This Saturday at the Cork International Poetry Festival, a group of former UCC students, including Theo Dorgan, Thomas McCarthy and John Fitzgerald, will gather to celebrate the life and work of their teacher John Montague, who died on December 10th, and read from his final collection of poems, Second Childhood.
The book, which will be published by Gallery Press on February 28th on what would have been Montague’s 88th birthday, is the sum of two parts. Part One is a sort of tapestry of his long life, featuring some of the places he lived (Brooklyn, Garvaghey and Paris) and the people he encountered along the way, including fellow poets John Berryman and Hugh MacDiarmid. Part Two is a collection of conversations, written as poems, that he had with the great British poet David Jones in his final years. The subjects discussed cover the gamut, ranging from Ireland’s conversion by a Briton and Scotland’s by an Irishman (the irony not being lost on either man), to the Great War, which Jones himself fought in, the Irish Troubles, and the meaning of Robert Graves’ “White Goddess”.
Graves himself might have had his friend John Montague in mind when he told the Paris Review in a 1969 interview that “words are already fixed in the storehouse of the memory”. Montague dug deep over the years into the recesses of his own memory, “scratched for and exhumed” the right words, creating small vignettes on the written page. Second Childhood offers us glimpses of a man who believed he was “born twice” as a result of the trauma he experienced after being shipped off from Brooklyn at the tender age of four to live with his spinster aunts, Freda and Brigid, in the “rough field” that was Garvaghey, in Co Tyrone.
The mood changes throughout this collection with the help of precise, pared-back language. It is at times playful, longing, and seriously heartbreaking. Montague perfectly captures the simplicity of domestic farm life with his beloved aunts in the mischievous poem Fowl Play, where a rooster gets his comeuppance for getting above his station in the natural pecking order.
But when, lord of the farmyard,
he stalks over to chasten the turkeys,
swiftly they surround him,
plying their long, stabbing beaks –
eating the head off him!
The bright red rooster staggers,
his wattles laced with blood,
his trumpet call silenced,
while the hens settle in the sand
indifferent to their much offended lord.
Another poem, New Milk, reveals the sometimes carefree world and the anticipation of young love.
Sara Anne came to fetch the milk
Down by the Waterside every evening.
I lay in wait for her, shy, but bold
enough to entice her into a meadow.
In the stubbly aftergrass we kissed
and I touched her impossibly yellow hair.
My nostrils tingled with the smell
and dust of hay. All of summer
seemed to gather towards that hour
where we lay so close together.
But when I grew daring enough
to ease my body across hers
I upset the can of sweet milk,
Briefly whitening the warm earth.
But lurking beneath this bucolic scene is the trauma keenly felt by Montague as he remembers another place far beyond the meadow “and all the confusions” of his childhood coming flooding back. The pain of rejection and displacement captured in the heart-wrenching poem The Locket is revisited again in this collection as he searches for his lost childhood, his lost mother. In the poem Riddles, Montague gives voice to the silent experience of the returned Yank, a reverse Irish emigrant experience. Brooklyn embodies the longing for his dear mother. One minute he finds himself amid the hustle and bustle of an American city, and the next he is standing alone in an Irish field trying to make sense of a world turned upside down.
I am a small boy,
standing in a field
Where is my mother?
Where is my father?
Where is all
I have known,
streets of Brooklyn,
trolley cars and subways?
A whole world,
a whole town
turned upside down
into a lonely robin
on a branch of hawthorn.
Throughout his life there were moments when Montague felt like an outsider – the young American boy in an Ulster primary school and later in a boarding school, the Catholic in a Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, the Ulster poet in Dublin, the Irishman in America, and the cosmopolitan in Cork. But he used this “outsider” status and the sense of displacement he felt all his life to good effect.
