A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Eugene Kavanagh, the licensee since 1973, lives above the pub with his wife, Kathleen, and his son Niall, the last of his six children, a barman informed me. I was more curious than ever about Kavanagh and why he was so resistant to change, valuing tradition over modern cocktails and exclusive cigars. Did he fear that he’d lose some quality integral to Ireland’s identity, that ineffable something I’d first experienced at Birchall’s? I wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t around, and the barman was too frantic to field any more questions. The GAA match had just ended with Kerry on top, and a band of excited jersey-clad fans were streaming into the Gravediggers, so I sat on a hard bench and drank my pint, vowing to catch up with Kavanagh next Saturday.

  Not long after my trip to the north side, I came across an odd news item about the Quiet Man Movie Club, based in Cork. Its members are guardians of the true flame, determined to build a Quiet Man pub in Cong, the film’s location. John Ford would have preferred to shoot it in Spiddal, County Galway, his father’s birthplace—both his parents were native speakers of Gaelic, who had emigrated to the U.S.—but he failed to get his way. He fared better with the film’s budget, though. Herbert Yates, the head of Republic Pictures, kept a tight hold on the pursestrings until Ford dragged him to a wild and scenic stretch of Connemara and pointed out a cottage—whitewashed, naturally, with shutters and a thatched roof.

  “There it is, the house where I was born,” he said, as the tears rolled down his cheeks. Yates began to cry, too, and replied, “Okay, you can have the $1.5 million for your picture.”

  Ford loved to tell the story, since in reality he’d been born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Still, he treasured his Irish roots, and his “beautiful travelogue” has had a more profound, widespread, and lasting impact of the public’s vision of Ireland than I’d orginally thought. When the movie was released on video in 1985, for example, it sold about a quarter of a million copies in the UK alone in the first five years, despite the fact that it played frequently on television. Its influence on the Irish Tourist Board, founded in 1952, the same year as The Quiet Man’s theatrical release, was monumental. The board adopted Ford’s bucolic imagery for its ads, and the look of the film became the look of the Emerald Isle.

  The vision of the country as a pastoral refuge is still so prevalent that such keen-eyed observers as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times have remarked on it. “People all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of sprituality,” Friedman once wrote, “hoping to siphon off what they can to save their souls.” Critics harp on about the soul of U2, and the soulful performances of Van Morrison. (Even Angel of Buffy fame, born in Ireland in 1727, has a soul, but it’s a hindrance to him because he’s a vampire.) The Quiet Man may contribute to the success of such companies as Creative Irish Gifts, whose mail order catalog of 2002—Guinness T-shirts, claddagh rings, flashing shamrock pins—generated $13 million on the merchandise, some of it manufactured in China.

  For the Quiet Man Movie Club, the pub project in Cong sounded like a mission. (You can already wet your whistle at Quiet Man pubs in Melbourne, Paris, Boston, and Dover, New Jersey.) Pat Cohan’s still stands in the village, but it’s not identical to the pub in the film. Ford liked the storefront of Johnny Murphy’s grocery better, so he transferred Cohan’s sign to it. As for the pub interiors, they were shot on a Hollywood sound stage, and the props and fittings had been stored in an L.A. warehouse for more than fifty years. The club was rumored to have purchased the lot, and intended to ship it across the Atlantic and reassemble it as a tourist attraction—the authenticity of replication taken to the max.

  In the old days, before JVC excavators made the gravediggers at Glasnevin obsolete, they’d knock on an outside wall of John Kavanagh when they wanted a pint, and a small boy carried out the beer and collected their money if they had any, or marked it down to credit on his pad. That was Eugene Kavanagh. Because the pub is so ancient, I pictured Eugene as a relatively decrepit sort, pale and short of breath from his long career in the haze and fumes, but he bounded down the stairs to meet me when I stopped by on Saturday, as fit as a man can be at sixty-eight. He’s short, stocky, and pugnacious, an obsessive runner who has competed in 169 marathons—Beijing, Paris, Boston, he’s circled the globe—along with more strenuous events such as a hundred-mile race across the Sierra Nevada at the height of summer and a Belfast-to-Dublin jaunt.

