PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Just a day or so before heading across the pond for Dublin, I found a photograph of myself from a visit to Ireland in 1987—“Exhibit A” supporting my longstanding claim that I didn’t have a gray hair on my head before I became the father of three daughters.

That photo may not be a fair gauge of change for this visit . . . but inevitably I have been tuning in to various other measures. One that struck me particularly on my last couple of nights is the proliferation of taxis. Last night—my last night in Dublin, spent happily in the company of my friends Fionán and Paula and their fine children Oisín and Laoise—I needed less than 15 seconds to flag down a cab in the northside community of Drumcondra. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much to say that close to 50% of the cars driving the streets of Dublin at 1:00 in the morning were taxis. Chatting with the driver on the way back to the Burlington Hotel, I learned that this radical change came about partly because of an intense enforcement of drunk driving laws in Ireland and partly because of a deregulation of the taxi industry, which allowed pretty much every man and his dog to buy a hackney medallion and get into the business.

Another gauge, of course, is the gradual disappearance of various Dublin landmarks with literary associations—especially Joycean associations. One that I happened to notice whose days are numbered is the Ormond Hotel, site of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses . . . and until recently site of the “Sirens Bar” as well. It is now shuttered and up for sale: I imagine the wrecker’s ball and the developer’s dream will give an entirely new face to that old Liffey quay.

But some things also remain the same—including Bewley’s Café as an essential place to grab a bite to eat and a restorative cup of tea or coffee. There used to be a number of Bewley’s locations in Dublin—there are fewer now and the only one that I visited is on Grafton Street. I had a great lunch there on Saturday with my old friend Robert Duffy, who drove up from Hacketstown, Co. Carlow for the afternoon. Robert and I go all the way back to 1977 and have managed to keep our connections alive over the years by get-togethers on both sides of the pond—in Indiana, in Boston, in Carlow. But we hadn’t seen each other since 1998, so it was great to get caught up on personal, familial, professional, and writerly matters: just before I left for Ireland I read about halfway through Jack in the Box, an engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in small-town Ireland, that Robert published a year or so ago. . . . After Bewley’s, just to punctuate—or “christen”—the reunion properly, we decided to grab a pint at one of Dublin’s true landmark pubs, McDaid’s. Associated with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, among many other writers of “Bohemian Dublin” of the 1950s, it is a grand place to raise a toast to “the good auld days.” But as one more measure of change, right across the street from McDaid’s, in front of the Bruxelles nightclub, stands a larger-than-life-sized statue of the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy that rocked the charts back in my student days in Dublin in the late ’70s. It seemed apt that Robert and I pose for a shot with the man who sang on the hit single “The Boys Are Back in Town”!

CANAL BANK WALK

“O commemorate me where there is water,” poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.” Well, as the photograph affirms, he got his wish in the form of a statue of himself sitting on a bench situated at the side of Grand Canal. I wonder if I earned my own canal-side commemoration after all my walking along its banks today, perhaps my unintentional affirmation of another of Kavanagh’s well-known poems, “Canal Bank Walk”: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” That long, long walk—from Kilmainham back to Ballsbridge (I don’t even know how many miles)—was what linked the two major events of my day.

The first event was a cuppa java with Mary O’Donoghue, an old poet-friend from Boston who has just had her first novel, Before the House Burns, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press. It’s a beautiful-looking book which I will sit down with when I get back to Boston. She launched it in Galway a week or so ago. I had hoped that she might be launching in Dublin too while I’m here, but no such luck. Back home in County Clare for the summer, Mary just happened to be in Dublin for the day, coming in by train from Galway. We had a nice catch-up at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And then we walked a few blocks over to catch up with another Boston-based poet-friend, County Monaghan-born Aidan Rooney. Aidan knew he would be seeing Mary, but he did not expect to see me “out of context”! It was great to spend a few minutes with the two of them . . .

Then I set off to do some wandering around Dublin. I had no specific plan beyond simply absorbing the sights and the sounds (and the smells, too) of the city. But I guess I did more than wander—I just kept on going, following streets rather than a map . . . and eventually I realized that I was headed toward the infamous Kilmainham Gaol. Dating back to the late 18th century, this prison housed not only the full range of criminals—from debtors and petty thieves to ruthless murderers—but also many of the major figures of Ireland’s struggle for political autonomy—from Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell at either end of the 19th century to the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markiewicz), fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad in the stone-breaking yard within the prison walls. The prison was decommissioned in 1924 then stood in disrepair until the mid-1980s, when it was restored and opened as a museum of—and a monument to—the Irish nationalist cause. Obviously, the conditions under which the prisoners lived were horrendous. I found my visit to Kilmainham to be very moving and very thought-provoking about what certain individuals will do—and also what they will endure—for love of their country.

Leaving Kilmainham, I followed my nose for water and found the Grand Canal, which I knew would lead me back within a block of my hotel. At least an hour later . . . I got back just in time to freshen up and head into Merrion Square—specifically to O’Connell House, the Dublin home to the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies. (In the 19th century, the building was the home of legendary nationalist Daniel O’Connell—the Liberator.) I had gotten wind that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney would be giving a private reading there this evening, for participants in the Notre Dame Irish Seminar. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Center director Kevin Whelan and from ND Irish-language professor Breen Ó Conchubhair when I arrived on their doorstep: I’ve known both of them for years . . . but hadn’t seen either of them for years, so the friendly greeting from each of them was no small part of the evening’s pleasure.

But the larger part of the evening’s pleasure was, of course, Heaney’s reading. I have heard him read perhaps 8 or 10 times, dating back to 1981. This reading was particularly enriching—and enlightening—as he pre-viewed a number of new poems from his collection Human Chain, due out in September. He also read a number of poems that recognized the presence in the audience of his longtime friend and long-ago (early 1950s) classmate at St. Columb’s College in Derry, Professor Seamus Deane. For my money the preeminent scholar of Irish literature, Deane is also a fine poet and the author of the staggeringly powerful novel Reading in the Dark (which I have taught on a couple of occasions). After the reading there was the usual milling about, in the midst of which I managed to have a nice conversation with each of the Seamuses. Like Kevin and Breen, they were very welcoming of my being there.

On my way back to the Burlington Hotel, I walked along the Grand Canal again. Passing Kavanagh’s statue, I wondered if even that notoriously cantankerous man-about-town might have enjoyed some of the company I kept during this long and winding day.