The Atmosphere of Dublin

Well, I've had a horrible day (which included sending three emails of complaint to different institutions), and it's a stiflingly hot night. Today was the hottest day of the year so far, apparently.

Therefore I'm going to blog to distract myself.

I said in my last blog post that my next post was going to be about Chesterton and atmosphere.

Except that I've already blogged about that. I thought maybe I had.

So now I'm going to blog about the atmosphere of Dublin. I spent all day in the city centre today, so it's a good day to do it.

Trigger warning. This blog post will contain poetry. I see no way around it. I'll try to keep the poetry short as I realize that everybody, except about five people, now hates poetry with a loathing beyond all measure. (Luckily, all five of those people either write or read this blog.)

First things first. I've never really been a proud Dub. Donagh MacDonagh's poem "Dublin Made Me" is a very fine poem indeed, but the attitude is completely foreign to me. Please don't stop reading, I'm only going to quote four lines:

Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements
The jobbers, the gombeenmen, and the cheats...

Since I was about fifteen and started developing my own personality, the idea of a "little town with the country closing in on its streets" seemed far more exciting to me than a capital city.

Also, if you didn't have a happy childhood and you are poetically inclined, it seems you are likely to hold it against the place you grew up. Like Kavanagh and Larkin.

But having said that...

I remember, when I was a teenager, becoming profoundly excited at the idea of O'Connell Street in Dublin, whenever I passed through it. Dublin was the capital of Ireland and O'Connell Street was the "capital" of Dublin. That thought excited me hugely. Furthermore, I liked to think of the angels on the O'Connell Monument as sentinels watching over the four provinces, their eyes penetrating to all the little towns and country roads and rocky islands.

(I think all main streets in capital cities should be a Big Deal, like a perpetual celebration, with balloons and bunting and all sorts.)

My father was a proud Dubliner. He's the biggest influence on me, but I never sympathized with his love of Dublin. Dublin was the least Irish part of Ireland, it seemed to me.

For instance, I could never get excited about Dublin winning or losing GAA games, except for a very brief period in 1993. The county has the biggest population in Ireland by far. It really didn't seem a big deal to win anything in that case. How could Dublin ever be the underdog?

Anyway, my father very often used to quote Louis MacNeice's poem "Dublin". How much of this poem can I get away with quoting? Just like MacNeice's other wonderwork, "Snow", "Dublin" seems to me a semi-miraculous poem, one of those feats by which language is pushed to express that which seems beyond expression. The Dublin he describes was gone when I grew up, but there was enough of it left for to me to know exactly what MacNeice was evoking:

Grey brick upon brick
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals –
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore –
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.

I swear to you that, in reading over these lines as I copied and pasted them, I got goose-pimples all over my flesh from my scalp to my toes. This is writing as magic. It's not just that MacNeice has correctly observed several disparate aspects of Dublin. It's that he's managed to convey an underlying aesthetic they create.

Nelson and his pillar were blown up eleven years before I was born, and I can't remember any brewery tugs. But the swans were (and are) still there, as were the fanlights over Georgian doorways, the sombre pedestals, the grey brick, the porter running from the taps (I was no strange to pubs even as a kid), and the soft air on the cheek. The gestalt has rather evaporated, though.

(In my teens I became convinced that footage of Dublin was literally more colourful than footage of other places because the most air heightened the colours. Nonsense, no doubt.)

As brilliant as that opening description is, the most brilliant moment of the poem, in my view, comes later:

But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalour,
The bravado of her talk.

"The glamour of her squalour, the bravado of her talk". Again; I know exactly what MacNeice is describing here, the sort of rhetorical extravagance which flourished in the inner-city tenements and which then migrated to the satellite suburbs in the forties, fifties and sixties. This is the world of gentleman tramps and pianos in tenements. It was something very real and very recognizable even in my childhood, although it's pretty much gone now. Even Dublin guttersnipes tended to be witty. (My favourite take-down was always "you dropped a triangle", when someone was swaggering, or "throwing shapes". This might have been a hyper-local usage as the only "hit" I can find for it on the internet...comes from a Ballymun page!)

Beloved Dublin eccentric "Bang Bang", who shot more people than anyone in Dublin history. Luckily he had no gun.

In the same way, "seedy elegance" isn't just a cheap paradox. It describes something very real and very definite.

