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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work – poems and prose. Together they transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable influence throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major essayist, whose potent non-fiction work challenged and changed Irish culture and society. This collection of her most important essays combines autobiographical and critical reflections on the events and influences that shaped her life and work. It includes work never before collected, as well as draft chapters of the memoir Daughter that she was working on when she died. This wise, generous book, published on what would have been Eavan Boland's 80th birthday, tells the intertwined stories of her life and her writing, her work as a writer who was also a mother and a daughter, her sense of Ireland and exile, and her evolving insights into how the poet can earn, widen and share her freedoms. 'As time went on,' Jody Allen Randolph writes, 'Boland's prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet's work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critique by which they will eventually be judged.'
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Contents
Foreword
Irish poetry, Eavan Boland famously said, was one in which you could “have a political murder, but not a baby.” The first time I read this statement, in 1997, it hit me like a revelation. I was a graduate student at Trinity College Dublin, and Boland’s first book of prose, Object Lessons, had recently come out. As I read Boland’s essays about a young woman writing poems in her Dublin garret, I felt less alone in my own damp, cold flat in the Liberties. I was thrilled by the attention Boland paid to women, and I appreciated her clean prose. Unlike the poststructuralist theory then sweeping American campuses, Object Lessons was obviously the work of a poet—its language clear and crystalline, a slow-running stream glinting in sunlight. And poetry was all I wanted that year in Dublin. I spent my days discussing poems in class and my nights at boozy poetry readings. But the voices I read and heard belonged mostly to men. Object Lessons called my attention to this gap. I knew about Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich—all poets who influenced Boland—but I had managed to get an undergraduate degree in English literature without reading any of them. The only woman poet I had studied with any seriousness was Emily Dickinson, whose viiiwork I cherished but found gnomic. I had practically memorized James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but there was no künstlerroman for women who wanted to light out for the territory, like Stephen Dedalus, and make art. Now I see that Boland’s essays are that guide.
Living in Dublin in the late 1990s, I began to understand what Boland was up against as a woman poet trying to make herself the subject, rather than the object, of the Irish poem. I could see that the Irish poetic tradition made little room for what Boland called “ordinary” women. Irish women did not have recourse to the freedoms that I, as an American, took for granted then. Divorce was illegal in Ireland until 1996, and abortion illegal until 2018. I found these sexist laws infuriating, but not surprising. I had grown up in an Irish American family in which the answer to life’s burdens was to “offer it up.” I thought I knew about the secrets and silence that abraded women’s suffering, but I was not prepared for the revelations that began to surface in the 1990s about the Magdalene Laundries. These Catholic institutions were places of violence and cruelty where unmarried pregnant women were abandoned, shamed, and imprisoned until a male relative came to free them, or until their babies were adopted—often by wealthy American Catholics. I was later shocked to learn that one of the laundries was still operating when I lived in Dublin, a half-hour walk from my flat. I’d had no idea. These were the stories I did not know, because they were women’s stories, and no one had told them.
I had heard other stories. One summer during college, I lived on an island off the Connemara coast. I worked long nights in a pub where the crowd quieted as old men stood up and sang ballads of loss, their voices a living register of pain. Islanders still talked about Oliver Cromwell’s murderous seventeenth-century ixcampaign through Connaught, and how he had imprisoned priests on the island. His men had tied a bishop to a rock in the island’s harbor and watched him drown as the tide rose. All the islanders knew this rock, whose location had been passed down for more than 300 years. On the island, I began to understand that the Irish had a pressing and intimate relationship to history—the “nightmare,” Stephen Dedalus famously said, “from which I am trying to awake.” That summer, there was a steady drumbeat of stories on the radio about sectarian murders in Northern Ireland. I heard stories, too, about domestic violence and alcoholism on the island. A young woman drowned in mysterious circumstances. But those stories were whispered, not sung. And not passed down.
Boland knew the powerful songs, poetry, and plays that had inspired generations of Irish men and women to fight for independence from Britain. She knew, too, about the dangers of mixing art and politics in Ireland. “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” William Butler Yeats wondered in his poem “Man and the Echo,” about his and Lady Gregory’s incendiary 1902 drama Cathleen ni Houlihan. Boland understood better than Yeats the mythic and seductive role that women had played in Irish nationalist iconography. “Until we resolve our relation to both past and tradition,” she wrote in “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” “we are still hostages to that danger.” For Boland, resolving that relationship to the past meant telling women’s stories, both real and imagined. In her poems and essays, she reinscribes the voices of women who were silenced, and left no trace. We meet Boland’s grandmother, dying alone in a Dublin maternity hospital; an elderly woman on Achill Island with a living memory of the famine; a desperate mother and her children fighting for survival in the Clonmel workhouse; poor xyoung women bound for Boston to work as domestics, or forced by hunger into prostitution. Like the water diviners in the Irish countryside, Boland searched for the undercurrents of suffering that coursed below the official histories. Reading Object Lessons, I began to see how Irish women had been written out of their own poetic tradition, made into “dehumanized ornaments,” as Boland put it, by men. They were queens and muses, reduced to political propaganda, emblems of a colonized nation—Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, the Poor Old Woman. If this truth was hiding in plain sight, it was also, for Boland, a fraught discovery. As she told Jody Allen Randolph in 1999, “There was only one poetry world in Ireland and I seemed to be putting myself at odds with it…. [T]he idea of the poet it offered was not mine. I couldn’t use this inherited authority and pretend it was mine. I had to make it for myself.”
