St. Patrick's Day

Thomas Mcgonigle

Description

On Saint Patrick's Day, an Irish American writer visiting Dublin takes a day trip around the city and muses on death, sex, lost love, Irish immigrant history, and his younger days as a student in Europe. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas McGonigle’s award-winning novel St. Patrick’s Day takes place on a single day, combining a stream-of-consciousness narrative with masterful old-fashioned storytelling, which samples the literary histories of both Ireland and America and the worlds they influence. St. Patrick’s Day relies on an interior monologue to portray the narrator’s often dark perceptions and fantasies; his memories of his family in Patchogue, New York, and of the women in his life; and his encounters throughout the day, as well as many years ago, with revelers, poets, African students, and working-class Dubliners.

Thomas McGonigle’s novel is a brilliant portrait of the uneasy alliance between the Irish and Irish Americans, the result of the centuries-old diaspora and immigration, which left unsettled the mysteries of origins and legacy. St. Patrick’s Day is a rollicking pub-crawl through multi-sexual contemporary Dublin, a novel full of passion, humor, and insight, which makes the reader the author’s accomplice, a witness to his heartfelt memorial to the fraught love affair between ancestors and generations. McGonigle tells the stories both countries need to hear. This particular St. Patrick’s Day is an unforgettable one.

Sujets

• Literary
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Literature
• Irish American
• Ireland
• Irish
• English
• Stephen Ireland
• Irlando-Américains
• European
• Short Stories
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Musique irlandaise
• Fiction
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268087036
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Notre Dame Review Book Prize
2013 Love beneath the Napalm , James D. Redwood
2015 Times Beach , John Shoptaw
2016 St. Patrick’s Day: another day in Dublin , Thomas McGonigle
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
another day in Dublin
THOMAS McGONIGLE
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2016 by Thomas McGonigle
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN 978-0268-08703-6
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] Published in the United States of America --> Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data --> Names: McGonigle, Thomas, author. --> Title: St. Patrick’s Day : another day in Dublin / Thomas McGonigle. --> Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, [2016] | Series: --> Notre Dame Review Prize --> Identifiers: LCCN 2016025045 (print) | LCCN 2016025130 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268035389 (softcover) | ISBN 0268035385 (softcover) | ISBN 9780268101053 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268087036 (epub) --> Subjects: LCSH: Irish Americans—Fiction. | Americans—Ireland—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Saint Patrick’s Day—Fiction. | Dublin (Ireland)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / General. | FICTION / Literary. --> Classification: LCC PS3563.C3644 S7 2016 (print) | LCC PS3563.C3644 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54-dc23 --> LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025045 --> ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). -->
Armastusega Anna’le
It is not easy to think of myself as a man who is thought of as dead. I might as easily think of myself as dead. And perhaps some writers do before they begin to write. They think of themselves as dead. Or they think of themselves as thought of as dead.
—Gerald Murnane
4 November 1977 9.30 am. The capsules have been taken with some whiskey . . . It’s a bright sunny morning. Full of life. Such a morning as many people have died on . . . I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened. No big bang or cut wrists. 65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure I did some [At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop].
—Keith Vaughan, Journals, 1939–1977
L’artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part.
—Samuel Beckett, on Jack B. Yeats
To lavish love on objects unworthy of it is infinitely better than living a cold, ordered life in a study, in an office, or even a garden tending flowers . . . it has not been the sinners, the degraded, the drunkards, the gamblers, the crooks, the harlots who have made me shudder, but the dead, the respectable dead; cut off like a branch from the tree.
—Francis Stuart, Things to Live For
Contents
1. ST. PATRICK’S DAY
2. In Grogan’s
3. Out on the Street to the Memorial
4. To Rathmines and Rathgar
5. Starting Out Again
6. Taken Apart
7. McDaids
8. En Route
9. Again, Grogan’s
10. TO THE PARTY
11. The Corn Exchange
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
C ome, hear something, read some things, I was saying.
That spring I was staying at the Russell Hotel in the cheapest or, as I have been taught to say, the most reasonable available room. I have sat before the fire in the lobby, cold glass of Carlsberg in hand, realizing: traveling out the patrimony, a gift in my case, from all the years of my father’s fear of doing anything which would endanger his retirement.
After forty-nine years of work at the American Can Company he survived two years of doing, as he put it: nothing.
Died, he did, alone in a parking lot with strangers looking on at his performance.
Upstairs, built into the cabinet next to the bed was a radio which received only Radio Eireann—stories always seemed to begin: In 193 . . . In 189 . . . They, He, She, and . . . the words flowed into never remembering a fact except the pause before the announcer saying a birthday greeting to someone’s Granny of County . . . who wanted to hear “Apples and Oranges” as performed by the Metropole Dance Band and then the female announcer would say three or four words in Irish, allowing me to remember this announcer, Ruth Buchanan, who had taught English to foreign students in the same school where I would work in Baggot Street when I had lived in this city with the Bulgarian, this Ruth who could also still be seen in cinema adverts plucking a little shampoo bottle growing in the center of flowers then blooming down there in Stephen’s Green; this Ruth who was now saying three or four words in Irish every hour, reminding people there are two languages in this country—and for me, one of those languages drowned in the ocean across which my grandfather at the age of twelve was shipped from Donegal to New York where that Bulgarian lived BUT let’s not go into all of that just yet.

