BOOKS

The Buck

By FRANK O'CONNOR

MYrecollection of Oliver Gogarty is of a man who looked rather like a cat—a cat that smiled and smiled and was a villain. One of his friends said of him that 'he had the kindest heart` and the dirtiest tongue in Ireland.' The kindness I have good reason to remember be- cause I went to him once when I had been ordered into hospital for an operation. He was extraordinarily gentle and sympathetic. Then, as he examined me, he began to purr. 'There are doctors in this town who don't know the difference between cancer and a sore toe. There's nothing wrong with you except the Irish disease —Indian tea. What you need is Lapsang Soochong —I think that's what it's called. I've forgotten all my Chinese.' His sense of humour was peculiar, and one writer resented it when he called at the nursing home to see his sick wife and was presented with her tonsils on a plate. My last recollection of him was of his vicious behaviour at a New York dinner party to a young novelist I admired. After that, I felt I didn't want to see him again.

And yet I knew I was being unfair. The truest remark Mr. Ulick O'Connor (no relation!) quotes in his biography of Gogarty* is Lord Glenavy's —whichever Lord Glenavy he means: 'He would choke if he couldn't get it' out.' And Augustus • John explained why he had thrown a bowl of nuts in Gogarty's face in a Galway hotel: 'He had become pathological after three hours non- stop.'

He was an intensely competitive man and his background was that of a ruthlessly competitive society. He had to be a success and he was. He was a fine athlete, a good airman, a famous surgeon, a poet and a wit. If he had been born in the eighteenth century, 'stately plump Buck Mulligan' would have shot himself to the head of his profession. He flew an aeroplane as he would have fought a duel.

But for the Revolution he was certain of a knighthood, and in his usual way he made fun of it. Whether he ever really did all the things he said he did, I doubt, but it was certainly in character for him to write to Lloyd's, asking for insurance against a knighthood. Whether he accepted it or not, he explained pathetically, it would halve his income. If he did accept it, his Nationalist patients would desert him; if he didn't, his Loyalist patients would.

I admired Gogarty, but I did not feel so com- fortable with him as I did with Yeats and Russell, who talked uncompetitively. They were about the only Dubliners who did. Pubs and drawing-rooms of the period gave a slow-witted man like myself the impression of having strayed into a rehearsal of Love's Labour's Lost. According to Mr. O'Connor, James Stephens oace described Dublin as 'a nose-red city half * OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY. By Ulick O'Connor. (Cape, 36s.) as old as Time,' and Gogarty capped it with 'Oa sont les nez d'antan?' I could not function at all on that high level of intensity. Yeats was really fond of Gogarty, but it was not because of the wit. It was because he was himself a shy, introverted man who needed outrageous extroverts like Gogarty and F. R. Higgins to stalk in and talk bawdy to him.

Once I met him in a state of mingled amuse- ment and rage, coming from Gogarty's, and he exploded on me: 'That damn fellow talks nonsense for two whole hours, and then says one sentence that is unforgettable. This after- noon he said, "The Irish people—their backs still aching for the lash." ' Later, complaining that he could get no business done at Aeademy meetings, he muttered that there were three drunkards on the Council—`two of whom make themselves drunk, and a third who came drunk from his mother's womb.' Naturally, the third was Gogarty.

Mr. O'Connor tells us that Gogarty 'disliked snobbery,' though his index might suggest the contrary. My own feeling is that if he couldn't have dropped names like `Winston,' Arthue (Griffith, that is) and 'poor Collins' he would have choked. He had to know the very best people, on both sides of the Revolution. On the surface his life was English Edwardian— morning suits and Latin quantities—but he seemed incapable of enjoying them for their own sweet sakes. Yeats, of course, was a great friend and a great poet, but 'If only Mahaffey were alive! He sent the quantities marked to Yeats when it was necessary for him to take the oath in Latin before permission could be obtained to read in T.C.D. library. "My ear is warther sensitive."' So is mine, and I detect an accent that is neither English nor classical.

