English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980

Home , Gerry Murphy (poet), Greg Delanty, John Montague (poet), Maurice Riordan, Patrick Galvin, Pat Boran

English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin Institut du Monde Anglophone Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-030-38572-9 ISBN 978-3-030-38573-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I ndil cuimhne Tomás Ó Ríordáin Foreword

Opening my advance copy of this book on my computer, I was caught by a fragrance reaching me—not from the decade that is its subject—but from the early 1960s, from my own undergraduate years in University College Cork. A delightful time, a moment of freedom to discover people and ideas that were contemporary, with eccentric but mostly benevolent teachers to look after the past centuries—I have never learned so much or so fast, about life, art and philosophy, as I did then in a small, provincial, traditional college, in a provincial city. Of course that whiff is the fragrance of youth, but not only—the city had a musical, theatrical, cin- ematic and artistic culture of the kind that flourishes in places where the whole audience moves in a body from play to concert, cinema to gallery; and the university drew on a large province, for which it was still a true centre for commerce, culture and education. Of the five years I spent as a student, what I remember most vividly is the sense of a cohort, of a group of people thinking, arguing, reading and discovering life, together. But Clíona Ní Ríordáin’s book makes me ask, what was missing? Lit- erary culture was lopsided. Although Cork had produced notable writers who were still alive and writing, notably Seán O’Faoláin, who had chal- lenged the narrowness of the national debate by founding The Bell in the 1940s, much of their work was officially unavailable. Censorship was active and especially directed at fiction by Irish authors. There was a Film Festival where we saw uncensored European films, but no Book Festival to bring us The Golden Ass or The Well of Loneliness. Although (of course)

vii viii FOREWORD we procured and read the banned books, native and foreign, we were also absorbing the message that literature and the state were at odds. And poetry, though (again of course) we were reading poetry, seemed remote from the place and time we were living in. Something that for the almost- clandestine poet I then was gave a feeling of unreality to the pursuit. So that it was an apocalyptic moment when a newly appointed lecturer, Seán Lucy, read the poems of the emigré Corkman Patrick Galvin to a student society—I can still hear his slightly Anglo voice almost possessed by the rhythmic violence of Galvin’s ‘The Kings are out’:

With knives of ice Anddressedtokill The wine ﬂows down from Summer Hill Christ! Be on your guard tonight The Kings are out …1

Galvin was to stay abroad for almost another decade but the unmistake- able voice continued to be accessible in the broadsheets and pamphlets that occasionally erupted from his English base. I left Cork for Oxford and then Trinity College Dublin. I went on writing, and presently published poetry in Dublin, returning to see family and friends—and then in the early seventies I happened into a student event, the launch of the Irish-language journal INNTI, that showed how much things had changed in the College. Poetry was not just visible, rooted in the place and the voices of the students who were writing, it was unapologetically in print and challenging a national readership. Older poets in English and Irish, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin, Pearse Hutchinson, were there to validate a student enterprise. The phenomenon of INNTI has been widely commented on; now Clíona Ní Ríordáin (who is among those who have written on that group of poets) turns her attention to the English-language strand of poetry writing that surfaced at UCC in the same period. The two lines are entangled, some poets writing in both languages, and it must be that the simultaneous presence on the campus of two writers whose verse was cele- brated in Irish and English, respectively, Ó Ríordáin and John Montague, helped to precipitate that sense of possibility, that made people identify themselves as poets. Ní Ríordáin’s study draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation” and points to the introduction of free secondary education in the FOREWORD ix

