Andrew O’Hagan

3 October 2002, London
There’s something to be said for places like Simpson’s in the Strand. When you ask for cigarettes they bring you a packet without any of them already smoked, or stolen, or held back, as happens with those terrible machines that demand the right money. In Simpson’s they bring them on a silver plate, and the waiter smiles darkly, as if you had just ordered the head of John the Baptist. At the dinner to mark Norman Mailer’s appearance as Hemingway at the Gielgud Theatre, they put me next to George Plimpton, elegant WASP, honourable putter-away of Johnnie Walker Red, editor of the Paris Review.

Me: ‘I was just listening to the radio, just heard Clinton’s speech to the Labour Party Conference. I wish it was Bush talking.’
Plimpton: ‘So do I. Oh God, so do I.’
Me: ‘He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’
Plimpton: ‘Clinton? Well, I’ve met him.’
Me: ‘In Martha’s Vineyard.’
Plimpton: ‘Indeed. At William Styron’s place. Carlos Fuentes was there and Garcia Marquez. We thought things were getting a big bogged down in policy questions and so on, so I asked everyone at the table to say what their favourite book was. Styron said Tom Sawyer. Marquez said Don Quixote. And Clinton said The Sound and the Fury. Then he began to quote gigantic passages from it, and, you know, Faulkner’s not an easy person to quote from memory.’

Mailer came over. We had worked together in February, and he asked me what I thought of the Hemingway stuff.

Me: ‘I guess you understand him. It was sad to see how much he loved Fitzgerald and how much he disliked himself, and it makes you wonder, you know, can talent ever save talent?’
Mailer: ‘Never. It’s more a case of can you stop talent from savaging other talent to death. What you doing?’
Me: ‘I’m going to Dublin for three months, to be a visiting fellow at Trinity College.’
Mailer: ‘Beckett. Joyce. Sean O’Casey.’
Me: ‘You once wrote a piece about Beckett saying he must be hopeless because any poet who promoted impotence was no good.’
Mailer: ‘Yeah. God. That’s right.’
Me: ‘You hadn’t seen the play. You hadn’t seen Waiting for Godot. Why didn’t you go and see the play?’
Mailer: ‘I was young and arrogant. Young and stupid. I’m going on a long flight to Los Angeles tomorrow.’
Me: ‘How old are you, Norman?’
Mailer: ‘Eighty-one.’
Me: ‘Jesus Christ.’
Mailer: ‘Yes. Beckett. Promoter of impotence.’

6 October 2002, Dublin
Holy Catholic Ireland. Just as I stoop to kiss the tarmac, I remember how much Fidel Castro admires the Pope. Once, when working as an editor at George magazine, my friend Inigo Thomas accompanied John F. Kennedy Jr on a secret trip to meet Castro. In a room in some palace in Havana, a room fringed with revolutionary-seeming leaves, they sat down to dinner, which started with a half grapefruit each topped with a cherry. Before embarking on a five-hour Shandyan monologue, Castro told the American contingent how much he admired the Pope. ‘He’s very good,’ Castro said. ‘You know he gets up at 4 o’clock in the morning? That’s why I like the Pope. He’s an early riser.’

‘Let your senses guide you’, says a large ad for Bailey’s Irish Cream in Dublin Airport. For some reason, Irish advertisements don’t only tell you what to buy, they tell you how to live. ‘Don’t give out if you don’t’, says an advert telling people to vote in the referendum.

Trinity College is the kind of campus that Columbia could never hope to be: beautiful grey stone, trees a hundred years older than their planters, lamps that stand over the cobbled stones like a thought maintained. My rooms overlook the greens on either side; the large Georgian windows catch the shadows of the trees at night, and in the morning everything is clear, the Irish light, the leaves falling onto the stones.

The students arrived today in their thousands. Looking at them, I think of my old granny and her thoughts of the Ireland her family barely remembered, and her telling me constantly that it was all in front of me. It’s all in front of them, I say to myself at the window, watching their smiles, their free-floating embarrassments, but the statues are there too, and the old buildings, and I realize how much it’s all behind us as well.

7 October 2002
At the National Bible Society Bookshop in Dawson Street, they have a large bible in the window, open at Romans 10:11: God’s Mercy on Israel. ‘It is the same way now: there is a small number left of those whom God has chosen.’ Also in the window is Padre Pio, In His Own Words, and an instantly fascinating book written by Brother Victor Antoine, Soups from a Monastery Kitchen. Though it was a thoroughly Protestant outfit, I asked inside the shop if they had anything on the guy who was canonized yesterday in Rome, the new saint. Not a chance, so I bought the monk’s soup book, and wondered halfway down the street if Nigella Lawson could improve on this small epiphany, The Immaculate Conception Winter Broth with Chard.

My rooms need a touch of Girl, so I go to Habitat and buy a red checked tablecloth, four candleholders, a dozen candles, and a glass vase, later to be filled with ten remorseless lilies from Molly Blooms. By the time I get back to Trinity I’ve also got six tumblers and a good bottle of whisky. I move the furniture around, remove the net curtains, borrow some paintings, which I never find time to hang, and there you have it, in no time at all, a set of rooms that would bring a spot of colour to the cheeks of Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

8 October 2002
The rain is coming down so hard it is making the car alarms go off. Under my window, running long-armed over the cobbles, are a couple of giant gorillas, each clutching a sheaf of white leaflets in its rubbery paw. Hmmph. Rag week. Looking onto the green, I realize that no one except university lecturers and rock promoters ever sees this number of young people together. Here they all come, the youth of today, so self-conscious with their cigarettes and haircuts. Taking in the statues, I remember the words of J.P. Mahaffy, Trinity’s former provost, who hated Ulysses with a vengeance. ‘It was a mistake’, he said, ‘to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island, for the cornerboys who spit into the Liffey.’

