There’s a bar near me that goes all out for the Masters. It’s a corner place with a small walkway it annexed from the development by subtle encroachment; a table here, now two, now six tables and outdoor TVs on the wall. I don’t think they own the “patio,” but it’s theirs now.
A few years ago, sections of the windowed front were replaced by glass garage doors. In good weather, weather like today, they open up the place and it’s all one big breezy space. All of it, the interior and the squatters-rights walkway, are covered in sod for the Masters. Not rolled out astroturf. They bring in real grass. I wouldn’t think it’d look good – ripped up in seconds by beer and wine guzzler feet I assumed – but it somehow does. They have drink specials, bands at night, and always one of the best hamburgers and bowls of chili in town.
My wife and I want to head out for a bit this afternoon and hang out. We hate golf. And crowds. This stinks.
Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out of work asap and get the weekend started. The Masters is on. If you’re in Birmingham, try Otey’s in Crestline, but don’t expect a seat this weekend. Damn golf.
First, a little verse.
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“Twelve years ago Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow. His poetry fits the incident, a gay, stoical—no, I will not withhold the word—heroic song. Irish by tradition and many ancestors, I love, though I have nothing to offer but the philosophy they deride, swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men; yet I do not think that is the sole reason, good reason though it is, why I gave him considerable space, and think him one of the great lyric poets of our age.”
– W. B. Yeats, from the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935
Oliver St. John Gogarty was a dear friend of Archie Griffith and with him, a founding member of Sinn Fein. He variously carted around Irish Republican Army members as surreptitiously as allowed by the canary yellow Rolls Royce he drove, volunteered his house as a safe house, and otherwise behaved anti-Englishly. He sided with Griffith in supporting a treaty despite internal opposition to peace within the revolutionary movement, and sat as a Free State Senator, a designation considered by many in the IRA such as Liam Lynch, as traitorous capitulation to the crown. Lynch ordered the IRA to shoot the office holders and that led to Gogarty pretending diarrhea and the escape Yeats refers to above.
There’s a second story involving a revolver. In 1904, Gogarty rented a Martello tower – one of many small defensive coastal forts built across the British Empire in the 19th century and meant to house roughly twenty men – in Sandycove, Dublin. Now it’s known as James Joyce Tower and Museum. The idea was to give his university friend Joyce, famously on the needy side, somewhere to live while finishing a novel (Wikipedia says he called his mission “Housing the Bard.”) I can’t confirm which one. He gave up on Stephen Hero in 1905. It would reemerge shorter and reworked as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, so I’m assuming Stephen Hero was the novel in question because it fits the timeline, but that doesn’t really matter. There was a shooting and it made an impression.
It was Joyce, Gogarty, and a school acquaintance they didn’t know too well, Samuel Chenevix Trench, holed up in the round tower. To hear Gogarty tell the story (and you should – audio here) the three slept in a circular room with a shelf above the beds round the whole. Trench suffered from nightmares, and one evening something frightened him in his sleep. He awoke screaming, “There’s a black panther!” and fired off two shots from a revolver that must have been under his pillow or on his person.
Things calmed down and everybody went back to sleep, but not before Gogarty squirrelled the gun away. Shortly after, Trench awoke screaming again. Gogarty cried “I can take care of the menagerie!” and started shooting cans and tins of fish on the shelf above Joyce’s bed. The world needs more Gogartys.
According to the linked recording, Joyce rose, dressed, packed, and left, “ash plant,” “white yachting hat” and all, never to return.
A year and a half ago I confessed on these electronic pages to never having read Ulysses. I’ve done nothing to rectify that. I have read enough of other people’s accounts and thoughts of the book to be third hour cocktail party conversant. At the risk of embarrassing myself, Ulysses opens in 1904 at the tower. From early in:
—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?
—A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther.
The character Buck Mulligan is based on Gogarty. The character’s full name is Malachi Roland St. John Mulligan, which (I didn’t note where I read this and can’t find it again, so my apologies to whomever noticed and deserves credit) is a syllabic match to Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty.
I’ve gone on a bit without any poetry. Further but non-parenthetical apologies.
There’s a type of poem that eludes may ability to classify it in genre or form. Robert Graves is the poet I most associate with them. I don’t know why I image the persona having a touch of white hair, but I do. A man speaks calmly to a woman he loves (can’t say “the woman” because of Graves.) The voice is masculine, wise, and confident that what he offers or what they share is sufficient. They’re intensely intimate. Here’s an offering in that vein from Gogarty.
After Galen
(Oliver St. John Gogarty 1878-1957)Only the Lion and the Cock,
As Galen says, withstand Love’s shock,
So, Dearest, do not think me rude
If I yield now to lassitude,
But sympathize with me. I know
You would not have me roar or crow.
Scene setting and establishment of atmosphere like that is what drew me to poetry in the first place. Done properly, it seems effortless; an exhale before a moment earned together. I’m like a Swiftie when I read that stuff.
