REDEEMING PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE:

JOHN MONTAGUE'S TEXT AND TRADITION

1949 - 1989

By CAROLYN MARGARET MEYER, B.A., M.A.

Q A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University October 1990 JOHN MONTAGUE: REDEEMING PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (1990) McMASTER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Or.tario

TITLE: Redeeming Patterns of Experience: John Montague's Text and Tradition.

AUTHOR: Carolyn H. Heyer, B.A. (University of Toronto)

'I.A. (University of Toronto)

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Brian John

NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 324

11 ABSTRACT

The informing and animating principle behind John Montague's critical, editorial, and creative agenda has !Jeen his unremitting search for "redeeming patterns of experience." As a Northern poet coming of age in Dublin at mid-century and bearing witness to both the Republic'S far­ reaching cultural revolution in the early 1960s and the re­ emergence of the Troubles in Ulster later that decade, Montague has sought to create for himself a fertile literary context where there had once been only acrimony and discontent, to redefine the traditions handed down to him and understand their relevance to the world at large, and to reintegrate and re-member the communities, both large and small, of which he is the self-appointed spokesman. In reassessing tradition and reformulating his context, Montague has also undertaken an ongoing revision and full-scale reordering of his body of work. Barly in his career, Montague participated in the cultural debates enforced by the tension bet~een Joycean and Yeatsian imperatives. The rise of Liam Miller's Dolmen Press and the generation of poets it brought to attention (including Montague) acted as a mitigating and liberating force on the Irish literary scene, and hel.ped to resolve iii this long-standing debate and bestride its intractable categorizations. Montague has come to fulfill his own belief: "A man's life-work can be seen as a pattern, with individual works existing not so much in themselves but as part of a total elaboration and investigation of themes .... " The multivalence of individual texts arising from their canonical reordering helps to illustrate and reinforce the creative tension between fixity and flux that informs and cements Montague's vision. The precarious atemporality of memory and the poet's mnemonic function is another aspect of this tension, yet it is also part of Montague's palliative and therapeutic art where the act of remembering, of confronting the past, history, or history's most immediate form--politics--works towards the re­ membering of communities as well as towards a healing of the wounds by which they have fallen into division or obscurity.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special words of thanks are owed to all those who have assisted me in the preparation of this study. I am especially indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Brian John, Chairman of English, McMaster University, and to the members of my committee, Dr. Richard Morton and Dr. John Ferns, for their astute critical sense, intellectual support, and scholarly compassion. Sincere thanks are also extended to Dean Chauncey Wood for his kindness. I would like to express my gratitude to Vincent Kinane of Special Collections, the Library of Trinity college Dublin; Howard Gerwing and Dietrich Bertz of the Special collections, Mcpherson Library, University of Victoria; the staff of the Special collections, Mills Library, McMaster University; the staff of the Fisher Rare Book Library, university of Toronto; Jonathan Barker of the Arts Council Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, London, England; Dr. Ann Saddlemyer of Massey College, university of Toronto; Dr. Thomas Dillon Redshaw; Peter Dale, Editor of Agenda; and Prof. Bar":y callaghan of York

University. Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. ~awrence Hopperton for their computer expertise, and to my parents and my brother, Dr. Bruce Meyer, University of Windsor, for their patience and encouragement. The undertaking of this study would not have been possible without the generous support~f the v Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of canada. I also wish to express my sincere appreciation to Richard Murphy and Anthony Cronin for their personal assistance, invaluable information, and generosity in granting me interviews. The list of those to whom lowe a very special gratitude would not be complete without a note of thanks to .John Montague for his kindness, attention, and magnanimity in the preparation of this study.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION " 1 Notes to the Introduction...... •...... 8 I BROTHERS IN THE CRAFT: MONTAGUE AND THE CREATION OF CONTEXT CHAPTER ONE - JOHN MONTAGUE IN THE ERA OF INHIBITIONS 12 Notes to Chapter One 48 CHAPTER TWO - JOHN MONTAGUE AND THE DOLMEN PRESS GENERATION 58 Notes to Chapter Two 98 CHAPTER THREE - MONTAGUE AND THE RE-MAKING OF TRADITION 105 Notes to Chapter Three 147 II liTHE ALWAYS RENEWED TEXT": READINGS OF THREE POEMS CHAPTER FOUR - "THE WILD DOG ROSE" 157 Notes to Chapter Four 199

