IS THERE any such thing these days as a literary pub? asks Frank McNally
I know, it's embarrassing to have to ask. I'd be crushed to learn from readers that there was one around the corner from The Irish Times, and nobody had ever told men until now. But I only admit my ignorance in the matter because I'm fairly confident no such place exists.
Or if it does, it must be a rather pale version of the old Palace Bar in Fleet Street, where in the 1950s, if the ceiling had collapsed any night around closing time, it would have wiped out half the writers in Dublin. The other half would have escaped only because they were in McDaids.
No doubt the decline of the literary pub is a feature of the decline in pubs generally. Interest groups are less likely to be defined now by where they drink, although there are exceptions. Doheny Nesbitts, for example, remains strongly identified with a coterie whose great passion in life is discussing how to run the country.
Go in there after work on a Thursday and you'll see the suited elders of the Nesbiterian community - politicians, economists, accountants and the like - at prayer.
I believe the room at the back is preferred by a less formal crowd (the so-called "Free Nesbiterians") who are opposed to the wearing of suits on religious grounds. But I could be making that up.
It's not just the literary pub that has declined. One never hears of literary "salons" any more either. They were a big thing once - held in stately houses, typically, where elegant hostesses would invite members of the intelligentsia around for the evening to be witty and/or profound in a group situation. I've heard that Celia Larkin still maintains a salon somewhere, but I've never been invited.
In fact the whole concept of a "literary circle", meeting anywhere, seems to have fallen away completely; even though such groups loom very large in the history of writing.
The two most famous examples of the genre were not circles at all, of course. The Bloomsburys - Virgina Woolf, E.M. Forster, et al- were usually described as a "set", and took their name not from a pub but from the part of London where they lived and socialised. They included writers, artists and at least one economist (J.M. Keynes), and they met mostly in private houses for "aesthetic and philosophic discussions".
The other famous example, if not a circle, was at least circular. Dubbed the "Algonquin Round Table", it was somewhat similar to the Palace group, in that it was associated with one place - Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel - where members met for lunch daily throughout the 1920s. They had little lofty intent, other than to amuse each other. And with the likes of Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and even Harpo Marx - who talked in real life - attending, the lunches had witticisms on tap (still and sparkling). Several of the group being newspaper columnists, the highlights were always guaranteed to reach a wide audience.
I doubt if the Petrashevksy Circle of mid-19th century St Petersburg was a bundle of laughs. It wasn't really about art either, being devoted mainly to the discussion of utopian socialism and the overthrow of the tsar. But it included Dostoevsky and several poets, so it qualifies as a literary group of sorts.
An even older circle was the one that met in the Mermaid Tavern in London's Cheapside during the early 17th century. This hosted a monthly lunch known as the Friday Club, whose members included Ben Jonson, John Donne, and - it is said - Shakespeare.
So great was the pub's fame that, two centuries later, Keats wrote a poem about it, the chorus of which sounds like an old advertising jingle: "Souls of poets dead and gone,/ What Elysium have ye known,/ Happy field or mossy cavern,/ Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"
In the internet era, I suppose, nobody needs literary pubs any more. Even whole cities have declined in importance as places for like-minded people to gather. Once, if you were serious about your art, you had to go to London or Paris or New York. Now, a multinational group of writers could organise a circle on Facebook and "poke" each other any time of the day or night.
Of course, they would lose something in the process. Writers need to meet each other in person occasionally, preferably in pubs or restaurants, if only to create moments like the famous one in which Norman Mailer head-butted Gore Vidal and the latter, while still prostrate, delivered the immortal response: "Words fail Norman Mailer, yet again." OK, that happened in the green room of the Dick Cavett Show, which is not technically a pub (but close enough, probably).
And there are other things you can't do over the internet. Take the Bloomsbury Set. As well as having "aesthetic and philosophic discussions" - which they could certainly have pursued via an online forum - they also famously liked to engage in other forms of interaction: for which, frankly, Facebook's poking option would not have been an adequate substitute.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie