Midlife Irish (26 page)

If the West of Ireland seems like the nineteenth century, Dublin is right on the cutting edge of 2002. The population is a
million and a half, but I got the strange impression from talking to people in Dublin that everybody knows each other. Nobody
calls Dublin a “city.” It is a “town.” As in the rural parts of Ireland, the people were unfailingly friendly, and it is much
harder
not
to get into a conversation than it is to begin one. Dublin is by far the friendliest large city I ever experienced. I’m not
much of a world traveler, but Dublin seems friendlier than any large American city. Other Americans we met told us the same
thing. I have no theories about this.

Like New York, Dublin has the horribly poor and the abominably rich right next to each other. You can see serious-suit guys
with their cell phones glued to their ears, and they’re walking by buildings where you can make out wash-lines hung in the
rear.

Dublin circa 2002 is the epitome of a “boom town.”
Housing prices have gone up over 25 percent in the last year, and its economic growth rate stays about 8 percent. You can
almost feel it grow as you walk around, but it grows, like New York or a teenage boy, vertically, not horizontally.

A lot of places in Dublin have the juxtaposition of the old and the new. There are bars that look as if H. G. Wells and E.
M. Forster should be sitting at a corner table, but the second floor of the same building looks like
Clockwork Orange
with an Irish accent.

Many of the major streets in Dublin are the polar opposites of the roads in rural Ireland. They were the widest streets I’ve
ever seen. I couldn’t really tell you how many “lanes” of traffic there were. The moving cars are only rarely in a straight
line.

It’s a great city for strolling, but a better city for stopping completely. You can’t walk twenty-five feet without seeing
someone standing still or seated. Dublin is New York in the Bizarro world: I never saw anyone who was obviously in a hurry.

Even though it’s a huge city, it seems to invite you to take it easy. The park, Phoenix Park, is huge. It seems appropriate
that the largest area in the city is dedicated to nothing more serious than walking your dog. There are a lot of statues in
Dublin. I saw a tour guide with some tourists and I thought he was talking about statues. He was pointing at them, anyway.
I eavesdropped. He was talking about a statue of William of Orange that was exploded, melted down and rebuilt, and then exploded
again. William of Orange was not unique. The tour guide talked about many other statues of famous people that the Irish had
exploded.

Maeve Binchy has said that a good way to write a novel is to go Ireland, go into a pub, sit down, and listen. Dublin is probably
the best place to do this in Ireland. Some people would argue with that and say that the west is conversation central in Ireland,
but my vote goes to Dublin. The west is more charming, but in the “pub talk” category, I’ve got to
go with Dublin. I vote for Dublin because of the
range
of talk you can get there. If you look hard enough you can find almost any kind of conversation you like. The conversational
range is vast: from meandering tale to urban speed-talk. The way Irish people use English is always amazing, and compared
to a lot of American talk, it’s like listening to a guy come in and play something on the piano after you’ve listened to a
guy tuning it for an hour. If the English language were an electric guitar, Dublin is Jimi Hendrix. Most of America plays
on a Yanni album.

In Dublin pubs, the simplest sentences can become a tangled web of words. I spent a few years teaching high-school English
and, for me, Irish talk was an amazing experience. No subject-verb-object. No present or past tense. Questions are answered
by questions. Sometimes statements are questions. Everything has already happened, and we are recalling it or we’re pretending
we’re in the future and we are describing it. Are you after having read that? Is it the next sentence you’re after?

That may make it sound as if it’s difficult to understand (for a Yank). It isn’t at all. It does make you pay attention, though.
After having spent some time in Dublin I no longer think that James Joyce was a completely and utterly unique writer. He was
just really good at Irish.

I am, I think, the only member of the extended Gannon family who ever got paid for producing words, but I am, to be honest,
not in the top ten as a word producer, and I haven’t even met a lot of my extended family. I may be in the bottom of the top
hundred, but by that statement, I’m being nice to myself. Irish people naturally love words. I am the only one in the family
who ever wrote them, that’s all. I wouldn’t put a patch on an Irish writer’s ass, as my mom would say.

