The following series consists of a number of excerpts from the previously unpublished novels of Belfast author Gerard Keenan, long time pseudonymous contributor to The Honest Ulsterman. This material is reproduced here by generous permission of Gerard’s son John and is edited and introduced by Dr James Gallacher of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.

The name Gerard Keenan is one in large part lost to Irish literary history. The majority of his writerly life was spent pseudonymously as Jude the Obscure, longstanding keynote columnist for this publication and author of ‘The Business Section’, a regular feature of the magazine from 1971 until its final print issue in 2003. The column itself was largely given over to literary and artistic criticism alongside episodic forays into the world of Jazz and cultural commentary. Given a broad mandate by the magazine’s editorial staff to articulate a jarringly iconoclastic vision of literary appraisal, ‘The Business Section’ soon established itself as an avenue for the magazine to cultivate publicity and rancour in equal measure, with dissenting voices soon coming to crowd out the letters section. Controversy notwithstanding, the column’s longevity as well as its popularity among the Ulsterman’s audience was attested to in 1995 with the publication of a collection of selected essays titled The Professional, The Amateur, and The Other Thing: Essays from The Honest Ulsterman. In addition to criticism, early Ulsterman issues also including works of fiction by Keenan, published variously as Jude or alternately as Joe Biggar, the most notable of these being the novella ‘Farset and Gomorrah’ that was serialised in the early 70s. These efforts, however, have remained largely overlooked by literary scholars, and therefore what relatively scant attention has been paid to Keenan’s place within twentieth-century Irish letters has remained concerned entirely with his pseudonymous role as a critic, rather than that of a creative writer. In turn, this has resulted in Keenan’s appearance in several prominent literary publications being overlooked, most notably those contributions made as a short story writer under his own name to the Dublin based Envoy: A Review of Literature & Art in 1950 as well as Lagan: A Miscellany of Ulster Writing in 1946, when aged just nineteen.

     Keenan’s publication in Envoy, an important mid-century periodical that facilitated the articulation of a distinct and innovative approach to literary and artistic matters among Dublin’s bohemian milieu, represents a manifest expression of his enduring fascination with literary affairs in the Irish capital. This fascination was particularly acute in relation to Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, themselves both regular contributors to the magazine and members of its attendant coterie. The two writers’ respective influence on Keenan remained consistent throughout his authorial career and was often extensively in evidence among the pages of ‘The Business Section’; indeed, of the first ten instalments, seven had either or both writers as their subject matter. While the influence of Kavanagh on the early days of the Ulsterman was readily, indeed enthusiastically, acknowledged by the magazine’s founder James Simmons, Keenan could boast a more direct and personal relationship with the poet, having served as ‘Northern Correspondent’ for Kavanagh’s short lived but intellectually pugilistic magazine, Kavanagh’s Weekly, while also having maintained a haphazard social and literary relationship with the older man for several years.

     While Keenan’s published legacy remains overwhelmingly that of a writer of critical prose, his creative impulses remained undimmed throughout his life, as evidenced by a series of unpublished novels left among his private papers and kindly made available for study by his son John. The novels themselves were written at various intervals across a timeline spanning almost half a century, with the earliest being completed in 1963 and the most recent in 2009, some six years before his death in 2015. In spite of the long interludes between composition, the novels retain several recurring commonalities both of style and content sufficient for their grouping together under the umbrella title The Chronicles of Farset. Farset, a subterranean tributary of Belfast’s river Lagan, is used consistently by Keenan as a sobriquet for his native city, one chosen for its metaphorical correspondence to the artistic underworld he perceived himself and his circle to inhabit. This light touch redrawing of Belfast as Farset is also an example of the novels’ most consistently recurring feature; adopting a pronouncedly biographical style, Keenan renders many prominent Irish artistic and literary figures subject to the very faintest of fictionalisations, often providing a fictional name only to immediately offset the ruse by providing a resoundingly identifiable description. The extract featured here recounts Keenan’s earliest attempts to engage with literary and bohemian Dublin, as well as his first encounters with Kavanagh and O’Brien and the moment of his invitation to contribute to Kavanagh’s Weekly. The two writers are afforded the respective pseudonyms Joseph Shepherd and The Snapper; also present in disguise are Irish Times editor R.M Smyllie (Bob Powell), editor of Envoy and artist John Ryan (Hugh Pugh), while author and editor of The Bell magazine Seán O’Faoláin is dismissively referred to as Sean O’ Something. Additionally, The Irish Times becomes The Dublin Observer, Envoy becomes Challenge, The Bell is changed pointedly to Free States, and Kavanagh’s Weekly becomes Shepherd’s Weekly. Also present are several descriptions of two rival power blocs in literary Dublin: ‘The Respectable Majority’ and ‘The Disreputable Minority’ – these refer respectively to the writers’ circle that orbited The Irish Times and The Bell, who famously socialised at The Palace and Pearl bars, and their counterpart congerie of upstart bohemians that came to frequent Envoy and McDaid’s pub.

