Books: Gogarty & Pals

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TUMBLING IN THE HAY — Oliver Sf. John Gogarty — Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

Dr. Gogarty, "wittiest man in Dublin, has a sharp tongue and a thin skin. Two months ago the famed surgeon-poet-Senator-wit collected £100 libel damages from poor Irish Poet Patrick" Kavanagh. Immortalized in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as Malachi Mulligan, Gogarty declared that Joyce had perpetrated a gross libel. The Mulligan portrait, said its original, was a brutalized version showing only the bawdy side of his wit; Joyce had maliciously muted his subtler accomplishments, such as his poetry, his witty out-talking of Dublin's best talkers.

In two books of verse and his witty reminiscences of Ireland's literary great, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, Gogarty gave his version of Gogarty. In Tumbling in the Hay, his thinly fictionized reminiscences of medical-student days at Trinity College, he scores with accustomed ease on witty professors, on pals in saloons, dissecting rooms, brothels.

Gogarty ("Gideon Ouseley") and his medico pals soon discovered what was wrong with Anatomy—"it lacked humor." They worked hard to make up the deficiency. Their workshops were fat Mr. Golly's bar, the Hay Hotel (an all-night cabbies' eating joint), Mrs. Mack's brothel. Here, on pawnshop financing, they galloped their horseplay, sang bawdy limericks, chummed with Jenny, the circus tumbler, Liverpool Kate, "the well-known and popular epileptic," Piano Mary, a neurotic socialist whose propaganda was Shakespearean readings in Mrs. Mack's brothel.

Although it all happened about 40 years ago, Gogarty remembers everything as if it were last night. The reader's problem is whether to admire most Gogarty's memory or his imagination. "An Irishman," says Gogarty, "believes best in what he knows to be untrue."