A fence of rocks piled one on top of the other, cement forced between, about an asphalt paved front yard. Will you come in? The house set back from the drive. Will you come in?
Down there in the street, troops of high school bullies have been formed up to strut and twirl and shake their behinds for all they’re worth: St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, imported from New York and points west—them showing them how it’s done; bands and marching units in between flatbed trucks on which shivering girls stand throwing sample packets of dried peas and frozen fish fingers. Looking down from my window I couldn’t tell whether this was the end or the beginning of the parade. His watch on my wrist had stopped.


In the corner a red plush straight-backed chair on which I had been stacking the books bought in an effort to catch up for the years since in Dublin. I put the books on the floor next to my suitcases. I thought to sit, watch them down there. The window sill is too high for my feet or the chair too low and either way I couldn’t see with ease what was happening in the street.
I couldn’t remember whether the pubs would be open so I called down for a couple of Carlsbergs to be sent up: three bottles and a glass.
Waiting in thirst I again twisted the problem, what was I doing in Dublin, when as before coming in from the airport there was the same identical sinking feeling of why in whatever it is, had I come back, again, because I always had that feeling, back here again , never remembered of course until after the rush to find the bus for Busárus, find the change, find a seat, get all the luggage into the bus because I wouldn’t trust them to put it into the luggage compartment.

A SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
To ensure a comfortable journey through this day an ITINERARY is provided:

Starting (obviously) in the Russell Hotel
Walking to Grogan’s by way of Stephen’s Green and Neary’s Pub
In Grogan’s
Out on the Street to the Memorial by the Grand Canal and Baggot
Street Bridge
To Rathmines and Rathgar
Starting Out Again
Taken Apart
McDaids
En Route
Again, Grogan’s
To the Party
The Corn Exchange
Back here again riding in the bus across land being packaged up into housing estates and petrol stations, looking out at the old woman washing down her step into the pub and the same people still sitting in all the same places, maybe a little worse for wear, but who isn’t in this day and age (von Webern music) but knowing too, at least, they did have a place and after all I had spent years here which had been more alive than all the years spent in other places or was that another lie among others which had brought me back here to Dublin, as before?
A knock at the door. The kid was here with the beer on a silver tray. He was twelve, fourteen, or fifteen years old, how should I know? I signed the check and gave him 20p tip. He thanked me and backed out of the room. I skipped the glass. The beer wasn’t really cold. Back then, I would never complain about something like this, because Americans were always complaining about warm beer, cold rooms, and people who didn’t bathe. The Americans came dressed in white socks and London Fog raincoats. I lost my white socks and kept the J. C. Penney raincoat which was soiled down the right front side with dried red paint after brushing against wet posters in the anarchist office in Glasgow where I had visited: Americans never wore soiled clothing being afraid of getting run over by a truck . . .
Alone in this room, standing at the window, drapes pulled back, looking down at the rainy street now deserted.
Over there, at an angle across from the hotel: backroom of a chip shop where after the fashion I danced to Beatles records in 1964 with a shop girl who wouldn’t tell me her name because you’re just here looking for a good time of it and you ain’t never gonna come back here again, I know, so what do you want to go and know my name for, just for a dance, anyway, is that okay, you know, if not I’ll go back to my friends who’ll never talk to me ever again if I talk too long with you, just here for the joke of it, you are . . . A certain deep breath, look to the ceiling, hope people don’t notice but—in all of this: living at the Russell and thinking of going off to a chip shop.
I wouldn’t have anyone in this room unless they . . . not to dare beyond the beginning of thought—the fingers are long and tremble—never dare to say, though hearing all too clearly, as before: chopped your balls off, right, even if you say you never get mixed u