A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Meanwhile, Cullen’s ministry tightened its hold on the country’s abstainers. Yielding to Éamon De Valera’s clarion call, “Ireland sober, Ireland free,” the troops fighting in World War I occasionally wore the pin, but it also happened that a few of their wives, left in the lurch, drank more heavily in their absence. To emphasize the dangers of overindulgence on women, Cullen once drew a cold-hearted portrait of a drunkard’s baby, almost certainly the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. “When born it is puny, fretful, possibly feeble-minded or an idiot,” he said, “and fortunately very often goes to swell the infant mortality rate.”

  For all the inveighing against the horrors of drink, the culture of pubs still thrived, and that baffled such reformers as George William Russell, or Æ, who complained in 1925 that the Irish had twice as many licensed premises as England and three times as many as Scotland. “Ballyhaunis, with a total population of a thousand, has a drink shop for every twenty of its inhabitants . . . How many of these towns can boast a bookshop, a gymnasium, a public swimming bath or a village hall? Throughout the greater part of rural Ireland such things are still looked on as ridiculous luxuries, and the mark of social progress is demonstrated by the opening of two public houses when one would suffice.”

  Indeed, most country towns had many more pubs per person than Dublin, and they were often the lair of lonely, bibulous bachelor farmers. In essence, it has been argued, the farmers hit the booze so hard both to relieve their sexual tension and as a substitute for any satisfactory emotional relationships. Patrick Kavanagh painted a devastating picture of one such bachelor in his epic poem “The Great Hunger,” which caused a furor in its day with its graphic descriptions and its allusion to masturbation.

  O he loved his mother

  Above all others.

  O he loved his ploughs

  And he loved his cows

  And his happiest dream

  Was to clean his arse

  With perennial grass

  On the bank of some summer stream;

  To smoke his pipe

  In a sheltered gripe

  In the middle of July—

  His face in a mist

  And two stones in his fist

  And an impotent worm on his thigh.

  In a curious reversal of roles, some bachelor groups frowned on abstainers and accused them of being morally suspect. Because they didn’t drink, the theory went, they couldn’t be trusted. An abstainer must be up to something, the farmers believed, and it probably took the shape of cruising for young girls, getting them pregnant, and undermining their character. Yet it was actually the bachelors who ran into trouble when they lost their inhibitions after several jars and a dram or two, consorted with the village prostitute, and contracted venereal diseases.

  The Pioneers peaked after World War II. Their Golden Jubilee celebration, held at Croke Park, the national stadium of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Dublin, attracted ninety thousand supporters in 1949, and throughout the 1950s the organization retained about a half million members around the world. As late as 1968, about half of Ireland’s adults claimed to be teetotalers, but the pendulum soon began to swing the other way, so that by 2000 only 13 percent of the population, mostly elderly women, wore the pin. There are still lots of church-affiliated societies for abstainers, though, and the abundance of licensed premises remains a controversial issue, but it’s an irrefutable fact that 85 percent of the Irish stop by a pub at least once a month, although not necessarily one that’s vested in tradition.

  Chapter 5

  MIRTH IS GOD’S MEDICINE

  When I finished my stint at the National Library, feeling well informed but also slightly daunted, aware of some obstacles I hadn’t known about before—manufactured nostalgia, the so-called authenticity of replication—I decided to check out the Brazen Head on Lower Bridge Street, advertised as the country’s oldest pub and possibly, if I got lucky, exactly the sort of unspoiled traditional spot I was seeking. My hopes were high due to Edna O’Brien, who portrayed its unaffected nature in Mother Ireland. “Behind the counter the proprietess sat drinking tea,” she wrote. “The place was full of old furniture, old chairs stacked on top of other chairs, a sideboard, lots of sacking, things. On the tiers of glass shelving were the usual drink bottles, the usual empty bottles, and a candelabra of artificial dust-thick flowers.”

  The artificial dust-thick flowers sounded good, but what if they were fake, part of a contrived environment such as the Irish Pub Company might create? I’d have to be on my toes. Even the Brazen Head’s claim to antiquity—established in 1198, says the sign outside—was disputed in some circles. As Andrew O’Gorman has pointed out, the pub received a license to trade from Charles II in 1668 and may have served travelers before then as a coaching inn, but the current building apparently dates from 1700–1710 and used to be a hotel. Moreover, the owners of Grace Neill’s in Don-aghadee, County Down, swear their pub is older, since it opened as the King’s Arms in 1611. Grace Neill, a former landlady, enjoyed her last drink at the bar in 1918 at the age of ninety-eight, and the place was renamed in her honor. Rumor has it that her ghost, judged to be benign, still haunts the premises.

