Books: Wit’s Saint

I FOLLOW SAINT PATRICK—Oliver St.

John Gogarty—Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Whether Author Gogarty is only temporarily holding himself in, or really means to start living down the legends of his past, I Follow Saint Patrick is, for him, a strangely subdued and pious piece of writing. Of Gogarty the “wit, poet, mocker, enthusiast” and original of bawdy Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, the poet is about all that remains. As hagiographer of Ireland’s patron saint, Gogarty writes as one on holy ground, and it has taken most of the Elizabethan starch out of him.

“Ireland without St. Patrick is unthinkable,” declares Gogarty. “Every person in our island shares something of the personality of that steadfast and enduring man. . . .” But this is only Gogarty’s briefly stated conclusion. The main content of his tribute to the great Irish epic is an account of his pilgrimage in the legendary footsteps of the Saint. He investigated a half-dozen birthplaces, made a pilgrimage up St. Patrick’s mountain in Connemara, flew over Ulster in a plane piloted by his good friend, the Marquess of Londonderry, leafed through all the ancient and modern biographies. But his principal guide into the 5th Century Celtic twilight was surviving local legend.

Poetic license and a readiness to believe miracles did the rest. (“When you object, in the scientific twentieth century, to the magic of the fifth, it is no use expecting me to share your incredulity.”) Readers are likely to prefer Gogarty’s pilgrimage when he loses track of St.

Patrick altogether—as when he recalls the remark of a Dublin professor (“And the worst of it is that trumpery diseases which we never knew we had lift their heads and obtrude themselves the moment you go on the water-wagon”); when he praises the Irish language (“Ireland is either a Land of Song or a Land of Slugs with a trend to become a Land of Shylocks. Let Song save it . . .”) ; when, making his devout way up St. Patrick’s mountain, he forgets St. Patrick to muse on the beauty of the human foot (of the barefoot girl pilgrim in front of him).