Four Courts Dublin – Elward Photography
From Malcolm Burgess, publisher of Oxygen Books’ city-pick series, featuring some of the best writing on favourite cities, comes a new series for Spotted by Locals on the best city books written by local writers. This one is all about Dublin…
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Although he chose to leave Dublin for mainland Europe, James Joyce’s Ulysses focuses almost entirely on the city.
” He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the end of the city traffic. For instance, M ‘Auley’s down there: n.g. as position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattle market to the quays value would go up like a shot. “
William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969)
In this wonderful novel, the incorrigible photographer, Mrs Eckdorf, launches herself upon Dublin for the first time and quickly begins to learn something about the city and its inhabitants.
“In Dublin the rain fell heavily that morning. Turf in public parks became soft underfoot and the unpainted wood of hoardings changed colour and soon could absorb no more … Statues glistened: washed of their summer dust, gesturing fingers seemed less jaded in their stance, eyes stared out with a liveliness. Rain ran on Robert Emmet and Henry Grattan, on Thomas Davis, on O’Connell with his guardian angels … it polished to a shine the copper-greens of a tribute to Yeats, Moore and Burke, Wolf Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell, Goldsmith and ghostly Provost Salmon: dead men of Ireland were that morning invigorated.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Shelbourne (1951)
Novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote a celebration about Dublin’s most famous hotel, the Shelbourne.
“Around (the Shelbourne Hotel) everything else seems set back in time. The eighteenth-century spirit broods over this quarter – which still looks residential, though it no longer is. The lavishness of the trees in the Green itself creates, even in winter, an air of mystery. All round a graceful mellowness can be felt – in the brown-brick houses whose underlying tawniness glows at sunset, the classical doorways, the dark-watery polish of old glass. This Georgian part of Dublin is full of half-tones: sometimes by a trick of the shifting light, it looks strangely delicate, at once misty and clear-cut, all but transparent.”
Joseph O’Connor, The Secret World of the Irish Male (1994)
For novelist and journalist Joseph O’Connor, as for many, the ghost of James Joyce haunts the city …
“Freud said that the Irish were the only race who could not be psychoanalysed, because they were too much given to fantasy. And certainly, in Ireland, things which are not there are often more important than things which are. Joyce’s work reverberates with this knowledge. It is full of phantoms, apparitions, people who are not there any more. It is full of ghosts. Many of the most important characters in his work are dead. Parnell in The Portrait of the Artist, and Ivy Day In The Committee Room.’ Young Rudy Bloom and old Paddy Dignam in Ulysses. Poor Georgina Burns and Michael Fury in ‘The Dead.’”
Brendan Behan, Brendan Behan’s Island (1962)
Author Brendan Behan was one of Dublin’s most famous writers – and drinkers!
“Pubs are dull enough places at any time though not so dull in Ireland as they are in England. I suppose I know most of them in Dublin and I’d rather have them than the pubs in London. I remember being in the ‘Blue Lion’ in Parnell Street one day and the owner said to me: ‘You owe me ten shillings,’ he said ‘you broke a glass the last time you were here.’ ‘God bless us and save us,’ I said, ‘it must have been a very dear glass if it cost ten shillings. Tell us, was it a Waterford glass or something?’ I discovered in double-quick time that it wasn’t a glass that you’d drink out of he meant – it was a pane of glass and I’d stuck somebody’s head through it.”
Roddy Doyle, The Deportees (2008)
Booker-Prize winning novelist Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees describes another side of the city: the new Dubliners who have fled their homelands for a better life.
“I walk. Through Temple Bar. Along the river, past tourists and heroin addicts, strangely sitting together. Past the Halfpenny Bridge and O’Connell Bridge. Past the Custom House and the statues of the starving Irish people. I walk to the Point Depot. Across the bridge – the rain has stopped, the clouds are low – I walk past the toll booths, to Sandymount. No cars slow down, no car door slams behind me. I am alone.
I walk on the wet sand. I see men in the distance, digging holes in the sand. They dig for worms, I think. They look as if they stand on the sea. It is very beautiful here. The ocean, the low mountains, the wind.”
Flann OBrien, The Dalkey Archive (1964)
In Flann O’Brien’s hilarious novel, Mick has an engaging and surprising encounter in the very centre of Dublin.
“First he made his way to St Stephen’s Green and sought a seat there – easy enough so early in the morning. The Green is a railed-in square pleasure ground near the city centre, an extravagance of flower beds and fountains … Coming in through the green towards the hospital, Mick’s eye penetrated the tracery of shrubs and iron railings. Yes, (James) Joyce was standing there, and Mick paused to appraise him soberly … He was neat in person, clean, and had a walking stick. A dandy? No. The carriage of his head in the fuss of the traffic and passing people gave notice that his eyesight was uncertain. If a stranger were to try to classify Joyce socially, he would probably put him down as a scholarly type – a mathematician perhaps, or a tired senior civil servant, certainly not a writer, still less a great writer.”
Sean O’Casey, Pictures in the Hallway (1942)
In his novel-style autobiography the writer known as a playwright recreates the night when Charles Stewart Parnell, the champion of Irish Home Rule, died.
“Parnell! What had this man done that all the people were so upset about him, one way or another? The mention of his name always gave rise to a boo or a cheer. The Roman Catholics who wouldn’t let a word be said against him a while ago, now wouldn’t pick out words villainous enough to describe him; while the Protestants who were always ashamed of him, now found grace and dignity in the man the Roman Catholics had put beyond the pale … Well, they could all breathe in peace now that he was dead. His Ma said his Da often said the first chance the priests ever got, they’d down Parnell. And there he was now, dead among the dead men.”
Anne Enright, The Brat, The Portable Virgin (1991)
The Booker-Prize winner’s short story collection contains many evocations of the city in all its moods.
“Clare’s father makes his way from the Customs House to O’Beirne’s on the Quays, crosses the Liffey by means of a bridge, so sited as to add to the distance between the two buildings a length of nearly three hundred yards.
‘If I could swim now, I’d be right.’ He is a man much given to speaking aloud when company is absent, and to silence when the nicer of social obligations might urge him into speech. These contributions he does make are as counterpoint to the sounds of liquid consumption only, the sweetest of which is the sound of a pint drawing creamily at the bar, a music only those born with the gift, or those who can spend a minimum of three thousand hours acquiring the gift, can hear.”
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (1995)
Poet Patrick Kavanagh is one of Ireland’s greatest writers, here remembered by fellow poet Eavan Boland. Today you can sit beside him in sculpted but life-like form on a bench overlooking the canal mentioned.
“Gradually the city was catching my attention. Not far from my flat was the canal. At night the water glittered under street-lamps, the grass of the towpath took on a livid colour and the wooden bulk of the locks turned into hunches of shadow.
Patrick Kavanagh had come here in the mid-fifties. He had sat by the water within sight of the bridge and traffic. There was nothing particularly beautiful about the spot he had chosen. It was a noisy inch of city, shadowed by poplars and intruded on by a passerby. He had been a sick man then, disillusioned and estranged. And with his foot on that inch, he had written a visionary sonnet. I never passed the canal at that point without thinking of it. O commemorate me where there is water. “
Excerpts from all the books featured here are available in Oxygen Books’ city-pick Dublin (£8.99). Other titles in the series include New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice and Amsterdam.
www.oxygenbooks.co.uk
http://www.spottedbylocals.com/dublin/the-ten-best-books-on-dublin-written-by-locals/
