BOOKS
Preserved•
by poverty
Conn Welch
DUBLIN: A TRAVELLERS' COMPANION selected and introduced by Thomas and Valerie Pakenham
Constable, £14.95, pp.342
Some citizens seem strangely blind to the beauties of their own cities. Forty years ago I complimented Glaswegians on the sober grandeur of Glasgow architecture. `Och,' they would scoff, 'it's a tayribble old dump. Come back in 20 years, and ye'll have something to luik at.' I did come back in 20 years, and the vandalistic devastation was appalling, though not so bad as I'd feared, and it's stopped now. Some of Calcutta's citizens too are painfully aware of the prevalent filth, squalor and misery, some are not. Very few have eyes for the creamy, crumbling Georgian splendours of 'the city of palaces', rising round its vast and hazy Maidan. And Dubliners — it would be wrong to say they hate their wondrously beautiful city, but haven't they treated parts of it with callous disrespect? Aren't some of them still baffled when people like the Pakenhams bewail what has been done, say, by the Irish Electricity Supply Board office block to 36 lovely houses in Fitzwilliam Street? It makes us rage, till we ruefully recall what, say, London University has done to Blooms- bury. We are all guilty. . .
Dubliners don't or didn't want to live in the 18th century. They want or wanted a modern capital. Far more beautiful build- ings were destroyed by the planners and developers in the Fifties and Sixties than ever were in the Easter Rising and its consequent `crossnesses'. A miracle, according to the Pakenhams, was needed to save Dublin. Is it now, they ask, not without hope, taking place? The money runs out. The vandals' party is over. What but relative poverty protected Georgian Dublin from the Victorians, who had no time for it? The destructive tide recedes. Eyes are opening. A new pride in what remains spreads even to those who did not mourn what has gone. One thing apart from fine architecture Dublin has in common with Calcutta (and one more thing they perhaps should have In common: their own book in this admir- able Travellers' Companion series. Delhi and Agra already have one, along with St Petersburg, Moscow, Naples, Edinburgh, Florence, Istanbul and Vienna). Both are in great part alien cities, designed and built by foreigners, imposed by a conqueror on a subject race; which race floods in mostly at the bottom, living and teeming there large- ly in unimaginable poverty and misery amidst and around, under and between unimaginable splendours; taking over the noble squares and streets of the Ascendan- cy only as they fall abandoned into ruin and decay. It would be silly to expect this enforced inheritance to be valued as much as whatever the unintended beneficiary has done for himself. The Mick of legend had on his walls the Virgin, a patriot or two, a mountainy cabin with peat smoke rather than an engraving of the Englishman Gan- don's Custom House.
The Pakenhams' rich anthology cannot but help the saving miracle on its way. Every part of Dublin has its history, its moments of shame and glory, of tragedy and comedy, here recalled by contempor- ary witnesses, often describing the same scenes and events from quite different but complementary points of view, and by many well-chosen pictures, all, alas, in black and white. One cavil, perhaps un- just: there is much laughter in these pages, but is there quite enough? Surely funnier things have happened in Trinity College, and funnier things been said by its great Provost Mahaffy, than are here recorded? No Myles na Gopaleen or Somerville and Ross, no Honor Tracy, no Con FitzGibbon or Arland Ussher or J. P. Donleavy or Patrick Campbell, not enough Gogarty or Joyce (though Charles Lever and Thack- eray are present in force and most wel- come), not much about University Col- lege. Many of the omissions are due to the Pakenhams' sad decision to stop in 1916. They themselves describe their pain at having to exclude so much. We owe them sympathy as well as gratitude for the riches we've got.
Of the amazing contrasts between the Ascendancy and the gurrier life swirling below their book gives many vivid impress- ions. Gurrier, the Dublin equivalent of our cockney; I only learnt recently what I should have guessed, that it derives from guerrier. And what fights they actually had, what Donnybrooks, what feuds and brawls, with a thousand or more involved, all shops barred, business suspended, peaceable citizens trembling behind locked doors, stones and other missiles flying in all directions, terminating sometimes in ghast- ly excesses. In the late 18th century the butchers cut the tendons of their adversar- ies' legs, rendering them lame for life. In revenge the butchers were hung by the jaws from their own meat hooks. The Ascendancy fled, watched with horror — or joined in! Brawling Trinity lads were hung by the butchers, but only by the waistbands of their breeches: far worse had been expected by their belated rescuers. The disorders, fully covered in these pages, which later greeted Synge's Playboy did not arise in an otherwise invariably peace- ful city.