In the evening, Colm Tóibín meets me at the front gate. We go to the launch of a book at Liberty Hall; the book is about the brilliant Argentinean journalist Rodolfo Walsh. The man who wrote the book comes into the room wearing a red PLO-style scarf – one of those items one used to wear to annoy the priesthood. He passes a sign that says ‘Yes, we want bread, but we want roses too.’ I realize all of a sudden that I’m enjoying an evening with the Irish Left. The author, Michael McCaughan, is also wearing a too-small, velvet, pinstripe suit with baseball boots coming out the bottom; the suit is like something from the closet of the late Bunny Rogers.

Tóibín: ‘He’s just wearing that scarf to annoy me, now.’
McCaughan: ‘Hello, Colm.’

The author starts, quite unwittingly, unconsciously, without a word, and very slowly, to draw the scarf off his neck and stuff it into his pocket.

Tóibín: ‘Mmmm. The suit.’
McCaughan: ‘Would you believe it? Second hand.’
Tóibín: ‘Yes. The nouveaux poor.’
Outside, for the first time, I see the autumn nights arriving. The glass towers over in the financial district are cold-looking, and the cranes around them are still busy, moving against the sky. The evening’s props tell you everything you need to know about the party’s personnel: South American drinking cups abound, as do knapsacks, Fair Isle jumpers, moustaches, children in full school uniform, and the pleasingly Leftish spectacle of every other person wearing small spectacles.
‘Buenas noches!’ shouts Mr McCaughan.

One of the schoolchildren sits on his father’s knee drinking from a glass of red wine. Colm Tóibín has the task of introducing the book. He starts by saying it would be foolish to think, as people once did, of Argentina as a paradise, a European city in South America. He looks straight at the Lefties in their baseball boots, and speaks, in the context of the disintegration of Rodolfo Walsh’s work, of ‘the solitude, distance, and separateness that a writer needs’. I don’t think the gathering quite understands him; they don’t appear to believe in separateness, and distance is not what they care about. They don’t want to be alone; they want togetherness, like this, the kind of togetherness that celebrates itself.

Out on the street I meet Ciarán Cuffe, the Green TD for Dún Laoghaire. ‘Jeezo, that was a right ’70s flashback that!’ he said. When I tell him I’m working at Trinity, he starts talking about the College’s unecological ambitions into Pearse Street, and asks if I could stop them buying up buildings and putting up walls and destroying the city. ‘I just talk to young postgraduates about verbs and adjectives,’ I wanted to say, but he was gone in a flash of environmental-friendliness.

A new play at the Peacock, Done Up Like a Kipper by Mark Harmon. As soon as I see the set – a suburban living-room – I begin to wonder if there will ever be a Scottish or Irish play not set in a living-room, a kitchen, or a pub. The theatre needs a new world of interiors: whatever happened to workplaces, where people spend most of their days, or bedrooms, where they lie all night? Orange-faced, working-class women talking over the kitchen table, things going badly, husbands-wise, things looking better, vodka-wise, and the production splutters almost as soon as it starts. Truth is the play is about six to ten drafts short of being ready, and the Abbey should know better than to expose a young writer to this kind of chaos.

Two women who review plays for the radio – calling themselves The Muppets, after the moany old men in the box – come into the foyer and start gossiping about the actors. The daughter in the play is supposed to bring in a black boyfriend; problem is the guy playing the black fella is not black, only a bit dark. The Muppets say they had a black actor but he disappeared to London to take part in the new series of the talent show Popstars: The Rivals. The Irish playwright Loughlin Deegan was standing nearby as The Muppets talked. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know that actor playing the boyfriend and he’s usually much darker than that.’

12 October 2002
At 9.25 this morning, a strange, intergalactic noise was coming from Government Buildings on Merrion Street. Five clear notes, like those understood by the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Nobody about the place, so I poked my face through the railings and thought: ‘We are your friends.’ A couple of Canadian tourists came past. ‘What the hell is that?’ said one of them.

‘It’s the Irish parliament,’ I said. ‘They bring a message from another world.’

Catriona Crowe, who works at the National Archives, is helping to set up a new women’s refuge in County Longford. I go with her and the architect Denis Looby to see the proposed site and to have lunch with the women. The new centre is in the grounds of a ready-to-open facility for drugs rehabilitation; Coolamber House it is called, and the women gather on the landing. They are open-natured and used to one another’s company. They wear pink cardigans and patterned jeans; they smoke heartily and laugh easily. What they seem to share more than anything is an unfussy understanding of what life can be like in modern Ireland, especially those parts made complex by poverty, violence, and addiction.

The cottage is dilapidated. An empty pink tin of Coconut Creams lay in the cupboard, bleached with the dampness, and the wallpaper was hanging in strips, and there were holes in the floor, but Denis, the architect, thought it could be renovated and parts could be rebuilt for about €100,000. Some of the women – Cathleen O’Neill, Joan Byrne – are from the SAOL Project in Dublin, a group that works with women who have suffered from drug abuse or domestic violence. As I talk to the women, a line comes into my head: ‘Masculinity is a nightmare from which Ireland is trying to awake.’

