Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Consider this, Kerrigan: You will no doubt die never having read Finnegans Wake. But at least you have, after carrying the two volumes around with you from residence to residence for over thirty-five years, read the first volume of War and Peace, which of course was brilliant and thrilling and entertaining. But what about volume two?

  He sips his stout, thinks of all the things he will never be able to fit inside his head before it begins its process of decay and desication, a skullful of dust. Skull-alone in a dark place.

  Kerrigan’s slow feet walk him down Harry Street to Grafton, where yellow and white and red flowers fill the passage and a woman sits on a case awaiting customers. He steps over crunching matter on the pavement—the rubble of history? Of his history?—left past Bewley’s Oriental Café, whose continued existence is under threat, to Duke, right to the familiar wood-and-glass facade at number 21. Always changing color, it is currently painted gold, a licensed premise for two hundred years, under its present name since 1889, Davy Byrne’s Bar & Restaurant.

  Here, for the first time in the 1940s, J. P. (Mike) Donleavy met Brendan Behan, and because the American did not like what Behan called him, a narrowback (i.e., one who has not worked with his body, living easy in the new world, although Kerrigan has also heard it defined as a reference to how narrow immigrants had to be if they were to be crammed into the ships that carried them across the ocean), Donleavy offered either to thrash him in the bar or to do so outside on Duke Street. Duking it out on Duke Street, so to speak.

  But outside, Behan—perhaps shrewdly recognizing that Donleavy was a skilled pugilist who had trained with a professional boxing coach—offered his hand in friendship instead: “Ah, now why should the intelligent likes of us belt each other and fight just to please the bunch of them eegits back inside the pub who wouldn’t have the guts to do it themselves.”

  Kerrigan spent a few hours with Donleavy once, at his house in Mullingar, outside Dublin, a mansion that features in Joyce’s Stephen Hero.

  Donleavy was a gracious host, served a tray of bread and scones and cheeses and tea while feeding great hunks of peat into the pungent fire. The walls of the mansion were filled with Donleavy’s art, the shelves of his library were filled with various editions of his books, the music rack of the grand piano displayed the sheet music for one of his own compositions. And Donleavy himself drove Kerrigan in a vintage automobile to the station to catch the last train back to Dublin and stood there to wave him off as the train pulled away.

  Kerrigan does not like to think of the sadness that descended upon him in the train, for Donleavy was the great American literary hero of his early twenties, after he had come through Joyce and Camus and Dostoyevsky, and seeing Donleavy in the last year before his seventh de cade, Kerrigan himself in the last year of his fifth—the year he married Licia—he felt that one of the great moments he had always dreamed about had been fulfilled, but none of the promise that had always seemed imminent in his life ever would be, and in fact the great shock of his adult life would happen in but four years—a college education later.

  As unlike as he was to this legendary writer, he felt an intense kinship to him. But it did sadden him that Donleavy took such evident relish in singing tales of fisticuffs and broken jaws, jolly barroom brawls, never mentioning the cracking of skull bones that occasionally results in partial, sometimes permanent, even total paralysis, partial edentulousness, reduced vision or hearing. Kerrigan tended to blame this attitude on John Wayne. Ironic, it has always seemed to him, that the homosexual serial killer of many young American men in the state of Illinois was named John Wayne Gacy, while another man, castrated by his wife for allegedly raping and abusing her, was John Wayne Bobbitt, who after his penis was located and reattached, founded a band called the Severed Parts and appeared in two adult films, John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis, in an attempt to pay his medical bills.

  Donleavy did, however, express sorrow at the inadvertent punching out of the teeth of a woman in a brawl on the Isle of Man, an event later translated into an anecdote in A Fairy Tale of New York in which the main character, Cornelius Christian, accidentally punches an eyeball out of the head of a woman in an East Side New York barroom brawl.

