The Figure in the Cave E-Book

John Montague

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The Figure in the Cave selects the prose of one of Ireland's foremost contemporary poets – part autobiography, part criticism, part self-commentary – a gathering, from the mid-century to the present day, that marks a lifetime's critical engagement with literature in both Europe and America. In the title essay Montague looks over his career as a writer; in others he describes a coming-of-age in Ulster, explores his own poetics, and appraises Goldsmith, Carleton, George Moore, Joyce and Beckett, MacNeice, Clarke, Kavanagh, Hewitt and MacDiarmid. Pieces on American literature include a vignette of Saul Bellow, a review of Lowell and an intimate sketch of Berryman. To conclude, the author examines the impact of international modern poetry on Irish writing. Humorous, forceful, impressionistic, enriched with personal and political observation, this dialogue between early and later selves traces the development of the boy from Garvaghey to the figure in the cave, and reveals the workings of a fine poet's mind.

Leseprobe

THE FIGURE IN THE CAVE

AND OTHER ESSAYS

JOHN MONTAGUE

Editor ANTOINETTE QUINN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

The Figure in the Cave

I

1 Tyrone: The Rough Field

2 The War Years in Ulster

3 The Unpartitioned Intellect

4 Notes and Introductions

i A Primal Gaeltacht

ii I Also Had Music

iii A Note on Rhythm

iv Tides

v On Translating Irish, Without Speaking It

vi A Slow Dance

vii Poisoned Lands

viii The Rough Field

ix The Dead Kingdom

II

5 Oliver Goldsmith: The Sentimental Prophecy

6 William Carleton: The Fiery Gift

7 George Moore: The Tyranny of Memory

8 James Joyce: Work Your Progress

9 Samuel Beckett: Spoiled Hermit

10 In the Irish Grain

11 Louis MacNeice: Despair and Delight

12 Kinsella’s Clarke

13 Patrick Kavanagh: A Speech from the Dock

14 John Hewitt: Regionalism into Reconciliation

15 Hugh MacDiarmid: The Seamless Garment and the Muse

III

16 The Young Irish Writer and The Bell

17 Fellow Travelling with America

18 American Pegasus

19 John Berryman: Henry in Dublin

20 The Impact of International Modern Poetry on Irish Writing

Biographical Notes

Acknowledgments

Copyright

FOR MARK AND TOM

PREFACE

These essays have gone through several transformations. I always knew I would collect them; did John Jordan, that saint of McDaids, not once mischievously describe me as ‘a full-time prose man’? My papers are full of little title lists but since, for me, poetry always came first, in the intervals between earning a living, reviewing and lecturing, I never had the push left to make a definitive selection. Several people came to my aid: Thomas Dillon Redshaw assembled all my reviews in a massive effort to make me more systematic. If God is good, or if Redshaw becomes God, I will end up with as many volumes as Goldsmith, or Randall Jarrell. Then Mark Waelder made a selection which ended up on the dying Liam Miller’s desk, before it disappeared: all that is left of it is his chronology. Then, nearer home, Antoinette Quinn made her own rigorous but sensitive selection which you hold in your hands.

There is one general factor that colours these essays. Because of what Derek Mahon calls my mythical stammer there are few full-scale lectures here. I admire that discipline, the leap of the mind over the hurdles of a predetermined course, and have sat delighted as a Deane or Donoghue, an O’Brien or Brown, made the lecture rooms of UCD or TCD, or some Summer School, sparkle with ideas. But as the play of the mind, that Berkeleyan fountain, sank, I wondered often what was left, even for the lecturer. The fluency of the professional is shadowed by the anguished reticence of a Beckett or Wittgenstein, leaving the lecture room because they could not teach what they could not fully understand. In the myriad-minded Coleridge, the critic I most admire, confusion and coherence co-exist: no word is final except the always renewed text, which the critic should serve as enthusiastic mediator.

As for method, I cling to the old-fashioned notion that most of the best criticism is by writers, from Samuel Johnson to John Berryman: they know by training what they are talking about. Writers who are sure of their own gift can often show a warming generosity towards fellow craftsmen; what is regarded as envy is often dismay at disproportionate success, which fuels still further the paranoia of the neglected. It may be hard to realize it now, but when I was starting out all Irish poets were in a state of stunned isolation, except for Louis MacNeice.

So many of my earlier essays were strategic, attempts to get respected elders back into print, to recreate a fertile context. My publisher in the sixties was Timothy O’Keeffe, then with MacGibbon & Kee, and he accepted my case for a collected Hewitt, as well as embarking on a fraught attempt to assist the ageing Kavanagh. But not only Irish writers were invisible to the then British establishment: Tim also shared my admiration for another neglected elder genius, whom he affectionately nicknamed Red Hugh MacDiarmid. O’Keeffe was also aware of the transatlantic time-lag: ‘American Pegasus’ may seem obvious now, but despite the polemical anthology of Alvarez there was, and still is, little appreciation of the complexity of the American poetic adventure in this century. This, and other promptings, led him to remedy one great omission by publishing William Carlos Williams for the first time in England: another master of the idiom of the ordinary.

I am proud to be associated with the publication of these writers and salute the practical generosity of my English publisher. Meanwhile, back in Ireland, Liam Miller was working to make the later Clarke more widely known, also partly against his will. And he would assemble faulty but useful editions of Devlin and Fallon. I am glad that Irish poetry is now better understood, and given the grace of more leisure I would like to examine some of the themes that concern me most deeply, like the implications for the tradition of courtly love of our modern dispute between the sexes. What happens to the love poetry of Yeats and Graves when the Muse, the White Goddess, disdains her role? What can poetry say when history and politics are stained with violence, those ultra-modern techniques of disintegration and sudden death now so commonplace in Ulster? And I have still to do justice to that gentle prophet Oliver Goldsmith, who has become for me what Henry Adams was for R. P. Blackmur, an example and an albatross. I have already started a mosaic of praise to the fellow writers I have admired, amused glimpses of whom emerge through these pages; another LivesofthePoets?