Catriona Crowe comes over as I stand by a fence, looking into the dumb eyes of an old ewe. ‘Many of the women who come here will never have had a holiday in their lives,’ she said. ‘They’ll be safe here now, miles from anywhere; you can’t do better than that.’

I hear Denis saying a row of Scots pines should be got rid of. ‘They’re very depressing,’ he said. ‘Sure, you wouldn’t want to be looking into those dark trees all day, so you wouldn’t?’

Coolamber itself is a large Georgian house with outbuildings renovated for workshops. ‘It costs €100,000 to keep a man in prison for a year,’ said one of them. ‘A place like this – where long-term users can begin to prepare for a proper life – is much cheaper than that. All we’ll ask is that the clients be over 18 and off the drugs.’

In one of the rooms there’s a mound of toothpaste boxes. I find myself wondering about the many mouths, the cleaning of teeth in the morning, the sense of an ending, and a fresh start. I think of the way the people might talk in this place, once it gets going: I see them looking over the fields, minty-mouthed, all decay set aside. ‘Why are there pinboards beside all the beds?’ I asked Cathleen.

‘Often the thoughts you have last thing at night are the ones that matter. I have my deepest thoughts then.’

‘I’m still waiting for a deep thought,’ I said.

‘I’m having insights,’ Cathleen said, ‘insights about why I’m not a good person.’ I wanted to tell her she was a good person, but it was difficult to say, and she just smiled.


In the Gaiety for the last night of Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming. Sitting there, looking up the tiers, you can see, even now, that Irish theatre bears a deep and traditional relation to the political landscape and plays a part in the creation of a national consciousness. It is not in any way like the London theatre: here, and the other night too, at Sive, John B. Keane’s play, you feel the audience is engaged in a conversation with some aspect of their own conscience, and that the words and events onstage pour over the people and through them into their own past, or perhaps into the past of the country itself. London theatregoers watch what is happening onstage as if it were happening behind glass. Maybe that is why television stars are currently so popular in the West End.

Evidence for the social interestingness of the Dublin theatre audience can be gleaned from watching them watching one another; there is drama in the stalls, opera in the dress circle, as people wave down to each other, whispering, gesturing, walking quickly down the aisles to say hello. Never in the London theatre does anyone wave to anyone, or recognize the events, onstage or off, as things that are happening in a social way. Maybe that’s tourism, but I think it’s more than tourism: it’s culture, and the lack of it. If that’s good news for Ireland, it’s the last of such for tonight: Murphy’s play tells as many difficult truths as you can tell in two hours.

In the green room afterwards, Tom Murphy stood with a pint. He had only just come back from New York, where Bailegangaire is being produced, and he seemed relieved to be among people he could talk to. Murphy stands something like a man who is standing his ground. He is quite compact, and he spreads his weight pretty evenly between his feet; he’s proud of his chest in that way that some men are, and proud of his arms too, and he looks to me like he wouldn’t go down in a hurry.

We talk about the origin of a line in the play, where the main character looks over the audience and says ‘ugliness, ugliness, ugliness’.

Murphy: ‘It was a west of Ireland politician. He was to give a speech to the great and the good. He’d had a drink. A few drinks. He stood like that. [Murphy crosses his legs like someone desperate for a pee.] He looked over the audience and said “ugliness, ugliness, ugliness” and that was all he said. He was going on later that he felt humiliated and I said I thought it was just the greatest eloquence.’

14 October 2002
Monday drinks in my rooms at Trinity. First of a series to resist the Dublin dark, the frost, the fireworks. ‘The old style,’ says Anthony Cronin. ‘People haven’t been doing this in Dublin since the 1950s.’

The table has thirty new wine glasses and a dozen bottles of Chateau Musar. Before anyone arrives, I look out through the shutters: can’t believe how quiet Trinity is in the evening, an island of thoughts, most of them past thinking about now. The leaves are still coming off the trees; I think of the party, and the leaves coming down, and, inevitably, of the women taking coats at the opening of ‘The Dead’.

I tell Anthony Cronin there’s nothing better in all the world than the description in Dead as Doornails of Brendan Behan and him knocking around Paris without two ha’pennies to rub together. I remember them trying to sleep by the Seine, and of Cronin taking his shoes off to get comfortable, and someone stealing them in the night. The next day he finds some small shoes; he describes hilariously, unfussily, tear-makingly, the strange locomotion involved in walking in shoes that are so small you’ve had to crush the heels: pressing down and forward at the same time as you make your way.

Cronin: ‘There was worse.’
Me: ‘It’s a particular skill, that. Being able to write well about your friends.’
Cronin: ‘You know the Scottish poet Stanley Graham?’
Me: ‘W.S. Graham. “The Nightfishing”.’
Cronin: ‘Right. Well, he used to be asked to write a radio poem now and then for the Third Programme. Half the time he was in no fit state to write the thing. We used to sit in his flat. The producer would be waiting for the poem. Stanley was in the habit of breaking the plastic tube off those nasal inhalers: inside them was a strip …’
Me: ‘Soaked in Benzedrine. Jack Kerouac and all that mob were always at them.’
Cronin: ‘Stanley would heat the strips in front of the fire – all of them hanging just so – and would lick them one after the other. Of course he would be completely out of his head. The producer would say, “Now. We have to get a line down.” I would say: “The light-reflecting brown water of the Clyde flows past in the night” or some such rubbish, and then Stanley would nod and the producer would write it down. Then it was another strip of the thing – giving it a lick.’

