Talk, the National Industry of Ireland, from Irish Literary Portraits, edited by W. R. Rodgers (1973)

It was not only the well-known writers who had contributions to make; one is forever being surprised in Dublin by the high standard of knowledge displayed by ordinary citizens in any walk or on any level of life. I had many instances of this; as he pulled me a pint, a Dublin publican said to me on ‘Bloomsday’ 1962, when the Martello Tower was opened as a commemorative museum to James Joyce, ‘I wish Joyce had been alive now to finish the book. All that grand crowd up there at the Tower today, he could have polished them off.’ ‘There’s gravel in that,‘ I said. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘I sent some of them word last spring that there was a great old Dublin character by the name of Ted Keogh dying in one of the hospitals there. They took no notice. Oh there was a picture of him all right in one of the evening papers after his death, but not a word to say that he was the man on whom Joyce based that famous character, Blazes Boylan in Ulysses. Not a word. Just teetotal indifference.’ ‘You’ve read Ulysses?’ I asked. ‘I bought it in Miss Beach’s shop in Paris in 1928. The nice-looking edition with a white cover and blue letters. It was the only book in the window. A wonderful book that, especially for Dublin people. I think that for other people Joyce will always be a hard one to make out.’ Not that Irishmen in general are voracious readers of books. They are not. The late Dr Best of the National Library who appears in the library scenes in Ulysses told me he had never read the book. Yeats admitted to never having finished it. Bernard Shaw Wrote me that he had never had time to decipher Finnegans Wake. Synge did not read Yeats or Shaw. James Stephens and George Moore at first meeting were aware that each had not read the other’s work. ‘You and I,’ said George Moore to Dr Best, ‘can be very good friends without your having to read any of my books.’ And Joyce, writing to Miss Weaver, said, ‘I have not read a work of literature for years.’ All of a piece throughout. The truth is that the Irish are too fond of the spoken word to bother overmuch about the written word. ‘Architecture,’ said Caréme, the famous French chef, ‘is but another form of patisserie.’ In the same mood Irishmen tend to look on writing as just an architected kind of talk. Ireland’s best exports, in fact, are her talkers, and her best imports are listeners, and she usually manages to show a credit balance. Talk is a national industry, and always it is dramatic and colourful talk with the thrust-and-parry of debate in it.

Irish Literary Portraits collects the transcripts of nine programs produced and edited for BBC Radio by W. R. Rodgers, ex-Ulster Presbyterian clergyman, poet, and as Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it in his Introduction, the “one good listener” in a land of good talkers. “He would have made a good spy, in the sense of being able to find out an extraordinary amount about the people among whom he moved, but a very bad spy if required to report anything that could harm the people in question,” O’Brien.

Rodger’s oral portraits, assembled from dozens of recorded interviews with men and women who knew these writers, do not suffer, however, from any added gloss or rosy hues. One of the things Rodgers had to take great care with was the level of gossip, back-biting, and mutual denigration that was the warp and weft of Dublin’s cultural fabric. “A literary movement,” Rodgers quotes A. E. Russell, “consists of a half dozen writers living in the same city who cordially detest one another.” As O’Brien puts is, “Dublin’s malice is enjoyably present in these portraits, but the average level of malice is distinctly — and acceptably — lower than the average level of malice in Dublin talk.” “For a long-impoverished nation, with no rich urban heritage of culture, words were both portable and inexpensive, requiring only a mouth and an ear,” Rodgers writes of the tradition of talk in Ireland. And there’s no finer tribute to that tradition than his Irish Literary Portraits.

Irish Literary Portraits, edited by W. R. Rodgers
New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1973