Leaving Dublin FAQ

Q: You’re not particularly well known, yet you’ve published a book of memoirs. Why would people be interested in the memoirs of someone they never heard of?

A: It’s all in the storytelling, don’t you know? Nobody had ever heard of Frank McCourt before he published Angela’s Ashes, yet his book became an instant bestseller.

Q: Do you think your book is going to become an instant bestseller?

A: One lives in hope.

Q: What would it take to become a bestseller?

A: A review in The New York Times would help. So would a review in The Globe and Mail. Or the National Post.

Q: How about a review in the Irish Times?

A: That would help too.

Q: But what if the reviews were negative? Wouldn’t that adversely affect sales?

A: Not necessarily. Yann Martel received some stinging reviews for Beatrice & Virgil, yet that didn’t stop him from ascending to the top of the national bestseller lists in Canada. Pierre Berton used to tell young writers, “Don’t read your reviews. Measure them.” The longer the review, said Berton, the better the chance that readers will want to buy the book.

Q: Have you received negative reviews for any of your previous books?

A: Yes, a couple.

Q: And?

A: The best revenge, as one of my publishers once told me, is to forgive your antagonists, live well, and wait for the sales figures to come in.

Q: You’ve changed the working title of your autobiography a few times. Initially it was called Reinventing Myself: Memoirs of a Dublin Rogue. Now it’s called Leaving Dublin: Writing my Way from Ireland to Canada. Why the changes?

A: An editor pointed out that I had not, in fact, reinvented myself after I moved to Canada at age 23. I had simply adapted to new opportunities. My publisher suggested I put the word “writing” in the title to indicate that this is what I do.

Q: But you’ve done other things. You’ve been a professional musician. You’ve been a radio announcer.

A: Yes, I was a writer who played music for a living, and a writer who worked in commercial broadcasting. I’ve been a writer since I was a child, when I made up bedtime stories for my younger brother.

Q: Your publisher, RMB ❘ Rocky Mountain Books, puts out books about outdoor adventure, mountain culture, hiking guides, and so on. Where do you fit into that mix? Are you a climber or a hiker?

A: No, not at all. My publisher, Don Gorman, has broadened the scope of his catalogue considerably in recent years. He also publishes books of travel, biography, history and social justice. A very popular recent title, for example, is John Reilly’s Bad Medicine, about crime and punishment on a First Nations reserve where the author served as a provincial court judge.

Q: What prompted you to write this autobiography, and why did you decide to do it now?

A: Because I can still remember. I hoped that in the process of remembering things and writing them down, I might be able to make sense of my life and give it context.

Q: That sounds like a self-serving rationale for writing book of memoirs.

A: Indeed. A book about oneself is – by definition – an exercise in self-absorption. But an autobiography is also about being rooted in a particular time and place. That makes it an exercise in social history, a subject dear to my heart.

Q: You write about growing up in Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. Why would readers in Canada, the U.S. and other countries be interested in that?

A: They have read about the Celtic Tiger and how it stopped roaring in recent years. I expect they would also be interested in what things were like in suburban Ireland before the cub was born.

Q: Then you write about coming to Canada at age 23. What makes your immigration story different from any other?

A: The fact that I came here not to find employment or escape from a repressive regime, but to get away from an Irish civil service job that was driving me crazy.

Q: Why couldn’t you have looked for another job in Ireland?

A: Because Ireland was driving me crazy too.

Q: You worked as a singer of Irish folk songs after you got to Canada. Couldn’t you have done that in Ireland?

A: As a matter of fact, I did. But there wasn’t enough money in it to justify giving up my day job. Canada gave me the chance to do it full-time.

Q: Then you worked in radio. What was that all about?

A: I wanted to try something different. I knew the manager of the radio station in Prince George and he opened the door.

Q: During your 30 years in the newspaper business you worked at a number of different jobs: police reporter, theatre critic, staff writer for the Calgary Herald’s Sunday magazine, obituary columnist. Why so many changes?