16 October 2002
In the Long Room at Trinity, Professor Terence Brown shows me the bust of Jonathan Swift. ‘It’s the only distinguished one here,’ he says. ‘There’s something very lifelike in the face. Very distinguished.’ We look up at the arched ceiling and the beautiful beams. ‘You know what John McGahern said about this place?’ Brown says. ‘He said this is the most beautiful room in Ireland.’

Later, in the Davis Theatre, Professor Nicholas Grene is introducing Merlin Holland, who will talk about the afterlife of his grandfather Oscar Wilde. ‘Today is Oscar’s birthday,’ says Grene. ‘He would have been 148 today had he lived. No one in this audience needs convincing about the importance of Wilde’s Irishness. We don’t need to be territorial about Wilde; we are willing to share him with the England where he made his reputation.’

Merlin Holland has the shape you imagine Wilde might have had. Big-shouldered, and broad, with thick fingers, thick lips, and a sweet lilac shirt and tie, very apt.

Holland: ‘My grandfather cast a rainbow of forbidden colours over the age of Victorian hypocrisy.’

I notice Holland – an elegant speaker – only ever stammers or trips when he mentions Lord Alfred Douglas.

Holland: ‘Someone claimed to have got drunk with Oscar in Paris on cherry wine, which seems unlikely, and that my grandfather did not touch him for 100 francs, which seems even more unlikely.’

There are many old ladies in the audience. They nod wisely and keenly when Holland uses the word ‘queer’.

Holland: ‘Upton Sinclair, with impeccable socialist venom, said that Wilde was “the spoiled darling of the putrescence leisure class”.’

There was a question about Wilde converting to Catholicism on his deathbed.

Holland: ‘Yes. He was quite delirious. Some have thought that when he waved his hand, as if to give assent, he was actually saying “get that priest away from me”.’

Holland remembers an incident in Hyde Park, when he was very young, where a group of nannies took their children away from the Holland children in case they would be ‘contaminated’. As he says this, I think of the incident happening in Kensington Park Gardens, where the children play, under the statue of Peter Pan.

But the biggest laugh comes with news of a letter sent to Holland’s father by Rebecca West at the time of the first publication of Wilde’s letters. ‘It’s a hateful thing to have to face,’ she wrote, ‘and your father cannot have written those letters expecting they would be read publicly. P.S. A friend of mine is a zoologist and she says giraffes are always at it and it’s amazing to see.’

Later, in Bruno’s, a cold restaurant in Kildare Street, Merlin Holland does something quite strange. He lays a place at the table for Oscar Wilde. It’s not done overtly, or pretentiously, not much, but half-smilingly. ‘Sherry started this early on,’ Holland says. ‘Whenever they had dinner. A place for Oscar.’

I ask him what he thought of the biography of Lord Alfred Douglas published last year.

Holland: ‘Shockingly edited. It was as if the book had just been shoved in without being read. A lot of hype – you know, the author is very young, an undergraduate …’
Me: ‘Slightly enamoured of his subject.’
Holland: ‘Yes. And some people were slightly enamoured with him, the author – his publishers I mean. Enough said about that. I would really like a cigarette but I don’t know.’
Terence Brown: ‘Go on. You know what your grandfather said about temptation.’

22 October 2002
The high-rise flats at Inchicore are due to be pulled down, and something will be lost to the people there. ‘You’re going to have a special treat,’ says Cathleen O’Neill. ‘It’s about the threat to an entire culture and it’s about displacement in Dublin.’ When I asked her to show me the condemned flats in St Michael’s Estate, Cathleen had seemed pleased to make it happen, and drove me there in her car.

‘Will You Go, Lassie, Go’ is playing on the tape deck. Cathleen explains that Kehoe Square had been an army barracks before the British left, and was later turned into housing for those Dublin-dwellers who had trouble paying their rent. Then in the 1960s the old barracks were torn down and the new high-rises were put up. Like many in Glasgow or Manchester, the tower blocks quickly went bad, and people living on St Michael’s Estate were surrounded by poverty. ‘It became the place where many of the women we have worked with would have come to get their drugs,’ said Cathleen.

Cathleen believes in progressive feminism, in ‘empowering women’, and she has a strong community development ethos, which would appear to grow out of her own experience and her sense of a commitment to working-class life in Ireland. ‘Robert Emmett was hung, drawn and quartered there,’ she says as we pass a church in Thomas Street. ‘His memorial is on the ground for the dogs to pee on.’ When we reach the high flats you see a long cloth hanging down the length of one of the blocks; it features the mostly-smiling faces of everybody who’s ever lived on the estate.

Rita Fagan comes fizzing towards us. She’s famous for a show called Once is Too Much, about domestic violence. ‘Hello hello,’ she says, ‘come in here. You be nice to him now, he’s an illuminary.’ She takes us into one of the ground-floor flats – most of the people had already gone from their homes – and Rita had turned the flat into an art gallery, a mini-Hayward, where work made by the St Michael’s residents stood in pristine rooms. ‘The exhibition is about memory,’ said Rita. ‘It’s the hidden Ireland.’ She pointed to a painting. ‘And unlike the estate, this painting will last,’ she said.