Boland was eighteen when she first wrote what she called a “real poem.” It happened during the Big Freeze of 1963, the coldest winter in a century. In Object Lessons, she writes about how that experience overlapped with news of Sylvia Plath’s death:
She had died alone in that season. The more I heard, the more pity I felt for it, that single act of desolation. From now on I would write, at least partly, in the shadow of that act: unsettled and loyal. Other poets—men—moved easily among the models of the poet’s life, picking and choosing. I chose this one—not to emulate but to honor. Not simply for the beautiful, striving language of the poems when I came to read them. But because I could see increasingly the stresses and fractures between a poet’s life and a woman’s. And how—alone, at a heartbroken moment—they might become fatal.
xiThe essays in Citizen Poet record Boland’s struggle to harmonize the parts of herself that she once thought were unreconcilable, and to renew and reshape the Irish poetic tradition through the inclusion of women’s voices and stories. Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov were inspirations, but, as Boland later wrote in her introduction to Rich’s Selected Poems (1996), her own feminism was different. Rich’s poems “describe a struggle and record a moment that was not my struggle and would never be my moment. Nor my country, nor my companionship. Nor even my aesthetic.” Boland had a harder battle to fight in a conservative, Catholic nation where sexism and sexual repression were pervasive, and where the violence in Northern Ireland consumed political and emotional capital that might otherwise have supported a women’s movement. Boland would look to Rich’s poetry and prose for inspiration, but she would become a different kind of citizen poet. “We need to go to that past: not to learn from it, but to change it,” she wrote in “Letter to a Young Woman Poet.” “If we do not change that past, it will change us. And I, for one, do not want to become a grateful daughter in a darkened house.”
When Boland was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in the early sixties, she spent time with her fellow student Derek Mahon, who would become, like Boland, one of the finest Irish poets of his generation. Though she had been writing poems for years, she saw herself as Mahon’s apprentice—a grateful daughter. She remembered, “When I was starting out, over coffee in Roberts’, he told me approvingly that one of the real strengths of my poetry was that you could hardly tell it had been written by a woman.” She took Mahon’s words as a compliment and continued to write what she called “genderless” poems. Dublin then, she recalled, was “not only male. It was xiibardic.” In pubs and coffeehouses, she heard slights from her male friends “that women were bringing into poetry currents of experience which would somehow make it small. One word above any other: autobiography…. Women—so it goes—have not lived the lives which fit them to be the central, defining poets that men can be.”
After Boland married, moved to the suburbs, and had children, she began to feel disconnected from the Dublin poetry scene. In A Journey with Two Maps as well as in Object Lessons, she writes about her struggle to reconcile the words “woman” and “poet” as she cleaned the kitchen, sang her children to sleep, and tidied the nursery. These were the quotidian realities of her life as a wife and mother. “The dial of a washing machine, the expression in a child’s face …. I wanted them to enter my poems,” she wrote. But: “I had learned to write poetry …. by subscribing to a hierarchy of poetic subjects.” She began to question those hierarchies. In her seminal essay “Domestic Violence,” Boland wondered, “What did it mean for generation after generation of poets that the world outside was deemed to be a horizon of moral transcendence and pastoral significance? But not a half-empty cup, a child’s shoe, a crooked patch of sunlight on carpet?” Vermeer had captured the inner lives of women in his still, soulful paintings of domestic interiors, but few poets had done the same. Apart from Plath, there was little precedent for the kind of poetry Boland imagined—a poetry in which the child’s cry held as much significance as the skylark and the moor. She began to reimagine and redefine the sublime, making room for new moments of grace: “Standing in a room in the winter half-light before the wonder of a new child is aesthetics,” she writes in “Reading as Intimidation.”
When Boland’s one-year-old daughter nearly died of xiiimeningitis, she decided she had to become a different kind of poet—one whose words commemorated and validated women’s lives, and women’s suffering. She realized, with shock, that she knew no poem about a mother watching her child struggle through a serious illness. So many women had endured this grim condition, and yet she could not find the words that would console her. “Sitting there alone …. my child’s life in the balance, I expected to feel abandoned by circumstance, luck and even life. But not by art…. [N]ot a line of poetry, not a single poem, came to my mind or memory in that terrible solitude.” It seemed absurd to her that she could summon up poems about birds and flowers, but none about a dying child. It was then that she realized with full force how few poems had been written by women, and especially by mothers. In her essay “Daughter,” published here for the first time, she wrote, “The power, privilege and consolation of art—why did it leave me and my child so unattended in that room? The more I thought about it, the more the question seemed urgent, huge and ominous…. I felt the beginnings of a true intellectual anger.” In her darkest hour, she hit against the limits not just of the Irish poem, but of poetic convention itself. She knew she had to expand those conventions, in Ireland and farther afield. This great invisibility needed to be redressed. She had no choice. I had to make it for myself.
Boland’s late-twentieth-century struggle to write as a woman poet seems almost quaint in the socially progressive, cosmopolitan society that is Ireland today. We now take for granted that women are the practitioners and subjects of poetry. But Ireland has expanded its figurative borders because of writers like Boland, whose works confronted and challenged the nation’s endemic sexism. Though there has been an explosion of writing by Irish women since the early seventies, Boland’s essays remind xivus that these reconciliations are a recent phenomenon. They remind us, too, of the change she helped bring about, which is nothing less than the redefinition and expansion of what Irish poetry—what any poetry—can be. The journey was not easy. Her stance was controversial, and she often drew criticism. But Boland understood what she had achieved. In “Letter to a Young Woman Poet” she writes, “On the best days I lived as a poet, the language at the end of my day—when the children were asleep and the curtains drawn—was the language all through my day: it had waited for me. What this meant was crucial. For the first time as a poet, I could believe in my life as the source of the language I used, and not the other way around.” When she wrote her best-known poem, “Night Feed,” about a suburban mother feeding her infant as the sun rises, she felt no joy afterward. But she thought she had written something “aggressive and solid. As if I was trying to teach lyric poetry a new word,” she asserted in “Daughter.” She knew the effort was worth the cost, and that more work lay ahead. In her 2001 poem “Is It Still the Same,” she asserts that the “young woman who climbs the stairs” to write alone in her flat will now inhabit a “different” tradition: “This time, when she looks up, I will be there.”
Heather Clark
Editor’s Preface
Eavan Boland was a trailblazing poet, critic, and essayist. Her essays influenced how Irish poetry was understood in Ireland and abroad. They also became an essential part of the conversation on how women poets shaped poetry across the English-speaking world. This volume contains essays selected from the prose books Boland published during her lifetime: Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995) and A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011). It also includes pieces published in periodicals, and an unpublished draft of “Daughter,” an earlier project that Boland returned to shortly before her death but did not live to finish. As such, it forms the most complete single volume of Boland’s essays available in any format.
That Boland’s essays speak persuasively to many beyond the borders of her home in Ireland and her career at Stanford University where she taught for twenty-four years is not surprising. Born in 1944, the daughter of a well-regarded painter and a gifted diplomat, Boland learned to walk and talk in Dublin, learned to read and write in London, and arrived at adolescence in Manhattan, before returning to Dublin as an awkward, xvidisplaced teenager. The cultural and geographical displacements of her childhood, so vividly described in her essays, produced early estrangements vital to Boland’s later understandings of how collective imaginaries are negotiated, contested and remade.
From the start of her writing life Boland published critical prose. She published her first essay before she turned twenty-one and her last shortly before her death at seventy-five. Looking back in 2005, she noted: “All poets face one thing, and they face it alone: the mysterious distance, part cultural and all solitary, between writing poems and being a poet …. I certainly found the writing of prose essential to managing that distance” (Poetry Magazine). Her early essays, reviews and articles reflected her diligence as a young poet as well as the hospitality provided to Irish writers across a broad range of media in the Dublin of that time. As time went on Boland’s prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet’s work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critical conversation in which they will eventually be judged.
She wrote her first prose pieces for the Dublin Review in 1965, while still an undergraduate at Trinity. Many more were written for the Irish Times, not all of which can be labeled as simply journalism. In the Dublin of that era the line between journalism and literary criticism was blurred. That fine line is represented here by “The Weasel’s Tooth” (1974), written in the immediate aftermath of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. As the earliest essay included, it provides a first glimpse of the thinker, theorist, and writer of position statements we would come to recognize over the next two decades. Her unease at the effects of nationalist politics on the Irish poem is already evident, as is her powerful sense of communal responsibility. Most notable, however, is her effort to use her womanhood as a lens on nationhood. xviiForty years and many essays later she would ask: “Why have so few women, in the history of poetry, been citizen-poets? Why have so few set up their poems with country, nation, nationhood, placing themselves at the center of those themes?” (“A Woman Without a Country: A Detail”).
By the mid-eighties Boland’s prose began to acquire focus and direction using what would become a signature new development—the mixing of autobiography with analysis and argument. Early attempts in this vein, “Religion and Poetry” (1982) and “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma” (1986), were quickly followed in 1987 by “The Woman Poet in a National Tradition,” an autobiographical essay on the difficulties for women poets writing within a national tradition resistant to them and a history that excluded them. What a national tradition offered her as a young woman poet, she would later surmise in A Journey with Two Maps, was not the comfort of finding a nation but just “a new way of not belonging.”
“The Woman Poet in a National Tradition” led Boland forward into a long, passionate effort to join together those parts of her identity that had seemed impossibly separate: woman, poet, citizen. This happened not in a single leap but in fits and starts as Boland developed and published her arguments, revised them and published again. The scholar and poet Catríona Clutterbuck describes this germinal phase as “bracketed by Eavan Boland’s first and final versions of what would become one of the most important essays in Irish literary culture, titled ‘The Woman Poet in a National Tradition’ in 1987, ‘A Kind of a Scar’ in 1989, and by 1995, when collected in Boland’s [first] volume of prose, retitled again as ‘Outside History.’” Here Boland argued Irish poetry had idealized women, enmeshing the national and the feminine in a trope which simplified both. “Women in xviiisuch poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic,” she wrote in “Outside History,” “but to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption.”
In her turn toward autobiographical essays, Boland had two decisive influences: W. B. Yeats and Adrienne Rich. Boland first encountered Yeats’s essays as that estranged teenager just returned from a childhood abroad in London and New York: “unable to name the country I came from,” she wrote in Crossroads (1998), “unable to come from it until I could name it.” In her first years as a poet, Boland learned from Yeats how to use language to belong to a place. As her autobiographical analysis gathered force and focus, she learned from Yeats that through language a poet could not only claim a place but change it as well.
By the time I came to know Boland in the late 1980s, the fiercely questioning and subversive essays of Adrienne Rich were already spurring her development as thinker and theorist. After marrying the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969, Boland moved to the suburbs where they would raise two daughters, and where she first read Rich in the mid-1970s. She turned increasingly to Rich in the 1980s, as a strong example of a woman poet forging her own critique against a resistant literary culture. In essays describing her growth as a poet, Rich made connections between the life she led as a woman, the works she wrote, and her role as a dissenting citizen and an activist for change. Rich’s named intent, “to write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman’s body and experience, to take women’s existence seriously as a theme and a source for art,” steeled Boland’s resolve to construct a critique for Irish poetry to address the painful distance between being a woman and becoming a poet that she recognized in Rich’s account of her experiences as a young writer (Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet [1985]).
xixBy the early nineties Boland’s prose was gathering into a coherent narrative. Her radical questioning of the ethics of a poetry which had flourished in the shadow of a powerful national tradition had become an influential critique. Irish, American and British journals now circulated her essays. PN Review and American Poetry Review regularly featured her longer pieces. In 1995 these culminated in Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, compiled from essays written over the course of a decade which found their final form there. Object Lessons traced Boland’s long uncertain route to a poetic self from confusions over nation and belonging, through estrangement to embodiment, as she became a wife and mother in a Dublin suburb, turning away to write poems from a new grounding. Her arguments in Object Lessons, about womanhood, nationhood and the relation between the two, came to be viewed as central texts in the theorization of women’s writing well beyond Ireland.
If Object Lessons followed a young poet as she wrote herself out of a national tradition of heroes and into the silences of women’s lives beneath it, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011) starts out with a map of the poetic past, then offers a second map that charts Boland’s reading and writing across several decades, before ending with an address to women poets of the future. Both maps are contoured by self-portraits of Boland as daughter, wife, mother, and citizen. The essays move freely between Ireland and the United States, to post-war Germany and back again. “In the sense that my life as a poet has been marked by boundaries,” Boland writes, “this book allows me to unwrite them—moving freely between countries and poems and histories.”
The central essays in A Journey with Two Maps trace Boland’s route to becoming a woman poet through tradition, the canon xxand change. They are included here, minus Boland’s essays on individual women poets—Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paula Meehan, and most recently the poetry written by women in Germany at mid-century—which will be published by Carcanet as part of a subsequent volume. Her landmark essay in A Journey with Two Maps, “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” forms the rationale for the book as a whole, as well as indicating the anticipatory and wayfinding role these memoirs and essays play for more recent creative nonfiction by younger Irish writers including Anne Enright, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Sinéad Gleeson, Vona Groarke and Emilie Pine. In Boland’s essay, an encounter between an older and younger poet echoes Rainer Maria Rilke’s title “Letters to a Young Poet.” It also deliberately echoes Boland’s poem “The Journey” in which Sappho guides her charge through an underworld so she would “know forever/ the silences in which are our beginnings.” The younger woman is the future. The older woman is the past. She enters a room she has made herself of language to explain to a young poet the necessity of engaging with the past, “the place where authorship of the poem eluded us. Where poetry was defined by and in our absence.” “Why visit the site of our exclusion?” Boland anticipates the younger poet asking. “We need to go to that past not to learn from it,” the older poet replies, “but to change it.”
The final section of Citizen Poet: New and Selected Essays gathers key essays that appeared outside of Boland’s two volumes of prose. It is framed by new readings, new arguments and new narratives of becoming both a woman-poet and citizen-poet, including an unpublished draft of “Daughter” which began as an extended essay before turning into a book project: “a book about a way of life—motherhood—and an art—poetry—which xxihardly made any room for it.” A major stylistic departure for Boland, “Daughter” is composed of fragments in conversation with each other: definitions, quotations from letters, parts of poems, journal entries from her years as a young poet and mother, knit together with sections of running commentary. Conventions of the lyric and the dream vision are raised then confronted and complicated by fragments of poems, argument and personal narrative. The fragments, Boland explains, “echo, retrospectively, the anger, irony and estrangement I felt as a working poet and a mother, and the incoherence I felt would make it impossible to draw these two sides of my life together.”
In “A Woman Without a Country: A Detail,” published in PN Review in 2014, Boland returns to the major theme of Object Lessons: how a woman belongs to a country. “Why should women want to be citizen-poets?” she asks. The obvious reason, Boland answers, “is a confirming tradition of national reference in male poetry. More importantly, within that tradition it’s clear that male poets in England, Ireland and America are not just drawing on words and names when they refer to their countries. They are also pulling up a deeply sunk reference-hoard of power, nation and poetry.” But Boland also insists that reading well outside those national traditions is vital to the future of poetry: “New poetry requires fresh resources. From poet and reader, both. Those resources will be necessary if we are to read an emergent generation of women poets whose poems are rising out of the deepest contentions of history. And who need us to listen.”
In her last years, Boland worked assiduously to encourage a new, diverse generation of Irish poets. The final pieces included here are short editorials written in the final three years of her life when she served as guest editor for Poetry Ireland Review. At Poetry Ireland, Boland was a guiding presence in a xxiiconversation about diversity, inclusion and community, on which she knew the future of poetry depends. These editorials, along with the remarkable body of essays gathered here, became part of Boland’s legacy, and, in a sense, part of her poetic canon, where they enrich our understanding of her remarkable commitment to the craft of poetry, to the future of poetry, and to her country, the one she found and the one she helped to shape.
I
FromObject Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995)2
Author’s Preface
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored. It was an emblem to the whole culture that self-expression and survival could combine. A contested emblem, certainly—the relation was never easy and may even, in certain ways, have been corrupt—but it existed, it was there. A poet was remarked upon and pointed out, was sometimes quoted, and the habits and sayings of poets frequently found their way into a sort of image file of idiosyncrasy which further reinforced the sense of poetry as something in high relief and set apart.