His poetry, too, is Edwardian, and it is a type of poetry I still enjoy. That may be why I like his, though now, having read so much of it in Mr. O'Connor's book, I am beginning to have doubts. Once, he tried to get me to accom- pany him to Yeats with a characteristic joke— `Yeats is writing a few little lyrics for me, and I must see how he's getting on,' but Yeats, I begin to suspect, did not get on too well. Even a beautiful poem like 'Non Dolet' has curious amateurish touches.

Our friends go with us as we go Down the long path where Beauty wends, Where all we love forgathers, so Why should we fear to join our friends?

It is still moving because it is a man's voice, speaking of the things he believes, but 'wends' suggests Mahaffey's lisp, and the third line is like a good-looking girl with her arm in a sling. It is never for more than a couple of lines that Gogarty is technically competent, and in the political poems and parodies, where irritability and malice come on top, he is usually grossly clumsy. What did the killer of Michael Collins do to deserve lines like:

Down the memorial ages, he shall have The fame of Judas who McMurrough clad... ?

Judas clad' Maturrough? When and in what? Or is 'who' a misprint for 'which'? The comic poem to Joyce on page 73 is greatly improved if in the fifth line you read 'those' instead of `thou,' which is not English and which does not rhyme, but nothing one could do would make the Collins lines less uncomfortable.

An untidy man, and Mr. O'Connor's biography is an untidy book. The English is all over the place, and if the reader doesn't trip over the grammar, he is liable to slide on some extra- ordinary critical judgment, such as TEdipus in fact was to be Yeats's finest dramatic work.' Mr. O'Connor even writes about the Revolution: `Now, in the next few years, each public hang- ing or death by hunger strike of a patriot was to strengthen the movement.' Has he forgotten which century he is writing of or does he really believe the British authorities indulged in public executions?

There are sides of Gogarty's character which the reader cannot even guess at after finishing the book. For instance, there is an admirable ac- count of the libel action brought by Henry Morris Sinclair against Gogarty, which upset him par- ticularly because another writer, Samuel Beckett, appeared as a witness for the plaintiff. I was at a dinner with Gogarty on the evening that judg- ment was given against him and I admired Gogarty's courage and high spirits. But there is no reference at all that I can find tb Gogarty's, own libel action against a young poet, which struck me as being completely baseless, and, as between an older and a younger poet of dis- tinction, malicious and indefensible.

Moreover, the last eighteen years in America are hardly covered at all. Gogarty gave several reasons for his self-imposed exile, such as. his refusal to pay taxes to a Fianna Fail Govern- ment and his hatred of de Valera, none of which I found convincing. Mr. O'Connor implies that he was exceedingly well-off there, and indeed, if Gogarty flew his own private plane as we are told he did, he must have been; but from the way he talked to me about prizes, fees, agents and publishers, I got the definite impres- sion that he was hard-up and very lonely. The most moving anecdote of his American years is that typical explosion when someone put a nickel in the juke-bOx during one of his stories, which by that time had turned into serials: `0 dear God in heaven, that I should find myself thousands of miles from home, at the mercy of every retarded son of a bitch, who has a nickel to drop in that bloody illuminated coal-scuttle.' That is the Gogarty I prefer to remember from my New York years, and now I only wish had tried to be a little kinder to him.

The virtue' of the book, like the virtue of its subject, is gusto. Gogarty was sometimes vulgar, malicious and wildly wrongheaded—anyone who enthused about the Christian Brothers as edu- cationists as he did clearly had a slate loose— but he was defiantly his own man. He hated Mr. de Valera and Erskine Childers with a passionate hatred, and his biographer follows him quite fearlessly in his rages, even to spinning fairy-tales about poor Erskine Childers, who did none of the things for which he is denounced; and in the namby-pamby atmosphere of modern Ireland this calls for blessings rather than blame.

Whatever 'Gogarty's faults may have been, he was a vastly entertaining figure, and Mr. O'Connor has enjoyed him and so manages to communicate his enjoyment to us.