At the Edge of Ireland (4 page)

We couldn't have found a more Irish city pub than this one, described in one revered guidebook to Ireland's taverns as “possibly the best pub in the world.” (Similar accolades celebrate the eight-hundred-year-old heritage of the nearby Brazen Head, long regarded as the hotbed nexus of nefarious plots to rid Ireland of the hated British.) And according to a sign outside on the side wall, even the great “
Ulysses
man” himself, James Augustine Joyce, wrote that “in the particular is contained the universal. Kehoe's with all its charms and beauties will surely live for generations.” And indeed it has, with its aged yellowed ambience, old wood paneling, etched glass, ancient worn floorboards, and a clientele that knows this is one of the best places in town to enjoy the best of times. Even to the point of offering impromptu hugs, which I received from one charmingly exuberant youngish lady who said she loved my white beard and “lovely tummy” and had always wanted to say a special thank-you to dear old Santa Claus for all his kindnesses. So—as we were leaving—she did just that, which halted our departure for a while longer as we chatted with her coterie of female friends (three more hugs here—I tell you, this Santa beard is a keeper for life! Not too sure about the tummy, though…) and managed to squeeze in another pint or two before we finally eased ourselves painlessly out the door as they all wished Anne and me a very good night—
oíche mhaith duit!

Despite the abrupt deluges, which were interspersed in schizoid Irish fashion by brilliant periods of bright, hot sun and blue skies, the exuberance and vitality of the crowds on Grafton Street washed us northward into the tiny squares and courts of the Dickensian Temple Bar Quarter and eventually to the River Liffey itself.

Writers often make this stream seem as imposing as London's Thames or Manhattan's East River, but in actuality it is an enticingly modest stream crossed by stubby bridges that provide easy intercourse between the twin urbanities on either side.

We strolled on past the great Dublin landmarks—Christ Church Cathedral, the stately composition of Dublin Castle, the National Gallery, and the architectural extravaganza of Trinity College, meeting and melding place of Ireland's greatest artists, writers, and statesmen. Finally we circled around to the great O'Connell Bridge. Here we crossed into O'Connell Street, that gloriously broad avenue that is featured so prominently in Dublin's turbulent history, a history that was now being flaunted from banners and poster and placards declaring the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the great Easter Rising of April 24, 1916—one of the most spectacular, if ill-organized, of Ireland's attempts to throw off the scourge of British imperialism.

And guess what day it was? It was April 12, 2006, and the Easter Rising celebrations had already begun and were an incessant generator of discussions, documentaries, and political diatribes for another three weeks!

And if that wasn't enough, it was also the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, that maverick poet, playwright, and novelist, once described by Nancy Cunard as having “the look of an Aztec eagle and a feeling of the spareness of the desert about him.” His
Waiting for Godot
and a score of other minimalist productions still confuse the uninitiated, delight his disciples, and create infinitely more pompous pontification and pseudo-intellectual blather than all his own strange pieces combined.

Samuel Beckett

Beckett left the city—“this nothing of a noplace”—without ever adequately explaining any of his work, except to hint that maybe his whole genre and oeuvre was a send-up of the very idea of genre and oeuvre—and pretty much of life and living in general.

And it was ironical that he and fellow Dubliner James Joyce became companions and strong coworkers in Paris during the late 1920s. There was Joyce, renowned with his
Ulysses
and his impenetrable
Finnegans Wake
for putting everything into his works (at almost seven hundred pages,
Ulysses
covers only a single day in Dublin), whereas Beckett took just about everything out. A review of
Waiting for Godot
, which was running at a city theater during our visit, read: “Each fresh viewing sheds new light—on nothing.”

And yet despite the differences in their works, they were very similar in other odd respects. As one biographer suggests, they were both: “agnostic, polyglot, metaphysical, apolitical, numerologists, superstitious, and humorous.”

So we had arrived in the midst of this zany carnival-like celebration of a key historic and political event, on that fateful day in April 1916, that was in truth an utter confusion in terms of organization, public interest, and comprehension. Then this was coupled with a second event that honored a writer who, according to one critic, epitomized “organized disorganization” and certainly generated enough public incomprehension about “nothing and nothingness” to guarantee his celebrity for a second centennial.

Swimming about for a couple of days in such dichotomous tides of “un-history” and nonsensical rhetorical contradictiveness, we felt we were touching something of the true wacky and audacious spirit of this compact and cohesive city (cohesion that, alas, collapses into utter confusion, of course, when you get behind the wheel of a car).

Joyce, who wrote the ultimate “Dublin novel” in his
Ulysses
, despite the fact that he lived most of his life out of the country, captures the rambunctious stream of glorious consciousness here. In fact, so richly descriptive of Dublin is the book, that Joyce claimed, if the city were ever destroyed, it could be re-created through the pages of his
Ulysses.