THE FIGURE IN THE CAVE

Young men (young women) ask about my ‘roots’

As if I were a plant …

I can’t see it. Many are wanderers,

both Lawrences, Byron, & the better for it.

Many stay home forever: Hardy: fine.

Bother these bastards with their preconceptions…

I’d rather live in Venice or Kyoto,

except for the languages…

(John Berryman, ‘Roots’)

‘Withallmycirclingafailuretoreturn’: but to where? I was born in Brooklyn, St Catherine’s Hospital, Bushwick Avenue, in 1929, the year of the Depression. I returned there in the mid-1980s at the insistence of a journalist from Newsday; I feared to find the usual run-down brownstone. To my astonishment there was more left of the neighbourhood than of Garvaghey. Yes, there was the local cinema with its matinée of monsters and Mickey Mouse. The wooden Indian was gone but one cannot expect one’s childhood to be preserved, like a doll’s house; or a Montague museum. And yes, there was the library, steps upward to a wide room full of books with, wonder of wonders, some of my own! And when I climbed the steps to the platform of the old El, I instinctively reached for a larger, taller hand. The trains must have been more sedate in my day, not scrawled with graffiti like action paintings, but, as a sympathetic critic has suggested, ‘All Legendary Obstacles’ could only have been written by someone whose infancy was full of the rumble of trains; likewise ‘The Cage’ and ‘Last Journey’.

And my first church was not Garvaghey chapel, where most of the Montagues lie buried, but a big Brooklyn church built by the dimes of Irish emigrants at the turn of the century. In its font I was baptized, fidgeted through mass with my family, until the funeral of my godfather, John Montague, bootlegger and quondam bushleague gangster. My Aunt Freda declares I got it all wrong in ‘The Country Fiddler’ and that he would not be let off the boat in New York until he played a jig on the gang plank for the waiting crowd. I remember him as large-hatted, cheerful and kind, but I hear no music in the background. Instead the sound of many voices, sometimes quarrelling, the clink of glasses. And then the sounds die away because, without his help, we could not survive as a family. So my two elder brothers were sent home to the small town where they had been born, resuming their Fintona lives after only a five-year break in America. In Derry the children were shared out, and I went home with my aunt to become the last Montague, in the male line, to live in Garvaghey.

Garvaghey! I suppose that name is associated with mine, forever or nearly. I think of those few years from four to eleven as a blessing, a healing. My aunts wisely kept me at home for a year from school until I adapted to local ways, and no longer spoke of our Protestant neighbours, the Clarkes, as from the next block. I explored the mountain, roving farther and farther with my dogs, to the mass rock at Altamuskin where I stayed with Aunt Anne, or the endless slope of the Pole Hill, Slievemore, with its view as far as Monaghan. There was a hazel grove where the Lynchs and I cleared a secret meeting place and the little river where we guddled trout, bathed buck naked, raced or jumped in the meadow like the boy Fianna. When later I read the CollectedWordsworth of my Uncle Thomas, dated 1903, it all swam back. To visit Dove Cottage finally was like coming home to where another bewildered boy had lost and refound himself in nature, like an Indian brave.

Then there were my summer holidays with the O’Mearas in Abbeylara, County Longford: their father had courted my Aunt Mary when he taught in Rarogan School, before Ireland was divided. There the hills flattened and the rivers widened, flowing sluggishly from lake to lake. And instead of trout we caught pike and perch from the Reillys’ rowing boat. And there were village games: the tall echoing concrete of the ball alley, where the Widow Farrelly’s foxy-haired son sank butt after butt, and the pitch-and-toss school in the evenings where Padna Hyland cursed and cursed. Olenostalgiedupaysplat! I tried to pay homage to this drowned world in the second section of TheDeadKingdom which is also meant to be a homage to Oliver Goldsmith, country bumpkin andcosmopolitan. As well as an introduction to the strange ways of the South, the O’Mearas became my second family; there was a girl and boy nearly my own age whom I could love and quarrel with, as I could not with my distant, townie brothers. Flamboyant presents arrived to remind me of my American past, Red Indian outfits and cowboy chaps and Colts. And a pair of boxing gloves: I set up a gym in our barn where we pummelled each other and sparred with a swinging sack of grain. I date my love of boxing from then, the Billy Conn-Louis fight, the Reverend Henry Armstrong who held three titles, the two Sugar Rays, the bruised dignity of Tommy Farr or ‘Enry Cooper, who did so well against Cassius Clay. As Gerard Lynch said at my Aunt Freda’s wake: ‘If those gloves could talk –’

At the age of eleven I was sent to St Patrick’s, Armagh, partly to distinguish me from my brothers at Omagh CBS, partly because my aunts hoped I might follow the example of my Jesuit Uncle Thomas, or Cardinal MacRory from Shantavney, whose mother was a Montague. And religion did fascinate me; there were bibles as big as ledgers at home, my grandfather’s copies of books by Cardinals Manning and Wiseman. An altar boy, I might have been drugged by the incense, the glorious ritual that heightened our country lives, but something warned me off. Those five years in Armagh were the most cramped of my childhood; just as I was learning to play with the healthy girls of Glencull I was enclosed in the black chill of celibacy. True, there were glories; the cathedral bell chiming over our heads every quarter, the ceremonies of Holy Week; but I would have exchanged all the rituals of Rome for a kiss from a girl. Someday I will exorcise it enough to forget and forgive, but at the age of sixty, images from that little hell on the hill haunt me, too harsh for long contemplation. I know many of the priests of the Armagh diocese as friends, but some as school bullies. Bitterness is a negative emotion unless you can enlarge it to a macrocosm, like Dante, whom I still read against the grain because of my unease with the Roman version of our Western faith.