The most striking thing to be found in the rooms are the ‘Memory Chairs’, where women have used photographs of their loved ones (some of them dead from cancer, asthma, and drugs) and fashioned patterns out of them around a chair, using bits of mirror and net curtain and domestic bric-a-brac. ‘Love labour is what women do all the time in their lives,’ said Cathleen, ‘and it is not counted in the gross domestic product.’ We stop in front of a wall of photographs, mainly young people going from the estate on summer bus trips years ago, and Rita begins pointing out young faces.

‘Dead,’ she says. ‘Dead. Dead. Dead.’

‘But it’s about giving people their story back,’ says Cathleen.

‘Exactly,’ says Rita. ‘I can see my story in this, is what many of the women who come here say to me.’

I spoke to some of the old-age pensioners who had gathered that afternoon for a writing class. The elderly ladies spoke and laughed among themselves and someone pointed out that the ladies have the old Dublin way of speaking. ‘I’m not very artistic, by any means,’ says the first one.

‘Where are you going to live now?’ I asked.

‘I’m getting a bungalow,’ she said, ‘if I’m not in St James’s first. First I’d one bad leg and now it’s two.’

‘I know your face,’ said a second old lady to Cathleen. ‘Were you on the telly?’

‘I was.’

‘That was it, Joan. She was on the telly.’

‘I’m still embarrassed by it,’ said Cathleen.

‘Why should you be?’ said the second lady, hobbling over to the table and picking up a writing pad. ‘It’s your gift. You’ve got it.’

23 October 2002
You learn a lot about the condition of Ireland from listening to the radio. On Anna Livia FM, there’s a man called Gary talking about strange formations on his living-room wall. ‘There’s another face starting to appear within the face!’ he says. It turns out there are ‘cold feelings’ in Gary’s house, and he recently lost his dog. Just about that time, he says, a patch of Artex on his living room wall started to look like the face of Jesus. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘There’s definitely a face within the face,’ he says. ‘People come in and say, “Sure, you must’ve done it yourself,” and I say, “If I could do the likes of that then I’d be doing it for a living. That’s the paranormal, that is.”’

Other listeners are moved by Gary’s story. ‘There’s spiders coming out o’ me hair,’ says one. ‘Little brownie-black fellas. I once knew a girl who had a mouse come out of her perm.’

25 October 2002
Walking over O’Connell Bridge I’m stopped by a woman holding a baby. ‘Please give,’ she says.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Please give me,’ she says.

Beggars are much keener to be ignored or humiliated than they are to be questioned. I found this out years ago when I spent several months hanging around with beggars. I remember a night-shelter next to the Tropical Diseases Hospital in Camden Town, where many of the men were Irish or Scottish, waiting out the night over their vast bowls of pea soup. All the intricacies of coins collected and drink procured could be discussed, but when you asked a person where he came from, how he got here, a sad, protective cloud of silence would gather about him, and he’d only shake his head.

‘Are you Romanian?’ I said to the woman on O’Connell Bridge.

‘Little money for baby,’ she said.

‘I will give you money,’ I replied. ‘I will certainly give you this’ – I took out a note – ‘but can I only ask you about yourself?’

‘This,’ she said.

‘Here it is,’ I said. ‘Will you speak with me for one minute? Did you come here from Romania?’

‘The baby needs food,’ she said. ‘From Romania, yes.’

‘Where do you live now?’

‘We are living out here with family.’

‘Your own family?’

‘With family, yes. Here with family.’

‘Do you live in a house?’

‘In a house.’

Then she took the note, made a gesture with her hand, and made quickly off. I guess the woman was nervous about discussing her circumstances because they were quite possibly illegal. The Liffey looked dull as it flowed and when I turned round the woman had disappeared into the crowd, once again among the unknowables.

28 October 2002
My friends Horatia Lawson from the BBC and the actress Maria McErlane arrive with no other project in mind but to spice up my Monday drinks party. They waltz through the gates of Trinity in excellent dark glasses, Jackie Onassis and Anita Ekberg: high-heeled, lipstuck, coiffed, wide-eyed, ruby-cheeked and ready to go.

They were having some trouble with the cobblestones. ‘What’s wrong with them round here?’, Maria says. ‘Have they never heard of tarmacadam?’ After a series of tall gins at the Morrison, they come to the rooms and tickle the students with feather boas. ‘All part of the literary education,’ I say to Vivienne Guinness, who immediately and good-naturedly asks them to supper.

Maria used to co-host a show with Graham Norton. That means she understands the modern Irish temperament very well, according to her, and she remains resolutely un-shy when it comes to conversing with the students. ‘Do you like commas and semicolons,’ she asks one, ‘or do you prefer gigantic cocks?’

‘Come now,’ I say, ‘let’s stick to the influence of Ibsen on James Joyce’s notion of the human.’

The student sips some of Berry Brothers’ Good Ordinary Claret, and offers a single word to his friendly agitator. ‘Both.’

In the snug at Kehoe’s there’s a painter who reckons the girls might be a little bit English.

‘Show us your nipples,’ says one of them.

Later, of course, the painter wants to take one of them home. ‘It’s only charitable,’ she says, before hopping into a cab. Next morning she rings to say she’s having to do the walk of shame in her Chanel heels. ‘But listen. He lives with his mum. Can you imagine the sweetness? Is it like this in Dublin all the time?’

5 November 2002
Up in my room in the Oscar Wilde Centre, a man telephones the department to see if I’ll not speak to him about ‘the world of writing’. His name is Ian Steepe. I arrange to meet him in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel, where the world of writing, according to the hotel’s biographer Elizabeth Bowen, is always at least an hour behind the next bottle of champagne.