  The Brazen Head does look medieval rather than Georgian, with its stone walls, battlements, and a cobbled courtyard for horses and carriages. It’s located in an ancient quarter of Dublin, too, near Christ Church Cathedral, founded by the Viking Sitric Silk-beard about 1028, and a half block from the Liffey, gray-green that afternoon and smelling of the sea. There’s a plaque outside that features, yet again, a likeness of James Joyce. It attests to the quality of the food—an award of some kind that casts Joyce, often penniless and hungry in his youth, as a gourmet authority, although he’d probably be more interested in a drink. When he finally came into some money in Paris after the success of Ulysses, he preferred white wine to red, “electricity” to “beefsteak.” His maternal grandfather ran the Eagle House, a pub in Terenure, so it’s no accident Finnegans Wake involves the dream life of a Chapelizod publican.

  A Polish couple paused to stare at Joyce, read the bold black sign—IRELAND’S OLDEST PUB, EST. 1198—and walked right in. Four women from Spain followed in their wake. They ducked into the courtyard, snapped some photos, and scurried away without so much as a sip of Guinness. The courtyard was a pleasant, open-air space, with ivy-covered walls and lanterns to be lit in the evening, where more tourists were enjoying a late lunch. The pub proper consisted of three rooms with very low ceilings and prominent beams, but there was no trace of O’Brien’s proprietress or artificial flowers. The rooms were fairly dark, cozy, and creaky with age, done up with historical photos and posters and a grandfather clock, but I also noticed an assortment of kitsch I hadn’t encountered anywhere else in Ireland.

  Tacked up behind one bar were some cloth badges from the Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Nutley, New Jersey, fire departments, the U.S. Border Patrol, and the California State University Police, among others. (Why grown men pack such badges to distribute on their trips abroad would be an intriguing topic for a post-doctoral dissertation.) Another wall was covered with inscribed dollar bills—“Wayne State Law, Paul and Chad,” “Go Buckeyes, Doug, Michael, and Ed,” ad infinitum. Presumably, the Brazen Head had become a magnet for American cops, firemen, and frat boys on the loose, and though I have no bias against any of those parties and had in fact been a wayward frat boy myself, their presence in such numbers, when added to the tourists I’d already observed, raised a question about just how genuine the pub could be.

  Until recently, a barman told me, you could rent one of the eight hotel rooms upstairs—no timber framing, just bricks-and-mortar—each with a fireplace and often reserved for lodgers. An English friend of mine had lodged there for a while after he graduated from Trinity, hoping to live cheaply and produce a novel, but he never wrote a word in five years because the bar down below kept seducing him away from his desk. In those days, you could ask for a drink from the hangman’s cup, a signal that you were f
amiliar with the Phoenix Park murders and how the Invincibles, a Fenian splinter group, had assassinated Lord Cavendish and his undersecretary in 1882. Surgical knives were the weapons of choice. The hangman of the not-so-invincibles had been a regular at the Brazen Head.

  One reason tourists flock to the pub, the barman continued, is the free nightly session of traditional music. I was a trifle suspicious, since authentic traditional sessions tend to be loosely assembled and spontaneous, and they gather momentum in the same way that the randomly distributed craic does. They start slowly and build toward a crescendo instead of adhering to a program set in advance. When I was still an innocent, I once fell into the trap of believing I was listening to the real thing at the Oliver St. John Gogarty in Temple Bar, the city’s liveliest, booziest, and most touristy district. Along with being the model for Buck Mulligan, Gogarty, who grew rich as a nose-and-throat surgeon, was an aviator, a senator, and the owner of Ireland’s first Rolls-Royce. Inside the pub, a bronze statue of the good doctor, also a poet and bon vi-vant, presides over the festivities.

