ago, just returned from London, was walking on this summer eve from College Green to start up Grafton Street and was about ready to cross Suffolk when I turned to see the other side of the road passing in front of the Provost’s House none other than the legendary Gainor Stephen Crist. And in his elegant dress, a tweed herring bone jacket and as always his neat grey flannel trousers. His beard and hair grey. His hands as they always did entwined twiddling in front of him. I even stopped for a moment and nearly cried out and said that bloody well looks like Crist. Till I remembered it can’t be. I began to walk on but stopped again remembering his remark about Bloomsday. And said to myself in very definite words, that was Gainor Crist. And it wouldn’t be the first time he’s reappeared from the certain dead. And as I turned to look again I could see the upright posture of those familiar squared back shoulders pass on the granite pavement around the front of Trinity. But instead of shouting long distance for his attention I walked on. Why disturb a ghost on a pleasant summer eve. For I had many years ago a letter passed on to me from the American Vice Consul in Madrid, informing:

  ‘Mr Crist died in Santa Cruz de Tenerife Islas Canarias on July 5th 1964 and was buried at the Cementerio de Santa Lastenia in that city.’

  But now as I walked further on up Grafton Street I began to remember the curious stories reported over the years. Crist had never in fact been seen again when he disappeared as he did one day, invited aboard this strange gentleman’s vessel to sail with him to South America. And this war time friend, a US Marine Major, the story was, he’d again met by accident in a Barcelona street and had not seen since the Second World War and with whom he’d previously went on a drinking spree which began in a London pub and ended up four days later in the back of a lorry full of broom sticks on the banks of the Rhine river during one of the last battles of the war, with neither gentleman, one in naval and other in military uniform, being sure as to how they got there. And as I strolled away up Grafton Street the realization came that no one who knew Gainor actually saw him dead nor, due to his landing at Tenerife, was present at the graveside to see his coffin go into the ground. But long now have I verily believed him buried, as he might be, having actually seen a photograph of his gravestone. But two years ago I smiled amused at the uncanny resemblance in surreptitiously taken photographs sent me of a cocktail gathering in Kansas City, Missouri, where a man was disporting who looked for all the world like this man Gainor Stephen Crist. And I again chortled at the photo sent me of another clone, black tied at dinner at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira and but two hundred miles away by sea from his grave.

  Now if I’m imagining all of this, as one does tend to do on occasionally seeing the ghost come alive in the bronze Patrick Kavanagh seated alongside the Grand Canal, I imagine, too, that there will be a reincarnation of sorts when John Ryan’s statue arises somewhere suitable the top of Grafton Street. And now I know that there must also be, too, a statue commemorative of Gainor Stephen Crist to stop me imagining I’m seeing the real him. It could reign as a reminder on Bloomsday and we could go in his silver footsteps on the pavement where he walked with his nervous bird like gait. Alas the Cosmos House and the Seven Towers, two of Crist’s favourite pubs where he drank, are no more. And the tiled interior once on the corner of Dame and Anglesea Street is far away restored in Zurich. But if it’s him alive passing the Provost’s House or a damn good looking resemblance sporting his ghost, let me only say.

  Who doth it be

  Who hoots

  Out of a sorrow

  Cold and old

  Long lain now

  Believed resting in peace

  Mike

  Question me not

  It be me

  Who hoots

  1994

  Night Out in Dublin

  There is no nicer nice person than a nice American. And he or she does not deserve to suffer. Nor be affronted by this broken tumbledown unkempt city struggling into the twentieth century as the natives emerge from their centuries old deprivation and poverty. Nor be brought to what may be the most overpriced place in Western Europe. And you, sophisticated traveller, may, like a damp pale handshake, find, as Henry James did, little here to please you.

  But wait. Although the place has gone computer wild and you will jump like a scalded cat from every bill you’re handed, cheap bargains are not everything in life. So don’t flee just yet. The native smile will make you feel that if not your money’s worth, at least the generous amount of blarney you’re getting is served up at a discount. It is why I as a midlands bog trotting native, contemplating a night out in Dublin, took three nights to work up one’s nerve. Terrified of prices, and the bleak prospect of scruffiness and that the music would knock my ears off and the smoke choke me.

  Bravely I slot into a corner of Dublin that was once a bohemian hot bed but now houses the Westbury Hotel. This spacious lobby alone is as smoothly comfortable and as American as you could wish. I take a gastronomically agreeable French meal in the restaurant. So far so good. But soon realize in this well meant anti Irish elegance that it is no night out in Dublin. Twenty four hours later, my nerve strengthening, I attend the venerable Olympia theatre. To hear and see Billy Connolly the Scots roaming iconoclast philosopher tear Irish repression to shreds telling among other outrageous things what might hopelessly happen when an Irishman attempts to wear his condom. But again the night evaporates in chaste respectability with a trip with Billy to the King Sitric restaurant in Howth, and in these quiet confines, seafood a speciality, the night ends peacefully out on this windswept peninsula.

  As another dawn comes and breakfast is taken and I begin to shrink back towards the midland bogs, a night out in Dublin now becomes remote. But I do as I intrepidly did years ago in this city and simply saunter out. For Dublin has always been a private club and old members lurk everywhere. And sure enough up an alley I meet an acquaintance, Michael Meenaghan, a polo player. Who assures me as we go for coffee at Bewley’s Oriental Café that I ought not to be dismayed. The dowager lady waitress who speaks her own Irish brand of the Queen’s English made one feel, ordering a coffee and spice bun, that one was being knighted in the process. And in this venerable institution with its Jersey cream, splendid coffee and cakes, my confidence creeps back that all has not been lost in this honky tonk Dublin where at least you can still listen to the priceless form of native entertainment, the blarney.

  As we stroll down Grafton Street it becomes again as it used to be like the main hall in a country house. My polo playing friend has for years made it a habit to buy bouquets from the girl flower seller on the corner to give to deserving ladies. And wonders why she’s absent this evening as he leads me on to the Bailey a few paces further in Duke Street. After a pint or two in this interior resembling a somewhat luxurious students’ union, our pub crawl has truly begun. Warming to his task my friend in this intimate club manner of Dub
lin talks to anyone either side as if they’d known each other a lifetime. We cross the street to Davy Byrnes, a haunt of my own student days. Somehow Michael Meenaghan does not take to the clientele, who, although they look a perfectly acceptable bunch, perhaps seem a notch too up market and not your true denizens of a real Dublin pub.

  However, a drinking premises is never more than sixty seven paces away in Dublin, and you need never run out of choices. But the stale smoke and grimness of the next place drive us quickly out again and our crawl continues up Dawson Street. To enter the most astonishing confines of all. And so private is the Royal Irish Automobile Club that only one man sits in the bar remarking to nearly no one in particular except the bartender that he likes the wide marble halls in the old world hotels to remind him of the once spaciousness and graciousness of life. It’s almost as if he here solitary sits in lone defiance to the awful things that have happened to this city. And in fact this is precisely what he is deliberately doing.

  Ah but not all is downhill abysmal, and from singular solitude the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel is suggested where Jimmy one of Ireland’s most famed bartenders presides. This now being the last remaining meeting place for the socially élite. Which of course in this peasant land happily includes everybody. My polo player guide is conducting introductions and is clapping and being clapped on the back by other polo players. Queens of fashion, impresarios, horse breeders, art connoisseurs and moguls abound. Champagne bottles are dipped across the bar to pour. Cigars are puffed. And some nervously laugh as a lone tweedy defiantly Anglo Irish lady exclaims.