Austin Clarke Austin Clarke Kit Fryatt Aberdeen University Press © Kit Fryatt Aberdeen University Press University of Aberdeen Aberdeen AB24 3UG Typeset by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Anthony Rowe, Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-85752-086-6 The right of Kit Fryatt to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Contents 1 Austin Clarke, 1896–1974: Life and Times 1 2 “No Dues to the Parish”: 1916–1935 26 3 ‘Sods of Dry Turf and a Story’: 1936–1954 55 4 “Early Unfi nished Sketch”: 1955–1963 81 5 ‘Every tickle i’ the thalamus’: 1964–1974 111 6 Conclusion: ‘Rhyme is no comforter’, Austin Clarke, minor poet? 135 Bibliography 145 Index 149 Chapter 1 Austin Clarke, 1896–1974: Life and Times Austin Clarke’s fi rst book of memoirs, Twice Round The Black Church (1962), opens with an intriguing admission: ‘For many years I could never hear without a moment of uneasiness, the name of Shakespeare mentioned by anyone’.1 It is a typical statement: ostensibly confessional, yet in the awkward redundancy of its fi nal three words hinting at the evasion that characterizes all his autobiographical writing. Clarke goes on to explain the source of his unease, a portrait that hung in a disused room of his childhood home in north Dublin. He was told that the rough oil painting, whose eyes seemed to follow the viewer’s movements, was of Shakespeare. Fascinated by the bellicose connotations of the name and the optical illusion, he began to play at sneaking glimpses at the frightening object, a game that issued in genuine night terrors and an episode of sleepwalking (Twice Round, p.2–3). His analy- sis of the reminiscence is likewise characteristic: Children can enact in their little way the primary myths, fi nd for them- selves the ancient ritual of fear. So, night after night, my mind was drawn in obedient horror towards that room upstairs. […] Were it not for the childish alarms which all of us remember so well, we would forget the power of our earliest imaginings, forget those fi rst years when the mind seemed to part so readily from the body […] It is easy to forget not only the workings of our early imagination but the power of the will when we fi rst discover its use […] The struggle between my will and my imagi- nation was a mighty one. (Twice Round, p. 2) 1 Austin Clarke, Twice Round the Black Church: Early Memories of Ireland and England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962; repr. Dublin: Moytura, 1990), p. 1 2 Austin Clarke Myth and ritual, memory and forgetfulness, obedience and will, mind and body, fear and imagination: these, starkly opposed or obliquely paired, are some of Clarke’s major preoccupations. The episode of the portrait ends in anticlimax – the poet notes that as an adult, he discovered the perspectival trick that produces the effect and learned of its use by painters of religious iconography: ‘Such spiritual exercises were not mine, and I fancy that the lay picture which affl icted me in childhood was but a freakish copy […]. It gave me a bewildering sense of guiltiness, but that was all.’ (Twice Round, p.3) Bewildered guilt is a common sensation for the Clarkean speaker, and some of the poet’s less successful experiments can be bewildering for the reader too. Twice Round The Black Church and its successor A Penny in the Clouds (1968) are sources more frustrating than illuminating for anyone wishing to grasp an outline of Clarke’s early life. Their structure is one of free association – for example, the account of the painting and the childish terror it occasioned, which must have taken place in the early 1900s, is immediately followed by one of curfew-breaking during the winter of 1920 – and Clarke offers few specifi cs by which readers might orient themselves. Owing however to the unavailability of external biographical data,2 the memoirs assume consider- able importance. Augustine Joseph Clarke was born on 9 May 1896, not in the Mountjoy Street house where ‘Shakespeare’ hung, but about half a mile west of it, at 83 Manor Street. Dublin was little developed north of the river Liffey before the eighteenth century, but Manor Street along with its continuation Stoneybatter is an old road, having been the main route into central Dublin from the west and north-west; as Clarke writes, ‘in ancient times part of the highway from Tara of the Kings’ (Twice Round, p.15).3 The neighbourhood retained a rustic character almost into Clarke’s lifetime, and even now has an atmosphere distinct from that of surrounding inner suburbs. The poet’s father, Augustine Matthew Clarke, was the son of a farm 2 The existing critical books on Clarke offer biographical sketches; Maurice Harmon produced a chronology for the Irish University Review shortly before Clarke’s death in 1974; it is very substantially drawn from the memoirs. See Maurice Harmon, ‘Notes Towards a Biography’, Irish University Review (Austin Clarke Special Issue) 4:1 (Spring 1974), pp. 13–25. Unpublished sources include the holdings in the National Library of Ireland and in the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin, Texas. Mary Shine Thompson has compiled a chronology of the poet’s life and work up to 1952 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University College Dublin, 1993). 