A walking tour of the Irish way with words 

I didn't realize, when I checked in at the upmarket Georgian guesthouse that is Staunton's on the Green, that I was sleeping next to Newman House. Not until literary tour guide Gerry Boland congratulated me the next morning on my serendipitous location, that is.

It turns out that novelist James Joyce attended college at Newman House, a duo of elegant Georgian townhouses that -- like Staunton's -- overlooks the ancient common ground that is now St. Stephen's Green in downtown Dublin. "He walked up these stairs every day," confirmed Boland for me as we set off past Newman and into the Green on a literary marathon.

Boland called it a walk, but you'll need more endurance than a mere walk's worth if you're going to cover the city's literary connections: you can't throw a stone in Dublin without hitting a building of some significance to its word-ful heritage. As the city is fond of proclaiming, it's home to no less than four Nobel literature winners (playwright George Bernard Shaw; poet/playwright W.B. Yeats; minimalist Samuel Beckett; and poet Seamus Heaney).

It's also rather fond of Joyce. In fact, the entire place celebrates Bloomsday every June 16 -- the day and the book that is Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece. Written in an English weighted down with words that the author basically invented, the tome chronicles the wanderings of its hero, Leopold Bloom, in Dublin on June 16, 1904. 

"On Bloomsday, Duke Street is the place to be, especially Davy Byrne's Pub," Boland tells me as we stroll down the near-deserted street early on a Saturday morning, the flower sellers just beginning to arrange their blooms in water-filled pails. "It's jammed with people lashing to the Burgundy and the gorgonzola cheese sandwiches (that Bloom ate there)."

I won't pretend that I made it through Ulysses (the easier Dubliners was more my style), but Joyce is now an industry here, with a cultural centre downtown and a museum on the coast. You don't have to be a Joycean scholar to appreciate Dublin's literary heritage, however, because the city is jam-packed with other authors who once lived here, from Bram Stoker (of Dracula fame) to Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest).

Terraces and squares
Even today, it's easy to see how the city might have inspired such creativity. It remains the heart of Ireland, an eastern port to which roads and railroad tracks link from the island's outermost reaches, breathing in workers during the week, and breathing them back out on weekends when it's the shoppers' turn to visit.

The downtown, split north from south by the narrow River Liffey, has managed to retain much of its elegant 18^th-century Georgian architecture. The narrow, terraced townhouses, with their four-storied symmetry and simplicity, still make this a walkable city -- one where you can always see the sky and where you're never far from a café to sip coffee in, or a pub for something more ... medicinal.

Merrion Square, several blocks east of Duke Street, is a perfect example. Smaller than St. Stephens Green, but sporting a similar carpet of lawn and flowerbeds, the green space here is lined with terraces using their doors as personality -- shining in bold glossy hues of red, green, black, blue and yellow, and topped by lace-like fantail windows. "You can guarantee that writers' steps have followed yours," Boland says with a grin as he points out Numbers 82 and 52, where Yeats lived in the early 1900s.

Across the square at Number 1, Wilde's childhood home is now a museum. A statue of the wit reclines for posterity opposite the house, bearing Wilde's quote that "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." In pursuit of his own art, the sculptor has captured the duality of Wilde's controversial life -- from one angle, the award-winning classics scholar appears drunk; from the other, he's contemplative, almost sad.

National treasures
Across the road from Merrion Square lies the National Gallery, to which George Bernard Shaw gave a third of his fortune. "He often said he learned more from looking at the paintings than he did in all of his classics," notes Boland as we stop for a latte in the gallery's café to rebuild our energy. Next up is Trinity College, the setting for Educating Rita, drawn from Shaw's Pygmalion.

As the alma mater for Wilde, along with Stoker and Beckett, plus Jonathan Swift and J.M. Synge, the college's buildings today mix those that were being built when Swift (of Gulliver's Travels) was satirizing the establishment in the 1700s and those completed after our recent millennium. The effect is a campus where Venetian windows and solemn red bricks still take precedence over upstart concrete pyramids and glass enclosures.

The highlight is the Old Library, where one of the world's most famous books lies in state, its calfskin pages turned periodically with the utmost of care. It was likely the monks on the island of Iona, off Scotland, who -- early in the 9^th century -- painstakingly illustrated the four Latin gospels now known as the Book of Kells. The colours are still bright on the pages in gold, vermillion and azure, the intricate Celtic designs interweaving in crosses and circles and knots.

One floor above the Kells exhibition, the Long Room's barrel-vaulted ceiling and colonnaded cases shelter some 200,000 of the college's oldest books, their brown, black and green bindings faded, some tied with red ribbon, but their knowledge intact.

It's tempting to linger, imagining the limitless wisdom and imagination in the pages beyond the guideropes, but Dublin awaits. We cross the narrow River Liffey under the cast-iron arches of the Ha'penny footbridge, and head to the Abbey Theatre. Sadly lacking the character of the fire-ravaged original, the modern theatre nonetheless still produces plays by the likes of co-founder Yeats, keeping his dreams of a modern Ireland alive in hearts and minds.

From the theatre, the Dublin Writers Museum is just a few blocks north. Within its walls, a collection of manuscripts, historical documents and personal items from many of the city's eminence grises lead visitors through the literary landscape under soaring plaster ceilings. Don't miss the gallery upstairs, where writers such as the bespectacled Joyce and the cowlicked Yeats are immortalized in paint.

Boland leaves me there, but I continue on with the literary theme, heading back to Duke Street in the early evening to join another of Dublin's institutions: the Literary Pub Crawl. We start at The Duke, where an actor named Brendan -- one of two hosts for the evening -- reminds us that Joyce's Bloom visited Davy Byrne's, directly opposite us and our evening's final destination.

Between the pubs, the actors enliven the character of the writers and the city, becoming Oscar Wilde lecturing to silver miners, and then explaining the concept of the "snug" -- a small room in a pub where the women would traditionally drink, banned from the main area because the church had decided that they would otherwise corrupt the men's morals. Brendan shakes his head. "Now, as every Irish man here knows, we're the only men in the world who would walk over 20 naked women to get to a pint of Guinness," he quips.

I take a sip of the rich, dark beer that was first brewed just blocks from here and settle in for a night of literary stories and wood-panelled pubs.

Wilde would have approved.

If you go
Tourism Ireland and Dublin Tourism offer excellent ideas for accommodation, attractions and walking tours. Most guidebooks also contain good literary walking routes.

The Dublin Pass offers entry to multiple attractions, including the Bram Stoker Experience, James Joyce Museum, James Joyce Centre, Shaw Birthplace and Dublin Writers Museum; located above the excellent Chapter One restaurant). The Dublin Literary Pub Crawl can be found at dublinpubcrawl.com.