Tommy went a-cuirtin’

Some years ago, a young man wandering, as young men will, down the garden path found a well-dressed but slightly dishevelled man of middle age asleep in the back of his father’s car. On awakening the sleeper, two words of explanation cleared everything up. “Galway Races”.

Although awakening myself in my own hired bed rather than the vehicle adverted to in above anecdote, I murmured an explanation to myself as follows “Cúirt Festival of Literature”, and pausing only to curse the day I was born and, in a daring flashback, the night I was conceived and to remove my coat and shoes, I resumed that most Irish of condition, O’blivion. This, of course, could not last and a telephone call from a delightful Canadian lady revealed that this copy was required yesterday. Ah yesterday, when all my troubles seemed so far away. But were in fact only beginning.

Begin then. The Festival Club, Brennan’s Yard Hotel, night one. I have already sat through an amusing if somewhat low-key interview between Susan McKay and Andrea Dworkin which consisted of a long preach to the converted. If one wanted to boil it right down, and let’s, it was “Men bad women good”, with the exceptions of Nelson Mandela, John Berger and Andrea’s current squeeze. Incidentally I wonder if, when Nelson and Winnie used to play hide the salami, she referred to the little brown bomber as Nelson’s pillar? I didn’t bother Andrea with this one but I did ask her what she thought about Ireland and she confided that she liked the lowing of the cattle. It wasn’t until I was half a mile down the road that the phrase “Dworkin on the mooin’” wandered into what remained of my mind and by then it was too late.

One thing I’ll say for Nadine Gordimer is that she has a nice quiet reading voice. So quiet and soothing in fact that I drifted off into a sort of reverie and the next thing I remember was talking to novelist Ken Bruen up in the club. It was his job to officially write up the Festival and many was the epigram we swapped and line we promised each other not to use. Careful readers will notice how few I managed to remember.

It was a great pity that Olaf Tyaransen, whom I met next day, hadn’t got his trademark dark specs with him although he did have the manuscript of his expanded Ukraine brides article with him, which is just one long hoot. ‘Why was it a pity about the shades?’ you ask, alert reader. Because if I’d been able to borrow them I wouldn’t have been dazzled by the beguiling smile of Melvyn Bragg at the Anne Kennedy Memorial Lecture which was so admirably introduced by Lelia Doolin. Melve is Charlie Charm the king of smarm for sure and went over a bomb with the packed house.

Unfortunately those twin imps alcohol and morpheus prevented me hearing much of his dissertation. James Joyce who was sitting behind me (and I must stress that there really is a James Joyce who is a writer, and a fine one, living in Galway) said that one point I was snoring so loudly that I almost woke the person next to me up. Later in the club Mr. Bragg redeemed himself by telling me how much he had liked my exhibition (advt) in Kenn’s Gallery.

Now every Cúirt has a highlight and this time around who should it turn out to be but that son of fun Professor Brendan Kennelly. Nuala Ni Dhomnaill who preceded him was, in this reviewer’s eyes, a tad so-so but once Br1endan hit form (which was from the word go) there was no contest. This boy could charm the birds out of their trees and while slightly out of my own I can honestly say that the reading came second only to the magnificent evening that the late Alan Ginsberg gave us just a few years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an audience laugh as much as they did at the professor’s poem about Joyce and the Holy Family. You had to be there.

Somewhere I soon wished I hadn’t been was at the Bardic Breakfast the following morning. The breakfast itself was fine being full of tasty carbohydrates and the Erdinger Weissbier went down a treat as accompaniment. Unfortunately there was poetry to be endured. Local(ish) boy made loud Patrick Carton was just a smidgen over the top and after informing us that he was ‘Dancing in ecstasy on the cliffs of despair’ succeeded in making my flesh creep out of the venue and into the pub across the road.

From here it was but a short bus journey out to Coole House which Lady Gregory once made the focal point of the literary revival. Here that double-headed stalwart Bill McCormack entertained us first by his given name with an extract from his excellent Synge biography and the and thereafter with his verse under his nom de plume, Hugh Maxton.

That was the last gig I attended. I was just too plain Cúirted out to get to Mike McCormack’s reading and the screening of his short story ‘The Terms’, which has been so successfully produced by Johnny O’Reilly. My heart was too full. Ah children, poets and their hearts. There is surely matter there for a dissertation had anyone the strength to write it. Pearse’s heart used shake with great joy when he saw a squirrel. Wordsworth’s leaped when he saw rainbows and danced when he beheld daffodils. Keats’ just ached and mine did too when I saw how short was the skirt of Cúirt director Helen Carey who did so much to make this year’s bash the thundering, thumping success it was.