A: They were all great gigs. I enjoyed the challenges and the rewards of every one.

Q: One of the longest chapters in Leaving Dublin is about an eight-month lockout and strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999-2000. Why did you devote so much space to this topic?

A: Because nobody had told the insider story before. This was an unusual dispute in Canadian labour history in the sense that it wasn’t about wages or vacation allowances. It was about a group of journalists who wanted to be treated with dignity and respect.

Q: Do you think people will take issue with your interpretations of certain events, for example your description of what was happening at the Calgary Herald before the journalists started walking a picket line?

A: Undoubtedly. Everyone has his or her version of a story. This is my version.

Q: What other stories are you writing these days?

A: I’m working on the centennial history of the Calgary Public Library, for publication in the spring of 2012.

Where the heart is

"She wheeled her wheelbarrow ..."

“Would you ever consider moving home again?” asked the cab driver as we made our way out to the Dublin airport after a short holiday in Ireland.

Home? I’ve lived in Canada for almost 45 years. I spent just 23 in Dublin. Much as I still love it, I haven’t thought of it as home in a very long time.

It is quite a different Dublin now from the city I left behind in 1966. The restaurants are more appealing, the public transit system more efficient, and the place is crawling with tourists, even in rainy June. They crowd into Bewley’s Oriental Café and convince themselves the coffee served there is better than the caffè misto brewed at Starbucks. They have their pictures taken with the statue of “Molly Malone” at the bottom of Grafton Street just like they have their photos taken on the Spanish Steps in Rome or with Eros at Piccadilly Circus. The Irish go to Bavaria for their vacations while the Germans come to Dublin. Go figure.

Molly Malone is the tragic heroine of a popular Dublin anthem called “Cockles and Mussels.” It’s not known if a real person by that name ever existed. Doesn’t really matter. She lives on in song and story like the heroes of renown. The locals, in typically irreverent style, refer to her statue variously as “The Tart with the Cart” and “The Dish with the Fish.” Dubliners love to give catchy names to public monuments. When a bronze statue of Anna Livia (representing the River Liffey) was unveiled in O’Connell Street in 1988, they dubbed it “The Floozy in the Jacuzzi.” Even the sculptor got a kick out of the name. The “Floozy” has since been relocated to make room for a singularly unprepossessing monument called “The Spire of Dublin,” which stands on the site formerly occupied by Nelson’s Pillar. Nelson was blown to kingdom come in 1966. The IRA claimed responsibility but charges were never laid. Nobody expected they ever would be. There was cheering in the pubs the night after the old admiral was finally toppled from his perch.

I climbed the Pillar once. Dubliners used to let the visitors indulge in that sort of activity, like kissing the Blarney Stone or riding in a horse and trap around the Lakes of Killarney. But I wanted to see the view from the top. Joyce used to say that if the British ever bombed Dublin, it could be reconstructed brick by brick from the descriptions in his books. I wonder if Joyce ever climbed the Pillar.

The Pillar and the Theatre Royal are gone, as are the Metropole Cinema and the venerable “Bono Vox” advertising sign on O’Connell Street from which the lead singer of U2 famously derived his stage name. But some things remain the same. The eyeless Bank of Ireland still has bricked-in windows all around, the locals still feed the ducks in Stephen’s Green with stale bread crumbs, and the traditional musicians still jam nightly at O’Donoghue’s Bar in Merrion Row hoping to follow in the footsteps of Christy Moore and Ronnie Drew.

Drew was an unlikely pop star, a basso profundo ballad singer who performed as front man for The Dubliners and knocked the Beatles off the Irish charts with his gravelly renditions of “Nelson’s Farewell” (celebrating the demise of the iconic Pillar) and “Seven Drunken Nights.” The Clancy Brothers did the same, topping the charts with such rebel songs as “The Rising of the Moon” and “The Foggy Dew.” Both the Dubliners and the Clancys wrote the soundtrack of my life during the 1960s and gave me a greater sense of my Irish identity than any of the historical propaganda drummed into me by the Christian Brothers through 12 years of schooling.