  If traditional music in Ireland has a patron saint, though, it must be the extraordinary Francis O’Neill, born in West Cork in 1848. The son of a wealthy farmer, O’Neill played the flute and was so good at Greek, Latin, and math that his classmates called him “the professor.” He ran away from home at sixteen, off to Cork city with a pound in his pocket, but he couldn’t find a job and shipped out to England instead, later traveling through the Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea before his twenty-first birthday. In Boston, he signed on with the Minnehaha, a full-rigged ship, for a seven-month voyage to Japan, but he was marooned by a shipwreck on the journey home. He managed to scrape by on Baker Island in the South Pacific, living like Crusoe until he and his mates were rescued by the Zoe, a brig whose captain supervised a Polynesian crew.

  The Zoe was short on provisions, so the men subsisted on tea and biscuits and reached Honolulu terribly malnourished—except for O’Neill, who had played an Irish air on a borrowed flute and charmed the Polynesians. They rewarded him with rations of their poi and canned salmon. He was so healthy on arrival that he went directly to California instead of into the hospital, and tried his hand as a shepherd in the Sierra Nevada, only to succumb to the doldrums and ship out again. He taught school in Missouri for a year after that, then moved to Chicago and sailed the Great Lakes until they iced over in winter. He married another Irish émigré there, joined the police force in 1873, and was shot by a notorious burglar a month later. The bullet lodged too close to his spine to be extracted, so he took it with him to his grave—sixty-two years later.

  Mishaps aside, Chicago was a fine place for any Irishman to wind up. The city was about 13 percent Irish, with all thirty-two counties represented, including a large contingent from Cork, many of whom had been employed to dig the Illinois and Michigan canals, and they’d brought their love of traditional music to the New World. O’Neill climbed the ladder swiftly and served as chief superintendent of police from 1901 to 1905, but his duties as president of the Chicago Irish Music Club were more significant in the long run. He’d met a host of countrymen on the force, who were experts on such instruments as the fiddle, the flute, the tin whistle, and the uillean pipes, and they’d committed a huge store of tunes to memory.

  From “Big Pat” Mahoney, a patrolman from Clare, he learned some rare double jigs and hornpipes, for instance, and he wasn’t above recruiting talented musicians to walk a beat, as he did with James O’Neill, a former ironworker, whose command of Ulster favorites was unrivaled. Chief O’Neill couldn’t transcribe any music himself, so he relied on James as his arranger, and together they collected the more than eighteen hundred melodies that went into The Music of Ireland, published in 1903 and still a definitive resource for musicians, almost biblical in stature, that’s known affectionately as “The Book.” The Chief even invested in an Edison cylinder phonograph and made some of the earliest field recordings of Irish music ever done.

  The Book, a monumental effort, listed 625 airs; 75 Carolans (after Turlough Carolan, the harper and composer, who was blind from smallpox and so beloved that his wake lasted four days and drew more than a thousand mourners); 415 double jigs; 60 slip jigs; 380 reels; 25 hornpipes; 25 long dances; 50 marches; and so on. O’Neill’s fieldwork paid tribute to the immense variety of traditional music, a remarkable achievement because the tune is never the same twice. The players improvise, so the tune changes from musician to musician, as it does from region to region. George Petrie, another collector, rarely got two identical settings of an unpublished air. In some instances, Petrie recorded fifty notations of a single melody.

  The Irish gift for music can be traced back through time. Indeed, it was among the sole virtues of the natives that Giraldo de Barri, a Norman priest from Wales, admired when he visited the island in 1183. Otherwise he expressed dismay over the sloth and odd behavior of the “barbaric” clan. “I find among these people commendable diligence only on musical instruments, on which they are incomparably more skilled than any nation I have seen,” de Barri wrote. “Their style is not . . . deliberate and solemn but quick and lively; nevertheless the sound is smooth and pleasant.” He goes on to laud the subtle rhythmic motifs and profusely intricate polyphony, and also the sensuous way the harpers caress their strings.

  In his Irish Minstrels and Musicians, a companion piece to The Book, Chief O’Neill wrote, “Mirth is God’s medicine, and never was there an agency better qualified to administer it than the favorite of the muses.” That’s how I felt at the Oliver St. John Gogarty when the musicians, seated before a bank of microphones at a table by the door, started their gig. They were four gents of staunch middle age, who were equipped with a flute, a tin whistle, a bodhran, and a guitar. The guitar is a contemporary touch, and some classicists frown on it, although the bodhran, a shallow one-sided drum introduced in the 1960s, is a more recent addition. (The drummer wore a motorcycle T-shirt that said “Orange County Choppers,” as if to underscore the fact.) Bodhrans are often made with goat skin, but calf is used on occasion and also, if you heed the gossip, illegal greyhound. The word itself means “deafener.”

