This month's museum pick...

Dublin Writer's Museum

Restored mansion honors some of the greatest writers of English

Americans watching English people being interviewed on TV quickly notice how articulate the average Englishman is compared to themselves. There’s little of the hemming and hawing or use of the “likes,” “reallys” and “you knows” that serve as place markers in American speech. Generally, an Englishman's vocabulary, stock of verbs and ability to issue complex sentences exceeds that of an American.

There are perfectly good reasons for this disparity. The English are generally a less emotionally expressive people than Americans, so must depend more on language to get across the nuances that Americans can act out with a much more animated body language. Besides, egalitarian Yanks have always distrusted the man who was too glib or articulate, unless he were somebody like the two Roosevelts, aristocrats who had the little people’s interests at heart. It just has never been in the Common American job description to be that blithe with the language.

So what does this have to do with the Dublin Writer’s Museum? Only the fact that the Irish, who originally spoke a very distant cousin to English, generally speak English much better than the English. If you listen to an Irishman speak, you will not only hear the Englishman’s rich vocabulary and powers of description, you’ll also hear a Celtic lilt, a whimsy, a poesy that few English can summon. The Irish take on English is like the icing on the cake or the finishing sauce on a fine portion of meat.

This is because the Irish, an oral people until conquered by the English, simply shifted their fine ear for sound and storytelling from their native Erse to the conqueror’s tongue, finding possibilities in it that even the English could not.

That talent later applied to writing. If Shakespeare commands the summit of English prose, then Yeats, Swift, Joyce, Beckett, Sheridan, Shaw, Behan and O’Casey command adjoining heights. Over a 300-year period, the Irish were among the most formidable contributors to the English language, a fact made more notable given Ireland’s status as a conquered land.

The Irish are proud of that fact, although it took them a surprisingly long time to institutionalize it. It wasn’t until 1991 that the Dublin Writer’s Museum opened to honor the country’s great array of writers, whether they had been Dubliners or not. The museum is located on Parnell Square, near Dublin's center, in a restored 18^th-century Georgian mansion and features displays, memorabilia and first editions relating to Irish writers. Along with its exhibits, the museum is a regular site for lectures, poetry readings and literary meetings. There’s also an onsite restaurant and Volumes Bookshop, a bookstore that specializes in Irish literature and searches for out-of-print books.

Since some of these native sons were also womanizers, men-izers, drinkers, druggies and partyers, one would expect the museum to cover its subjects’ non-literary lives. It turns out that the naughty details have been left to the devices of the people who arrange Dublin’s famed pub crawls. Participants there can learn all the dirty they’ll ever want about Erin’s best and brightest.

The museum is located on the same square as the James Joyce Cultural Centre, also housed in an 18^th-century Georgian townhouse. – Patrick Totty