John Montague: A Poet’s Life, by Adrian Frazier, Lilliput Press, 500 pp, €24.95, ISBN: 978-1843519102
A serious biography, properly considered, is a very curious kind of book. It takes a certain nerve on the part of the author to venture on what the reader must hope will be a fair, accurate and considered account of an interesting life – interesting because, of course, there isn’t much point in reading about a life that was of no import, that was dull and boring. Courage is needed, and a quality of self-confidence, in one who presumes to give a full account of another’s life, the more so when few or any of us could presume to account for all that constitutes our own lives as lived. Leaving aside personal acquaintance with the subject – and granting that such a personal relationship can be as unhelpful as it can be helpful – the good biographer will demand of herself or himself a very considerable commitment to research, interviews and reflection.
Then, the life under scrutiny must be of interest because of the subject’s personality, life and achievements. In the case of a poet or any other artist, the reader will not necessarily be interested in the bundle of accidents who rose each morning to go about in the world but will certainly be interested in the poems or works, and will hope to find an intelligent and informative account of the relationship between the mortal artist and the, hopefully, enduring work.
Our brave biographer must at a minimum be prepared to study the life under interrogation with diligence, scrupulous regard for sources, restraint of judgement and, at the same time, a watchful self-critical eye on his or her own powers of discernment and judgement.
A hostile or skewed biography is of little use except as a mean, passing entertainment, just as a sycophantic or unduly indulgent one is a waste of both author’s and ‘time. Of course, a perfectly judged account of anyone’s life is all but unachievable, but we are entitled, I think, to expect a commitment on the part of the author to as much truth and good faith as might reasonably be expected.
What, then, with these things in mind, to make of Adrian Frazier’s biography of John Montague? His subtitle, A Poet’s Life, foregrounds what was central to that life – the poetry. That subtitle makes a certain promise: that the focus will be on the poetry, that the life will be studied mainly in the light of how Montague drew his poems from the matter of his life. Frazier sets out his stall very clearly: ‘To write a proper literary biography you need more than just a writer of interest. It is necessary to have the materials, the traces of works-in-progress, living witnesses, observers in the past who left memoranda, and a full archive of correspondence.’ In this regard I salute him; Frazier has done trojan work. The footnotes to his fourteen chapters, 988 of them, are evidence of meticulous, painstaking and industrious study of his materials. I doubt it would be possible to surpass Frazier’s exhaustive researches into primary documents. I can think of some whom he might profitably have interviewed, but of course it is an author’s prerogative to choose whom he should speak to, and Frazier has spoken, sometimes at length, to a good number of those principally involved in and with the life and the work. I cannot think of an aspect of Montague’s life that does not draw his attention to some degree or another.
The question then arises, naturally, of what use the author makes of these materials. Here too, Frazier can be praised, up to a point. He makes commendable efforts to find the connections between the poems Montague is producing at a given point and what is happening in his life, creating a certain narrative fluidity designed, I would imagine, to persuade us of a certain inevitability in the link between life-event and the poems being produced in the time of that event. Unfortunately, however, things are rarely that simple. He might have remembered from time to time Wordsworth’s observation that poetry comes from ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Turbulent moments in the poet’s life are not often marked by the eventual poem until a certain time has been allowed to pass and may well be modulated in memory to the extent that in pursuit of the desired poem strict fidelity to the precipitating event may be elided, sometimes to the point of invisibility. With this passing of time, an inevitable blurring of the phenomena inevitably takes place – the emerging imperative of the poem as it takes shape can and very often does displace the banalities and tensions of the precipitating events in favour of the well-made object that is the poem. It is a dangerous impulse to attribute a poem to a single life moment, and Frazier, I fear, succumbs to the impulse more often than seems prudent or, sometimes, just. An example is when he offers his thoughts on ‘Beyond The Liss’, which he describes as ‘a quirky fable in the manner of Graves, about an old hunchback who walks the roads at twilight and, hearing music, puts his head over a hedge to spy on female faeries’. Now, old lads walking the road at twilight who spy fairies dancing in a lios is so common a trope in Irish traditional music and song that it is a far more likely spur to the poem than an impulse to imitate a Gravesian poem while visiting the great man in Mallorca. Montague, after all, was steeped in the tradition and would have heard such songs from childhood. (And, incidentally, despite Frazier’s confident assertion at the end of the paragraph, Graves never had ‘a retinue of muses’; such women as fitted the designation ‘muse’ came singly, and at sometimes long intervals, in his life.)