Dublin in the 1960s was a sleepy provincial backwater on the western outskirts of Europe. Dublin today is connected, cosmopolitan, and aware of what’s going on in the rest of the world. I like it better now than I did when growing up.

Would I ever consider moving “home” again? In a way I have, by writing about it. My memoirs will be published this fall by RMB. But my true home remains in Canada, in Calgary, where I have lived most of my adult life. Dublin bore me but Canada made me. It calms my nights and invigorates my days.

Remembering Charly’s

My favourite neighbourhood Chinese eatery will be operating under new ownership as of  July 1, 2010. The current owners have retired. I don’t know if the new owners will keep the name, Charly Chan’s Rice House. I don’t even know if they will continue to run it as a Szechuan restaurant. They should. It has been part of the neighbourhood for so long–twenty-seven years–that Charly’s has become an institution.

When Charly’s first opened, in 1983, Kensington was just starting to reinvent itself as a trendy neighbourhood synonymous with modern, middle-class style and comfort. The old Kensington, otherwise known as Hillhurst, had been a pastiche of wartime bungalows, vanilla-flavoured walk-up apartments, corner groceries, coin laundries, and appliance stores. Black and Decker City. The new Kensington was dotted with architect-designed homes that looked like miniature grain elevators. Instead of appliance stores, it offered the shopper everything from custom tanning to mountain bikes. Silk lingerie, beauty salons, and linguine with clam sauce. Patio tables with Cinzano umbrellas, interlocking red-brick sidewalks, and  the Plaza Theatre art cinema. Post-modern commercial architecture in the sun-baked California style.

The new stores and restaurants, many of them now long gone, proclaimed to the world that Kensington was no longer a sleepy, working-class inner-city neighbourhood populated by students and hippies. It was now a place where you could shop for Stilton cheese, gnocchi, pesto and French bread, buy the New York Times, and listen to Bob Erlendson’s jazz piano during Sunday brunch. It was a place where you could take in a foreign film, drink expresso, buy a novel, and savour the salty taste of  the patented deli-fries at the Kensington Delicafe. If I had written this piece back then, the Deli owner  would have given me a couple of dining coupons as “payola.”

Charly Chan’s offered such Szechuan favourites as fried shredded beef, salt-and-pepper seafood, and Mongolian chicken. Its only competition in the neighbourhood, the venerable Lido Café, offered a more traditional selection of “Chinese and western cuisine,” including chow mein, chop suey, and fried-egg sandwiches. The Lido opened at 8:00 AM every day except on Sunday, when it opened at 1:00 PM “People are supposed to go to church,” explained the waitress. She put an “out of order” sign on the counter jukebox to stop customers from complaining they received only one play instead of two for fifty cents.

Long before Starbucks and Second Cup moved into the neighbourhood, the owner of The Roasterie was serving café au lait to his customers in cereal bowls. He had researched the market and discovered that Canadians love their coffee. “We’re number twelve in the world after the Europeans,” he said. A sign on his wall said, “Even when it’s hot, you can have a coffee and still be cool.”

Canadians, it seems, also loved to collect things. At Toys from the Attic Collectables, you could find a treasure trove of vintage Coca Cola memorabilia, Victorian vanity cases with sterling silver accoutrements, and classic Elvis albums in the original shrink-plastic wrappers. A collectable, explained owner Brian Lehman, was defined as anything worth keeping and up to forty-nine years old. Older items, aged fifty to ninety-nine years, were classified as heirlooms. Items more than one hundred years old were classified as antiques. Who knew?

At Blue Vinny Foods, the weekend chef could never resist a joke. “I’ll let you have it for free if you eat it with your hands,” he told a ten-year-old girl who ordered Eggs Benedict for breakfast. She giggled and declined the offer.

