rara avis, one whose note was uniquely beyond the common scale, a thin pure signal that might not wash genially across the earthy reaches of one's nature but had the capacity to probe in the universe of spirit as far as Pluto. Yet one could grant this inimitable status to his achievement and still recognize the process that produced it as the usual, uncertain, hopeful, needy, half self-surrendering, half self-priming process which the rest of us also experienced.
What one learns ultimately from Eliot is that the activity of poetry is solitary, and if one is to rejoice in it, one has to construct something upon which to rejoice. One learns that at the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one's own that are to be mustered, or not, as the case may be. Many of the things Eliot says about poetic composition are fortifying because they are so authoritatively un-consoling:
And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what had been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
So, to conclude. If Eliot did not help me to write, he did help me to learn what it means to read. The experience of his poetry is an unusually pure one. You begin and end with the words alone— which is admittedly always the case, but often in the work of other poets the reader can find respites and alibis. With Frost or Yeats or Hardy, for example, there is a corroborative relation between a landscape and a sensibility. The words on the page can function in a way that is supplementary to their primary artistic function: they can have a window effect and open the blinds of language on to subjects and places before or behind the words. But this kind of mutual help does not exist—and is not intended to exist—between
the words of Eliot's poetry and the world that gave rise to them. When I visited Burnt Norton, for example, I did indeed find a rose garden and a dry concrete pool; but I also found this very documentary congruence between poem and place oddly disappointing. I realized that I did not really want a landscape to materialize, since I had long since internalized a soundscape.
Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads to the via negativa. Eliot forfeited his expressionist intensity when he renounced the lyric for philosophical song. It may even be truer to say that the lyric renounced Eliot. But in accepting the consequences of renunciation with such self-knowledge and in proceeding with such strictness of intent, he proved a truth that we want to believe not perhaps about all poets but about those who are the necessary ones. He showed how poetic vocation entails the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.
Belfast
THE GROUP
'If a coathanger knocked in a wardrobe / That was a great event' —Derek Mahon's evocation of the unfulfilled expectancy of an old man living in Belfast could be extended to the young men around Queen's in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A lot of people of a generally literary bent were islanded about the place, but they in no way constituted an archipelago. There was Denis Tuohy, Don Carleton, David Farrell, Stewart Parker, Ian Hill, Seamus Deane, John Hamilton, myself and many another, all dabbling. I don't think many of us had a sense of contemporary poetry—Dylan Thomas's records were as near as we seemed to get to the living thing. Laurence Lerner was in the English Department and produced a collection called Domestic Interior, but it was somehow remote, none of our business. And as for Philip Larkin, who had just left, I graduated without hearing his name, from student or lecturer. Michael McLaverty was teaching in town, but we never saw him; Roy McFadden had drawn the blinds on Rann, John Hewitt was in Coventry. That older generation were perhaps names to us but not voices. Gorgon and Q, the university literary magazines, were hand-to-mouth affairs, with no real excitement, audience or clique attaching to them. Mary O'Malley, John Boyd, Sam Hanna Bell, Joseph Tomelty and others were at work, but again, they were beyond us. We stood or hung or sleepwalked between notions of writing that we had gleaned from English courses and the living reality of writers from our own place whom we did not know, in person or in print.
Those of us who stayed around saw that state of affairs changed by the mid-1960s, and one of the strongest agents of change was Philip Hobsbaum. When Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast, he moved disparate elements into a single action. He emanated energy, gen-
Belfast
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erosity, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted. He was impatient, dogmatic, relentlessly literary: yet he was patient with those he trusted, unpredictably susceptible to a wide variety of poems and personalities and urgent that the social and political exacerbations of our place should disrupt the decorums of literature. If he drove some people mad with his absolutes and hurt others with his overbearing, he confirmed as many with his enthusiasms. He and his wife, Hannah, kept open house for poetry, and I remember his hospitality and encouragement with the special gratitude we reserve for those who have led us towards confidence in ourselves.
I remember especially the first meeting of the group. Stewart Parker read his poems and was the first—and last—writer to stand up as he did so. That ritual of rising up to enounce, that initial formal ratification of the voice, seems emblematic in retrospect. What happened Monday night after Monday night in the Hobsbaums' flat in Fitzwilliam Street somehow ratified the activity of writing for all of us who shared it. Perhaps not everybody needed it ratified—Michael Longley and James Simmons, for example, had been in the swim before they landed—but all of us were part of it in the end. What Hobsbaum achieved, whether people liked it or not, was to give a generation a sense of themselves, in two ways: it allowed us to get to grips with one another within the group, to move from critical comment to creative friendship at our own pace, and it allowed a small public to think of us as The Group, a single, even singular phenomenon. There was his introduction of a number of us to 'The Arts in Ulster', a BBC programme produced by John Boyd. There was an article in the Telegraph. There was Mary Holland scooping it all for The Observer when she arrived to cover the Festival in 1965. It's easy to be blase about all that now, for now, of course, we're genuine parochials. Then we were craven provincials. Hobsbaum contributed much to that crucial transformation.
