A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  The competition among pubs is fierce, he went on, not only in Ranelagh but all over the city, and they’re up against attractions that Ireland never had in such abundance before—fine restaurants and cafés, elaborate movie complexes, dramatic shopping malls, and even Starbucks, along with video stores and the Internet. Budget airlines also take a toll. For the cost of a few pints, you can practically book a cheap flight to London. To combat the tide, Kevin dreams up gimmicks. He sponsors trivia nights with prizes, and hosts an annual Super Bowl bash. He also rents his lounge for birthday parties, often a thirtieth, the mean age of his clientele. When the pub closes, he picks up discarded tram tickets to see where people come from, so he can target them with ads and promotions. He distributes his business card to the neighbors and urges them to phone him instead of the cops when they have a problem. If a pipe bursts in a toilet, he fixes it himself. He likes doing repairs, he said, because it keeps him busy, but it sounded as if he already had plenty on his plate.

  I commiserated with Kevin. Almost everybody wishes their job was a little easier. I definitely wished writing was easier. It was the illusion of ease that had drawn me to writing, back in my bored college days. “It looks easy,” Auden once said in an interview I’d read, and I failed to hear the irony. Your ideas on a piece of paper, a lashing of drama or heartbreak, a cliffhanger ending—never mind the thirty years of solitary confinement and the damage to your brain. They don’t mention those side effects in writing programs. Anyway, I hoped Kevin earned a fortune for his hard work, but the revamped McSorley’s was too trendy to suit me. While the Irish publicans were racing toward the future and copying America—here was an irony I did appreciate—I, the wandering American, was dead set on embracing the traditional Irish pub, unspoiled and undoctored, before it vanished for good, so I transferred my affection to Jack Birchall’s Ranelagh House.

  I remember my first visit to Birchall’s quite well. I’d just finished a not-so-easy stint of writing and decided to go for a walk to clear my head, feeling tired and eager for some company. When I reached the pub, I stopped outside to study the inscription in Latin on the stained-glass panels over its windows—Quare Verum, or Seek the Truth. How appropriate, I thought, wondering if Jack Birchall had been educated by the Jesuits. The inscription could also be translated as “No Bullshit Allowed,” I later realized, since the pub’s central motif was its simplicity, even humility. I was drawn toward the hearthlike glow pulsing through the stained glass, as radiant as a last blast of sunshine at twilight, and when I heard the warm babble of voices and the heady clink of glasses, I knew the craic would be mighty inside.

  Craic looks as if it’s an old Gaelic word, but it derives from the Anglo-Saxon. Pronounced “crack,” it was spelled that way until the media recast it, faux style, to avoid any confusion with crack cocaine. At its most basic, it means fun, especially the fun to be had in pubs. Craic can be as elusive and free-floating as ectoplasm, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. The sociologist Adrian Peace has called it a “collectively produced performance.” In the village of “Inverest”—not its real name—Peace recorded how the craic descended randomly on one pub. “Word spreads that the atmosphere is promising,” he wrote. “People begin to drift in its direction . . . Conversation becomes intense, the noise level soars.” Everyone enjoys the fun, but nobody can account for why it occurred at that particular pub on that particular night.

  I followed the flow of the craic through a scuffed entryway and into a compact L-shaped room already crowded and brimming with good vibes. The size of the pub enhanced its bonhomie. You had to brush shoulders with someone just to buy a drink, an ideal pretext for a chat. The room had a pleasing lack of affectation, too. The décor was as abrupt as an afterthought, and the bric-a-brac truly had collected over time. Nobody would choose the stuff for its cuteness—a few vintage beer bottles on a shelf, say, and a tin that once held potato chips. On the walls were some landscapes in oil, including a portrait of swans on the Grand Canal; some faded photographs of unidentified persons; and a framed thank-you note for a donation to Guide Dogs for the Blind.