St Patrick’s College seminary in Armagh during the second World War, which he recalled in the poem Guide, was an inhospitable and cold place of scholarly learning that produced priests for the archdiocese. The young Montague quickly learned that he was not destined for the pulpit. Surely his stammer, an emotional scar from his childhood, played a pivotal role. However, he was sustained by his friendship with Frank Lenny (a fellow Tyrone boy and future auxiliary bishop of Armagh) and instead found his voice in the written word, thanks to one of his teachers, Sean O’ Boyle, who shared his love of language and literature with the young student. O’Boyle was gone by the time I arrived in Armagh some 32 years later, but his presence was still felt and his portrait hung in the main hall near the refectory – a ghostly presence keeping a watchful eye as the students went about their day.
As a past pupil of St Pat’s, it’s not hard to imagine a young John Montague walking those same corridors, stopping now and then to scan the faces of the past in the many photographs that adorned the walls, wondering about their hopes and dreams, and what became of their lives. It’s reminiscent of a similar scene in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams’ character John Keating asks his students about the meaning of the opening stanza of 17th-century Robert Herrick’s poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying."
“Carpe diem.” “Seize the day,” Keating offers his young charges as they huddle together and look more closely at the gallery of faces in the faded black and white photographs before them.
In another scene, the students can be seen crouching around their unorthodox teacher at the back of the classroom as he recites Walt Whitman’s poem O Me! O Life! and offers them a clue to their uncertain futures.
The question, O me! So sad, recurring – What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here – that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
“What will your verse be?” Keating asks them. No doubt John Montague experienced such an epiphany during the many hours he spent in Sean O’Boyle’s presence, as he sought to figure out his vocation. “He grabbed his pain and ran with it, and that’s what most good artists do,” says former student and Cork poet Thomas McCarthy. Montague dedicated himself to a scholarly life in writing and excelled in Dublin, Iowa, Albany, Berkeley and Cork. He made the world his home and poetry his life. For him poetry was a full-time occupation. He became what McCarthy calls an “unacknowledged legislator of the public…speaking to power, national struggle and conflict. To be a poet was to live an exceptional life, particularly a poet of a small nation.”
McCarthy also remembers him as one who possessed a communal sense of the poet. “He was not a loner. He was a person who believed in the community of poets, one that spoke for the community,” he says. And that sense of community stretched to everything he did, including what McCarthy called “the first response” to his writing, which Montague shared with his students when they visited his home on Grattan Hill, not far from the university in Cork, and discussed their work.
In the months since his passing, that sense of community has come full circle. University College Cork has acquired Montague’s extensive library (some 15,000 volumes in all) from his home in Ballydehob, as well as many of his writings, including his correspondence with fellow Ulster poet Seamus Heaney and notes from his conversations with British poet David Jones, some of which have been included in Second Childhood. The books and writings will take some 18 months to list and some will eventually be digitised,” says John Fitzgerald, the director for information services at UCC, himself a former student of Montague’s.
The university has also recently acquired the iconic Colin Davidson portrait of the poet. It will be soon be hung among the poet’s collections. It seems fitting that just as Sean O’Boyle’s portrait presided over the students in Armagh, that this bard’s likeness and spirit will now keep a watchful eye over future generations of students in UCC as they browse his heavily annotated volumes and peruse his papers in search of a better understanding of the poetic life.
John Montague had a strong sense of place, both physical as well as spiritual. And this is particularly evident in the poem Wild Bird.
In our last mountain field
beyond the limekiln
a stubborn circle of stones
with, at its grassy centre,
a stiff glistening feather
shorn from a bird's wing.
'Look Johnny, and remember
for all those years to come,
that you once stood inside
what people round here still
call the Old Fairy Fort,
and that stray feather…
might well be a fairy's wing.
Nothing lasts forever, we are all here but for a short time. A giant in the literary forest has been felled. But to quote another great poet, Leonard Cohen: "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." Despite its traumatic beginning, John Montague's life burned brightly. The glowing embers he leaves behind in the grate shall warm the hearts and inspire the minds of generations of poets to come. Second Childhood is but the closing chapter of an exceptional poetic life. "His poetry was a lifelong quest for consolation for his original rejection. He worked through the hurt," says John Fitgerald, and ultimately he found solace in the written word
Emmanuel Touhey is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Twitter at @netouhey