     The extract chosen is the first instalment of this four-part series and is taken from a novel written around the year 2000. Titled Meet Doctor Foo, the text exemplifies Keenan’s style of fictionalised biography, one that facilitates the necessary elasticity of a fictional narrative, while affording the writer the opportunity to recount real or historical events with significant degree of accuracy. Present also is Keenan’s sharp eye for cultural analysis, as well as the formidable extent of his literary, artistic and musical knowledge, familiar to anyone who has perused his ‘Business Section’ essays. It is hoped this excerpt and those that follow it will help foster an increased awareness of Keenan’s identity not only as a pseudonymous critic, but also as a writer of considerable creative prose who maintained a significant and enduring connection to some of the towering figures of twentieth-century Irish writing.

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     Like most constant readers I often had the notion that one day I myself might write. I thought that if I could write a book, or even a meaty pamphlet, it would be a sort of membership card to the commonwealth of letters, the only club to which I wished to belong. I would write it, then I would immediately be accepted and grasped by the hands of my confreres, the friendly, appreciative members of the club. It took me years to shake off this illusion of commonwealth, to realize that not only the commonwealth of letters but all commonwealths were illusory; that, apart from the bald framework of their constitution, all clubs, confraternities, political parties, sects dedicated to common ownership, sworn friendships, even group sex on the living-room carpet, were permeated by hierarchy, by good, better and best, by the eternal ladder with its top and bottom rungs and the pigeons perched on the rungs above had not the slightest intention of being even seen in the company of the pigeons humped on the rungs below.

     The company into which I wanted to crash was in Dublin, not in Farset. The commonwealth of letters in Farset was plain-pudding provincial, consisting mainly of dyed-in-the-wool regionalists dedicated to flattering their native hearth in drama, fiction and verse, its accents, its customs, its quaint but ever so endearing little ways. There was a tranche of the Dublin writing community, most of the community, to be honest, who pursued the same ignoble goal of flattering the indigene: I called them the Respectable Majority. But there was another tranche, thin slice to be precise, bare half-dozen individuals to be even more precise, whose every line was critical of the community and culture in which they lived; who, motivated by principle and supported by standards of excellence, swam against the current with the effortless elegance and power of Olympic champions: I called them the Disreputable Minority. Everybody liked the Respectable Majority: nobody liked the Disreputable Minority. I knew I should like not to be liked in their company.

     There were two writers in the Disreputable Minority who dominated the literary scene – ‘dominated’ was my word, my opinion: in the eyes of the Respectable Majority, who had the London publishers, New York publishers, and bank accounts to prove it, the two writers I mean were at best marginal figures, failures in fact, even figures of fun. However, watching the Dublin scene from Farset, it seemed to me that there was something uneasy about the assumed superiority of the Respectable Majority, that they suspected in their inner hearts that they had missed the one prize that writers seek more eagerly even than big money, the succés d’estime.

