James Liddyrecalls the old Shelbourne, and a 'nearly invisible parade of intrigue'
Grand hotels remain the monuments of the middle-and upper-class gilded age that began in the mid 19th century and petered out in the 1930s, of which an aftertaste persisted until after the second World War. By then this aristocrat-tinged medium-high culture was giving way to economic pressure and a more businesslike set of manners. I was, as a child and later, privileged to enter this world through my mother's connection with the Shelbourne Hotel.
After the war she went there from the country and sometimes stayed overnight. Before that she had lived in the hotel for a few years, and she was married from it in 1931 at Westland Row church, nearby. (This last fact has an echo of Mr Harding in George Moore's A Drama in Muslin: "Then you don't know the famous Shelbourne Hotel! All the events of life are accomplished here. People live here and die here, and flirt here, and, I was going to say, marry here.")
She told me dinner was two shillings, the charge for her room £5 a week. There were few permanent guests; a couple she remembered staying there was Sir Thomas Grattan Esmonde and his second, American wife. She also used to see the young Kate O'Brien with her sister.
One dressed for dinner, although the food was generally uninviting. What she recollected as remarkable was the lobster mayonnaise, whose quality she never found in any other restaurant. She said living in the Shelbourne then was quiet; the hotel did not do so very well; times were hard for people. On her wedding day she planned to have a small reception in her bedroom, but when her party got back from the church the bottles of brandy, whiskey and gin had disappeared from the table.
My early memories of the Shelbourne confirm the glittering background, the theatrical sense of stage on the lower floors and the nearly invisible parade of intrigue, reminiscent of the sumptuous accounts of the resort hotel on the Normandy coast in Remembrance of Things Past. The Writing Room, where the Horseshoe Bar was placed later, was perhaps reserved more for the ladies and their privacy than for salesmen writing up their orders. Guests went up a stairs at the far end of the room to a Georgian interior - initially a house not part of the hotel, 32 St Stephen's Green, where glowed a Georgian cocktail lounge at which a Martini or a white lady could be ordered. There one could be at peace as an American tourist.
When, as children, my sister and I entered the revolving door, past the well-known porters, the first thing we made for was the lift. It was on a pulley, which we used to play with while the strange cage was in motion. When it returned we pestered the lift man - a tubby little man in the hotel's grey-and-green uniform - with questions.
The lounge was the centre of the gorgeous establishment. In contrast to the Writing Room, which was Dresden in style - duck-egg-blue walls with plaques - the lounge was decidedly Victorian, with a frieze, flock wallpaper, a large mirror over the fireplace, the Bossi mantelpiece and another large mirror at the other end of the room, underneath which was a serving table with a white tablecloth.
The most prominent waiter was Bill, a stocky, amiable character who always remembered us, but mother's favourite was the last of the German waiters, Fred. German waiters had long been the distinctive feature of Shelbourne culture. In A Drama in Muslin, Moore surveys the scene of the debutantes leaving for Dublin Castle: "On the first landing, about the winter garden, a crowd of German waiters, housemaids . . ." Elizabeth Bowen tells, in her history of the hotel, of their internment as enemy aliens in the first World War, a fate that was avoided in the second. There is even the rumour that Hitler's half-brother was a member of the staff for a while.
Events at Christmas, during or after the hostilities, were intense to the eye of childhood. My sister and I were carrying balloons from Brown Thomas, holding on to them carefully, as we made our way up Grafton Street to St Stephen's Green. I lost mine to the sky outside Tysons. Nora got through the door and into the lounge before she let go of her balloon. It sailed over the tea table and the couch to the plaster ceiling. Fred and Bill rushed out, and an apprentice waiter brought a ladder.
The lounge resumed its cups and saucers, and Mother took her Scotch while we contemplated the pot of tea and thin, delicate sandwiches. Fred stopped by and regarded me. "That's quite a child you have there, madam."
