Fear and Loathing in Dublin E-Book

Aodhan Madden

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In 1970s Dublin, transformation is everywhere: people have money in their pockets and wear the latest fashions. But in the pubs and clubs of the city, following the death of his mother, Madden is being crushed by the weight of his closet homosexuality a desperate place for a sensitive young man in that homophobic time and is struggling with alcoholism and paranoid delusions. After a series of surreal drunken 'adventures' around the city, he checks himself in to St Patrick's Hospital where his own transformation begins. Madden writes movingly of his experiences in St Patrick's hospital, his sometimes dubious friendships with his fellow patients including a drag queen and a murderer and his battles with the authorities and the drink. He tells of how he eventually got his life back on course and launched a successful career as a playwright. Finally, he writes with great tenderness about his father, who lovingly stood by him through the worst of his troubles. This bleakly comic memoir, reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, makes for gripping, enthralling reading from the first page to the last

Leseprobe

Fear and Loathing in Dublin

Aodhan Madden

Contents

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1

The day’s shift on the Evening Press was over and, as usual, some of the sub-editors sought solace in the grimy back lounge of Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street. We were watching Bernadette Devlin making a speech in New York. ‘Up the IRA!’ someone shouted, and there was a general murmur of approval. I was drinking with Adrian McLoughlin, the acerbic film critic of the Evening Press. He rarely saw any of the films he was supposed to have reviewed but that did not detract from the entertainment value of his Saturday column. His film pieces were wild, intoxicated essays. He said that he was thirty-six but he looked more than fifty. He was small and tubby and his clothes were a riot of colours; he bought them in a boutique called ‘Hot Pants’ off Henry Street in the centre of Dublin. This afternoon he was wearing pink, skintight trousers, over which his beer belly flopped like a gigantic codpiece. He was painfully conscious of his retreating hairline and was forever cultivating the last bits of straggly vegetation. I often saw him combing his hair on the street, one eye furtively scrutinising his reflection in a shop window.

‘Fuck Bernadette Devlin!’ Adrian roared at the television set. This elicited a murmur of approval from some of the newspapermen in the bar. Tom, the barman, looked affronted. He was young and from the country, and was very sensitive to any disparagement of his republican beliefs. ‘Now, Adrian, keep it down,’ he warned, his fat, rubbery face flushed with indignation.

But Adrian wanted to talk about the book he was writing and the strident Northern platitudes emanating from the television disrupted his flow because she was adored by the entire country. He hated the common cause and relished being aloof from anything that was fashionable.

We went to Mulligan’s every afternoon. Sometimes the newspaper’s editor, Conor Byrne, joined us for a gin and tonic, but he rarely talked and liked to stand slightly apart. Adrian believed that Conor, who was from Blackrock, was a snob. Certainly Conor exuded a certain gravitas, as if the responsibilities of being an editor of a Dublin evening newspaper had elevated him above the rest of us. He talked about rugby, and his friends were mostly barristers and judges – rather seedy-looking, turkey-wattled gentlemen who dropped in to Mulligan’s on their way home from the courts.

‘Adrian, let’s talk about something else apart from your fucking book.’ I was bored by his obsessive retelling of every verse and chapter of his magnum opus. His face clouded over and his eyes narrowed viciously behind the broken glasses – the result of one of his ‘falls’ when he was going home at night from the pub.

‘Let’s talk about you, ye mean,’ he hissed. ‘Let’s talk about you and your fucking trendy friends up in the Bailey.’

There was jealous rage in his voice. He was consumed with bitterness. Most of the time this anger was channelled into drunken eccentricity, but when it became personal, it was very disturbing. Why did he hate me so much? Yet he followed me around everywhere. He even tried to dress like me, desperately attempting to be the twenty-year-old that I was then in 1971 and that he apparently had never been. The Bailey, to him, was the repository of everything that was crass, modern and fashionable. It was ‘up there’, off Grafton Street, where the new generation strutted and pouted like peacocks, and was a world away from Adrian’s decrepit old Dublin of newspaper ‘characters’ and Georgian ghosts.

Mick Barlow, an irascible court reporter, sidled into our company, attracted by the prospect of trouble. Barlow was tiny and wizened; he wore a floral bow tie and sported a malevolent gargoyle grin. He had spent too many years in the courts, reporting on murders and rapes and the seamy side of human experience. His jaded manner hinted at long afternoons at dismal press receptions, sipping cheap wine and munching wet cheese crackers with flashy types in mohair suits.