     The two writers in Dublin who fired my imagination were The Snapper and Joseph Shepherd; they not only haunted my imagination, they directed my thought; it could even be said they gave me a reason for living. I loved them with a passion that was almost equal to the passion for my girlfriend, Jo Gribben, and sometimes Jo sensed it and was jealous and we quarrelled. Pseudonymously, The Snapper wrote a column in The Dublin Observer, the daily newspaper of Dublin’s educated classes. He had written a brilliant series of articles (so I had read) under this pseudonym and had simply carried over the name to the Observer. Swift was known as the Drapier by the plain people of Dublin: it seemed that The Snapper had achieved a similar pseudonymity, for most people knew him by no other name and if they had heard him referred to by his family name they would not have recognised him. The stuff he wrote in his daily column was more Yorick than Drapier. Like a master Jazz-soloist he would open with a simple phrase, then develop it with a cascade of increasing absurdity involving encounters with the Pope, Parnell, Einstein, members of the Irish Cabinet and the Dublin Corporation, European men of letters of the nineteenth century and contemporary Dublin men from the most diverse walks of like, businessmen, professional men, literary gents, hoteliers – and, inevitably, publicans, episcopally severe behind the polished wood of their pulpits, the long bars of their legendary Dublin public-houses. Which of these two statements is the more correct grammatically, The Snapper liked to ask: The best Irish is drunk in Dublin; the best Irish are drunk in Dublin. In good jazzman fashion, he had in his repertoire an assortment of figures, tropes, topics, musical phrases, like the sports of colours on an artist’s palette, that he could draw on at will and that his readers could grow familiar with and greet with an anticipatory smile. Joyce, of course, was the paramount influence: every line The Snapper wrote glowed with radioactive fallout from the nuclear explosion with which Ulysses had destroyed Dublin and then miraculously reconstructed it, every line down to The Snapper’s fastidious notation of the slanderous and malicious commentary on Dublin life and world affairs conducted in Barney Kiernan’s public-house in 1904 and conducted without ease in every public-house in Dublin since. To read The Snapper’s daily column in The Dublin Observer was to read the sequel to Ulysses that Joyce had denied his readership in writing Finnegans Wake.

     As to Joe Shepherd’s stuff, in his poetry and prose, I shouldn’t have liked it. When I first encountered it, I tried not to like it. I could see he was drawing his subject-matter from the same over-used well as the Respectable Majority – the doings of his simple life of the rural Irish, their simple Catholic faith, their simple attachment to their meagre acres, their late marriages. I knew from literary gossip that came my way that Shepherd had more right to use the water of this well than the university graduate types who were memorializing, not their own experience, but that of their father’s acres, their grandfather’s acres, where they had never toiled; that, in a northern county distant from Dublin, Shepherd had lived the life of a small farmer for many years, into his late thirties, and his taking root, late in his life, in Dublin was one of those rare transplantations that only a botanist could explain. As I read more of his stuff it began to penetrate my townee’s skull, began to get through my carboard armour of superficial urban sophistications, that I was in the presence of the real thing, that where the Repellent Majority cheapened their material by flattery of the indigene or by the injection of coy, stomach-turning humour, Joe Shepherd was searching, not tentatively, but with the awesome, infallible power of an Olympian Zeus, to extract the truth from the life he had led, to illumine meanness, to glorify the petty, to make the unimportant important, to drag meaning free from beneath unmeaning. Joe shepherd restored life to over-used material by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: he never, never lied.

     I knew what he looked like, as I knew what The Snapper looked like. I worked in a newspaper office whose maw was gorged daily with every Irish newspaper and magazine that was published and I had seen photographs of both men, even pencil portraits of them by Dublin artist. That was how I was able to recognize Joseph Shepherd one day in Grafton Street. It was July and Jo and I were in Dublin for a week’s holiday. I was twenty, Jo a couple of years older. We had little money, but that didn’t matter. I had enquired, over the office telephone, for the terms of rooms in the Dolphin Hotel, for the sole reason that it was an hotel often mentioned in The Snapper’s Observer column: The Snapper claimed first-name acquaintanceship with the Dolphin’s manager. I was shocked, stunned, by what the girl on the line told me it would cost to stay in the Dolphin Hotel: one night in the Dolphin would have cost more than the budget for our entire holiday. So, Jo and I were staying in Barry’s Hotel, a reasonably-priced commercial hotel chosen because it was next door to Belvedere College where Stephen Dedalus had gone to school: for Jo and me Dublin was not so much a city of a half-million souls as a set of 3-D illustrations to Joyce’s oeuvre, and number seven Eccles Street was just round the corner from Barry’s. we had separate rooms, and not even adjacent rooms. The nervous strain of any other arrangement would have poisoned the week for us: Dublin was the favourite holiday spot for hosts of Farset folk who could know us and, as a Catholic schoolteacher employed by the parish priest, it was not only Jo’s job that gossip could put at risk, it was her entire career.