I am blessed, I think, with a resilient, basically optimistic spirit. Whatever about my earliest years, only twice has my resistance really sagged: when the barrenness of Yale afforded no lift to my already depressed state, coming from Ireland, and, again, when in my early fifties I had no longer the energy to transform the narrowness of academic strife in Cork with my own private sources of release. In both instances the sterile aspects of academia came to the fore because my comic zest had wavered. It was my sense of humour which saved me in Armagh, allied to a strong sense of purpose; I felt there had to be a way out of that frustration, the swish of the cane in the dean’s study, the priests patrolling the corridors at night, the endless walking around the Junior or Senior Ring. So when I was pressed on the question of vocation, the summumbonum, I felt I would first see if the world held any real attractions before renouncing it. Girls were constantly on my mind: I wrote long letters to a convent girl in Lurgan whom I had only met briefly on a train, but whose image loomed warmly in the chill air of St Vincent’s dormitory. And when I courted Maureen Canavan after a feis in Ballygawley, kissing and fondling on a low bridge opposite the RUC barracks, I had material for endless letters, praising her small ears, the cloud of her fair hair. We met all that summer after college was ended, but as my stammer came back I let our relationship drift.

That last year of the war, however, brought a growing sense of release. Going to the speech therapist in Belfast once a week, which also meant a film before I caught the last train home, prepared me for a city again though I was never to know Belfast in the way I would know Dublin. The elation of speaking in debate, if only for a few months; the excitement of the first All-Ireland College championships; swooning over stars I saw in the films I escaped downtown to revel in – Betty Grable, whose legs were insured for a million dollars, Joan Leslie in HollywoodCanteen– a fascination connected with a sense of my lost life in America, and which probably led to my first job as film critic of TheStandard.

So to Dublin in 1946, thirty years after 1916. My eldest brother Seamus, who had been a medical student there, following my uncle Frank Carney, was very persuasive in our Fintona family conference. While I thought of becoming a civil engineer, slide rule and all, it had become obvious that my talents were literary. And Dublin was where the newspapers were, and the Abbey Theatre. If I thought about writing it was to be a journalist, or a best-selling novelist like A. J. Cronin or Maurice Walsh: TheKeysoftheKingdom/AbovetheDoor was about my level, although I had tried to read in the Russian novel. And poetry was something on exam papers, where it would remain until I met my poet contemporaries.

I travelled to Dublin by stages, the last being by train from a station near Abbeylara. Or was it a long-distance bus coming from Granard? I think it was the latter, but in any case Uncle John O’Meara left us off at the stop about two miles away. Us, because Aunt Freda came with me, and delivered me to Mrs Crinion’s door at Chelmsford Road, Ranelagh. Perhaps the vision of Aunt Freda, a solid woman of her own age, endeared me to the corseted bulk of Mrs Crinion, but now I had my share of a little room upstairs, with a view of the yard and a cold-water washbasin to wash in in the mornings. I shared with a medical student called MacCaughey from the Barr Mountain outside Fintona, who was nearly as naïve as myself, though in his Second Year. He had come over to see us in Fintona to enquire if he could share with me, Mrs Crinion’s being already known to us through my elder brother Seamus. It meant I had a companion from not too far away in the North, from what had now become my second home.

For although Freda travelled up with me to Dublin, and managed a few days’ holidays, including an evening at the Theatre Royal, Babs de Monte and the Royalettes, Ted Heath and his Big Band blasting, I was moving away from the fields of Garvaghey. My mother sent a Northern Bank cheque for my board each week, plus a little pocket money, and I spent most of my holidays with her, for Fintona had a billiards room and a dancehall, some companions nearer my own age. And it was that adolescent world I was seeking now, determined to enjoy myself after the restrictions of Armagh. While I found university life daunting, and a little depressing, there was the wider world of Dublin outside, on a far larger scale than Fintona and Omagh. At long last I might find some pleasure, some adventure, and although I had found few companions at the university in my classes, there was the anonymity of the city to lose myself in, slaking my thirst for romance in the artificial light of dancehalls and cinemas.

I made few friends because, socially, I was at a complete loss: there was no link between St Patrick’s, Armagh, and where I now found myself. If I had gone to Belfast there would have been some fellow Armagh students at Queens, and others dotted through the city like John Kennedy, whose father was a bookie, but there was less than nobody in Dublin. I found my own lonely paths, accompanied by a boy from Derry, who also had a stammer, or a nervous hesitation, though much less drastic than mine. Self-absorbed, I skulked from classroom to library, watching the girls, waiting for the release of the evenings, when I would wander the melancholy, foggy streets.

My problem with my southern contemporaries was that they all knew the ins and outs of their little society, had homes to go to, if they were from Dublin, had already had their future paths drafted and discussed by parents. They were the sons and daughters of the first middle class of the Irish Free State, already affiliated by birth to one or other of the major parties, Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. It could have been Tweedledum or Tweedledee as far as I was concerned; elections were distant things for us in the North, all the more because of the War which had dwarfed local party politics, which in any case were simple. We were Nationalists, they were Unionists, and cars called to bring all the electors to the polling booths. I was so ignorant that I did not know that the Treaty Debates had taken place in one of the double lecture rooms of Earlsfort Terrace, and no-one bothered to explain their significance to me. Among my classmates, Donal Barrington was already on his way to becoming a brilliant lawyer. Commerce students like Brian Lenihan and Charles Haughey were heading towards politics. I knew nothing of where they came from, Belvedere, Clongowes or Rockwell, so how could I know where they were going?