CHAPTER FIVE - liTHE COUNTRY FIDDLER" :07 Notes to Chapter Five :40

ll CHAPTER SIX - "A MEETING •••••••••••••••••••••••• 244 Notes to Chapter Six.....•.....•....•...... 266 III CHAPTER SEVEN - "BY MEMORY INSPIRED": REMEMBERING AND RE-MEMBERING THE COMMUNITy ...... •...... 270 Notes to Chapter Seven , 306

BIBLIOGRAPHY "309

vii INTRODUCTION

John Montague is in an unique position among both poets of the North of Ireland and Irish poets of his own generation. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929, relocated early in childhood to his father's native parish of Garvaghey, county Tyrone, and taking up long-term residence in both the Republic and France, he is, by birth and background, the rightful beneficiary and claimant of at least four literary traditions. Like another prominent Irishman of American birth, Eamon de Valera, he has had a hand in the creation; or, more precisely, in the re­ creation of Irish consciousness in the years of the south's transition from colonial backwater to aspiring competitor on the world stage. Yet quite unlike the perennial autocrat of the Fianna Fail, whose detel'nsination to "resign Ireland from the twentieth century" resulted in the entrenchment of old orthodoxies and chronic hardships, Montague's intent has been to raise Irish consciousness, to open it up to the enabling range of possibilities that reside within \t and lie only slightly beyond it. 1 Where de Valera, in prescribing a formula for artists to match his political agenda of insularity and courageous self-sufficiency, looked inward to the reassuring recesses of ruralism and

1 2 Ieligion, Montague's mUltiple allegiances allowed him to look backward to Ireland's pre-Revolutionary, pre­ Cromwellian, and pre-Christian pasts as well as outward to more permissive and enlightening cultural models. In addition, he found room for exchange and, ultimately, points of contact between these traditions that would speak for the conceivability of a United Ireland (the symbol· for which, the newly strung harp, Montague takes as his own) and, beyond that, for the underlying unity of global culture and human experience. 2 Montague's integrating vision--his willingness to entertain and allow for "richness and narrowness, the world and [his] province"--makes him, in Irish terms, not so much a transitional writer as the catalyst, arcbitect, and executor of tbat transition. 3 Montague was in the vanguard of those who sought not merely to fly by the nets of race and religion, as Joyce had done in exile fifty years earlier, but to turn those nets to their advantage. "one explores an inheritance, It Montague has said, 'Ito free

lt oneself and others. • Yet such declarationawere not always part of Montague's artistic strategy. His early career, up to and even following the publication of his first full collection of verse, Poisoned Lands (1961), found him caught between the contradictory claims of iconostasis and iconoclasm, between whatbis country and province wanted from him and 3 what he wanted for himself. For an Irish writer at mid­ century, this was familiar, if inhospitable, territory.

Notwithst~~ding the overwhelming pressures towards conformity, state censorship not the least of them, Montague, along with most other dissatisfied and disaffected young writers of his generation, made every conscious attempt to distance, divest, and disengage himself from the "emotion,l1 "deliberateI:,:,ishism," and "ruralism," that might be construed as acquiescence to the status gUQ.s Montague's early criticism, through which he first undertook to come to terms with and understand the traditions to which he was heir made no attempt to hide the contin~ental, cosmopolitan, and plu:ralistic inclinations and allegiances of its subjects.- Only by taking in hand and redefining the traditions that had been handed down to him, by seeing them not as "anachronistic defence[s] against experience," but as a richly creative and enabling means of addressing his own experience, could Montague achieve the Ilfertile balance" of conflicting demands, a compromise made without compromising his own artistic integrity.7 Beyond the example set by French contemporaries and by the resurgence in Gaelic language verse, Montague has also had recourse to a vitalizing and liberating American tradition through the writers with whom be studied and associated at the American Seminar at Schloss Leopoldskron (1950), the Indiana Summer 4

