CH 20: A Dublin Homily Backstory
Dublin skyline, courtesy Merrill Morrow.
I knew from the beginning of writing MITG that I wanted to have a chapter in Dublin. Though I wasn’t sure what exactly it would entail, I had some idea. During a trip to Dublin in 2005 I wrote a poem about Dublin trying to record some of my thoughts:
Irish Homily
Intemperate, immoderate defeated, spent dram life away smoke life away endearing only for good hearts beneath the crush.
Squeezed between an infection of church and pub on every corner some blocks with extras in between, how can they find peace? What cockeyed place pits sin and piety like crows to pick at livers alternating noon and night?
Days are what we make, not pre-cast disappointment. Rise up from low expectations seize the better parts discard the rest, be not victims of resignation.
Clear your heads lads and lasses, your good hearts can save you.
As you can infer from the poem, my visit left me somewhat ambivalent about what I saw there. I was only there a few days, but I had the impression the only sources of pride (and only exports) were religion and alcohol related. Add to that a haphazard city aesthetic which felt a little drab, and I was left wishing it had been a different experience, and that I needed to go back again to repair my first impressions.
Doheny & Nesbitt, site of the great debate. FYI, I’ve never been there!
Part of that imperative to include a Dublin chapter arose from having a person of Irish heritage as the protagonist (half Irish that is), and the fact that I make no secret of writing an American Ulysses in the form of MITG. The debate which occurs in the bar (Doheny & Nesbitt) affords an opportunity to revisit the theology thread and to poke some fun at Joyce and his characters: Mulligan and Finnegan in particular. Finnegan is portrayed as dense and bullying, two qualities I ascribe to Finnegan’s Wake, perhaps the most ridiculously difficult piece of English literature ever produced. I say perhaps because I was unable to read it, because after 3 pages of nonsense my brain had had all it could take. I know there are people who like it, just like there are people who drink vodka straight, but I’m not one of them and find both behaviors rather baffling.
Cover of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Continuing that theme a second, one of the threads comprising the fabric of the novel involves various masterworks of English literature. As much as I make fun of Finnegan here, I do admire Joyce. Ulysses itself was right at the edge of what I could tolerate myself as a second-rate student of literature, but even I could recognize it had moments of greatness in it. While this chapter focuses this thread upon Joyce, there are other passages which engage Cervantes, Melville, T.S. Eliot, Dostoevsky and many others. This makes a bit more sense in light of the Epilogue, but I’ll leave further discussion about that until later. Suffice it to say it is an important thread, though one not necessary to appreciate (nor understand) to enjoy the rest of the story.
The debate itself focuses mostly upon religion, pitting the faithless McGhee against a priest over pints of beer at D&N. Around the table you might notice some of the characters epitomize Ireland's fraught demograpy: English, Protestant Northern Ireland and Catholic Southern Ireland, all nipping at one another in an internecine civil war. Honestly, it was a pleasure to write that bawdy dialog and play out something akin to the dinner scene from Joyce’s The Dead in Dubliners. I’ve always marveled at that story.
As for the religious debate itself, it was a chance to engage a deeper discussion of those topics than appeared in CH 9: Confessions in the Gloaming, even though CH 9 appears later in McGhee’s chronology (age 59), versus his age in ADH (44). This allows one to revisit CH 9 with a fuller appreciation of McGhee’s restraint in his chat with Fr. Chepelsky. Fr. Linus in this chapter gives voice to McGhee’s own self-doubts here, reinforcing McGhee's personal doubt and his ambivalence about the city and its perverse adjacency of sin and piety. While he doesn’t retain the piety, he does still have the sense of loss from his faithlessness.
There will be more about the other characters in a future backstory, but alas, it would be premature now.
As a footnote, the chapter originally ended right after leaving the bar and did not include the follow up section with Arlene. I wasn’t happy with the chapter – it felt incomplete – and my editor expressed disappointment there wasn’t more Arlene at the end. Adding the final section allowed us to see more of the social (and sexual) side of McGhee (the latter being mostly absent to this point), and to place the discussion at the bar in fuller context, especially considering the predominant theme of wandering which characterizes McGhee’s life.
Butler, PA painting, at the foot of hill by my elementary school, St. Paul’s (Butler Catholic).
One other footnote regarding the painting above. I did the under-painting in 2001 when my father was sick, and revisited it in 2009 or so to add the outlining and over-painting. It’s set across the street from my Catholic elementary school. Note the bar in the foreground and the church steeples in the background. I guess some features juxtaposing sin and piety were good enough to import into my hometown (and many others in that neck of the woods).