  Kerrigan’s own father, a man of song and lyric, admired those who were “good with their dukes,” but Kerrigan has never understood why men should wish to punch each other’s faces. He had tried it a time or two himself, was moderately good at it as a lad, did enjoy the power that befell a boy unafraid to throw his clenched fist into the face of another boy, but when he was fourteen, after a particularly vicious fight one day with another boy named Theodore in which the two of them rolled over desks, tore each other’s hair, punched each other’s lips and teeth and jaws and skulls and eyes, Kerrigan no longer wished to. He did not lose the fight, but he knew enough later to understand that no one wins a fight like that and, further, Theodore means “the love of God,” and even if the will of God had embodied tooth and claw and the need for every living creature to ingest the tissue of other living creatures, animal or plant, he thought it was a bum rap, and he did not wish to cooperate unnecessarily with this system.

  He wonders, for not the first time in his life, despite poetic wisdom and advice that he should “to this due degree of blindness, submit,” how this system of life feeding off life could have been devised. Whose imagination could have devised it? William Blake asked as much, and so did T. S. Eliot: “Who then devised the torment …?” Providing teeth to tear open the throats of others in order to procure fresh, unresisting meat upon which to sup? The only exception is the sweet miracle of the breast, which can only nourish, not be used as weapons.

  Then he recalls the pie-size, sculpted medallion he saw of Sheela-nagig in the window of a shop on South Great George’s Street earlier. It depicted the mysterious Celtic exhibitionist goddess whose image is found hidden away in nooks and corners of certain Christian churches in Ireland and England. The stylized image of a woman holding apart her labia, her eyes and mouth bemused, almost moronic.

  Within your stony nook you lurk

  In acrobatic pose.

  You leer, you stare, and open jerk

  The petals of your rose.

  Come in, you breathe, come into me.

  My cunt is what you crave.

  The little death is yours for free,

  As is the cold, cold grave.

  At the bar he orders a pint of the black stuffto keep his consciousness from pinching. On a shelf behind the bar stands a bottle of Irish vodka—Boru—named for the first king of a United Ireland, Brian Boru, who routed the Vikings in the eleventh century, whose son was Kennedy, and who was stabbed in the back by a Dane while praying on Holy Thursday, a sanctified death to which Hamlet refused to deliver his uncle, slayer of his father.

  Beside him now at the bar a leather-jacketed man with a flowered necktie, squat-nosed, sits scowling over a pint of lager. A white-haired man at the drum table by the wall, ruddy-faced, burgundy sweatered, lifts an empty pint glass silently above his head and jerks it toward the bar. More! Ignored. More!

  Three middle-aged women in flowered dresses, seated on an upholstered benchat a table, eat plates of ham and mustard. Kerrigan orders half a dozen rock oysters, and the barman says, “Ah, I wouldn’t eat the rock oysters.”

  “They’re usually brilliant,” says Kerrigan.

  “They are that, yes, usually.”

  “The salmon then.”

  “Now I’m your honest barman. You wouldn’t want the salmon at this hour.”

  “The cheese platter?”

  “The cheese platter would be agreeable,” he says, and when he has served it, “Enjoy it now, there’s a good Stilton,” and, “Thank you very much indeed.”

  Kerrigan thinks it good that he eat cheese, which is provided from the sweet miracle of mammary glands. Further, he wonders if this red-haired barman would ever seek to punch his face should he be angered by him for some reason. He himself would never dream of
punching that honest barman’s freckled puss.

  On the ceiling are art deco lamps shaped like tulip bulbs. A stained-glass door bears the same colors as the painted flowers in the ceiling recesses. The white-haired man, cane between his knees, jerks his empty glass aloft again. More!

  Across the street, through the front window, Kerrigan can see the Baily at numbers 2 and 3, from which Mr. Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, in the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, retreated in disgust from the gobbling pub-grubbing faces to dine on burgundy and blue cheese, which Kerrigan eats now, ninety-five years later:

  He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. Cashed a cheque for me once. Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuck-stitched shirt-sleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin … Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate … Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.