  Upholstered banquettes offered comfortable seating, each with a table and some little stools about two feet high, perfect for a milkmaid. Normal stools lined the worn bar, divided into two sections by an arched doorway. At the back bar, solitary men were doing crossword puzzles or reading the paper, oblivious of the barely audible recorded music playing through hidden speakers. The front bar, where I ordered a pint of Guinness, was the epicenter of the craic. A barman, neatly dressed in a shirt and tie, filled a glass to the three-quarters mark and put it on a rubber mat to settle. I watched it froth and foam, agreeing with Tom Corkery. The mechanics and metaphysics of stout do promote contemplation.

  Were the bubbles rising or falling? How long before the barman topped up the glass? Is Guinness really good for you, as the company’s ads used to claim in the old days? The answer is, “Maybe,” at least in moderation. The yeast residue contains traces of thirteen vitamins, while humulone, a chemical compound in the hops, has a mildly sedative effect. (Pillows stuffed with hops were once prescribed for insomniacs.) Whether stout acts as a tonic for “rundown” patients—a potential benefit the company once touted—is debatable, but some doctors still recommend it to nursing mothers to help them relax. Guinness has also been sold as a balm to invalids; a method for enriching iron-poor blood; a boost for a depressed appetite; and a calmative for the shattered nerves of those who are “weak and shaky.”

  Guinness tastes much better in Ireland than anywhere else, and you can buy a version of it in about 150 countries worldwide. The flavor of stout seems to change depending on where it’s brewed. A pint in London doesn’t have the same full-bodied, creamy richness of a Dublin pint—indeed, some London pubs now feature Guinness imported from Ireland—while the stout I drank in California struck me as a miserly imitation, thin and bitter and barely palatable in my opinion. Irish Guinness does have a drawback, though. It weighs heavily on the belly, more from its sheer heft and bulk than its alcoholic content, a relatively low 4.1–4.3 percent compared to 5.2 for Stella Artois, a popular Belgian lager. Dubliners refer to it as “liquid bread” or a “meal in a glass,” even though a pint contains just 198 calories, less than a low-fat pint of milk.

  Still, it takes some effort to swallow enough of it to attain the fuzzy state accurately described as “well-jarred.” The more likely result of overindulgence will be soporific, as Charles Halliday noted in An Inquiry Into the Influence of Spiritous Liquors in Producing Crime, Disease, and Poverty in Ireland, published in 1830. Halliday argued that whiskey, not beer, was the problem. Even a single dram could rouse a drinker to the “highest pitch of animal excitement . . . mad for the commission of every type of villainy which his depraved imagination may suggest,” but beer was benign and blameless. “To drink a quart of Ale or Porter requires some time, and there are few stomachs able to bear the quantity sufficient to produce intoxication, without allowing a considerable period to elapse, and the certain progress from drowsiness to stupor, which in the interval takes place, gradually renders harmless the wretched object deprived of reason.”

  As I nursed my second pint, I witnessed Adrian Peace’s formula in action. People kept streaming through the door, possibly deserters from Russells or T. Humphreys who’d been sucked into the vortex, and the craic continued to mount. Customers were three deep at the front bar now, while the crossword puzzlers at the back bar had put down their pencils to converse with each another. Voices grew louder, as Peace had predicted, and the entire room seemed bathed in rosy light. The Irish may consume more alcohol per capita than any developed nation except Luxembourg, but its effects are modulated in a well-managed traditional pub. The staggering drunks who flooded Dublin’s streets in Halliday’s time are rare, and when you do see one, it’s usually a young binge drinker reeling out of a nightclub in the wee hours.

  Jack Birchall wouldn’t tolerate any binges on his premises, anyway. He looked a comman
ding presence, as eagle-eyed as a ship’s captain navigating a choppy sea and on the alert for a troublesome wave. Impeccably groomed, with the trace of a golf-course tan even in winter, he operated on the “firm but fair” principle, and the pub echoed his character. He supervised every detail and bent over backward to deal with his crusty regulars, who were the crustiest in Ranelagh by far. That he handled their idiosyncracies with good grace showed his devotion to his profession, one he was still practicing well into his seventies. He saw the publican’s life as an honorable calling, I believe, and that made his patrons respect him. With Jack on duty, everyone drank responsibly because it would have been embarrassing to do otherwise.

