From the Elephant's Back (37 page)

However, I swallowed my misgivings and took a plane which lofted me into the warm pearly sunlight of a precocious spring morning, high over the Irish Channel with its criss-crossed vortices of wind hither-and-thithering. Tilted up against the sky-ceiling we could look down upon the islands which lay about like cattle in a field, while the glittering sea flared back at the windows of the aircraft like a shield of bronze. Ireland slid towards us silently, looking somehow frail and vulnerable with its soft curves—not craggy and beetling like Scotland or Wales. We hovered, we circled, coming down lower and lower until at last the pilot made a short run in and rolled us towards the small compact building of the airport. Dublin Airport—its homely size gives one a premonition about the capital—perhaps even the secret of its charm, namely size, that vital key to living values. All the cities which haunt one are life-size, built to human scale. Once they grow beyond a certain size their cohesion gets swallowed up and it's no longer possible to be haunted by them in quite the same way. London and Paris have grown this way—out of affection and intimacy: one loves little pieces of them now, not the whole. But Edinburgh, Zagreb, Lucca, Geneva—it is still possible to centre a poetic obsession around them. A fine poetic city should be walkable across and should not have more than a quarter of a million inhabitants living in it. I felt Dublin would be this way, and it was.

Duffy was waiting for me, talking to a pretty Customs Officer in uniform; she had blue eyes and a cowslip complexion. I thanked him for his presence. “Nothing is too much for a friend one distrusts,” he replied, lighting up his pipe. Nobody could have minded his luggage being searched by such a girl but she simply smiled and waved us through, so that Duffy led me out into the blue-violet air of an Irish spring. He himself looked as if he had slept in his clothes, and he was rapturously unshaven—presumably because it was Ramadan. In the taxi he appeared to drowse as we sauntered and bumbled on our way. He had become very much stouter since last we had met, and when I commented on the fact he said it was a “phantom pregnancy,” whatever that might be—he had read about it in a woman's paper. Everything smelt marvellous out here: wet earth, glimmer of streams, larks rising from dewy ground. And Green! That was the code word—Irish green. I told him that the philosophic society of the University had invited me over to hear a paper read on my work and to take part in a discussion on it with the students.
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It had been a marvellous chance to visit the island and correct the impressions I had gathered from my readings. “Sinister impressions, about the Liffey running dark with Guinness, about Saturday night being folklore night, and so on.”
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Duffy puffed and wagged his head. “I fear that mostly your impressions are well founded. Why even the damned island is shaped like a diseased liver.”

The earliest impression one gets on the way into the city is one of amazement at the number and height of the television aerials. It's as if the people were dying of news-hunger, as if the houses were reaching up to drink the sky empty of information. Reception was bad, said the chauffeur, and now with the troubles on the northern border people wanted to get the English channels. He was a mine of essential information but I have forgotten most of the things he told me—all except one. He said that Guinness was not fattening if you drank enough of it. I made a mental note of the fact.

I was deposited at the old Shelbourne hotel,
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which appeared to have as many bars as bedrooms—comfortable old-fashioned bars with good service, where hunting men could gather round a tall glass in the intervals of riding to hounds. Here there was a good deal of damning of England's eyes—always a pleasant occupation—but not so much serious politics was talked. I had agreed to meet Duffy later in the day, and to deliver myself to the student representative who would meet me in the bar. This pleasant and serious young man, by name Richard Pine,
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was waiting for me already, and Duffy, who had a terror of intellectuals, fled with a murmured goodbye.