‘Ah, Adrian,’ he said, ‘I hear you are about to take the literary world by storm.’ A smirk cracked his face.

This remark did the trick, and Adrian was stopped in full flow of invective.

Barlow winked at me mischievously. ‘And may one enquire what the manuscript is called?’ he asked in a mocking tone.

Adrian snorted and drained the last of his pint. ‘Footsteps in the Scullery,’ he said sharply.

Barlow’s eyes rose in mock appreciation. ‘How suggestive of a lower-middle-class Joycean milieu. It is set in Dublin, I presume?’

Of course, this had the desired effect, and Adrian was off again, bustling through the maze of the book’s plot. Barlow’s eyes now suddenly glittered and his mock wistful sighs encouraged Adrian in his hopeless, useless, drunken odyssey.

I turned back to the television. At least Bernadette Devlin had honesty and passion going for her. She was not like these cynics in Mulligan’s. They were running a national newspaper, yet they were so bored, so weighed down by their own hopelessness, that they could not believe in anything any more, not even themselves. The pub filled up with more reporters and printers. The winter afternoon darkened and I got drunk again.

The subs desk in the Press was like a home for terminal eccentrics. They were mostly middle-aged men in varying stages of mental and physical disrepair. Some had stopped talking to others years before. Others were so permanently drunk and wet-brained that they merely went through the motions of editing copy. Readers who rang in to complain about misprints in the paper had no inkling of the bedlam behind the typographical chaos. The cause of much of this anarchy was Harry O’Toole, a former priest who wore a green gansey that looked like a Picasso painting with the egg and soup stains of a lifetime gathered in it. He was the sub who had spiked a breaking news report about the Six Day War because he’d had to catch the four o’clock bus home to Bray, where he kept a guest house. No mere war was going to interfere with his domestic arrangements.

Then there was John J. Dunne, who, apart from his sub-editing duties, wrote ghost stories for the paper. He was obsessed with ghosts and murders and knew more about Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper than he ever did about journalism. A bachelor in his sixties, he was so insecure that he had to possess two of everything: two houses, two cars, two dogs, and apparently only two shirts. His insecurity made him ferociously intense. I once sold him a pair of elephant flares for two pounds. He proudly wore them around the office. Adrian said that he looked like a scarecrow; but a bargain, even one that might make an ageing man look vaguely ridiculous, was still a bargain. His home-made ‘fry sandwiches’ were an office joke. At eleven every morning, he produced this oddity from his satchel – two ugly lumps of bread clamped over a fried egg, black pudding and a tomato – and fed upon it with the fury of a barracuda.

For a few years, I revelled in this strange, witty world of middle-aged male eccentricity. But it was also a selfish and cruel world. The laughter was harsh – like that of hyenas feasting on the marrow of human frailty. There was a lot of fear, too: a sense of impending doom. At around seven in the evening, after spending three hours or more in Mulligan’s, I used to get the number 10 bus home to the North Circular Road. I was usually inebriated, and my mother was often angry. ‘You’ll ruin your life,’ she used to say, fearfully.

I knew she was right, but what other life was there apart from Mulligan’s and the Bailey and occasionally Searson’s over in Baggot Street? Life was in the pubs and the clubs, in the back room of Groome’s Hotel in Parnell Square, where what passed for the Dublin demi-monde assembled after the pubs had closed. I was young and this was a young age. The economic depression was over and we had money in our pockets for the first time. Besides, I was writing a column in the Sunday Press and I was often on the radio reviewing plays. What other twenty-year-old was doing these things? I had it made, I kept telling myself. Even if I woke up in a gutter of vomit and blood in one of the lanes at the back of the Press, I knew I had it made. I often stumbled home to hammer out some smart-ass review on the typewriter and impress the world. Oh yes, I impressed the world all right.

Bernadette Devlin might have been loathed by many of the older generation, but to us younger people she was a heroine, the voice of persecuted Irish nationalism. She linked us to the great youth protests of the age, to Alexander Dubcek in Prague, the students at the barricades in Paris, the anti-Vietnam war protesters outside American embassies around the world. I knew very little about Northern Ireland, though. Some of my grandmother’s people had been burned out of Belfast in the 1920s, but the Orangemen were stranger to me than aliens from a distant planet.