  Kavanagh’s face looked familiar, and I realized I might have seen it before on an officer of the law, friendly but a trifle wary, quick to size someone up, and hinting that serious trouble lay ahead if you crossed him. He wouldn’t be the type to suffer fools gladly. He wasn’t eager to talk at first, either. He might bar television from the pub, but he has one in his quarters and devotes his Saturday afternoons to horseracing and other sports. I offered to call later in the week and arrange a more convenient time, but that wouldn’t do. His phone is unlisted, and he never gives out the number of his cell. Even the Gravediggers doesn’t have a listed phone.

  “I’m eccentric,” Eugene said, with a tight grin, and set about proving it. Instead of going back upstairs, he stood at the bar and talked with me for three straight hours.

  He was proud of the Gravediggers, having rescued it from the brink of disaster after he bought it from John M. Kavanagh, his stepfather and a man he revered, who’d grown old and tired and only opened in the evenings because of a depressed economy. His own father, Michael, a carpenter and John M.’s brother, had died when Eugene was just eight and left the family so destitute that Eugene spent two-and-a-half years in an orphanage before his mother married again—to John M. this time, making him both a nephew and a stepson. He was put right to work at the pub, but he didn’t mind. The Christian Brothers had taught him discipline, along with manners and respect. They were tough but fair, he said, and he’d never been abused, even though he was a “little blondie fella” and a favorite “on the bell,” charged with answering the door and calling a brother to the phone.

  He had to cut back on his pub chores, though, when he accepted a job with Guinness as a boy laborer at fifteen. You had to sit for a special exam to be hired, and he was fortunate to pass it, since all he did at home was eat, sleep, and play football. “It must have been my mother’s prayers that did the trick,” he ventured, although she relied on other forms of motivation, too, and gave him the odd larruping to cure him of his bad temper and his pig-headedness. He stayed with Guinness for nineteen years, eventually moving into the adult work force, and loved it. “I’d have died for that company,” he swore, but that was before Diageo had taken over.

  Diageo was a sore point with Eugene, and its mere mention set him off. He sold more stout per square foot than any bar in Dublin, he claimed, and yet he felt shabbily treated. The accountants and merchandisers were in control now, and they knew nothing about the pub business, he said, and seemed to have no interest in learning. The company’s attitude toward service was indifferent, he thought, and it reflected a similar indifference among publicans, especially the absentee owners. Rather than paying attention to the basics, the pubs aligned with the leisure industry and cooked up gimmicks to survive—quiz nights with cash prices, Texas Hold ’Em tournaments, bingo, karaoke, I’d seen them all myself—and if they kept it up, they’d drift even farther from their traditional function as a space apart for socializing, where casual friendships and a democratic spirit prevail.

  Greed had the Irish in its grip, Eugene believed, despite their high level of intelligence. He wasn’t entirely sympathetic to the new Ireland, nor was he shy about making it known. Snobbery and pettiness were afoot, he asserted, with people trying to outdo the neighbors and envying someone else’s material success. They wanted everything handed to them on a silver platter, as well. Nobody expected their children to be plumbers, carpenters, or plasterers anymore, even though those trades paid good wages. Instead, the kids had to be professionals—doctors, lawyers, brokers—and drive a flashy car and buy a pricey house in the suburb
s. He spoke in a measured tone without any rancor, giving voice to an opinion only beginning to be heard above a whisper—that Ireland’s sudden prosperity might have a downside.

  Kavanagh also had strong opinions about being a publican. “It helps if it’s bred into you. It’s not my job,” he insisted, seconding Dessie Hynes. “It’s my life.” To do it right, you need a small, manageable unit, where the owner is around all the time and accepts full responsibility for every aspect of the trade, from training the staff to schmoozing with the regulars. “If you’re willing to do that,” he told me, “you can earn a very good living.” He’d been able to buy up an entire block of Prospect Square himself, currently worth a small fortune, but he felt sheepish just saying that. He didn’t have a clue what to do with so much money—security had always been his goal. The pub was also worth a bundle, but he wouldn’t have sold it even if his kids had begged off—and luckily they hadn’t. Instead, he’d have put it in a trust.

