A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  In the end, I wrote off the Brazen Head as another museum piece, and wondered if a night at the Brazen Head in Brooklyn—or San Francisco, Omaha, or Mingo, West Virginia—would have been very different. Had Ireland already been packaged so completely that it could never be unwrapped? The thought was so unsettling I stopped for a whiskey at Davy Byrnes, another trophy and also Joyce’s “moral pub,” where the eponymous owner frowned on gambling. You won’t find anyone scrounging for tips now, though, nor would Joyce recognize the place, lavishly refurbished as an Art Deco jewel the year after he left Dublin for good. The pub is very smart and popular with foreigners, who can order Leopold Bloom’s lunch—a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy—for about fifteen dollars during the summer high season.

  Chapter 6

  THE GRAVEDIGGERS

  My night on the town, though not without its aspects of fun, taught me I couldn’t count on the trophy pubs of the city center for a taste of unspoiled tradition. As usual, the easy solution I’d hoped for—the Brazen Head as a Platonic ideal, that is—had evaporated and left me with the not-so-easy job of extending the search to areas of Dublin where the tourists seldom go. In essence, the trophies could be divided into two camps: those like Gogarty’s that deliver a packaged, formulaic Irish experience, and others such as McDaids and Davy Byrnes that don’t actively court visitors from abroad and yet are inundated, anyway, for literary, historical, or sentimental reasons. The high-profile pubs are just too adulterated by folks like me to qualify, plus they represent a costly investment that doesn’t leave much room for ragged edges.

  The Brazen Head belongs to John Hoyne and Tom Maguire, I learned from the Sunday Business Post, who bought it for about $8 million in 2004. Maguire has been in the game for twenty-two years and had sold about five pubs in the previous three, leapfrogging in the manner of Dessie Hynes, perhaps to fund the purchase of a trophy without borrowing heavily. The tactic is more common than ever now, and it’s carried out on a grander scale. While individuals or small partnerships still run most pubs, they often have a finger in many different pies. Maguire has an interest in two other pubs, for example, so his attention is necessarily divided in the way of Frank Smyth, but he’s not spread as thinly as the high roller publican Charlie Chawke, whose interests also include property development and a piece of the Sunderland UK football team.

  Chawke owns the Goat in Goatstown, County Dublin, where Gertie, a real goat later released into the mountains, once acted as a mascot. (Gertie’s kids were Dinny, Miley, and Biddy, and a statue of her stands at the pub, in Gogarty-esque splendor.) Chawke has the Dropping Well on the Dodder River, too, used as a hospital during the famine, and he paid about $29 million in 2005 for the Old Orchard in a suburb that’s being redeveloped. “It’s basically being seen as a building site,” he has said, and he’s turned down several substantial offers from developers. The planning board rejected his own scheme to construct 114 apartments, shops, office and light industrial units, and a medical center on the land. As part of a broad investment portfolio, such pubs are under pressure to produce.

  Louis Fitzgerald is an even heavier hitter. He has about twenty-four pubs across Dublin, Kildare, and Galway and an estimated worth of $170 million, all cultivated from the single acorn of a rundown joint on Townsend Street that he picked up for a song in 1970, financing the deal with a bank loan. When he acquired the Stag’s Head recently, a city center trophy that dates from 1760 and sports an antlered buck on a wall of the listed building it occupies, he dropped about $8.5 million at auction, although he’d just seen the pub for the first time. The Stag’s Head had a “no TV except for special events” policy, but it’s not rigidly enforced anymore, and Fitzgerald has opened a cellar bar for music on the weekends. The purchase was no apparent strain on his finances, because he shelled out about $54 million for the Arlington Hotel by O’Connell Bridge on the Liffey that same year. The Arlington’s bars and nightclub are catnip to believers in Fairytale Ireland, with their “hooleys,” or boozy parties, and a Riverdance-style floorshow.

