This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 8 (August 2018), 5.
“You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger.” So James Joyce, in Ulysses, has his character Stephen Dedalus recollect one leg of the journey he took from Dear Dirty Dublin to La Ville Lumière—Paris, the City of Light. Joyce made that journey himself, as early as 1902, and eventually, beginning in 1920, spent most of the last two decades of his life in Paris. He completed Ulyssesthere and wrote Finnegans Wake there too.
But Joyce is just one of many Irish writers who lived famously in Paris. Other household names include Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan. James Stephens, who maintained an apartment in Paris for more than thirty years, reportedly misplaced (briefly, fortunately) the manuscript for his novel The Demi-Godswhile living there. Poets Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevy also found inspiration there during extended sojourns in the city.
The number of French writers sojourning in Dublin is considerably smaller, but recently I happened upon one who not only visited but actually sketched out in verse the outline of his time there. In fact, for Frédéric Jacques Temple, Dublin seems to have been a place of pilgrimage. He reflects on this in a little remembrance he wrote about meeting Thomas McGreevy, sometime in the 1950s, in Montpellier, France, at the home of a mutual friend, transplanted British man-of-letters Richard Aldington. According to that remembrance, Temple, moved by his subsequent epistolary friendship with McGreevy, visited Dublin twice—both times, though, after the Irish poet’s death in 1967. The first time, he was invited by the Alliance Française in Dublin and gave a talk on McGreevy, titled “An Irishman in Paris or the Key Witness,” that drew an audience of nearly 200 people to Bewley’s Oriental Café on Grafton Street. His second visit, at the invitation of Roger Little, a noted Trinity College professor of French, led to his writing a series of eight very short poems.
There is not a lot to say about them as poems per se (except that I found them pretty easy to translate). In their brevity, their slightness, they seem to aspire toward satori, the Japanese equivalent of Joycean “epiphany” associated with a poetic form like haiku; but they never quite achieve that level of illumination. Perhaps they are best thought of as vignettes: a literary term, vignettemeans “little vine” in French and derives from the tendril-like decorations that nineteenth-century printers would add to title pages of books and the first page of chapters. Gathered under the title “À Dublin” (“In Dublin”), these vignettes—sort of calligraphic pen strokes, not much more substantial than monkish marginalia—are part of a larger gathering of poems that Temple titled Périples(Journeys). Reflecting the poet’s self-consciousness as a visitor, that context actually lends his Dublin verses resonance beyond their substance.
Indeed, beginning with the first poem, Temple inscribes a sort of touristic connect-the-dots map of Dublin with literary and nationalistic shadings:
We will go tomorrow
to lay flowers on the tomb
of Maud Gonne
in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Immortalized in poems by her ardent admirer W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, a fervent nationalist, became in 1902 the literal embodiment of “Mother Ireland” thanks to her acting the title role in Cathleen ni Houlihan, a play co-written by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory for the Irish National Dramatic Company. Late in his life, Yeats would ask rhetorically: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”
Perhaps that specific association prompted the second poem in the sequence:
Remember
Cathleen ni Houlihan
who sparked the powder
to dislodge Albion.
Interestingly, Temple’s use of Albion, an ancient name for Great Britain (dating at least to the fourth century B.C.), may also implicate James Joyce, who has his character “the citizen,” a diehard Irish nationalist, deploy the phrase “perfidious Albion” in a rant against the French in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. Joyce probably knew that the phrase had great currency in France, especially among journalists, during the nineteenth century. He may even have known that the phrase was first coined by French poet and playwright Augustin Louis de Ximémès in a poem titled “L’Ère des Français” in 1793: “Attaquons dans ses eaux la perfide Albion.” Temple too may have known that earliest reference.
There may be a Joycean element in the third poem as well:
If you are wise
you will see
in the mist of the Liffey
the phantoms of Chapelizod.
Named for its association with the Irish princess Iseult (or Isolde) in the Arthurian Legend of Tristan and Isolde, the Liffey-side village of Chapelizod figures prominently in Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, as the home of his central character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their children Shaun, Shem, and Issy. But Temple’s reference to “phantoms” may also invoke the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novel The House by the Churchyard(1863) and tale “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (1851) are both set in the village.
Joyce definitely factors in the next two vignettes. The first, a tribute to Temple’s old pen friend, obviously involves a visit to the Martello tower where, like his character Stephen Dedalus in the opening episode of Ulysses, Joyce once lived:
In Sandycove I enter
James Joyce’s tower
and doff my cap
to salute the shade
of Tom McGreevy.
The next one returns the reader to Finnegans Wake:
At Mulligan’s Bar
in Poolbeg Street
we hoist a solemn toast
to the memory of Anna Livia.
In Irish, the name for the River Liffey is Abhainn na Life, from which Joyce derived the name of his character Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is the embodiment of the river in Finnegans Wake.
By the evidence of the next poem, Temple had drink on his mind more than once during his Dublin visit:
I am going to Bewley’s
to drain three pints of stout.
Molly Malone
sings her tune
at the foot of Grafton Street:
<<coques et moules fraîches,
mussels and cockles, oh! oh!>>
Temple’s transcription of how he misheard the lyrics of the popular ballad “Molly Malone” may be endearing, but he would have been disappointed in his quest for Guinness, as Bewley’s does not serve alcohol—only tea and coffee!
Undaunted, however, he continues his literary tour by taking his reader down Grafton Street to College Green and through the arched gateway of Trinity College. Did Temple personally know Samuel Beckett, the TCD alumnus who spent the last fifty years of his life living and writing in Paris? The poem offers no hint; but it does seem to suggest that Temple was housed on campus during his Dublin visit hosted by Professor Little:
In Beckett’s lodgings
at Trinity College
I caress in a dream
the 340 vellum pages
of the Book of Kells,
a wonder of the world.
The series ends on Duke Street, not far from Trinity and that famous illuminated manuscript (which dates to around 800 A.D.), at another drinking establishment with another Joycean association:
It is winter,
let’s duck into Davy Byrne’s
and take on for ballast
a feed of coddle.
That venue is immortalized in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysseswhen Leopold Bloom slips in for a bite to eat: “He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub.” Bloom orders a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy for his lunch. Temple opts for a more robust dish with a particular Dublin flavor (as it were): sometimes simmered in Guinness, coddle usually includes pork sausages and rashers of bacon mixed with chunks of potatoes and sliced onions then seasoned with salt and pepper and maybe a sprig of parsley. Ballast, indeed!
Born in 1921, Frédéric Jacques Temple is now 97 years old and apparently still living in Montpellier where he met Thomas McGreevy more than sixty years ago. His poetic record of his time “à Dublin” lives on too.