     Jo and I were poised at the top of Grafton Street, fresh out of St Stephen’s Green, ready for our daily pilgrim’s descent on Davy Byrne’s to partake of a glass of burgundy with Leopold Bloom and then to continue on to the back-room of the Palace Bar in Fleet Street where legend and Alan Reeve’s famous cartoon assured us The Snapper and all of literary Dublin drank.

     “Damn it, that’s Joe Shepherd in front of us and the man beside him might by The Snapper,” I whispered urgently in Jo’s ear.

     “Where?” Jo said.

     “There! The big guy with the smaller, broad-shouldered fellow in the hat.”

     We followed them, our gaze fastened on their backs as the children might have followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The ambled easily, in easy conversation, the big one in tweed jacket, unpressed pants, the shorter, broad-shouldered one in a suit, wearing a felt hat. We walked down the length of Grafton Street. At the bottom of its gentle slope, at the junction with Nassau Street, the couple halted. As we sidled past, eyeing them from the corner of our eye, the big one said with a smile, “Are you following us?”

     “Forgive me,” I said, “but aren’t you Joseph Shepherd?”

     “The man himself. And what do you know about Joseph Shepherd?” The big fellow said with a kind smile. He was big like Joe Louis and as fit-looking, a man perhaps in his forties. Across his balding dome he had drawn strong black strands of hair. He wore horn rimmed spectacles. His voice was deep and trumpeted down an enormous nose and he exuded confidence. His shorter companion was younger, probably in his thirties, and if he exuded anything it was respect for the big guy at his side. I stumbled out a hotchpotch of praise for Shepherd’s poetry and prose, trying not to sound unctuous, careful to use “Joseph” and not the familiar “Joe”. Shepherd included Jo in the conversation, got her laughing, and then asked us to join him for a coffee in Bewley’s.

     The nearby Bewley's proved to be a café of character, not posh, but delightfully old-fashioned, vast, with marble-topped tables and bentwood chairs like a coffee-house in Vienna or a café in nineteenth-century Paris painted by Degas. Sitting around a table, we told Shepherd about our excitement at the announcement of a novel by him soon to appear. He said: "It's only the first. Only the first of many. This one is the first of a trilogy."

     To draw in Shepherd's silent smiling companion, I said, "Forgive me, but Jo and I were wondering if you were the writer who uses the name The Snapper?"

     "I only wish I were," he said ruefully. "You can say I'm just a friend and admirer of Joe's. But Joe is a good friend of The Snapper's."

     "You want me to tell you about The Snapper," Joe said. "I'll tell you. First, God help us, the poor man's the father and mother of a drunkard. He's never sober. Despite that, the man's a saint. There's no other word for it, he's a bloody saint. He's a top civil servant and he writes that Observer stuff and every penny he makes goes to support and educate a whole collection of younger brothers and sisters left by the unfortunate death of their poor parents. He's a bloody remarkable man. He and I go out drinking often. sure, aren't we barred in half the pubs in Dublin for bad language." Shepherd beamed benignly on us we laughed.

      "How on earth can a man write as well as that when he's drunk?" I said.

     "He writes all his stuff in pubs," Joe said. "Sometimes he is too drunk to manage it and he'll get one of his friends to write it for him. I've written the column to help him out many's the time. Would you like to meet him? I'll introduce you to The Snapper. If you want to meet him be in the Pearl Lounge across there in Fleet Street tonight at eight o'clock. I'll be there, never fear.”

     When the two men were gone, Jo and I stared at each other with the same wild surmise as those bearded Spaniards silent on that peak in Darien. It was better than being published. To be in on the Dublin writing set was better than being published, although a tiny voice at the back of my mind basely hinted that it was on the road to being published. We went straight away to locate the Pearl Bar in Fleet Street and were disappointed by its appearance: a modernist bar was not what we sought in Dublin. We wanted Dublin to remain what it had been on the sixteenth of June 1904 as, indeed, forty years later much of it still was: Davy Byrne's was unchanged, and Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street. But this Pearl, it looked like a jazzy bookie's pub and the upper half, where presumably the Lounge was, had a wall of opaque glass bricks like the glass bricks in "pavement lights" over a cellar: public lavatory architecture. Nevertheless, we were installed at a Formica-topped table in the Pearl Lounge at half-past seven with our two Guinness in fancy lounge-bar glasses before us - at fancy lounge-bar prices, one-and-sixpence for a bottle of stout, a fifty-per-cent mark-up. The Snapper was there.

