E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten
Ryan Remembering How We Stood
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84351-235-6
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Bohemian Dublin at the Mid-century
E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-84351-235-6
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
JOHN RYAN was born in Dublin in 1925, and attended the National College of Art and Design. He enjoyed a varied life as a set designer, publisher, broadcaster and licensee. He was founder-editor of The Dublin Magazine and secretary of the James Joyce Society from 1970 to 1974. He died in 1992.
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John Ryan was my first publisher, who presented my earliest writing, a short story, ‘A Party on Saturday Afternoon’, in the pages of his magazine Envoy. However, I knew him long before that. As an invariably polite, quiet, and somewhat shy individual, who when at the bar of a pub, would patiently listen to anyone’s stories and if prompted sufficiently could tell splendid tales of his own. He was also a rare man in Irish life who could harbour many a secret from which, I suspect, comes much of the wisdom lurking in his words.
In Dublin, following the Second World War, there was a celebratory air and the pubs of the capital city were jammed. And in the years following, of which John Ryan writes, there was a carelessness about life with the hopeless present being made tolerable by adorning the days ahead with rosy dreams. These, for target practice, always being promptly shot down in flames by your listeners, who in a public house, need have no mind for having to please a host or hostess. Intellectual social life, rather than being conducted in the salons of Dublin and country houses as it seemed to have been in the decades previously, was nearly entirely exercised where drink was for sale or available in one or two of the more impromptu places such as that now legendary basement redoubt, the Catacombs. Unselfconsciousness and face breaking being rampant at the time, no one knew or much cared that a so called literary period was then in the making. Comeuppance and instant amusement were all the rage and you were as good as your last fist thrown or sentence uttered. While delving into the problem of obtaining a lifetime private income, food, not for thought but to devour, was on every mind. And if little hope of that was to be had, then a drink held in your fist was the preferred substitute. The exception to all this deprivation and behaviour was John Ryan.
Courtesy a mother who was as intrepid as she was charming and who ran her considerable business of the Monument Creameries, Ryan was one of the few who personally had available to him both food and drink in plentisome quantity. With money to spare, and able to elect to a degree as to what he did with his time, he could have done as nearly all did, spend his days racing and dining evenings at Jammets and the Red Bank with jodhpured cronies. However, Ryan had a distinct consciousness of the value and worth of the writers, painters and poets of the period. And he chose to be interested in his native city and the relics left by so many of its literary sons who had fled or been driven out. It was nearly as if to redress such wrong that Ryan had collected their books, music and pictures, and let it be known that such banned and ridiculed things were still to be seen and heard back in the creator’s native land and that there remained at least one man there who kept their names alive and held them in high esteem. For as this book reveals, Ryan was himself, as well as a publican and publisher, also a creator of painting, writing and music. And he in turn self-effacingly cherished and nourished those in the same pursuit, who embattled, still remained in this land so hostile to their survival.
But Ryan was even more than a helping hand. Over the years of which he writes, he grew into a central figure to become a touchstone who was always sought out by those returning to Dublin. And when found, he would be a ready repository for news or able to report that which was soon to become news which was usually gossip turned into a fine art. He listened to all mouths and spoke into all ears. And without snobbery he would never ignore, as many did, the awestruck gas meter readers who edged near to be in the intellectual vicinity of the greatness of poets. Nor would a deaf ear ever be turned to the ‘chancers’ who swarmed about him exerting their charm looking for loans or trying to launch their money-making schemes. Thus, with Ryan invariably remaining imperturbably benign to and indulgent of all, did he become himself a dependable focus in a land where begrudgers abounded during a period of censorship and religious repression and when the philistine and pompous pedant held full sway, albeit with all kinds of shockingly prurient behaviour omnipresent.
