Books: Wit's Saint

I FOLLOW SAINT PATRICK—Oliver St.

John Gogarty—Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Whether Author Gogarty is only temporarily holding himself in, or really means to start living down the legends of his past, I Follow Saint Patrick is, for him, a strangely subdued and pious piece of writing. Of Gogarty the "wit, poet, mocker, enthusiast" and original of bawdy Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses, the poet is about all that remains. As hagiographer of Ireland's patron saint, Gogarty writes as one on holy ground, and it has taken most of the Elizabethan starch out of him....