Words Glow With Wit, Poetry : Gift of Tongues Like Irish Birthright

In John Mulligan’s pub on Poolbeg Street, where James Joyce’s “Dubliners” might have tarried after a funeral in the pleasing period squalor of booze, burnished wood and gleaming stout pulls, the conversation turned to speculation about a general election.

“Remember what your man Conor Cruise O’Brien said about Charley Haughey?” began a red-haired barrister, wiping the froth of a Guinness from his lips with the back of his hand.

The slightly hung-over physician, healing himself with a double gin, could not recall what O’Brien, the journalist and sometime politician, had to say about the leader of Fianna Fail, Ireland’s largest political party. The lawyer gleefully delivered the quote in full, addressing the jury of other customers who had tuned in:

Just to Be Sure

“If I saw Mr. Haughey buried at midnight at a crossroads, with a stake driven through his heart--politically speaking--I should continue to wear a clove of garlic round my neck, just in case.”

The physician, who favored Haughey to become the next prime minister, felt obliged to fight back, or else what’s a pub for?

He countered with: “Well, now, do you remember what they said about Conor Cruise when he was minister of posts, telephones and telegraph? They said he was about as effective as a lighthouse on the Bog of Allen.”

The bog happens to be a huge dismal swamp of peat, which when dried is the fuel of turf fires. The fact that it also can be used to fuel an argument demonstrates that the art of conversation, wild with unpredictable metaphors, is not dead in a land where Daniel O’Connell, the great champion of Irish home rule, once likened British Prime Minister Robert Peel’s smile to “the silver plate on a coffin.”

Conversation among the Irish is considered a gift, like perfect pitch, not an acquired skill like squeezing an accordion or denting an opponent’s shinbone with a hurling stick. Even in polite argument, they go for the jugular with vocal cords woven of silken wit and paradox, pulled taut with neat little epigrams. The sarcasm is so cutting, you hardly see the blood flow as it cleaves layers of humbug and hypocrisy.

Here in the Emerald Isle, conversation is one of the martial arts, and the pub is the designated arena for word duelists who seek satisfaction for an insult with rapier thrusts of repartee. But the field of honor must be a real state-of-oral-art pub, innocent of jukebox, color TV, video games or other counterconversational intrusions. Sadly, this sort of pure Joycean pub is now threatened by the disco-corrupted demands of the tourist trade, but it still manages to hang on in the back streets of the big cities and in most of the smaller towns.

‘A Busman’s Holiday’

Only in a pub dedicated solely to dispensing strong spirits, warm ale and heated discussions will you hear lines like:

“The mother who reared him would drown nothing.”

“For her, the honeymoon was just a busman’s holiday.”

“The foreman sent him for an X-ray to see if there was a trace of work left in him.”

It was in Higgin’s bar on Upper Abbey Street, where Michael Collins and the old Irish Republican Army cabinet used to meet, that Brendan Behan, in the presence of his in-laws, delivered himself of the courageous observation: “All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream, except my wife’s family.”

The playwright thus exempted himself from the unwritten rule that “in Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.”

After Jonathan Swift, that savage satirist, almost all the great Irish writers who dominated the English language for the last three centuries were dramatists. From William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan down through Shaw, Wilde, Synge and O’Casey to the modern works of Beckett, Behan and Brian Friel, the Irish genius has always flared from the gift of tongues--brilliant, withering dialogue that most likely was first tried out in a pub, except in the case of the teetotaling George Bernard Shaw.

Even the novelist Joyce and the Nobel laureate poet William Butler Yeats were proud to be numbered among Ireland’s performed playwrights.

Not Only the Literati

Lilting language, full of zest and originality, is an almost everyday delight in Ireland and in the British province of Northern Ireland. The phenomenon is not limited to the literary class or found only in pubs--which the Irish critic Arland Ussher aptly called “the layman’s monastery.” People in the humblest circumstances seem capable of the most luminous phrases, as if trying to brighten their daily drudgery and despair with the glow of words.

“I’m heart-scalded with the lot of them,” a tenement dweller recently poured out her anguish to a Dublin court trying her three teen-age sons on drug-dealing charges.

Ghostly Visit

An old Irish “shawlie,” a casting director’s dream for a John Ford movie, vividly told her parish priest what it was like to be visited by the ghost of her dead husband: “It felt like a wind from the sea coming bechuxt (between) me skin and me blood.”

Country people seem to have memorized astonishing amounts of poetry, which ornaments their ordinary talk with heroic and romantic imagery.

Some months ago, a weekly newspaper in the west of Ireland told how a somewhat sobered-up citizen reacted to a 15-pound fine imposed on him for urinating off the back steps of the Galway bus: “Fifteen pounds, your honor! Is this the Ireland I fought and died for?”

And a few weeks later, an elderly, pixie-faced priest drained the charisma from a sophisticated BBC commentator hosting a panel on birth control by arguing that banning the pill would not bring about a population explosion because “Irish women since time immemorial have known how to keep the kettle off the boil.”

Another venerable cleric in the company of this writer told the waitress in the Gresham Hotel to serve the old-fashioned brandy fruitcake “because at our age, it’s nice to have archaic and eat it.”

