Dublin Read online

  Dublin

  A Portrait

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Foreword

  When I look back on my early life as a writer, I see what a great debt I owe to the Irish short story writers of this century. The debt goes back to 1922. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had been signed, the Civil War had started. As a twenty-one-year-old journalist I was sent to report on the response of ordinary people to their situation as one of the first newborn states in Europe. I soon found myself in a marvellously eloquent city, listening to Yeats and AE, and I revelled in the Abbey Theatre. Never can an aspiring writer have been more indulgently welcomed. I stayed for two years and in this time the gifted younger writers were teaching me their art. I often returned and in 1967 I stayed for many months and wrote Dublin: A Portrait.

  I

  Dublin as it is; Dublin as it was. I must declare my interest. It is very personal. If I were to write an account of my education the city of Dublin would have to appear as one of my schoolmasters, a shabby, taunting, careless, half-laughing reactionary. His subject? History, of course. I did in fact have such an Irish master at my London school. His name was Callaghan; he glittered with mocking amusement during school prayers and was famous for his tempers, his personal disasters and his scorn. After reading something I had written, he delighted himself and our class by demonstrating to all of us, and with exact command of language, that I was raving mad. When I first came to Dublin, he was often in my mind.

  This was in January 1923 when I crossed the Irish Channel as a very young journalist to write about the Civil War. I spent two separate years there, with a long interval between in Spain. I had been living in Paris and arrived in Dublin innocently wearing a broad-brimmed green velour hat and a trench coat: if you add a revolver, I was the very picture—only less dismal—of that gunman whose statue adds nothing to the aesthetic attractions of Athlone. My equipment was quickly stolen from me by protective friends. At Westland Row I stepped out into the sleet, and into the smell of horse manure that was the general smell of Dublin in those days and drove by outside car to an hotel in Harcourt Street. It was, to my astonishment, a temperance hotel. The jarvey, who was drunkish, whipped up his fast little pony and delivered a long speech full of Bedads, Begobs, and Please Gods and with asides about the terrible state of ‘the unfortunate country’ as we drove; he turned out to be a Cockney. Dubliners and Cockneys have a cheerful taste for disguise, and a common adenoidal quality in their vowels.

  The worst of the Civil War was over in Dublin but one was frequently stopped by military patrols in the street and searched for arms; there were raids by lorry loads of troops in the night. There were occasional rifle shots. One explosion brought the soot down the chimney of my room—and comments from the chambermaid. But the war had moved to the south-west and after a while I followed it there, spending my evenings with commercial travellers who paid no attention to the Troubles, in going to hear an English Shakespeare company who were playing to packed houses in Cork and other places. The line in Hamlet saying that everyone in England was mad—thereby confirming my schoolmaster—was wildly cheered.

  My first Irish friends were boundlessly hospitable, of course, but they pointed out to me that I belonged to a fleshly, materialist, sensual nation given to sex, the love of money and over-eating. This could have been true for I have met the same remark in Aarland Ussher’s The Face and Mind of Ireland; but I must point out that Dublin was then, and still is, a city where very fat, black-haired, red-faced men abound, men as soft and plump as tenors in training. This is said to be due to a diet of Guinness and Dublin’s excellent bread. For myself, in two years of Ireland, I faded away to wanness in that languid climate and was rarely able to get up before eleven in the morning. I became sensitive, snobbish and fey: this was much noticed when eventually I returned to England. I was even to come across a Quaker ex-Auxiliary who had settled down with an Irish Catholic girl in Tipperary—a county he had probably terrorised a couple of years before—who had the same characteristics. Something odd happens to the English in Ireland. And to the Irish in England: my schoolmaster, who was an Irish Catholic, denied he was either Irish or Catholic when we attacked him about his politics.

