A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Moriarity trailed in just minutes after me. His visit had been costly so far, he reported, but he intended to shoulder the bills stoically, without complaint. He was in an expansive mood. His photo studio was doing well, thanks to the wedding portraits and such that he swore he’d never stoop to when he still viewed himself as the next Cartier-Bresson, so he was flush and delighted to treat his partner S. to a night at the august Shelbourne Hotel, recently renovated like every other entity in Dublin and part of the Marriott chain now. S. and Moriarity had been together for almost a year, but she didn’t know, of course, that she’d set a record for longevity, yet it’s a fact that your man cut a wide swath among the impressionable art students until he mended his ways and began the day with Barry’s tea instead of stout.

  Under his new program, he never touched a drop before the evening and rarely went overboard when he did, more content than ever with his work—he still took artistic photos, too—and in his relationship, a word I’d never heard him utter before except as a kind of snarl. Against the odds, Moriarity appeared to be settling down, although he showed some of his former fire when I spoke the r-word myself and asked if he was serious about S. He almost bit me, flashing his incisors at the stupidity of the question—“Life is serious!”—and my naïveté in putting it to him, even though he’d have done the same if the shoe had been on the other foot. Some friendships just don’t abide by the rules of common sense.

  What did Moriarity think of the new Birchall’s? He seemed unfazed, so I prodded him. He took a minute to survey the pub, already quite busy at five in the afternoon and bubbling with a giddy energy born of blistered credit cards. “Shabbily genteel Dublin is dead,” he pronounced, “and scarcely a soul will care.” He among all men mourned the loss of shabby gentility, he elaborated, and its passing caused him to wax nostalgic for his days as a carouser. He remembered the curative power of an early pint at the Lord Edward, the lively patter at Grogan’s, and the homey sustenance of Brogan’s, all pubs I hadn’t sampled.

  “Never?” Moriarity questioned, an eyebrow raised.

  “Ireland has about twelve thousand pubs.”

  “I take your point, in fairness. But still, the Lord Edward . . .”

  The Irish say “in fairness” so often I’m sure they really mean the opposite. I translated Moriarity’s remark as, “I’d like to be fair and honor your point, but you’ve committed such a colossal blunder, I can’t do it”—not that he didn’t bend over backward to pretend that he understood my dilemma. He carried on about how one should never interfere in somebody else’s creative process, because you always sound critical even when you’re being constructive, et cetera. He alluded to the “daunting logistics” I faced, too, but the knife was already in. How could I have overlooked those pubs? What if they turned out to be gems? In a flash, I went from being a confident authority to an uninformed misfit.

  The irrational dotes on anxiety, and it strikes when you’re feeling vulnerable. I believed I’d come to the end of the road, but Moriarity, insensitive to the extent of my efforts, able to afford a posh room in a five-star hotel with a view of Stephen’s Green, had the nerve to remind me, perhaps correctly, that the road has no end. Every ending is arbitrary, he implied, in the same way that certain paintings are never truly completed. In fairness, he didn’t mean any harm. He was just callous and remote in the moment. Despite his astounding lack of empathy, he must have sensed my distress, because he insisted I drop by the hotel, say hello to S., and have a nightcap.

  High spirits engulfed Moriarity when we hit the streets. “This walk used to take me four hours,” he laughed, talking about all the stops he once made while he covered the mile and a half to the green. First he had a pint at the Waterloo on Pembroke Road, where Jim of the Oarsmen had worked (“It’s a superpub now, unfortunately.”) and sometimes at Smyth’s nearby (no relation to Frank), then proceeded to the Bermuda Triangle of Nesbitt’s, Toner’s, and O’Donaghue’s on Lower Baggot Street (“Men have been sucked under there and never found again.”) before he reached the grand dame of a hotel that Elizabeth Bowen called “an affair of size, ruddiness, solidarity, good-nature, prosperity, and prestige.”

