Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin

Website design By BotEap.comAnyone 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 for authors may be forthcoming, but it often comes from those with 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 art histories can be as biased as any. But he was there, and he seems to have described what he saw and experienced, warts, vomiting and all.

Website design By BotEap.comThis was a group of writers and artists, bohemian in common parlance, that sprang up around Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s. Anthony Cronin, himself a writer, was adopted into this quarrelsome family and lived out his life for a while. He traveled with Brendan Behan, sleeping rough and ready as they roamed the continent. Thus he saw the inside of a few barns, but perhaps inevitably the inside of many more bars, at least those from which he and his companions were not yet 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 inadvertent mess to clear up.

Website design By BotEap.comOne such mess 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’s amazing that someone has been sober long enough to have assimilated anything.

Website design By BotEap.comDead As Doornails by Anthony Cronin is neither a biography nor an autobiography. Nor is it a story. And it’s not really a memory. It’s more of 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, maybe just being noticed.

Website design By BotEap.comBoth together and individually they produced some extraordinary contributions for their time, contributions that surfaced as the pages of Anthony Cronin’s Dead As Doornails unfolded. The book’s prose is dense but never heavy, thus reflecting a rather nostalgic but regretful reflection on a past now not only left behind, but perhaps also rejected. However, Anthony Cronin does not pass judgment and does not try to make, break, create, destroy or even change the reputation of those he describes. He thus lets the story speak for itself.

Website design By BotEap.comDead As Doornails is therefore both serious and entertaining, a detached but compelling portrait of lives that sought their own degrees of fame, achieved personal success, eliminated failure, limitation, and disappointment, and then left the scene. Whether the title of the book indicates a judgment about the legacies of these individuals is a matter of 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 judging, of criticizing, 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.

Website design By BotEap.comAnd anyone who has read the work of one member of the group will be completely fascinated by Anthony Cronin’s reports on what they thought of the others’ work. The alcohol didn’t seem to affect his critical faculties.

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