REVIEW OF ST. PATRICK’S DAY ANOTHER DAY IN
DUBLIN by GEORGE O’BRIEN for the DUBLIN REVIEW OF BOOKS
Thomas McGonigle, St. Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin (Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press
Thomas McGonigle has published
three novels. The first is called The
Corpse Dream of N. Petkov ((1987), a treatment of the last moments of the
leader of Bulgaria’s Agrarian Party, executed by hanging in 1947. The second is Going to Patchogue (1992), the story of a day trip there and back
to the town on what the natives call Longh Island where the author grew up (he
was born in Brooklyn in 1944). Now, more than forty years in the making –
‘Dublin-Sofia-New York 1972-2015’ -- comes St.
Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin – St Patrick’s Day 1972, that is, when
the narrator, one ‘Tom McGonigle’, returns to the city where he was once a
student at UCD, although the action, if that’s the name for it, is not confined
to Dublin or to the year in question, but wanders hither and yon through time
and space. Headlines referring to later events, such as the hunger strikes, and
an evening out with, among others, a poet by the name of Nuala and a man called
Jonathan who writes history about Belfast and Ulster, earn their unpredictable
though unexceptional keep as readily as do recollections of Patrick Kavanagh
and lectures by ‘Denis’ at a certain university. Spatially, while the eponymous
day essentially consists of a via
dolorosa taking in Grogan’s, Neary’s, McDaid’s, the Russell Hotel (where
Tom is staying) and ending up in a bacchanal in Poolbeg Street, there are also
side-trips to Paris, Sophia, Copenhagen, Flensburg, and other international locations,
not forgetting Patchogue -- a name whose resemblance to the title of a book by,
say, An t-Athair Peadar is just about the only literary connection that’s
beyond this novel’s range, both in terms of names dropped and (mainly
modernist) techniques adapted.
But
then Tom isn’t much of a one for the Irish – for the Irish in any form, animal,
human or mineral (though few minerals are in evidence on the day in question). Or
rather, it’s more accurate to say that he is and he isn’t. He acknowledges
attachment – by blood and also by virtue of emotional and sentimental ties –
but he also maintains detachment. He knows everyone, without seeming
particularly close to anyone. He’s a displaced Yank, a deracinated Paddy. These
and many other contrasts (not conflicts, interestingly) equip the narrator with
his presence and his uneven though ineluctable momentum, and generate an
extensive series of registers which constantly give way to each other, phasing
in and out with no discernible pattern, with nothing, really, but their own
unavoidable multiplicity. From such layering what might be described as a collage-like
portrait of the protagonist emerges, as the book’s cover suggests by featuring a
piece entitled ‘Pub Crawl Down Memory Lane’ by New York-based, Belfast-born
artist David Sandlin. Tom is in mourning, that essentially modernist condition.
He’s also a boozer, a jilted lover, an ugly American -- at least in the eyes of
many of his fellow-imbibers, allegedly -- a traveller, a loner, a writer, a
litterateur, and an emigrant traversing not the briny the ocean but that of his
consciousness of loss. The collage view of St.
Patrick’s Day, an assemblage of scraps, bits of material that have outlived
their use but which are still knocking around, is also reinforced by the use of different type-faces. These, too,
signal different registers, but they also suggest the distracted, or
distractable nature of the apprehending subject, and depict the mind as a
sphere through which anything might pass at any given moment. There is, then,
an inveterate restlessness, or a kind of passive-aggressive attitude to direction
and purpose, to the novel, so that the narrative’s stream of consciousness
technique, to which restlessness is endemic, spills over into all aspects of
the book, aesthetic, psychological, social, and whatever you’re having
yourself.
This
is all fine and large in its way, no doubt, and it’s interesting to find in
this age of literary reaction for find a work still committed to the
indivisibility of matter and manner. One result of this commitment is that St. Patrick’s Day flaunts much of what
might be expected of it. This is not to say that the story (for want of a
better term) is completely random and arbitrary. Tom’s visit to Dublin, and his
ability to afford it, is one outcome of the sudden and undignified death of his
Donegal-born father in an upstate New York carpark. Thoughts of his father’s
working life as an executive tacitly question the worth of such a career, which
in the end turns out to be no more solid than the drink that lubricates the moment’s
passing and then itself is passed. The mourning note is accentuated by attempts
to undercut it, such as the fingering of the grimy banknotes that sustain the
many rounds stood in the course of the day. The Yank has cash, but it’s a poor
thing, all in all – the novel ends on an absurdist financial (and textual)
note, reproducing a cheque for half a million pounds signed by Derek Mahon. Time’s
uneven current and its inscrutable value is more to the point that the
supposedly invariant reliability of currency. The rounds of drinks, and the
rounds of the various pubs, are only the most obvious instances of a more
general notion of circulation deriving from recollections of travel and, indeed,
from recollections of all sorts. An interplay of repetition and difference
underlies this shifting around, as ‘another day in Dublin’ suggests, in
addition that subtitle’s paying a downbeat homage to, as well as establishing a
distance from, the book of June 16,
1904. This same sense also resides in Tom’s active dating life as a UCD undergraduate,
which features a beauty from Réunion as well as various Europeans, and above
all Barbara, a local, the moment of parting from whom, casual and unnecessary
as it seems, continues to haunt him (haunting being a form of returning, which
is a fundamental component of circulation). But special moments with Barbara
coexist with a nostalgie de la boue for
other people and places from earlier days – African students, dodgy lodgings,
coffee at the New Amsterdam in South Anne Street or the Copenhagen, Rathmines
Road.
