What price art? What cost to the artist? To their entourage? These are questions that Adrian Frazier places at the centre of his monumental biography of John Montague. Ten years in the making, this volume, written with the co-operation of the subject, his family, friends and colleagues, comes with an introduction entitled Preliminary Considerations. It serves as a mise en garde for the reader.
Frazier, who was a friend of the poet’s, will follow Montague’s own example of “ruthless intimacy” and “pitiless fidelity”. This is a no-holds-barred biography, revealing what some “would keep hidden”. We are reminded of Richard Holmes’s declaration that biography is a disreputable genre that has been causing trouble ever since its invention. Frazier acknowledges the cost of a life turned “into the achievement of poetry”, yet he reminds us that it is because of the poetry that the biography exists.
We are not surprised as readers then when presented with tales of disagreements, obsessions with the success of other poets, notably Seamus Heaney. Nor are we shocked by tales of extra-marital dalliances, detailed accounts of the poet’s trysts with women, some named, others anonymous. We learn of Montague’s questioning of his sexual orientation and his propositioning of male companions for “a roll in the hay”.
Frazier identifies Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, a guidebook addressed “specifically to young men who wanted to know how to write a great poem”, as a potential source for this behaviour. It enabled promiscuity, adultery and the objectification of women. For central to Graves’s book is the Muse theory, where the secret to inspire creation was to fall in love with a woman, not your wife, in whom “the Moon-goddess has taken up residence”.
Michael D Higgins leads tributes to Michael Longley: ‘One of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced’
Award-winning poet Michael Longley dies aged 85
‘There is this massive appetite for work that is doing something different and new’
Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips: Migration, loneliness and broken dreams
Yet it is not licentiousness but poetry that occupies pride of place in the book. The early years, recounted in detail, are sources for the future verses. Frazier writes empathetically of four-year-old Johnnie’s separation from his older brothers upon their arrival in Ireland from Brooklyn, the lonely nights in Garvaghey, Co Tyrone, with his aunts, the emergence of the stammer that was to dog the poet during the early decades of his life.
Frazier makes much of this fact and recounts the impediment it represented in John Montague’s schooling. He sees traces of this early trauma in the poetry and in the central metaphor of the grafted tongue that would later shape one of Montague’s most significant poems.
Montague’s poetic vocation emerged during his years as a student in UCD, beginning in 1947. However, it was in the US from 1954-56 that it was shaped, honed and harnessed. Frazier writes with authority of the stints in Yale, Indiana, Iowa and Berkeley. The archival work reveals an unhappy year at Yale, with many unsent letters, a depressed Montague, according to his biographer, “had come to inhabit a state of fear”, an alienation caused by the culture shock encountered and the ongoing Cold War. Montague was energised by the summer school in Indiana where he encountered, among others, Richard Wilbur and John Crowe Ransome. The latter, impressed by Montague’s recitation of Kavanagh’s Stony Grey Soil at a cocktail party, arranged for Montague to spend the next year in Iowa.
Frazier points out how innovative and singular the Iowa course was at the time, with “master craftsmen (and women) as the instructors, rather than professors of literature”. There, Montague was surrounded by American talent (Bly, Snodgrass, Justice). The central influence was Robert Lowell, against whom all the writers measured themselves. Lowell and William Carlos Williams gave workshops. When Williams put his arm around Montague at the end of a reading, addressing him as “Poet! Poet!”, Frazier says that Montague felt it was a kind of “christening”. A note by Montague to himself, penned during that period states: “Annotate, like F Scott Fitzgerald, my entire life”, before declaring “Lowell’s poems can be equalled”.
In his life-long apprenticeship, Montague learned how to mine the seam of his own life, connecting the confessional American genre with the historical Irish home-ground, dinnseanchas on the divan, so to speak. Frazier’s detailed work on the genesis of Montague’s poems proves this point. Describing how the poems evolve, he illustrates the use of notebooks, research, and private life for poems that emerge years later. For instance, Frazier connects the verses for Minnie Kearney, the Cailleach figure of Like Dolmens Round My Childhood..., to a photograph of a Sheela-na-Gig from Barrie Cooke, an essay Montague wrote in The Dubliner in 1964, and newspaper clippings. Montague also makes use of a note that he wrote about his aunt Brigid in 1960. All come together in The Wild Dog Rose, a poem that only appeared in 1970, which Frazier rightly calls “one of the best poems John Montague ever wrote”.
There are also the poems from a sequence entitled Home Truths consigned to the end of the biography, which both his American and Irish publishers declined to print. The reason for their refusal is the issue of domestic violence. Foreshadowed by Frazier’s earlier comments about DH Lawrence and Frieda’s situation, it is clear that Montague saw himself as the victim in this situation. Although the poems were deemed “lean, well-tuned so they resonate”, according to Guinn Batten, their publication was considered inappropriate. Peter Fallon concurred.
The non-publication of the poems placed a burden on Montague, a writer’s block which led to him exploiting material from his notebooks, some written as early as 1973 appearing in Drunken Sailor (2004). He also took refuge in translation, Englishing the poetry of his old Paris comrade, Claude Esteban. Yet, his final volume, Speech Lessons, seemed to indicate there had been a resolution, “an ease and gentleness, a warmth”, according to James Harpur.
Rachel Cooke, reviewing Nicholas Jenkins’s volume on WH Auden in the Observer last September, suggested literary biography was doomed to be consigned to oblivion “in fifty or even 10 years”. John Montague: A Poet’s Life shows that it remains very much alive and kicking on this side of the Irish Sea.
Clíona Ní Ríordáin is the Thomas J and Kathleen M O’Donnell Chair in Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame
