As I Was Going Down Sackville Street

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";[3] 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 frequently embarks on humorous, rambling narrative monologues, pertaining to other characters, to the landscape, and to various salient issues of the time.

While not strictly polemical, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street is notable for its political overtones, expressed in both Gogarty's monologues and in the speeches he places in the mouths of other characters.

As a Catholic with strong intellectual and personal ties to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, a founding member of Sinn Féin with a deep devotion to Arthur Griffith, and a Free State Senator who had suffered kidnapping and arson at the hands of IRA gunmen, Gogarty's political identity was complex and idiosyncratic, and in his book he gave frequent vent to his animosity towards Éamon de Valera and his disillusionment with Irish politics.

[citation needed] As I Was Going Down Sackville Street opens with the disclaimer "The names in this book are real, the characters fictitious", and a number of notable figures make appearances in its pages, including Eoin O'Duffy, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Lord Dunsany, Seumas O'Sullivan (as "Neil"), Æ, Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, John Pentland Mahaffy, Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and Horace Plunkett.

One of the most frequently recurring figures in the book is that of Endymion, a Dublin eccentric, who prominently features in the opening and closing scenes and appears at intervals throughout the text.

[5] As I Was Going Down Sackville Street was highly anticipated before its publication as "a riposte to Ulysses and an appendage to [George Moore's] Ave, Salve, Vale", and as a result of its popularity became the subject a lawsuit brought forth by Harry Sinclair, a Jewish art dealer, who said that two passages in the book contained libels against himself and his recently deceased twin brother, William Sinclair.

[6] The case attracted a great deal of public attention, with one commentator observing that "only The Pickwick Papers, rewritten by James Joyce, could really capture the mood of this trial.

Appearing as a "publication witness" for the prosecution was Samuel Beckett, then a little-known writer, whose impartiality was called into question based on his familial relationship to the plaintiff (his aunt had been married to William Sinclair) and who was humiliatingly denounced by Gogarty's counsel as "the bawd and blasphemer from Paris".

Gogarty, put on the stand, alleged that the unnamed Jews of the verses were parodies or composite characters rather than deliberate evocations of living persons, and were intended to throw discredit on the practice of usury and moneylending generally.