When Michael Kane as a young man came to Dublin from Wicklow in 1956 to work in the telephone exchange as a “temporary night operator” he lodged with his aunt Miriam in her tall, chaotic house on Pembroke Road. Miriam’s household was an eccentric collection of family members and lodgers and Kane’s evocation of it in his memoir, generously illustrated with his own work, is a wonderful introduction to what is to come.
His depiction of a pair of gentlemen-boulevardier uncles, of his grandmother by the fire like “a primordial deity”, and of Miriam wandering around the dimly cavernous kitchen, is rich with the sepia mood and odours of the house. Upstairs in the Front Room, Kane, wearing his new bespoke suit, reads Dostoyevsky et al, as he pursues his erotic and contemplative enthusiasms. The poet Patrick Kavanagh, whom he reveres from afar, passes the window daily, “shambling magisterially towards town”. Ronnie Drew, another night telephonist friend, appears as a teddy boy from Dún Laoghaire studying Spanish guitar.
Soon after his arrival in Dublin, Kane enrols as a student at the College of Art on Kildare Street and quickly identifies as a rebel. Rejecting “the British pastoral tradition imposed on Irish art” he sees himself as European. He falls madly in love with a fellow art student who he will marry. His departure for the continent, to France, Spain and Italy is a romantic quest — she is in Italy on a scholarship — as much as it is artistic. His later life, as an artist more and less successful, according to the prevailing art climate, married and unmarried, stormy and settled, is in Dublin.
From this book alone — and he has written much in his long lifetime — it’s clear that Kane is as much a writer as he is a painter. Interesting though his life is, you will read Blind Dogs for the pleasure of immersion in his writing, in which compassion and dispassion, pathos and comedy are deliciously mingled. Interested in ideas and where he stands, he has an equally avid interest in people and observes them acutely. With his eye for the peculiar and the askew he can be unfashionably frank — but is just as frank, and unfashionably funny, about his own “contemptible self”.