More mystifying to me than their certainty was the negative gloom of those who did not want to belong, who had seceded inwardly from the values of the state. Anthony Cronin was their leader, a brilliant orator from Enniscorthy, who could hold the L. and H., or Literary and Historical Society, spellbound with his speech on ‘Jem’ Larkin, the final touch a red rose solemnly laid before him. With his cronies he drank in the bars near college, Dwyers and Hartigans, and the Green Bar. He was joined by Pearse Hutchinson, already a published poet, and by his contemporary, a year younger, John Jordan, also from Rathmines. Most of the intellectuals came from the less grand schools, especially Synge Street in Dublin.

They bothered me because I thought I was an intellectual myself, with my good marks in English and History, and my furious reading from books bought cheaply on the quays where I searched the book barrows. And to my surprise I had got a first in nearly everything in my First Year, which I immediately attributed to my genius and not to the better schooling I had received in the North. But these Guinness-swilling, lecture-avoiding, gambling layabouts seemed to know something which I did not, something which the brighter girls, who were often the more pretty, appreciated. They controlled TheNationalStudent, the student magazine which had fostered so many Irish writers, back to James Joyce. They had the swaggering arrogance of a clique to which I, a star student, had no claim; that their comradeship was based on a social anger and genuine hurt was something it would take me years to understand, although I carried an even more potent variant in myself. Their bible was ThePortraitoftheArtist, their avatar and hero James Joyce, whose work would shortly have its cathartic effect on me as well.

It was near the end of my first year, I think, when I attended a meeting of the English Literature Society. Although I resented the presence of the enemy, who controlled it, I could not but be fascinated by the atmosphere. There, one of our future diplomats, Brendan Dillon, gave a paper on ThePortrait which stirred me so strangely that I went and bought the book. For someone of my background who had suffered through a strict Catholic upbringing, it was like a case study of my own little psyche. Now at last I had been shown what was wrong with me, what was wrong with us, with our country. The process of independent thinking had now taken root, and the danger of arrogant solipsism.

I have already commented on this period in my preface to the revised PoisonedLands, and indirectly in my fictional memoir TheLostNotebook. Growing more distrustful of academic success, I slowly acceded to the ranks of the alienated, the wild ones. So while I was not always at ease with my contemporaries, I am grateful to them for their embodiment of the importance of poetry. Tony Cronin’s zeal brought me to Auden, while Hutchinson was a walking library already fluent in several languages. At an Arts Ball in the Metropole Jordan rebuked me for my levity: ‘In the atomic age, John, youth is no longer light-hearted.’ The shrillness of Envoy, the slow sinking of the second version of TheBell, became part of a melancholy period in Irish letters when we experienced what Cronin called ‘the infinite bitterness of being young’, insular existentialists isolated in a post-War world.

Was such negative gloom necessary? I wish it had been easier, and comfort myself that frustration when young may stoke a later head of steam. And did (future Bishop) Frank Lenny not spot the change in me? ‘I hear you have discovered your vocation’: not priest, but poet.

I tackled Cronin about what seemed to me his harsh view of things, and he answered disarmingly that it was because he was so defenceless. Helping to bring Kavanagh back into the limelight, a process which ended in his legal crucifixion, left little time for anyone infected with the Irish thing, like Clarke, whom I also found fascinating. Had he not read me out on Radio Éireann, poems subsequently published in the old-world DublinMagazine? After three years’ flight I finally found, with Kinsella and Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press, a working relationship based on the thrust of common ideals. Liam especially had a rich generosity which transformed work into adventure: he seemed not to have a mean bone in his body. And if Tom now looks like an Assyrian king, then he was devastatingly funny, hard-working but hilarious, sharing my distaste for those who had prematurely baptized themselves as poets, ‘the knowingness of them’.

I think I now understand why FormsofExile (1958) took so long to crystallize when young poets nowadays are ‘exploding like bombs’ (to use Auden’s brilliant but dubious phrase). There was too much of a backlog of confusion for an early start: Brooklyn-born, Tyrone-reared, Dublin-educated, constituted a tangle, a turmoil of contradictory allegiance it would take a lifetime to unravel. And the chaos within contrasted with the false calm without: Ireland, both North and South, then seemed to me ‘a fen of stagnant waters’. And there was no tradition for someone of my background to work in; except for the ahistorical genius of Kavanagh, just across the border, there had not been a poet of Ulster Catholic background since the Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century. So when I describe myself as ‘the missing link of Ulster poetry’ I am not only joking, for, hard as it may be to understand today, there was no Northern dimension to Irish literature then, no question of going to Belfast for someone like myself, when even to get a little bourse to finish TheRoughField took nearly half a decade. I made a dutiful call on John Hewitt, but he was as ill at ease as if I had come from Mars, which was what West of the Bann was for even literary Belfast. My southern contemporaries were just as uncomprehending: I remember a sly comment in TheIrishTimes that reading my essay on Carleton, after the book by Benedict Kiely and a BBC blast by Kavanagh, gave the critic the uneasy feeling of being followed around by ‘wee men’. Were the northerners going to become as clannish as the Corkmen? Even a friendly father-figure like O’Faolain found my northern twang a little ludicrous.

Austin Clarke rang me up, however, when he read ‘The Sean Bhean Bhocht’, recognizing that I had come home to base, begun to speak of the people I had grown up with in Tyrone, who had never before achieved the dignity of verse. But that was a complicated legacy and there was no point in my pretending either that I was going to stay down on the farm, or that farming was not doomed as a natural way of life. Aunt Freda dated my acceptance of Garvaghey from the day I raced home, late and breathless, saying I had been ‘kepping’ the cows, who had taken fright because somebody ‘coped’ a cart. I love the rhythms of speech, the northern which gives us access to Scottish literature, from Dunbar to MacDiarmid, the flattened vowels of the midlands which toll through the melancholy of TheDesertedVillage, the deflating Dublin dryness of a Kinsella or Behan, the extravagance of Munster speech with its Irish base, rolling as the French spoken around me here in what used to be Languedoc. Only the West has not spoken to me.