school (1954), the Iowa Writers Workshop {1954-55}, and the literary circles of San Francisco and Berkeley in the

fifties and sixties. 8 This wider perspective and range of experience no doubt provided Montague with the wherewithal to distinguish between what was authentic and valid within his own literary context and its more restrictive and debilitating malformations. Montague's interrogation of tradition--his questioning of the value, motives and directives of the Irish Literary Revival and the nationalist objectives of the Revolution and its aftermath­ -has been transferred and translated into the de­ mythologizing impulses and deconstructive treatments central to his numerous collections of verse, his novella, The Lost Notebook, and his book of short stories, Death of

a Chieftain. 1t Ably disposed, not only by allegiance to his many 'parishes' but by his curic..us status as lithe missing link"

among Northern Irish poets, to aS~~5S und negotiate the

, extremities of Ireland's literary past, Montague bas, in his capacity as editor, critic, anthologist, and translator, redeemed the reputations of his literary

progenitors who had fallen out of favour or currency. 10 while remaking their legacy, often, it seems, in his own image, Montague has also created for bis own contemporaries a fertile literary context that accepts the past and admits the outside world. As an interpreter, exponent and 5 disseminator of Irish tradit10n--enforcing its permanence but also renewing it into relevance--Montague has become a major participant in the process Seamus Deane has "brilliantly diagnosed" as "the attempt to describe what we have yet to build. "11 For Montague, the past has no assured monumental life, any more than the art which addresses it can be rendered in a definitive text or can be fixed by a

definitive reading.1~ "The only unchanging thing," he has said, "is change itself. 1I13 Given the primacy of process and mutability among his poetic preoccupations, Montague has set about proving the autonomous integrity as well as the 'multivalence' of individual poems by submitting his

ca~on to constant revision and re-ordering. 14 Each of Montague's verse collections--but most of all the second edition of Poisoned Lands (1977) and the landmark ten-year achievement of The Rough Field (1962-1972)--can in some way be regarded as a 'selected poems,' a ransacking, re­

~ssignment and accretion of all his previous work. Hence, Montague is committed not only to remaking his literary progenitors or to easing the progress of his most promising successors, but, in what might be described as an unremitting program of self-analysis and interpretation, to

re-fashioning and creating afresh the tenor ~nd scope of his literary achievement. In this regard, each recapitulation or textual re-alignment provides a valuable 6 insight not only into the growth of his poetic consciousness and artistic sensibility, but into the development of his political (and political here is used in the widest sense possible) conscience, what might be seen as his heightened responsibility towards the past and towards its impact upon the community.15 Inasmuch as Montague is a self-appointed assessor and custodian of Ireland's cultural memory, he is also fascinated, even obsessed, by its precarious atemporal preservation of the living moment and the living community.11S "By Memory Inspired,ll to quote the patriotic ballad of the nineteenth century, Montague makes appreciable the presence of the past. 17 While that mnemonic or retrospective dimension necessarily enhances the theme of loss on which so much of his work is predicated, it also acts in defiance of the cruelty and divisions which are its cause. 18 Remembering thus becomes a means of 're­ membering,' of reasserting kinship, of re-creating, within an imaginative context, lost but once shared worlds, and of healing or easing the divisions which brought about their collapse. From the young writer who once sought to disengage himself from his "sickening community," Montague has elected himself to the status of its spokesman. 1. More than that, however, he has become an architect of integration, seeking to reconcile or at least contain seemingly 7 1mcompatible claims and ideologies, to see "Modernism,1I as his friend Robert Duncan had done, lias another wave of Romanticism,lI to reassert continuity where mere fragments remained, to create a fertile literary context, for himself and for other Irish writers, where there had once been only acrimony and discontent. 20 Montague's success has been in finding authentic and "redeeming patterns of experience" with which to embrace the totality, rather than a reductive stereotype, of Irish reality.21 In reaching back to Ireland's past and its enabling repository of traditions while remaining sensitive to the relevance of international

voices and universal themes, Montague has found th~ balance, the optimum intermediation, from which to address and better understand contemporary Ireland and the dynamics--personal and historical--which went into its making.