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.

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]