Republic by Donogh O’Malley at the end of the sixties as the public event that gave young people in Munster permission to develop their imagina- tions in new ways. I’d suggest that the rapid withering away of censorship after 1967 (when a new Act liberated a huge backlog of previously banned books) must have added to the sense of freedom. But her focus on an educational centre and on the impact of some exemplary teachers is both just and a corrective to the widespread emphasis on individual talent as the sole source of poetry. But John Montague’s influence was decisive. He was ten years younger than the agonising bachelor Ó Ríordáin; he was embarking on his second marriage; he was professional and international in his approach. Thomas McCarthy is quoted: “New collections of poetry came our way, our attention was drawn to reviews. We were made familiar with the activities that are the norm in a literary life”. McCarthy, the late Seán Dunne, Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Gerry Murphy, Maurice Riordan and the late Gregory O’Donoghue, all born in the 1950s and all undergraduates in the 1970s, went on to make a mark as poets, widely various in style but all engaged in the life of poetry in their country and abroad. The progres- sion happened “in due course”, if at uneven pace; the absence of women from the procession has been remarked. The mutual support of a cohort seems to have been lacking; female poets were perhaps still moving to a different time signature. Clíona Ní Ríordáin comments on the poetry of this “generation” with perceptive enthusiasm, showing also how by retrieving, collecting and republishing the poems of Patrick Galvin they constructed a forebear for themselves. She pays due tribute to Seán Lucy who as Professor of English welcomed Montague to the College, and to his student, the academic, novelist in Irish and English, and poet of Cork’s southside, Robert Welch, who was born in the late 1940s, left Cork by 1970, but remained attached to the tradition, co-editing the Galvin volume. An important fea- ture is her analysis of other publishing projects, the anthologies including Seán Dunne’s Poets of Munster, Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Jumping off Shadows‚ and Seán Lucy’s Five Irish Poets published in Cork in 1970 by the local Mercier Press. Those titles tell us something about a national (and international) back- ground. From the mid-1960s onward, the notion of “Ulster poetry” as possessing a claim to be on the one hand the Irish poetry best worth attending to—and on the other hand not quite Irish at all—was made in certain quarters on the back of the appearance of a bunch of major talents x FOREWORD in the North. The cultural-geographic-political assertion drew responses both inside and outside Ulster, and the notion of Munster as an equiva- lent cultural entity was canvassed. Lucy, on the other hand, was implicitly claiming that his five Cork poets have as good a right to claim a central role as poets based in or published in Dublin. All of this academic, cultural and literary context is visible in the published books, the obituaries and library catalogues. Ní Ríordáin has gone deeper: into the archives of the student journal The Quarryman, into interviews and memoirs, and into the social history of the city. This is, in her telling, a closely woven story where trade unionists like Michael O’Riordan, journalists like the late Robert O’Donoghue, friend of Galvin and father of Greg, ancestral figures like “Father Prout” (Francis Sylvester Mahony, author of “The Bells of Shandon” and much else), musicians like Aloys Fleischmann, Geraldine Neeson, circle around each other. The effect is to give us a real sense of the way these literary lives were lived, in a real place. National and local politics are a necessary complication; after all, Thomas McCarthy was labelled “The Fianna Fáil poet”. International connections range from the impact of the Penguin Modern European poets to McCarthy’s fantasies of the eighteenth-century Merchant Princes to the 2005 project of translating Eastern European poetry. In saluting her book I am especially grateful for this thickness of detail and people, and most of all for the sense of place that seems so effortlessly evoked. The physical shape and outlook of the city underlies so much, its vertig- inous sightlines—Redemption Road to Collins Barracks, or Sydney Place to the Bus Station, as in Seán Dunne’s lovely poem where he watches the flashing of the passport photo machine from his tower house:

The passport photo booth ﬂashes in the bus station near the river. I watch it from my high window: a message sent with a mirror from desperate souls in a valley, frantic for answers in the far hills.2

Here is a reminder that the life of poets is bound up with the close ties of youthful friendships, but also, by virtue of presence and place, with FOREWORD xi those lucky encounters that show us the ﬂashing messages it can take a lifetime to decode.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

“The Bus Station” from Collected (2005) is reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Seán Dunne and The Gallery Press. “Sydney Parade” appeared in THE SHELTERED NEST (1992).

Notes

1. Patrick Galvin, The Selected Poems, (ed. G. Delanty & Robert Welch), Cork University Press, 1996, p. 97. 2. Seán Dunne, Collected, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2005, p. 81. Rimbaud in Cork

You sailed out on the Prinz von Oranje, Sporting the azure and orange of the Dutch Army, To carry its ﬂag through a sweltering landscape (good-bye to Europe, anywhere will do), Under the smouldering crest of the Krakatoa. Months later you signed on The Wandering Chief , A lean deserter, leaving off tropical fruit, You took the name of ‘Holmes’, heading home; (did you swim to Napoleon’s bleak St Helena?) Finally you docked in Queenstown, alias Cobh: But what befell you, that lost day in Cork? * Bemused by a signpost reading ‘Charleville’,

xiii xiv RIMBAUDINCORK

Rimbaud stumbles into the Long Valley, Meets Humphrey Moynihan, and staggers back; ‘This man has deranged all his senses!’ He stays long enough to sign the Visitors’ Book; Then in the Corner House, surrounded again By those petulant accents of Cork (a chorus of aggrieved doves), he ﬁnds Gerry Murphy, Who slaps him on the back, buys a round of Murphy, And brings him to meet McCarthy in the Library. At long last, the voice of sanity! ‘That Charleville signpost leads to North Cork, And not your famous French birthplace. Better leave for Waterford or Wexford, To embark again on the Continent. If you get lost, look up Dorgan in Dublin; He’s a sailor himself, and knows the ropes.’