     I could see how I had mistaken Joe Shepherd's friend for The Snapper, going only on a poor newspaper photograph: they had the same puggish, flat-nosed face, but The Snapper was a smaller man, not at all broad-shouldered, and the hat The Snapper was wearing was the famous black priest's hat. The hat was a smart felt hat, but The Snapper's sports-coat was a jacket I, for one, would never have worn, poor as I was: it was the sort of off-the-peg checked jacket that just anyone I knew in Farset could have worn: no taste, no individuality, no chic. He was sitting on a banquette, his back against the wall, his glass of whiskey in front of him on the table, a cigarette between his fingers. I knew who the older man was who was sitting beside him, a portly, bulky man in a belted raincoat, moustached, with thick spectacles, staring impassively before him, huge pipe in his mouth. He looked like the notoriously cruel Japanese general of the recent war, General Tojo. Many newspaper photographs I had seen identified him as Bob Powell, editor of The Dublin Observer. He was The Snapper's boss; he looked more like his bodyguard.

     The lounge was crowded and thick with smoke and conversation. Every little round table was occupied; there were many intelligent-looking women who were more fashionably dressed than Belfast women and just as intelligent-looking men who were dressed as soberly and dowdily as schoolteachers. There was no one flamboyant enough to be called a bohemian. One of the men I identified to Jo as Sean O’Something, doyen of the Respectable Majority: Jo, whose hearing was more acute than mine, told me he had just said to his table companions, "Oddly enough, I never met Mussolini." In Farset they would have been discussing the form of their regional soccer teams. All the time we were covertly watching The Snapper on his banquette. He was morose; black hair, black jowls, black look from the brilliant jet eyes, heavily lidded. He and the editor occasionally exchanged a few words, the editor answering The Snapper without changing his position an iota, looking into space, massive and immobile as a statue of the seated Buddha. Returning from the bar with another two expensive Guinness in their glasses like inverted bells, I passed by them just as a group of three men, entering the lounge from the stairs, went straight to their table.

     "Hello Tom," The Snapper said, holding out his hand for a handshake. "Bob, do you know Tom?" The Snapper's accent was of the harsh Dublin variety: "Hello Tam. Bab, do you know Tam?" I imitated the accent to Jo. We continued cautiously to spy. The newcomers were three well-built men in smart, light-coloured raincoats, grey-haired, self-confident, radiating authority; three American Senators, one could have believed, fresh off a transatlantic flight. The Snapper talked, they listened. Occasionally, one of them interjected a sentence, a query. The Snapper answered him and continued talking, talking irritably even, laying down the law, looking from one to the other, smoking his cigarettes, drinking his whiskies. The three men were respectful and they were older than The Snapper; they dwelt on every word he said.

     Joe Shepherd never showed up. I wasn't surprised. This was not his sort of company. When Prince Hal consorted with Falstaff, it was in the Boar's Head Tavern: The Pearl Lounge gathering of important men and women was more like the Court, where Falstaff never went.

     Jo agreed with me on this and she was suddenly full of sympathy for Joe Shepherd, for her big country poet from the farmyard, out of place here in a city of cosmopolitan sophisticates. We too felt like children among adults. Jo had to agree with me when, following my line of thought, I said I doubted if Joe Shepherd ever "helped Snapper out" by writing his Observer piece for him, but I sensed that Jo didn't want to hear any more criticism of Joe Shepherd: he brought out the protector in her. In fact, over time, the silly situation was created where I seemed to be jealous of Jo protecting Joe Shepherd and playing down his faults, while Jo seemed to be jealous of me protecting The Snapper and excusing his faults, his provocative coat-trailing.