A woman’s life was not honored. At least no one I knew suggested that it was exemplary in the way a poet’s was. As dusk fell in the city, a conversational life intensified. Libraries filled up; the green-cowled lamps went on, and light pooled onto open pages. The pubs were crowded. The cafés were full of students and apprentice writers like myself, some of them talking about literature, a very few talking intensely about poetry.
4Only a few miles away was the almost invisible world that everyone knew of and no one referred to. Of suburbs and housing estates. Of children and women. Of fires lighted for the first winter chill; of food put on the table. The so-called ordinary world, which most of us had come from and some would return to on the last bus, was not even mentioned. Young poets are like children. They assume the dangers to themselves are those their elders identified; they internalize the menace without analyzing it. It was not said, it was not even consciously thought and yet I absorbed the sense that poetry was safe here in this city at twilight, with its violet sky and constant drizzle, within this circle of libraries and pubs and talks about stanzas and cadences. Beyond it was the ordinariness which could only dissipate it; beyond it was a life for which no visionary claim could be made.
The opposite is now true. A woman’s life—its sexuality, its ritual, its history—has become a brilliantly lit motif, influencing the agenda of culture and commerce alike. At the same time the old construct of the poet’s life, for which I have such an exasperated tenderness, has lost some of the faith and trust of a society. Increasingly, it is perceived as arcane and worse: as a code of outdated power systems whose true purpose was to exalt not the poet’s capacity to suffer but his suitability for election to a category which made him or her exempt from the shared experience of others.
i know now that i began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary—that much the culture conceded—but they were 5oil and water and could not be mixed. It became part of my working life, part of my discourse, to see these lives evade and simplify each other. I became used to the flawed space between them. In a certain sense, I found my poetic voice by shouting across that distance.
But I was also hostage to it. As a young woman and an uncertain poet, l wanted there to be no contradiction between the way I made an assonance to fit a line and the way I lifted up a child at night. But there were many; they were deep-seated, they inflected arguments of power and presumption which were obvious to me and yet unexamined in any critique I knew.
The relative status of these lives has changed. The power of each to limit and smooth out the complexity of the other has not. In the old situation which existed in the Dublin I first knew, it was possible to be a poet, permissible to be a woman and difficult to be both without flouting the damaged and incomplete permissions on which Irish poetry had been constructed.
The new situation has made a role reversal. Now poetry itself, and the concept of the poet, have been put under severe pressure by any number of factors, among which the emergence of women and the new importance ascribed to a woman’s life are a real and powerful presence.
Here and throughout this book these lives remain the themes. These, after all, are the two lives—a woman’s and a poet’s—that I have lived and understood. They are the lives whose aspirations I honor, and they remain divided. I have written freely about both, and sometimes my pen has skidded on the modest particulars. I am not a scholar, and my historical sense is selective. My working life has been spent not in any aspiration towards knowledge or accuracy but in an intuitive struggle with form. And yet at certain points in writing this book, 6I have caught a glimpse of the wider implications of the theme. At these moments it has seemed to me that these lives, with their relation and division, make a sign which is ominous and revealing: about silence and expression, about democratization and oligarchy, about the life a society tolerates and the one it nominates to take it into the future, to both glory and survival.
II
I have put this book together not as a prose narrative is usually constructed but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence. Therefore, the reader will come on the same room more than once: the same tablecloth with red-checked squares; the identical table by an open window. An ordinary suburb, drenched in winter rain, will show itself once, twice, then disappear and come back. The Dublin hills will change color in the distance, and change once more. The same October day will happen, as it never can in real life, over and over again.
In various pieces I have returned to the same themes and their interpretation, often to the exact room and the identical moment in the suburb when the light goes out of the sky and dusk comes. I will need the reader’s patience as, once again, I go back to the visionary place, the obstructed moment. Not so much because of an aspiration to give a definite shape to the book but because each revisiting has offered me another chance to clarify the mystery of being a poet in the puzzle of time and sexuality and nationhood.
Argument and recollection may not solve the puzzle, but 7they have allowed me to note it. They have also allowed me to make a record of the interior of the poem as I found it; its angles of relation to my life and circumstance. There is nothing definitive about this; such angles are subjectively observed and understood. But it is also true that they are not found in textbooks, at least not for a working poet. They are best seen where they have most effect: at the actual moment of writing a poem.
And in a sense it is the very smallness of this moment and the ordinary furnishings which surround it—a suburban dusk, a table by an open window with a book and a pen on it—which have led me to a larger contention. To make it at all clearly here, as against the diffused form in which it appears throughout this book, I will have to return to the argument.
In an odd and poignant way these two lives, of a poet and a woman, have proved to be formidable historical editors of each other. In previous centuries, when the poet’s life was an emblem for the grace and power of a society, a woman’s life was often the object of his expression: in pastoral, sonnet, elegy. As the mute object of his eloquence her life could be at once addressed and silenced. By an ironic reversal, now that a woman’s life is that emblem of grace and power, the democratization of our communities, of which her emergence is one aspect, makes a poet’s life look suspect, can make it appear, to a wider society, elite and irrelevant all at once. Therefore, for anyone who is drawn into either of these lives, the pressure is there to betray the other: to disown or simplify, to resolve an inherent tension by making a false design from the ethical capabilities of one life or the visionary possibilities of the other.