Mr Steepe is a scholar, and a gentleman too, but for the first few minutes of our meeting I couldn’t stop looking at his mouth. Nancy Docherty, my paternal grandmother, found a whole new life when she improved the shape of her mouth; I mean, she got teeth, and they were the least Glasgow-like teeth ever worn. They were what the professionals call Number Ones: all the flashbulbs in Hollywood appeared to go off every time she smiled. She lived in a block of high flats and the planes used to be guided in to land at Glasgow Airport by the sight of her laughing out on the drying-roof. Ian Steepe didn’t have Number Ones, but they were One-ish, and I thought of my lovely grandmother every time he smiled, which, pleasantly, was more often than the usual denizens of the Shelbourne Bar.

It’s amazing how much a stranger might contain. Mr Steepe is a retired English teacher; his last port of call was Drogheda Grammar School in County Louth, and he loves his subject in the old-fashioned way, that’s to say he reads a lot, and likes the often very dubious company of writers. You imagine a love of words going all the way back through Steepe’s family: to the Germans from the Palatinate region who ended up in Munster, the Protestant small farmers and artisans, the newly-belonging, whom he speaks about carefully, as if it were indeed a responsibility of the living to regenerate the dead. As I look at him across the table I feel somehow that Ian Steepe is a rather noble kind of Irishman – an old man speaking, a self-realizer. And then his own past finds new air over his pint of Guinness. ‘Michael Longley and I taught in adjoining classrooms at the Royal Belfast Academical Institute,’ he says, ‘and he and Derek Mahon attended there as schoolboys.’

‘Do you run?’ Mr Steepe is very healthy looking.

‘Hockey,’ he said. ‘I was an Irish international for eleven years, 1961 to ’72, then the national coach for the men’s team for a few years, then, from 1981 to ’88, coach for the women’s team. I’ve coached in Zimbabwe and Ghana and Oman.’

He drinks the last pint slowly, and just as slowly I read through a vast folder he brought with him, full of holograph pages written by novelists and poets, a collection Mr Steepe has been making for ten years. I looked at dozens of writer’s hands. I think it was Margaret Atwood who wrote like a snail. Paul Muldoon’s was harmonious.

‘Has anybody ever refused you?’ I asked.

‘Oh now,’ he said. ‘Let me think. Yes indeed. Salman Rushdie.’


To Iveagh House, the Department of Foreign Affairs, for the launch of the new volume of diplomatic papers, 1926–32. The room was full of doddery guys with white hair and old ladies who needed chairs. Out of the sea of watery eyes comes this bright young thing: you know the type, 35-ish, bad skin, chardonnay rush. ‘Are you Andrew O’Hagan?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘I used to run a literary magazine at Oxford. You ran a free ad for us.’

‘Oh good. We tried to like small magazines.’

The Bright Young Thing mentions a friend of his. ‘I was talking to him today,’ he says. ‘Like everybody else in Scotland he’s going off his head about what you wrote in that essay about Scotland being addicted to injury.’

‘Oh well.’

‘No. It’s the second time. That last time you did it he wrote a big attack on you. Did you see it?’

‘Well, I don’t see everything.’

‘A really gigantic attack. Do you want me to send it to you?’

‘No thanks.’

‘He was worried after writing it that he’d never get to write for the London Review.’

‘Well, that’s silly. I didn’t see it, but agreeing with me is not a qualification for being published in the London Review.’

‘Well, he was panicking. Then they asked him to do something recently, a review of some shit book about Blackwoods.’

‘It’s a good subject.’

‘He thought you must have suggested him.’

‘I did.’

‘For the piece? Christ. You haven’t read the thing he wrote about you.’

‘He’s an interesting writer.’

‘Is that Colm Tóibín standing next to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I send you a copy of my book? It’s very good. It’s about Scotland and Ireland.’

He hands me his card, which Colm Tóibín –– talking to a young diplomat — takes out of my hand.

Tóibín: ‘YOU ARE … YOU FUCKING BASTARD!’
Bright Young Thing: ‘I’d like to speak to you. I know I’ve been horrible about your work.’
Tóibín: ‘This fucker thinks I should reconcile myself to the meaning of my own liberalism. Do you know what that means? It means I should join the IRA.’
Bright Young Thing: ‘Is that what I’m saying?’
Tóibín: ‘He writes this shite about me all the time. When are you going to stop?’
Bright Young Thing: ‘There’s a chapter about you in my book. People say it’s the best chapter in the whole book.’
Tóibín: ‘What these people do – like him. It’s a very interesting technique. They lump you in with the dregs, and they hope that their mediocrity will rub off on you. Then they compare you as a group to another group, a group of geniuses, Declan Kiberd and Seamus Deane. It’s a nasty, shitey business, and that’s HIM!’

12 November 2002
Supper with Bernard O’Donoghue, a nice man and a good poet with patience and intelligence to burn. He tells a funny story about a novelist we both know, a man he taught at Oxford. ‘I think he was the most gifted student I ever had,’ says O’Donoghue. ‘I once made reference to a passage from Dombey & Son. He leaned in very quietly, very carefully, and said, “Hard Times, I think”. And of course he was right. Amazingly untidy, though. The man once lost a girlfriend because of that. She said it was the last straw when she discovered a half-eaten sandwich inside one of his socks.’