  The Thomas Read Group comes at the business from a different, trendier angle, and has the young, the hip, and the fair as its target. Its gem is the elegant Bailey across from Davy Byrnes, the site of many famous quarrels and disastrous affairs, and the group also owns Ron Blacks (champagne bar, live jazz); Searsons on Upper Baggot Street, a magnet for yuppies; and the lushly renovated Lincolns Inn near the National Gallery. Bars based on a foreign theme also figure in the group’s holdings—Bodega with a Spanish twist, Pravda with a Russian one, and the glitzy Floridita, where you can savor a “modern cocktail” on the patio and smoke an “exclusive” Habanero cigar. Floridita makes the idea of a quiet pint sound positively quaint.

  Some Dubliners greet such cosmopolitan sophistication eagerly, and while there’s no denying that good craic can be had at the pubs of Chawke, Fitzgerald, and the Read Group, the owners can’t possibly exercise a Birchall-like quality control over them all. The personal touch may go begging. Each pub is especially vulnerable to the bottom line, too, and if one fails to perform, it could be divested in the way of Ranelagh’s Four Provinces or Quinlans in suburban Terenure, sold for $12.5 million to provide the ground for thirty-seven apartments and a parking lot. “There are publicans and there are businessmen,” Graham Canning of the Kestrel in Walkinstown once told the Post. “Publicans are not going to succeed.” The pub trade isn’t about drink and talk anymore, Canning felt. Instead you sell product, service, atmosphere, and entertainment at the right price—just as the IPC does.

  That amounts to a drastic change in attitude, because most pubs in Ireland have always been family-owned and operated. A decade ago, nine out of ten met this criterion, but it’s no longer the case in the city. Still, there are over ninety pubs in the Republic that have been in the same family for at least a hundred years, although only two or three are in County Dublin, among them John Kavanagh. It’s located next to a gate of Glasnevin Cemetery, wittily referred to as the city’s “dead center” and “Croak Park” after the GAA stadium nearby. Daniel O’Connell and his followers established Glasnevin as a burial ground for Catholics, but it accepts the deceased of any faith now and honors O’Connell with a 165-foot-high round tower by his tomb. For company, he has such luminaries as Michael Collins, Brendan Behan, Éamon de Valera, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, lonely and secluded in Ireland, who is interred in a plot reserved for Jesuits.

  I got wind of John Kavanagh by chance when I ducked into the Barge, a pub on the Grand Canal, to avoid being drenched in a sudden late-summer downpour. Swans glide by the Barge on occasion, but there’s no other aspect of romance. It’s a generic place without any maritime flavor, and its two TVs were blabbing the news to a bored bunch of patrons, one of whom might well have been a truly heroic pintman. He looked the part, at any rate, with rubicund cheeks, pouchy eyes, a potbelly, and a bemused expression that long hours on a barstool seem to produce. If a bomb had exploded inside the Barge, I doubt that he would have shifted a haunch. He was in a talkative mood, too, although not in a bellicose or intrusive way. Instead he acted light-hearted and guileless, as if by emptying out the contents of his brain he’d be doing everybody in the vicinity a world of good.

  When he heard my accent, he jumped on it and asked where in America I was from, secretly hoping, I soon realized, I’d say New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, the three cities he’d visited himself, so that the anecdotes he proceeded to tell anyway would have a superior degree of relevance. It’s a point of pride with the Irish to have been to the U.S., and they’re adept at separating their admiration for our culture from their revulsion over our foreign policy. The first anecdote concerned a cheesesteak sandwich and doesn’t bear repeating, but the second was better. He’d attended a Mets game with a cousin from Queens, paid an extortionate price for a beer, and caught a foul ball with his bare hands.

  “Mike Piazza,” he gloated.

  “Amazing.” How else to respond?

  He kept the
ball on a bookshelf at home, he confided. His cousin, not Piazza, had autographed it. He liked Ashtons pub in Clonskeagh down the road, he added, and he’d be heading for it right now if he didn’t have such a gorgeous pint before him. He spoke of it very lovingly, as though the pint had landed there by accident, a gift from the gods, and then wondered if the Barge was my local. I took this as an accusation, denied it vehemently, and outlined the nature of my quest, even alluding to The Quiet Man and Pat Cohan’s, and when I was done, he slapped the bar for emphasis and cried, “The Gravediggers!” the nickname for John Kavanagh. It was on the north side of the Liffey, he went on, and far from the tourist trail. The Kavanaghs, who were purists, hadn’t altered or remodeled it in over a century.