  “I’m a preservationist,” Eugene said, and a part of what he preserves are his memories. There was his grandmother Josie, for instance, a strong woman who frightened the bejesus out of him in her black widow’s weeds, worn long after her husband John H. Kavanagh had died. Her nose was a hooked beak, and she leaned on a cane on account of her varicose veins. “I thought she was a witch,” Eugene laughed, “but I was only four.” John H. had suffered from “the nerves,” calmed them with liquor, and hastened his early demise, and that was one reason, along with an addictive personality, that Eugene himself has never drunk any alcohol. I must have looked at him strangely, because he corrected himself. “No, no, twice I took a drink for medicinal purposes, some hot whiskey when I was sick in bed with the flu. I hated it, but I felt fine by the morning. I’ve only missed two half-days of work at the pub in my life.”

  A fellow at the bar cleared his throat and interrupted us. He hadn’t visited Kavanagh’s for a while and shared a memory of his own, although he didn’t have complete faith in it. He nodded toward a dark corner and asked if a coffin hadn’t rested there in the past. “No, but you might have seen that in a fil-um,” Eugene informed him, since the pub had once been used as a movie set. The man seemed disappointed, so Eugene cheered him up with a spot of trivia and explained that the term “jar,” meaning a pint, had been coined at the Gravediggers during World War I, when a shortage of pint glasses forced the barmen to rely on jam jars as substitutes.

  By virtue of living over the pub, Eugene was at the mercy of his customers, but he swears it isn’t a hardship. When he’s relaxing upstairs, he’s perfectly at ease unless he senses a weird vibration down below, like a dip in the barometric pressure, and that’s the signal for him to show his face. If there’s an argument or a dust-up, he prefers to resolve it himself instead of calling the police. He was a boxer in his youth and never lost a match, except once when he gulped down ten pints of water to gain some pounds and go up a weight class, and he played indoor soccer until he was fifty-nine. If you took into account the marathons, too, and that penetrating gaze, you’d think twice before you violated the barroom etiquette at the Gravediggers.

  His oldest son, Anthony, a banker, would most likely become the publican when Eugene threw in the towel. Ciaran, another son, who’d been a chef in Italy for eight years, had taken over and improved the pub’s cuisine, and served both lunch and dinner in the lounge with the help of his sister Anne. (Though opinionated, Eugene’s no Luddite who’s against progress.) Niall, at twenty-five, is the apple of his father’s eye, a smiling, good-natured young man with Down syndrome, who still pulls pints and has been a champion swimmer, specializing in the butterfly. “He brought unity and happiness to this house,” Eugene said, as Niall passed by and paused to greet the regulars.

  He remembered when Niall was born, and how he had dropped Kathleen at the hospital around midnight, chose not to stay, and returned to Prospect Square. He received a call early the next morning to report that both the mother and child were doing fine, but he got a second call later from a doctor, who urged him to come in right away. He knew something must be wrong, and when he saw the baby he knew what it was, yet he and Kathleen, who believe in the hereafter, decided Niall must have been sent to them for a reason. Only once did Eugene crack, a month after the birth. He drove to Portmarnock by the sea and cried and cried, but he came to an acceptance of the facts and never looked back.

  For Niall’s sixteenth birthday, he gave the boy a racehorse—a six-week-old foal that only cost him three grand. Eugene owns some horses himself, all jumpers bred for the National Hunt, but he doesn’t bet on them because gambling, like drink, can be addictive. Though Niall can’t really read and has a limited vocabulary, Eugene invited him to name the foal. “Rory,” Niall suggested, but that was the name of a dog they once had and not inventive enough. A few days later, Niall called his father outside and pointed toward the sky at twilight and shouted, “Sunset!” so they agreed on Rory’s Sunset. The expectations were low for such a cheap purchase, but Rory’s Sunset won a maiden hurdle and next a handicap hurdle for a bigger purse, after which someone offered $125,000 for the horse, but Niall turned it down.