I first met John Montague when he came to teach at UCC in 1972. I liked him from the start, not just for the exemplary quality of his poems but for his endearing, mischievous, cosmopolitan personality. He was a breath of fresh air in what was then a rather narrow provincial city; he brought welcome intimations of a wider world, and he was more than happy to share this with a small coterie of young poets, then taking their first tentative steps into a world where he was already established as a considerable figure.
He befriended us: that’s the long and the short of it. And Evelyn befriended us. They made us welcome in their home on Grattan Hill; they fed us, they challenged us, they took our awkward and clumsy aspirations in poetry seriously, they laughed with us, sympathised with us in our little crises and above all they encouraged us. John had an expansive library of contemporary American poetry, and he made us free of it. It was thanks to him, for instance, that I first read Galway Kinnell, thanks to him that Tom McCarthy encountered the poems of Theodore Roethke – an important and liberating influence on McCarthy as a young man, as Kinnell was for me. Grattan Hill was a bright and happy home for the most part, as it appeared to us, and if we were sometimes aware of tensions between John and Evelyn we were adult enough to understand that between two such strong and marked personalities such stresses and tensions were only to be expected. It’s important to say this because the unwary reader, faced with Frazier’s account of the relationship between John and Evelyn, might well think of their life together as one of unremitting warfare, a dark and turbulent life marked by violence, betrayal, mutual incomprehension and rage. Frazier goes to a great deal of trouble, not without justification, to show us the dark and disturbing side of that marriage, but he might have made more of an effort to take into account that, though these things were present, and increasingly so in the later years of the marriage, there was light and, yes, sweetness too, as many of us can attest. To be scrupulously fair here, Frazier does give a brief but sensitive account of how caring both John and Evelyn were to Derek Mahon, sheltering him during a dark night of the soul, which shows that to some extent at least he was aware that there was more to Grattan Hill than a grand guignol theatre of pain and darkness. A pity, then, that he does not do more to explore this warmer side of life in that remarkable house. And indeed he might have done much more to balance the undoubted darknesses in Montague, in the life as in the poems, with the kindness and lightness of touch which was equally characteristic of both man and work.
I was always aware, as were many others, that his early years, the years of abandonment, left a great unsolved wound in John’s psyche. Frazier is good on the early years, quite persuasive in fact. I find him thoughtful on Montague’s childhood, perceptive and often kind in his understanding of how that early abandonment by his mother shaped his psyche. He misses, though, to some extent, how Montague would go on to have an ambiguous relationship with that wound. I could have told him that when Montague asked my advice on how best to bring an end to his marriage with Evelyn, he rejected my suggestion that there was an opportunity also to close that long-festering childhood wound; he became angry, asking, where will I find the source for poetry then?
It was no great secret that Montague was from time to time adulterous, thought I cannot pretend I was aware that his liaisons were as numerous as Frazier has discovered. I never thought any of these episodes of which I was aware, apart from those that led in succession to his second and third marriages, were of any particular significance in his development. Frazier seems to think otherwise, though perhaps I have failed to understand him; in any case he treats us (or himself?) to a forensic and near salacious catalogue of those affairs, but I could wish that the man who so shrewdly and sympathetically examined that early, fatal damage to the poet’s sense of self-worth had brought the same sensitivity to bear on the rather obvious point that Montague sought in these serial encounters and betrayals the temporary healing grace of novelty, in effect a respite from and at the same time renewed immersion in what he saw as the ultimate source of his work. There was, in other words, a self-wounding element in his character as well as a recurring need to assuage pain. Frazier makes much, some might feel to the point of prurience, of Montague’s occasional homosexual dalliances – to the same limited effect as far as illuminating the poems is concerned.
It is, I think, acceptable for a reviewer to feel uneasy when he finds a less than adequate description of an event in which he was intimately involved. On page 348 Frazier rather misses the point when he describes an event at the Gate Theatre on June 11th, 1989 as little more than ‘a boost for Montague’ and ‘a lift for John’, organised by myself. He refers to a celebration of Montague’s sixtieth and Heaney’s fiftieth birthdays, which was marked by the evident pleasure in each other’s company shown by both, on and off stage. It was a remarkable night of poetry and friendship, not least for the generous tributes each made a point of paying to the other. The motto for the night’s larger purpose, a celebration of the renewed vitality in Irish poetry at the time, was a restatement of the United Irishmen’s ‘It is new strung and shall be heard’; nobody there present failed to understand the deeper subtext.
In the next paragraph, on p 349, Frazier tells us that ‘Theo Dorgan had another ingenious publicity project in the works’. He is referring here to The Great Book of Ireland/Leabhar Mór na hEireann – which he scants as a ‘publicity project’. I’m not sure that the 252 contributors to this unique vellum manuscript, distinguished artists all, would appreciate his description.
