I was meeting friends in Kehoe’s of South Anne Street, our regular Dublin haunt, last Friday night. And when the plans were made, we had envisaged sipping pints outside in the sunshine, as happened in July and August.
There are few more pleasant street corners on a weekend evening in warm weather. Occasionally, on the way home afterwards, I have even taken to humming a paraphrased version of Shane McGowan’s hymn to mindfulness and joy: “When it’s summer in South Anne …”
But on Friday it was raining and the temperatures were suddenly autumnal. So we huddled instead in the snug at the back. And going home later, in the chilled darkness of late September, it was Thomas Moore I was rephrasing, sadly:
“Tis the last Kehoe’s of summer,/Left blooming alone;/All her lovely companions/Have faded and gone.”
***
Cutting down the adjacent Duke Lane, meanwhile, I noticed a gleaming new bar – not yet open – on the corner with Duke Street, where until recently had been a travel agency.
A sign proclaimed it “The Burton”. And for anyone who has read Joyce’s Ulysses, the reference was unmistakable. Sure enough, a mural on the side depicted a mustachioed figure in a bowler hat. This could only be Leopold Bloom, whose fictional visit immortalised the original Burton, a hotel and restaurant.
The new development is clearly trading on its literary fame. But of possible inconvenience to this ambition is that Bloom did not stay to eat there in 1904. On the contrary, before leaving in a hurry, he gave the restaurant a review that, if repeated on Tripadvisor today, would be a PR catastrophe.
In Joyce’s Homeric parallel, this part of Ulysses echoes an episode in the Odyssey where the hero and his men arrive in Lestrygonia and find themselves among a race of cannabilistic giants who eat some the crew before Odysseus makes a narrow escape.
In the Dublin Lestrygonoia, Bloom is merely disgusted by the sights and smells that confront him: “Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed. Men. Men. Men.”
Joycean scholars have argued that the scene hints at his “latent vegetarianism”. In any case, revolted by what he sees in the Burton, the man who has begun his day eating “the inner organs of beasts and fowls”, he goes next door to Davy Byrne’s and opts for a gorgonzola sandwich.
***
In fairness to the people behind the new bar, they referenced the scene in their planning application. Indeed, the architectural statement includes even the indelicate detail of how, from the Burton’s doorway, Bloom’s refined nostrils picked up the smell of “men’s beery piss”.
Also of interest is that, by way of illustrating the site’s evolution, the architects included a picture the inaugural Bloomsday pilgrimage of 1954, with the Duke Lane corner in the background of Davy Byrne’s, occupied by a shopfront.
You will often hear it said in Dublin that the Bailey pub now stands where Burton’s did – I may have repeated this myself on occasion. In fact, while the Bailey is opposite Davy Byrne’s, the latter and the Burton were on the same side. Hence the line where, after his Burton ordeal, Bloom “came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton Street”.
***
By coincidence, I am belatedly reading a book called Remembering How We Stood by John Ryan, one-time proprietor of the Bailey and convenor of that Bloomsday pilgrimage.
A classic memoir of Bohemian Dublin in the mid-20th century, it was written 50 years ago, but somehow eluded me until Trevor White lent me his copy at the National Ploughing Championships.
It’s full of fascinating stories, not least about Patrick Kavanagh, a Bailey regular only under Ryan’s stewardship, the previous owners having banned the poet from wearing his hat on the premises: presumably with a view to discouraging the rest of him.
But some of Kavanagh’s stories, as repeated by Ryan, seem questionable to say the least. He is quoted claiming, for example, that when he first walked from Inniskeen to Dublin (a distance of about 80km), he “crossed the lands of only three men”.
Could that have been true even at the height of landlordism, I wondered, never mind in 1931?
Luckily I knew who to ask: my friend Terry Dooley, a Maynooth professor who not only specialises in the history of Ireland’s big houses and estates but also happens to be from Killanny, next door to Inniskeen.
“Absolutely no way”, said Terry of the possibility it could have been true then, after the big estates had been broken up; “and what’s more, its not possible that it could ever have been done.”
He also showed me a Land Commission map of Kavanagh’s locality, showing areas sold under the 1881 and 1903 Land Acts or owned by a “phalanx of smaller gentry”, and concluded that the writer would have passed through the lands of many men “before he left Monaghan”.
Oh well, we must remember that Kavanagh was the holder of a poetic licence, first class. On which subject, this may be as good a place as any to mention that the latest Patrick Kavanagh weekend starts on Friday in Inniskeen. Full details are at patrickkavanaghcentre.com