It is surely time that someone came out against Kavanagh’s narrowing notion of parochialism. Garvaghey gave me a glimpse of the old agricultural pattern but I am not going to lie and say that life is going on: I have watched my neighbours live through an agricultural revolution as drastic as the Enclosure Acts. There are local pieties, of course: the children of Glencull School did a video on me, and I am the laureate also of Abbeylara and receive many little tokens from Longford. And when I pass through New York I stay in Brooklyn, and the friends gather. Any place where you have lived, loved and suffered is your parish, as Pembroke Road was for P.K., or Herbert Street for myself. Heaney and I still have family homes in the North to which we can dander back for family occasions, but it is hard to think of Belfast as a parish, especially since no-one has put it on the map, as Joyce did for Dublin. Belfast is of interest as a microcosm of the tensions that rack the end of our century, the wall between the Shankill and Falls a miniature of the Berlin Wall, its sectarian strife a simpler chart to read than Beirut, the pastor Paisley a Protestant version of the Ayatollah. We are caught in a blind alley of history, and while one can appreciate the high comedy of urban intellectuals discussing the poetic equivalent of the old Abbey’s peasant quality, it is a cop-out from the complications involved; a roots racket. Let me be more specific.

The only one of my books so far that has been a complete flop is AChosenLight and I now find that historically interesting. My first wife had moved me back to Paris in 1961, and while I was, as always, entranced by the city, and found my stories were going well although no one wished to print them for large sums, I worried a little about the poetry. I showed her a sequence, overlapping with PoisonedLands, when she asked how the work was going. She read the sheaf, and handed them back to me, without a word. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, ‘are they bad?’ She hesitated: ‘Do you really want to know?’ I nodded. ‘Of course they’re good: you will always have style, but none of you will ever be able to write about the country the way Kavanagh did; he lived it! Besides, there has been enough cowdung in Irish poetry. Why don’t you write about something you’re living with?’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Likeme!’ she said, putting her hands on her bosom, so to speak.

The sequence, ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, opened my next book, the poems she read are in the second section. The irony is that I was editing the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh in the background, and clearing the way for a vision of the rooted poet to replace that of Yeats. Meanwhile TheRoughField was also being ploughed or excavated, a cross-fertilization between the longer Irish poems I admired, from TheDesertedVillage to TheGreatHunger, and my fascination with modern experimental poetry, from Pound to the ‘field theory’ propounded by poets as diverse as Duncan, Snyder and Olson; Duncan had followed the discussions of the physicists who were the real pride of Berkeley. But my subject matter kept me on course: I sleep-walked through TheRoughField like a medium transcribing a familial and, by extension, tribal message, keeping faith with the burden of that vision for a decade. Where did it come from, why should I be the chronicler of what happened the lost intentions of the O’Neills? In my foster home at Garvaghey, as well as the family Wordsworth there was a large green volume on the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell and although, like Umberto Eco and the reconstructed medieval version of Aristotle’s Comedy in his library, I can’t remember reading it, it must have crossed my little beaver path.

There was also a copy of Moore’s Melodies, signed by my grandfather and godfather. Who were these John (Mon)tagues? Every time I stir a genealogical stone a wild ambiguity appears. A cousin writes from the Mint in Washington, disappointed to discover that we were all Tagues, and I remember Aunt Brigid speaking with a rare fury, because I had brought back word from Altcloghfin ‘to tell Biddy Tague I was asking for her’ – ‘nevercallmethatagain,’ she cried. I have played upon our change of name and am delighted that in the original Irish taidgh means ‘son of the philosopher, poet or fool’: I claim all three. But like the poet/genealogist of an old Gaelic family, another cousin stalks me after public readings in the North, triumphantly producing an old volume. ‘I have the family history worked out,’ he says: ‘the Duke of Manchester had two sons who fought on opposite sides at the Boyne. Sir James of Cloghfin Castle was pardoned because of his brother William, and he took an Irish name, Tague.’ Barney Horish, my guide to the lore of Garvaghey and now a gentle eighty-six year-old, partly goes along with this and, like Yeats sighing to be Duke of Ormond, I enjoy the idea, although Cousin Tommy’s ultimate proof lacks historical weight. ‘Look at the Montagues,’ he says, ‘the men never did a tap of work; they let the women do it for them, and lay back reading and talking and drinking, like lords.’ True enough, in the parish of Errigal Kieran the Tagues are famous for the ‘larnin’; known in Altamuskin as ‘the raving Tagues’, they have produced a long line of distinguished clergymen and finally, a class of a poet.

But what of Michel de Montaigne, whose tower is just across the way from where I write and with whom I share a birthday, and probably a character? My pull towards France manifested itself as early as 1948 when I cycled with a copy of Rimbaud in my knapsack from the battlefields of northern France to the Côte d’Azur. In that dance of choice and chance that constitutes a life it was the first decision which I took completely on my own, without knowing why. Brooklyn and Tyrone were chosen for me, Armagh and Dublin as well, although there I had begun to play my part. But in that first and many subsequent journeys I have rarely been disappointed, especially in the way each region has its own quality, tangy as a cheese, or the aroma of a great wine. Their controlled hedonism, their care for the earth that nourishes them, heartens me, although Paris and even French country life is changing. And their rich poetry has run underground, away from its audience, a far cry from the days when Éluard and Aragon were public figures.