* In the attic of his Cork B&B, Is there still a dusty sailor’s trunk Impounded by an angry landlady? ‘That skinny Frenchie had no English money. There’s nothing in here but a scribbled RIMBAUDINCORK xv

Notebook: Hallucinations, I think, the cover of it, Tomorrow I’ll burn it, or take it to the ﬂea market! John Montague Acknowledgements

The idea for this book emerged from a conversation I had with Terence Brown over lunch at the Orléans SOFEIR (Société Française des Études Irlandaises) conference that was held in 2007. At the time, I had ﬁnished my Ph.D. and was looking for new topics, new poets, and new pathways to explore. He recommended that I read the work of Greg Delanty, sug- gesting that after spending so many years reading Northern poets I should turn my interests southwards. From that initial suggestion, the project took shape and form, enabling me to explore a world of poetry that had been there on my doorstep all along. Many people have helped me in the writing of this book. First and fore- most, I would like to acknowledge the poets themselves, Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Thomas McCarthy, Gerry Murphy and Maurice Riordan. They made themselves available for interview, shared their memories and, in some cases, their papers with me. They were most encouraging in their support for this venture. The late John Montague also answered many queries and gave me a lengthy interview. I would like to thank Eliza- beth Wassell for her permission to use John Montague’s poem “Rimbaud in Cork” as the epigraph for this work. William Wall wrote a long text detailing information about his years in UCC. Thanks are also due to Sheila Pratschke who was the Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris for the duration of this project. She facilitated meetings with many of the poets included in this book. Peter Fallon of Gallery Press shared his archive of Seán Dunne material with me, and Trish Edelstein gave me every encouragement.

xvii xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gemma McCrohan kindly provided me with a copy of a programme she had made about Seán Dunne for RTE. I acknowledge also the help of Pat Boran and John F. Deaneof Dedalus Press for their responses to my questions regarding Gregory O’Donoghue. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin also agreed to be interviewed and introduced me to the late Robert Welch, who shared memories with me, as did Colm Breathnach and the late Liam Ó Muirthile, whom I met during a fine afternoon in Dublin in the company of Greg Delanty. Louis de Paor spoke at length to me about INNTI and UCC in an interview in Paris. Catherine Phil MacCarthy also talked to me about her time as a student in the English department in UCC. Patrick Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre has been constantly supportive of the project, giving an interview, providing bibliographical information, and aiding in the logistics of a conference held in the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2008. It was on that occasion that I first met many of the poets. Paul Durcan, in the course of many conversations, also shared his memories of UCC in the 1970s with me. To him too I owe a debt of gratitude. I owe thanks also to members of the faculty at UCC who shared their insights on the period with me: Maeve Conrick, Patricia Coughlan, Col- bert Kearney, Grace Neville, Seán Ó Coileáin, Patrick O’Donovan and Pádraigín Riggs. Thank you to the UCC archivist Caitriona Mulcahy. I would like to express my gratitude also to the staff in the special collections department of the Boole Library, (director Crónán Ó Doibhlin) and Sheyeda Allen, Mary Lombard, Peadar Cranitch for their patience and diligence in pulling out copies of the President’s Reports and round- ing up copies of The Quarryman. Special mention must go to the late Helen Davis who, over cups of coffee in the Rest, gave me the benefit of her knowledge of UCC, both as a student and member of staff, and was always full of ideas for possible new people to quiz or sources to hunt down. I would also like to thank the staff of the Cork City Library (Special Collections) and the staff of the National Library of Ireland for their help, together with the librarians in the Hesburgh Library, especially Aedín Ní Bhróithe-Clements, at the University of Notre Dame, who were most helpful in locating obscure texts. The CNU (Conseil national des universités) in France funded a six- month sabbatical in 2011, enabling me to work on the project. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, in par- ticular Carle Bonafous-Murat, Wesley Hutchinson and Christine Raguet, for their encouragement. The Sorbonne Nouvelle also gave me a grant ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xix for a Jeune chercheur project, which enabled me to organise the “Poètes traducteurs, poètes créateurs” conference in November 2008 which brought many of the poets included in the volume to Paris. I am also indebted to Paul Bensimon, Stephanie Schwerter, Órla Ní Ríordáin and Rícheal Ní Ríordáin, who patiently listened to and reread endless excerpts from the work in progress. I want to thank Pascale Sardin of the Uni- versity of Bordeaux for her careful proofreading of the manuscript. I am immensely grateful to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin who took time out from her busy schedule as Ireland Professor of Poetry to read the manuscript and write a very generous Foreword. I acknowledge the organisers of the following conferences who allowed me to try out parts of the book in a number of papers: IASIL (Interna- tional Association for the Study of Irish Literatures) Porto, SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur) Limoges, SOFEIR (Société Française des Etudes Irlandaises) Nantes, EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) Vienna, The Law, Literature and Translation Conference Trinity College Dublin, The British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference Belfast, the 2013 Notre Dame Irish Seminar. John Goodby was most helpful: his detailed knowledge of contemporary Irish poetry, coupled with his first-hand experience of Cork, made him an ideal interlocutor. John McCourt and Alexandra Poulain encour- aged me to keep going when my morale was flagging. Robert Tromop and Christine Van Dalen sustained me with both intellectual and terrestrial nourishment. Tom Murphy of The Irish Examiner helped with research- ing the history of the poetry published in The Cork Examiner during the 1970s. Nora Hickey M’sichili, Donal Ó Drisceoil and Patrick Cot- ter helped with permissions. Sinéad MacAodha offered Barry’s Tea and stimulating conversation at crucial moments. Do mo thusimitheoirí, Máire agus Tomás Ó Ríordáin, gabhaim buíochas don chabhair a thugadar dom leis an leabhair seo, don ghrá a chothaigh siad ins na healaín, agus don tacaíocht a bhí ar fáil uatha i gcó- naí. I also want to thank my children, Patrick and Anna O’Mahony, for understanding that poetry is important, always, at all times of the year (even during the holidays). Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to James O’Mahony, who stepped into the breach whenever he was needed and provided endless logistical backup and moral support during the years that this project has taken. xx ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the permission of the following to quote from the authors’ work:

