YOU COULD SAY my fascination with the Irish pub began long before I ever set foot in Ireland. Like so many other romantics, I was steeped in the allure of the country through the work of its great writers and musicians, and I thought of it as an enchanted land beyond the grip of change. I’d seen The Quiet Man far too many times, as well, and though I knew the movie was sentimental, filled with stereotypes, and deliberately unreal—a “beautiful travelogue,” John Ford called it—I let it color my perceptions and felt compelled to start looking for a local as soon as I settled in Ranelagh, a neighborhood south of the Liffey, where I joined a lovely Dublin woman I had the good luck to meet on holiday in London and the good sense to follow home.
In my innocence, I assumed it would be easy to find a pub as devoutly Irish as Pat Cohan’s in Cong, the village in County Mayo where The Quiet Man was filmed in 1951. The city might not deliver a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof, of course, but surely there would be many bars where a sense of tradition prevailed, and a genial but hardnosed publican kept the intrusions and distractions of the civilized world at bay to allow the art of conversation to flourish. Ireland has about twelve thousand pubs to choose from, after all. Moreover, I’d been in training for the job most of my life, starting as a bored college student trapped in the snowbound wastes of upstate New York. Whenever my boredom peaked, I had one remedy only. I hitched a ride to Manhattan, wallowed in the beery charm of such iconic spots as McSorley’s Old Ale House and P.J. Clarke’s, and pretended I’d fetched up on the Auld Sod.
The word “Irish” soon acquired a special meaning for me. It stood for talk, drink, laughter, fun, and a release from ordinary cares. I found the literary angle appealing, too. As a secret poet, I hoped the beer would lift me into the realm of Yeatsian glory. The lines I scribbled on bar napkins certainly seemed to improve with each pint, and before long I couldn’t pass even a lowly Blarney Stone without feeling a twitch of inspiration. That may sound ridiculous, but the Irish pub, at least in its mythic form, encourages such fantasies. Its attraction is universal, and it cuts across cultural boundaries and crops up everywhere on earth with a frequency matched only by the unavoidable Chinese restaurant. A plate of dim sum doesn’t conjure images as seductive as the Lake Isle of Innisfree, though. For that you need a jar of the black stuff and Van Morrison on your iPod.
In my travels over the years, I gathered further evidence of the pub’s enduring popularity. At an “Irish” bar in the Caribbean, I drank rum with a noted cricketer and discussed C. L. R. James, the sport’s premier author, and at another in Florence I joined some fashionable Italians, all carrying shopping bags from the boutiques on Via Tornabuoni, in a fractured sing-along of “Danny Boy.” The Fountain, once my local in Islington, North London, morphed into Filthy McNasty’s, rumored to be a favorite pit stop of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, an endorsement of Irishness money couldn’t buy. I sampled stout in Malaga and Vancouver, Paris and Guadalajara, and became convinced that even if I journeyed to the far reaches of the globe, to São Tomé or the Tro-briand Islands, I’d catch a glimpse of the familiar Guinness logo on the horizon.
My experience was so vast I considered myself a modest expert on the subject when I made the move to Dublin. It never occurred to me that the Clancy’s and O’Malley’s I’d visited elsewhere were mere imitations based on an ideal, or variations on a theme. A quick tour of the city taught me that the homegrown pubs exist in a bewildering array of styles now, from the architectural splendor of Doheny & Nesbitt to the grottolike confines of the Dawson Lounge, down a tricky staircase and into a cellar with only 350 square feet of space. Café en Seine was a temple of baroque overkill furnished with a hodge-podge of statuary, ferns, and sconces, while John Kehoe looked so unadorned that it scoffed at the very notion of decoration. From friends I heard about gay pubs, Polish and Nigerian pubs, early houses that opened at seven, and illicit after-hours pubs that supposedly never closed, but I stuck to my guns.
I wanted a local with a timeless quality. It should be humble and welcoming, I thought, and have a strong sense of community, where a shared set of values still obtained. The pub I imagined embodied the virtues traditionally associated with Ireland—kind and gentle, polite, good-humored, and devoted to the spoken word in all its base and exalted forms. It would be a refuge, a safe harbor with worn wood floors, a bar that could tell stories, gents in flat caps, and a turf fire blazing on cold winter nights. There I sat at a warm corner table with my Irish pals, a postmodern John Wayne basking in tranquility and relishing the sweet mood of surcease that Flann O’Brien described so memorably in “The Workmans Friend.”
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night—
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When money’s tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt—
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
I had no doubt I’d discover such a pub eventually. As I say, I was an innocent, and I still had a lot to learn.