BOOK OF THE DAY: City-pick. Perfect Gems of City Writing: DublinEdited by Heather Reyes Oxygen Books, 245pp, £8.99
IT IS always interesting to read a book about one’s home town, and the prospect of a literary homage is even better. However, it can also be a puzzling and even disappointing experience, with a perspective on the place that is lopsided and barely recognisable.
This compendium is a broadly satisfying selection – it includes contemporary works along with well-thumbed chestnuts – but it has curious fixations and omissions.
The most glaring cop-out is signalled at the beginning: there will be no James Joyce, the most famous Dublin writer and someone who celebrates his city in a way unparalleled in modern literature – except perhaps for the Paris of Zola and Flaubert.
The omission is not because of copyright problems, which can be notoriously difficult with Joyce, but because, according to editor Heather Reyes, “those who love his work do not need it repeated here, while those yet to be persuaded of its great riches and pleasures could hardly be converted by a short extract”. But why not?
So what we have instead is people talking about Joyce. Or writing about him. Or writing about the festival built around him, the Bloomsday celebration. And so once again we hear about straw boaters and pints in Sandycove.
I live in the heart of Joyceland, in Phibsboro, with associations to his life and work everywhere, but you never see a straw boater. What is it about the tourist version that it stops its homage to Joyce in the early sections of Ulyssesand parks its satisfied rear on a stool in Davy Byrnes?
It is difficult to satisfy everybody with an anthology like this, but how odd to leave out Joyce and Austin Clarke, the poet laureate of the north inner city, and yet have repeated selections from the likes of Keith Ridgway, and authors such as Colin Irwin and Orna Ross, frankly unknown to me. You know it’s an English production when you get a sentence like this: “Dublin used to like its writers dead. For the first 50 years of the Irish State, any living author who wrote a worthwhile work was censored and, often, hounded out.”
This would have been news to Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh or Flann O’Brien, lauded in their own lifetime.
Still, the value of a selection like this is that it sends you back to the originals and even to Joyce, if you haven’t already read him.
For this purpose, it comes in a tidy size with easy accessibility. The selections are under subject headings such as the past, the people and the pubs, predictably. It also has the merit of including non-fiction, with extracts from Nuala O’Faolain and Pete McCarthy in among selections from Iris Murdoch, Robert Lloyd Praeger and VS Pritchett, who gives us a wonderful account of meeting his hero, Yeats, in Merrion Square and watching while the ageing aesthete, with “Irish practicality”, goes to fling a pot of old tea out the window. This may not be everyone’s cup of the same, but it is a guide, and a legacy, worth dipping into.
Eamon Delaney's latest book is Breaking the Mould – A story of Art and Ireland(New Island)