Sometimes into a working-class family, a little prince is born. Derek Mahon was the only son of a fitter in a Belfast shipyard, but he was from the start “a strange child with a taste for verse” (for other refinements too). When a choirboy, “the hymnology invaded the mind”. An orderly procession of rhymed stanzas became second nature to him.
He loved making poems out of paintings (by Edvard Munch, Pieter de Hooch, Paolo Uccello and so on) and, almost as much, out of biographies. One of his procedures was to read the life of, say, Schopenhauer, and then, as if flipping through old photographs, look back on the life, before his own marmoreal closing words.
In middle age, tempted, he thought a biography of himself would be pleasant, like being a witness at his own wake. However, as the publication date approached, he became horrified. How terrible for his life to be reduced to someone else’s words! Like dying while still alive.
Part of his horror was that there was no way to hide the fact that, in basic ways, he had made a mess of his life. Drink got the better of him, and all that comes with it: disorder, debt, divorce, despair.
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Somehow, he kept the ability to write wonderful poems even in periods of desperation. The lyric that buoyed so many during the pandemic, Everything Is Going to be All Right, was written when everything was going wrong. He was drying out in John Montague’s attic bedroom, looked after by Evelyn Montague. Yet he had some magical resource by which he turned rock bottom into a trampoline. Singing line laid upon singing line lifted him right up. Great darkness could be taken into the work, and there be made to glitter with starlight.
The 18 contributors to this collection of essays bring the poetry alive, not that there was a danger of it being forgotten. Throughout the volume, the level of respect for the author is apparent in the meticulous scholarship. The late Gerald Dawe takes us on an illuminating tour of Mahon’s Belfast. Lucy McDiarmid tracks the circuits of the poet in Manhattan in the 1990s (and makes manifest the coherence of The Hudson Letter). Relationships with music, painting, politics, class, and French and American poetries are each illuminated by people with true expertise.
He is always good, and the more Mahon the better, but it’s possible the best came first. That seems the general opinion
The Trinity College Dublin conference from which this book arose was a warm occasion. Mahon’s college contemporaries were there – Terence Brown, Michael Longley, and Edna Broderick (later Mrs Longley). One of the editors, Nicholas Grene, is the brother of Mahon’s college friend Ruth Grene. Alas, on the day there was no Brendan Kennelly. As for Eavan Boland, while not present at the conference, she does appear in the book in the form of an essay by Catriona Clutterbuck. It is remarkable how many modern Irish poets – and some marquee names of the subsequent Ulster Renaissance – were in Dublin in the pre-Troubles 1960s, and at TCD.
One had to rejoice at the personal contentment Mahon found during his last decades. Six collections of new poems came out of his final harbour in Kinsale. He is always good, and the more Mahon the better, but it’s possible the best came first. That seems the general opinion. I join those who like the “decadent” verse letters of the 1990s, but Edna Longley thinks the work went downhill after 1982. About his final updating of the early books for The Poems (1951-2020), she is severe: he “perpetrat[ed] routine self-harm in the name of correction”. “He translates himself into prose.” Those who have his first editions should hang on to them.
The contributors make one aware of the various sides of the poet’s character. He wrote often out of loneliness, and at other times, poems radiate affability. He readily fell into nostalgia but could also face the facts. He revelled in junk but had a rage for order. He could be standoffish but more usually was good-natured and good fun. He was alive in all these ways not just as a person but in his work.
With a “beloved presence” in Kinsale (Sarah Iremonger attended the conference too), he was aware of his final good fortune, even if “grumpy, contrarian, and out of reach”. Having recovered his inner Ecclesiastes, he seems happy while lyrically raging about consumer capitalism. His defences of the planet against the human species made an honourable use of his gift.
A final anecdote: after a conversation on the prom in Salthill, Co Galway, around the time of the Belfast Agreement, he gloomily surveyed the architectural blight, then muttered that he had just thought of a good use for those weapons in the IRA’s arms dumps. Not just a genius, but a very droll character.
Adrian Frazier’s latest book is John Montague: A Poet’s Life (Lilliput)