  My knowledge of history was small—in any case I am inclined to believe poets and imaginative writers rather than historians—but what there was, I soon discovered, was disadvantageous. My family were firm Manchester Guardian liberals and Home Rulers. That condemned me from the start. My grandfather thought Gladstone was God and some historians have malignly suggested he probably was. Such views appealed to no one in a country which is innately illiberal where, as in Scotland, there is more feeling for the Devil than for the Almighty. My next disadvantage was that as a child in 1912 I had taken part in a small suburban concert in our part of London, a concert run by local Fabians, in order to collect money on behalf of Jim Larkin’s dock strike, the strike that brought James Connolly’s labour movement into the Easter Rising; this involuntary precocity on my part was more sensible than I could know. I had also listened to Percy French’s anecdotes and songs at school; and in 1923 Percy French was ‘out’, just as Somerville and Ross were. (I was delighted to hear this year in Dublin that they are ‘in’ again; the imaginary, synthetic Gaelic Irishman appears to be fading.) Finally, an Irish stationer in Streatham gave me a copy of McCabe’s Priests and People in Ireland, warmly urging me to conceal it and never to get into a religious or political argument. My only useful equipment was a heavy suitcase full of books by Yeats, AE, Synge, Lady Gregory, James Stephens and others. These were moderately approved of by the startled Free State soldiers who once or twice came barging into my room on some raid or other at three in the morning. One, I recall, stopped to read a poem.

  They were nasty times, often comical, often horrible. Dublin had had a terrible six years since the Rising: the ‘war’ was degenerating into gangsterism. The politicals were suffering from strain and many were out of their minds. The public was, quite rightly, weary of the business, just as in Europe people were sick of the 1914 war and its aftermath. Harsh and obstructive as the British had been, the liberated Irish were colder and harsher to one another, as Lord Birkenhead had predicted they would be. There was jealousy among the leaders. The scale though not the savagery of the Troubles was greatly exaggerated; every week houses were burned down—thirty-seven country houses, some of them very fine—or robbed, and people were murdered or killed in action, the word varying with your politics. There was continual talk of ‘principle’ but, in fact, personal jealousy and vengeance were at the bottom of these actions which have left a deep bitterness that lasts among the survivors of my generation and my few elders to this day. In Dublin nowadays, if you ask about this crime or that, the memory has to be avoided; it is invariably described as ‘a mistake’.

  O’Connell Street was still largely in ruins. It had been one of the finest streets in Europe; and on the rubble, some of the fanatical women fighters of the time would scream at their tiny audiences. There were processions—and Dublin is a processional city—appealing for the release of the political prisoners. Among them Frank O’Connor, later a dear friend of mine, and I regret to say that at that time I could not have sympathised with him. There would be occasional days when in St Stephen’s Green you would notice two’s and threes of men, armed with heavy sticks, gradually moving across the city until by the time they got to O’Connell Bridge they turned into threatening hundreds. The government buildings were surrounded by sand bags and barbed wire. In the Dail the new government, led by the clever and dogged little Cosgrave, was young a
nd astonished people by its political aptitude. Cosgrave stood out because of his experience of government, his quick humour and his courage. He was the perfect exemplar, in that period, of the ordinary man suddenly elevated to high office, who had the inborn moral character that is required for rule. It was a delight to hear this little fighter with the gay brushed-up hair, in debate. I remember O’Higgins’s blistering tongue and also his gravity. Astonishing that a man so young should have been so formed and so fit for the demands of revolution and government. Ireland will never give him a statue.

  The English had expected a circus; but in fact, in the most serious sense, the Irish had created a Parliament. It was the one hopeful thing in a city torn by private rancour underneath the surface; though outwardly the old Edwardian life still went on. Poor women still wore the black shawl, there were hundreds of barefooted children, the jarveys were drunk more often than not; one heard derelict ballad singers in the streets. You were addressed as ‘Your honour’ by beggars and ‘Whatever you say yourself’ seemed to be the answer to every question. The symbol of Dublin’s Edwardian ease was that eternal, giant policeman who used to direct the traffic at the bottom of Grafton Street and who had inspired one of James Stephens’s novels. A lady jay-walker whom I knew nipped through the traffic one day and stood by him, saying ‘I think it will be safer if I stand with you in the middle’. To this the giant replied ‘And with me, ma’am, you’ll only be middling safe’. That described the sensation one had in Dublin. You picnicked in the Dublin mountains, but you passed the rough wooden cross—as it was then—that marked the place where Lemass, the brother of the present Taoiseach or Prime Minister, was ‘killed in action’ or ‘murdered’. Walking home to my lodgings in Waterloo Road one summer evening, I collided with a young man who came hurrying round the corner and who put a revolver in my stomach. ‘Sorry’, he said and ran away. It was an instance, I suppose, of Dublin playing up.

