Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
`Now, isn't it the Venice of the West?' asked the old, unshaven Dubliner leaning against the wall of the Baggot Street Bridge over the Grand Canal. I could feel him watching me out of the side of his eye to see whether I seemed green enough to swallow a 'begorrah' or two. 'Bigod,' I replied, bor- rowing an Irish word I had learned from Brendan Behan and looking down on purple-black water blotched with creamy foam, it looks more like the Guinness of the West to me.' A fairly meaningless riposte, but proof that I was paying my toll of admiration to the city as a visiting Englishman. He acknowledged it with a rattle of the lungs and the launching of a gob of spittle which spun and flared in a starlit arc like a meteor. What, I wondered, can an outsider say about Dublin •which will sound new, or even credible, to the inhabitants. I think your priests are wonderful? The Ban Gardai are a splendid body of women? It could only happen in Ireland?
According to a learned and loving article by
lain Hamilton on the Irish in the current issue of Encounter, some of the natives are getting restless over the kind of advice given by those amateur diagnosticians from England who nip over once a year to take the nation's pulse. He quotes a young Irish writer as complaining: Here's how you go. The censorship. The hierarchy. The illiberality of the National University. The ludicrosity of Fir and Mita for Men and Women. Telefon. Aerphort. And where are your Great Irish Writers of today, eh, playwrights, actors, artists, etcetera, and don't you think you could be doing with the English • back to give you a bit of stimulus? . . . But it's all very simple, you know. We happen to value family life and neighbourliness, and it's true that we tend in sexual morality towards the puritanical. So what? Why not? If that's the . way most of us want it, why should it worry you?
This `young writer' is not going to have the satisfaction of picking much of a quarrel with me. No national from a country where the magistrates of Swindon read the Decanteron for him, or where only Lord Cobbold stands be- tween him and the word 'fart' on stage, • can preach an indignant sermon on foreign censors. Their hierarchy at least identify themselves by a recognisable uniform across the Irish Channel and are prevented by law from passing their privileges and powers on to their children. Remarks on the illiberality of any academic in- stitution would sit oddly on the lips of one who was educated at Oxford. And nobody who has puzzled over the legend in British Railways lavatories, 'Gentlemen • Lift The •Seat' (is it the flat statement of a statistical conclusion?—or a terse order carrying the authority of a by-law?) will be much moved to joke about bureaucratic jargon.
'Irish, or Gaelic, or Erse, or whatever it is called, has continually proved itself beyond the reach of my tongue even when sober (an English word which carries the same pejorative under- tones' in' Dublin at Theatre-Festival time as 'drunk' would in Canterbury Close during Lent). Even the magic phrase 'Bond Failte,' which opens so' many doors and closes quite a few mouths, in the tourist season, comes out when I say it like `bored vulture' and has led to occasional unfortunate,' and regretted, misunderstandings. This is a pity because the Bord is a powerful and generous organisation described to me by one Irish journalist as 'a cross between the OGPU and Dr. Barnardo's,' which often gives the rather unnerving impression that it is willing, and able, to restage the 1916 Rising if necessary to gratify a visitor's whim.
Those who can pronounce it convincingly report the instant materialisation underfoot of IRA heroes, hundred-year-old folk singers, play- writing publicans, singing nuns, dancing police- men, certified leprechauns, or at least a man in a white coat with a tray of stout, depending on what is required to complete the holiday. The only thing BF cannot produce is a genuine Irish cheese which is not masquerading as Cork Caerphilly or Galway Gorgonzola. There is said to be a famous nunnery which does exactly this but it is so famous that no one knows where it is any more (`you must have passed within the smell of it on the way here,' they say), and I classify it as a comforting legend like the crock of gold.
On earlier visits I sometimes made play with my one term of the old language—'shee-gwee.' This I found on the wrapper of the soap in the Shelbourne Hotel where the makers announced --`,Shee-gwee is the Gaelic word for the "fairy wind," an apt description of this frag- rance.' It seemed to me an even apter description of other fragrances in the cultural air, such as
some displays of dance or evenings of poetry
on the fringes of the Theatre Festival, and I would announce 'it's just a load of old shee-
gwee' or 'a strong touch of the shee-gwees there.'
Where I would cross a rubber shillelagh with 'the young writer' is over his proud apology for the puritanism of the Irish. (I must curb a tem- peramental tendency here, no doubt inherited from my Irish ancestors, to generalise on a small number of instances—for the Bord Failte's arm is long and it would not have to stretch far to reach Mooney's Pub in Fleet Street.) Let's keep the randy, mongrel English out of this. I find it difficult to imagine the puritan Scots of Edin- burgh beamingly enjoying in their stuffy Festival Club the sight I saw last week in Dublin's equivalent—a handsome, flirtatious man with plucked eyebrows and powdered cheeks floun- cing through the drinking mob in a low-cut gold evening dress down to his nyloned ankles. ('A former barman of your House of Commons,' explained Seamus Kelly—as though that were an explanation—who writes in the Irish Times under the name of 'Quidnunc.' And another columnist bobbed in to explain Kelly's pseudonym as a sporting term meaning 'Let's see your pound now.') But I realise I am already catching the Irish disease of the endlessly retreating anecdote, a conversational Paul Jones which sends you round to St. Patrick and back before you get to a punch-line.
In last year's Dublin 'Afterthought,' I men- tioned the surprise I experienced at seeing so many young things glued belly to belly in the public osmosis of a silent tango under the blaring lights. This year the atmosphere of a pagan Puck Fair was even soupier, almost as though Sean O'Casey's Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy were pre- siding as MC over a maypole courtship of grass widows, retired celibates, ageing battleaxes and not-so-young Lochinvars.
For this fortnight anyway Dublin begins to wear the mask of a Mardi Gras city—the New Orleans of the North—with pretty girls and witty men circling each other in the ring; The young writer in his cottage on the road to the mountains may regard this as just another English libel. But the comparison is not especially flattering to those of us in Cathleen ni Houlihan's Other Island. We seem grey and formal and dull and dry beside a new Irish generation which is always optimistic about tonight, and tomorrow night, even if not about next year and the year after. They are like a Chelsea Set with brains, a Soho Gang after a bath. And as for their 'playwrights, actors, artists, etcetera,' they are gathering once more for their traditional task of exporting blood-transfusions into English veins. Between Sheridan and Wilde (two Irish authors, needless to • say) the London theatre suffered a long dark night of bad first-nights.
The instincts are no longer cut off with tourniquets in Ireland. A playwright like Eugene McCabe in his King of the Castle (see last week's Sunday Telegraph) also registers the earth tremors as copulation begins to thrive. He succeeded in making a theatre blush by the sight of a man merely holding up a hen's egg. There are no Puritans without Cavaliers. Ireland may be gradually opening up a new Restoration age. Depressing as this may be for moralists, it is an exciting prospect for playgoers. No Irishman or woman (let alone the Bord Failte) will believe what I say. But it takes an English fly-by-day and talk-by-night on a wing-dipping visit to see the picture 'of Dublin that Dubliners refuse to admit to themselves. Down with shee-gwee, up the Republic!
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