Dublin in a Comic Portrait:

...But if Dublin epitomizes neither Irish life nor Irish history it has at least dominated Irish literature, particularly in the 20th century...

...Campbell has already been eulogized as a budding James Joyce, but the analogy is false...

...For all her eccentricities Peter Perry is a "great and magical person" who has miraculously preserved her love of life and her youthfulness...

...Peter Perry, whose real name is Patricia, is a kind of Irish Auntie Marne, of indefinite age and somewhat baroque appearance...

...If this elongated woman who seems to live entirely on tobacco and alcohol and gives parties for weirdly assorted music-hall artists and residents of Bohemia—"would you write a play, boy, and have all the characters fond of one another...

...and if his manner more likely suggests Henry Green than Brendan Behan he leaves no room for uncertainty about his intentions...

...Ah, Dublin, me darlin' you've nourished A strange, mixed-up family 'tis true...

...Even her nephew has come to her for what she can give him—a place to live while he goes to college...

...Its influence is not always subversive, however...

...He is not given to rhetoric—in the best sense of that maligned word...

...Unlike Joyce—in fact unlike any other Dublin writer I know of—Campbell writes outside the native tradition altogether...

...Here Saxon and Huguenot flourished Gael, Norman—a wild, hardy crew...

...With its wide, well-planned 18th-century streets, its Georgian doorways— quaintly shielded by canvas from the summer sun—and its mixture of people from all over Europe it strikes one as being anything but Irish...

...Perhaps only a genius could have done it: looked into the future and recognized the symbol in the flesh...

...Although he has an Irishman's interest in speech and can recreate Dublin accent and idiom, he does it with a tone of detached amusement and in his own voice speaks an unadorned English of no particular time or place...

...Peter Perry's career, I gather, is intended to provide a semi-comic allegory of the city itself...

...Of this he quite clearly approves...

...She wears a double-breasted tweed suit, smokes cigarettes constantly, drinks her whiskey neat, and owns none of the accessories other women regard as essential—handbag, gloves, compact or lipstick—except a hairbrush which she runs through her hair for hours on end...

...Campbell leaves no room for uncertainty here either...

...Sometimes it sits for its portrait, and this is the role it plays in Peter Perry, a crisplywritten and comic novel by a native Dubliner named Michael Campbell...

...strikes us as being a bizarre symbol of stately Dublin, it is because Campbell would have us know that she epitomizes what is unique and imperishable in his native city...

...by Captain Perry, the "best gymnast in the British army," who was also a practical joker and "travelled in elastic" before he deserted here...

...But she was once upon a time beautiful and was selected by W. B. Yeats to play the role of Kathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman who is Ireland in his symbolic play...

...Finally there is James Pettigrue, a gentle con-man from London who makes the last assault on Peter by impersonating her husband of 30 years ago and attempting to extort a fortune which she no longer possesses...

...It broods over the work of the native or merely resident writer, breathing into each novel or play written in its environs something of its own eccentric mannerisms and aberrations...

...Like the stately streets and Georgian squares of the city, she may not be Irish, but she is singular, dignified and capable of restoring some of those virtues to the people who come under her influence...

...But his novel is about Dublin...

...One need only think of The Ginger Man—written by an American from the Bronx—to see how completely it can infiltrate an author's personality...

...How he too retreats in failure is the story of Peter Perry's —and Dublin's—ultimate victory...

...She has been victimized by Lambert Newcomb, an actor in an English travelling company...

...Not without reason had Yeats chosen her for Kathleen ni Houlihan, for the old woman—in the prime of her youth...

...His heroine, who is a prime example of Dublin eccentricity, is also somebody he approves of...

...Enormously tall, with pencil-thin form— "a perpendicular of astonishing length"—she has no upper teeth at all and her lower teeth are black...

...then by Tommy Kinsella, current star of the Dublin music-hall stage...

...But if Peter Perry in her youth has been the old woman who is Ireland she is now in her old age the symbol of Dublin...

...Dublin, he tells us directly, is a city "where people believe in being themselves almost to the point of madness...

...Editor, "An Anthology of Irish Literature" The stately city of Dublin may well deserve the reputation bestowed on it by history and by its eminence as capital of the Irish Republic, but to anyone familiar with more typically Irish "cities" like Galway or Kilkenny it seems an anomaly...