It is these very tensions, and not their absence, and not any possibility of resolving them, which makes me believe that the woman poet is now an emblematic figure in poetry, much as the 8modernist or Romantic poets were in their time. I make this less as a claim than as a historical reading. It does not mean she will write better poetry than men, or more important or more lasting. It does mean that in the projects she chooses, must choose perhaps, are internalized some of the central stresses and truths of poetry at this moment. And that in the questions she needs to ask herself—about voice and self, about revising the stance of the poet, not to mention the relation of the poem to the act of power—are some of the questions which are at the heart of the contemporary form. This does not give her any special liberty to subcontract a poem to an ideology. It does not set her free to demand that a bad poem be reconsidered as a good ethic. Her responsibilities remain the same as they have been for every poet: to formalize the truth. At the same time the advantage she gains for language, the clarities she brings to the form, can no longer be construed as sectional gains. They must be seen as pertaining to all poetry. That means they must also be allowed access to that inner sanctum of a tradition: its past.
At the age of seventeen I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city. That room appears often in this book. I can see it now, and I have wanted the reader to see it. It was not large. It looked north rather than south. The window beside the table was small and inclined to stick on rainy afternoons. And yet for me, as for so many other writers in so many other rooms, this particular one remains a place of origin.
But one thing was lacking. There were times when I sat down at that table, or came up the stairs, my key in my hand, to open the door well after midnight, when I missed something. I wanted a story. I wanted to read or hear the narrative of someone else—a woman and a poet—who had gone here, and been there. 9Who had lifted a kettle to a gas stove. Who had set her skirt out over a chair, near to the clothes dryer, to have it without creases for the morning. Who had made the life meet the work and had set it down: the difficulties and rewards; the senses of lack. I remember thinking that it need not be perfect or important. Just there; just available. And I have remembered that.
Lava Cameo
In the early days of October, in the year 1909, a woman entered a Dublin hospital, near the center of the city. The building is still there. If you approach from the south, with the Dublin hills behind you, and look down a tunnel of grace made by the houses of Fitzwilliam and Merrion squares, your view will end abruptly in this: the National Maternity Hospital, red brick and out of character, blocking the vista. The rooms inside are functional and light-eating. They show no evidence of that zest for air and proportion which was the mask of an Augustan oppressor.
October is a beautiful month in the city. If you turn around and go back towards the hills, away from the hospital, the roads are narrow and gracious above the canal. The woman who entered the hospital may have passed them as she made her way to it. If, for instance, she drove around Stephen’s Green, having arrived on the late-morning train from Drogheda, she may also have noticed a trick of light peculiar to that time of year: in the dark corridor of Lower Leeson Street, sunlight cuts the houses in half. Halfway up the brick, the reflection of the 11houses opposite builds another street: chimneys, roofs, gutters made of unglittering shadow.
She may not have come that way. She might have travelled down the unglamourous back streets that lead more directly to the hospital. Fenian Street. Hogan Place. Past the mills. Past the Dodder River on its way to the Liffey. Up the slight gradient which would still, in that year, be cobbled. The prewinter chill, which can be felt on some October mornings, could have struck extra music out of the horses’ hooves.
It is not a long drive. But whatever she saw that morning, it is lost. Whatever that journey yielded—the child with a hoop who never existed, the woman with a red hat I am now inventing—they were her last glimpses of the outside world.
This is the way we make the past. This is the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our violations, the past waits for us. The road from the train to the hospital opens out over and over again, vacant and glittering, offering shadows and hats and hoops. Again and again I visit it and reinvent it. But the woman who actually travelled it had no such license. Hers was a real journey. She did not come back. On October 10 she died in the National Maternity Hospital. She was thirty-one years of age. She was my grandmother.
nineteen hundred and nine. It was a different city and another time. The difference is worth settling on. In just a few weeks George Roberts of Maunsel and Co., the Dublin publishing house, would write to James Joyce promising him the proofs 12of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” The proofs would not arrive. A little later Roberts would write again. He would ask Joyce to remove all references to the king in his story. Towards the end of 1910 Augustine Birrell would inform William Butler Yeats that his civil list pension, at last, could be counted on. “I know you don’t care about Doctor Johnson,” he wrote, “but I always think his pension was the money best spent in England during the whole of my beloved eighteenth century. It is well that the Twentieth should follow suit.”
It was a year on the edge of political upheaval. In the next fourteen months England would have two general elections. The second one yielded a result which was important for Ireland. True enough, only 84 out of 272 successful Liberal candidates so much as mentioned Home Rule in their election addresses. Nevertheless, as the results were gradually declared throughout December 1910, it became clear that the Liberals would depend for their majority in the House of Commons on the Irish members there. It was also clear that the driven, ambitious son of a Yorkshire wool manufacturer had changed his mind. Herbert Asquith, now prime minister of England, who had once vowed the Liberal party would never take office again if they were to depend on the Irish members, now accepted the result. Unlike other politicians, his literacy extended to the writing on the wall. In April 1912, by introducing the Third Home Rule Bill, he would set tar barrels and bonfires blazing throughout Ireland.
The city which waited upon these changes was itself changing. In 1909 it was a place of roughly a quarter of a million souls. We have to imagine a town of bowler hats, bicycles, trams and red uniforms. By all contemporary accounts, it was a mixture of occupation and indigenous obstinacy. There were frequent recruiting marches for the British army. New recruits, after all, 13got a shilling there and then—an amount hard to resist. The police still chased thieves and arrested drunks wearing the uniform of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Horses were everywhere. James Joyce would repeat the city superstition that you never crossed O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse. Bystanders tell of the small, daily theatre of watching runaway horses break out of the shafts and even, on occasion, collide into shop fronts. On the corner of Marlborough Street there was a shop which sold pigs’ trotters in brown paper bags.
Poverty was widespread. The death rate for Dublin was the highest of any city in Europe. In Britain Street and Gardiner Street and Rutland Street, all north of the Liffey, evictions were a daily occurrence. Trade unionists blamed the bad housing and worse health conditions on a corrupt city council, mainly of Irish nationalists.
A place on the edge. A place of resentment and beauty and conflict. All abstract qualities perhaps, but nonetheless potent for that. In another ten years it would all change again. There would be gunfire in these streets and outside the windows of the building she died in. There would be carts and lorries full of hostages carried to and fro by the Black and Tans. The glittering dances, the genteel imitations of British manners practiced by those who saw no tomorrow in this year of 1909 would be waning ten years from now. The schemes and conspiracies of those who could not tolerate the present moment—the men and women with the “vivid faces” Yeats referred to in his poem—would soon be vindicated.
how much did she care? Politics and social change, except as it touched her immediate circumstances, could only have 14seemed a distant drum. The facts of her life are briefly stated; none of them makes an obvious intersection with political change. She came from a large family. She lived in the midlands of Ireland. She married a seaman in her late teens. He became a master mariner and then a sea captain. She had five daughters. She died in a Dublin hospital.
Even the fact that she was the wife of a seagoing husband put her at a remove from some of the most intense national questions. In 1903, for instance, George Wyndham, the chief secretary for Ireland, managed to pass a new Land Purchase Act in the House of Commons. It was easily the most satisfactory settlement yet of the festering question of British landlordism. She and her husband lived in a cottage on the outskirts of Drogheda. I have no doubt it was rented. If they had been tenant farmers instead, living on the estates whose demesne walls ran from one end of Ireland to the other, she would have noticed the change. By a clause in the act, tenants could now buy their lands and the legal cost of transfer would be met from public funds. This was a new and attractive provision. Landlords benefited also. If a whole estate was sold, they were rewarded with a 12 percent bonus on top of the purchase price. In another six years 270,000 land purchases had been negotiated out of a possible half million tenant occupations. And she was dying.
a hundred years ago she was a child. But where? Strange to think that once the circumstances of her life were simple and available. They have become, with time, fragments and guesswork.
I have pieces, but they are few enough. But she has a name. Three names, in fact. Mary Ann Sheils. There is a faint surprise 15about the three flat take-it-or-leave-it syllables of the Christian names. Mary Ann sounds more like the name of a younger sister in Jane Austen than a girl from the end of the nineteenth century in Ireland. Then again, it was a time of turmoil and turmoil is easily negotiated into ambivalence. Which in turn can be seen in the Irish endowing their sons and daughters with echoes of the names given to the children of squires and vicars across the water.
I know nothing about her childhood. There are no photographs. No letters. Nobody ever recalled her to me as living memory. It is another erasure. And yet something does survive: a story so odd and strange that it has the power to upstage all those icons and arrangements that survive the recorded childhoods of official family histories. It is a story I heard twice—so improbable that each time I thought of it as one of those signs the past makes when it has transferred its available resources from memory to allegory.
she came from a family of millers. Sometime after the famine they left the small fishing town of Milford in Donegal. Hard pressed as they were, they must have missed the idiosyncrasy of their own place: the sight of Mulroy Bay in February light. The main street with its steep climb up the side of a hill. They moved east and south to the town of Dundalk. There the business failed. And they moved again to Leitrim where her father was born. It was to him that legend clung. And the way I build that legend now is the way I heard it: out of rumor, fossil fact, half memories.
He was a small man, compact and saturnine in the way of many western people. If he was anything like his son, whom I 16met for a few hours years ago, he had eloquent and strained features. A fine profile. Close-set, obstinate eyes. There was something strained and pinched about it all which kept it well away from beauty. He grew up in Leitrim and some time in his early manhood—I imagine the early 1870s—he had fallen in love with a local girl. I know so little about her or him that I must become the fictional interventionist here and say that she was, of course, winning and expressive and utterly true to him. And that he loved her stubbornly.
But there was an obstacle. She was a younger sister. In the manner of fairytales, her older sister was plain and deserving and on no account to be slighted by having the younger girl marry first.
And so it went around. The parents insisted he should offer his suit to the older sister. They may have offered him inducements, but I doubt it. The inducement can only have been local custom and iron decorum. There were no dowries. These were poor people, reduced in circumstance by a difficult century, utterly vulnerable to the sickness of a heifer or a farthing’s change in the price of wheat. They would have brought to bear on him the influence of local opinion and approval. He must marry the older girl and that was that. He was implacable. It would be the younger one, and that was all. The younger girl retained her love for him, and he for her. Finally—and now the narrative quickens, gets unsteady, fills with unknown passages of time and event—the impasse yielded. Love triumphed. The wedding day was set.
I have no document or certificate. I have Mary Ann’s marriage certificate but not this one. In any case, the cold signatures of the witnesses and the sacristan could not do justice to the event. The wedding day came. It seems safe to imagine a small, 17granite church in the middle of a townland and the weather, more than likely, grey and overcast. Perhaps the turnout was a bit more than usual because of the notoriety of the whole thing; the struggle of wills and all the gossip and curiosity incurred on that account. The bride came, dressed in white and heavily veiled. The vows were taken and repeated, said by the bride and the groom. The priest pronounced them man and wife. For a single moment it must have seemed to him that some wound of ill luck and misadventure in his own life had undergone a miraculous healing.
Then he lifted her veil. But it was not—the story turns gothic now—the face he loved. Convention had prevailed. The family had smuggled in the older, plainer girl, and he was bound to her by iron convention and legality for the rest of his life.
the nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the forties and sixties, the cultural and political desire for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity. It was an exciting time but not a pure one. Self-consciousness mixed in with improvisation, and not always happily. A new interest in the language and customs of Ireland went hand in hand with instinctive, colonial attempts to metabolize that interest into something weaker and less threatening. The love of a nation is a particularly dangerous thing when the nation predates the state. The danger was partly handled by a tabloid version of it, which suited British drawing rooms and did not put an obvious sell-by date on empire.
From this confused time come the false and synthetic Irish 18dances. The suspect emblems of harps and Celtic crosses. And while the Fenians experimented with real terror, the drawing-room version of Irish nationalism became acceptable and even fashionable. A genteel mix of nostalgia and sentiment.
This was the time when legends began to be dignified as myths. Cúchulain. The Red Branch Knights. Maeve. Conchubar. They reemerged from a lost scholarly past, but in the shape of a Victorian Round Table. While hayricks burned and gunfire could be heard at night after evictions, Germanic scholars worked over the old Irish stories and resurrected them in a new European time frame.
In all this, some of the real myths were ignored: those down-to-earth and hand-to-mouth yarns which start in fear and short-circuit into a pure and elaborate invention. Which bind a community together, not by what they explain, but by the very fact that they were forced to explain it. I can only think this must be one of them, this Rachel and Leah fable about beauty and denial. It is a wonderful image for something: a man lifting a veil on a plain and peremptory face. But for what? For history? For fate?
To me—the great-granddaughter whose existence was guaranteed when his was cheated—it seems to be something else. I think of it as the Gothic yearning to find for random misfortune something approaching the ritual and astonishment of the coffins certain enclosed orders lie down and sleep in at night, something which dignifies horror by anticipating it. He was an unlucky man. He had an unlucky daughter.
His vows finished on that lost day, in that small church, before curious neighbours, he accepted his lot and took his wife to his bed. They had thirteen children. It hardly seems an elegy 19for lost love. Six of those children survived. Mary Ann was one of them.
He died in the asylum in Mullingar. Of mental illness. Or drink. Or that combination of both which in Ireland, as anywhere else, might just cover a broken heart.
this is not a story about luck, or even memory, but about what replaces them. And whether we have the right to replace them. She survived, but only in fits and starts of oral recollection and memory. Looking back, I can see those fractions, those chances more clearly.
I left school when I was seventeen. A rainy summer intervened before I began my courses at Trinity College. Sometime during these months, my mother showed me the only piece of paper—a letter from her father to her mother—in her possession. It was an unusual act. Unlike most people, she treated the past as an opportunity for forgetfulness rather than a source of definition. She had no photographs, not one, of herself as a child. No copybooks from school. No pantomime tickets. She talked of her childhood rarely and without sentiment. Almost, it seemed, without interest.
I understand this better now than I used to. There are parts of Europe, commentators like Claudio Magris are witnesses to it, where minorities, even nations, jostle in the same square mile. Change a language, turn a signpost, rename a village and the previous identity becomes a figment, a hostage to persistence and stubborn recall. Magris speaks of a woman describing the country she loves, “which like all motherlands,” he states, “exists perhaps only in this love.” My mother wanted to forget. 20Childhood was a place of unreadable signposts and overgrown roads. The language could not be retrieved.
I took the letter from her in the back room of the flat I shared with my sisters. I bent my head to read it. My grandfather had written it at sea; there were references to the weather and the voyage. The handwriting was clear and sloping, and the page was lined. The garden, with its path to a locked wooden door, stayed at the upper edge of my sight. When that splintered door was unlocked it opened onto a towpath and the urban containment of the river Dodder. When you stood there, in the occasional July sunshine, you had a view of a stone wall, trees. You could hear cars and buses. You could see the roofs shelving into the city where she died. Now that landscape faltered. The North Sea raised its grey wall and swell outside the window.
The address at the start of the letter was declamatory, affectionate. My dearest wife? My darling wife? Then there were two things which I remember even now. The first was just a housekeeping detail. It made reference to a collection on board for one of the ship’s mates. For a hardship, perhaps, or a gift or a leave-taking. In any case, the tone of the account is apologetic. He had given a half crown. Two shillings and sixpence in old money. It was a good amount, he knew, but he felt constrained to do it. He felt she would understand.
A fraction indeed. Even so, the door opens a crack. I see her more clearly. She must have had three children by now, maybe four, and one was sickly. Milk. Rent. Doctor’s bills. Clothes. Every penny counted. A sea captain made respectable money, relative to the unrest and uncertainty in Ireland at that time. But the distances must have made it seem at risk, and all the more important that as much salary as possible returned home intact.
The second detail is clearer. There is a yearning note in the 21letter. The small talk of money and clothes—I remember some mention of a singlet—is anxious rather than anecdotal. The intimacy is of someone trying to set up house between Drogheda and the North Sea. Then the words I remember most clearly, although not exactly or in sequence. This is a paraphrase: “I don’t know why I always fear that something bad will happen, but I do.”