My childhood was surrounded by words. A whole bunch of weddings and get-togethers and wakes and what-have-yous. I grew up
in a big swirling ocean of words. They were
technically “English,” but in every way that matters they were Irish words, or at least “Irish-English.” There was an occasional
dip into Gaelic, but my mom and dad didn’t want us to know that language. It’s a cliché to say that Ireland has an “oral tradition,”
but it’s more than a tradition. Silence must be filled. I remember many long, crowded car rides where a “Pinteresque pause”
was, at the most, three seconds.

When I was little, very little, I was “the quiet one.” My mom told me that they would sometimes forget me because I was so
quiet. I was not quiet. I was just waiting for a break in the conversation.

My first memories are of this endless torrent of words. An unending spiel. Even when someone died, they would put the deceased
out there in his coffin, then they would talk to him anyway. The next day, they’d take him out and bury him. Then they’d go
back to the house and talk about him.

If they ever had a world competition for talk, Ireland would be a dominant nation. They would be like the Cuban boxing team
or the Russian weight lifters. When I brought Paulette home to “meet the family” there was an awkward period. This lasted
eight seconds.

In Ireland, no matter where we went, it was the same. We would walk into a pub, sit down, and in ten minutes, be into a deep
conversation about something. It could be trivial or profound, but it was, invariably endless. Talking in Ireland is breathing.
When you stop talking in Ireland, you are dead. Then they will no longer talk
to
you. They will talk
about
you. They will say many, many things about you. If you have led a truly exemplary life, “the life of a saint,” only half
of what they say will be bad.

You can’t spend time in Dublin without thinking of writers. We wandered into the staggering library of Trinity College and
looked at the long line of white marble busts in the great hall. You can’t avoid the writers. Many of them would
be shocked to see that they’ve made it to this room. When they were alive, Ireland sure wasn’t thrilled with them.

A Dubliner who taught at Trinity told me that some writers earn a greater honor than a place in the Trinity University library.
They have pubs named after them.

The Pubs of Dublin
would be a massive tome. More likely, it would be a multivolume set. Dublin is like a drinker’s heaven. The bars, as far
as I can tell, haven’t one single video game, and they all seem to have booths.

There are always a few old guys who are as serious about drinking as Elton John is about Lady Di. There are also several guys
who look like they belong somewhere near Fifty-seventh and Park. These groups never interact.

The sheer number of Fifty-seventh-and-Park guys is startling, as dense as downtown Manhattan at five in the afternoon. If
all the cell phones in Dublin went off at the same time it would destroy eardrums.

The whole Hermes tie-wearing set is also startlingly young in Dublin. Over half of the 1.5 million people look like they could
be in the Irish version of
Friends
. A lot of these guys work for American companies. Microsoft Europe is in Dublin, and Dell and Hewlett-Packard also have their
European bases there, but there are also monster home-grown computer firms: Iona and Trintech.

There are theories about why Ireland is so tech-friendly. I’ve read that the Celtic mind is naturally cyber-ready, but I’m
a walking argument that the Irish brain, even after prolonged exposure to American technology, is still quite dinosaurlike
in its resistance to high tech. But I am an old Irish guy. Among Dublin’s population I would be considered a pronounced elder.
Dublin’s silicon group looks like the senior class at Cal Tech.

Like every other place in Ireland, Dublin has some amazing churches, and these are much larger than the usual town church.
Among the most striking is St. Mary’s, with its soaring steeple looking down over Parnell Square. Even though
it’s a church, it looks threatening. It’s called “the Black Church.” That’s its color, but it also seems to describe its menacing
aspect. If they wanted to make the movie
The Irish Omen
, that would be a good place for something scary and terrible to happen.

It would be, for a guy like me, a nightmare to drive in Dublin. I would be an even-money bet to get lost every ten minutes.
Every street seems curved. We went for a two-hour walk. I strolled along thinking that Paulette was keeping track of where
we were going. I finally asked her. She said she thought I was keeping track.

