After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon: Poet’s life forcibly framed

After the Titanic: A life of Derek Mahon

Author: Stephen Enniss

ISBN-13: 978-0717164417

Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

Guideline Price: €29.99

Stephen Enniss occupies an unusual position. A librarian and scholar, he masterminded the purchase by Emory University of large portions of the estates of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Salman Rushdie and Derek Mahon. With full access to such rich material, Ennis should have been ideally placed to write After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon.

And the archival correspondence is rich: Heaney, Eavan Boland, Eamon Grennan, Harold Pinter and dozens of other contemporaries find their way into Enniss's pages. If Enniss locates someone making a casual comment in a letter, he logs it and moves on to the next name that catches his magpie eye. We learn about Mahon's friendship with fellow Belfast poet Michael Longley at TCD, his work as features editor at Vogue, his wife's spell as personal assistant to Pinter, the various film and television projects with director Philip Haas and others, the editorial route that led him from Oxford University Press to Peter Fallon's Gallery Press, his refusal of an OBE and subsequently the Queen's gold medal for poetry, his acceptance of a place in Aosdána and the importance of the cnuas to the development of his later work. But in the welter of proper names, it is easy to forget Mahon's poetry and the esteem in which it is held by those writers Enniss namechecks, which raises a problem for readers of this biography.

A biography of Mahon, or of any of the other figures Emory has invested in, requires a thoughtful “framing” of chaotic day-by-day itineraries and a clear sense that something is at stake when a poem is made and published.

Mahon's frequent changes of address and his creative approach to revision, while not unusual for a writer of his generation, do make him a difficult subject for a biographer to see "whole". And it must be frustrating for any biographer when his subject continues to develop: this book will already be dated by the publication later in October of Red Sails, a new book of essays and memoir (Gallery Press €11.95 paperback; €18.50 hardback).

Crude identifications

However, since his subject has possibly published more biographical poems than any other poet in the past half-century, it is surprising that Enniss has learnt so little from him about life-writing. Mahon’s subtle, expansive poems about, among others, Van Gogh, Coleridge, Jean Rhys, Ovid and Elizabeth Bowen, use those figures to test and discover ways of thinking about how we live now, and how art might respond to the eternally changing world we live in. Enniss, instead, collapses the dialogue which Mahon establishes with these figures into crude identifications of their lives with his.

Simone Weil has written that an artist’s work is distinguished by “a faculty of composition on multiple planes”, but Enniss’s approach often reduces the poems to a single plane, as after-the-fact footnotes on actual events. It is typical too that he spends more time discussing early drafts of unpublished poems than he does on Mahon’s celebrated publications, seeming to credit, naively, the drafting process with presenting a more “truthful” account, as if writing were a matter of “dressing up” and obscuring the facts.

What is missing in Enniss's book is an emphasis on Mahon's artfulness and inventiveness, the clarity of tone which has been so influential on subsequent generations of Irish and British poets, and how he has created new places where, as his most famous poem puts it, "a thought might grow". (In his typically too-brief discussion of that poem, A Disused Shed in County Wexford, Enniss errs in asserting that this is a poem whose text Mahon never revised when in fact Mahon has revised it, and effectively).

A glaring example of his unhappy use of the source material is his recourse to a discarded draft poem of Mahon's, called A Bender, which records how a drunken student swim in the Liffey was noted as "attempted suicide" when Mahon came to in a hospital. Mahon was not the first and will not be the last undergraduate to drunkenly, dangerously dive into the Liffey, but Enniss splices this poem draft with a quotation from a contemporary to argue that Mahon's work is founded on this incident, which serves as a template for subsequent crises (including the advent of the Troubles). Enniss may be distinctly unconvincing about Mahon here but he is revealing about his own mode of biography, which wants a foundational event as its narrative structuring device.

Like Orson Welles doing down Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, but without Welles' worldly irony, or like the many ambulance-chasing biographers of mid-century American confessional poets, Enniss persists with allusions to Mahon's draft poem throughout the biography.

He adds, spuriously, that a New York hospital in which Mahon was treated for alcoholism also treated Dylan Thomas, while Mahon saw an analyst who was the widow of John Berryman. At these points it is clear that Enniss would fit Mahon into the mould of a confessional poet, whose works send biographers in pursuit of “real-life” sources.

By approaching Mahon as a “confessional” poet whose work originates in particular traumas, Enniss misses out on the broader post-war scepticism about civilised society which characterises so much of Mahon’s writing (and the existentialist perspective that Mahon recognised in Beckett, which chimed so productively with his experience of growing up in a northern European city).

‘Provisional’ reality

In

Huts and Sheds

, the astonishing memoir-cum-essay with which Mahon begins his

Selected Prose

, the poet returns again and again to the word “provisional” to describe the world he grew up in. That sense of a provisional reality is a framing idea which helps us, more convincingly than Enniss’s crisis narrative, to understand Mahon’s disposition and the shakiness and unreliability his poems detect in the firmly held beliefs of any community.

After the Titanic is not definitive for many reasons, but it is also notably scant on the Indian summer Mahon's work has enjoyed over the past decade, perhaps because this would not fit with the trajectory Enniss envisions for a confessional poet. A future biographer might look on the bright side of the poems' wild faith that, in spite of the vicissitudes, everything is going to be alright. John McAuliffe teaches poetry at the University of Manchester