Walt Healy sold motorcycles and snowmobiles at his Kensington store until he was into his late seventies. He rode his bike every day, year round. Did it get cold in winter? “Not when you dress for it.” How about traction on the icy streets? “With a sidecar, no problem.” Walt died with his boots on, at age eighty-three, after attending a dinner for vintage bike enthusiasts. His friends said afterwards that the dinner was probably the best send-off party he could have asked for.

The Snoboard Shop urged its customers to “live original, die original.” The customers needed no further prompting. Skate-boarding youngsters competed with pedestrians for sidewalk space. Neighbourhood cars sported bumper stickers that said, “I Share the Road With Cyclists.” You don’t see such bumper stickers any more. Now the cars are festooned with silly little Flames’ flags, even when the team fails to make the playoffs.

Sandpiper Books promised its patrons that if they visited the store in the afternoon, they would often get to meet a “famous Alberta author.” On a sign in the window, they could read a fortune-cookie quote from Bartlett’s. “Every child is an artist,” said a quote from Picasso. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Artists were often seen around the neighbourhood. They came down the hill from the Alberta College of Art to pick up supplies at the R.A. Barnes store, and showed their works in the Kensington galleries. If they couldn’t afford the gallery rental, they would show their works on the sidewalk. As long as the weather stayed nice, you could always expect to see a one-person exhibition on Tenth Street or Kensington Road.

The Kensington Deli featured live music every night. It could be a folk artist, singer-songwriter, or a jazz performer like violinist Karl Roth, who would tell his audience, “We would like to play for you the Canadian version of the well-known Duke Ellington tune, Take the Train, Eh!” On a summer night, the Deli was the best place to relax with a nightcap after a filling plate of sizzling chicken and Szechuan noodles at Charly’s. The sweet sound of Roth’s violin would follow me as I headed home along Kensington Road. The moon would be in the first quarter, and the sky would be cloudless. It was always a beautiful night in the neighbourhood.

Shay Duffin

We were a cabaret duo, with a focus on Irish ballads, comedy patter, and musical parodies. We called ourselves the Dublin Rogues. Ben Kopelow, our agent in Vancouver, chose the name for us. He dressed us up in green corduroy pants, white sweaters and tweed caps, and had us performing at every corporate banquet job that called for an Irish tenor to hit the high notes of “Danny Boy” and “Macushla.” Duffin was the Irish tenor. He didn’t always hit the high notes but the crowds loved him anyway. I played piano. I also sang bass harmony, and strummed a little on acoustic guitar.

We first performed together  at a Burnaby restaurant called Little Black Sambo’s Pancake House. At least, that’s what the place was called when I first arrived in Vancouver in November 1966. A sign on the outside of the restaurant depicted a caricature of a curly-haired black child. The B.C. Association for the Advancement of Coloured People complained, the owner removed the offending sign, and changed the name to the less offensive Sambo’s Family Restaurant.

The customers at Sambo’s didn’t have much interest in Irish folk music. Although Duffin was getting some airplay on Vancouver radio stations with a self-produced recording of an old IRA marching song called “Off to Dublin in the Green,” he discovered that the Sambo’s customers preferred listening to popular vocal selections from the musicals The Fantasticks and The Sound of Music. He sang “Try to Remember” and “Climb Every Mountain.” I played “A Walk in the Black Forest” and “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. The customers applauded and the restaurant management was happy.

Duffin was keen to work full-time in show business. An upholsterer from Dublin who claimed to have once installed leather padding on a toilet seat in Princess Margaret’s Kensington Palace apartment—you could never tell if Duffin, an inveterate teller of tall tales, was making these things up—he did bit parts in movies and television shows shot in Vancouver, sold boxes of his 45-rpm singles on consignment at the Bay, and did his Irish tenor routine at golf club dinners and trade fairs.

The chance to quit our day jobs came in June 1967. A Vancouver impresario named Fran Dowie heard Duffin and me performing at Sambo’s and booked us for a two-month summer gig at the Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City. Duffin was to be the emcee, telling jokes, and doing some solo singing on stage. I would be in the pit, playing piano accompaniment as musical director. A second piano would be pushed out on stage when we did our ten-minute Dublin Rogues routine. By this time, Duffin and I had released our first album of Irish ballads, Off to Dublin in the Green, on the RCA Camden label.

