This was a public stage, the importance of which Morash prefigures with the coffee house and pamphleteering publishers surrounding Smock Alley Theatre in the western end of Temple Bar.
You might, however, manage a small newspaper column while sitting at the bar – pub conversations fuelled much copy and the national conversation beyond. Talents like McGahern and Austin Clarke went home to their desks, while visitors like Berryman and JP Donleavy confused alcohol with art and jumped right in. These were, as Morash describes it, “hostile assemblies of individualists united by stout”. Their interest in chaos was also an avoidance of humiliation, both social and sexual. The pub scene was refreshed by men arriving from the country, whose sometime misogyny was further inflamed by an outsider’s animus against the Dublin middle classes. “Once you get a glimpse of the world of the Women Writers’ Club,” writes Morash, “their absence from the memoirs of literary Dublin becomes all the more remarkable.” Its members included the much loved children’s author Patricia Lynch and playwright Teresa Deevy, who visited with Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press and partied with Jack B Yeats.
In the Shelbourne and the Gresham we see Bowen and Kate O’Brien honoured by the Women Writers’ Club, a group which met monthly to celebrate books and to battle censorship.
There are so many different ghosts here, fictional and real so many different ways, in this part of town, to be dead. Sitting beside the canal we find not just Kavanagh, but also Beckett visiting his mother in her last days – or is it his character Krapp? – waiting on a bench for the blind on her window to be pulled down. Christopher Morash’s fine update on literary Dublin may begin with McDaid’s, but it soon moves beyond the powerful myth of the drinking writer made and mourned by Anthony Cronin in his book Dead As Doornails.Įchoing through the streets of “Baggotonia” are the well-shod footstep of Elizabeth Bowen, who was born at 15 Herbert Place. It used to be said that some people give directions by way of the pubs and some by way of the churches, and for too long, perhaps, the literary map of Ireland has been a pub crawl.
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