Uncompleted tasks fascinate an author as much or more than his achievement. Will I be able to weave all my French translations together? What patterns will my love poems finally form? Both my wives were French, and my two daughters are bilingual, tri-if you include their Munster Irish. So I feel a natural affinity with the French attitude towards love which goes back to our poetic ancestors, the troubadours, and combines the ideal with the practical. Has my sense of experiment exhausted itself (MountEagle is full of sonnets)? In my files is a wilder, more sprawling version of TheRoughField. There is an ode to the Moon, and when the astronauts land there they find Johnny Danaghy sitting telling stories. My father reappears as a La Tène warrior, and David Jones mourns over these islands, and so on, with everything assumed into a final vision from Slievemore.

This is an age of self consciousness, raised to the level of art in Pal Bellow’s (to use Berryman’s affectionate term) novels such as Herzog and Sammler’sPlanet. There the confusion between author and main character, between fiction and autobiography, is part of the charm, for why should a writer abandon his hard-won views in a world where all seek direction? And few of us have refused the ritual exposure of the interview which, like the public reading, is part of publishing. Indeed, in a comic but also frightening way, appearance on television has become the necessary accolade, endorsing the public image of Behan as a drunk, Kavanagh as a sage, when the reverse was also possible. Even a literary Garbo like Samuel Beckett confesses shyly to having a TV, but ‘only for the games, of course, and only when Ireland was playing’. And if such rigour is impossible I, for one, would not begrudge my old companion a re-run of one of the comedies he loves and which he cannot easily slip in to see in a public salle.

There is a natural hesitancy about disclosing the hiding places of one’s power, but after sixty one is conscious of certain patterns, the figure in the cave, to echo late James. Why do stones mean so much to me? It was after visiting the grottoes of the Dordogne that I began my Mexican fantasy, ‘Death of a Chieftain’: I was there recently and the sensual thrill of entering the earth still vibrates. On the walls of Cougnac, as little known as Seskilgreen, there were drawings of mammoths and elks which strangely resemble Barrie Cooke’s cover etching for MountEagle. I sat in a flooded bar as our ship toiled through The Devil’s Hole off Cornwall and translated Guillevic’s long poem in short stanzas on Carnac where he was born. The green waters heaved outside, but that is a rhythm that speaks to me as well: I wrote ‘Like Dolmens’ watching Kenmare Bay, ‘The Trout’ after a morning looking into the Dordogne, ‘The Well Dreams’ where? Bury me under a standing-stone beside a well or spring, with a fish, trout or salmon icythus cut in the stone. Meanwhile a bird circles overhead, an eagle with a lark on its back? I accept the Celtic/Hindu idea of natural rhythms. I accept the North American Indian notion that God speaks through nature, the oldest values in the world as Snyder says in EarthHousehold; which we violate wholesale.

Thus music means much to me; the structure of TheRoughField reflects years of debate with O Riada, and my experience as a founding director of Claddagh. Old Irish music threads through the poem but there are also parlour songs, the silvery sound of the papal count which soothed our post-Treaty limbo land, drifting through TheDeadKingdom. But the larger units there are a homage to the symphonic structures of late nineteenth-century music, Brahms and Mahler, Bruckner’s Eighth where the mountains seem to dance. I like the mathematical mind of the composer, believe they are born with a sense of the essential harmonies which is gradually drowned by the cacaphony of our world. There is perhaps a sticking-point there. I admire the researches of Boulez or Gerald Barry but the most accessible modern music is jazz in its many forms: the old bump and grind routine of Calumet City, the throb of the big instrument of Mingus in the Black Hawk in San Francisco, the cool alto sax of Paul Desmond, the jagged edge of Black Panther jazz, the classical training of Wynton Marsalis. I am delighted that Cork is now venue for one of the great jazz festivals where I can listen to sounds familiar from New York’s Blue Note or Ronnie Scott’s. Put a drink by my side, turn the lights down and that music up –

Some writers can pass in this world, the mighty blues rhythms of Canadian poet Barry Callaghan, William Kennedy in his films and novels, the purist canon of Larkin; nearer home, Longley and Simmons, the mind-blowing of Durcan and Muldoon. Music has many modes: in my northern home I watched my cousin John, an almost Russian baritone, breaking the family piano with a hatchet. The strangled jangle of chords might have impressed Arche Shepp, or John Cage. Perhaps we are too fixed in our ideas of form and sound when Moore shows that everything has a shape, Messiaen that everything has a sound.

Artists can be great company; and I am not just thinking of my wife’s glowing mandalas. I got to know Morris Graves and Barrie Cooke in the Ireland of the early sixties; a nature-worshipping Zen monk from Fox Valley, Oregon, and a Jamaican-English hunter and fisherman. I couldn’t afford Morris, but the first work I bought was a wonderful watercolour of two trout by Cooke, and then I didn’t even know the sign I was born under! Their works have surrounded me since; there is a room in Grattan Hill dedicated to Hayter’s vision of the universe as a net of energies, a vision coinciding with mine. Because of the physicality of their discipline, outings with them tend to be abundant and varied. A day with Cooke on the Nore haunts me with such richness. After sliding down the mill-race at forty miles an hour he was calling for me to help net a salmon when I saw a swan sailing down a branch of that great river, while a mother waterhen ushered her brood across into the swan’s path. The salmon leaped, Cooke cursed, the valiant mother hen set off, a tiny feathery missile, to ward off the mighty bird. The rhythms were as glorious in their simplicity and complexity as a great sporting match, a driving jazz session, the Mozart concerto I am listening to on FranceMusique. When the veil lifts, of pain or misunderstanding, I catch glimpses of unity, a rich harmony that manages to accommodate disturbance, discord.

All this I seem to have been early aware of. I once wrote a playful variation on the usual child riddle:

Who has a father, but is fatherless?