Pine and I shared a precious glass of smoky whiskey while we talked about the paper he was to read to the society that evening, and then when I had washed and brushed up, he took me for my first leisurely stroll about the city, up and down the little streets made world famous by the writers who have lavished their poetry on them. Was ever a city—apart perhaps from Paris—so beloved of its artists? The net result, of course, is that when one gets there one is continually shocked into surprised recognition of its features. One knows the place already. The streets wiggle and wander in real life as they do in Irish fiction. The worlds of Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, and Synge
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leap out at one in isolated vignettes, or merge into a spectrum of colours illustrated everywhere by that soft, bitter-sweet accent with its sensual lilt. One realises the charm and strength of intimacy. Why, running like a
leitmotiv
under the soft buzz of traffic, one hears the crying of seagulls as they hover over the main street. One is aware of the sea always and of the Liffey, which puffs and stumbles and bumps its way through the streets like some tiny locomotive. Grafton Street down to O'Connell was not a long way in miles, but it spanned centuries of Ireland's confused but magical history, and once one hit the river one was seduced along its quays towards venerable pubs like the Brazen Head
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where ragged gentlemen of the most absurd respectability wagered mind over porter in huge glasses full of the foaming ruby brew. One recalls E.M. Forster's advice to the visitor to Alexandria. “The best way to see the city is to walk about aimlessly,”
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he says. Same goes for Dublin. But your journey will be punctuated at every turn by a pub of charm. My hosts informed me that there were over a thousand places where one could drink—a large number for a population of six hundred thousand souls. Consequently, it is safe to say that that little puddle of soapsuds at the bottom of the Irish soul is composed of the “heads” of thousands of demolished Guinnesses.

But that night it was Trinity,
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and here I was received for dinner in Hall with the philosophic society whose members were all very young but conscious of forming part of a venerable tradition. The surroundings too—the Elizabethan college with its world famous library and its clattery courts of cobbles linking the lecture rooms and residences softly lit in the evening mist (a feeling of gaslight): the imposing backcloth of the place was a fitting match for the dignity and sobriety of my hosts. The great Hall with its portraits has been so often described and I will not attempt yet another picture. Two pretty blonde girls—scholars of the college—opened and closed the proceedings with a Latin grace. I felt relaxed and happy, surrounded by these young philosophers of Ireland. I recalled Hamilton of Trinity
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—practically the Einstein of his day—who so entranced Wordsworth by his conversation that the old poet became a firm friend of his. These younglings were fitting successors to that great man, who was still practically a babe in arms when he became Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. After dinner we retired for coffee before the lecture, and here my host disappeared for a moment to consult his notes.

It will be enough to say that young Pine's dismantling of my ideas and intentions was brilliantly done and was one of the best close-ups of the work—such as it is—I have heard. He was a skillful and persuasive lecturer, and not at all deaf to the ironies and comedies which form so large a part of my literary baggage. The hall filled up, and the philosophic proceedings which followed allowed everyone to fire an arrow into the target area which Pine had labelled “Sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation in the work of.” It was a treat to see with what interest and vivacity these young men and women skirted the minefields of modern ideas, and with what idealism they tackled our contemporary problems from permissiveness to pollution. The young today are touching in their concern; they are young and fresh of course, and not worn down to the lining as we old buffers are—disgusted at the behaviour of man after having lived out a long lifetime of wars and catastrophes and big disappointments. They are more idealistic than I was at their age, and I give them a sincere
chapeau
in the French sense. I can well understand why my daughters think I am a damned old reactionary corpse-watcher. It's just that I have run out of oxygen and adrenaline.

It was a fine Irish gift to me this evening with the students of Trinity, and it formed so to speak one leg of my Irish see-saw. While I was in Dublin I spent half my time with Richard and his friends, being guided and coaxed and instructed by (what better?) undergraduates with their sharp and special knowledge of ways and means and their
sang froid
which reminded me of my own student days. The energy one had! I doubt if I slept more than a few hours between my seventeenth and twenty-third year. As I remember too, I lived on beer and Smith's Potato Crisps with an occasional watered gin to make the mortar set.