  He was a private man, who never engaged in happy talk. When I asked about his background once, he acted both gruff and shy. “Ah, you wouldn’t want to be writin’ about me,” he objected. Born on a farm in County Kildare, he came to Dublin in his youth and latched on at a pub, where he spent six years as an apprentice and junior barman before he earned his stripes. The discipline was essential, he felt, and largely missing from many pubs today. For publicans, the system had advantages, since they paid their lads a menial wage. The lads put up with it because they shared a common goal. If they lived cheaply and saved, they might buy a pub some day with the help of a backer. That’s difficult to accomplish now. Most pubs are too expensive, so being a barman isn’t necessarily a step toward a brighter future. An old saying has it that you’ll never attend a barman’s funeral, because they run their own place eventually or quit the business for something better.

  For Jack Birchall, the toil and the long hours paid off. He bought his first pub in the Liberties, so-called because the district lay beyond the jurisdiction of the medieval city. The Liberties has a rough-and-tumble history, fraught with bloodshed during the eighteenth century when a feud erupted between its Protestant tailors and weavers and the Catholic butchers at Ormond Market, who traded on the Liffey’s north side. The butchers hacked at the Protestants’ legs and severed their tendons; the Protestants retaliated by impaling the butchers on their own meat hooks. The Liberties was desperately poor in those days, as James Johnson, an American doctor, commented in 1844. “Winds and rain have liberty to enter freely through the windows of half the houses—the pigs have liberty to ramble about—the landlord has liberty to take possession of most of his tenements—the silk weaver has liberty to starve or beg.”

  By the time Jack set up shop, the Liberties, though still tough, had a solid blue-collar population. He made a success of that first pub and parlayed it into a more valuable one in Ranelagh, relying on a clever leapfrog scheme that compounded his original investment in real estate. McCauley’s, the pub he acquired, once figured in the column Myles na gCopaleen wrote for the Irish Times. (Myles was really Brian O’Nolan, whose other literary alias was Flann O’Brien.) Having stopped at the pub for a pint of plain porter, the drink he praised in his doggerel, Myles became exercised about McCauley’s clock. It only had one hand, he insisted, and he took a photo of the “seditious timepiece” to prove it, exhibiting it to his friends as evidence. The parlor trick worked until someone pointed out that the clock read 4:22, the hour when its hands overlap.

  I heard about the leapfrog scheme from Dessie Hynes, Kevin’s father, a dapper little man of eighty, who was a master at it. When we met at McSorley’s, Dessie looked as if he could still perform a spritely tap dance. He came equipped with a file of clippings he thought might interest me. The McCranns, his mother’s relatives, had owned some bars in Manhattan, and he produced a photo of their Gramercy Inn, where you dialed MUrray Hill 4-9153 for a reservation. Also in the file were a photo of the memorial statue atop the grave of Thomas McCrann (1875–1925), a former New Jersey state senator buried in Paterson, and an obituary notice for his wife Frances, who died at ninety-four. Last but not least, an article from the Galway Advertiser trumpeted the feats of Tommy Hynes, Dessie’s uncle, who won the Irish Junior Cross Country Championship in 1901.

  Dessie has the gift of gab. He lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was just eleven and went to live with his grandfather in rural Longford, where he failed to “absorb education” and instead fished in the Shannon River and rolled up reeds to smoke on its banks. At fourteen, he bolted for Dublin for the same reason Jack Birchall did, hoping to be hired at a pub even though he feared alcohol because of the damage it had done to some family members—he didn’t take a drink himself until he was forty-five—but he was judged to be too small to lift the heavy kegs. “I’m the right size for a jockey,” he laughed. He had the same problem in England, where he lodged with an aunt in Birmingham and decided after ten days—and a taste of bangers and horsemeat—that the country wasn’t for him, so he returned to Longford, worked at his uncle’s dance hall, and opened a “picture show.”