Joyce made Buck Mulligan a fun-loving medical student after his friend, the fun-loving doctor. Gogarty didn’t do so well at the Royal University of Ireland (Wikipedia cites drink as the culprit), but a second shot, done at Trinity College, did the trick. He set up a medical practice in Dublin where he was known as a man about town, raconteur, and surgeon who liked to keep things light and cheery in the surgery by cracking jokes and occasionally throwing removed body parts at the gallery window; at least one account specifies a larynx. I like this guy so, so much.
Ringsend
(After reading Tolstoi)
I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out
To soothe that wild breast
With my old-fangled songs,
Till she feels it redressed
From inordinate wrongs,
Imagined, outrageous,
Preposterous wrongs,
Till peace at last comes,
Shall be all I will do,
Where the little lamp blooms
Like a rose in the stew;
And up the back-garden
The sound comes to me
Of the lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.
Gogarty medaled at the 1924 Paris Olympics. A precursor to my legendary Jim Cashman, you’d wrongly dismiss him as a barroom fabricator if you met him. He played soccer for Preston North End FC and later Bohemian FC in addition to his flurry of other pursuits, but, if you can believe it, they used to give Olympic medals for poetry.
This was an extraordinary competition. Judges included Edith Wharton and Paul Valery. A yet unpublished Robert Graves was among the thirty-two competitors. Gogarty didn’t win gold. That went to the homer, Charles Louis Prosper Guyot who thought enough of himself that he preferred to be referred to by the mononym (mono-nym?) “Géo-Charles.”
“Géo-Charles” was not to be treated shabbily. From Paco Cerda in El Pais, August 2024
“They send [“Géo-Charles”] a medal in the mail. And he is indignant because he expected to be crowned in the Olympic stadium with the honors of any other athlete. So he mails the medal back to the Olympic committee; the ego. And the committee has no choice but to organize an official ceremony. Gold for Géo-Charles; two silvers, for the British author Dorothy Margaret Stuart and the Danish novelist Josef Petersen; and two bronzes for the French poet Charles Anthoine Gonnet and the Dublin physician Oliver St. John Gogarty.”
“Tailteann Ode” was the title of Gogarty’s Bronze winning entry, a tribute to the Tailteann Games, an Irish mini-Olympics. I couldn’t find a line of it anywhere online. My favorite librarian has sent out feelers as librarians do, so I may have something from inter-loan with a penalty-if-removed triggering office-use-only slip cover in a few weeks. In the meantime, this is tenuously in the thematic neighborhood by title.
The Conquest
Since the Conquest none of us
Has died young except in battle.’
I knew that hers was no mean house,
And beneath her innocent prattle
There was likely hid in words
What could never anger Fame;
The glory of continuous swords,
The obligations of a name.
Had I grown incredulous,
Thinking for a little space:
Though she has daring brows,
She has not the falcon face;
In the storm from days of old
It is hard to keep at poise,
And it is the over-bold,
Gallant-hearted Fate destroys:
Could I doubt that her forbears
Kept their foot-hold on the sands,
Triumphed through eight hundred years,
From the hucksters kept their lands,
And still kept the conquering knack—
I who had myself gone down
Without waiting the attack
Of their youngest daughter’s frown?
He’s an across the board entertaining figure and exactly the type of loveable rogue I wanted to share when I first conceived this series. In addition to gun play, revolutionary politics, anatiferous escapes, Olympic glory, and poetry, here’s a few other highlights from his Who’s Who Wikipedia Page: He was known around Dublin for public pranks, well-known to hang about “The Kip,” which trivia fans should pocket in case they have to buzz in with “What is the name of Dublin’s red-light district?”, banned from competitive cycling for cursing, rescued four people from drowning (after the Ulysses quote about the panther above, the next line is “You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however.”), was a friend of Yeats, an early motorist and airplane pilot, and he wrote a few plays. I’m sure the staff of the Oliver St. John Gogarty Pub/Restaurant/Short Term Apartment Building/Hostelry “in the Heart of Temple Bar” can tell you more.
One final Ulysses note; I’m not sure if or which way this connects, but Gogarty had a son, Oliver Duane Odysseus Gogarty, in 1907. Joyce published Ulysses in 1922. They corresponded and remained friends after the bullet-ridden tin cans, at least for a while. Did Gogarty put Ulysses in Joyce’s head? Did Gogarty name his boy because of something Joyce was working on? Neither? I like having little mysteries floating around like that. Every once in a while you get an answer from an unexpected source.
So far neither of my boys are keen, but I’m looking into the legality of retroactively changing either one of their names to Oliver. Banned from cycling for cursing.
Non Dolet
Our friends go with us as we go
Down the long path where Beauty wends,
Where all we love forgathers, so
Why should we fear to join our friends?Who would survive them to outlast
His children; to outwear his fame—
Left when the Triumph has gone past—
To win from Age, not Time, a name?Then do not shudder at the knife
That Death’s indifferent hand drives home,
But with the Strivers leave the Strife,
Nor, after Caesar, skulk in Rome.
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