  Martin Burke of Tipperary yoked together four brick houses to build the Shelbourne in 1824. Prior to the Marriott takeover, the hotel with its worn carpets and frumpy couches had lost its former glory and had become a candidate for shabby gentility. Disheveled poets hunkered at the elegant Horseshoe Bar, lunched on the free peanuts, and were tolerated because they behaved themselves, but they’ve been priced out of the market. The Shelbourne’s tony again, beautifully refurbished, and very expensive. The landed gentry still employs it as a base for such special occasions as black-tie balls and deb parties, just as it did in Thackeray’s time (“a respectable old edifice, much frequented by families from the country . . .”), and the hotel has a “genealogy butler” on staff to assist Irish-American guests interested in their ancestry, but it’s the new-money crowd that has adopted its public rooms as a playground.

  When you spin through the revolving doors that lead to the lobby, you’re thrust into the midst of an ongoing celebration that seems to have begun just before your arrival, with a potpourri of people who can’t wait to shake your hand and put a glass into it. The atmosphere is upbeat and frivolous, and it promotes a sense of well-being and also an inkling that you must be among the elect, an idea you’d have scoffed at if it had been proposed to you fifteen minutes earlier. There’s a good bit of middle-aged cruising on the weekend nights that relies on a healthy pour of champagne—always a boon to romances with a short shelf life destined to expire no later than Sunday afternoon.

  The Horseshoe Bar was too jammed to accommodate us, so we adjourned to the No. 27 Bar on the other side of the hotel, a brighter space where the elbow room was still at a premium. There are those (Moriarity) who thrive on being pressed in wafer-thin among strangers—this may be another trait of Irishness—but I’d have been overjoyed to go elsewhere, or even walk back to Birchall’s. Thank goodness for S., who joined us and had a soothing effect on my overwrought state of mind. Though I was happy for my insensitive friend, who’d chosen a warm-hearted, compassionate woman at last, and thrilled to be chatting about less onerous subjects than my shortcomings, all I really wanted to do was to go home, read a book of the soporific variety, and forget about the 11,873 pubs I hadn’t visited.

  The approach of the holidays in Dublin gains momentum with alarming force. A week before Christmas, the downtown streets were already thick with shoppers in Santa hats, bright red with fuzzy white pompoms. Some people wore paper crowns instead, the kind that come inside a cracker along with a prize you probably never dreamed of owning—a midget screwdriver, say, or a little plastic whistle. The crackers were featured at the office lunches that spilled out over tables heavily laden with wine. Nobody went back to work after eating, of course. It was too late in the day and almost dark, the indigo sky pinpricked with stars, and invariably someone who knew what lay ahead—a headache when the wine wore off, a furry mouth, and a dozen packages to wrap—voted to postpone it by asking, “Stop at the pub?”

  An amusing story was going around the pubs that December. It concerned some scientists at the University of Wisconsin, whose research showed that Guinness, taken in a twenty-four-ounce measure with a meal, might be as effective as low-dose aspirin in preventing blood clots and staving off heart attacks. Lager doesn’t have the same potential, perhaps because it lacks the anti-oxidants—or so the scientists surmised—but other experts argued that alcohol in any form has properties that inhibit clotting. The news sounded promising, at any rate, until you learned that the test subjects were dogs with narrowed arteries. Dubliners are quick to seize on any aspect of the ridiculous, so there were the inevitable jokes about ordering a bowl of stout rather than a pint.

  I heard the joke in Brogan’s on Dame Street. I’d gone there for a specific reason, so that Moriarity wouldn’t get the better of me. Obviously, I’d miss some fine
traditional pubs in Ireland—I’d known that from the outset!—but at least they wouldn’t be the ones my friend had pined for in his theatrical way. My honest hope was that all three of his suggestions would be losers, but Brogan’s looked like a contender. For starters, there was the photo in the front window. It showed Ginger, an undefeated fighting cock and the All-Ireland Heavyweight Champion, sipping his “second pint” with Dennis Hyland, a human being, in 1960. Ginger’s beak and half his crimson head were buried in the foam, and an empty glass by his right claw “proved” that it wasn’t his first.

  Brogan’s also earned a good grade for being so basic, as dull inside as it was without. The pub scored another point for its little upholstered stools reminiscent of the old Birchall’s, but the walls were an eyesore, so plastered with ads and posters for Guinness I was reminded of the roadside shrines in Mexico that peasants assemble from scraps of votive material. (St. James’s Gate was suspiciously close by, in fact.) The ads often centered on the Guinness toucan—an avian theme was developing here—introduced as a corporate symbol in 1935. The first ad of the campaign pictured the toucan with two pints of stout, perhaps the medically approved dosage for birds to judge by Ginger. The author of the accompanying jingle was Dorothy L. Sayers, later a distinguished writer of mysteries.

