A Day with Dublin Writers

Naturally enough, being who and what I am, the first place I go upon visiting Dublin is to the Dublin Writers Museum. The night before as I finally found the time to plan My Day in Dublin (it’s only been on my To Do list for weeks), I flipped through the guide books at my hosts’ house and wrote down the most interesting sites in my own notebook.

I’d already written in the Book of Kells. But everyone goes to Trinity College It’s one of the most touristy Dublin things to do. Even so, I’m also going to do it.

Scanning the paragraph about the museum, I become particularly compelled to check it out when I read that Samuel Beckett has some featured works there. Thrilled, or at the least intrigued, I put a #1 by the listing in my notebook (the Book of Kells is now #2).

To be honest, I’ve not really read anything of Beckett’s.

So, my sudden compelling is odd.

It’s odd in this way. I first heard about Samuel Beckett (I’m exceptionally out of touch with nearly everything even literary things) on a television show called Lewis, a procedural cop show which follows Inspector Lewis on his cases in and around Oxford. The sidekick character James Hathaway (who has an incredible character arc that I wish I’d written) holds an interview with a victim’s wife during which she says, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Oxford

To which Hathaway asks, “Joyce?”

“Beckett,” she replies.

And Hathaway gives one nearly soundless breath of a laugh and a smile which is all very emotive for his taciturn character. That smile, like a picture, is worth a thousand words. It conveys his appreciation of her equal and (maybe, just maybe) superior knowledge, it shows his own capacity for holding vast reems of verses, names, and dates in his head, it shows his love of language and scholarship, and it even manages to show a subtle and moving chemistry between the two characters.

All that to say, I found it to be a touching scene. And I found the quote to be a beautiful one. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

After the episode concluded, I did, in fact, look up the line and discovered it was from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I found the paragraph which the line concludes. The paragraph is all pretty stream of consciousness and I didn’t read much more than that.

Beckett by the Sea by Andre Monreal

To be honest, beyond that paragraph, The Unnamable sounds like a really awful book. Wikipedia says this of it: “The Unnamable consists entirely of a disjointed monologue from the perspective of an unnamed (presumably unnamable) and immobile protagonist. There is no concrete plot or setting—and whether the other characters… actually exist or whether they are facets of the narrator himself is debatable.”

Of course, this goes against all modern writing techniques. But Beckett pulled it off. Apparently.

Anyway, for all of that, I go to the Dublin Writers Museum.

I pay my entry fee of 7.50 euros and tuck my camera away. No photos allowed in the two main rooms.

In one of the first display cases is The Sixth Book of the Fairy Queen by Edmund Spenser. This particular volume was published in 1679. I stare down at the yellowed pages. I’m looking at a 339 year old book! I’m pretty sure I’ve read bits and pieces of The Fairy Queen in my distant childhood. Charmed, I spend a bit of time looking over the two open pages with the letter s inscribed as f and other such typographical fun.

The next case shows the works of Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame. One of his poems published in a volume from 1808 (only a mere 210 years old), called “On the Death of Dr. Swift” says, “Faith! he must make his stories shorter, Or change his comrades once a quarter.” And I mark that down as a Note to Self in my notebook. 

I pass the works of William Congreve. I stop to admire the case devoted to Maria Edgeworth whose Castle Rackrent published in 1800 (the age for that should be easy enough for you to figure out on your own) was the first novel written by an Irish writer on an Irish theme (as an informative square tells me). Sir Walter Scott was said to have written his Waverly novels to “emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth.” (another informative square announces). It seems odd (except when I remind myself of my complete lack of overall knowledge) that I’ve never heard of her. Never read a single one of her books. Her Wikipedia page says that she was a “significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe.” Without her, we might never have had Sir Walter Scott, but her link in the chain got overlooked as the novel and novelists evolved. I tuck that fact away to think about later.  

Bust of Bram Stoker by Bryan Moore

Along the third wall of the room, to my great surprise I discover that Bram Stoker was Irish. I also discover that Bram was short for Abraham. I’m informed that Dracula took seven years to write, was derived from a story by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu titled Carmilla, was published in 1897, and is the “most successful horror story of all time.” At only 121 years old? Can that be so?

 

Anyway, my doubts aside, somehow I’ve managed to live in a bubble all my life. I know next to nothing (James Hathaway would not be impressed by me at all. He’d have no laugh or smile for anything I ever said). Maybe I’ve just forgotten it all. My mind’s a sieve. But, anyway, I tuck my ignorance down into my bag next to my camera and continue through the room learning things I’ll probably promptly forget.

I make it into the second room where the famous Irish list of writers goes on, as do the years; George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Lover, Charles Lever, James Duffy, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, James Stephens, James Joyce (the very Joyce that Hathaway had hazarded his guess as having written the phrase, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”), Sean O’Casey, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and then Samuel Beckett.

The Beckett display case holds a few of his things; an open book showing “Three Poems”, a playbill for Waiting for Godot, and his telephone, a black telephone with a rotary dial and all kinds of cords, which has a button to exclude incoming calls. He was apparently very private. An informative sign says, “he shunned publicity.”

I read through the three poems. I’m not sure my obsession with Beckett will go much further than this. These poems are beautiful and melancholic, but his style is known to be dark, often ugly, coarse, and (perhaps) incomprehensible. I don’t intend to make a deep study of his work. I don’t feel the need. I’ll carry along one of his lines and that might be enough for me.

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Satisfied with all I’ve seen and learned, I leave those Dublin writers behind me and go on across the bridge to Trinity College and the Book of Kells.

After all the hype, the display—two of the four Book of Kells volumes (one for each Gospel), the 8/9^th century The Garland of Howth, and the Ricemarch Psalter from 1079—seems a bit anticlimactic. Only four total pages of the Book of Kells are actually viewable. But nevertheless, it is something to see.

As I lean over the protective display cases to admire the intricate markings on the pages showing Mark 15:36-45, I wonder if the monks who worked to illustrate the pages and inscribe the Gospel words in Latin knew that over 1200 years later people would be looking at their work.

Would they have taken great care to avoid mistakes? For it’s no secret that the Book of Kells is rife with mistakes.

For some reason, that fills me with delight (it’s a fact I hadn’t known until today, or had forgotten if I did). I spend some time looking at each of the four displayed volumes, admiring the faded pigment of the illustrations, the age-browned pages, the lines and curves and swirls of the script. And then, eventually, since I can’t stay, I go on.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unnamable_(novel)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Edgeworth