3 See also James Collins, Life in Old Dublin (Dublin: James Duffy and Co, 1913), pp. 70–81. Life and Times 3 labourer from Blessington, Co. Wicklow. The poet knew little of his paternal ancestors and records no contact with members of his father’s family, though he spent holidays near their place of origin. Augustine Clarke is described as a ‘self-made man’ (Twice Round, p.64); competent and successful at his trade of plumbing, he ended his working life as superintendent of the waste water department in Dublin Corporation. He married Ellen Browne, the daughter of a skinner from Watling Street in south inner Dublin. The Brownes, until the generation of Ellen’s father, were well-to-do, with Protestant and ulti- mately English antecedents (Twice Round, p. 13–14). William Browne lost the family’s money, and Ellen grew up in a tenement, denied an education. She understandably resented her father’s impoverishment, and her son records an indefi nable air of disgrace surrounding his maternal grandfather’s visits, which in turn ended because of a disagreement concerning the old man’s second marriage (Twice Round, p.15–16). Ellen Clarke’s experience of poverty fostered in her qualities of delicacy and social aspiration; she was determined her family should prosper, but was scarcely a loving parent. Clarke recog- nised his mother’s qualities in himself, and came to a grudging admiration of the ‘obstinacy’ that provoked confl ict between them, particularly about religious matters (Twice Round, p.7). Clarke attributes his dislike of Mariolatry to his diffi cult relationship with his mother, but it is more likely, as with much that is termed ‘anti-clerical’ in his work, to be the legacy of her fastidi- ousness, which in her educated son became distaste for simple-minded and superstitious Catholic piety. Ellen and Augustine Clarke had 12 children, only four of whom sur- vived childhood. Austin’s surviving sisters, Mary Esther (known as Doto), Eileen and Kathleen, were all somewhat older than he; they attended boarding school during his childhood. Doto and Kathleen then trained as primary-school teachers at Carysfort Training College in south Dublin; Eileen entered a Carmelite convent, from which poor health later forced her withdrawal. Clarke records a few memories of his younger brother Louis, who died aged two; but his other siblings are remote if ‘constant’ presences, ‘names […] set down piously on the fl y-leaf of the Douai Bible […] our little brothers and sisters watching us from Heaven’ (Twice Round, p.15). The personality that emerges from the memoirs is that of an indulged only son and youngest child of a relatively small family, sheltered, sometimes timid. The extreme nicety of Ellen Clarke’s manners, particularly where bodily matters were concerned, meant that ‘in comparison with it, the religion of the churches we attended seemed gross. […] it was at Mass 4 Austin Clarke that I got my earliest intimations of immorality, for the language of religion belonged to franker centuries’ (Twice Round, p.9). ‘Immorality’ is a mislead- ing word in this context – Clarke goes on to record his shock at a priest’s mention of Matthew 9:20, in which Jesus heals a woman suffering from a menstrual haemorrhage, and his mother’s discomfort at the mention of the Virgin’s ‘womb’ in the Hail Mary (Twice Round, p.10). It was the clergy, also, who gave Clarke his fi rst intimations of prurience: at his fi rst confession, a priest tried to bully him into an admission of masturbation. Clarke, only seven years old, had no idea what he meant, but the priest persisted until, desperate to escape, the boy owned the ‘unknown sin’ (Twice Round, p.130). This scene of psycho-sexual verbal abuse recurs in a number of Clarke’s literary works; his subsequent anxiety about the possibility of inadvertent false confession also constitutes a theme. Most of Clarke’s schooling took place at Belvedere College, to which he was admitted in 1905. He boarded for just over a term at Mungret College, near Limerick, in 1910–11; this excursion introduced him to Sousa marches, the ‘verbal music’ of poetry (Longfellow’s Hiawatha), and homosexuality (Twice Round, pp.