  On the walls, painted murals of smiling people in a dark wood over a bright beach behind a light mountain—painted, Kerrigan knows, by the father-in-law of Brendan Behan.

  Joyce drank here, too. And across the street in The Duke, where he and James Stephens had their first meeting. The Duke was then called Kennedy’s, and Stephens invited Joyce in for a tailor of malt whereupon, according to Stephens, Joyce confided that he had read the two books Stephens at that time had published, pronouncing that Stephens did not know the difference between a semicolon and a colon, that his knowledge of Irish life was non-Catholic and so non existent that he should give up writing and find another job he was good at, like shoe-shining, as a more promising profession.

  Stephens claimed to have responded that he had never read a word of Joyce’s and that, if his protective wits were preserved by heaven, he never would read a word of his unless asked to review it destructively. Yet years later, in 1927, when Joyce was near despair over the negative critique of the bits of Finnegans Wake he had so far published under the title Work in Progress, he is said to have entertained the idea of inviting Stephens to complete the book for him.

  Stephens was born in 1882, the same year as Joyce and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seven years before Adolf Hitler, the year Charles Darwin died. Joyce died in 1941, FDR and Hitler in 1945, and Stephens in 1950, at the respective ages of fifty-nine, sixty-three, fifty-six, and sixty-eight, Hitler’s life the shortest of the four. Stephens had been one of Kerrigan’s father’s favorite poets, especially the poem he had read aloud to young Terrence on frequent occasions about a rabbit caught in a snare whom the narrator of the poem can hear crying out in pain, but cannot find even though he is searching everywhere. Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, his real name Jalâl al-Dîn (1207–1273), born in north Afghanistan, wrote a similar poem about the helpers of the world who run toward those screaming in pain simply because they can hear them.

  Kerrigan smokes a cigar thinking of this, and of the fact that he doesn’t do much for anyone in a helpless situation. The old man jerks his pint up once again. More!

  This time the response is immediate. A fresh pint of Guinness before him, cane between his knees, glowering, he surveys the room like an Irish king. Kerrigan nods with respect and moves out into the May night.

  Through the gates of Trinity (CYCLISTS DISMOUNT), he treads across the cobblestones to Building 38 where, watching himself in the mirror brush his brownish pearly whites, he fears sleep, recognizing that he will die someday, that he may die in bed feeling sweaty and alone beneath an overwarm blanket, knowing he is going far away and not a friend in sight to understand this journey, the awareness of which we all block out as long as we can, are almost incapable of thinking about, an ending which, though known, comes always as a surprise we secretly believe we might be exempt from simply because of the very special nature of being one’s own unconditionally self-beloved self, self-contempt notwithstanding.

  If there was a phone in this room, he would call his Associate and berate her, make her pay for his unhappiness for no reason other than that he suspects she would allow him to do so because of her apparently great heart.

  For a moment he thinks he loves her and will propose marriage, but quickly dismisses the thought, knowing that it would involve other people, too, her daughters, witnesses, officials. In any event, marriage will do nothing to alleviate this pinpoint of death fear. It is all illusion, delusion, and the job of human beings is to maintain that delusion in order to enjoy themselves and accomplish their work upon this earth: to live and be happy and love the heady liquor of the drink known as air, and that, anyway, is something. The word delusion is immediately accompanied in Kerrigan’s mind by an image of Licia in her bikini blue as the false blue of her eyes.

  Because he cannot face the task of removing his hairs from the plumbing fixtures, he plops still unwashed onto the bed in his skivvies, considering how Thea’s fragrance will still be there somewhere yet, probably stale now, and even as he reaches for himself, he is off in a distant land, and his father waves from an even more distant shore, smaller now, but glad of face as Kerrigan calls out, “Dad! Dad! Come over for a pint!”

  And he is in the house where people sit in darkness; dust is their drink and clay their meat. They are clothed like dark birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness … the house of dust.

