by Bill Barich
If drink is truly the good man’s weakness, McDaids on Harry Street must have been a paragon of virtue during its heyday in the postwar 1940s as the pub of choice for Dublin’s self-destructive literary stars. I stopped there one afternoon on my way to the Traditional Music Archive, where I planned to bone up before attending a session at the Brazen Head. The writer Anthony Cronin has called the ambience “church-like or tomb-like, according to mood,” and I felt a quiet sense of ceremony, along with a flutter of ghosts, as I nursed a pint in the clerestory light flowing through four arched windows of stained glass. On the walls were portraits of Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Joyce, naturally, but none of Brian O’Nolan, who once insulted the barmen by dipping a pocket hydrometer into his whiskey to be sure it hadn’t been diluted.
In the guise of Flann O’Brien, O’Nolan achieved a modest fame around Dublin with At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, but it only sold about 250 copies in its first edition, a fact he bemoaned. (Graham Greene said it resembled Tristam Shandy composed by a fan of Groucho Marx.) A few years after its publication in 1939, he started writing “Cruikskeen Lawn,” or “the little brimming jug,” for the Irish Times, a column that could be witty, sarcastic, sardonic, and nonsensical by turns. “It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale,” he wrote, in a representative sample. “I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive.” Early in his career, he knocked out the column in batches on Sundays and enlisted a pal to do the typing if he was too tipsy, then made the round of pubs during the week.
O’Nolan worked as a civil servant, but he seems to have had considerable freedom to roam. The map of his daily route was well known. He might begin with an eye-opener at the Pearl before he moved over to the Scotch House by eleven or so each morning, later shifting to the bar at the Dolphin Hotel, where you could still get a good steak in wartime. He usually made a last stop at O’Rourke’s in Blackrock where he lived, and often further delayed his return home with a game of cards and a bottle at a neighbor’s house. (Though O’Nolan praised porter in “The Workmans Friend,” he was devoted to his “ball o’malt.”) Inasmuch as he greeted the day with a “curer” or three, it’s astonishing he wrote anything at all, but the drink and the grind of the column ultimately dulled his talent and sapped his ambition. “A great future lay behind him,” Hugh Kenner joked.
As O’Nolan’s alcoholism progressed, so did his bedtime. Toward the end, his cronies carted him back to Blackrock and tucked him under the covers by the late afternoon. In spite of his notoriety as a columnist, he was afflicted with the familiar writerly complaint that his books had failed to generate the visibility and the money he craved and perhaps thought he deserved. (“I declare to God if I hear the word ‘Joyce’ again,” he griped once, “I will surely froth at the gob!”) Literary success on the grand scale did tap O’Nolan at last, partly through a postmodern affection for his quirky books, and partly because the creator of Lost, the hit television series, included a copy of The Third Policeman in a key scene. The novel soared onto Amazon’s bestseller list, but the author was already in his grave, an irony he might have appreciated.
O’Nolan joined the gang at McDaids when it became a literary pub. The action focused on The Bell, a monthly journal with an office around the corner. Almost every afternoon, the contributors and the hangers-on showed up to shoot the bull, but no pub had enough room for so many sizable egos. Petty feuds of an irresolvable and sometimes unexplainable kind were bound to occur, such as the ongoing spat between O’Nolan and Kavanagh, who recognized each other’s gifts and yet avoided any direct contact except to backbite. No doubt O’Nolan envied Kavanagh, who had a publisher in London and a reputation abroad, so he put down his rival as a country bumpkin, while Kavanagh sniffed at O’Nolan’s inability to write a novel with the epic scope of Moby-Dick, a classic he admired.
In fact, Kavanagh was anything but a hick. Cronin cites him as McDaids’ resident genius, possessed of a finely tuned sensibility that he kept hidden beneath a gruff exterior. Originally a farmer from County Monahan, he tried to support himself as a freelancer in Dublin while he wrote his poetry, and it sentenced him to a lifetime of poverty. His most memorable stint was as a cranky movie reviewer, who seldom sat through an entire film and expressed his dislike for Walt Disney. He survived instead on racetrack gambling, contributions from his brother Peter and a sympathetic clergyman, and loans from the Gnocchis, newsboys on Grafton Street. Kavanagh drank only stout initially, but he switched to whiskey as his frustrations mounted and his health declined, and it became his crutch, even his reason for being. The same was true of O’Nolan, who insisted that the choice lay between whiskey and boredom.