  For myself, these sights, words and experiences were strange and at first exhilarating, and Dublin captivates, in any case, by the purity and languor of its air and the beauty of its situation. The English, as distinct from the English State, have rarely been disliked in Ireland (the Black and Tans represented the English State); as for the troops, most Irishmen love a soldier even if they kill him. The Scots, the Welsh and the English and the Irish, those cantankerous and mixed races that have been maliciously forced to share these islands and have colonised widely in order to get away from their quarrel, have learned to mock one another. The Irish Troubles were, in an important sense, a continuation of the European revolution caused by the European war: the two parties in Ireland who were uniquely aware of this were the urban workers and the Anglo-Irish, both of which have come poorly out of the struggle and both of which were more European than they were patriots. But a class revolution had taken place and the Anglo-Irish who left in tens of thousands, and who shook their fists at the Dublin mountains as the mail boat took them out of Dunleary, knew this. The strangeness of the Irish situation lay in its contradictions. One was taken back thirty to fifty years into the domestic scenes of a Victorian novel, into unbelievable gentilities and snobberies. People had tea parties. They lived on cake. One was back in Mrs Gaskell’s country world; and at the same time was thrown forward into the first conflict of colonialism, as my friend Sean O’Faolain says in his autobiography, a foretaste of events in India, Cyprus and Africa. One was being pushed out of purely Irish history into the modern world of small, young, emancipated states which would have to make their minds up about nationalism and social revolution. Ireland dodged the issue by creating a Catholic middle class; but its present situation does not differ greatly from those of the Eastern European satellites in 1945. ‘Ould Ireland’ had vanished. Ireland was now young and new and was to become alarmingly on its own and to lose the importance, as a state, to which the great gifts of its scattered people had entitled it. It began its new existence as a gamble; fortunately that is irresistible to Irish people, who move easily from torpor to recklessness.

  ‘You cannot conquer Ireland, you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom’, Pearse had said.

  The gamble, in this century, began in the Easter Rising in 1916, the tragic, muddled fiasco that was to turn into a triumph because it created heroes and martyrs. It was followed by the guerilla war against the British. The scene in central Dublin at Easter 1916 has been compared to Ypres in the same year, and Dublin had the distinction of being the first capital city in Europe to be wrecked by war in this century. The fact contains a temptation to exaggerate; the losses after the Easter Rising have been put at 1,351 people killed or wounded and about 170 houses destroyed. As I have said, whether Dubliners knew it or not, Dublin was having its share of the European revolution of those years; one man, James Connolly, knew it. He was a social revolutionary. The other leaders of the Rising belonged to the ‘physical force’ traditions of the Irish struggle; they had seized control of Sinn Fein, whose policy was the pacific wearing away of lazy British rule. Once Ulster, backed by British Tories, had raised their armed Volunteers in the north, the raising and arming of Volunteers in the south was inevitable. And, as before in Irish history, there was the attempt (always a failure) to get in foreign aid. The lesson seems to be the paradoxical one that in Ireland’s isolated position, the enemy was more reliable than the so-called allies—he was at any rate there to fight and beat.

  In an article in the Daily Telegraph of Easter Monday, fifty years later, Terence de Vere White makes an important point about the Rising when he says:

  There were two elements in the Rising—poetry and poverty. It is the poetry that, in a desperate and dotty way, has survived.