Greg Delanty from The Hellbox, Oxford Poets, 1998; Collected Poems 1986–2006, Carcanet, 2006; The Greek Anthology Book XVII, Carcanet, 2012; by kind permission of the author and Carcanet Press. Theo Dorgan, from What This Earth Cost Us, Dedalus Press, 2008; Greek, Nine Bright Shiners, Dedalus Press, 2014; Orpheus, Dedalus Press, 2018; by kind permission of the author and Dedalus Press. Seán Dunne, from The Sheltered Nest, Gallery Press, 1992; In My Father’s House, Dublin, The Gallery Press, 2000, Collected, The Gallery Press, 2005; by kind permission of the estate of the author c/o the Gallery Press. Patrick Galvin, from New and Selected Poems, ed. Greg Delanty and Robert Welch, Cork University Press, 1996; by kind permission of Macdara and Gráinne Galvin. John Montague, New Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 2012; by kind permission of the estate of the author c/o the Gallery Press. John Montague, “Rimbaud in Cork”, by kind permission of the estate of the author, c/o Elizabeth Wassell. Paul Muldoon, translation of an extract from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Fifty- Minute Mermaid, Oldcastle, Gallery, 2007; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cork, Gallery, 1977; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Fifty-Minute Mermaid, Oldcastle, Gallery, 2007; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Thomas McCarthy, Extracts from published and unpublished diaries and let- ters; The First Convention, Dolmen Press, 1978; The Lost Province,Anvil Press, 1996; Mr. Dineen’s CarefulParade: New and Selected Poems,Anvil Press, 1999; Gardens of Remembrance, New Island Books, 1999; Merchant Prince, Anvil Press, 2005; The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer, Anvil Press, 2009; Pandemonium, Carcanet 2016. Gerry Murphy, RiodelaPlataandAllThat, Dedalus, 1993; Torso of an Ex-girlfriend, Dedalus 2002; End of Part One, New and Selected Poems, Dedalus, 2006; My Flirtation with International Socialism, Dedalus, 2010; Muse, Dedalus 2015; by kind permission of the author and Dedalus Press. My Life as a Stalinist, Southword, 2018; by kind permission of the author. Gregory O’Donoghue, Making Tracks, Dedalus, 2001; Ghost Dance,Dedalus, 2006; by kind permission of Dedalus Press. Maurice Riordan, Floods, Faber 2000; The Holy Land, Faber 2007; The Water Stealer, Faber 2015; by kind permission of the author and Faber. Contents

1 Beginnings 1

2 A Terrace of Generations 27

3 The Brindled Cats: Language and Translation 43

4 Journeys to the Past: Identities, Histories, and Myth 69

5 The Grumbling Questioning Poet: Politics and Social Engagement 99

6 Conclusion 115

Bibliography 121

Index 131

xxi