Northman review: John Hewitt, the ‘daddy of us all’

Northman: John Hewitt 1907-87 An Irish Writer, His World, and His Times

Author: WJ McCormack

ISBN-13: 978-0198739821

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Guideline Price: £45

Northman is a strange undertaking, as biographies go. It proceeds in fits and starts, moves backwards and forwards, inside and outside. It begins at the point where John Hewitt's "literary biography" begins, with the publication of No Rebel Word in 1948. The publisher was Frederick Muller, and before we are properly introduced to Hewitt, we learn a good deal about Muller's policy, back-list, internal difficulties, areas of dispute with the author and so forth.

By this means, author WJ McCormack sets the pattern for his detailed investigations of aspects of his subject’s life and times, carried out with a scholar’s thoroughness and aplomb, but allowing little scope for narrative momentum or intrepidity.

McCormack is not, for example, especially concerned to place the child John Hewitt in his Belfast setting, though Hewitt himself, in the series of sonnets which make up his verse autobiography, Kites in Spring (1980), left an absorbing account of his upbringing in the north of the city, full of relatives, games, seasons, rituals, street-life and all kinds of vivid particulars ("A Happy Boy", "The Irish Dimension", etc).

All this might have been elaborated in prose, but with McCormack it is always more a matter of statistics than evocation ("Belfast by [mid-19th] century flourished at the head of an extensive linen industry"). This makes for an austere approach, with intermittent lapses into indiscretion and inconsequentiality. When he lights on the phrase "the Grey Man's Path" in one of Hewitt's early, unpublished poems, McCormack can't resist glossing it via Brewer's Dictionary of Phrases and Fables (1898), which really doesn't enhance its impact.

Over-interpretation tends to be a feature of the sections of the book titled "Break for Text 1", "11", etc, culminating in McCormack's analysis of the late story Daybreak, which Hewitt contributed to the magazine Threshold in 1980.

By this stage, Hewitt was back in Belfast, following his years as director of the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry, and secure in his role as “the Daddy of us all”, in the poet James Simmons’s much- quoted phrase. The furore surrounding Hewitt’s drawn-out departure from Belfast in 1957, five years after he’d failed to be appointed director of the Ulster Museum and Art Gallery – a post to which many people felt he was absolutely entitled – is judiciously appraised by McCormack.

The rejection by the board of the Ulster Museum was a blow to Hewitt’s self-esteem, but he rose above it, taking off for Coventry with his head held high. Though, as we learn from this biography, Coventry was not entirely a bed of roses as far as bureaucracy, struggles with adversaries and arguments about acquisitions were concerned.

Still, for John and his wife, Roberta, there were new friendships to be consolidated, trips abroad to be enjoyed, an active social life to be engaged in and, above all, a new perspective on Ulster affairs to be acquired, from outside the intractable spot. The fine poem An Irishman in Coventry was one result.

When the Hewitts returned to Belfast in 1972, the North of Ireland was already in the throes of bloodshed and terror, and John Hewitt's literary impulse was reactivated accordingly, as poems beginning with An Ulster Reckoning (1971) displayed a quiet, discerning, non-ambivalent aversion to any murderous creed or conviction. At the same time, what he calls "assertors and protestors" in a just cause chimed with Hewitt's egalitarian instincts.

Hewitt knew the North inside out, and all the causes of its disaffection. He understood the difference between diversity, which contributes richness to a culture, and divisiveness, which has a lethal effect. And, as Frank Ormsby put it in his incisive introduction to Hewitt's Collected Poems (1991), no other poet has taken greater pains to define the culture ("a particular fractured culture") he found himself confronting.

Roberta Hewitt died in 1975. Throughout the greater part of her life she kept a journal that is now in the public domain, and looms prominently in McCormack’s admirably broad selection of source material. By and large, however, the Hewitts’ private life remains private, the odd extramarital flirtation or episode of exasperation aside.

On one memorable occasion, on a road outside Cushendall, Roberta lost her temper and bashed her husband in the face, smashing his spectacles and causing his nose to bleed. Generally, however, more cordial relations prevailed. She was loyal and endlessly supportive. After she died, her husband remarked, “I’ve no one to tell things to.”

Northman clears up some chronological confusions, and adds a degree of complexity to the image of Hewitt as gruff, reticent, obstinate, unsociable, temperamentally Methodist, all-but teetotal (at one moment, it seems, he was actually observed to be drunk to the point of swaying on his feet), and harbouring a certain recoil from Catholicism. The book, as well, contains a copious amount of background information, which, at its most relevant, supplies a context and enlarges our perception of the poet and his world.

At the same time, the book is full of non sequiturs; many people who knew Hewitt have not been consulted; McCormack cites Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby's Selected Hewitt as the best introduction to his poetry, but doesn't include it in his bibliography; and some significant figures among Hewitt's cherished exemplars, such as William Drennan, are absent altogether.

This biographer is inclined to steer clear of anecdotes: a rather touching story, for example, attaches to Hewitt’s death – an event that merits no more coverage here than the bald announcement, “John Hewitt died on 27 June 1987”.

Because of its conscientiousness, and because of its oddities and omissions, Northman is by turns illuminating and infuriating. The academic tone is clearly crucial to the enterprise, though, and if this detracts a little from its fascination, it also underscores the importance of Hewitt as a poet, man of letters, northman, man of integrity, of indomitable spirit and independent outlook.

As the poet Derek Mahon once summed him up: “Hewitt was a prickly blackthorn and no mistake, but he was, too, a gentleman, a gentle man, and a worthy . . . descendant of the 18th-century radicals he admired so much.”

Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her latest work is Bookworm (Somerville Press), a memoir of childhood reading in Belfast.