Gogarty (Moore, 1925)

1.34, 657. George Moore, Hail and Farewell!, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925), vol. I, p.466. BL 010856.dd.38

An extract from George Moore, Hail and Farewell! (1925), on Oliver St. John Gogarty.

A number of elements in Moore’s sketch of Gogarty recall Mulligan in ‘Telemachus’, from the epithet of “arch-mocker” to the identification of him as a “survival of the Bardic Age,” a man “overflowing with quotation” and partial to the recital of “whole ballads,” though whether of the kind recited at 1.584-99 seems unlikely. The passage come from the early part of Chapter XI of Salve, in which Moore is describing his garden:

Above the rosemary is thick ivy; it was clipped close a few years ago, but it is again swarming up the wall, and Gogarty, the arch-mocker, the author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin — Gogarty, the author of the Limericks of the Golden Age, the youngest of my friends, full in the face, with a smile in his eyes and always a witticism on his lips, overflowing with quotation, called yesterday to ask me to send a man with a shears, saying, Your ivy is threatening my slates. A survival of the Bardic Age he is, reciting whole ballads to me when we go for walks; and when I tell him my great discovery he will say, Sparrows and sweet-peas are as incompatible as Literature and Dogma; and you will cut the ivy, won’t you?