After Bloody Sunday, when the SAS shot down thirteen unarmed civilians in Derry, the country went mad. Adrian and I joined the mob outside the British embassy in Merrion Square. We were both mouldy drunk – as were, it seemed, most people, walking around in the drizzle that winter’s day like extras in a ghastly melodrama. Every time one of the Sinn Féiners lobbed a petrol bomb from their lorry up at the embassy, a drunken cheer went up. ‘Go home, ye fuckin’ Black and Tans!’ a boy, aged about ten, screamed up at the beautiful Georgian building. I noticed a neighbour of mine on the back of the Sinn Féin lorry. He was generally a quiet, simple man but had now suddenly been transformed into a salivating lunatic, as he urged us all to storm the building. We had absolutely no doubt that right was on our side: there was no space in that frantic place for the merest hint of doubt.

When it was all over, we trudged back through the January gloom to the solace of Mulligan’s, elated because we had done our bit for Ireland. The atmosphere in the pub was electric, like that after an All-Ireland football final. There is nowhere quite like a newspaper pub when a big story breaks: it is all as phoney as the Hollywood stereotype, with reporters pumped up on self-importance and piddling about like children playing Shakespeare. Clichés became the poetry of anguished inarticulation. Great emotions were described in garish brushstrokes, and a moment of great historical importance was reduced to a facile headline.

Not long after that, Dublin was hit by a series of bomb scares; the Irish Press was an obvious target for loyalist terrorists. Every time there was a scare, we evacuated the old building to seek refuge in one of the pubs on Burgh Quay beside the Liffey. The Scotch House was like an old barn. It attracted a strange mix of newspaper people, actors and, sometimes, rent boys, who cruised the quay in search of customers. One Saturday afternoon during a bomb scare, I was sitting at the bar observing a High Court judge making eyes at a scruffy young male customer of about eighteen when Adrian stumbled in sporting a black eye and looking as if he had fallen out of an old painting.

‘I was beaten up by a priest,’ he said. He refused to elaborate and I knew from experience that it was pointless to pursue the matter. Adrian was not just a drunk, he was a free spirit, and that was what had brought me into his crazy orbit. He lived his life in pubs and knew the secrets of all their inhabitants, but he could never write anything more substantial than the journalism pieces that he tossed off for the newspaper. There were books in him all right – a whole library of bibulous tales which would never be written down but would instead be acted out to strangers in pubs. I sensed that he knew that he was trapped in this literary twilight. He told the world that he was writing his great book, but nobody believed him.

Later, I learned that he had been beaten up by two clerics in the grounds of Clonliffe College, Drumcondra, after they had been awakened by his drunken bawling: ‘Fuck the archbishop! Fuck the archbishop!’ The archbishop in question was the legendary John Charles McQuaid, with whom Adrian was obsessed. He hated the old autocrat and regularly regaled his pub cronies with outrageous stories concerning McQuaid’s alleged sexual practices.

Adrian nodded to the High Court judge and then, to my amazement, ordered a pint of lemonade. ‘I’m giving up the drink,’ he solemnly declared. Of course I didn’t believe him. ‘I can’t drink and write at the same time,’ he said. ‘So now I have to rewrite the book again.’ I had thought that the sudden crisis in the North had pushed that particular obsession out of his mind. But no, it was still there, gnawing at him, a ghastly mammoth defying extinction. Then he gave me a strange, unsettling look. ‘I have to write it, you see.’ So he returned to his typewriter and rewrote many thousands more words of petrified prose which no publisher would ever read. He must have read my mind, because he slammed his pint glass onto the counter. ‘I’ll show you, you little fucking bastard.’ Downwind, the judge knocked back his glass of whiskey and loped wearily back into the jungle.

Terry O’ Sullivan wrote a social column in the paper every evening. His ‘Dubliners’ Diary’ archly described a Dublin that was still cosily provincial. But now, in the early 1970s, that was changing. The old shabby city was disappearing as new office blocks replaced the music halls, cinemas and run-down Georgian buildings. The old-style newspaper columnist, who came into the office in evening dress reeking of whiskey and eau de cologne, was beginning to look like a pomaded extra from another age.

One evening, O’Sullivan mentioned to me that the American singer Guy Mitchell was making a comeback in, of all places, the Drake Inn, a somewhat tacky pub out in Finglas. He gave me one of his extravagant matinée winks. ‘That’s up your alley, old chum,’ he said, referring to a recent series of articles I had done for the paper called ‘Where are they now?’ This was an exercise in journalistic necrophilia which involved raiding hospitals, nursing homes and drying-out clinics in pursuit of actors, politicians and sports stars of yore – the flotsam of a vanished celebrity circuit. One such ‘celebrity’ was a former Theatre Royal matinée idol, Freddy Doyle, now ancient, rouged and sitting on a bed in Baggot Street Hospital surrounded by yellowed newspaper cuttings. He went on and on about the Boer War, and after a while I realised that he regarded me as a contemporary.

