Dublin Go Bragh!

As I WAS GOING DOWN SACKVILLE STREET--Oliver St. John Gogarty--Rey-nal & Hitchcock ($3.50).

Dublin's Dr. Gogarty may go down in history merely as the original of Malachi Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses, but if so he will go down fighting. Ever since the publication of James Joyce's big book (1922), legends of Dr. Gogarty's near-mythical person have been stealing round the world like a slow smile. His many friends in Dublin could swear he was flesh-&-blood, but it was not till this week that the struggle for existence between the live doctor and the fictitious medical student began to look like a fair fight. Gogarty had published in the U. S. two books of verse (Wild Apples and Selected Poems; TIME, Nov. 27, 1933) which indicated that his Joycean counterpart was merely a portrait of the doctor as a young man; this week he published a work long in progress that showed him an unmistakably three-dimensional figure, as live as a high-tension line, as individual as an Irishman.

As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (the line is from a bawdy ballad) is not patterned in the ordinary, staid memoir manner. Not only by the title but by the book's motto ("We Irishmen are apt to think something and nothing are near neighbors") and the author's note ("The names in this book are real, the characters fictitious") readers are warned to hang on to their hats.

The Dublin through which Gogarty takes his sometimes headlong but not always straightforward course is peopled with queer, usually delightful characters, many of them transatlantically famed. Francis Hackett, George Moore, AE, William Butler Yeats, many a lesser fish swim through the bright underwater of Gogarty's world, and few of them are not good for a laugh, for Gogarty is never reverent even where he admires. Queerest fish of the lot is one "Endymion," who regularly steers his course home by compass, was once arrested for sabering a ham (which he had previously bought) running off with it on the end of his cutlass.

Dr. Gogarty is a distinguished throat specialist who works in an up-to-date hospital (built from profits from the Irish Sweepstakes), a married man and a father; but readers would hardly guess those facts from his book. Here he steers a carefree bachelor course from pubs to parties, escaping occasionally to drive his plane or shoot seals from a curragh, but always returning to drink with his friends, to be talked at and talk a sizzling blue streak. Only when the talk hovers on politics or poetry does the twinkle leave Gogarty's eye. "But nobody can betray Ireland: it does not give him the chance; it betrays him first." An ex-senator of the Irish Free State, he has no love for the Republicans, not one good word for de Valera: "De Valera and degeneration are synonymous." As an outspoken enemy of the Irish Republican Army during the Civil War (1922-23), he was shot at, kidnapped, had his country house burned down. At that point he took his family to England for a strategic vacation.

There he visited Talbot Clifton, English sportsman and explorer (The Book of Talbot; TIME, Sept. 25, 1933), who had been his neighbor in the Irish countryside. Gogarty's description of deerstalking with his paladin-host would bring tears of joy even to S.P.C.A. eyes. Clifton was a stern father, believed in teaching his sons everything he knew. At dinner he would suddenly fling a question: "Harry! Second picture from the top corner on the left?" "Canvasback duck, Father." "Right, go on with your dinner. . . . Dermot! The one in the corner?" "Sheldrake, Sir!" "Correct!"

The conversation of AE, says Gogarty, was glorious but hazy. He tells "how O'Leary Curtis lost his Faith one night through listening to AE, only to find it again next morning when he tried to explain to Fr. Paddy exactly what he had heard." Once Yeats and his wife were weekending at Gogarty's country house, which boasted an extremely active ghost. Gogarty had never minded the ghost, but Yeats proceeded to lay it. He sent it the following manifesto: "1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep. 2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys. 3. You must walk the house no more. 4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by. 5. You must name yourself to me." Says Gogarty, the adjuration worked.

George Moore, "the most potentially cantankerous man one could meet," and Gogarty were both guests at a men's dinner party which was interrupted by the irruption of a naked elderly lady, obviously beyond herself. When the host asked them not to say anything about it, Moore made an ambiguously flippant reply, and was shown the door. He soon reappeared, saying that he had been bitten by a mad dog. His host, a famous doctor, treated the slight scratches, made him pay -L-5 cash for the treatment. As he was shown the door a second time, the doctor's little Pomeranian (the "mad dog") trotted in.

Moore once came to Dr. Gogarty to have a rash on his forehead treated. Gogarty said: "Memoirs of your Dead Life," confined him to his house for a week, then managed to have a glittering invitation for every night of the week sent to Moore, was adamant when Moore declared he had made a marvelous recovery, begged to be allowed to accept just one.

Of James Joyce Dr. Gogarty has little to say, and that little cold. He remembers how it gave them the shivers, even in their young days, the way Joyce would suddenly disappear from a jolly gathering to make notes on what he had heard.

The book closes with a picnic, on a mountain-top with a fine view of Dublin, "the dear and fog-crowned Athens of my youth!" And plenty to drink. The guests are many and various. Noblest, by implication, is old Dr. Tyrrell, Professor of Greek at Trinity College, who tells an indignant anecdote about a lunch where he was nearly" allowed to perish of thirst. "Days later my 'host' had the audacity to ask me what I thought of a young subaltern who, incredible as it seems to me, got drunk in his house. 'It shows marvellous industry,' I said." Dr. Tyrrell believes there is no such thing as a large whiskey.

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