As a diplomat in a Dublin where undiplomatic behaviour was invented, Ryan has no peer. The fact that he was able to keep as life-long friends many of those who detested even hearing another’s name mentioned, is proof. But he was not to be, in the literal sense, pushed too far. He could and did, when required, mete out plenty of unpoetic justice, especially when it required to aid a friend in battle. And unlike the slight self-congratulatory slaps one might be expected to give oneself in a distant reminiscence, it is amusing to read Ryan’s accounts of his being constantly saved from extinction in various brawls by other hands such as those of the fair-minded Gainor Stephen Crist, the patron saint of Dublin tourists and stickler for justice. It is true Crist was possessed of incredible strength and would administer punishment to the unworthy by levering them on their backs and bouncing their heads on the floor. But from my own recollection of watching Ryan’s fists fly and innumerable adversaries in the briefest of seconds be poleaxed to the deck, there was never any question in my mind that here was, in spite of his well-behaved diplomatic retiring nature, one of the world’s all-time-best light heavyweights. And even now these considerable years later I can still feel the wind over my shoulder as the whoosh of his straight right fist rent the air like a thundering freight train to put manners upon some nearby vulgarian.
Perhaps because of this, Ryan himself has become one of the strangest characters Dublin has ever found in its bosom. As host and friend to an astonishing array and cross-section of men, including princes, criminals, revolutionaries, and movie stars. For Ryan was forever in Dublin’s midst. As an occasional surveying visitor to one of his mother’s many shops. Or as proprietor of The Bailey restaurant and pub. Or as friend and comforter to both sides in libel actions, these so often erupting from the endlessly circulating letters and slanderous reporting of the greatest series of soap operas ever to run concurrently in the history of mankind. And as a dedicated Irish nationalist and patriot, Ryan sailed the most treacherous of these bohemian seas with the same skill he used as a mariner when navigating his yacht around the unpredictable and hostile waters of this island. Ryan survived it all. And without, as few of his contemporaries avoided doing, ever, even semi-permanently, leaving these shores.
But alas, I suppose, with stories retold and in their telling added to and embellished, it’s not surprising I might find, on a minor point or two, that my memory does not quite jibe with his. And I must say that I have never known Gainor Stephen Crist ever to despoil an alcoholic beverage, or to enter, sit down or drink a cup of coffee in a Dublin coffee house. Yet here it is in black and white, in Remembering How We Stood, and perhaps it’s true, the unbelievable. Also that Crist set elaborate traps for comely females. And I reel back in surprise. And maybe that’s true too. But what I do remember is that, Crist, whose compassion for and loyalty to women was a saintly obsession, was always pursued by them and himself stepped into many an elaborate ensnarement. Ah but what matter. There’s plenty of time later for disputing facts if a little bit of fiction has you enthralled with the truth of entertainment said for the time being for your listening pleasure. And that is how John Ryan has always told his tales.
Now as one reads his words, dressed in their wonderful finery of irony, the world he speaks of reblossoms to be back again awhile. To see, feel and smell that Dublin of that day. Drawn from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the streets he loved and daily lived in. His erudition always used to entertain but never to impress. His savouring of language, rolled about on the tongue, tasted for its vintage and measuredly poured out into waiting ears. His words sounding with the same deft intimate solemnity which he himself uses when with a gently perceptible signal he orders a drink at a bar. Among the begrudgers, he is the least begrudging of men. And even oft accused of lacking malice in a city so noted for such. Indeed it was unknown for him to take a friend’s name in vain in a Dublin where no man’s name was sacred. But there could always be his nod of the head and his dry chuckle. Which would tell you as much as any oath of condemnation shouted from the rooftops.
In a masterpiece of reminiscence, he gives a touching tolerant account of Brendan Behan, under whose laughing vaudevillian behaviour lurked much hidden haunted suffering and whose nightmarish soul blazed its brief blasphemy in Dublin. And always between the lines of John Ryan’s words, the ghosts abound, sorrow and sadness pervades. His words ‘It was a bleak February in a bad year’ might be, with their timeless profundity, another sub title for this book. But bleak Februaries or bad years, Ryan was always there alertly listening. To the nonsense spouting and the great bards thundering their daily complaint while all present were existentially hoping there would be no delay in the buying of another round.
We can now, before our own time comes, pick over dead-men’s bones with our own silver-plated utensils. Sentimentally to live again in this city as it does in this book. Where the graves of the departed dead are never...