So—here are a few fragments of his homage to Dublin:

The gray warm evening descended upon the city…The streets swarmed with a gaily-colored crowd. Like illuminated pearls the lamps shone from the summits of the tall poles upon the living texture below, changing shape and hue unceasingly.

In a second vibrant vignette:

The air without is impregnated with rainbow moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under star-shiny coelum. God's air, the All Father's air, scintillant circumambiant cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.

And from another of his beloved books,
Dubliners:

It was noon when we reached the quays and we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping by the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin's commerce—the barges signal from afar away by their curls of wooly smoke. The brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay…Looking at the high masts I imagine the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance before my eyes…Then we walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street singers, who sang a come-all-you, about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me.

There's something utterly enticing about Joyce's rich ramblings that resonates here in the city. They are perfectly suited to one another—the prose and the zany realities. You want to go about reciting aloud his observations and celebrations, sharing them with the smiley-faced people on Grafton Street, watching their eyes light up when they see how his bouncing words and rhythms pick up and toss like bright baubles all the sensations, sounds, and sights that surround us. You want to shout out “D'ya see it?” “D'ya feel it?” “D'ya understand what he's painting in words?”

But instead of shouting we shuffled off instead to a church where, it being the Easter season, one of many services was in progress. Easter is one time in the year when even the most recalcitrant churchgoers finally bow to guilty consciences and bend a humble knee. And we were no exception on this particular occasion. It is also the one time, on Good Friday, when all the eight thousand or so pubs in Ireland are closed and there's a national panic over booze—or the lack of it.

We entered the church and, despite the excellence of the choir and the rapidity of the Communion that in an Anglican Church with five hundred congregants could have taken a good hour or more to get through, the long service inevitably developed a droney, droopy pace and mood. And I caught myself remembering the flash and flourish of Joyce's religious revivalist rhetoric in the turbulent middle section of
Ulysses
, and wondered how this would go down if read aloud here in the church instead of yet another dirgy psalm:

Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when He shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Elijah is coming! Washed by the blood of the Lamb. Come on, you wine-fizzling, gin-sizzling, booze-guzzling existences. Come on, you dog-gone, bull-necked, beetle-browed, hog-jowled, peanut-brained, weasely-eyed flower flushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extracts of infamy. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bum show. I put it to you that He's on the square and a corking fine proposition. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation and King Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaap!

It didn't happen, of course. Instead the congregation began one more murmured recitation of the Our Father, and I felt the yawns easing like sleepy cloudscapes over me. A little Joyce would certainly have juiced up and jollied the process along, but as this period is the most sacred of the Catholic calendar, maybe it was best to stick to the tried-and-true. After all, I convinced myself, we were going to need all the blessings we could engender during this new adventure of ours in a new country—and by the sound of it, most particularly on the racetrack roads where we'd been told many drivers were unlicensed, uninsured, and far too often, unsober.

James Joyce

And so back to Beckett, who, like Joyce, spent most of his life out of Ireland and was typically obscure when defining the settings for his works. This fragment possibly captures something of the spirit of Dublin that we sensed during our own brief introduction:

 

Apologies. As another editor emphasized to me eons ago, authors should not play games with their readers. But—this tease of blank space could be interpreted literally. I honestly couldn't find, in all of Beckett's works, a single reference that seemed to have any relevance to our reflections upon Dublin. Or any other recognizable place on our earth, for that matter. On the other hand, this space could be interpreted artistically as a recognition of the minimalist blankness, the emptiness, the near vacuum, the void that permeates almost all of his plays:
Acts-Without-Words, Roughs-for-Theatres, Roughs-for-Radios,
and even his forty-second contribution to Kenneth Tynan's
Oh! Calcutta!
, “written” in 1969 and titled simply
Breath
. This work consists of a curtain raised up with a faint light falling on “miscellaneous rubbish” scattered across the stage followed by “a faint brief cry,” an expiration of breath, and then silence, before the curtain drops again. Some claim it's actually been performed in just over twenty seconds as opposed to the forty seconds estimated by Beckett. Undoubtedly a relief to many in the audience.

What a bizarre nonworld the Nobel-Prized Beckett offered to a confused public—minimalistic tableaux of suspended heads with frantically chattering mouths; people in overgrown plant pots; characters immersed in sand; two Chaplinesque tramps waiting by a solitary tree for someone or something that never comes; a man feverishly winding and rewinding a recorded tape searching for…the truth, the meaning, or perhaps just the meaning
less
ness of man's existence. I find his work irritating, absurd, pretentious, arrogantly elusive (and illusive), ambiguous to the point of total nonsense—and utterly, gloriously enticing. Even if I can't call up the necessary rigorous attention his plays need, I still sense fundamental truths, humor, and deep eternal perceptions floating by, tantalizingly just out of reach. Or certainly
my
reach, and certainty, or the lack of it, seems to be the elusive essence of many of his works. As one of the
Waiting for Godot
characters exclaims: “To have lived is not enough for them…They have to talk about it…To be dead is not enough for them.”