Irishman in Exile

IT ISN'T THIS TIME OF YEAR AT ALL! (256 pp.)--Oliver St. John Gogarfy--Doubleday ($3.50).

"My thoughts are subjected to no rules . . . I can fly backwards and forwards in time and space." With which brave words Ireland's exiled poetaster and throat specialist. Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty, takes off on the umpteenth lap of his favorite circuit--Dublin in the first decades of the century.

The difficulty is that most of the terrain has been described in his earlier flights (As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, Going Native, etc.) It Isn't This Time of Year at All!, his "informal and unpremeditated autobiography," is a hunt over the old ground for neglected oddments of gossip and reminiscence. It contains many fine old chestnuts (such as George Moore describing William Butler Yeats as "looking like an umbrella forgotten at a picnic") and a few fresh ones (such as the same George Moore, affronted by a badly cooked omelette, summoning a policeman and saying sternly: "Go down and arrest [my cook] for obtaining money under false pretenses"). But most of the new material consists of Author Gogarty's telling a lot more stories about his bosom friend Dr. Gogarty.

Stately Buck Mulligan. Son of a Dublin physician, Oliver Gogarty finished his education at three universities--Oxford, and Dublin's Trinity College and Royal. He left Oxford a hero--the only undergraduate, he reports, who had ever drained at a draught the famed silver ale sconce of Worcester College (contents: "more than five pints"). Trinity College made a racing cyclist and physician of him, but the Royal gave him his chief claim to fame by bringing him in contact with an unknown student named James Joyce.

They were not alike. Student Gogarty was bibulous, ebullient, indulgent (or, as Joyce tagged him in the first sentence of Ulysses: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . ."). Student Joyce was afflicted by "seedy hauteur" and rarely allowed "those thin lips of his [to] cream in a smile . . . the most damned soul I ever met." They shared rooms in an old tower outside Dublin until Gogarty upset the mutual trust one dark night by firing a revolver into a pile of saucepans that hung above the sleeping poet's pillow. In so far as he ever does, Gogarty blames himself for not having noted at the time "the latent lunacy" of his pistol-shy pal; but he explains that "it is one thing to study lunacy in an asylum, another . . . to recognize it in a friend."

To the tower friendship belongs the occasion when Joyce, while in search for a title for his first book of poems, stumbled on a salesman's suitcase containing one gross of "ladies' undies." Fortified with "a few pints," Joyce took the underwear to the red-light district and hurled it into the bed of "the mistress of Sweeney the greengrocer . . . As he did so, his toe struck the night jar or 'chamber' and it rang musically." Gogarty and Joyce woke next morning lying side by side in a potato field, and the poet's first words, says Gogarty, were: "I have the title for my book of poems--Chamber Music."

Soon after, Joyce eloped to Paris with Hotel Maid Nora Barnacle. Gogarty set up practice in Dublin and became such a popular physician with the "moneyed garrison" of British troops that there was soon a grave danger of his being knighted for their pains. This would have resulted in Gogarty's losing "the bulk of my practise"; Irish Republicans are not the type of people to understand that "a doctor has to be all things to all men." Gogarty was wondering whether Lloyds of London would insure him against the fatal accolade when the 1916 Easter Rising went off under his feet like a bomb. Hastily turning his back on Dublin, Gogarty holed up in distant Connemara.

Unforgiven Republicans. He reemerged into public life as a Senator in the first, middle-of-the-road, Irish Free State Parliament and was sitting cozily in his senatorial tub one evening when he felt the cold muzzle of a pistol on his bare neck and heard a grim voice bark: "Out! And be quick!" His captors (De Valera Republicans) took him to a wall outside Dublin and were, he says, about to shoot him when he sprang into the River Liffey and swam to safety. "With much reluctance," he moved his practice to London, "where I was feted as a hero."

Gogarty, who now lives in Manhattan, has never forgiven De Valera (He "did more harm to Ireland than Cromwell"). But although he says he would gladly live his life over again "with little change." his tone of conviction is rather that of the Irish professor who, on being asked, "Are you saved?", replied: "To tell you the truth, my good fellow. I am, but it was such a narrow squeak it does not bear talking about."

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