Memoir of a Spirited Celt
WOLFE, ANN F.
Memoir of a Spirited Celt It Isn't This Time of Year at All! By Oliver St. John Gogarty. Doubleday. 256 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday...
...Ignored and derided," Dublin's modern goliard eloped to Paris with a hotel maid...
...Outrageous pranks are played on the minor skilift Olympian, George Moore, who told and did not kiss...
...In puckish moments, he strikes discords to annoy...
...With as antic a shanachy as Gogarty, the parts are necessarily greater than the whole...
...Even then the sardonic parodist of his childhood Catholicism, writes Gogarty, "Joyce was the most damned soul I ever met...
...It was he who described Yeats as resembling an umbrella forgotten at a picnic...
...Churchill is "blub-faced," "Bertie" Einstein a melancholy humbug and master of "oral fiddlefaddle," Marx "that dirty carbuncular character who hated mankind...
...Actually, the place is the never-never land of an Irish poet's memory, peopled with some of the golden heroes and black scoundrels of earth's most irresistible and impossible race...
...When they moved in, Joyce's sole baggage was a sheaf of crystalline, un-Joycean lyrics later published as Chamber Music...
...Arthur Griffith and Augustus John cast titans' shadows...
...The factual will call it Dublin, that turn-of-the-century Athens past whose Georgian and Palladian fagades walked Yeats, "JE," Dunsany, Hyde, Joyce, Mahaffy, Arthur Griffith and James Stephens...
...Even the place is a translunary thing...
...Through the parts move??by no means all together in the same direction??the immortals of Irish poetry and politics, some moon-struck drolls and a few of the Liffey's light ladies, but never a humdrum ordinary mortal...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" IT ISN'T this time and it isn't this year and it never was, either...
...His friend Gogarty, simultaneous winner of poetry contests and bicycle races, studied at Trinity, Royal and Oxford...
...He went to hell and he could not get out...
...During the civil war, his mansion was burned down and he was kidnapped by gunmen, to be saved from death only by his presence of mind and his prowess as a swimmer...
...After marrying, he went to Vienna, where he specialized in otolaryngology...
...In Dublin's climate of dedicated animosities, Gogarty's own epithets burgeon...
...The author of this "unpremeditated autobiography" is in every sense a character out of a book...
...To be sure, some of the tales of wits and rhymers are not new to readers of As I Was Going Down Sackville Street...
...Back in Dublin, the successful young specialist bought a house in fashionable Ely Place and, later, a haunted old 60-room mansion on the magical Connemara coast...
...This sequence you will pretty much have to put together out of episodes, conversations and gossip well laced with poetry, quips and learned ribaldry...
...In Franz Joseph's gay capital, he occupied the former apartment of Krafft-Ebing, "instigator of that enemy of the human race, Freud...
...With the establishment of the Free State, he became a Senator...
...Had I succeeded in ministering to a mind diseased, Joyce would not be the greatest schizophrene who ever wrote this side of a mental hospital...
...Spirits abound in this memoir, of course??the disembodied less than the full-bodied kind quaffed at Johnsonian Bailey's...
...Here "JE" holds court, that "angelic anarchist" whose rambling monologues were all music and half poetry...
...He is the Buck Mulligan of that "masterpiece of despair," Joyce's Ulysses...
...When an Irish poet fingers the harp of the past, he plays variations on familiar airs...
...As for de Valera, he "did more harm to Ireland than Cromwell...
...For two years, as an impoverished medical student, Gogarty shared with Joyce a chill Napoleonic fortress outside Dublin...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 12
