As mentioned last week (Diary, Feb 19th), Fr Patrick Dinneen – he of what the Taoiseach called the “gold standard” Irish-English dictionary – was mercilessly lampooned for many years by this newspaper’s Myles na gCopaleen, aka Flann O’Brien. But this was only the second half of a rare literary double. For decades earlier, Dinneen had also featured in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
That was a more respectful mention, if also a fleeting one. Blink and you might miss it: a risk increased by the fact that the chapter in question, Scylla and Charybdis, is perhaps the most boring in Joyce’s book.
Set in the National Library, the scene has the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, outlining his convoluted theories about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to an audience of admirers, including the librarian Thomas Lyster. Then there is this interruption:
An attendant from the doorway called:
Dictionary on the Double – Frank McNally on the enduring literary life of Patrick Dinneen
‘This wonderful horse seems to have been as remarkable in death as in life’ – Frank McNally on an unbeatable stallion
‘Ireland, more than other countries, ought to be a country of trees’
‘The whole position in Europe is one of uncertainty and of menace’ – John Mulqueen on Éamon de Valera’s foreign policy
Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants…
O! Father Dineen! Directly.
It’s apt that the great lexicographer is a mere background detail, because in June 1904, when the events of Ulysses happen, Dinneen (Joyce docked one of the surname’s usual three ns) was almost part of the National Library’s furniture.
He was the first reader to arrive every day, on the dot of 10am. He always sat at the same desk (where No 20 is now, apparently), having tried all the others and decided it was the least draughty. Then he reserved the seat by leaving his tall hat on it and, while “chewing a bit of apple, or carrot, or dulse”, made the first of many visits to the counter.
At least that was his habit in the summer months. In late autumn, when men from the Office of Public Works would arrive to check the pipes, it was Dineen’s signal to migrate to his winter reading grounds: the Royal Irish Academy on nearby Dawson Street.
There, he was in the habit of “sitting over the fire with his trousers folded up to the knees, revealing the white woollen stockings that that redoubtable Irish-speaking Protestant lady from Kerry, the Hon. Albinia Brodrick, knitted him for thirty years.”
Those quotations, and the estimated coordinates of his favoured desk, are from a 1959 profile in this newspaper by Risteárd Ó Glaisne, who went on to venture the opinion that Dinneen was “in some ways, as mad as a March hare”.
Other eccentricities included extreme miserliness. He never bought a newspaper, for example, preferring to borrow one from a newsboy long enough to read the bits he wanted.
Nor did he waste money on bus or tram tickets. Instead, his modus operandi was to “sit down next to some girl, inform her who he was, and tell her what a privilege it would be for her to buy him a ticket…he was seldom refused”.
Like Myles, whose work he didn’t live to read, Dinneen was also very fond of wordplay, although if there had been a Geneva Convention on torturing puns, he would have been arrested a few times. Myles was of course a master of the genre. In one of his classics, he called himself a “spoiled Proust”. And in that joke too, he and the dictionary man had something in common.
Dinneen was ordained an actual priest in the 1890s before having doubts about his vocation, or before the Jesuits had doubts about him, or both. In any case, he left the order in 1900 and thereafter could celebrate sacraments only with permission from a bishop.
He retained the clerical garb and devout faith for the rest of his life, however. So Catholic was he, people said, even the Pope would have struggled to compete.
His departure from the Jesuits coincided with a conversion to the cause of Irish. Although born to native speakers in Kerry, he had never shown much interest in the language before then. Now he immersed himself.
As it was for Joyce, 1904 was a big year for Dinneen. In its “Irish Language Notes” column that spring and summer, this newspaper made repeated mentions of the forthcoming dictionary, on which he was said to be making “rapid progress”. Finally, in November, it noted that the book was out and “we hear…is selling with a rapidity which was not anticipated even by the most sanguine”.
Twelve years later, the printing plates were destroyed in the 1916 Rising. The goddess Nemesis may have been implicated, because Dinneen had been a long-running critic of Patrick Pearse, considering him pretentious, mockingly referring to him as “Pee Haitch”, and looking down on his poor Irish.
When in 1906, Pearse published a novel under the persona of a western gaeilgeoir, Dinneen wrote an equally pseudonymous letter to a newspaper suggesting the Irish used was “more like the margarine of the slums than pure mountain butter”.
Still, whatever other faults he had, they did not include laziness. From the ruins of the Rising, he built a second, greatly expanded edition of his dictionary, running to 1350 pages and published in 1927.
With the endless layers of meaning in its definitions, many (it seemed) known only to Dinneen, the result kept Myles na gCopaleen in material for years. But it was the definitive Irish-English dictionary for the next half century. And as recently as last week, it was cited in the Dáil as the ultimate authority.