When the Hobsbaums left, we missed the regular coffee and biscuits, the irregular booze, the boisterous literary legislation. One act of the drama had closed down. When the second act opened in my own house, after interludes in the back room of the English Department and the upper room of a pub, some of the old charac-
ters had departed, to London, Portrush, Holywood, wherever, and a crowd of gifted boy actors were in the wings to claim the stage. But by then the curtain was about to rise on the larger drama of our politics, and the writers were to find themselves in a play within the play.
CHRISTMAS, 1971
People keep asking what it's like to be living in Belfast, and I've found myself saying that things aren't too bad in our part of the town: a throw-away consolation meaning that we don't expect to be caught in crossfire if we step into the street. It's a shorthand that evades unravelling the weary twisted emotions that are rolled like a ball of hooks and sinkers in the heart. I am fatigued by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail of race and resentment, at another by the more acceptable feelings of pity and terror. We live in the sickly light of TV screens, with a pane of selfishness between ourselves and the suffering. We survive explosions and funerals and live on among the families of the victims, those blown apart and those in cells apart.
And we
have to live with the Army. This morning I was stopped on the Falls Road and marched to the nearest police barracks, with my three-year-old son, because my car tax was out of date. My protests grew limp when the officer in charge said: 'Look, either you go to the police up the road or we take you now to Holy-wood'—their own ground. It hasn't been named martial law, but that's what it feels like. Everywhere soldiers with cocked guns are watching you—that's what they're here for—on the streets, at the corners of streets, from doorways, over the puddles on demolished sites. At night, jeeps and armoured cars groan past without lights; or roadblocks are thrown up, and once again it's delays measured in hours, searches and signings among the guns and torches. As you drive away, you bump over ramps that are specially designed to wreck you at speed and maybe get a glimpse of a couple of youths with hands on their heads being frisked on the far side of the road.
Just routine. Meanwhile up in the troubled estates street-lights are gone, accommodating all the better the night-sights of sniper and marksman.
If it is not Army blocks, it is vigilantes. They are very efficiently organized, with barricades of new wood and watchmen's huts and tea rotas, protecting the territories. If I go round the corner at ten o'clock to the cigarette machine or the chip shop, there are gentlemen with flashlights, of mature years and determined mien, who will want to know my business. How far they are in agreement with the sentiments blazoned on the wall at the far end of the street I have not yet enquired. But 'Keep Ulster Protestant' and 'Keep Blacks and Fenians out of Ulster' are there to remind me that there are attitudes around here other than defensive ones. All those sentry-boxes where tea and consultation are taken through the small hours add up to yet another slogan: 'Six into Twenty-Six won't go.' I walk back—'Good night now, sir'—past a bank that was blown up a couple of months ago and a car showroom that went three weeks ago. Nobody was killed. Most of the windows between the sites are boarded up still. Things aren't too bad in our part.
There are few enough people on the roads at night. Fear has begun to tingle through the place. Who's to know the next target on the Provisional list? Who's to know the reprisals won't strike where you are? The bars are quieter. If you're carrying a parcel you make sure it's close to you in case it's suspected of being about to detonate. In the Queen's University staff common-room recently, a bomb-disposal squad had defused a bundle of books before the owner had quite finished his drink in the room next door. Yet when you think of the corpses in the rubble of McGurk's Bar such caution is far from risible.
Then there are the perils of the department stores. Last Saturday a bomb scare just pipped me before I had my socks and pyjamas paid for in Marks and Spencer, although there were four people on the Shankill Road who got no warning. A security man cornered my wife in Robinson and Cleaver—not surprisingly, when she thought of it afterwards. She had a timing device, even though it was just an old clock from an auction, lying in the bot-
torn of her shopping bag. A few days previously someone else's timing device had given her a scare when an office block in University Road exploded just as she got out of range.
There are hardly any fairy lights, or Christmas trees, and in many cases there will be no Christmas cards. This latter is the result of a request by the organizers of the civil disobedience campaign, in order that revenue to the Post Office may be cut as much as possible over the joyous season. If people must send cards, then they are asked to get the anti-internment cards which are being produced by the People's Democracy and the Ardoyne Relief Committee to support, among others, the dependants of the internees in Long Kesh camp. Which must, incidentally, be literally the brightest spot in Ulster. When you pass it on the motorway after dark, it is squared off in neon, bright as an airport. An inflammation on the black countryside. Another of our military decorations.