13 November 2002
Up early to go in a car to Kenny Live. It must be one of the chief advantages of small-nationhood: you can feel everyone is listening to the same radio show in the morning, and Britain has no national equivalent to Kenny Live. Next to it the Today programme on Radio 4 can seem sepulchral.

Pat Kenny is Ireland’s Tom Brokaw – so handsome he’s almost ugly, and similarly tuned in to the average appetites and pieties of his own people. I was interviewed by him once before, a few years ago on the television, and even there his technique seemed odd: what he says with his mouth is quite intimate and cosy, but his eyes are elsewhere, nowhere near yours, and if you fail to trust his speech you can feel harried by his attentiveness to the clock. What I most remember from our last encounter was him asking me to explain something about western culture’s fascination with serial killers, then, as the camera came to me, combing his hair repeatedly and very daintily with his fingers.

I only really want to say one thing about Scotland. That is that it can not be the modern country it wants to be until it stops blaming England for everything; it is not courageous, not manly, not intelligent, not faithful, not progressive, to rely on an ancient narrative of injury to explain your current woes. It is the behaviour of a small culture, and Scotland is not a small culture, just a small country in which the national will is enslaved by its negative options. Fools among the Irish intelligentsia lean back in their pews to tell us that we should have followed their example and ditched England in 1920; that is a dense-minded view that little understands Scotland’s experience within the British Union, its experience as an imperialist force, a colonizer, a world warrior, and a commercial entity par excellence. It is not the occupied territory the Scots Nats call it, nor has it, as a Protestant country, ever had (despite all our good songs) anything other than a footnote-able amount of the Home Rule spirit so pleasant to the Irish mind and heart, and liked by the Scottish ear alone.

Pat Kenny is tolerant enough of all this. Then he asks me what I think of the idea of a super-league that would include the English and Scottish football teams. Now, this allows me to tell you exactly what it means to be Scottish. Despite everything I’ve said, and despite not even liking football, at the sound of this question the Dr Jekyll of small patriotism rises unrestrained in my breast: I don’t want a super-league, I want small divisional teams like Forfar and Brechin and Queen of the South not to fall by the wayside; I want equal rights for small towns in the Highlands; I want recognition for the small man; I want equality. I want our Scottish rights! I want FREEDOM!

By the time I reach the car my face has taken on the obligatory Mel Gibson aspect, imaginary blue wode and non-imaginary nationalistic fury blazing defiantly in the eyes of reason.

‘That was good craic,’ says the driver.

14 November 2002
Dublin doesn’t really work, you know, as a city. If you want to be far-fetched it’s like Calcutta – full of nice British buildings, with too many people for its size, too many cars, and a rather steep inner-city distinction between the newly rich and the old-fashioned poor. For what the tourist brochures like to call a twenty-first-century city, it has a mad shortage of cash machines, taxis, and wine shops, though no shortage of Ryanair Generation winos out on stag nights. The food in the restaurants isn’t nice and it costs too much. There are queues everywhere, for cash, for drinks, for Marks & Spencer.

The glory is the Georgian squares, the talk of books, the neon signs, the poetic force of the drama, the jokes, the soda bread, and a general fair-play attitude that makes everybody seem accountable and nobody secluded from what is best and worst in the Irish day. Unlike Edinburgh, whose present-day middle class is unintellectual, the Dublin middle class are old-fashionedly attentive to their own political and literary culture: they read the Irish Times and fill the Abbey; the novelists appear on the radio discussing moral crises; the work of abstract painters goes on sale, and, in any event, the artists are given money and shelter by the government from the roughs of the marketplace. I’m too short to start arguing with the likes of James Joyce, so it may be true that Irish art is a cracked mirror held up by a servant, yet a mirror is at least a mirror, and not a pitiless void, and an outsider in Dublin may feel that all is not entirely lost when it comes to workaday relations between money and thoughts.

The artists this week were scared the government was about to remove their tax exemption, but it didn’t happen. What’s the point in pissing off the nation’s premier big-mouths in order to accrue an extra two or three million euro a year? A London literary agent tells me all his Irish clients were phoning last week in a tremendous panic.

After the deluge, comes the deluge: rain is general all over Ireland. I walked to Lower Abbey Street in a treacly downpour to be interviewed on Eamon Dunphy’s radio show. The neon is picking out the puddles at four o’clock in the afternoon.

I like Dunphy. He has the face he deserves at fifty-two. Into the room he comes like a punch-drunk Glasgow boxer – three parts Jimmy Breslin, two parts Ken Buchanan – and he’s busy in the way good journalists ought always to be busy, keeping the spinning plates of the news diary and his lifelong obsessions turning on high sticks. Sitting in front of the microphone Dunphy is one of the last of the valiant smokers. He makes good points and he likes conversation; it’s noticeable that he doesn’t waste any of his famous ire on a friendly target. He’s a populist, I suppose, but before long we’re talking about Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, and he smirks when I say it’s a myth about people not reading the way they used to. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I’ve sold over 500,000 copies of the Roy Keane book in hardback.’

15 November 2002
As part of my work at Trinity, at the behest of the British Council (who sponsor the International Creative Writing Fellowship), I’ve organized a Day of Scottish Literature and Talk. The arrivers all arrive at different times in Dublin today, with different enthusiasms, and different needs. Karl Miller’s remain the funniest: ‘We had a rather nervous time in the air,’ he says, ‘and a train to the place that leads to the air, which Robin Robertson appears to have brought into being.’