  Ireland has a standing army of five thousand poets, Patrick Kavanagh once said, though the Irish do not, he asserted, give a fart in their corduroys for culture.

  And near as many pubs or more, Kerrigan cannot but think. He considers volunteering to do a volume on Dublin’s pubs for the series, as he sets off to visit some of Kavanagh’s old haunts, having dreamt inter alia of his own father waving from across the river—his father who had read him Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” years before Kerrigan was capable of appreciating more than the music of its language, of the narrator’s being suspicious as a rat near strange bread when a woman laughed.

  But first he visits St. Andrew’s Church to light two candles for the dead and one again for the still living but stolen from him, kneels in a pew to which is affixed a plaque that says, PRAY FOR THE SOULS OF JOHN AND ELIZA D’ARCY.

  Instead of praying for the D’Arcys, Kerrigan retreats from the church and stops at the Chemist Shop Sweny’s at 1 Lincoln Plaza, where he sniffs a bar of lemon soap, thinking of Bloom buying one of these, even as he knew Molly was preparing to cheat on him with Blazes Boylan. He buys a soap oval wrapped in tissue paper and stores it in his hip pocket in honor of Poldy, poor peaceful cuckold onanist Jew—just like me, though I’m not Jewish—planning to give it to his Associate if he ever sees her again. Soap successfully delivered. For her, not for me.

  “Is it for herself?” asks the sweet elderly lady with a twinkle behind the ancient wooden desk, and Kerrigan smiles, nods, steps out to note that what used to be called Kennedy’s public house across the street, mentioned by name in Beckett and Joyce, is now called Fitzsimmons. He strolls north a block toward Merrion Square, past the birthplace of Oscar Wilde at number 1, who died in 1900, same year Nietzsche died and Thomas Wolfe was born, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim appeared, and Joyce’s first piece of writing, “Ibsen’s New Drama,” was published, a review of Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899):

  We only see what we have lost

  When we dead awaken.

  And then what do we see?

  We see that we never have lived.

  You are so blind.

  Remembering another of Ibsen’s plays, An Enemy of the People, published the same year Joyce was born, the quintessential modern play about the willful poisoning of the environment for profit, and The Wild Duck, equally about blindness as was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, he pauses to look at the door of number 82 Merrion Square, where Yeats spent six years—remembers that Yeats had been one of the first to experiment with mescaline, imported by Havelock
Ellis from Mexico in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old. Kerrigan recalls his own experiments with LSD in California in the sixties, can recall standing on a cliff over the Pacific in Ocean Beach, San Diego, thirty-three years before, watching the sea crash on the sandstone in a wild splash of electric color, droplets of red and green and yellow flying up into the moonlit evening. He remembers lying on the floor of an adobe cottage with a young woman, both of them wearing jeans and nothing else, his fingers on the denim at the fork of her thighs, and she held his hand there, projecting images upon the ceiling of writhing blissful bodies in embrace that in some mysterious way they both claimed to have witnessed. And he can remember convincing himself that, since his body was composed of atoms in movement and the door was composed of atoms in movement, if he would only move purposefully and with true belief, there was no need to open the door, for his atoms could slip right through the spaces between the door atoms. The trick was to do it quickly, not to get welded in there, like The Fly. And he did that.

  His painful bloodied beak brought him back to earth fast and ended his psychopharmaceutical experiments forever. And just as well. Those sixties were dismal in truth.

  He moves on to 84 Merrion Square, where Æ (George William Russell, 1867–1935), lifelong friend of Yeats, wrote Voices of the Stones, which Kerrigan’s father so loved:

  Uncover: bend the head

  And let the feet be bare;

  This air that thou breathest

  Is holy air

  Sin not against the breath …

  And J. P. Donleavy reported receiving a letter signed Æ in 1957 in which the letter writer suggested that The Ginger Man made men worse than brutes, poisoned the minds of children, dragged the Savior’s name in the mud. “The Holy Name of Jesus,” he wrote, “belongs to a Person who will judge you soon.”