Bohemian rhapsody

MEMOIR: Prodigals and Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin's Baggotonia,By Brendan Lynch, The Liffey Press, 308pp. ¤19.95

THE LATE JOHN RYAN SNR, a noted chronicler of Dublin’s bohemia, has written – or possibly spoken: I can’t say which, as this book is largely unencumbered by attributions or scrupulosities such as footnotes – about a train journey he took to Galway in the company of a bottle of sherry and a friend, the lawyer and raconteur Eoin O’Mahony, known to all as the Pope O’Mahony.

The author of Baggotonia, Brendan Lynch, tells us how the Pope got his title – as a boy at Clongowes Wood College he was ambitious for a post in the Vatican and later would cycle around Dublin clad in a cloak and his Knight of Malta regalia – but not the reason for the sherry, surely an unbohemian choice of drink. Or libation, as the Pope would surely have it.

Anyway, inspired by a sight of the ruins of Rathmogerly Castle, home of the Plunkington-Foreshaws, the Pope was soon raconting happily in his characteristic style. Lynch gives us what is for him an unusually lengthy quote from one of his sources, in this case Ryan’s account, whether written or verbal.

“The Foreshaws were a decent Catholic-Protestant, Anglo-Irish family. One of their forebears – a Dolan from Westport (who changed his name by deed poll) was the midshipman on the Victory . . . The Pilkingtons were the natural issue of a liaison between Harry, first Duke of Grafton, the illegitimate son of Charles the Second who fell at the siege of Cork, and an amorous adventure with Charlotte Albion, whose family changed their name to Bryuthon and whose motto was Facile Princeps . . .”

Through the several generations of Plunkingtons, the Pope continued with his “series of potted biographies, epitaphs and elegies” as far as Galway, writes Lynch.

I would have been very glad to alight at Athlone and leave the Pope discoursing away in his carriage. I'm with Patrick Kavanagh when he pronounced him "a terrible bore". But some considered the Pope a brilliant talker, and if you're in their camp you would probably like this book. If, like me, you're in Kavanagh's you probably wouldn't. I don't know in which camp Brendan Lynch would place himself. But his line about "potted biographies, epitaphs and elegies" is an uncannily concise description of Baggotonia.

Baggotoniais, Lynch says, the word coined in the 1950s to denote our artistic and bohemian quarter, Dublin's version of Chelsea or the Left Bank, which centred on Baggot Street. I have it from a horse's mouth that such an epithet was never applied then. But let's not nitpick.

In any case, Lynch’s Baggotonia is an accommodating place, confined neither geographically nor historically. Nor, indeed, chronologically: the first person appears to land on the moon at the same time as Mary Robinson is elected president. It can be anywhere in central Dublin – though there’s a definite bias towards the postal district of Dublin 2 – where rooms can be rented and congenial bars and eating-places are to hand. Lynch documents, if briefly, earlier times and recruits citizens who may not necessarily identify with the drinkard and raggedy character of the quintessential Baggotonia.

Artists as diverse as Swift, Lady Morgan, Lady Wilde, all the Yeatses and Katharine Tynan make appearances. The Pike Theatre is cited in the same sentence as Synge. If you cycled into town from Ballsbridge, like Bertie Smyllie, editor of The Irish Times, or bought books in Parson's on Baggot Street Bridge, as Seamus Heaney and John Banville did, you are a Baggotonian. Indeed if you were literary or artistic and lived in Dublin or visited it between the 18th and later 20th centuries you are almost certainly one.

Baggotonia's heyday, though – certainly its self-consciously bohemian height – was in the middle decades of the last century. It has been described in books such as Ryan's Remembering How We Stood, Ulick O'Connor's Behan, Antoinette Quinn's Kavanagh and, most elegantly and comically, in Anthony Cronin's Life of Rileyand Dead As Doornails. Lynch makes full use of such sources, generally unacknowledged, so that Kavanagh, Behan and Flann O'Brien loom large – sadly, though, as simplistic and bowdlerised versions of themselves yet again.

Ernie Gébler does get a chapter, rather melodramatically, as Ireland’s Forgotten Writer, as does Gainor Crist, the actual Ginger Man. Beatrice Behan too, though for no obvious reason other than being the widow. This was an opportunity passed up. Mary Lavin, who is an important and interesting writer, makes all too brief an appearance. Lavin lived on Lad Lane for many years, and we could have been told much more about her and her work as well as her soirees. Indeed, there is nothing on the thorny topic of how women Baggotonians coped in this hard-drinking, macho world.

Possibly it was women’s rising confidence, as well, more obviously, as bad heating and high rents, the rise of the computer, the demise of the pub and, above all, the gentrification of the artist, that did for Baggotonia.

One thing, though, I did learn was that the upturned butter box used to be an essential item of furniture there. Isa MacNie, the cartoonist, made her bed in the end out of butter boxes, and the artist Owen Walsh placed them around his stove for visitors to sit on. As someone who happens to have a TV sitting on an upturned butter box, maybe I can consider myself a kind of natural heir.

Anne Haverty is a writer whose most recent novel is The Free and Easy (Vintage )