I was a real prig as a child (and well beyond), so I disdained a lot Dublin idioms and usages because they weren't standard English. I shuddered every time someone pronounced "book" as "buke". It's taken me almost half a century to get over this.

I'm going to quote one more poem, OK? It's a sonnet. Fourteen lines. I know you can do it. Just hold your breath and jump in and I promise you it will be worth it.

This is a really obscure one, by an English guy called Osbert Lancaster who's more known as a cartoonist than a poet. If you know where Ctesiphon was you're smarter than I am. (It was in Iraq.)

The distant Seychelles are not so remote
Nor Ctesiphon so ultimately dead
As this damp square round which tired echoes float
Of something brilliant that George Moore once said:
Where, still, in pitch-pine snugs, pale poets quote
Verses rejected by the Bodley Head.
For in this drained aquarium no breeze
Deposits pollen from more fertile shores
Or kills the smell of long unopened drawers
That clings forever to these dripping trees.
Where Bloom once wandered, gross and ill-at-ease,
Twice-pensioned heroes of forgotten wars
With misplaced confidence demand applause
Shouting stale slogans over the Liffey quays.

Lancaster died at a good old age in 1986. I have no idea when he wrote this poem. However, it describes the Dublin of my childhood perfectly. (I'm talking about the city centre rather than the suburbs.) I think the last three lines are absolutely first-rate poetry, and they capture the sense of decay that characterized eighties Dublin perfectly. For once, my recollection isn't at odds with the general perception; do a quick Google search for something like "Dublin urban decay 1980s" and you'll see that.

Of course, I see something romantic about this now. I didn't at the time. Run-down buildings made me shudder.

Lancaster's poem, of course, isn't just talking about buildings. It brilliantly evokes the sense of cultural decay that was definitely there in my childhood. Everything Dublin claimed as its heritage belonged to a world that had disappeared, albeit recently. The new hadn't really replaced it yet. There was a sense of stasis.

But that's enough about the Dublin of my childhood. I'm going to try to go a bit deeper.

How about symbols of Dublin? The Molly Malone statue and the Millennium Spire are relatively new, so they don't work too well-- for me, at least. (The song Molly Malone is another matter. That's pure Dublin.)

The Ha'penny Bridge works magnificently because it's so distinctive, so easily stylized, and a visible part of the cityscape.

People talk a lot about Clery's clock, but the clock across the street at Eason's always made more of an impression for me. However, the name "Clery's" very much evokes Dublin for me, especially since it's impossible not to hear it in a Dublin accent. This is even more true of the clothes shop Guiney's.

For some reason, the very name "Laurence O'Toole" epitomizes Dublin for me. He is, of course, the patron saint of Dublin. But the truth is I know very little about him and I rarely hear his name used. If it's used at all, it's because of the various institutions named after him-- sports clubs and the like.

Another strange one-- the Pro-Cathedral seems quintessentially Dublin to me. I hated it as a child. My father used to take my brother and me into it to light a candle every now and again (probably not more than five times in all). It seemed dark, musty, reminiscent of death and mortality, haphazardly laid-out, and ramshackle. Now, of course, all these things appeal to me.

The G.P.O. was never really a symbol of Dublin for me, probably because of its national significance.

Stephen's Green was a symbol of Dublin. Again-- I hated it. I grew up hating parks and I've found it hard to shake this hatred. Perhaps because they are the opposite of wilderness. They always seemed very melancholy to me as a child. And most of the monuments in Stephen's Green pertained to the national struggle which was all about death, suffering, and sacrifice. Did the Irish have to be so morbid?

Well, the night has cooled a little bit and I'm sleepy. I'm going to post this without pictures and without a conclusion. (I've added pictures, since.) Perhaps I'll expand it another time. Perhaps I'll make a "part two". I don't know. It's hard to write about something that's been so close to you for so many years. I have a lot more to say.

There's one thing that I should add, and that I occasionally become aware of, walking around the city. For all my conflicted feelings about Dublin, the city centre has always had an underlying (very underlying) sense of something very hard to describe. Bliss? Ecstasy? Ultimate fulfilment? History creeped me out but it also pointed to something deep about the human condition, something just waiting for me to dive into. That's the best I can do, right now.

One more thing, added the next day: this blog post is mostly about the city centre. The northside suburbs are a whole different subject, and the southside suburbs a different subject still. Globalization, of course, is diluting everything in Ireland, especially in Dublin.