DUBLIN SKETCHBOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 15

DUBLIN SKETCHBOOK

| Written for "The Listener"

by

A.

A.

EFORE Nelson's Pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown’ and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston patk and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off: -Rathgar and Terenure! -Come on, Sandymount Green! Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a_ singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel. ~-Start, Palmerston park! ELSON’S Pillar stands there still, being not so debasing as the corpulent lady of a later era. But of James Joyce’s trams, no more. Only their tracks, which by their width inform me that Dublin’s trams must have been at least as wide and as spacious (that hardworked word of nostalgic literature) as those of Christchurch. Dublin’s last tram changed trolley for the last time only a few months ago (there followed an astonishing scene: the crowd went mad, tore it to pieces for souvenirs) and now, after a hot summer, little tongues of bitumen are creeping across the rails in Rathmines Road. Doubledecker buses run instead, like London's, only green. Everything that is ted’ in England seems to be green here. * * % SHOPFRONTS: Old fashioned, meek, unsmart. None of the slickness of the New West. "Kelly the Practical Taylor." "Right here for Bikes." There is a shop called Boylan’s .... Blazes Boylan and Mrs. Bloom-ah yes, I remember. Bewlay’s Oriental Café is of another age from ours. A draughtsboard floor of black:and white tiles. Counters and high, mirrored dados of ornate polished mahogany, dark plaster above. A row of girls dressed as waitresses in an old comedy-in black, with black stockings, white caps and little white aprons -stand watching their tables. A high, domed skylight above, with a _ pattern in stained glass, casts a reverent, /sobering light. One tends to whisper. Rich things to eat under glass bells. But you don’t help yourself; a selection is brought, a teapot in Wedgwood cameo, a cup festooned in Adam-pattern wreaths,

with B.O.C. in old copperplate lettering. Ah, those spacious days! The bill 1s. 2d. * Bs * AIRIES: Yes, there were fairies at Blessington and Poulaphouca during my few days. A boy of 17 was playing his mouth-organ out of doors at Blessington, and a leprechaun began to play on the bottom three notes. "It took me three steps to get home," he told the papers. * * RT in tke Hibernian metropolis: An exhibition of frantic oils by Jack B. Yeats, the currently boomed younger brother of W. B., was opened in a private gallery the day I arrived. Most of them would have suffered no detriment had it been possible to tell on sight what the figures and objects were, and what was going on. They were not abstract shapes, and the rather literary titles suggested that something was going on. But to find out what, one had to go to the only-too-keen-to-assist proprietor of the gallery, who seemed to be always rinsing his hands beneath a tap of gratification (and well he might, for practically all the twenty-three oils were sold, and the sum of the prices in the catalogue was £7,400). If you have seen nothing of Jack Yeats’s latest style, put the "apoplectic scribble" of Felix Topolski into oils, remove lucidity, add passion, fine untrammelled passion, and a texture produced by squeezing paint straight from tube to canvas, add a horse -always a magnificent horse, like those of Marc-and you have something like a characteristic example. But can you tell what that is in the lower right corner? Is it a man seated, or a parrot? And if not why not? In "The Last Dawn but One," one gets the awful boding fear all right, but what is going on? Are they soldiers sitting on ammunition boxes, awaiting orders? When Mr. explains that they may be any human beings, and the idea (his own idea, he tells you, not Mr. Yeats’s-that would be cheating) is that they have another whole day to endure, not just a last few hours and then The End, but another day and another night, one says "Ah yes, I see now," and so one does, and shudders. But what would one do without the busy, smiling Mr. : Se One woman we heard of had no need of

his help, however. Standingin front of one startling canvas priced at £1,200, she is reported to have cried out suddenly, "My God, I can’t stand the emotional impact of this any longer" and swept downstairs to the office -the proprietor on the spot in a split second, pen in hand-where the deal was fixed in five minutes. Let us hope that now, to use Mr. S. J. Perelman’s phrase, "She’s made her emotional adjustment." (continued on next page)