  If he can say as you can

  Guinness is good for you

  How grand to be a Toucan

  Just think what two can do

  It’s possible the ads were originals, not repros, and had some historical value, but I tended to think otherwise. A TV was on at Brogan’s, too, recycling Sky News as usual, so I relegated the pub to the category of a neighborhood bar—a homey one, it’s true, but hardly deserving Moriarity’s exaggerated praise. Next I tried the Lord Edward near Christ Church Cathedral, a short stroll away. The pub is easily recognizable because of the portrait of Lord Edward Fitzgerald on the front of the building, a dashing youth in a green frock coat and a red cravat. Fitzgerald, the fifth son of the Duke of Leinster, was a rebel nationalist. He died in a shootout with British troops, while he hid at a house in the Liberties that belonged to a dealer in feathers.

  The Lord Edward is also the oldest seafood restaurant in Dublin, and the laminated menu posted outside offers ample clues to the cuisine—Sole Meuniere, Lobster Newburg, Scallops St. Jacques, here were the very classics Fitzgerald might have dined on himself before his death in 1798. The pub spread itself over two floors, with a lounge above the bar. The lounge, very spare, had some tables crafted from wine barrels and more portraits of the lord. The bar below, another horseshoe like the Shelbourne’s, was small and well attended by the locals, who were served the same portion of Sky News available at Brogan’s.

  Two down and one to go. I couldn’t wait to be done with my tour. As difficult as it is to believe, I was losing my appetite for pubs, much like a man who declares his undying affection for T-bone steak and then is force-fed it for the rest of his life. Pubs had also begun to affect my dreams, and not in a healthy way. In one nightmare, a Poe derivative, I was locked in a cellar full of kegs after closing time. Only the desire to upbraid Moriarity propelled me toward Grogan’s—the Castle Lounge J. Grogan, more accurately. If you had warned me months ago, when the Brazen Head was still virgin territory, that I’d someday almost not want a pint of Guinness, I would have laughed, but the day had come.

  Grogan’s location confirmed its status as a trophy. It’s just off Grafton Street and adjacent to Powerscourt Townhouse, a shopping complex and formerly the urban retreat of Richard Wingfield, the viscount of Powerscourt. Wingfield had a vast estate in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, whose architect was Richard Castle. That could account for the Castle Lounge tag, although nearby Dublin Castle, once billed as “the worst castle in the worst situation in Christendom,” could explain it, as well. The pub’s exterior was lackluster and no different from so many others in town, with its name in simple block letters and no additional adornments. Inside I expected to find a few ragged diehards waiting out the typical doldrums of the late afternoon, but Grogan’s was jam-packed at 4:43 P.M.

  Even in the depths of winter, its two little rooms were so steamy with body heat that a barman had switched on a fan to keep from breaking a sweat. There must have been fifty drinkers in the pub, but not one was gaping at Sky News. Grogan’s doesn’t have a television, nor does it inflict any recorded music on its clientele. It isn’t an old pub by Dublin’s hoary standards, with just fifty years or so of business under its belt, and it’s furnished with the sort of tatty tables and chairs you see in the flats of graduate students still disengaged from the idea of earning a living. Its only eye-catching attribute is the ongoing exhibition of art on the walls—figurative paintings, mostly, in a wide range of styles from the tortured threnody of Munch and Nolde to the peaceful Constable pastoral. There was even a portrait of James Dean, although not on black velvet.

  I scanned the walls for a Moriarity, perhaps a nude study from his raffish period, but his work wasn’t on display. That didn’t mean he hadn’t hocked a photo for drinks in the past, though, because the art at Grogan’s can be purchased and a Moriarity nude might have sold, although my guess was that the regulars were liable to spend their cash on pints rather than pictures. Be that as it may, the pub was such a winner that my appetite for Guinness returned, and while Tommy Smith, who owns Grogan’s with a partner, tended to the stout, I marveled at the mixed batch of customers—Trinity students, businessmen, and aging bohos—all talking and drinking in what amounted to a fine democracy of the spirit.