Who has a mother, but is motherless?

Who has brothers, but no family?

Myself, of course; losing a family and a country in one sweep must not have been easy, although for long I suppressed my earlier memories. The first proposition is probably at the root of my veneration for older writers of genius. I lost my letter of introduction to Ezra Pound in St Elizabeth’s and did not feel confident enough to call on Wallace Stevens at Hartford, but the year at Yale was very confused and lonely. I later sought out MacDiarmid, Robert Graves, David Jones, and already knew Austin Clarke – four masters concerned with the matter of these islands. Graves was also writing in a tradition of love poetry going back to the amourcourtois which began here in the valley of the Dordogne, a tradition in which I also inscribe myself, with modern hesitations. But I was always fond of my literary fathers, in verse and prose, and they have usually returned the compliment. In helping to get Kavanagh and Hewitt back into print I was also trying to recreate a context in which Irish poetry could flourish naturally once again

The second proposition is at the heart of TheDeadKingdom, and probably most of my love poetry. The last has influenced my sense of literary comradeship: I like the French idea of a fertile literary community and would not wish anyone to go through what I endured as a young writer. The unselfish generosity of our great father figure, Yeats, seems to me an ideal that has been temporarily lost, but would Irish writing have world-wide respect but for him, serving as focus for both activity and reaction? From TheDolmenMiscellanyofIrishWriting (1961) through my 1974 Faber anthology to BitterHarvest (1989), the Scribners anthology, I have tried to present the best of my contemporaries. It is in this context that I find the element of self-seeking in the northern thing depressingly close to Ulsterkampf, when our giant forbears, Yeats and Joyce, have given us the freedom of the world.

And outside Ireland I belong to several interlocking groups of writers, quite naturally, the Irish branch, so to speak. I worked with the highly disciplined Snyder in Berkeley and at the weekends would ride pillion on his motorbike across the Bay Bridge into North Beach for a rich time of relaxation and reading. In Gian Carlo’s, the San Francisco MacDaids, you might meet Jack Spicer, one of the first to cross linguistics and poetry, while Robert Duncan came sailing by in his Yeatsian cloak, his cast eye in a fine frenzy rolling. Was it luck or destiny that I walked in on a scene where poetry was briefly centre stage, with electric public readings, often with music, jazz or Country Joe and the Fish. Robert had just published his great trilogy, TheOpeningoftheField,RootsandBranches and TheBendingoftheBow, and his broodings on the neglected H.D. were ramifying into eternity. How curious it was to have gone as far as San Francisco to find someone who believed in magic like Yeats, and who persisted in the great romantic vision of Blake and Shelley!

Compared to the Mountain-Red and marijuana-fuelled readings in the Bay Area, Paris has always taken poetry with mandarin concern. I find it strange that the flowering of French poetry in the twentieth century, with masters like Jouve, Char, Ponge, Michaux, Perse, has not been appreciated: a real anthology of modern French poetry would be staggering in its range. Again, I have been lucky in my contemporaries, beginning with Esteban who lived just across the way from me in the rue Daguerre. I have translated many of them but they have repaid the compliment handsomely with a selected poems in French for my sixtieth birthday, translated by six poets. There is also a splendid selection from Bordeaux produced by a poet/publisher who calls himself William Blake & Co. If there are very few English among my friends it is, alas, because of the Little Englandism of the Amis generation. I have shared interests with Tomlinson, sparred with Davie, and feel I understand Hughes, but not since Auden has there been a talent which deploys the resources of the great English tradition which I once learnt, and now teach and read with passion.

An astonishing and heartening development is the way the American dimension is being restored to my life in my later years. If, as some psychiatrists argue, it is the first three years that are crucial, then a lot must have already happened to me before I was sent, following an old Tyrone tradition, into fosterage. I came upon a cache of letters once, dealing with those Depression years, written from Brooklyn by my Uncle John: it was a rough time. An old tabloid clipping describes how the family were rescued from being gassed by my eldest brother Seamus, coming home from school: the baby is described as still chortling in its cot. I have no doubt that the separation from my mother, whatever the reasons for the decision, is at the centre of my emotional life, affecting my relationships with women, shadowing my powers of speech: my stammer broke out for the first time after she returned to Ireland. But though to understand, however dimly, is to begin to forgive, a writer should not forget, and my American past keeps surfacing. A journalist in the HeraldTribune turns pale on meeting me in a Paris bookshop; his father worked with mine on the New York subway, would cover for him when he went on the tear, rescue him, scoop him up, bring the Brooklyn equivalent of the wheel-barrow. ‘My mother was terrified of Jim’s late night phone calls,’ said Charley Monaghan.

Brooklyn is dotted with people who share aspects of my early experience, including a poet Charles Martin, and I have always read people like Whitman and Crane with grateful recognition. And with American poets, like those I met in Iowa in the halcyon days of the Workshop, from Berryman to Dickey and Snodgrass, or much later in the releasing freedom of San Francisco in the sixties, with Snyder and Duncan and MacClure, I have always felt a strong sense of kinship, the shared adventure of modern literature, to which Ireland has contributed so much as well. And yet I have been reluctant to stay there until now, taking the greenbacks without plumbing the responsibility involved. In 1956 I was stunned to see the Joyce manuscripts and portraits in Buffalo; now mine will be going to join them, as well as those of Graves, Dylan Thomas, and my dead friend Duncan: what more can I ask? With my first doctorate from SUNY followed by a reception from both houses of the New York State legislature, destiny seems to have decided to give me back my lost childhood in America just as my Tyrone background is being destroyed by bulldozer and bomb. Ballygawley is now as black a name as the South Bronx or Brooklyn.

