This falls into the category "Stories we'd like to know more of". It concerns Katherine Tynan, one of the most prolific Irish writers ever (over 100 novels and three books of autobiography, plus a few more volumes. And some verse.) Anyway, to Whitehall, Clondalkin, her father's fine, whitewashed farm, on a Sunday, came a stream of callers, many with "endless talk of poetry." (She wrote verse, too, as above.) And, it says solemnly in this book just arrived, "Willie Yeats would hypnotise the hens." We know of Yeats's interest in mysticism. But hypnotising the hens!
It's Just one of the nice quirky touches in a book about Dublin and Dubliners and sometimes people who had only a passing acquaintance with the place. It's called Dublin's Famous People and is by John Cowell. Tynan's poetry used to appear in anthologies: "Sheep and Lambs"; "The Woodpigeon"; "Song of an Island Fisherman". Sometimes she writes under her married name, Katherine Tynan Hinkson. And Yeats, who wrote many letters to her from London, was annoyed when she published them in her Twenty-Five Years, but conceded that it gave a very vivid picture of "the Dublin of my youth."
The author tells us that on the gable of Numbers 1 and 2 Leinster Street you can still read, when the leaves fall, the words Finn's Hotel. That introduces Nora Barnacle, who was a chambermaid there, and on one afternoon stroll met James Joyce. Farther on we read: "When Yeats's body was returned to Ireland, Nora sought, but was refused, the same honour from the Irish Government for her husband. Embittered, she refused the manuscript of Finnegans Wake to the National Library of Ireland, donating it instead to the British Museum."
Will Shields couldn't use his own name on the stage because his civil service bosses mightn't like it, so he chose Barry Fitzpatrick. But the printer got it wrong, and he appeared as Barry Fitzgerald, not only as Captain Jackie Boyle in Juno and as Fluther Good in The Plough, but in 45 Hollywood films, including The Quiet Man, no doubt. Michael Davitt spent the last twenty years of his life at Rose Lawn, a villa in Ballybrack also known as Land League Cottage.
A quiet tribute to William T. Cosgrave: "Himself without flamboyance, he led a cabinet of steely characters. With quiet determination he presided over the transition of Ireland from a British possession to a modern democracy." De Valera is quoted as saying of Erskin Childers: "The model of all I wish to have been myself.
Endlessly quotable, endlessly informative and witty. A revised version of an earlier volume (O'Brien Press, £8.99).