The seasonal appeals will be made again to all men of goodwill, but goodwill for its proper exercise depends upon an achieved self-respect. For some people in this community, the exercise of goodwill towards the dominant caste has been hampered by the psychological hoops they have been made to jump and by the actual circumstances of their lives within the state, Rritish and all as it may have been. A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled. You see, I have heard a completely unbigoted and humane friend searching for words to cope with his abhorrence of the Provisionals and hitting on the mot juste quite unconsciously: 'These . . . these . . . Irish.'
Instead of the Christmas tree, which will be deliberately absent from many homes, people will put the traditional candle in the window. I am reminded of Louis MacNeice, 'born to the Anglican order, banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor'; and of W. R. Rodgers, whose Collected Poems has appeared in time for Christmas; and of John Hewitt, that Ulsterman of Planter stock whose poetry over the years has been an exploration of the Ulster
Protestant consciousness. All three men were born to a sense of 'two nations', and part of their imaginative effort was a solving of their feelings towards Ireland, a new answer to the question that Macmorris asked Fluellen in the Globe Theatre almost four hundred years ago: 'What is my nation?' As Northern Protestants, they each in different ways explored their relationship to the old sow that eats her farrow. They did not hold apart and claim kin with a different litter. Although, in fact, I have never seen farrow eaten by a sow in my life: what usually happens is that the young pigs eat one another's ears.
Last Sunday, at an interdenominational carol service in the university, I had to read from Martin Luther King's famous T Have a Dream' speech. T have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the full meaning of its creed'—and on that day all men would be able to realize fully the implications of the old spiritual 'Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, we are free at last.' But, as against the natural hopeful rhythms of that vision, I remembered a dream that I'd had last year in California. I was shaving at the mirror of the bathroom when I glimpsed in the mirror a wounded man falling towards me with his bloodied hands lifted to tear at me or to implore.
It used to be that you could predict the aftermath of Christmas: 'How did your Christmas go?' 'Oh quiet, very quiet.' There isn't much predictable now, except that the sirens will blare out the old and blare in nothing very new. In some parts of the country they will have killed the wren on St Stephen's Day. In some houses they will still be hoping for a first-footer to bring a change of luck.
Cessation 1994
The announcement by the Provisional IRA last Wednesday changed everything for the better. I listened to the radio all afternoon, hoping to hear words that would be up to the magnitude of what was happening. But while the political leaders and the commentators were (with predictable exceptions) elated, the sheer volume of the talk began to have an almost claustrophobic effect.
I went outside to try to re-collect myself and suddenly a blind seemed to rise somewhere at the back of my mind and the light came flooding in. I felt twenty-five years younger. I remembered what things had felt like in those early days of political ferment in the late sixties. How we all were brought beyond our highly developed caution to believe that the effort to create new movement and language in the Northern context was a viable project.
But as well as feeling freed up, I felt angry also. The quarter century we have lived through was a terrible black hole, and the inestimable suffering inflicted and endured by every party to the conflict has only brought the situation to a point that is politically less promising than things were in 1968.
At that time, there was energy and confidence on the nationalist side and a developing liberalism—as well as the usual obstinacy and reaction—on the unionist side. There was a general upswing in intellectual and social activity, the border was more pervious than it had been, the sectarian
alignments less determining.
I remember in particular feeling empowered (although the word was not in vogue then) by a week on the road with David Hammond and Michael Longley in May 1968 when we brought a programme of songs and poems to schools and hotels and libraries in unionist and nationalist areas all over Northern Ireland.
The programme was called 'Room to Rhyme', and I thought about it again last Wednesday. The title was taken from the opening verse of a mummers' play that went 'Room, room, my gallant
boys, and give us room to rhyme', a line that expressed perfectly the eagerness and impatience that was in the air at the time. As a member of the 11-Plus generation of Catholic scholarship boys, just recently appointed to the faculty of Queen's University, I knew myself to be symptomatic of a new confidence in the nationalist minority; and on this particular trip, sponsored by the Northern Ireland Arts Council, with David Hammond singing 'The Boys of Mullaghbawn' and Michael Longley writing about 'Leaving Inish-more' and myself reading 'Requiem for the Croppies', I was conscious that an Irish dimension was at last beginning to figure in the official life of the North.
Which is to say that 'diversity' was beginning to be recognized and to find its expression long before it became a buzz-word. Small changes of attitude, small rapprochements and readjustments were being made. Minimal shifts in different areas—artistic, educational, political—were beginning to effect new contacts and concessions. The fact that I felt free to read a poem about the 1798 rebels to a rather staid audience of middle-class unionists was one such small symptom of a new tolerance.
In a few years' time, of course, to have read 'Requiem for the Croppies' in such a venue would have been taken as a direct expression of support for the IRA's campaign of violence. And this was only one tiny instance of the way in which, during the 1970s, artistic and cultural exercises got peeled away from the action of politics.
Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001 Page 5