tom 2 of 9 ire Care EA este 44/84 See or *e hee We | + eee ee, 5 2. eee ene bee. + en eee A DUBLIN ~ SKETCHBOOK | (continued from previous page) Better than that little story, however, | which was told in the papers next day, | is this, which The Listener may print | for the first time if it likes: | Mr, Yeats was present at the opening; | So was a young American who had come | to Ireland to write the umpteenth book /on W. B. He was introduced to the Mas- | ter’s brother. "Ah yes," said that unfeeling cynic. "The Yeats racket-the Yeats racket. (pause) First there was the Synge rac- | ket. That didn’t go too well. Then there was the Joyce racket. That went better. (long pause) But the Yeats racket! the Yeats racket! Poor Willie, Poor Willie, POOR Willie." * * * AYBE I shouldn’t laugh. Being in Ireland to "gather material," as they say, myself, I had my own chastening moment. (Copyright hereby reserved to the author): On a wet Saturday afternoon I was taken to see a super-con-sciously Irish play at the Gate Theatre, a dowdy little auditorium beside the Rotunda. My hostess and I took seats near the front, and soon two persons came to take the next two seats: none other than the Irish poet, Seamus O’Sullivan, and his wife, the incomparably beautiful Estella Solomons, a painter. After exclamations of surprise (such chances evidently are unusual in Dublin, though it felt like a small town to me -like Auckland) introductions were effected: " ... and he’s come over to get material for a book about Katherine Mansfield." "Katherine Mansfield!" cried the cheerfully extraverted minor Irish poet, in whose eyes I detected the spaniel-look of a man who has loved his bottle and somehow weaned himself. "What a choice!" © My hostess made ready (I think) to defend me. "Good God, I already have to review a book a month about her," he added (Mr. O’Sullivan edits the Dublin Magazine, which is a quarterly.) I took this well enough, I fancy; the more gladly when I shortly learned that the O’Sullivans were present at a certain memorable party on the Hill of Howth in summer 1913, when Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry spent a fortnight with my hosts. "Have y’ torld ’im how you and Katherine ondressed The Boss?" said Mr. O’Sullivan, out to make mischief. My hostess flushed, not with shame, I hasten to say, but with pleasure at the recollection of these reckless fargone days. Te Boss, it seemed, had been boastful and overweening, and in need of some little deflation. Here the lovely Estella leaned forward from the seat beyond. "Have you told him how Katherine came rushing out to our taxi as we were leaving and said Markiewicz had bitten her on the cheek?" "Na, na," sneered her husband, waving her away with the gesture of a man whose wife always gets the story wrong. "It was she bit Markiewicz on the cheek." i * * * LD Erin: Staring out of the window at 11 o’clock in the morning I am. looking across a stone garden wall to a

paddock rising up to a low white cottage above whose single chimney is a static, perpendicular column of blue smoke. In the paddock twenty or thirty cows are grouped in a corner, and at some distance from them a cow stands nervously over a newborn calf. My host joins me. As we watch, and he curses the casual Irish for their ways with cattle (the calf was born in the open on a wet night) a small delivery van enters the field by the corner gate; now I see why the cows are gathered there: the car has come to milk them. They gather round and are milked into buckets beside the car, and this is called veiling. "Any old time," I am told, "all hours of the day-cows get uncomfort-able-never regular-casual as you like." * * * UBLIN in the Rain: Al! Dublin with its soles damp, trudging, softly padding along, dowdy, shabby. Smartness is obtrusive and conspicuous, is seen mostly in Grafton Street, the Hibernian Bond Street. I begin to observe a little trick of the Trish, when spoken to, of standing still, the head fixed as if under a kind of invisible candle snuffer, and turning only the eyes towards you in answer: big eyes, and soft speech, often hard to hear at all, Quiet, gentle, and oh, how effective. The passive, injured race. At the door of Trinity College Libtary, where I have been looking at that miracle of Irish Christianity, the Book

of Kells, I find a group of young candidates for the priesthood blocking the way out, sheltering from the rain which I, too, hesitate to go out in. Students, but sober, sombre, unboisterous, palely smiling; their lips move but little as they speak. Their hands are in the pockets of their black overcoats, but lightly, not thrust hard in. Their movements are meek and tentative. Eg * * PoLirTics (Keep Off): At dinner one evening when there were visitors, including a former minister of De Valera’s government (from whom I subsequently won 214d. in the coinage of the Republic of Ireland, after he had taught me for the first time in my life the rules of poker) I heard the word "capitalist" used in a sense that startled me by its novelty. That former minister was reproached by his neighbour at table, a North of Ireland woman painter, with the state of the roads in Co. Donegal. An argument of such heat ensued that I feared for the atmosphere of the evening to follow, in my ignorance of Irish manners, or at any rate the Irish manners of this good humoured house, The climax of the scene was reached when the defender of the administration cried out, "And you can consider yourself damn lucky to be living in the last capitalist country in Europe." I don’t remember when I last heard that word so used.