  Always keen to improve his lot in life and seize an opportunity, Dessie tried his hand at various other businesses, too. He sold sweets from a van and drove the back roads like a madman, convinced he’d be dead before he turned thirty; distributed bread with a similar disregard for the cattle and chickens that crossed his path; owned an ice cream franchise; and purchased a main-street shop, where he tripled the sales in just six weeks and later sold it, giving him the seed money to move his family, nine children and counting, to the seaside suburb of Blackrock outside Dublin, where he took over the Three Ton pub. This would form the foundation of an empire as Dessie jumped from one pub to the next, each worth more than its predecessor in an era before capital gains taxes, until he picked up O’Donoghue’s, his crowning glory, in 1977, a “trophy pub” on Lower Baggot Street renowned as a venue for folk music.

  Everybody in Dublin knows O’Donoghue’s. Apart from the music, its trophy status derives from a choice location five minutes from Stephen’s Green, and to the healthy income it generates by catering to a mix of tourists and locals. The pub’s interior is nothing to brag about, though. At O’Donoghue’s, you feel as if you’ve stumbled into a farmer’s barn. It has a hayseed ruggedness that complements the fiddles and guitars. Fans from around the world honor it as the birthplace of the Dubliners, a notoriously hard-living folk group, who began by performing for drinks at the pub. The group’s first big hit in Britain was “Seven Drunken Nights,” and you wouldn’t be wrong to guess it carried an element of autobiography. In photos, the Dubliners often glower at the camera with baleful intent, all wearing long, scraggly, anarchic beards like itinerant preachers of the apocalypse.

  When Dessie assumed control, he realized in an instant why the pub had been struggling and was for sale. Musicians filtered in with their guitar, banjo, and fiddle cases and expected free booze, whether or not they were on the bill. He counted forty-three scroungers on his very first night. “It was like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with all those fellas coming in,” he told me, and he’d have been the unfortunate victim if he hadn’t changed the house policy. He kept O’Donoghue’s for about twelve years and built it back up, then moved a final time to Hynes (currently the Wellington) at Baggot Street Bridge, a pub notable for its fire-engine-red façade; the five grinning pints of stout and big clock (“It’s Guinness Time!”) on it; and the government workers and politicians from the Dail, or Parliament, nearby, who swapped views with Dessie over the critical issues.

  I asked Dessie what made for a good publican. “Seeing people, being fond of people,” he replied, without hesitation. In a sense, he took care of his flock. Barmen are called curates sometimes, because their duties are similar to a priest’s. They preside over the celebrations at christenings, weddings, and wakes, and some of them even doubled as undertakers in the old days. Dessie extended credit to trustworthy customers and doled out an occasional loan. He offered advice if it was solicited, and might even drive a regular home on a rainy night. It’s been said that a publican must be a democrat, an autocrat, an acrobat, and a doormat, and Dessie would agree. “Don’t do this job if you don’t like it,” he warned. “Because if you like it, it is your life. I miss it,
but I wouldn’t be able for it anymore.”

  As for traditional pubs, Dessie steered me toward a fine one in Roscommon, where a relative of the owner had lost a fortune betting on horses and greyhounds. He also mentioned Lamb Doyles in the Dublin Mountains, only a few miles from the city. Sheep ranchers used to drink there, he said, and he remembered a man who ordered a baby brandy every afternoon and applied a splash of it to the lips of any lamb in distress. Dessie wrote his phone number in my notebook and invited me on a tour of the pubs in Rosslare, County Wexford, where he and his wife had retired, and I might have accepted if he hadn’t spun all those tales about his madcap speeding and the near-collisions with animals. I thanked him, anyway, as he left to join Kevin and another son at the bar. “Ten pubs would have been better than ten kids,” he quipped, but only a fool would believe him.

  Chapter 3

  A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

  Jack Birchall’s Ranelagh House marked the end of the trail. I adopted it as my local, ready to play by the unwritten rules. “Traditional Lounge,” it said over the front door, a boast the pub mostly fulfilled. True, Birchall’s had recorded music, but it was never too loud, nor did it subject us to the likes of Britney Spears. The TV, a boxy old console, rested on a high ledge and only coughed itself to life for a major sporting event, or an important news program such as the annual report on the Irish budget, always a matter of concern because of a possible tax hike on the price of a pint. Though the two fires were electric, not turf, they kept us warm. The barmen were rock-steady and dedicated to Jack, who’d tutored them well and exercised a control over the place that was somehow both iron-fisted and as light as a feather.