As I Was Going Down Sackville Street

As I Was Going Down Sackville Street: A Phantasy in Fact is a book by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Published in 1937 by Rich & Cowan in the UK and by Reynal and Hitchcock in the US, it was Gogarty's first extended prose work and was described by its author as "something new in form: neither a 'memoir' nor a novel". Its title is taken from an obscure Dublin ballad of the same name, which was "rescued from oblivion and obloquy" by Gogarty's erstwhile friend James Joyce, who recited it for Gogarty in 1904 after hearing it in inner city Dublin. The book features many of Gogarty's Dublin acquaintances and well-known contemporaries as characters. Shortly after its publication, it became the subject of a highly publicised libel lawsuit. Literary style As I Was Going Down Sackville Street is told in the first person from the perspective of Gogarty. Unlike a conventional memoir, however, the book deals little with events in Gogarty's personal or professional life, instead using his persona as a vehicle for encountering and describing the geography and chief inhabitants of 20th-century Dublin. In writing Sackville Street, Gogarty sought to give "past and present the same value in time"; thus, while the first-person narrative is continuous and appears to occupy a compact chronological space, the events detailed span the years 1904–1932. Gogarty also rearranged events into (approximately) reverse chronological order, beginning with life in the Irish Free State and moving backwards through the Irish Civil War, the Irish War of Independence, and, finally, colonial Ireland. This structure was intended to loosely recall that of Dante's Divine Comedy, with the Dublin of the mid-1920s–1930s standing for Inferno, the Dublin of the 1910s–1920s for Purgatorio, and turn-of-the-century Dublin for Paradiso. The tone of the book is predominately anecdotal and conversational; much of its action consists of lively accounts of dinner parties, luncheons, "at-homes", pub conversations, and chance meetings, allowing Gogarty to draw vivid portraits of his contemporaries by reproducing their speech patterns and characteristic social interactions. Gogarty also frequently embarks on humorous, rambling narrative monologues, pertaining to other characters, to the landscape, and to various salient issues of the time.