Literary classics like Dracula, Ulysses and Gulliver’s Travels were born in this Irish capital. We walked down roads which Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw called home
Think before you take that walk on the streets of Dublin. Perhaps a pint of the dark Guinness or an extra ladle of whisky in the Irish coffee might come handy. For you never know who is waiting at the bend. Bram Stoker with Count Dracula, Oscar Wilde with a satirical smile, William Butler Yeats laying dreams on the feet of his Muse Maud Gonne or Leopold Bloom whose one day in Dublin was chronicled by James Joyce in an unpunctuated Ulysses. Don’t get frazzled if Oliver Goldsmith talks to you in alliterations or Jonathan Swift walks out of St Patrick’s Cathedral in an embroidered cowl. Say your prayers, rather learn your pentameters, before you take that walk in Dublin, for there are not many cities with their sky so laden with literature.
It all began when Irish saints preached and scholars transcribed the Bible and Ireland became the hub of all things saintly and literary. And then there walked along a man who would skew the very idea of humanity with a gigantic Gulliver, a bunch of Lilliputians in a novel called Gulliver’s Travels. As the dean of St Patrick’s, Jonathan Swift would often kneel by the pew but he had to trudge miles to Belfast for inspiration. No, the storyline did not resonate from heaven, instead the idea of a giant popped from a brawny basaltic outcrop of the Cave Hill that overlooks the city of Belfast. Walk by in a hurry and it might look like an ordinary mountain, but squint your eye, focus and you would actually see the giant’s Napoleonic nose and colossal eyes staring back with eyebrows knitted in disdain.
Belfast might have dropped a brilliant story idea on Swift, but it was Dublin that has the literary chromosome. Walk into 33 Synge Street and you would think that the Shaws have gone for an evening out. The terraced house in which Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw was born has been so diligently restored that you might almost hear a saxophone losing its breath at a musical soiree and almost imagine a little Shaw conjuring characters on his neat study table. But nearly two decades before Shaw hit the cradle, Dublin would get a bundle of sarcasm and wit. For it was here that Oscar O’Flahertie Fingal Willis Wilde was born, a man who would redefine wit and farce and teach the world The Importance of Being Earnest.
In Dublin, every street seems to have an aspiration, to house a Nobel Laureate. If Synge Street had Shaw, 5, Sandymunt Avenue was proud of William Butler Yeats, who famously said, “We make our quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Poetry. That is what Yeats did in Dublin and his summer home in Sligo. And yes, the Abbey Theatre at 26, Lower Abbey Road of which he was the chief playwright. The auditorium where Yeats ran his pencil on the folios was destroyed in a fire in 1951, but Abbey has neither forgotten the Acts of Yeats nor his love for Maud Gonne, the revolutionary, who is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
But if you want to see Dublin at its literary best, be there on June 16, Bloomsday, a date on an ordinary calendar that was immortalised by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses. It took Joyce 2,50,000 words with puns, parodies, love, sex, longing and reams of pages to chronicle that one day in Dublin. The first chapter of the book is set in Sandycove where now stands the James Joyce Museum. However, it is not only his birthplace—41, Brighton Square—where Joyce still lives. There is the James Joyce Centre set in a 1784 Georgian House and the Dublin Writers Museum in Parnell Square with exquisite stained glass windows and intricate plasterwork.
Wait! There is more to Dublin than lyrical sonnets and elegant plays. Watch out for some gore. A vampire. Count Dracula. That blood sucking evil was born in Dublin. At least in the mind of author Abraham (Bram) Stoker, who lived in Kildare Street and worked as a civil servant in Dublin. The former house of Stoker with a white door, an ornate knocker and wrought-iron fence still stands.
But I would rather stay away and do the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, a two-hour walking tour. It begins in a pub on Duke Street where you get to see and hear the writers—through the two actors on the tour who enact scenes from the works of the featured writers. Imagine, standing in Trinity College and have an Oscar Wilde in his brusque, yet guttural, voice say, “It is absurd to divide people into good or bad, they are either charming or tedious.”
I never divide people into good or bad. I do not bracket them as charming or tedious. I do not do that to cities either. For Dublin, I would digress from that rule. Dublin is charming and I would love to be born as a Dub but only if Oscar Wilde promises to be my neighbour!
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