A Life of Anecdotes
It Isn't This Time of Year at All. By Oliver St. John Gogarty. (Mao. Gibbon & Kee. 15s.) DR. GOGARTY is the last of the great stage Irish. His plump statelt manners, now silvery, as he glides into a room—no longer that 0/ George Moore or Professor Mahaffy, but of lion-hunters between New York and the Florida Keys—belong to 1904. He is a splendid humorous, infinite talker, and when he jibes you at the tea-table with Yeats's beautiful early line: The butter's at your elbow, Father Hart, or as he intones a forgotten lyric in a high mournful chant, yon 1 tfafeel with curious excitement you are listening to another century. Dr. Gogarty has not tried to grow into the present. He is not concerned with our world. He thinks we are all poisoned by Freud, and turned into raving schizophrenes by Joyce. Of course, he ,laiew Joyce, but that was before the fellow went mad and started i write literature from the stream of consciousness. Dr. Gogarty as never needed to regain the past: it has always existed in a life anecdotes. His books are a substitute for his conversation, but they lack" his ty1e. One of the many funny, things about them is they are so ' s Dr. Gogarty talks you'll get a good whiff of his anecdotal genius. dly written. It all adds to the comedy. The latest is supposed be an autobiography, and follows at least three other auto- lographies, starting from 'As I was going down Sackville Street.' ou have to read them all, and then you'll have your head full of ring incidents jumbled into a life that is deliberately mock-heroic. i e are given one date in the book, when he went to Oxford in 1904, d drank the sconce at Worcester. Otherwise, the writing darts and out of a sort of dateless present, and if you can read as fast
So let's abandon ourselves to the fun. And here comes Gogarty `0.--hurrah!---on his bicycle, foul language streaming from his nostrils,
d he's winning the Junior Championship of Ireland, to be suspended I. rom the track for vulgarity. And the same day a neat little notice ! TCD announces the awarcl of the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for
glish Verse to Oliver St. John Gogarty, medical student. That'll
o for Weldon's pawn-shop, thinks a friend. Turn on to the Martello !Tower at Sandycove. They see Mr. J. B. Yeats approaching. *II "It is your turn," Joyce whispered. "For what?" I asked. "To touch".' Joyce was the most damned soul I ever met." He is planning some sort of novel that will show us all up and the country as well: all will be fatuous except James Joyce.' There is the little phrase that sums up a relationship.
One forms the impression that Gogarty is a character in a story, who needs a great comic writer to bring him off.. Here he wanders about a little aimlessly between the fine dramatic situations. He requires George Moore whistling"ffir a policeman to come to arrest his cook during dinner, or the newly-married Yeatses playing ghosts at Renvyle, or a gun in his kidney and a headline in tomorrow's papers, before he comes to life. He plays the buffoon companion. Moore says in a train, ' I will give ten pounds to see how that sunset Will imitate Hone.' Gogarty comments, ' I tried to save him five by pulling the communication cord.' — You must accept the Governor-Generalship. I 'won't have Healy, a man who betrayed , Parnell." So spoke Griffith to me.' Griffith must have had a grand ense of humour. However, Gogarty got no further than the ath, and escaping from the firing-squad down the River Liffey—a enate, and immortalised his office by being kidnapped from his 'thrilling story here beautifully told.
Many Irish people lack a sense of when to stop being funny. Presumably Dr. Gogarty, when he removed Yeats's tonsils, .knew Where to halt. Now his humour has a sad and sour purpose. He looks back to the tall houses and large drawing-rooms, the high mbitions and the golden political faith of his youth with disappoint- ment and frustration. The civilisation of Ireland which he cherished was wrecked in the tivil war. He blames de Valera. Since then, there has only been the increase of peasant prosperity and Catholic_ peasant power. Dr. Gogarty in his eighteenth-century house, and his country mansion which was burned by the rascals of his plum- blue mountain, and Yeats with his Burke-style oratory on divorce in a Senate of bankers and business-men, had no power in the new state of Ireland. Hence Dr. Gogarty's life appears to cease in the 1920's with the failure of his hopes. It is not just a failure of the big-house or gentleman-concept in the modern world, but a failure of an Ireland become narrow and insular, prudish and depopulated, isolated and blind. Such a country is suffocating to writers, and so they stream across to London or Boston, to Paris and Rome. Dr. Gogarty's book is a sad and laughable reminder of the wing-beats of a people always in flight. Long may he continue to fly and to scoff!
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