Collection: John McNamee is very likely the last indigenous Dub, the last man standing in what was once the great and tragic village of Dublin. He is certainly the only writer now working on the banks of the Liffey who has walked most of her streets, sheltered in most of her doorways, drunk in most of her pubs, writes Theo Dorgan
On the evidence of these stories, and the autobiographical essays that keep them company, he is a man of constant sorrow who keeps raising his head to see where the sun is shining now. He is often battered, sometimes near despair, but still, somehow, ahead of the great game of life - if only by a short head.
He began as a poet, he tells us, in deepest Drumcondra - and his heart is with that murderous trade still - but he has been a labourer, a deckhand on a trawler, a kitchen porter, a factory worker, a machinist, a cleaner, a steward on a German tanker (jumped ship, naturally) and a temporary clerical officer in the rates department of Dublin County Council - to name but a small selection of his occupations, drawn from his dizzying curriculum vitae.
He has also been homeless, hapless, busted, jailed, a hitch-hiker across continents, a befriender and champion of the poor and marginalised, an astute promoter of his own work and welfare - and latterly the organiser of the highly successful Out To Lunch series of readings at the Bank of Ireland, College Green. He is a living rebuke to the sanitised, squared-off, uptight, desperate-to-be-cool, money-grubbing and mortgage-obsessed new Ireland.
I like the autobiographical essays in this book better than the stories, which have too much of the John D Sheridan in them - too much saccharine neatness. It's in the life that we get McNamee the near-mystic, the vagrant soul who sees us at a slant, the man with few illusions about us or himself. McNamee, he tells us plainly, lives entirely on his wits. A man not unfamiliar with the existential joys and terrors of the bookies, he is a mordant observer of pub life and sub-life, an instinctive sympathiser with all who live by the turn of the next coin.
If his relationship with the English language is sometimes semi-detached, if he has sometimes a cavalier disregard for the unhoused verb and the abandoned sub-clause, his prose has a salty flavour and texture all its own. There is sulphur here, too, and chaos, and a few unholy inadvertent gems.
My own favourite, one that will draw a wry smile from McNamee connoisseurs, is the following: "On Monday I met a fellow traveller in the Dublin branch of the literary trade who was somewhat short in the cash-flow. He cost me a small donation from my rent allowance; but he is also a dear friend."
Theo Dorgan's Sailing for Home is available in paperback; his translations of Slovene poet Barbara Korun have recently been published as Songs of Earth and Light.
A Man with a Hat: Collected Stories and Prose. By John McNamee, Weaver Publications, 190pp. €12