  The afternoon had slipped by, and we were finally talked out. I watched a last ray of sunshine explode through the pub’s front windows and ignite the rich gold color of the ceiling. There were about twenty people at the bar, and they each had three personalities, Eugene joked—sober, half-sober, and pissed. Kathleen came down to let him know his dinner was ready, and he puffed up in her presence. “She paints, she teaches, she writes poetry,” he whispered, afraid that he’d embarrass her by going on. He advised me to look at a painting of hers in the lounge before I left. For the first time, he sounded a bit unconfident, even slightly apologetic. “I’m totally different to the norm,” he said, almost with a sigh, as if to sum up our conversation. “I can’t help it. It’s just me.”

  At Birchall’s, where I stopped on my way home, the renovation had begun, but the pub remained open in spite of it, with building materials scattered here and there. The old slate floor was gone, and so were the carpets. The clutter had disappeared, creating more space and visibility. The dodgy rear entrance had been fixed—a boon to those who liked to slip out via a side street rather than into the bright lights of Ranelagh Road. Half the banquettes were stripped of their upholstery and covered in slick, mocha-colored leather, with little stools, still perfect for milkmaids, to match. A mild chemical odor, that mix of paint and sealants and flooring compound, wafted over everything. Newness was the smell of Birchall’s now, and maybe of Ireland.

  Eugene Kavanagh’s comments about Diageo had the ring of prophecy when I read the Irish Independent at the bar. A lead story in the business section addressed the firm’s problems with its Guinness brand at home. In 2001, the Irish consumed 70 percent of their alcohol in pubs, but the figure had dropped to 47 percent, and the cheap lagers at off-licenses—so cheap some publicans were buying from supermarkets at a better price than their wholesalers offered—and the growing popularity of wine did not bode well for stout. Reportedly, Diageo intended to sell its landmark complex at St. James’s Gate and move to an industrial park in the suburbs—a wise financial decision, perhaps, but one that would cost Dublin a precious piece of its history. It would be a different city without that scent of roasted barley along the Liffey.

  As the pace of change in Ireland quickened, Kavanagh’s decision to preserve his family pub and its memories acquired a sort of nobility. He wasn’t so much stuck in the past as choosing to occupy a middle ground between his heritage and the future, refusing to swap the traditional values he believed in for a passel of unknowns. In the headlong rush toward material gain that had captivated so many of the Irish, the middle ground had largely been passed over and ignored. Even Ireland’s ancient treasures, such as the Hill of Tara in County Meath, where the legendary high kings once ruled, had lost its sacred glow in the current climate.

  Tara is the dwelling place of the ancient pagan gods, and an entranc
e to the mythical otherworld. With its megalithic tomb, its barrows and fortifications, and the standing stone called Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, said to roar at the touch of Tara’s rightful king, it’s the equal of Delphi or Stonehenge, yet the government planned to build a highway near it that might intrude upon an archaeological site of immense value. The plan had provoked an outcry, not only in Ireland but around the world, over the desecration of such a vital site, and it had prompted Seamus Heaney to accuse the Celtic Tiger of smashing the strings of the Irish harp with its tail. Tara represents “an ideal of the spirit,” Heaney said, and its savage destruction “is a signal that the priorities on these islands have changed.”

  Chapter 7

  THE HALCYON DAYS OF MANHOOD

  Before I moved to Ranelagh, while in my brief courting phase, I rented a short-term furnished apartment in wealthy Ballsbridge, although my place belonged to the lower depths of the housing market. The real estate agent described it as “twee,” and its three petite rooms, adorned with knick-knacks and needlepoint samplers, needed only a Thomas Kinkade print to be terminally cute. (Emerald Isle Cottage is included in Kinkade’s vast gallery of prints. “To me, Ireland means tradition and stability,” he says on his Web site, suggesting he hasn’t visited the real Emerald Isle for a while.) To escape from the heart-shaped throw pillows and the ceramic angels on a shelf, each with its hands clasped in prayer, I walked almost daily along the Dodder River, still a lively urban trout stream, past the rugby stadium on Landsdowne Road and then Shelbourne Park, where the greyhounds run, to Ringsend on the river’s bank.