The word made flesh

Long before the speeches broke out at the Galway Arts Centre to launch the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, your reporter and a trio of gals had secreted themselves at a secluded table in the Galway Arms. Returning laden from the bar I encounter much girlish laughter. “Why so risible?” I ask, dispensing pints. “You’ll never guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing,” says the smallest of the little group. “I was above in the sister’s makin’ artificial vaginas for sheep.”

For it seems, citified readers o’ mine, that in order to get the sperm from stud ram to ideal recipient, the artificial method rules. “They play music for the rams while they’re at it,” explained the blonde, thus affording me a chance to utilise a line a cellist of my acquaintance had come up with some days before. “You mean like ‘Embrace me, my sweet inflatable ewe’?” I said, boldly appropriating it as my own. My reward: a trio of tinkling laughs.

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Shortly thereafter in the Town Hall Theatre the festival kicked off on so high a note with readings by Michael Longley and John McGahern that I didn’t see how the evening could be bettered. Someone has written: “Michael Longley/Feels extremely strongly/That he ought to be more famous/Than Seamus.”

Anyone present at this tremendous reading, particularly when he read ‘Wounds’ would find it hard to decide which will be number one in posterity’s hit list. McGahern, surprisingly for one who until now had known him only through the work, turns out to be a jolly fellow and had the audience chuckling with his expertly timed reading from his short story ‘Gold Watch’. His long awaited new novel is out from Faber and Faber in the spring.

Afterwards I get him to sign his collected stories. “You must be the cartoonist,” he says. “Yes,” I say, “it’s an honour to meet you.” “No, no,” he says, “it’s an honour to meet you.” So at this point I shut up lest it develop into the scene in Love And Death where Woody Allen, Diane Katon and the guy playing Napoleon keep bowing faster and faster and saying “No, I insist, it’s a greater honour to meet you” until everybody gets dizzy.

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The Festival Club is in Brennan’s Yard Hotel. Full swing is what things are in when I arrive. A bearded man in a hat tells me: “You can never get what you want. So why settle for less?” Why indeed? Spotting a lady novelist of my acquaintance, I wander over and ask how she’s keeping. But as she is drunk as a skunk, she merely says “Bwibble libblelibble” and slides to the floor. “I hear Michael Jackson is getting back together,” a read-faced local scribe quips, stepping over her, hoping correctly that I’ll use it in this piece. “Hear about the drunk squirrel?” he continues. “He got locked out of his tree.” And if, at this juncture, I went and did likewise, who shall blame me?

At the bar I listen to a young lady enthuse about Anthony Cronin’s comic masterpiece The Life Of Reilly. Some moments later I spot that eminence himself holding court and sidle over. After cutting up the old touches, I explain that the young lady I have in tow practically had an accident while reading said volume. Understandably gratified, he smiles affably behind the trademark bottle lenses. Judge then of my discomfiture when she launched into an encomium for Murphy, a work by S. Beckett. I endeavoured to move the conversation in other directions but the spell was broken and I slid away from the chuckling sage in search of the solace only the bar can on such occasions provide. And when I tell you that soon I was enjoying myself so much that even when the young person returning remarked “You have the life of Murphy Mathews,” I forbore to fell her with a blow, you will have some idea.

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It is a fact universally acknowledged that anyone waking up with a hangover and being immediately confronted with naïve oils of Disney Characters such as I reproduce here must be in want of a cure. Thus it is that I find myself at the Arts Centre where Ken Bruen’s novel The Guards is being launched. I am clutching a bottle of Becks in my hand. Along about five bells, Mayor Quimby, sorry, Quinn, gets up and puts in his five cents. It is, he explains with a light laugh, his first time opening a book launch, though clearly not his first time opening a book, as he soon has the crowd on a roar with his anecdotes about his time as a hippy film extra with blossoms in his hair (now alas shorn), back in those lost summers of love.

I enjoy Bruen’s reading – punctuated as it is by the bull-like roars of a drunken poet (you know who you are) and the door slamming and staircase tramping of some cute kiddies – enough to buy the book. But I am all readinged out afterwards and just go to the club.