My girlfriend India arrives to inspect my rooms at Trinity. ‘Oh darling, how sweet,’ she says, ‘and all your little books set out,’ before immediately reserving a suite at the Fitzwilliam Hotel. Colm Tóibín throws a party to open the Scottish literary day; the guests eat curry and pass before the long windows. Karl Miller and Anthony Cronin are the two oldest people in the room. The first was literary editor of the Spectator while the second did the job at Time and Tide; that was in the late ’50s, and they had never met, though Karl Fergus Connor Miller wondered if the Irishman across from him wasn’t once known to be a ferocious hand at the drink. They are brought together, more than 140 years between them, senses of nationhood, literary friendships, governments, and a hill of marked galleys behind them, and they shake hands, standing together to talk about novels, seeming like two old knights with different accounts of the Crusades.

16 November 2002
There are about a hundred people at the Scottish event at Trinity, which is pleasing. Apart from my own students, the audience are people with shopping bags; I assume they are, like everybody in Ireland, listeners to Kenny Live.

Robin Robertson: ‘Most of these poems are about death and sex, or near-death experiences, and near-sex experiences.’

Alan Spence reads about undertakers, and Janice Galloway from her novel about Clara Schumann. Karl Miller speaks about Scots Bards and Scots Reviewers, the great period of Scottish self-inquiry. The audience seems to love it, and so do I, but I wonder if Scotland might not seem from all this talk of the dead to be a land of the passed and passing away. The day ends with the kind of debate that can only lead to further debate, and the security guards are frowning from the doors, and soon the entire group, Scots, Irish writers, Trinity clan, the lot, step over to St Andrew’s Street for the evening, and prove that conviviality is the natural partner to Caledonian pessimism.

18 November 2002
I was telling a journalist in Neary’s pub about my day on Saturday, and he puts me in my place by telling me about Bono’s day on Saturday. ‘First thing. Breakfast in his house with the US Secretary of Health and his three aides. Then he goes to a gallery at lunchtime to paint a big frieze for charity, works all the way to nine o’clock at night with hardly a break. Then he has his dinner and talks about another big project with a guy. Walks home and writes a song before going to bed at one o’clock. Then he gets up first thing to catch a flight to New York.’

1 December 2002
You wonder how much of Dublin has been lost to the renovations. I walk past Sweny’s chemist, the one that features in Ulysses, and notice they have heritage-style lemon soap in the window, to tickle the literary tourists no doubt, but everything around the shop and beyond suggests Dublin is a city much fiddled with and hammered, as if certain modern uglinesses have moral precedence over guilty old beauty every time.

Walking over the squares you see that nearly every one of the spectacular houses is now an office. Looking at the upper floors, I wonder what single people do now to live, and if they are still hanging in there and paying the exorbitant rents. The thought gives way to a stanza of Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Axel’s Castle’:

Beyond

the back-lit tree-tops of Fitzwilliam Square

a high window is showing one studious light,

somebody sitting late at a desk like me.

There are some die-hards still on the upper floors,

a Byzantine privacy in mews and lane,

but mostly now the famous Georgian doors

will house a junk-film outfit or an advertising agency.

10 December 2002
Off to the National Archives in Bishop Street to look at the files from 1972 that will be released on the 1st of January.

The accredited people in the reading room are all interested in what the new papers might say about Bloody Sunday. It is harrowing, all over again, to read, for instance, Lord Brockway’s original affidavit. He writes as someone who was present at the scene. Brockway is a good reporter, and he doesn’t mince his words. ‘When we reached Free Derry Corner there was a lorry for the speakers and a crowd around it of about 2,000,’ he writes. ‘It was a quiet and orderly crowd, except that a few girls in front were singing “We Shall Overcome”, and a rather more militant song in denunciation of British troops. There was no evidence of disorderly indignation, however, and the people were as serious and quiet as they had been at the beginning of the march in The Creggan.’

I decide to leave off Bloody Sunday, and instead study some papers relating to the ashes of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Iris Leslie was living at 16A Palmeira Court in Hove, and the date of her initial letter was 23 September 1971. Her letter was addressed to the Irish Ambassador in London.

Your Excellency,

As you are no doubt aware my husband Sir Shane Leslie passed from this life on August 13 last. I am most anxious that the Parnell relics which … were entrusted to Sir Shane should now be passed to the Irish nation. May I suggest that they be deposited in the safe keeping of your Embassy and transferred to Dublin at some date. Sir Shane did discuss the matter with Mr De Valera a few years ago but no immediate decision was taken as to where they could best be placed hence the fact that they are still here. There are photographs, miniatures, locks of hair, rings etc. and a set of silver gifts to Parnell’s grandson when a child … I will not be staying in Hove much longer and am most anxious to get this settled, and the relics placed in the right hands.

I love the notion of Parnell’s ashes and those locks of hair sitting in Palmeira Court. Further on in the correspondence, a member of the family says that ‘the contents of this box were treasured for nearly 30 years by Kitty O’Shea – from October 1891 to February 1921 … It was Mrs Parnell’s wish … that one day these Parnell relics would find a lasting resting place in Ireland.’

Walking towards St Stephen’s Green, the wind was cold. The autumn was truly over, the greys of a real winter lay ahead, but for today the sky was clear over the city of Dublin, and I walked ahead smiling at the thought of Parnell’s ashes and the thought of my own great-grandfather, a Glasgow man with a memory of Ireland, making his way up the road with a song about the blushing Miss Kitty.


Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 10 Spring 2003