  You rap the bodhran with a two-headed stick, or the palm of a hand. It looks simple, but it isn’t if you want to capture any subtlety. The mastery of any traditional instrument comes very slowly and with great patience, because there’s so much to be learned and appropriated from other players. Folklore has it that it takes seven years of practice and seven of playing to make a piper. (The uillean pipes evolved from the ancient Irish war pipes early in the eighteenth century.) Sean Ennis, a renowned piper, has remarked that even after twenty-one years, he felt like a beginner. The flute also presents a new set of vagaries to the uninitiated, because the keys are seldom fingered. It’s the feathery breath that counts.

  The group at Gogarty’s didn’t engage in patter. They just leaped in and ran through each tune two or three times, although in the old days they might have done six, eight, or ten repetitions. The guitar sounded wrong to my ear, disjunctive against the flute and the bodhran, and the group’s air of weary professionalism, along with the mikes and the stack of CDs for sale, robbed the performance of any spontaneity, but the music still had a curious effect on me. Though I was undeniably in Ireland, I imagined that I wasn’t, only longing for it as Finian had longed for his mythical Glocca Morra in Finian’s Rainbow. This strange delusion put me into a sort of trance, and I wasn’t alone. I could see a dreamy look of yearning on the faces around me, too, some with their eyes closed, all of us lost in a mutually reinforced fantasy.

  In retrospect, it’s easy to see what had happened. The entire experience had been carefully staged and choreographed—worked over, refined, and tested on countless audiences before. Every critical element of the Irish Pub Concept’s formula for success was invoked, whether by accident or not, and when you coupled it to a longing for the changeless, enchanted land I still half-believed in at the time—
call it Fairytale Ireland—you had a potent combination. True, no real Dubliner would fall for it, but that was beside the point. Gogarty’s wasn’t for Dubliners. Here was the pub as theater, as entertainment, but also as caricature—sanitized and packaged—and though the fun it generated was harmless, it amounted to another form of replication.

  Traditional music, it’s been said, connects the past to the present and closes a circle, and that’s the source of its powerful hold on an audience. Even the group at Gogarty’s, who were far from pure and might better be described as folk musicians, could tap into the slipstream and squeeze out a little juice. There’s a magic to it, as Chief O’Neill demonstrated with the tale of Tullogh McSweeney, a dour piper from Donegal. Poor McSweeney had “no music in him” until he braved a trip to a hilltop fort, confronted the King of the Fairies, and dared him to swap tunes. The king blew him away, piping so brilliantly that dozens of leprechauns in red shoes began to dance. The spectacle drove overwrought McSweeney to his bed, but he recovered and had the music in his grasp forever after.

  My trance ended when the guitar player sang a song in English. It broke the group dynamic and shattered the mellow atmosphere, and I returned from Glocca Morra with a thud and woke up to where I actually was, in a pub full of tourists who were pounding down beer and shots of Irish whiskey. As an epicure travels to France for the food, a small percentage of Ireland’s visitors come for the drink, and they thrive on the anonymity and behave as they never would at home. Temple Bar is where they choose to do their acting-out, hopping from one pub to the next along Fleet Street from the Auld Dubliner to Fitzsimmons (“4 floors, 4 bars, & 4 DJs—All 4 U”) until they’re spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and so on.

  Like misery, insobriety loves company, so the tourist drunk is never alone in Temple Bar, but the scene after midnight, with its shoving matches, broken bottles, and pools of vomit, isn’t for everyone. What all this amounts to, really, is a weird perversion of the measured, convivial imbibing that goes on at a pub such as Birchall’s. In Hair of the Dog, Richard Stivers’s study of Irish drinking and its Irish-American counterpart, the author notes that the drunkard in Ireland is a figure to be pitied, someone who’s fallen from grace for any number of reasons but still deserves compassion. “Drink is the good man’s weakness,” as the proverb has it, but this approach undergoes an odd transformation abroad, in America and elsewhere, and the inebriate becomes the “happy drunk” of stage and screen, a stereotype the Irish find offensive.