I present my ticket at the Town Hall Theatre where Edward Bunker “America’s greatest living crime writer”, youngest ever inmate of San Quentin, and Reservoir Dogs’ “Mr. Blue” is reading from his autobiography of that title. I hand my ticket to the ticket girl. “What row?” she asks. “Death,” I say. But she doesn’t get it. Bunker, a tough guy in leather jacket and boots, has a high IQ and a prison code of honour. He looks like Duke Wayne in The Shootist except that Wayne didn’t talk about Dostoyevsky so much.

“I smoked a joint in the gas chamber,” he says. “They weren’t executing me. I was just cleaning it.” He reads about solitary, about a razor fight in the shower, about boredom, until he gets bored. Then he takes questions. No, he didn’t think much of Billy Bathgate. He can believe a guy would give another a blow job at knife point, but not that the victim wouldn’t hunt the guy down. He thinks the death penalty was a good move. Once. Eichmann.

Also on the bill is William Shaw, a middle-class Englishman who spent a year with LA gangsta rappers, dimbulb hopefuls from streetgangs like the Crips and Bloods. He takes us through meaner streets than Marlowe’s where the protagonists in this malest of sub genres await, full of Cisco (morticians’ fluid in cheap wine), either the contract and platinum record, or what the late Peter Cook called “God’s precious gift of death”, the latter being the likelier option.

Later Bunker, looking as if somebody’d sewed his nose on upside-down, grins and signs my book with a black marker almost as big as his cigar. “Lotsa good stories in there, boy,” he says.

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Two fast sandwiches and a pint later, I’m back in the Town Hall again, this time to listen to Annie Proulx whose Brokeback Mountain convinced me some time ago that there are still great writers in America. She turns out to be a real charmer explaining to the capacity audience that she doesn’t like readings or festivals but that when she asked Colm Tóibín should she attend Cúirt he said, “Oh yes. That’s the good one”. She wouldn’t read from her novel in progress because she thought Irish readers the most discerning. “I might read from it in New York or somewhere like that.” Applause.

Then she read the magnificent short story ‘The Half Skinned Steer’ from her collection Close Range. Also on the bill was chain smoker and all round good egg Dame Beryl Bainbridge or ‘Brainbridge’ as the gentleman introducing her persisted in calling her. Dame Beryl read to us from her novel about Dr. Johnson and his depression at the Thrales. Attagirl Dame Beryl. There is nothing like a dame. As I stood in a queue for almost an hour waiting for Ms. Proulx to sign my book I missed out on the screening of Reservoir Dogs and so fail to put any questions to Edward Bunker, who was introducing it. But what of that? Between them the gals had provided an evening to match the first and besides, the club beckoned.

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On the humid streets at midnight the young, Ciscoed up on the local swill, projectile vomit, shag up alleyways or stand gawping at and slagging off the visiting eggheads. In the Club the depleted army of inspiration-scarred warriors in the battle for harmony and precision in a world where the concept of order has become an obscene joke, lean at the bar trying to order and making obscene jokes.

I ask local poet, the very wonderful Mary O’Malley, if she can do me the trifling favour of obtaining for me a large wet fish with which to belabour a lady writer of our acquaintance about the empty head, but sadly she demurs. “Is that Dame Beryl Bainbridge,” somebody asks. “No. Thash Dame John Banville,” somebody else answers. “D’you want a revolution?” a novelist asks, noticing the empty glass I’m waving under his nose. For a moment I am transported in imagination to a happier time when the mayor and I wore flowers in our hair and children of the revolution that we were, hummed that Lennon opus. “Better make it two,” I said. “They’ll be closing the bar soon. But they didn’t.

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If there was a better way to finish the festival than screening Joseph Strick’s 33 years banned Ulysses then I have yet to think of it. Even after all this time crackling, skipping and underbudgeted, it’s a remarkable tribute to Joyce and Strick both. I laughed. I cried. And at the end the crowd stood and applauded.

In the club later I spoke to Helen Carey, exhausted, ecstatic and already enthusiastic about next year. “Did you think it was a good one? Did you? Will you come again next year?” She wanted to know. And then she asked me with her eyes to say again yes and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

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Staggering in Monday evening sunlight uphill to the station I meet the painter Philip Lindy, spectacles gleaming. “I’m just back from Dublin,” he says, “and I’m afraid I left it in a terrible state. Dishes not done or anything.” I smiled. “Wait’ll you see Galway,” I said.