On the subject of Dublin tour guides inventing stories or traditions, Colum Carr writes from faraway Wyoming about a benign version of the phenomenon he overheard on a recent trip here.
It was at the statue of Phil Lynott in Harry Street, where a guide was telling people how he likes to “say hello to Phil by stroking his hand”. Which, as Colum adds, is a harmless and even charming gesture, and “not at all comparable to grabbing Molly [Malone’s breasts]”. I agree.
Tourists of all the main genders continue to molest Molly, shamelessly, on nearby St Andrew’s Street, justifying my call here some time ago for the city council to imitate some 16th century popes and hire a sculptor to give the statue an extra layer of clothes.
But who knows? In time, the stroking of Phil Lynott’s statue may also evolve into a supposed Dublin tradition, sure to confer good luck.
Being a rock god and the epitome of youthful male vigour, Phil could even be in danger of going the same way as Victor Noir (real name Yvan Salmon, 1849-1870), a French journalist who was shot dead by Prince Pierre Bonaparte while trying to arrange a duel on behalf of his editor.
Noir’s tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery became the focus of a strange fertility cult, not because of anything he did in life but because the sculptor of his bronze effigy, depicting him as he lay dead, saw fit to add a notable protuberance in the crotch.
It used to be only grave robbers that bereaved families had to worry about. But poor Noir thereby unwittingly launched a cult of grave rubbers.
Even since his death, it has been a thing for some women in search of husbands or pregnancy to place a rose in the upturned top hat beside the effigy, then kiss Noir’s lips and finally rub his relic (as it were), which over the decades has been polished to obscene brightness.
It may be just as well that neither Phil Lynott nor his sculptor emulated a well-known rock music tradition (famously practised by another bass player, Derek Smalls, in the airport scanner scene from Spinal Tap) of exaggerating certain physical extremities.
The statue is mercifully modest in that area. Even its hands are discretely downturned, as if to discourage touching. Which may explain why the nearest thing to a cult that has grown up around Lynott’s likeness, so far, is musicians sticking plectrums under the strings of the guitar.
Other Dublin statues that might be targets for molestation include James Joyce’s on North Earl Street. It already has the obligatory rude, rhyming nickname. But again, the sculpture lacks anything obvious for the tourist-rubbing cults to latch on to.
An admirer once asked Joyce if he could kiss “the hand that wrote Ulysses”, to which the writer said a firm no, because “it did a lot of other things too”. Well, the same hand is clutching a walking stick in the statue, while the other hand is thrust deep in a pocket. Elsewhere the nearest thing the sculpture has to an obvious extremity is Joyce’s sharp chin.
Then there’s Countess Markievicz and her dog, on the footpath beside The Irish Times office on Townsend Street. Her dress is a lot more demure than Molly Malone’s, thank God.
But as depicted, she is thrusting a hand out, as if about to shake somebody else’s. Despite which, there’s no evidence that this has become a Dublin tradition, even a pretend one, yet. Maybe her fearsome reputation goes before her, just as her fearsome dog goes behind.
The brass Patrick Kavanagh at Wilton Place is doubly vulnerable to abuse, being not just at ground level but also seated on a bench. Apart from women sitting on his lap occasionally, though, which the poet would have appreciated in real life, his likeness has not yet spawned any rubbing customs.
Nor has that of his nemesis, Brendan Behan, also now preserved in bronze on a canal bank seat, but a safe distance away. They were neighbours around Baggot Street Bridge once. At the height of their enmity, however, Baggotonia wasn’t big enough for both. Now they have matching commemorative seats but on different canals, about three miles apart.
Speaking of which, I see that the first American edition of Tarry Flynn, with Kavanagh’s affectionate dedication to Behan, went for a hefty €13,000 at Purcell’s book auction in Birr on Wednesday. As mentioned here last week, that inscription came back to haunt Kavanagh during a libel trial of 1954. Someone should have warned him that the value of his investment in a friendship with Behan could fall as well as rise.
Still, whatever about the friendship, the notoriety of their subsequent feud (which will be among the themes touched on at the annual Kavanagh Weekend later this month – see patrickkavanaghcentre.com for full programme), continues to soar in value. The auction price was more than twice the expected estimate of €3,000-€6,000.