  Had Connolly, as he was prepared and determined to, made his own protest in arms on behalf of the Dublin slum dwellers, the horror of whose conditions had been exposed in 1913, his effort would have been able to show, after the October Revolution in Russia, that Ireland had narrowly escaped Bolshevism. Without Pearse and his friends a Rising would have been smaller, more quickly suppressed and, in the long run, unavailing.

  From 1912 onward it was a common sight to see uniformed and armed Volunteers parading and even conducting manoeuvres in the streets. There had more than once been mock attacks on the Post Office which the public took as a regular part of city entertainment, Dublin streets being notably full of life. After the dock strike in 1912 when Connolly formed his ‘workers’ army’, one could see ragged, barefooted children marching up and down with sticks on their shoulders, copying their elders. The British, gripped by the German struggle, were anxious not to provoke the Irish after 1914, and did little or nothing to interfere. If rebellion was in the air, they relied on an extremely efficient espionage and code-breaking system which would enable them to pounce on the leaders if things became dangerous. And Irish rebellions have been notoriously amateur and subject to disunity. The British knew in detail of Casement’s venture. But their officials failed to make up their minds quickly enough about the pouncing; and, on the Irish side, there was muddle. The Rising was countermanded; but Pearse and Connolly went through with it, knowing their gesture was suicidal. The number of Volunteers collected on the famous day was small compared with the total number of the movement. This makes their effort all the more remarkable.

  The story has often been told. The British troops (a large number of new recruits, for the seasoned soldiers were fighting in France alongside Irish regiments) were scarce on the Easter Morning. As many as could had gone off to the Fairyhouse races; so that in fact the key point of the Castle was left with little more than a corporal’s guard. The small band of Volunteers who shot the sentry and tied up the guard had no idea that the place was empty; awed by their achievement they retired to positions in a neighbouring newspaper office and lost an enormous chance. The Post Office was easily occupied. A detachment walked into the vast hall, where a memorial to the Rising now stands, frightened off the clerks and, catching a British officer who had gone in to send a telegram
or buy a postal order, locked him up in a telephone box outside. From this he had a ringside view. Then outside the Post Office, Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic in words that take one back to Wolfe Tone and the ideals of the French Revolution—ideals which have a limited appeal to the Irish public, as later writers often remind us. Even so, the moment was a fine one; no criticism can dim it and it reminds one of how long Dublin remained an 18th-century city. For many hours, half-empty Dublin was dazed by the lazy spring morning; but soon the barricades were going up, British troops were hurriedly brought in and then house-to-house street fighting and artillery bombardment began. At Boland’s Mills near Ballsbridge, de Valera held out. He has been reproached for failing to relieve the hard-pressed insurgents who in the ‘Battle of Mount Street’ kept a whole English battalion pinned down but he cleverly deceived the gunners of the Helga who were shelling the city. One could go on with the frightening struggle in the corridors and wards of the Nurses’ Home.

  Presently O’Connell Street was on fire. Regular troops, especially in those days, were at a great disadvantage in this kind of fighting; a relatively few Volunteers could hold down a company. The fighting became a horrible affair of breaking into houses, moving from corridor to corridor. There were snipers on church towers. At Portobello, an Irish officer serving with the British went mad and started executing prisoners in cold blood. Among those he murdered was Skeffington, James Joyce’s pacifist friend, who had gone out to try and stop the fighting and rescue the wounded. The Countess Markievicz, retreating from St Stephen’s Green to the College of Surgeons, and with the ferocity of the women who engaged in the struggle then and in the Civil War, asked where the knives were for hand-to-hand fighting. The bodies of men, women and children were lying in streets and gardens. When the insurgents were unable to hold Linenhall Barracks any longer they sloshed drums of oil and paint in one of the rooms and set the place on fire. Terrible things and odd things occurred: when Bridewell Police Station was taken—according to Max Caulfield’s excellent narrative—twenty-four policemen were found hiding in the cells.