Page 168 - WDT MAGAZINE IRELAND ISSUE WINTER 2018

The Dublin Literary Pub Crawl

By Sharon Whitley Larsen

hen food is scarce and you see the ysses”: “It’s about different Dubliners who come in and
hearse, you’ll know you’ve died of hun- out of Dublin on that particular day”—and which was
“Wger!” set on June 16, 1904 (now called “Bloomsday”), the day
As we sipped Guinness in Dublin’s The Duke that Joyce (“a thick-skinned man”) had his first date with
pub, our group of 16 Nora Barnacle, who
laughed. We were be- eventually became his
ing serenaded on this wife.
weekday evening in a As I sipped my
small, upstairs private usual Chardonnay,
room (called a “snug”) by I recalled suffering
actors Frank Smith and through this difficult
Brendan Morrissey. As masterpiece in college-
they sang this rousing -yet felt vindicated after
rendition of “The Waxies’ Smith, with Morrissey,
Dargle,” we cheered them performed a first chap-
on, toasting with our ter scene, then looked
glasses. Donning black up at us, winked, and
bowlers, the duo then noted, “Few people get
performed a scene from beyond the first part,
Samuel Beckett’s “Wait- including Irish people!”
ing for Godot” to our hearty applause. As we chuckled, the duo dramatically recited
This was my third visit to Dublin—the formerly Molly’s monologue at the end of the book: “. . .so he
gritty, now glowing city of some 1.6 million, home since could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was
1769 to world-famous Guinness (today the storehouse going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
is a popular tour attraction). Besides Beckett, the city “Now you don’t have to read it!” Smith bellowed as
has produced such famous writers as James Joyce, we laughed with relief.
William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard As Colm Quilligan notes in his guidebook, “Dub-
Shaw. lin Literary Pub Crawl” (available for purchase on the
And what a fun city! My husband Carl and I had tour), it took Joyce seven years to write the epic; but, he
signed up for the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl--celebrating confides, “it took this writer seven years to read it.” So I
its 30th anniversary this year--which sounded intriguing. wasn’t the only one who suffered!
We figured this literary pilgrimage, so to speak, would “There have always been pub crawls in Dublin,”
be a fun way to sample some history and culture--while Quilligan adds. “As far back as the 17th century Trinity
researching the spirits, of course. students earned a reputation for rampaging through the
This is reportedly the only city in the world to pro- city’s taverns, no doubt declaiming from the works of
duce three Nobel laureate authors--Beckett, Shaw, and Virgil, Ovid, and Homer. Dublin’s reputation as a literary
Yeats—and which boasts some 800 pubs. So it seemed city derives partly from the period just after the Second
the perfect place to follow in the footsteps of these liter- World War. The pub has always been the centre of local
ary giants, even sipping a whiskey or Guinness in some life.”
of the same watering holes they frequented. There It was Quilligan who founded this pub crawl ver-
would be “a very simple quiz” at the end of the tour, we sion in 1988 with several actors, and it grew mostly by
were told. The grand prize? A Dublin Literary Pub Crawl word-of-mouth.
T-shirt! “Dublin is a great word-of-mouth city,” observed
Smith then gave our group a tagline of Joyce’s “Ul- Smith. Since then—with the help of brochures, news-

168 WDT MAGAZINE WINTER 2018