Anyone who has read anything by Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, or Patrick Kavanagh should read Anthony Cronin’s Dead As Doornails in some detail. Critical praise may be drawn for authors, but this often comes from those who have their own points to make or their own trumpets to blow. Anthony Cronin himself can fall into any of those groups, so his personal view of these artistic stories can be as biased as any other. But he was there, and he seems to have described what he saw and experienced, warts and vomiting and all.
It was a group of writers and artists, bohemians in ordinary language, who emerged in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s. Anthony Cronin, himself a writer, was adopted by this fighting family and lived his life for a time. He traveled with Brendan Behan, slept hard and ready as they crossed the continent. Thus he saw the interior of some barns, but perhaps inevitably the interior of many more bars, at least those from which he and his companions were no longer excluded. A lot of alcoholic beverages were consumed. The behaviors weren’t always predictable, unless the people involved had fallen asleep, and even then, there was often an unintentional clutter to clear up.
One of those messes eventually led to a grueling court case involving Kavanagh and Behan. It seemed to revolve around who had said what, or perhaps who had written something about whom. It is surprising that someone has been sober long enough to have absorbed something.
Dead As Doornails by Anthony Cronin is not a biography or an autobiography. Nor is it a story. And it’s not really a memory. It is rather a reflection of time spent within a circle of, for lack of a better word, friends, who drank and sometimes dreamed together, dreamed of recognition, artistic recognition, perhaps simply of being noticed.
Both together and individually, they produced some extraordinary contributions in their time, contributions that emerged as the pages of Anthony Cronin’s Dead As Doornails unfolded. The prose of the book is dense, but never heavy, thus reflecting a rather nostalgic but regrettable reflection on a past now not only left behind, but perhaps also rejected. However, Anthony Cronin does not judge, nor does he attempt to make, break, create, destroy, or even change the reputations of those he describes. In this way, let the story speak for itself.
Dead As Doornails is therefore serious and entertaining, a distant and engaging portrait of lives who sought their own degrees of fame, achieved personal successes, eliminated failures, limitations, and disappointment, and then left the scene. Whether the title of the book indicates a judgment on the legacies of these individuals is up for debate. But what does seem clear, as the book progresses, is the growing distance Anthony Cronin felt between himself and his self-destructive and mutually destructive acquaintances. And it’s this aspect of Dead As Doornails that makes it such an engaging read. The possibility of judgment, of criticism is always present, but Anthony Cronin always seeks to achieve a detachment that provides space for the reader to meet these people with the most open mind possible.
And anyone who has read any work by one member of the group will be absolutely fascinated by Anthony Cronin’s reports on what they thought of the work of others. Alcohol did not appear to affect his critical faculties.