Contrasts: a clergyman surveys the Liberties in 1798. He finds frequently, in one room not 15 feet square, up to 16 fever-stricken people, of all ages and sexes, stretched on wads of filthy straw, swarming with vermin, with no covering save wretch- ed rags. Jettisoned ordure rises oozing and stinking nearly to first-floor windows. In one house he is interrupted by an inunda- tion of putrid blood, alive with maggots, from an adjacent slaughteryard, which bursts the back door and floods the hall to a depth of several inches. Torrents of water pour from the shattered roof down through every floor. The 37 inhabitants wade with- out concern through the filth, insensible to the unbearable stench. (People who de- nounce the horrors of the industrial revolu- tion often forget the horrors that preceded it.) Amidst such dire surroundings rose Dublin's two great Norman cathedrals. A few streets away rose the Palladian Parlia- ment House of the day, Leinster House, its successor, and Trinity College. Nearby spread spacious St Stephen's Green. A Malton engraving of the Beaux' Walk there shows supremely elegant Dubliners taking the air and gracefully greeting each other, for all the world as if they were about to embark for Cythera.
Perhaps the elegance was a bit over- done: like Watteau, MaIton was not on oath. At a Castle ball, admittedly 65 years earlier, after the minuets the doors of the supper room were flung open: `the hurly burly is not to be described: squalling, shrieking, all sorts of noises; some ladies lost their lappets, others were trod upon. Poor Lady Santry almost lost her breath in the scuffle. .' At the Lord Lieutenant's dinner a little later, in the fight for food, a woman seized a large custard pie and dropped it all over a bishop. For such scenes a Rowlandson rather than a Wat- teau is required.
An English tourist admires the nearly completed Four Courts in 1799: 'I was astonished by the elegance of its exterior, exhibiting all the embellishments which architectural and sculptural science can bestow. . . [Within] I began to fancy myself in one of those fairy palaces which some romance-writers have described.' The spell is soon broken: 'My olfactory nozzle was assailed by the horrid stench which arises from the Liffey (the cloaca maxima of Dublin); my auditory nerves were assaulted with the clamorous impor- tunities of a crowd of beggars.' Another contrast not to be over-emphasised: no doubt the Thames stank too when Somer- set House was built by Gandon's master, Chambers. For us the most poignant con- trast is between then and now. When last did a great public building arise amidst universal admiration to spontaneous ap- plause? Could anyone not drunk enter the Dublin Electricity Supply Board and think he was in a fairy palace?
In vivid accounts of the Easter Rising ironies and contrasts abound. James Stephens hears about much rifle fire. Prac- tice, he concludes. He sees silent groups of strangers, all looking towards the Green. 'Has there been an accident?' he asks. There has indeed! From the roof of the occupied Post Office, Pearse's secretary sees soldiers (British, I assume) walking 'unmolested and unarmed within five yards of our guns'. A unionist Trinity scientist notes useless barricades in the Post Office — 'mailbags, evidently filled with letters, to keep out bullets! Chairs and tables through which bullets would pass almost as easily. . . . Oh, how pitiful! A fantastic chimera, and death the sure and certain wage!' The brazen looters, children mak- ing off with huge bunches of bananas — what, bananas in war-time? Not in our war, surely! Clery's smart dress shop for some reason spared: an old woman wistful- ly eyes the fur coats in the intact windows, saying mournfully 'Isn't it a great shame that Clery's is not broke?' The man who comes into the besieged Post Office to buy a penny stamp: 'I don't know what Dub- lin's coming to when you can't buy a stamp at the Post Office.'
With this last yarn the heroic Connolly, badly injured and about to be shot, strove in custody to cheer his wife. Truly with his noble death, and with that of Pearse, a terrible beauty was born. Isn't it a great shame that the beauty has faded and the terror has not?
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