Kavanagh seemed never to tire of crossing swords with his adversary, but he often ran from the pub in disgust at the sight of Brendan Behan. He castigated Behan, some twenty years his junior, as a “phony and a blackguard,” and he resented, as only a starving poet could, Behan’s triumph as an international man of letters, honored for his plays and his memoirs and rich enough never to beg for another drink. On the other hand, Cronin found Behan wonderful company until he surrendered to the adulation, the liquor, and his private demons. Bisexual, with a taste for teenage boys and a long-suffering wife in the bargain, Behan bore all the hallmarks of a tortured soul, and he outdid the others in his undying affection for pubs.
Cronin tells of a Christmas Eve when he and Behan left McDaids and passed some carolers at Stephen’s Green, who held up placards in support of a Christian charity. Behan despised the church and destroyed a placard in a fit of drunken pique, shouting, “Chairman Mao will soon put a stop to your fucking gallop, ye creepin’ Jesus ye!” The carolers were too stunned to react, but four men from the crowd chased Behan, who scrambled over the the Green’s spear-tipped iron fence to elude them. Only when the coast appeared to be clear did he emerge from the bushes, but his pursuers caught him and a brief scuffle ensued, after which Behan and Cronin bolted for the safety of the Russell Hotel’s lobby. When the police arrived, Behan protested that he was the victim of some murderous country people, who might belong to a “rural-based organization with fascist tendencies.”
Behan’s brother Brian has recalled the time when Brendan rode a bus to Kilcoole to surprise J. P. Donleavy, the American-born author of The Ginger Man and another McDaids regular, with a visit. (There are four Ginger Man pubs in Texas and one in New York, each with the author’s approval.) Nobody was at home, so Brendan climbed through a window and twiddled his thumbs until a desperate thirst overcame him. In a driving rain, he hiked to a pub about a mile away, but the hike left his shoes soaked, so he went back to Donleavy’s to replace them. He found twenty-one pairs in a closet, stuffed them into a suitcase, and set off again, donning dry shoes as necessary and tossing the wet ones into a field.
“You’ll have no bother finding them,” he told his friend later. “Your first pair is just there over the fence and the rest of them every fifty yards or so up to the pub.”
The Behan stories go on and on. When he was hungover, he blamed it on a bad pint—his twenty-seventh. Asked to reimburse a publican for a glass he broke, he balked at the ten-shilling price tag and cried, “Bless us and save us! Was it Waterford crystal?” No, the publican meant a pane of glass Behan had smashed during a brawl. Rather than buy a whole bottle of whiskey at closing time, afraid he’d forget where he’d stashed it the next morning, he once invested in a dozen expensive miniatures instead and planted two by the bed, two on a table, and so on. Behan often repeated an anecdote about an old man who drank two pints of poteen a day until he was sick, only to embark on the same routine as soon as he had recuperated. “When I’ve been off it for a fortnight,” the old man explained, “I feel so good, I want to celebrate.”
The anecdote could be applied to Behan himself. Predictably, his life ground to a crushing halt. The stories, once comic, turned tragic when he developed diabetes and failed in his many attempts to sober up. Racked with self-dou
bt, he became a cartoon character, red-faced and theatrically boisterous, yet he clung to his drinker’s persona until the end, talking his books into a tape recorder rather than writing them. He died at forty-one—much earlier than O’Nolan (fifty-five) or Kavanagh (sixty-three), who lost a lung to cancer—but the public loved him despite his flaws, and he received the most fulsome Dublin funeral since the death of Michael Collins, the revolutionary and statesman. A statue at Mountjoy Prison, where his play The Quare Fellow is set, commemorates him, as does the Brendan Behan Pub in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, winner of the Guinness Perfect Pint Award in 1996.