In
view of its mentioning so many well-known writers of the day, not all
favourably by any means – and no doubt readers familiar with the scene back
then will recognise many of the other personages – it might be thought that St. Patrick’s Day is a roman à clef . But
there’s no clef, because there’s no
one thing to be unlocked. True to the self-revealing character of
stream-of-consciousness, what you see is what you get with Tom. And other
characters, whatever their status, are just as much mixed bags and passers-by
as he is. No particular distinction or merit inheres in being a local, a
native, a national. On the contrary, although they may be at home in a certain
geographical sense, the great majority of the characters seem displaced, for
whom the pub is a wayside chapel, a time-out from the difficulties, domestic
and otherwise, of so many other nameless days. Tom has found no basis for believing
that being Irish is in any way a privilege. If it is, surely St. Patrick’s Day
is when what such a privilege take persuasive form, one combining public
affirmation with personal conviction. What we have instead is the pub and its
personalities, or alternatively bands and cheerleaders from Tom’s native
country. Such polarities are expressions of resistance and acknowledgement,
allowing Tom to state that this may be how it superficially is but that he
remains unaffiliated. And these differences are additional contexts for the
confession of remorse-free estrangement that constitutes the narrative as a
whole.
In
the course of the concluding bacchanal Tom is told, ‘It was a foolish idea
coming over to Ireland to relive the past, when all grown people know the past
is only in books.’ Well, not only.
But whatever about this remark’s accuracy, it does underline the status of time
in the book, both in how it is both the medium of memory and of the present
(and, as noted, there are a few flash-forwards too, bringing to mind T.S.
Eliot’s formulation: ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in
time future/And time future contained in time past’). Even the remark itself is
coloured by temporality, coming too late as it obviously does. The result is
that, intriguing as the presences of, say, James Liddy, Leland Bardwell, Philip
Hobsbaum and related figures may be, theirs are walk-on roles, appropriate
representatives of that time and place. Their names remain with us, but in
themselves, like Tom himself, they are embodiments of transience, just passing
through. Time is a lot more powerful than any of them are, a superior
character, as it were, replete with unpredictable agency and archival
authority. It might be that, as Tom is told, ‘You talk too much of the past and
your part in it’. But there’s a strong sense throughout that one of the few
sure things is that spending time is our basic enterprise, an outlay whose recompense
is as dubious as it is inevitable.
Those
lines of Eliot continue, ‘If all time is eternally present/All time is
unredeemable’. Tom would appear to go along with that, at least up to a point,
as with everything else. On the other hand, there it also seems that acknowledging
transience, as memory inevitably does, is a way of not being at its mercy. And
it may be argued that such acknowledgment is the novelist’s singular office, given
his engagement with duration, change, mutability, persistence, the whole chronological
apparatus of story. For that reason, perhaps, one of a kind though St. Patrick’s Day might be, it also glancingly
gives its avatars their due – Ulysses, Under the Volcano, The Ginger
Man being those most broadly hinted at obvious cases in point. Tom does
come across as a something of a latter-day Stephen Dedalus, death-haunted, recalling to the reader Stephen’s memorable
borrowing: Il se promène, au lisant le
livre de lui-même. He also has elements of Lowry’s Geoffrey Firmin, a soused
consul from another country, his own state of mind. And if Tom is a peppery
type of presence, the kinship between this book’s pub-crawl core and the world
of The Ginger Man is plain enough.
The
glimpses of these works, and numerous others, in St. Patrick’s Day help the reader find some bearings in its
complicated discursive domain, and they also affirm the possibility of
capturing transience while at the same time rendering it. A kind of continuity,
however uneven, is thus paradoxically proposed whereby the impermanence of
experience is a precondition for its retention. In that way, reading and
writing are models of temporality, making their mark but always moving on to
the next surprising thing. The particularly layered, stylistically unadorned
treatment of this type of conceptual material is undoubtedly demanding, not
that Tom or his author are going to apologise for that. Nor should they. And
that’s not the only reason the book could get up people’s noses. But if in its
simultaneous combinations and dislocations, its momentariness and recollection,
St. Patrick’s Day provokes, in the
long run it’s worth it. We could do with a bit more provocation.
GEORGE O'BRIEN is the author of many books and in particular: THE VILLAGE OF LONGING and DANCEHALL DAYS which are classic memoirs about his life in Ireland.
