Dublin Shades

McDaid’s in Dublin is not hard to find. I came across it last winter looming just off Grafton Street, one of the city’s tartier thoroughfares. It’s a high-ceilinged Victorian pub with an austerely ecclesiastical aspect; Dublin’s old pubs share with its churches the most uninviting façades in the city. I was early and had to stamp about in the cold before dropping in for the one.

I was there to pay tribute to the last survivor of Dead as Doornails (1976). Anthony Cronin’s harrowingly comic memoir of 1950s liter­ary bohemia is a simple book, a narrative of encounters with seven men bound together because ‘they are all dead; they died within a short space of time of each other; all of them were acquainted with some of the others; and I was acquainted with them all’. These were Brendan Behan, Ralph Cusack, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan, Julian Maclaren-Ross and the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, who all died with various quantities of talent wasted in the mid-1960s. Cronin, who died a celebrated man of letters in 2016, knew them each in turn and then together, but his necessary first acquaintance was with McDaid’s – which lives on. It is three-quarters of a century since Cronin first walked in. Called to the Irish Bar in 1948, he ditched the law for an office job that he loathed no less. He wrote poetry, lusted after girls and a roguish milieu (he knew neither), and drank. ‘The facts were that I earned seven pounds three shillings a week, paid three pounds for digs and drank the rest.’ Yet four pounds three shillings of drink in the wrong places brought him no relief. Things took a turn for the better when he was chucked out of his digs. He was told of a pro­spective landlord to be found at the bar of McDaid’s. I first read Cronin at university some years ago, starting with The Life of Riley (1964), his satirical novel of bookish ’50s beggardom. It was still just possible then to walk into a pub with the contents of your pockets: a thorough search of stray coats, trousers and jackets could yield enough 10- and 20-pence pieces to stand you the first drink of the evening, and it would be a low sort of company that wouldn’t see you looked after for the rest of the session. Riley dramatized this seedy financial mechanism. It is full of sympathetic aphorisms for the undergraduate idler: ‘The sky seemed always to be bright and airy sunshine through the window of the office, such as made you want to go and look at it through the window of a pub instead.’ That book traces Cronin’s descent into the underworld; Dead as Doornails describes what he found there. The interior of McDaid’s, ‘church-like or tomb-like according to mood’ (in fact the building began life as the Dublin City Morgue), harboured an indiscriminate clientele. ‘The divisions between writer and non-writer, bohemian and artist, informer and revolutionary, male and female, were never rigorously enforced; and nearly every­body, gurriers included, was ready for elevation, to Parnassus, the scaffold or whatever.’ Enter Brendan Behan. The pub was an IRA rendezvous, so the Republic’s greatest carouser was bound to turn up. ‘Friendship,’ writes Cronin, ‘like other forms of love, takes immediately or not at all.’ It took a walk to the cellars where he was dossing to make them intimate confrères. The lanky Wexford-born Cronin, a qualified barrister-at-law, was a beautiful foil to the Borstal-educated Behan, a card-carrying ‘Dubb-el-in man’. Together they scraped the funds for the crucial first drinks and commiserated over the neglect of artists. Neither was published, and Behan especially was a long way from the glories of The Quare Fellow and Borstal Boy. Reading Cyril Connolly’s famous Sunday Times obituary of George Orwell – ‘But the gardens of the west are closed, and there is no place now for the writer to wander . . .’ – Behan remarks to Cronin: ‘Arrah sweet and holy Jasus, would you mind telling me what fucking gardens of the west did you and I ever wander in?’ Discontent with the capital took them to the house of the painter Ralph Cusack, whom Cronin insists was the soul of courtesy and hospitality but whom he chiefly describes through Cusack’s intermittent manic rages. When these grew insupportable, Cronin and Behan made a counterfeit pilgrimage through France, begging shelter and smoking Afton Major cigarettes, with Behan scheming to defect to communist Czechoslovakia. The scheme foundered and the shad­ows began to lengthen on their friendship: Behan spent the repatriation money from the Irish Embassy treating sailors, and Cronin’s tale of their picaresque attempts to smuggle themselves home betrays an ominous weariness even once safely back in McDaid’s. ‘For some time we continued more or less as before, though both of our cir­cumstances were changing and drama, of a sort, was in the offing.’ Behan’s subsequent deeds, and fame, were ‘nothing less than night­mare’. Behan does not fade from the story, but he stumbles to the periphery as his capers grow more grotesque. McDaid’s became the headquarters of the magazine Envoy, edited by John Ryan, a con-temporary who is not one of Cronin’s subjects but who appears occasionally as a ministering angel to frayed bohemians. One of these was Patrick Kavanagh, whose curmudgeonly friendship began to displace that with Behan. Cronin describes all seven of his characters with startling frank­ness. When we tell others about our friends and their deeds, we’re inclined to expand and explain, not confident that the deeds or the words or the friends themselves will illustrate their character quite to the advantage we would like. Remembering How We Stood (1975), Ryan’s elegiac account of the same era and people, tends to illustrate the genius rather than the man. Though not immune to that instinct, Cronin resists it. Kavanagh was a genius, but unless you know his genius it is hard to discern in Dead as Doornails. At first Kavanagh seems a rather pitiful giant. He was physically scared by Behan. ‘On his appearance the great shoulders would shake, the enormous hand fidget nervously, the enormous head swivel from side to side in search of allies or openings . . .’ This was a nervousness born of insecurity. Kavanagh had been in the wilder­ness, living in a Pembroke Road flat with a rear-view mirror positioned out the window to warn when creditors were at the door. His haunts had not been literary. ‘To think’, he told Cronin, ‘how I wasted these last few years when there were people walking up and down Grafton Street who were ready to be my friends.’ But as I discovered when I went there, McDaid’s is not an obscure place, nor is Pembroke Road all that far away. What took him so long? It took me a good tramp around the city to understand how it could fit all the alienation of a metropolis into a space the size of an English county town. It’s a point Cronin returns to. Literary Dublin was not helpfully signposted in the 1950s, and most Dubliners pre­tended it wasn’t there at all. Pubs did not feature on cultural walking tours. Unless, of course, they were guided by scabrous literary types. Dead as Doornails includes the first gloriously tawdry Bloomsday, the 16 June traipse in the steps of the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses. Its first pil­grims numbered just six, including Cronin, Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan – alias Flann O’Brien, author of the sacred text of clever­ness, At Swim-Two-Birds. Cronin refers to him as Myles na Gopaleen, the pseudonym he used in his immortal Irish Times column (see SF no. 80). Myles’s bona-fide genius was channelled through a small man ‘whose appearance somehow combined elements of the priest, the baby-faced Chicago gangster, the petty bourgeois malt drink and the Dublin literary gent’. He was drunk when he arrived on the first Bloomsday and began to climb the rock at the foot of the Martello tower; Kavanagh joined him and climbed faster. This upset Myles. ‘When Myles was drunk and angry he snarled, and he was snarling now. Suddenly, he grabbed at Kavanagh’s ankle and attempted to pull him down.’ The cream of the Irish avant garde rushed to save two of their number from killing each other by ignominious accident. These are not stories to embroider one’s heroic image of an author. Cronin went to London later in the decade. There a spell in Fitzrovia intro­duced him to Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, artists and lovers from Ayrshire whose promise was sliding into drink before his eyes, and to Julian Maclaren-Ross, the model for X Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Extraordinary though these three were, they did not belong to Cronin as his Dublin cronies did. Stories of the Roberts’ bloodcurdling rows or Maclaren-Ross’s poverty are a little knowing, unlike his callow reportage from Grafton Street. There are brilliant scenes – the Roberts pursuing each other, armed and naked, around a suburban garden; Kavanagh, bafflingly, living in Haslemere in Surrey – but they are a postscript. For though Cronin repeatedly denies it, Dead as Doornails is his autobiography, all the more so for dispensing with the minutiae of his own life: it’s the Dublin stories that made him. We see a negative of his own character in his description of those who shaped it. Stray remarks – ‘Brendan was still no more drunk than was customary among us all’ – betray the fact that he is no mere observer. He derides the Grafton Street gossips who bitched about Kavanagh’s personal hygiene but earnestly adds that ‘he certainly did not smell and in fact he was always fairly clean looking and generally, like many of us, took care to wear shirts that did not show the dirt’. When Cronin’s memoir was published in 1976, those he memorialized had been dead for a decade. Their ghosts brought out his own ghostly qualities – qualities which linger in the high ceilings of McDaid’s. Last winter I toasted their melancholy shades, then drank up and left for the ferry.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Patrick Hudson 2024