Vignettes of Dublin

This literary memoir explores the past by capturing and reframing the city of the author’s youth, through a sequence of pen portraits of Dublin’s medical institutions, public houses and clubs, where the denizens of its legal, literary and medical establishments gathered to engage in the pastime that was the essence of life – conversation. The Royal College of Surgeons, and its sister college, the Royal College of Physicians, Jervis Street Hospital, Mercer’s, the Rotunda, Beaumont and Richmond hospitals, the tenements and numerous watering holes; these include the infamous Catacombs, providing a fertile theatrical backdrop to a constellation of characters and luminaries who walked the city’s streets. Here we encounter Bethel Solomons, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Denis Johnston, Malcolm Arnold, Arland Ussher, Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland) and Barbara Novak, the Sheridans, Niall and Monica, John Ryan, Petr Skrabenck, Gerald Dawe, and A.J. ‘Con’ Leventhal; this rich mulch of artists, musicians, writers and failed geniuses formed a Petri dish of privilege and poverty, a cauldron of expectation and frustration, defining a modernist post-war culture that has its origins in Baggotonia. All paths converge on Samuel Beckett and the topographical underpinning of his work, with the author’s The Beckett Country pubished in 1986 to honour the Nobel laureate’s eightieth birthday. This book changed Beckett scholarship by revealing the palpable presence of Dublin and a youthful past through the photography of David Davison, illustrating excerpts of Beckett's writing to which O’Brien bore unique witness.