‘Ye must remember Madge Cliften,’ he said. ‘She shot her lover in the arse and went off to South America, where she died in the war.’

‘Which war, Freddy?’

‘The Boer War,’ he rasped.

The Drake Inn was crammed with middle-aged ladies. As soon as Guy Mitchell limped arthritically on to the tiny stage, a great raucous roar went up from the peroxide ranks. He sang his trademark song ‘She Wore Red Feathers on her Hoola-hoola Skirt’, and the grannies of Finglas sang along adoringly. Then Guy plunged into all his other hits of the 1950s, stopping occasionally to sip from a pint of Guinness. The voice was gone and he looked haggard. It was sad, yet his fans were in a celebratory mood. Here was their great childhood hero returned – ravaged and shell-shocked, but alive – from the wars. Afterwards, in a Corporation house beside the pub, I chatted to Mitchell about his comeback. ‘Yeah,’ he announced with the doomed enthusiasm of a loser, he was going on to London and then Las Vegas. We never heard of him after that.

Not long after that scoop, I was back on the necrophile trail again. For some reason, the paper’s editor thought I was best employed trudging down memory lane. It was safer there for a young drunk.

Kathleen Behan, Brendan’s mother, was celebrating her birthday in her nursing home in Raheny. It was a bright, cheerful Friday afternoon, but the ward was as tranquil as a convent, with elderly patients snoozing behind their bed-screens. The sun, bursting in the windows, cast a remorseless light on this Limbo, but Kathleen was in high spirits. She asked me to stand guard at the ward door while she smoked a cigarette. ‘The Mother Superior will kill me,’ she chuckled.

We talked for hours about her life in Russell Street, with her unruly brood of brilliantly talented children; about Brendan, and his adventures, and his tragically early death. She described a past teeming with life, humour and tragedy. A deep sadness hung over us; I thought about what a lonely last act to such a riotously rich life this was.

‘You’ll visit me again,’ she whispered as I left her. ‘I don’t get too many visitors now.’

Kathleen died a few weeks later.

Occasionally I did theatre reviews for the Evening Press. Once I reviewed a play called When Did You Last See Your Mother? by Christopher Hampton. The play was about a young man’s painful attempts to come to terms with his homosexuality. In my review, I appealed for a more compassionate attitude to gay people. A few days after the review was published, a priest from our parish called to the house to ‘have a word’ with me. He said he was ‘most concerned’ about the views I had expressed in the paper. I brusquely told him that he should write a letter to the editor, who might consider publishing it, and then showed him to the door. The incident disturbed me, though, and I decided to keep certain views to myself.

It was safer to trawl down memory lane. I had found my perfect niche in this kind of journalism. The past had always been a favourite place of refuge for me. It was everywhere, beckoning from family photographs, from old newspapers under the linoleum in my bedroom, from every dusty nook and cranny of our Victorian house on the North Circular Road. And the past was like a drug, a soothing soporific. Belonging to a large extended family meant being part of living history. Pop talked about the Troubles with old cronies from the neighbourhood, recalling with relish the derring-do of IRA men on the run from the British forces. He also talked about the bravery of the Dublin Fusiliers in the Great War. Mother remembered how her Uncle Terry, a mere boy, had been dragged from his bed and beaten up by the Black and Tans. And there were the aunts, or ‘the girls’, as Mother called them. They were Pop’s three unmarried sisters, who lived together on the Cabra Road and idolised the only man in their lives – Éamon de Valera. They inhabited the past completely: all their energies were drawn from it. Their talk was about childhood holidays in an enchanted Greystones; the Eucharistic Congress and Count John McCormack singing ‘Panis Angelicus’; de Valera’s wartime tussles with Churchill; Monday nights spent swooning at camp English music-hall artistes in the Theatre Royal. Even when they came for the Christmas parties, they brought the past with them. They drank sherry and sang Edwardian-era songs, and Anna, the eldest and most accomplished of the three, played Ivor Novello tunes on the piano.

