True then, true now: revisiting the journalism of the great poet Derek Mahon

In her recent memoir of life with the novelist Aidan Higgins, writer Alannah Hopkin tells of time before the internet, when newspaper reviewers living in Kinsale met at the post office to mail copy to faraway editors. One was Derek Mahon, the master poet who for decades wrote as a freelance journalist.

When Mahon died aged 78 two years ago this month, many fine tributes were paid to his towering accomplishments in poetry. It is verse of singular poise and grace, the urgent telling of man near the edge, reaching out for “the real thing in its natural state”, one dazzling moment after another. The writing for newspapers and magazines was mentioned in passing, if at all. But that was high-class work too, done with verve and panache in the manner of someone in the know who was keen to pass on the good stuff.

I came to Mahon many years ago via a collection with the simplest of titles, Journalism, released by his long-time publisher, the Gallery Press. This was the toil of a quarter-century, much of it in the book pages in this paper. Such work is often forgotten. Yet there is an amiable quality in the prose that demands rereading. Mahon had stark struggles with alcohol, an addiction he eventually overcame, although the journalistic good cheer imparts little of the demons within. But the poet who wrote such unforgettable lines as “home is where the heart breaks” could slice right to the core in news ink.

Here he is on Oscar Wilde: “Only in very recent years have keener minds studied the enigmatic Wilde from the unexpected angles with which he was himself familiar, and discovered that the darling of the London drawing-rooms was not some sort of highbrow Noël Coward, but in reality a subversive, indeed a revolutionary figure; though why anyone should be surprised seems, at first glance, mysterious.”

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Mahon had range, writing as well of the “irascible” Baudelaire as of Ray Chandler, the Big Sleep man. “Chandler died, according to the obituaries, in 1959; in another sense, he will never die.” True then, true now more than ever — and the wisecracking PI is still our friend. “We take this guy to our hearts, and cherish whatever of Philip Marlowe there is in us.”

He was enthusiast for Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, a New York tale of fast youth in the 1980s outpaced by life itself. Though late to that one, a sensation in its time, he saw through the “critical contempt” that followed the initial adulation. McInerney came “dangerously close to being a designer novel” with emotional cop-out at the end, he argued. “But it’s the very designer qualities that give it its vintage contemporary zest.”

A rented ‘studio apartment’ in New York, five blocks from the river, time to think and work, long suffering friends and visitors, the bars where Dylan Thomas spent his final hours, God rest him

—  Derek Mahon

Then there is an impecunious old man in New York: one John Butler Yeats, headstrong painter father of William and Jack, who sailed for the glistening city at 68 and never returned. “For a while he was lionised. Commissions poured in, and he was in demand as an after-dinner speaker. Asked if he was the father of ‘the great Yeats’, he replied ‘I am the great Yeats’. Old habits soon reasserted themselves, however, the ‘hopeless insolvency’ of home giving way to ‘hopeful insolvency’.”

Mahon had a spell in the Manhattan metropolis, forging it into the 18-section Hudson Letter, a volume later revised (just a bit) as New York Time. In this searing work, like other collections, an icy undertow vies with the pull of joy. “Short the time left to find the serenity which for a lifetime has eluded me ... A rented ‘studio apartment’ in New York, five blocks from the river, time to think and work, long suffering friends and visitors, the bars where Dylan Thomas spent his final hours, God rest him.”

Yet brightness is still there. This is Florida, after a hurricane less severe than recent Ian: “The outskirts of Key West, when we got there, you driving, a white bandana in your hair, and Satchmo growling from the car radio, were still where they were supposed to be.”

Like the verse, the journalism is lean. Here is Jeffrey Bernard in London, “Low Life” denizen of the Spectator column: “I’ve seen him try to make an after-dinner speech at the Chelsea Arts Club and watched him climb a horizontal street in Soho to a favourite pub, clinging like a mountaineer to railings and lamp-posts.” You get the picture.

Mahon I saw only once, making his way in long ago dusk over Eustace Bridge at Leeson Street and onwards towards town. I was tempted to approach but didn’t. Back then I had read the prose, not the poems. I regret that now.