The other leg of my see-saw was, of course, Duffy, who awaited me at strategic points, strategic pubs where he crouched against the bar in the attitude of a mental defective, and in between, in gulps of ruby beer, addressed himself to a fearful drink called Dog's Nose (invented by the Liverpool Irish). To watch this thing being made up before him was horrifying—all the customers including myself turned pale to the gums. Unless I am wrong, it is equal parts of gin, whiskey, rum, cognac, and Liffey water with a touch of lemon and an aspirin.
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I didn't dare to try it. I stayed with the ruby which was dense and powerful and kept me getting thinner and thinner or so I hoped devoutly. Thus gradually under the tutelage of these people I assembled my impressions of this charming and seductive capital. With the students I explored the river line with its fine landmarks—St. Paul's, or Four Courts, or the ravishing Customs House. Softly puffing ran the Liffey, softly whewing wheeled the gulls in the high grey air where snatches of blue showed through. The spring was hesitant, still hovering on the edge of snow.

Faithfully after every such outing my undergraduate hosts would deliver me to pubs like Mooney's or Kehoe's
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in South Anne Street where Duffy would be waiting with his hat pulled down over his nose like the original Informer, drawing softly on his pipe. “Sure 'tis the drinking keeps me in a state of candour,” he admitted. Yet it was with Duffy I enjoyed the life of the open street; he had no eye or feel for literature or architecture but he had the innate taste to take me to the open markets in Moore and Thomas Streets where fruit and vegetables are sold to a background of scabrous back-chat worthy of Aristophanes. At every street corner practically he would introduce me to large fully-fashioned and loquacious bodies selling flowers from dilapidated prams. Whether they made any money is questionable as they seemed always ready to give away their stock to passers-by. Duffy never failed to earn a button-hole as he passed, exchanging growls of welcome and warm shoulder-thumps with these steatopygous
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mamas. When he did not know their names he called them “Mrs. O,”
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which is apparently the usual form of address when such a case arises. With Duffy I walked the slums as well as the docks. We went right down to the harbour mouth one day to a pub he wished to revisit for sentimental reasons. The girl behind the bar used to be “kind as a Christian to him.” But, alas, she had gone and nobody knew where, and the bar was full of rowdy French fishermen whose trawler had just put into harbour for refitting. They were huge crumbling men with the strong accents of Brittany. Nor need I fear to add that it was with Duffy that we made a deeply reverent visit to the giant Guinness factory on the southern bank of the river—probably the greatest religious edifice in the country, speaking purely in the anthropological sense. Even Duffy, for whom nothing was sacred, lowered his voice when he spoke of it. He almost took off his hat and genuflected when we entered the gates for the grand tour of the place. For miles around spreads the rich thick smell of heated barley. Like grave scientists we enrolled ourselves for the guided tour which we knew would entail a great deal of free sipping, tasting, and perhaps at the end (if our control broke loose) actually paddling in the stuff. There were about a dozen other tourists full of scientific curiosity like ourselves. Inevitably after this protracted tour we hit the evening air again and felt everything bending backwards. There was nothing for it but to rush down to O'Connell Street and restore the equilibrium of the universe with a more pointed drink—like Jameson's brown whiskey in small compact doses. But what happy memories of the factory I would take away with me! If ever I had to write about Ireland I would write a long mood-piece redolent of blarney, barley, and silky blackness: of Guinness, God, and whatever else begins with a G.

It was singular, too, how little time and thought people spent on the troubles in the black north; the situation went up and down like the temperature of a fevered patient. But in between its high points it could fall to sub-normal. One cheerful undergraduate spoke of an inevitable civil war. But there had been a long lull in the north and the mercuric Irish temperament could not sustain a high pitch of feeling unless it was perpetually being fed by bloody incidents. Thoughts turned elsewhere. Duffy admitted that everyone was behaving like cannibals. Nevertheless, he added, since the troubles began the suicide rate had dropped to zero. It was confusing, these sudden outbursts of blind hate followed by long sunny Guinness-golden periods when the troubles didn't seem to exist. For the sake of the record I note that we were ten days off the Londonderry incident when Dublin retaliated by burning down the Embassy in Merrion Square.
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