Wits in the Irish Department of External Affairs gave the code name “Fatsy Pagan” to the visit of Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, a takeoff on the folk song “Hello, Patsy Fagan.”

Air of Alliteration

Only devout reverence for the irreverent would prompt a Killarney Irish publican to characterize women emerging from the church across the road as “silly old crows sending up a constant caw of calumny.”

Irish clergy alluding to clergy from rival sects can always be depended upon to produce some ecumenical smoke unrelated to incense.

His Grace William Philbin, the frail ascetic Catholic bishop of Belfast, Northern Ireland, once said that the Rev. Ian Paisley’s doctorate in divinity from Bob Jones University in South Carolina was “self-inflicted.”

Paisley, the Protestant firebrand from Ulster, frequently refers to the Pope as “Old Red Socks” or “the Polish bachelor who lives on the banks of the Tiber.”

White, Not Red

The fact that the papal hosiery is white or that the Apostolic Palace is some distance away from the river does not diminish the imagery. As Honor Tracy, the novelist who lives in remote County Mayo, has remarked: “Facts in Ireland are very peculiar things. They are rarely allowed to spoil the sweep and flow of conversation; the crabbing effect they have on good talk is eliminated almost entirely. I do not believe myself that the Irishman conveniently ignores their existence, as sometimes is said, so much as that he soars above their uninviting surface on wings of fancy.”

But flights of fancy on wings of words allow one to escape from grim reality.

Where else but on this island, and particularly in bombed-out and burned-out Belfast, do you hear children skipping rope to so pathetic and so pungently poetic a jingle as:

To hell with the future

And long live the past,

May God in his mercy

Look down on Belfast.

Whatever the vicissitudes of life--terror that won’t go away, a damp, depressing climate, poor farm prices, the treadmill of inflation and taxes--the Irishman’s everyday world is warmed, for a few hours anyhow, by the incandescent wit and satisfying glow of conversation and verbal adversaries. The English spoken in Ireland, as playwright Brian Friel has noted, has a “syntax opulent with tomorrows.”

Proud Heritage

The gift of gab has been this tiny country’s proud heritage and saving grace in times of trouble since the last glimmer of the Celtic twilight when the high kings of Ireland every three years summoned bards and lawgivers to the peat-smoke-filled rooms of the palace on the hill of Tara for advice and consolation on current wars and problems. These ancient talkathons were the precursors of our modern political conventions.

No country can boast a livelier oral history.

England’s first Queen Elizabeth was charmed by the “fair words and soft speech” of Cormac MacCarthy, the lord of Blarney, but was unable to get a straight answer on whether he supported the crown. In exasperation, she cut short one of his hearthside chats with the cry, “This is all Blarney.” Ever since, the lord’s castle in County Cork has been a mecca, and its famed kissing stone a secondary relic, for pilgrims seeking the miracle of instant eloquence.

Riposte to Royalty

When the Stuart King James II lost his throne at the Battle of the Boyne, north of Dublin, he burst in upon Lady Tyrconnell, crying, “Those scoundrels of Irish soldiers ran!”

“Well,” said she, “I see Your Majesty won the race.”

During the era of the great English estates in Ireland, when tenants were driven off the land by absentee landlords demanding exorbitant rents, an Irish member of the Parliament at Westminster argued that those evicted were morally justified in taking up arms against agents for the landlords.

He was interrupted by shouts of “Treason! Treason!” from the front benches, but he won the conversational battle with a now-famous pun. “What is treason in England,” he rebuked the hecklers, “is reason in Ireland because of the absent T (absentee).”

Ireland’s stormy history is arched over with rainbows of colorful speech lighting up the darkest days.

The Birth of a Pun

Oscar Wilde’s mentor at Trinity College in Dublin was Provost John Mahaffy, a nimble wit who vanquished a feminist haranguing him to spell out any difference between the sexes with the riposte, “Madame, I cannot conceive.”

Mahaffy compressed the Hibernian mystique into a neat epigram: “In Ireland, the inevitable never happens, but the unexpected often occurs.”

Like the pubs, Irish courtrooms echo with the clash and clang of conversation as combat.

An Irish barrister, making the best of a weak argument, was interrupted by the judge on a point of law: “Your client no doubt is aware of the doctrine de minimis non curat lex. “

“I can assure you, my lord,” came the reply, “that in the remote and inhospitable hamlet where my clients have their humble abode, it forms the sole topic of conversation.”

This reporter had occasion to visit the special three-judge court in Dublin to try accused terrorists, set up because of the reluctance of Irish juries to return verdicts against the defendants in such case.

Devotion to Drink

On this particular day, a young Catholic of about 19 was on trial for setting fire to the “Protestant” pub where he worked--Ireland, of course, being the only country in the world where you drink according to the religion of your choice.

The defense argued that the accused was not an arsonist but a hapless drunkard who set the fire by accident. To advance this point, he called the lad’s toothless, seamy-faced old landlady to the stand.

“Tell me,” coaxed the learned counsel, “was your lodger in the habit of drinking much when he was by himself?”

To which the old crone replied: “Can’t say for sure, your worship. You see, I was never with him when he was by himself.”

As Sean O’Faolain, the Irish historian, has observed: “There’s a lot to be said for illiteracy. It teaches a people to think for themselves.”