  At Grogan’s, you can help yourself to a stack of papers and magazines, a mini-library free for the asking. Better still, you can assuage your hunger with a toasted sandwich prepared to order, not wrapped in cellophane in advance. It did my heart good to spot a toaster on a shelf of the bar, just like the one Jack Birchall used. A second barman, who was learning the trade under Tommy’s patient tutelage, applied some butter to the bread, then laid on the ham and cheese. That was enough to endear Grogan’s to me for life, although the pub had a topper in store. The sandwich came with a proper jar of Colman’s Mustard, rather that the usual selection of condiments in plastic packets.

  I ordered a toastie myself. Why not? Christmas was in the wings. As much as I hated to admit it, Moriarity had steered me right on Grogan’s, although he was only one for three in the recommendation department, a statistic I’d file away for future reference and debate. Grogan’s qualified as a true traditional pub, surely among the best in the city when you factored in the talk, which was a cut above the average, wide-ranging and discriminating. I conversed with a Trinity lad who was a fan of Raymond Carver’s stories, and we compared our favorites and moved on to the King George steeplechase to be run in England on Stephen’s Day. The time passed without my taking any notice of it, another felicitous aspect of being in the right place.

  For the holidays, Kevin Hynes wrapped McSorley & Sons in a big red ribbon with a fulsome bow, as if the delights of the season were concealed inside. At Birchall’s, Frank Smyth settled for a subdued array of ornaments and tinsel, but those outpourings, however generous and good-willed, weren’t really necessary to remind the regulars Christmas had almost arrived. They already knew that the ordinary rules had been suspended. A pint was permissible at any hour, because Dublin itself was on the nod, virtually shut down until the second week of January. The postmen, the librarians, the bureaucrats in the city offices by Merchants Quay, they’d clock in only as necessary, doing their best to ignore any obligation that might interrupt the flow of the craic.

  On Christmas Eve, I returned from a last-minute shopping trip with my blistered credit card in hand and rolled into Birchall’s, but I could barely make it to the bar, so dense was the traffic at seven o’clock. The same lemming-like rush was probably going on at the Flann O’Brien in Graz—and at the Blarney Stone in Tokyo and Finnegan’s Irish Pub in Rome—as merrymakers gravitated toward the gentler, uncomplicated, fun-filled world of Fairytale Ireland.
In real Ireland, the crush had its roots in the sad fact that the pubs wouldn’t be open on Christmas Day, at least not legally, although some publicans were known to take pity on the wounded. As John B. Keane put it, “They proffered the excuse that they could not bear to see so many downcast souls suffering untreated hangovers wandering the streets and laneways without a hope of recovery.”

  As a publican in Kerry, Keane had acquired the knack of keeping the coppers at bay. To protect his after-hours drinkers on Sunday nights, he hired Jimmy Joy as his lookout, a “brilliant exponent of the little-known art.” Keane’s customers entered by a back door, and alerted Jimmy with a special knock—a rap, a pause, and two more raps. Jimmy ducked down to peek through a crack, and checked the supplicant’s shoes. If they were brown, the supplicant gained admission, because the police never wore brown shoes on duty. A pair of black shoes raised a question mark, and Jimmy would eyeball the trousers for creases. The policemen’s trousers weren’t ironed, it seems, so the door remained shut.

  On the dangers of spirits, Keane was equally sound. “If a man tells you he has mastered whiskey, you can be certain that is the whiskey talking,” he wrote. I indulged in a tot myself on Stephen’s Day, careful as I lifted the bottle of Jameson not to overdo it and begin the slow descent into the dram drinker’s madness of yore. I watched the great chaser Kauto Star fly over the fences at Kempton Park to win the King George in a breeze, after which I limped toward New Year’s Eve with the rest of the country, determined to stay home and avoid the ruckus of “amateur night,” as Moriarity calls it. A few days later, the Irish Independent ran a front-page story on the death of the pub—the good ones, anyway, “killed off by blaring music, multiple TVs, and third-rate soccer.”