Beckett on Bars: The Session #147

There’s no shortage of mentions and images of Irish pubs and beers in the literature and artworks of this country, so when Phil Cook suggested the theme for this month’s The Session - basically to discuss something beer-related in art or fiction - selecting something to write about wasn’t difficult. The issue was more so to find something that hadn’t been written about before, or at least not to the point of readers skimming past it by it being just another misplaced or misinformed ode-to-the-ode ‘The Pint of Plain’ or another look at the Mr. Spock-like character in Harry Kernoff’s ‘A Bird Never Flew on One Wing.’ Not that these are not important and much-loved works, but they hardly warrant another revisit by me.

And where’s ‘here’? Well, The Session was originally conceived in 2007 by Stan Hieronymus and Jay Brooks as a way of pulling together a collection of blogposts from different beer writers on a single topic once a month, and hosted by a different writer each time who chooses a topic. It finished in 2018 but has since made a revenantial appearance thanks to Alan McLeod - this being #147, or #2.6 depending on whether you see it as a continuation of the old or the start of a new series.

This is my first proper contribution to the collection of writings.

-o-

Around the time when this month’s theme was announced I had acquired a copy of Samuel Beckett’s first novel called ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’ as once more I tried to delve into the works of The Big Irish Writers of the early 20th century. So far, I had failed with Joyce (apart from Dubliners), couldn’t find any huge love for Behan’s fictional work, O’ Casey was too theatrical for my taste, and O’Brien/O’Nolan/Na gCopaleen/etc. had been quite hit and miss. Beckett’s works didn’t seem to hold out any more hope for grabbing and holding on to my clearly substandard intellect but seeing as ‘More Pricks’ was a series of short stories like Dubliners I decided to give it a try.

It is a collection of related tales woven around a character called Belacqua Shuah and is set in and around Dublin, presumably in the early parts of the 20th century. The main protagonist is a somewhat unlovable character - for the reader at least -  who has some unfortunate relationships and a penchant for gorgonzola, mustard and cayenne sandwiches on blackened toast - possibly his most likeable attribute. The book itself would have been classed quite risqué in places at the time it was first published in 1934. Indeed it was seemingly banned in Ireland at that time, which is hardly a shocker given how the country was firmly in the grip of the clergy then as many tried desperately to find an upper level hierarchical body to replace the lost overlords in our relatively new country - quasi-militant Catholicism filled that void quite nicely for some. Even today it might certainly be cancelled for the latent misogyny that appears on occasion in its pages, although that’s not a reason for any rational person to ban, cancel or indeed, burn it.

Anyhow, most of the book is certainly quite readable and entertaining, although in parts it suffers from the same problem I have with the syntax, grammar and wording used by certain Irish writers, where some passages appear to have been translated into a vocally similar sounding but unfamiliar language by one person just using just a dictionary, before being translated back to English by another separate hand who similarly has no knowledge of the language into which they are translating, and who lazily decides to leave a few non-English words in the text to boot. (I am fully convinced that you could read out loud passages of Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, to a non-English speaker in Antwerp and they would nod along enthusiastically to whatever they were apparently hearing in their own dialect, regardless of what it meant in English.) The result is something that you can, at a push, make sense of and understand but it requires a lot of hard work on the reader’s part and can ruin the flow and entertainment that should be derived from reading. (And yes, dear reader, I’m hardly one to talk about jittery, over-punctuated, writing styles and invented words I know …)

But even allowing for my shoddy intellectual capability to understand parts of this book there are flashes of pure brilliance that even I can recognise, and one such passage is the piece of writing I want to highlight for this month’s The Session.

-o-

In the third chapter of the book, titled ‘Ding-Dong,’ our sub-hero is out on the town one evening and having walked up Pearse Street has ‘turned left into Lombard Street’ and ‘entered a public house.’ This may have been the public house now known as The Lombard, whose bar entrance appears to have been just across the road after the turn, but quite possibly was the pub that sat on the site where The Windjammer now is, further down the road at the corner of Townsend Street but with an entrance on Lombard Street. Certainly given Beckett’s description of ‘the rough but kindly habitués of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and vague joxers on the dole’ it might perhaps sound like the latter at the time but clues are scarce.

Regardless, it was the account of his experience within the establishment that grabbed my attention the most, just before anxiety and despondency hit him as he contemplated the day’s events and his general future:

Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash-register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety. So that he would say that the place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public house and that all the wearisome tactics of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place. But as they closed at ten, and as residence and good faith were viewed as incompatible, and as in any case he had not means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar, he supposed he must be content to indulge this whim from time to time, and return thanks for such sporadic mercy.*

Although even the latter parts of this passage suffer from the 'Flemishisation' that I mentioned earlier, it is pure prose and poetry combined. Something perhaps that should be studied and discussed by students in schools throughout this and other lands. We have poetic parts such as the ‘charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass’ and an almost religious aspect to his thoughts and feelings as he sat drinking his porter. It is descriptive to an extreme in how it portrays an early 20th century urban public house, with mentions of beer engines, cork-pullers, bar staff known as ‘graceful curates’ and customers ‘at rest on arse and elbow.’ The wording keenly reflects how this pub was seen to be a refuge and place of escape, albeit with some reservations, at that time. Superb stuff. 

I am not sure it requires much more discussion, perhaps just a second reading and maybe a third For me it is probably the best written piece on drinking and public houses that I have so far encountered, and it is worth nothing that I first read the passage in a public house on a quiet Saturday afternoon, at rest on arse and elbow.

So, I shall say no more, just go back and read it again, and again ...

Liam

*I quote this piece from the book purely for educational and non-commercial reasons, some hopefully I will not get in trouble with the executors of Beckett’s estate!?

Please note, all written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its sources, and a link back to this post. The quoted piece from Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks appears on pages 39 & 40 of the Picador 1974 edition. DO NOT STEAL THIS CONTENT!