It is like a fairy-tale, the little child who was sent away being received back with open arms. But while awed at the reappearance of this golden cradle to rock my dotage, I am grateful to have explored Ireland so intimately. Standing-stones and streams are not part of Brooklyn, nor are cailleachs. To judge by my contemporaries I would probably have been a writer, certainly a journalist, had I stayed in America. But who cut the long wound of poetry into my youth? Was it my mother who chose for her own good reasons to cast me off? She could have recuperated me when she returned, and I would have become as much a part of the fabric of northern life as my brothers in Fermanagh and Tyrone. But that would have been against my father’s wish and I might never have really known the streaming hair of Aunt Brigid, praying nightly for us all? Or was it the strange figure whom everybody feared as a witch, but with whom I forged a real friendship? Speaking of my aunts she said, with a nearly Scottish burr: ‘They’re trying to teach the wee boy to be a gentleman, like his grandfather, but where will that get him?’ Women are everywhere in my work, healing and harassing presences, the other half of an equation one spends a lifetime trying to solve. I have been trying to put my love poems together and am daunted by the complexity of responses involved, from old woman to girl child.

Fragments of confession is a Goethean formula, and I approach my future with the energy of gratitude: what were once obstacles are becoming miracles, and after years of ploughing rough ground I might be allowed a period of harvesting. For a rearing can be too drastic, despite Kavanagh’s theory about all art being ‘life squeezed through a repression’. There was a time, seeking through the strange volumes scattered around Garvaghey, that I identified with the child martyrs, knives plunged in their proffered breasts. Henri Michaux describes how his imaginary tribe, Les Hacs, rear their artists ‘in an atmosphere of terror and mystery… the Hacs have arranged to rear every year a few child martyrs, whom they subject to harsh treatment and evident injustices’. That dolorous discord, that forlorn note, still calls but something sustained me through those harsh, uncomprehending years. My amphibian position between North and South, my natural complicity in three cultures, American, Irish and French, with darts aside to Mexico, India, Italy or Canada, should seem natural enough in the late-twentieth century as man strives to reconcile local allegiances with the absolute necessity of developing a world consciousness to save us from the abyss. Earthed in Ireland, at ease in the world, weave the strands you’re given.

It has been a golden autumn in Mauriac, the hamlet near St Emilion where we now spend most of our holidays when we are not in West Cork. The vendange, or harvest of the grape, is in progress, and great machines lumber between the rows of vines. It is a far cry from when I nearly passed out with the heat as I and my Derry friend snipped the champagne fruit. We worked all day and danced at the cafe in the evenings: now there is only one organized Fête, but a neighbour will pass in the evening with a basket of grapes and at the weekend we gather to taste the first fermentation. I feel at home here as I did in Garvaghey during the War years when I helped to work the farm, potatoes, bog, hay and corn. A neighbour passing in his tractor, a Massey-Ferguson, salutes me at my desk under the lime tree. His lifted hand could be the same salute as the new farmers in West Cork give me while I work in the garden of Letter Cottage: modern farming is as mechanized as warfare. But the mixture of respect and complicity in his greeting represents what I love in France, where to be an artist is only an extension of the normal: ‘Bonjour, maître,çamarche,leboulot?’

I

1

TYRONE: THE ROUGH FIELD

The parish in which I was brought up lies in Tyrone, which a Belfast poet (John Hewitt) once called ‘the heart land of Ulster’. A seventeenth-century survey, on the other hand, describes it as ‘cold mountainous land’, which may explain why it escaped resettling at the time of the Plantation. Across the road from our house were the crumbling remains of stables, a halt on the old Dublin-Derry coach road. And with its largely Catholic population (MacRory, MacGirr, Farrell, Tague), Errigal Kieran could still be taken for a parish in southern Ireland, artificially marooned. Most of the place-names were pure Gaelic: Garvaghey (The Rough Field), Glencull (The Glen of the Hazels), Clogher (The Golden Stone). On a clear day, working at turf on the top mountain, one could see straight down to north Monaghan.

But there were defiant differences. The post-van which came down the road was royal-red, with a gold crown on each side. And the postman himself was an ex-Serviceman who remembered Ypres and the Somme, rather than 1916 or the eighteenth day of November. In school we learnt the chief industries of Manchester, but very little about Cuchulainn or Connemara. And none of the farmers had enough Gaelic to translate the names of the townlands. A dark-faced fanatical priest tried to teach us some after school hours. I thought him a fearsome bore until I greeted the last Gaelic speaker in the area after mass one Sunday, and saw the light flood across her face.

The ordinary life of the people, however, took little stock of racial or religious differences; they were submerged in a preindustrial farming pattern, where the chief criterion was ‘neighbourliness’. True, there were social differences which betrayed the historical cleavage. The depressed class of farm labourers were largely Catholic, just as the majority of the stronger farmers were Protestant. There were also the sexual fantasies which emerge when, as in the American South, two cultures rub uneasily together. Pedigree bulls were mainly owned by Protestants: indeed, there was a curious legend that Catholic bulls were rarely as potent. And when I went to fetch the local gelder for our young bulls, it seemed oddly appropriate that he should take down his cloth-covered weapon from beside a stack of black family bibles.

But in the seasonal tasks that pushed the wheel of the year the important thing was skill, based on traditional practice. Turf-cutting, which began in late spring, revealed all the instinctive layers of a craft. First there was the stripping of the bank, the rough sods being saved for the back of the fire. Then the three-man team moved in, one to cut (using the traditional slane or flanged spade), one to fill (grasping the wet turves in rows) and one to wheel (emptying the barrow sideways, so that the turf fell uncrushed, but open to the sun). At mealtime, they sat around the basket in a circle, their hobnailed boots shining with wet, and talked of turfing teams of the past. ‘John Donnelly and his two sons were the best team ever seen round here. They could go through a bank like butter.’