Green Doors, Green Fools – An Irishman’s Diary on the literary history of Ely Place in Dublin

For a short street with a dead end, Dublin’s Ely Place has had more than its share of literary dramas over the decades. I mentioned one here recently – George Moore’s feud with the neighbouring “Miss Beams”, begun when he painted his door a patriotic green, in contravention of the norm, which was white.

But Moore was a serial annoyer of the local residents, at least according to another of them, the poet and surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty, who lived across the street. And Gogarty’s memoirs have a further account of the Mayo writer’s irascible behaviour, this time at the expense of a third neighbour, Sir Thornley Stoker.

The latter is now best remembered, if at all, as the brother of the man who wrote Dracula. But he too was a surgeon – a very eminent one And the scene was a dinner at his stately home, Ely House, a seven-window-wide mansion that still occupies the entire end of Hume Street, as seen from Stephen's Green.

The year being 1910, his guests included Augustine Birrell, then chief secretary in Ireland, whose presence made Stoker even more insistent than usual on the other guests’ punctuality. So he was annoyed from the start when Moore deliberately turned up late.

If not the dinner party from hell, the event certainly seems to have been purgatorial for all involved. Some of this was due to the host’s excessive formality. As Gogarty put it, Stoker lived “in Ely Place, and in the Eighteenth Century”.

The dining room was lit only by waxen candles, deemed more sympathetic to the period decor. In this half-light, the dinner “dragged on”. And Moore’s antipathy to Birrell only added to the tension. Knowing well that the latter was also an acclaimed writer, he studiously pretended not to have heard of any of his books.

When a dramatic event broke the ice, however, it presented challenges of its own. Mid-dinner, the mahogany door burst open, and “a nude and elderly lady came in”. With a cry of “I like a little intelligent conversation!” she then ran around the table, pursued by two attendants who covered her up eventually and bundled her out.

After that and a very awkward silence, the host implored his guests not to speak of what they had seen. He made a particular appeal for discretion from Moore. But when the skittish Moore described the incident as “charming” and demanded an “encore”, Stoker had had enough. He threw him out.

That was not the end of the story, however. A short while later, claimed Gogarty, Moore was back, in urgent need of medical attention, having been bitten by a “mad dog” in the street

So Stoker brought him into his surgery, rubbed caustic soda into the thigh wound, amid Moore’s screams, and then insisted the patient pay the consultation fee (five guineas) before being allowed to leave again. And as Moore departed for the second time, according to Gogarty, the mad dog was quietly readmitted, now revealed as the Stokers’ pet Pomeranian.

I suspect that last detail, at least, may have been an embellishment of the facts, courtesy of Gogarty's mischievous sense of humour. But his humour was not always so robust. And mention of George Moore's green door reminds me of yet another notorious episode in the history of Ely Place, as featured in a book called The Green Fool.

That memoir of Patrick Kavanagh’s early life includes a breezy account of his first trip to Dublin, a fact-finding mission circa 1931, in which describes turning up uninvited on Gogarty’s doorstep and mistaking the maid for “his wife – or his mistress”. As Kavanagh added, by way of explanation: “I expected every poet to have a spare wife”.

It was a throwaway joke, nothing more. And it is beyond belied that the world-wise Gogarty would have been genuinely offended. On the contrary, he later claimed the real insult, mistress-wise, was Kavanagh’s implication that he had “only one”.

But Gogarty was still stinging from his own experiences at the receiving end of memoir-related litigation and he sued anyway, successfully. The court awarded £100 damages, plus costs. Worse still for The Green Fool's impoverished author, the book had to be withdrawn from sale.

So Kavanagh’s brief call to Ely Place was a very expensive one. And this was all the more annoying because it never happened. A casual reader of the book might guess as much, But as his biographer Antoinette Quinn established, the visit to Gogarty’s house was “entirely fictional”.