Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey, edited by Aengus Woods and Benjamin Keatigue, Irish Academic Press, 288p, €39.95
IN A WELL-KNOWN article published in 1934 entitled Recent Irish Poetry, Samuel Beckett distinguished a small number of Irish poets whose work suggested they were aware of what he termed "the rupture of communication" that had taken place in the modern world. Other Irish poets, who in his view were oblivious that this breakdown had taken place, he dismssively dubbed "the antiquarians", whom he saw as "delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods". Among those exonerated in this broadside was Thomas MacGreevy whom Beckett commended as "an existentialist in verse, the Titchener of the modern lyric". Along with MacGreevy, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey escaped Beckettian censure as he declared that they were "without question the most interesting of the youngest generation of Irish poets". This he reckoned was due to their openness to the influence of "Corbière, Rimbaud, Laforgue, the surréalistesand Mr Eliot, perhaps also those of Mr. Pound – with results that constitute already the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland". In Irish literary history this article has customarily been read as a 1930s manifesto for an Irish poetic modernism with Beckett himself, an experimental poet in that decade as well as novelist and short-story writer, a fourth figure in a quartet of Irish iconoclasts seeking to "make it new" in radical ways. One of the consequences of reading the work of such as Devlin and Coffey in the light of Beckett's propagandist article (a work probably given excessive authority on account of its author's later renown) is that they have tended to be assessed together as poets of the 1930s when in truth their careers, different in many ways, extended well beyond that decade (MacGreevy's poetic contribution was, by contrast, largely a 1930s phenomenon).
It is the laudable aim of the editors of this interesting volume of essays and articles by various hands (fruit of a s symposium held in Trinity College, Dublin) to help us to see Coffey more steadily and whole when his 1930s activities and work are understood as the foundation of a lengthy literary career that has as yet not received its critical due. They are perhaps somewhat hamstrung in this enterprise by the fact that some of the most fascinating essays in the book deal with his time in Paris in the 1930s when his friendship with Beckett (who gave him the manuscript of Murphyas a mark of that relationship) and his collaboration with Ulsterman/Russian George Reavey ( founder of the Europa Press which published Coffey's Third Personin 1938, with its beautiful, original engraving by SW Hayter, reproduced here) bespeak a time of aesthetic excitement, intellectual enlargement (the Irish science graduate was putting himself to school in philosophy as a student of Jacques Maritain) and bohemian freedom from the conventions of his high-bourgeois background (Sandra O'Connell writes well of the collaboration with Reavey, as does Thomas Dillon Redshaw of the cosmopolitan Parisian literary activism of the 1930s).
A sense in the book of Coffey's long life of severe, uncompromising dedication to his art does, however, emerge from the recollections and personal reminiscences of the poet that the editors have included among the more strictly academic entries in their volume. They whet the appetite for more biographical information and analysis (the book could usefully have augmented Redshaw's Descriptive Checklist of Books and Pamphlets by Brian Coffeyand Aengus Woods's bibliography of the poet with a chronological biography). We learn from Coffey's son John of his father being measured for an RAF uniform in 1942 in the England to which the poet had moved with his recent bride on the outbreak of war in 1939.We hear too of Coffey's sojourn in the United States after the war when he began a career as a university teacher of Thomist philosophy until it was abruptly truncated over issues of principle and payment. From this period came Coffey's most approachable long poem, Missouri Sequence, that anthologists might prefer to the densely-worked, often obscure, later achievements, Adventand Death of Hektor, his critical advocates have judged his masterworks. We get glimpses too of a rather scattered professional life lived out thereafter in England as poetry and his enlarging family seemed to focus Coffey's energies (what little we learn of his wife suggests a woman of considerable resources, a worthy subject, one senses, of her husband's moving reflections on the religious meaning of love). In all of this, there are things we wish we knew more of. How, for example, did the Thomism acquired at the feet of Maritain in 1930s Paris, when Maritain was "the unofficial philosopher of conservative Catholic France", develop over the course of a long life which had included service in British uniform against fascism? From the scholarly articles in this book that examine the key poetic texts an impression is gained that this was a poet who in early adulthood established core ideas about reality which formed the basis of his controlling aesthetic. There then followed a life-long struggle to be true to this aesthetic, irrespective of reputation or popular success.
In a telling article here, Gerald Dawe lets the elephant in the room of scrupulous scholarship and critical respect this book represents have its say. I mean of course the issue of the value of Coffey's work as poetry. Hc cites poet and critic Allan Gillis's damning critique of Coffey's Third Person, hearing its "audaciously negative tone". Elsewhere, Justin Quinn's dismissive observations on the Coffey oeuvre are noted. Dawe, while clearly an admirer of Coffey, by allowing the question of Coffey's poetic success or failure to enter the discursive field of the book, sets a test for the other contributors and for the book as an overall statement. Most of the scholarly articles in the book accept Dawe's challenge by demonstrating that Coffey's work is amenable to close textual and thematic analysis with philosophic import, for some, a measure in part of worth. For example Aengus Woods aligns Coffey's work with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. This reader remains unconvinced that this critical procedure is an adequate response to Dawe's intervention. One essay, that by Maria Johnston which reports on a collaboration with a composer to set Third Personfor music and voice, does suggest, however, that JCC Mayes's claim that "the best reason" to read Coffey, is that "you will like the way it sounds", has critical force. Her article, which intelligently invokes TS Eliot on the music of poetry, tells us that working on the project with Scott McLaughlin highlighted "the poetry's pre-existing technique, a technique that has confounded many literary critics". As we await further revelatory explorations of this kind the reader is tempted to agree with poet Augustus Young's beautiful assessment of this heroically ambitious, exactingly difficult poet: "There are intimations of a paradise in his poetry – rare word scatters that take wing. But the flight is more Icarus than Ascension".
Terence Brown is a literary and cultural historian. His The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticismis forthcoming from Cambridge University Press