The first contributions, writing directly on the vellum page, were made by Montague and Heaney earlier on the day of their joint celebration, the pair chosen to initiate the work for the very particular reason that beginning with titans set out a proper scope and ambition for what Mary Robinson would later call ‘a Book of Kells for the twenty-first century’. Everything and everyone else followed after, conscious of the standard set. Not incidentally, I would say happily, when Samuel Beckett came to make his contribution to the work, it would be Montague who steadied the vellum sheet as his old friend scribed out what would prove the last poem he would ever write. Frazier is wrong to say that ‘What Dorgan wanted Montague to secure was a page written by Samuel Beckett’ – I had written to Beckett, twice, to secure his participation in the venture, and it so happened that Montague was visiting the great man when our second invitation lay on his desk. Happily, Montague added his blessing, and in fact carried home the treasure to Dublin.
Well, these are not large matters, and no doubt I am being unduly sensitive, but I am left wondering how many others may find or have found themselves equally ill-served. There are other misjudgements in the book that somewhat undermine my confidence in the author. Take, for instance, a crass and wholly uncomprehending description of Graves’s The White Goddess. Frazier’s version of that extraordinary book is, in summary, that it amounts to little more than a charter for adulterers, a pretext for poets to justify being unfaithful to their lawful spouses. In his magisterial and meticulous biography of Graves, Robert Graves, his Life and Work, Martin Seymour-Smith devotes twenty-one pages to a consideration of The White Goddess. He fully accepts its eccentricity, as who does not, least of all Graves himself, but Seymour-Smith is very clear and unambiguous when he says ‘The simple answer to the oft-asked question as to whether Graves believes its thesis in a literal sense is that The White Goddess is a gigantic metaphor’ – having earlier quoted the author’s own words that the book is an examination of ‘the single grand theme of poetry, the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year’. The subtitle of the work is a clue to its true nature – ‘a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth’. Frazier’s reduction of it to such a banal compass, given its profound influence on Montague’s sense of the relation between lyric poetry and the sacred, is at best unfortunate. (It is equally unfortunate that Frazier considers the epic as the peak of every poet’s ambition – I have not met, even once, a working poet who would say so.) This misreading of Graves is all the more puzzling since on page xxi, Frazier tells us unequivocally that ‘The White Goddess was a formative book not just for Montague, but for Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Ted Hughes …’
It shakes one’s confidence to have a major work dismissed in such shallow terms, the more so as The White Goddess was so central to Montague’s sense of himself as a fated poet.
One line of Montague’s has always haunted me: ‘With all my circling, a failure to return.’ The inability, failure if you will, to transcend that primal hurt is the key to the relationship between the life and the work, how one feeds into and explains the other. I am not sure that Frazier, though he intermittently touches on this, finally and fully understands that this is in fact the case. What it was that he wished to return to, alas, was something the poet felt deeply but could never quite explain – least of all to himself.
I had hoped that Frazier, very close to Montague by his own account, would illuminate and to the extent that such a thing is possible help to explain a man who was and remains in some ways dear to me, a poetry that is still not fully appreciated as great, and the ways in which one flows into and grows out of the other. I am regretfully obliged to say that he has done so only in part. Having said which, when he does succeed, as in his comprehensive and illuminating examination of ‘The Rough Field’, the text and its wider context, he can be very good. I do not agree with his analysis in its entirety, but I acknowledge and salute the integrity of the effort. A biography is not, of course. intended as a study of the overarching corpus of poems. It will fall to a scholar of a different temperament, perhaps, with a different aim in view, to study with an equal diligence the love poems and the hymns to a living, wounded planet so characteristic of Montague at his relaxed and benevolent best.
Granted the undoubted and indeed laudable depth and scope of his researches in the archives – and Montague’s is a much documented life, not least by himself – Frazier falls short of his own ambition for this book: to offer an integrated, sympathetic and illuminating account of the poet Montague’s remarkable life and work. Well, Browning is an inferior poet to Montague in my view, but he put it well when he wrote ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?’ No one should fault a man for the scope of his ambition. Nor, indeed, is it fair to ask of a man more than he is capable of giving.
Professor Frazier has done Montague a considerable service in many ways. His impeccable research work in the archives is monumental and a credit to him as a serious scholar. If he falls short, it seems to me, his part-failure is in empathy and judgement – a certain prurient censoriousness marks the work; a darker Montague is painted than many who knew him well would recognise. Perhaps, in the end, we can say no more than that Frazier set himself a task impossible of fulfilment – but credit where credit is due, he has made a brave effort to pin down a man made of mercury. Montague, in death as in life, is elusive still.
Best perhaps to let him go, to let the poems speak for themselves.
1/7/2025