McDaids isn’t a literary pub anymore, but it looks much as it did during Behan’s era. To reach the gents, you have to climb two perilous flights of stairs covered with a mottled blue carpet that might have been laid when the place opened in 1873. I pictured how animated it must have been with the Bell crowd around, but all I had for company was a trio of golfers from Atlanta, who’d just finished a round at the K Club in Kildere and were buying logo T-shirts before they returned to their rooms at the Westbury Hotel nearby. As enjoyable as McDaids can be, it’s a tenderly curated museum piece now, not the hub of a distinct and vital community, and that’s a fate it shares with so many of the trophy pubs in the city center, as I was beginning to understand.
The Traditional Music Archive on Merrion Square is just a short walk from McDaids. Here in Georgian splendor Yeats lived on the square for a time, as did Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, who invested in his son’s brewery in Cork and, as a Catholic, reaped the benefits of the backlash against Black Protestant Porter. At the archive, I hoped to gain an insight into what constituted real traditional music, so I turned to Ciaran Carson, the poet and musician, whose Irish Traditional Music is an indispensable guide. The book’s appendix lists ten recommended CDs, and I found them all with the help of a librarian, who also suggested a DVD compilation of old TV tapes before she installed me in front of a computer.
I watched the DVD first, glued to a performance by some men posing as “wrenboys.” They were participating in an ancient ritual that still takes place in some towns on St. Stephen’s Day, or December 26. They wore brightly colored costumes in orange, magenta, and puce, each apparently assembled from a rag bag, and their leader held a cage made of twigs atop which rested a wren, or a “wran” in Hiberno-English. Perhaps it had been hunted down for the ritual, but it looked stuffed to me, like a prop stored in a drawer from Christmas to Christmas. With a TV camera in tow, the boys marched into a house, where the leader launched an appeal for a donation:
The wran, the wran, the king of all birds
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze
Although he was little his family was great
So rise up, landlady, and give us a trate.
Up with the kettle and down with the pan
And give us a penny to bury the wran.
Next, a chubby wrenboy with a double chin stepped forward and squeezed the living daylights out of an accordion, stomping away until a subordinate jumped into the fray and added to the racket by banging on a bodhran.
The wrenboys were small beer, as it were, in contrast to some mummers from the Dublin suburb of Swords. The mummers wreak their merry havoc just after the holidays at the end of January, on St. Brigid’s Eve, and they also dress in costume, although the fellows on my DVD hadn’t gone to any great lengths to disguise themselves, merely sticking on fake beards, mustaches, and sideburns of the dime-store variety. They seemed determined to flaunt their reckless lack of ingenuity. They went from door to door, too, yelling “Mummers!” and putting on a disjointed playlet that again involved a plea for money. Each mummer represented a different character—the Prince, Buck Sweep, the Doctor, Devil a Doubt—and had a rhyme to speak and a specific role in the pageant. Some carried musical instruments, and they were noisier than the wrenboys.
After the mummers, I dived into the pile of CDs. Less than three bars into a Tommy Potts fiddle tune, I heard how moving, energetic, and energizing real traditional music can be. Potts, a Dubliner, broke the rules and reinvented the fiddle, borrowing riffs from jazz and classical composers, and his peers admired him as an innovative virtuouso. Frankie Gavin, another wonderful fiddler who has jammed with Stéphane Grappelli, Earl Scruggs, and the Rolling Stones, once visited Potts, watched him play for a half hour, and never stopped crying. I listened to some tracks on Gavin’s tribute album to Potts, then got lost in the sheer exuberance of a session recorded at the pub of Dan O’Connell (not the Liberator) in Knocknagree, County Cork, with Noel Hill on concertina and Tony McMahon on accordion. Set dancers had dished up a lively counterpoint by battering the timber floor with their shoes.
The melancholy ballads of Darach O’Cathain, a sean-nos, or “old style” performer in the a capella mode of Connemara, were very moving. He sang in Gaelic of love gone wrong, while Mary Ann Carolan had a clear, windswept voice that touched the heart, but it was Joe Cooley who packed the strongest emotional punch for me. Like McMahon, he played the accordion, much maligned in some quarters and ranked even lower than the suspect guitar. (An old joke goes: “How do you play the accordion?” Answer: “With a penknife.”) Born in Peterswell, County Galway, Cooley hailed from a musical family—his parents both played the melodeon—and worked for a time as a builder, but he left for the U.S. in 1954 when he was about thirty and lived as a vagabond minstrel, supporting himself with gigs in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, where the hippies revered him.