From an early age, I was convinced that the past was an ideal place. All the best music belonged there. So too did the happiest times: of sunlit summer days and firewarmed winter nights when that exquisite music of remembrance wafted up the stairs to my room, and maiden aunts sang about love and regret. It was impossible to resist the pull of the past when, as a child, I viewed the future with nervous uncertainty. And of course, the past was the safest refuge for a drunk. Even the subs desk in the Press resembled a world closer to that of James Joyce than to the changing Ireland of the 1970s. It was peopled by ‘characters’ – Dublin shorthand for mild eccentrics, perverts, bigots, manic depressives, hopeless alcoholics and raving lunatics. And the nearby pubs belonged to a pre-1914 world. They were dirty and musty, their walls yellowed by years of cigarette smoke, their snugs and back rooms inhabited by gnarled and crabbed creatures redolent of Hogarth – creatures who were also besotted with the past, the 1930s or 1940s, when newspapers were supposedly better and reporters were fearless champions of the truth. And on weekend nights, these pubs were like Babels of ancient chaos, as the old crowd recycled all their fantasies with maudlin gusto.

Of course, the past fertilised and stimulated our politics as well: the North, England, the Famine and 1916. We thought we were hip, in our elephant flares and platform boots, but we were still rooted in some backwater of history, endlessly singing the same sentimental airs, furiously mouthing the anti-English lyrics of the Wolfe Tones in grubby ballad bars. We might have protested against the Vietnam War outside the American Embassy, but only Imperial Britain could inspire our deepest feelings of self-pity and racial hatred. We turned up at the anti-apartheid rallies, but no issue was ever as serious, as personal and as emotional as the ‘eight hundred years’ of England’s so-called colonial tyranny.

Adrian and John J. Dunne seemed to typify that age for me. I wanted to be like them – brilliant writers who were focused entirely on old Dublin, unsolved murders, ghost stories, the personal and anecdotal details of battles long ago. All their energies came, it seemed, from that miasma, and I was, for a while, dazzled. I walked O’Connell Street and saw only ghosts: an impossibly romantic Robert Emmet or Patrick Pearse, with their mad eyes and good looks; Parnell and Kitty O’Shea and the battalions of jealous priests; Maud Gonne swooping on a public rally outside the rotunda like an ancient bird of prey; Micheál MacLiammóir swanning into the Gresham Hotel in hideous make-up like a Byzantine emperor. MacLiammóir was Dublin’s token gay celebrity. Most people thought that he and his partner, Hilton Edwards, were the only gay people in Ireland; they were tolerated because of MacLiammóir’s status as a great ‘Irish’ actor.

Dublin’s idealised past was heady wine indeed, and I drank on it to stupefaction. I drank from the very first day I joined the Press after leaving school at eighteen. Drink was to be the great liberation from a 1950s Irish childhood. It was to be a grand adventure, opening up all the secrets of the forbidden. ‘You’ll ruin yourself,’ Mother warned, but I never heeded her. I used to see that fearful look in her eyes when I stumbled in drunk after a night in Mulligan’s and the back room of Groome’s hotel. That look came from the past, from a country town where an uncle had drunk himself into an early grave, and where many boys and girls my own age had sunk into a similar mire of booze and mawkishness. History was working its malevolent spell on another generation, she must have felt, and she was helpless to stop it.

‘I wish you had never gone into the Press,’ she said another time. Her disappointment was all the more painful because she could never understand or articulate it. The simple girl from Tipperary was proud of the achievements of her children, but beneath that pride there was a deep, dull, inexplicable ache that no amount of bylines and interviews with the famous could remove. I think she must have glimpsed my future, but she was not to live to see her deepest fears realised.

2

Mother fell out of the bath one morning. I remember that the radio was on, crackling with furious Northern voices. It was 9 august 1971, the day they introduced internment in Northern Ireland. My sister called the doctor but he never came. Then, in panic, we called an ambulance and Mother was taken to the Mater Hospital, where they discovered that she had suffered a minor heart attack. She rallied for a few days and her personality filled the ward. She seemed to know all the other patients – where they came from, their relations and friends. Mother was always saying in wonderment: ‘isn’t it a small world all the same?’ after about a week, she had recovered sufficiently, and the doctors said she could return home within a day or two.

Then the phone rang at 6 AM one Monday morning. I heard it and ran down the stairs, but Pop had already taken the call. He said gravely that we were to go down to the hospital. But I knew what he knew and resented that even then, at this critical hour, he was trying to shield us from the truth. At the hospital, I noticed nurses rushing in and out of the ward. Other nurses were removing a drip from Mother’s bed, which had a screen around it. Then I saw Pop bent over in pain. There was a suddenness about everything which was appalling: the terrible drip, the white figures darting about, the spontaneous gasps, and the jerky movements of shock. It all felt like a dream. I can recall walking in what seemed to me to be slow motion, in that white, dreamlike chaos.