The Dawson gig gave Duffin and me a great opportunity to expand our musical repertoire and create a tight show. Every night after the Palace Grand Theatre show we went over to the Westminster Hotel to play music in the bar until closing time. By the time we left Dawson we had developed enough Irish material to fill four one-hour sets without repeating ourselves. We quietly retired “Try to Remember” and the hits of The Sound of Music from our program, and in their place offered renditions of “The Garden Where the Praties Grow,” “Johnnie, I Hardly Knew Ye,” and “The Boston Burglar.” We drew simultaneously from the repertoires of the great Irish tenor John McCormack and the popular Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. That made it difficult for the music industry to pigeonhole us. We moved between the genteel Victorian drawing-room style of musical performance later depicted in the John Huston movie The Dead, and the raucous style of pub singing that one associates with the rhythm of clinking bottles and tapping feet. How do you categorize a hybrid like that? One minute we were all decanted port and pianos draped in brocade. The next, we were doing percussion with spoons (“stolen only from the finest restaurants,” quipped Duffin) and encouraging the crowd to shout out the words, “Fine girl, you are!” The record company and the radio stations called us a folk act. But we viewed ourselves as supper-club entertainment, as a Vegas-type act that should be featured on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Needless to say, we never made it onto Ed Sullivan. We never had a hit record to get us there. Instead, we went on the road, playing nightclubs in Ontario and Atlantic Canada until we got bored of touring. At that point, Duffin and I discussed the possibility of putting together a theatrical show based on the life of the booze-loving Irish playwright Brendan Behan, with Duffin impersonating Behan and me providing on-stage accordion accompaniment. But that would have taken goodness-knows how long to research and write, with no guarantee of getting any workshop money or production commitments when the show was ready for staging. It seemed too much of a gamble to me. I opted out of the project before it began. Duffin, to his credit, took the idea and ran with it. He developed the concept as a one-man show and later performed it to critical and audience acclaim throughout Canada and the United States. “Mr. Duffin, if not Behan, has given us a memorable evening,” said The New York Times.

I went into journalism after quitting the road, and Duffin carved out a successful career for himself in television and movies. He played the ring announcer in Raging Bull, a horse trainer in Seabiscuit and the bar owner in the early scenes of Titanic. We didn’t remain in touch over the years, but I admired his success from afar.

He died this morning in Los Angeles, of complications following recent heart surgery. I will miss him.

[Excerpted from my memoirs, to be published next year by RMB Books]

Ten Years Ago Today

I never envisaged it would end this way. I had always expected that when my career in Canadian daily newspapering came to a close, I would write a farewell column thanking the readers for taking the time to look at my stuff, and sometimes taking the time to phone or write. I would gather with my colleagues in the centre of the newsroom, the managing editor would make a nice speech about me, and I would respond in kind. I would tell my colleagues that during my time as the Calgary Herald’s theatre critic I “gave my best jeers to Theatre Calgary.” There would be laughter, cards, cake, and a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” My colleagues would present me with a framed replica of a dummy front page, filled with photographs of me and mock news stories about my journalistic achievements. It would be a splendid send-off.

None of this happened, of course. Instead, I found myself, a few weeks after my fifty-sixth birthday, scurrying down the back stairs of the red-brick fortress, clutching my well-thumbed copy of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary and the framed photographs of my wife and daughter that had been sitting atop my desk, held vertical by little cardboard flaps covered in fake velvet. There had been no fireworks, no marching band, no ticker-tape parade. This world was ending not with a bang or whimper, but with a step into the unknown. The first strike of newsroom employees in the 116-year history of the Calgary Herald was about to begin….

(The above is an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir. If the snippet whets your appetite for more, please let me know. I hope to have the book published next year, after the noise about the Sarah Palin memoir subsides.)