The Irish memoir is a risky form, liable to nostalgia, celebration of the eccentric, and overwriting. Not surprisingly, John Montague has avoided the traps, gifted as he is with an incomparably lucid prose style and an inclination towards mockery which doesn't spare the writer. This engaging and good-humoured book of reminiscences and acquaintances spreads across Dublin, Paris and America (and most significantly California), centring on the 1950s and 1960s, remembered by the poet himself as "those hopeful days".
The book has two kinds of predecessor: first the memories of the Irish literary scene and its eccentricities, whose ultimate archetype is that greatest of literary round-ups, George Moore's Hail and Farewell. But equally influential is the Paris-sophistication memoir such as Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a location which Montague has moved forward by a few decades from the tragic generation of Fitzgerald and friends.
Montague's life experiences have been remarkable, of course: born in Brooklyn; brought up in Tyrone learning to milk cows by hand; then life in Dublin and Paris with his mildly aristocratic French first wife - all interspersed with periods in America and Cork. All this does not suggest Montague's remarkable circles of acquaintance.
Like his 1930s predecessors, his Paris milieu contains painters and political emigrΘs as well as writers. And, as with all such memoirs, the suggestion of name-dropping is inevitable, simply because so many "names" are part of the experience: "Eddie Windsor", the ex-king, is around, and "Ionesco and his Asian wife would come wandering by on the Boulevard Raspail" (the kind of remark so devastatingly satirized by Myles na gCopaleen in his spurious Irish Times correspondences: "Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather's place"; "as a lad I knew Ibsen").
But Montague does have notable personalities to build the memoirs round: George Yeats, who gets the prologue to herself, is as attractive and lively a figure in Montague's account as in all others. Later she reappears as the recipient of select roses from the bellowing Theodore Roethke, when she confides the magnificently Myles-like testimony: "Poor Willy's favourite flower, the only ones he could recognise. He was nearly colour-blind you know." So much for the "Red rose, proud rose, sad rose of all my days!"
Along with George Yeats, three colossi dominate these pages: Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett and the great liberal Californian Yeatsian Tom Parkinson, who showed the same unfailing generosity and courtesy to Montague that he did to everyone else.
Montague's Beckett is "painfully shy", immensely generous ("you could not pay for a drink in his company"), and inclined to a Joycean total recall of Irish locations. He combated sleeplessness by playing "the course at Carrickmines, the old and the new, all eighteen holes, one by one, in my head". Montague's literary reflections on Beckett are acute, wondering for instance whether his gloom was a product of family tragedy, such as the fact, asserted with "grimly cheerful humour", that he had two uncles, once athletically gifted, "with only one leg between them". "Which came first", Montague wonders, "the chicken or the leg; in other words, did such miseries come to Sam's silent call?" Similar sympathy informs Montague's anguished account of Liam Miller, the creator of the beautiful books of Dolmen Press.
Behan, a close friend and neighbour, is sympathetically viewed along familiar lines; Myles's uncharacteristically enthusiastic view that he was "the sole proprietor of the biggest heart that has beaten in Ireland in the last forty years" is cited twice, corroborated by Montague's own assessment that "his generosity was as outsize as his burly physique". As usual too, the reader feels for Montague's moderately anti-alcoholic French wife as the burly physique comes crashing in on their basement flat. There are other heroic figures such as the Wildean Garech Browne, who founded Claddagh Records along with Montague. This chapter, 'Claddagh Raga', is arguably the most important, an account of a venture whose significance cannot be overestimated, registering and promoting a major change in Irish culture which brought skills and canons normally relegated to the folk margins to the centre. Incidentally of course, it brought great range to Montague's own poetry, perpetuating the old people that were dolmens round his childhood, in the analogous persons of Denis Murphy, Julia Clifford and their musical associates. (This does bring up the one significant disfigurement in this beautifully produced book which has marvellous, mostly new black-and-white pictures of the major figures: almost every quotation from Irish, from "Ceolteori Chullainn" on, is horribly garbled.)
But no book less deserves an ungenerous closing remark. It is perfectly titled: Montague is a great promoter of good company. To find generosity as the hallmark of so many of his acquaintances is of course evidence of generosity in the observer. Montague does not take his poetic vocation and status lightly, as indeed is his entitlement; but it is clear from this delightful book that if he were to borrow Yeats's great summary line from 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', "my glory was I had such friends", he would mean it wholeheartedly.
This is only the first instalment of the memoirs; the others will be awaited with impatience and goodwill.
Bernard O'Donoghue is the Director of this year's Yeats Summer School in Sligo, which begins at the end of this month
The Rough Field: An Ulster Epic, by John Montague, Claddagh Records, two CDs, £17
By Robert O'Byrne
Almost 30 years ago, John Montague organised for a reading of his newly published poem 'The Rough Field' to be performed in London. The recording of that occasion has now been reissued by Claddagh Records, coinciding with the publication of Montague's memoirs. Epic in scale, 'The Rough Field' is also strongly autobiographical in character, with the author taking the roles of both Dante and Virgil as he explores his own history and that of his native Ulster.
It was described at the time by the late Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press as being "an orchestration of personal and tribal themes". The story Montague chooses to tell stretches back centuries, in sections such as 'A Lost Tradition' lamenting the loss of the province's indigenous culture following the defeat of Hugh O'Neill and the subsequent flight of the earls. But it also regrets more recent losses such as the disappearance of familiar landmarks as new roads are created in the name of progress. And throughout the poem is a tone of elegiac regret, articulated in a series of anecdotal vignettes about not only Montague but many other members of his family.
Spread over two CDs, the performance at the Round House in Chalk Farm sounds to have been a remarkable occasion, aided by the variety of speakers who participated. These included the ever-mellifluous Benedict Kiely, Patrick Magee, Seamus Heaney, Tom McGurk and, of course, Montague himself reading, as he says in his introductory note "some of the more intimate family poems".
At times the performances, no doubt in response to the immediate audience, now have the effect of making the poet's satire appear a little too broad, his inherent romanticism seem dangerously tinged with sentimentality - surely Montague is being slightly disingenuous when he declares "No Wordsworthian dream enchants me here"? But the great pleasure of the recording lies, as is so often the case, in hearing an author's words articulated - in this case through a glorious richness of diverse Ulster accents which, despite their differences, still move to the same gorgeous rhythm.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author