We asked several people and we received very friendly but utterly incomprehensible directions. I have a hard time with directions
given in slow American English. In Irish English, I’d be better off reading the Rosetta Stone.

As we were wandering around half-lost reading street signs, I had a flash of recognition. I felt that somehow, I had seen
these street names before. When you are lost in Dublin, and you went to college, you are inevitably thinking of that big black
book that begins with that giant S…“Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan…”
Ulysses!
It was finally going to be of some use to me.

It is a good, but intimidating idea to read
Ulysses
before coming to Dublin. You can then walk along with the book’s characters and visit the same places Joyce immortalized
in the book. Joyce’s book is set on June 16, 1904. That is also Paulette’s birth date (month and day, not year). As I was
an English major, that explains my fascination with her.

I read Joyce’s book in college, and I remember it as being rare and among the only difficult-to-read books that were actually
worth the trouble. It’s hard going, but has some truly amazing and funny parts and is, in every sense, a real literary masterpiece.

Every June 16, Joyceans from around the world come to Dublin and live “Bloomsday.” They dress like Joyce (an easy Halloween
choice: eye patch, glasses, semi-Fu Manchu) or
one of the characters in the novel and, if they follow the book closely, end the day drunk. As you walk around Dublin you
notice “pavement plaques” that mark where things happened in the novel. One says, “He crossed at Nassau Street corner and
stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the field glasses.” As the game of Monopoly is to Atlantic City, so is
Ulysses
to Dublin.

It was not June 16 when we were in Dublin, so I missed out on the literary magical mystery tour. I also missed out on the
idea of using the novel as a directions device (I forgot too much). But we did visit the James Joyce Museum. It’s near Dun
Laughaire, walkable from anywhere in the city, and it’s worth visiting for anyone with any interest in Ireland’s most famous
exile.

The mere existence of the museum says something about Ireland’s “puzzle-the-world” contradictions. James Joyce was not, in
life, a big fan of Ireland. Joyce described Ireland as (among other unpleasant things) “a Sow that eats its own farrow.” If
so, it never quite digested him. He also supposedly rejected Ireland’s religion and even his own family. However, Ireland
is, of course, the thing he always wrote about, from
Dubliners
on. It is quite remarkable to consider
Ulysses’
effect on Irish tourism. How many dollars have all these English majors tossed in on their yearly pilgrimages?

If Joyce is still floating around up there it’s hard not to think that he would be astounded at the way things worked out.
Writer rejects his country. He writes a book about Dublin. The book is declared obscene. The book is finally published. The
“difficult” book becomes required reading in colleges everywhere in the English-speaking world. People who have read the book
come back in droves to visit and leave money in the rejected country. Enough irony there.

Joyce’s friend Oliver Gogarty felt that
Ulysses
became so big in America because Americans like crossword puzzles and detective stories and anagrams and smoke signals.

Whatever the reasons, no writer ever created a myth
around a city like Joyce, who said of his self-exile, “I go forth to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience
of my race.” For Joyce, the ultimate player with words, the word “forge,” with all of its meanings, couldn’t have been accidental.

Ulysses
is a great novel, but it’s no good as directions-finder in Dublin. We got in a cab and told the driver to take us to a big
American hotel. Hey, we were lost.

We woke up in a hotel in Dublin. It was our first non-B&B night, and it was a little strange. There were no religious artifacts
in the room, no holy water fonts, no crosses. There was a picture on the wall. The frame looked more interesting than the
picture in it. It looked a little bit like a Chagall and a little bit like a Picasso. It was color-coordinated with the wallpaper.
Our bed was huge and perfectly flat, the first perfectly flat bed we had slept in since we got to Ireland.

There was a huge dark brown piece of furniture with a large television in it. Across the room there was a minibar. Where the
hell were we?

I flipped on the television. CNN. Augh. I flipped it off.

I went over and looked out the window. Yes, it was Ireland all right. What now, room service?