Then they moved to their fervent topic as Mother lamented: "It doesn't look so good, Fred. Can Hitler be making the same mistake in a Russian winter as Napoleon?" "Yes, madam, we are as damn stupid as the French, but Napoleon was only a soldier. Hitler is a politician and knows what to do even in snow. And God is on his side." Fred bowed, and Nora and I ran out to the lift. We pulled at the rope and skipped into the cage, but it did not move.
There were more connections. Father went up to interview for a medical job in Dublin with the Appointments Commission. He spent the night at the Shelbourne and was awoken by heavy noise. He looked out the window and watched the fire and smoke of the Luftwaffe blasting the North Strand. He ducked his head back in quickly.
Shortly afterwards Mother brought us up again to the hotel. Before she left - worried about food, not having much left on the ration cards - she begged the local creamery manager for an extra, illegal pound of butter. She had taken a room facing the green, and she left the precious butter on the window sill to cool. It was requisitioned by seagulls.
Mother knew society. She became very adroit at pointing out personalities using the lounge. One of the first named to me was Sir Shane Leslie, whom she said was a first cousin of Winston Churchill. He was dressed in a kilt. Mother pointed to his legs. "I wish when they wore kilts they would wash their knees."
The tweedy gentleman in the corner she identified as Lord Adare, "an aide-de-camp to the last viceroy of Ireland". She recognised James Johnson Sweeney, the New York connoisseur and art administrator, whom she had met on a transatlantic liner two days before, in Cobh. There were the perennials Robert Briscoe, in his bow tie, Tom MacGreevey, sometimes in his cape, Billy Wicklow, looking Hanoverian in his blue or green tweed suit, and Leo Whelan, the painter, somewhat worse for wear.
The Shelbourne lounge was a house of history. I felt about this sacred space what Osip Mandelstam wrote about his city: "It always seemed to me that in Petersburg something very splendid and solemn was absolutely about to happen." But other areas of the building had played their part. In a first-floor sittingroom, No 112, the Constitution of the Irish Free State was drafted.
Mother and I, in the early 1950s, spent a night in this room. Maud Gonne had died, and Mother, on a whim, insisted on going to the funeral. She had often listened to Gonne's oratory, and that of Charlotte Despard, on O'Connell Street. We drove from Donnybrook church to Glasnevin through saluting gardaí at traffic lights, uncomfortably close behind the hearse.
That night there was no room at the inn, so we were escorted up to the historic chamber, where beds had been made up for us. As I lay there I remembered what the Pope O'Mahony had told me about the death of John Redmond in the Shelbourne: out through his window Redmond heard the crowd cheering the procession of Constance Markievicz on her release from an English prison, and he turned his face to the wall. I wondered in what room this tragic scene had taken place.
In later years I often returned to the lounge, to meet people or to indulge in celebrations, such as the fearful and awesome nights after an international rugby match. A quick sketch of such encounters would detail having an unusual tea with Patrick Kavanagh, who commented as James Pope-Hennessy walked by: "A woman has nothing to fear from such a man." I stood with Liam Miller by the registration desk as Richard Ellmann checked out; I noticed the curious fact that his cheque book was printed in Irish. I had tea, too, with the Californian poet Brother Antoninus, who was captivated by the sing-song voices that the pages used to announce messages in the lounge. "The queens must really be turned on by these guys," he said.
I was often in company here, with John Ashbery, with the American-Canadian writers Stan Persky and George Stanley, or with Tom Ronan, my mother's first cousin, the London correspondent of the New York Times, who came over for elections.
Now we have the new. In her majestic book on the Shelbourne, Elizabeth Bowen describes her subject, on the first page, as: "Tall as a cliff, but more genial." May these characteristics continue to mingle.
I say my last reminiscence. In 1951 I saw a pile of Bowen's book for sale on the registration desk. A few years later I collected her in the lounge, and we walked across St Stephen's Green to her talk to the UCD English Literary Society. She was affability tinged with restraint, like her hotel.
James Liddy is a poet and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His latest books are On the Raft with Fr Roseliep, a new collection of poems (Arlen House), and his autiobiography, The Doctor's House(Salmon Publishing)