Writing Irish

One of my favourite things about living in London – a reason I listed in my very first blog entry – is treading the same ground as my beloved writers, like Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens. Ireland, and Dublin specifically, is heaven for someone like me. A person can (literally) not walk a block of the city without stumbling upon a statue of Oscar Wilde, pass by the house where George Bernard Shaw was born or see landmarks from within the pages of James Joyce’s novels.

This past weekend I flew to Dublin. Ostensibly, I was there to spend the Saturday with Adrian, my 17-year-old next-door-neighbour in Ottawa, non-biological little sister, who I helped raised since she was one (at least I like to think I did). She has been in Ireland for the whole month with a group called the Irish Experience, visiting Cork, Galway and Dublin, and gaining an English credit for high school. I was thrilled to fly in for 48 hours and spend time with her, but she had a strict itinerary and could only see me on the Saturday.

Fair enough. We had a lovely (based on companionship, not weather) Dublin day: wandering Trinity College campus, shopping on Grafton Street, strolling along the Liffey, drinking the freshest pints of Guinness on the planet (me, not Adrian). Newly lit up by the words of Irish writers thanks to her course, Adrian was even keen to stroll quite a distance along the Liffey to visit the house where Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ was based. Thrilling for me, of course, that someone else wanted to visit sites from my favourite novels, short stories and poems. (The next day’s literary obstacle course around the city would have been strenuous for even the most Guinness-fortified companion, however, so I was glad to be on my own for that one.)

Luckily for me, Adrian’s group leader had a couple of extra theatre tickets (resulting, most likely, from the fact that two kids had already been sent home for various forms of bad behaviour) so I got to prolong my visit with my girl for a few more hours. Since the kids had just read it in their Irish playwright class, we saw Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ in the Abbey Theatre off O’Connell Street, the very theatre where it was controversially staged for the first time in 1926.

The title of the pacifist play comes from the flag of the Irish Citizen Army. “Plough” refers to the symbol on the flag that in Northern America is known as the big dipper. The show was stunning, perfectly cast and acted, and even moving for me – despite the fact that I was the only one who hadn’t read it. Based during the months leading up to the infamous Easter Uprising of 1916, it chronicles the unextraordinary lives of Irish tenement-inhabitants who are each affected by those extraordinary nationalistic events in their own way.

Equipped with this very poignant Irish experience, I spent Sunday cramming in as much of Dublin’s rich literary history and culture. I walked out to the house where Nobel-prize winner George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 (he wrote Pygmalion which is perhaps more widely known as the film My Fair Lady); saw the Dublin Millennium Literary Parade in the park beside St. Patrick’s Cathedral (which includes Wilde, O’Casey, Yeats, Beckett and Joyce); visited, for the first time, the James Joyce Centre, a rather unspectacular timeline of the writer’s life with a few spectacular artifacts (his death mask and the actual door of 7 Eccles Street where his most well-known character, Leo Bloom, fictionally resided); and wandered through St. Stephen’s Green to see the commemorative statues to Yeats and Joyce.

Another stop in Dublin that I count as one of my must-sees is the Writer’s Museum. You wear a headset spouting out all sorts of facts about Ireland’s great writers – Swift (the father of satire), Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett and Synge (both phenomenal playwrights), among others. It is a really great museum with so much fascinating information in the ornately decorated rooms of a beautiful old house. Among the old artifacts on display are: a 1685 Old Testament, the first one translated into Gaelic; an original copy of Ulysses signed by Joyce; and a program from the first performance of Synge’s most famous play, Playboy of the Western World.

I had a truly wonderful visit with Adrian and thoroughly enjoyed my solo literary day. I made the kind of stops (and did the amount of walking) that not everyone would have the stamina for, especially since the landmarks I checked out were all related in some way or another to Ireland’s great literary geniuses. Now I'm back in London, hanging out with my latest visitor, my sister Lindsay,and getting really excited about this weekend's trip up to Scotland, the homeland.