  I chose to check on the information, of course, unwilling to trust the word of a pintman who’d been drinking at the Barge, maybe for weeks, and saw that he hadn’t exaggerated. According to The Story of the Irish Pub, John Kavanagh occupies the former residence of John O’Neill, a hotelier, who began to serve alcohol in 1833, the year after Glasnevin’s inception, and earned a tidy bundle on grief-stricken mourners. When his daughter Suzanne married John Kavanagh two years later, O’Neill gave him the pub, and the couple begat twenty-five children, as the Bible has it, and launched a dynasty, including three sons who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War and were all commended for bravery at the Battle of Gettysburg. Eugene Kavanagh, the current publican, represented the sixth generation in charge.

  I set off for Kavanagh’s on a fine September afternoon, as Kerry prepared to tackle Cork in the GAA All-Ireland Final, or championship match, before a crowd of some eighty-two thousand at Croke Park. (Gaelic football combines elements of both soccer and rugby, and it’s as fast-paced as hurling, the oldest Irish game that’s played with a stick and a ball and dates back to 1272.) As a typical southsider, I was guilty of being provincial and only crossed the Liffey to see a movie on O’Connell Street or a play at the Abbey Theatre, so I looked forward to exploring the area. The north side is often described as “working class,” but that has always sounded inaccurate to me and even insulting. There are more apartment blocks, to be sure, and more enclaves of recent immigrants, but you could as easily speak of the grand houses on Griffith Avenue and the North Circular Road, or the choice seaside districts of Clontarf and Howth.

  The area reminded me of London’s Islington, also a northern borough, where I’d lived for a time. Islington’s population is a wild blend of races, colors, and creeds, left-leaning, progressive, and more vital because of it. The wealthy south side of Dublin can be staid and even stuffy, rather full of itself, so it lacks the vibrant polyglot street life of the north side—of Moore Street, say, where the Irish equivalent of Cockney vendors hawk their bargain fruit and vegetables from carts. The butchers still sell cheap cuts of meat, too, the kidney and tongue, oxtail and liver that are scarce in Ranelagh, and they’re ringed by Russian, Polish, and African groceries, and also by noodle shops that herald an upstart Chinatown.

  Everywhere I looked people were on the move. The sidewalks in front of all the pubs were already awash with football jerseys, the green-and-gold of Kerry and the red of Cork. On Gardiner Street, I skirted the fringe of Monto, the old brothel district, where the madams operated freely until 1925. The authorities were so lenient that they earned a citation for their tolerance in the Britannica of 1903. “Dublin furnishes an exception to the usual practice in the United Kingdom in that the city police permit ‘open houses’ that carried on more publicly than even in the south of Europe or Algeria,” the entry read, scarcely a feather in the cap of local government. About sixteen hundred prostitutes worked in Monto at its peak between 1860 and 1900, sometimes sold into what amounted to slavery by their hungry parents.

  The most humanely treated women were confined to “flash houses” for wealthy swells, who paid a fee to be admitted and had to pass muster with the bouncers, or “fancy men,” hired to keep out the undesirables. Flash houses could be graciously furnished, often with a piano in the parlor and the madam’s name inscribed on a fanlight above the hall door as an advertisement. Such madams bragged that their girls were disease-free, and they posted medical certificates to that effect—supplied by their doctor clients—over the beds. For the small tradesmen and the office drones, there was a second tier of brothels, clean and functional but not so well appointed, where women who’d become pregnant and fallen from grace at flash houses were sometimes employed. The kips were the lowest tier of all, situated in grungy tenements and staffed with streetwalkers past their prime, who were condemned to service filthy, clap-ridden soldiers and sailors.

  There were pubs, of course, such as Joe O’Reilly, Paddy Clare, and Jack Maher, where the women sat outside in warm weather to show off their wares. Becky Cooper, who ran a kip house, drank at the Leinster Arms across from it until she was barred, an insult she did not take lightly, protesting instead by breaking the pub’s windows with her shoes. In spite of her outbursts, Becky was always well dressed, wore long hair down to her shoulders, and had a reputation for being kind-hearted compared to May Oblong, as hard as coal, who’d slash you up with a bacon knife if you gave her any reason. May forced her girls to stand in the freezing rain to flirt and tease, and issued beatings to those who disobeyed her orders, covering them with bruises and giving them black eyes. Far more respected was Annie Mack, who entertained the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. Shy of publicity, he slipped into her brothel through secret tunnels beneath Montgomery Street.

