Memoir: Of the making of autobiographies there seems no end; in writing, nothing is more fashionable. Poets have plied this trade before; now they do it in serried ranks and a second memoir follows closely upon the first. John Montague has just done us this favour, writes James Liddy.
The questions readers have to ask are: what function does the second memoir perform that the first didn't? (often the answer is chronological or philosophical). In what ways does this "take" overshadow the first production? What different strengths of the heart are invoked? Are there approaches to intricate personal decisions not hitherto disclosed to the reader? Are there new presentations of an ars poetica? Have styles of disclosure and tastes in literary politics changed? Most important of all, is the candour harsher, the wit more brilliant? Poets' autobiographies can be looked at as entertainments at Cana: does the waiter wander in with the best wine on the tray towards the end?
IN DEALING WITH these fundamentals, Montague makes available a flurry of evidence. At times, The Pear Is Ripe offers fresh or more detailed older friendships, stronger ongoing presences of the great, adventures with the beautiful and obscure, or with the beautiful and no longer obscure. These latter are part of the book's sub-theme, "a meditation on sexual mores". The volume can be read as a kind of sophisticated, travelled Irishman's guide to the proto-intrigues and emotional intensities of the 1960s. Montague sermonises but little, he is more adept at creating and fixing scenes of personal liberation. He attempts to develop a new standard of morality for the new situations, with an underlying acknowledgement of the shifts in literary responsibilities.
Out of Northern Ireland has he come, pace Yeats an even smaller room, but Montague's fascination lies with California and in particular with San Francisco, which was in the seasons he describes a hothouse peninsula of diverse loves, interrupted dreams, and smart chapbooks. But whether in the Bay Area, Paris, Dublin or Belfast, this poet's social calendar has always been an avalanche; there will never again be such an avid ambassador for Irish poetry. Montague's primary concern appears to centre around California in an era of emerging poetry achievement in which the magic canon consists of three names: Duncan, Spicer, and Snyder. The latter becomes the Irish poet's Vergil in a vatic lotus land. The preliminary section of The Pear Is Ripedraws a profile of Snyder that is parallel to Kerouac's vaster portrait of him in The Dharma Bums, with the same Buddhist-tinged, bucolic, puritan speech.
The memoir changes geography frequently and its other concern is with the author's position in Irish literature. The connection of Montague and Thomas Kinsella as longstanding contemporary poets, observable in these packed pages, cannot be oversold. Montague has the more social personality of the two writers; an intriguing charmer, his affability permeates this autobiography. It was in the shadows of these two poets that we, the next literary generation, set out to conquer UCD and thus the wider world. My circle of friends was electrified with Montague's seminal quoting of Cavafy in The Bell (1950), "You'll find no other places, no new seas in all your wanderings,/The town will follow you about. You'll range/in the same streets. In the same suburbs change/from youth to age;/in this same house grow white". That added an unusual music to our blood, first destiny would be final destiny, we would be Stephen Dedalus wherever we lived.
Montague cemented his influence in the 1950s by bringing to Dublin not very well known writing from America. There was his lecture in the Hibernian Hotel on William Carlos Williams's To Daphne and Virginia, which unlocked the doors to post-war American poetry for the audience. Montague travels the same ground updated in his second memoir; the field is widened to comments and stories on Roethke, Berryman, Ginsberg, Creeley, Lew Welch and others.
ON THE OTHER hand, Montague's narrative periodically retreats to the Parnassus away from home, McDaid's, an evening den of Dante-like infernos (with a Paradiso canto oddly appearing now and then). He has splendid anecdotes of course. One I enjoyed especially was about Nelson Algren's visit to the bar and his mixed-up encounter with Patrick Kavanagh. A disturbing element in these memoirs is Montague's sense of unfinished business with Kavanagh; the author's unease is palpable. I suspect Kavanagh felt Montague was never really on his side, and there may have been for both of them embedded Northern jealousies. Montague would come into the pub on Saturday mornings for a chat and a plowing competition with the resident champion, Kavanagh; I can see John parading along the floor with an imaginary veering plough in his hands.
A concern I had reading The Pear Is Ripe was that sometimes it seemed the material on people was either too short or too long. For one, I would have welcomed more on a figure like Valentine Iremonger, a neglected eminence, and also more about the connection to Robert Conquest. To compensate, there is a brief and wonderful sketch of Elizabeth Bowen at Cork Airport, "as noble-looking as a finely bred horse".
The author includes a poem on that great poet Jack Spicer I had not read before, "We only met for an hour/Or so, before closing time/In Gino and Carlo's/ (the clatter from the pool tables/And spoke of Casement's/Knightly quest". His description of the vagaries and eccentricities of Sean Ó Riada has unusual challenge and depth. I was put off by the too-frequent use of the word "Pal"; it has a superficial aura.
All in all, though, reading this autobiography is a mellow experience and mandatory for all investigators and students of the Irish literary community. To categorise it, one should place it with casually structured informative autobiography like that of William Carlos Williams rather than with haunted, spirit-traced writing such as Edwin Muir's.
James Liddy is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is working with Paul Vogel on versions of the last poems of Osip Mandelstam
The Pear Is Ripe: A Memoir By John Montague Liberties Press, 240pp. €25