     When the three Senators rose and left the lounge bar, the editor and The Snapper sat silently for a while. The Snapper drained his glass. Then, slowly, he sagged forward. He sagged until his face subsided, squashed, into the table-top, his black priest's hat pushed back on his head. He was out for the count, dead drunk. Impassively, General Tojo continued to smoke his huge pipe, to stare immovably into the distance, not acknowledging by even the flicker of an eyelid the collapse of his star columnist. The Snapper, so authoritative a moment before, commanding the rapt attention of the three big-shots, now looked frail, boyish, vulnerable, like a Petrouchka slumped in the toy-box, the strings that enlivened it trailing idly. Neither the bar manager nor anybody else in the bar would have dared approach the comatose Snapper: the stout editor would take care of the little companion by his side when closing-time came. Jo and I gathered our things together and left, over-awed by what we had seen, two babes in the wood who had witnessed for the first-time what grown-ups got up to after dark.

     The second time I tried to sneak up on the Dublin literary set was four or five years later and the visit was something I would have preferred to forget: it was pathetic: it was not even comically pathetic, it was just plain pathetic. An accelerated account of it would go like this. I had published a short story. A new monthly magazine had appeared in Dublin called Challenge. It favoured the Disreputable Minority, unlike Free States, the other magazine, the one that catered for the Respectable Majority. Challenge featured the work of The Snapper and Joe Shepherd and nothing stimulates a writer more than wishing to be seen in the company of those he admires. In the letter accompanying the editor's modest cheque, he invited me to drop in to see him any time I was in Dublin. After a delay of a few weeks (so as not to appear gauche) I phoned the Challenge number to say I would be in Dublin on Wednesday any chance of us meeting. "Certainly. Come along at two," the editor said. The editor's name was Hugh Pugh and, needless to say, I had researched him. He was a much-photographed art-patron from a much-photographed art-patron family, the kind who are photographed, either in evening-wear, or in tweeds and paddy-hat at the races, the label prominent in their lapels ensuring that one understood that they and their field-glasses were in the royal enclosure or whatever the enclosure is called in a republic. From the moment I met Pugh in the poky little Challenge office in fashionable Grafton Street I suspected I had made a mistake in coming. The sort of person I had hoped to meet in Dublin certainly wasn't a correctly dressed managing-director type with a polite Trinity accent and a suave diplomat's handshake. By and by I pressed Hugh Pugh's arm and murmured that I had to catch my train at Amiens Street. On the train, on my way back to Farset, I kept groaning to myself, "What a waste of time. God, what a waste of time."

     About six months after my excruciatingly awful visit to Literary Dublin a very nice thing happened to me and, because I have a profound distrust of very nice things and the near-sighted lady who dispenses them, I spent a lot of time trying to assess its exact significance: through the post I received a copy of a new magazine of eight pages printed cheaply on newsprint. It was in large format like an old-fashioned comic-cut; the title of the magazine was Shepherd's Weekly in bold type, and an attached note in green ink from Joseph Shepherd invited me to contribute a weekly "Letter from Farset"; for the time being, there would be no payment, later we would see. I was delighted by the primitive appearance of the broadsheet, like something put together in a cellar on an old flat-bed press by William Blake, or something hastily rushed out on an afternoon of murderous street-rioting in Paris by Camille Desmoulins during the French Revolution: it certainly didn't look twentieth-century.

     But where on earth had Shepherd managed to get an address for an unknown like me here in remote and foreign Farset, and why me? I took little drink that evening and made sure to be home early and early to bed: I had a lot of thinking to do about the contents of my "Letters from Farset". My name for Farset was "Cottonwool Town". In work, in my home, even in the streets of the city, I was surrounded by friendship: I was no isolated martyr: I was no St Sebastian, there were no arrows buried in my torso. It didn't matter that I was opposed to the entire ethos of Farset, to its limp complacency, its remorseless self-love, its bland, unshakeable self-regard, the whole composing an impregnable Fortress Philautia, every door out sealed, every window on green landscape and endless ocean bricked up blind, and that I expressed my views, voiced my opposition; it didn't matter, all was absorbed in cotton-wool, the only response was the cotton-wool response of good-humoured tolerance. My plan of work, my scrawny little plan of work, was to construct in each "Letter from Farset" a cube of concrete that would squash the cotton-wool flat, concrete cubes that would be so solidly solid that they would be incontournable; walk into one and you bust your nose.