  In Monto, James Joyce soaked up the material for what became the “Nighttown” chapter of Ulysses, and was such a regular visitor that his pal Gogarty chided him about it in a limerick.

  There is a young fellow named Joyce,

  Who possesses a sweet tenor voice.

  He goes down to the kips

  With a psalm on his lips,

  And biddeth the harlots rejoice.

  I arrived at my destination too early for a pint, so I strolled through Glasnevin Cemetery instead and found it very amiable for such a thought-provoking spot, handsomely landscaped with mature trees, even some California redwoods, and paths that wind through the necropolis and attract elderly cyclists perhaps shopping for a plot. Along the outer walls, there were some bleak guard towers that once kenneled a pack of vicious Cuban bloodhounds, who were let loose at night to scare off “resurrectionists,” or graverobbers. The robbers earned a pretty penny selling corpses to medical students and schools in the nineteenth century, often unearthing one by tying a rope around its neck and giving it a hard yank. The relatives of the departed, understandably upset, stood watch over a grave or resorted to a tamper-proof iron coffin.

  Considering John Kavanagh’s location, a few corpses must have landed on its doorstep over the years. Under the Coroners Act of 1846, any coroner had the right to dispatch a dead body to the closest pub, and the proprietor was obliged to store it, usually in a cool cellar with the kegs of beer, until an inquest could be held. The law stayed on the books until 1962 and encouraged some publicans to wear a second hat as undertakers. There are still pubs that advertise the service, such as Doyles in Urlingford, County Kilkenny, where I once eased a parched throat on a long trip to West Cork. The word “undertaker” was appended to a sign out front, but no cadavers were stored below, a blonde barmaid assured me, because the mortuary magic was performed in a parlor down the block.

  From Glasnevin I walked to sleepy Prospect Square, where John Kavanagh is the only business. The storefront, a deep shade of red, contrasts with the cold gray cement of O’Neill’s old house. The pub has two doors, and the first led me into a lounge bar so ordinary I could have been in Detroit, Atlanta, or pretty much anywhere else. I cursed the pintman at the Barge, who was obviously in cahoots with the author of The Story of the Irish Pub and had sent me on a wild-goose chase. The room’s only hint of tradition resided in its only customer, an antiquated fellow—probably a cemetery cyclist—who wore a suit, a tie, and a tweed cap. Irish gent
s of a certain age dress like that every day, as if their failure to do so would cause a sharp rupture in the fabric of civilization.

  A noise distracted me. It came from the other side of the wall, so I stepped out and went through the second door, where a parallel universe awaited me. Here, in fact, was the fabled Gravediggers, with its original bar still intact, untouched since the 1830s and crammed with animated drinkers, both men and women, who were divided into small knots by some panels that once had sectioned off a grocery counter. (The lounge was added in 1980, and it’s used mostly as a dining room.) Miracle of miracles, there was no TV and nobody complaining about its absence despite the All-Ireland Final, nor did I hear any recorded music, just the low babble of voices in discourse, as comforting as the Tolka River rippling through Glasnevin on its way to the Botanic Gardens.

  The single room was compact and convivial, its floor almost black with age. Dimly lit, it felt conspiratorial, although not in an oppressive sense. The Gravediggers isn’t exclusive. If a stranger hunts it down, he or she joins the conspiracy, too, and relishes the sweet satisfaction of discovering a semi-secret hideaway. I could imagine myself bragging about it, lording it over my friends. “Never been to the Gravediggers?” I’d ask. “What a pity!” Hard benches provide the seating, and the pints are much cheaper than in Ranelagh. For heat, the pub has a cast-iron fireplace, and for amusement an antique ring-toss game, but talk was clearly the drawing card. There was no bric-a-brac anywhere, either, phony or otherwise, only wood and more wood burnished and abraded over time. If you introduced a scrap of plastic, it might burst into flame.