Literary Portrayal
A highly visible and distinctive Dublin character during his lifetime, Gogarty appears in a number of memoirs penned by his contemporaries, notably George Moore's Hail and Farewell, where he goes both by his own name and by the pseudonym "Conan." His most famous literary incarnation, however, is as Buck Mulligan, the irrepressible roommate of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. Mulligan quotes a number of songs and poems known to have been written by Gogarty, the most famous of which, "The Song of the Cheerful (But Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus", was originally sent to Joyce as a belated Christmas peace offering after their quarrels of 1904. Other details, such as Mulligan's Hellenism, his status as a medical student, his history of saving men from drowning, his friendship with George Moore, and the metrical arrangement of his full name (Malachi Roland St. John Mulligan) parallel Gogarty's biography. Due to his influence on Joyce (he is also sometimes cited as an inspiration for Dubliners character Ignatius Gallaher and Exiles antagonist Robert Hand), Gogarty's name often comes up in Joyce scholarship, though Gogarty's own editors and biographers have complained that these references are frequently inaccurate, owing to Gogarty-related errata in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and a tendency to conflate the real-life Gogarty with the fictional character of Buck Mulligan.
It has also been suggested that the speaker of W. B. Yeats's poem High Talk, "Malachi Stilt-Jack", is intended to be a representation of Gogarty.
Read more about this topic: Oliver St. John Gogarty
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