As Carson notes, Cooley employed the old-fashioned press-and-draw technique to dazzling effect, creating a unique sound that’s been described as “lonesome.” He was only recorded professionally once, at Lahiffe’s Bar in his hometown just weeks before his death from cancer in 1973, and the photo on the CD shows a grinning, broad-chested youth with his head thrown back, as if to laugh in the face of every challenge, an attitude he kept until the end. “A lot of people around Ireland thought I was dead,” he begins, and then pauses for effect before he adds, “a couple of times.” Despite his illness, he rips through “The Blackthorn,” a tune he learned from the Flanagan Brothers in the Catskills, with such skill, dexterity, speed, and fire that I almost disturbed the archive’s equilibrium with some whoops and yelps of appreciation.
Even at a distance, you could sense the music binding everyone together at Lahiffe’s in a form of duende, that power Lorca defined as springing out of energetic instinct. “Whatever has black sounds has duende,” he quoted Manuel Torres, the great Andalusian singer. I kept those words in mind when I left for the Brazen Head on a beautiful evening in early August, marred ever so slightly by a chilly foretaste of autumn. The weather can affect a pub’s handle, as Kevin Hynes once told me. Before the grim, unrelenting rain of June and July, Ireland had logged an unseasonably dry and mild April, and business at McSorley’s had dropped off, but the wet months had driven people back indoors and rewarded Kevin with some bumper profits.
From Ranelagh I rode the LUAS tram, inevitably known as the Daniel Day, to Stephen’s Green and strolled down Grafton Street through the last shoppers hunting for bargains until I reached the Liffey, where a lovely wash of twilight fell on the water. Closer to the pub, I caught the scent of roasted barley drifting over from the Guinness brewery at St. James’s Gate. Two Japanese youths stood on a bench outside the Brazen Head and took photos of the stone walls and battlements with their cell phones, and probably beamed the images to their friends at the Irish Pub Company’s branch in Tokyo or Kyoto. That scenario, once the material of science fiction, didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.
Two of the pub’s three rooms are used for music, and the smaller one was thick with tourists—Italian, French, Swedish, and others—camped out around a little stage, although I saw no cops or firemen, at least in uniform. As for frat boys, I met two from Colorado, beefy guys with the look of second-string football players, who had already signed a dollar bill and handed it over to be tacked up. They were thrilled to be in Irel
and and swore they’d drink as much beer as they could possibly hold, and I was reminded, in a sentimental way, of my former self, the romantic naïf from California.
The music started at nine thirty on the dot. That was so contrary to the disregard of the Irish for punctuality, their refusal to accept the concept of time as anything other than arbitrary, it raised a red flag. A quartet of musicians, very groomed compared to the frazzled, apocalyptic look of the Dubliners, stepped onto the stage and tuned up—two guitars, a banjo, and a bodhran player who doubled on the bones, once made from animal ribs but generally wooden now. There was a hush in the room, a muted air of anticipation such as you register in church before the start of a sermon. When the quartet struck its first chord, some members of the audience, unable to contain themselves, clapped along as if by rote, well before the music had a chance to rouse their passions, perhaps as suggested by a guidebook.
The group on stage was even less traditional than the one at the Oliver St. John Gogarty. Without a doubt, they lacked Joe Cooley’s fire, and the black sounds were missing from their repertoire. They were competent and possessed a folksy authority, but I felt no emotional connection. They resembled a tepid version of the Irish musicians from my college days—the Clancy Brothers, say, who were on the jukebox in every New York pub in the 1960s and struck the spark for many a party. Cooley’s internal focus, the way he appeared to be isolated in his own world, oblivious of the crowd and attentive only to the dictated notes as they pulsed through him—that was missing. Cooley was an artist while these musicians appeared to be professional entertainers, and though they failed to meet my newly evolved standard of authenticity, they satisfied the expectations of the crowd.
