BOOK OF THE DAY: Fear and Loathing in Dublinby Aodhan Madden Liberties Press 184pp, €12.99
THERE IS no doubting the bravery of a writer who owns up to trying to set fire to himself in a lavatory. That the lavatory was as squalid as the one in the Irish Pressmakes the attempted self-immolation almost braver than the confession.
I say this advisedly since I knew the loo and I still know the man – for many years Madden and I worked together as subeditors in the Evening Press.
In his memoir of 1970s Dublin, this is how Madden describes our work environment: "The subs' desk in the Presswas like a home for terminal eccentrics.
They were mostly middle-aged men in varying stages of mental and physical disrepair. Some had stopped talking to others years before. Others were so permanently drunk and wet-brained that they merely went through the motions of editing copy.”
The operative word there is ‘mostly’: there was a high proportion of eccentrics on the desk and more than a dribble of hard drinkers, but most of the subs were sober, and the place crackled with energy, especially in the early years of the Evening Press when circulation was soaring.
Among the eccentrics was John J Dunne, a man “so insecure he had to possess two of everything: two houses, two cars, two dogs, and apparently only two shirts”. Every day Dunne produced “a fry sandwich” from his satchel: “two ugly lumps of bread clamped over a fried egg, black pudding and a tomato – and fed upon it with the fury of a barracuda”.
The official ethos of the Press was, of course, deeply green, but that did not prevent Dunne from denouncing Patrick Pearse as “the crazy queer that led us all to freedom”.
Madden's closest friend in the Evening Presswas Adrian McLoughlin, a roly-poly character "wearing pink, skin-tight trousers, over which his beer belly flopped like a gigantic codpiece".
Considering that he was passionately in love with Kylie Minogue and the city of Dublin, it is perhaps not surprising that McLoughlin’s inner life was tumultuous.
Madden’s mother, who, I guess, lies at the heart of his sorrow, only survived long enough to say of his drinking, “You’ll ruin your life.”
In 1971, she fell getting out of the bath and died in the Mater hospital.
Thereafter, Madden lived on in a decaying house on the North Circular Road with his “Pop”.
A reader of Dickens, a reciter of Goldsmith, a cook inclined to drop lumps of tobacco into the Irish stew, a recycler of teabags, an admirer of Dr Noel Browne, a hater of Eamon de Valera – by the end of the book, he has become an unforgettable father-figure.
It would be too easy to say that the cause of Madden’s tragedy was his alcoholism and his fiercely repressed homosexuality.
But toleration of the former and abhorrence of the latter certainly led to paranoia, the near-suicide in the lavatory and incarceration in mental hospitals – much of the book is spent in St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin.
Yet the combination may also have led to Madden becoming an Abbey playwright, the screenwriter for the film Night Train, and election to Aosdána.
Most newspaper memoirs are long on anecdote and short on inner suffering. Fear and Loathing in Dublinis exceptional in concentrating on the author's private life.
For once, one can say it is a pity the book is not longer. Madden’s retrospectively bitter insight – “I was young and this was a young age” – deserves expansion.
This is a funny, affecting and chastening read.
Brian Lynch's Duras Press has just brought outThe Nicotine Cat and Other People by Augustus Young