Belfast

1. 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 fifties and early sixties. 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 Interiors 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-sixties 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, generosity, 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 Hobsbaum’s 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 like 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’, 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 blasé 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 characters 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.

Honest Ulsterman, 1978

2. 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 throwaway 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 Holywood’—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 road-blocks 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 the 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 bottom 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, British 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 have 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 ‘I have a dream’ speech. ‘I 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.

Listener, 1971

3. 1972

Two quotations keep going through my mind these days, both from Shakespeare:

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

and then these lines from Timon of Athens where a poet talks about the process of writing, lines that have become a touchstone for me:

Our poesy is as a gum which oozes

From whence tis nourished.

On the one hand, poetry is secret and natural, on the other hand it must make its way in a world that is public and brutal. Here the explosions literally rattle your window day and night, lives are shattered blandly or terribly, innocent men have been officially beaten and humiliated in internment camps—destructive elements of all kinds, which are even perhaps deeply exhilarating, are in the air.

At one minute you are drawn towards the old vortex of racial and religious instinct, at another time you seek the mean of humane love and reason. Yet is your raison d’être not involved with marks on paper? As Patrick Kavanagh said, a man dabbles in verses and finds they are his life.

You have to be true to your own sensibility, for the faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. Poetry is out of the quarrel with ourselves and the quarrel with others is rhetoric. It would wrench the rhythms of my writing procedures to start squaring up to contemporary events with more will than ways to deal with them. I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery. They certainly involve craft and determination, but chance and instinct have a role in the thing too. I think the process is a kind of somnambulist encounter between masculine will and intelligence and feminine clusters of image and emotion.

I suppose the feminine element for me involves the matter of Ireland, and the masculine strain is drawn from the involvement with English literature. I speak and write in English, but do not altogether share the preoccupations and perspectives of an Englishman. I teach English literature, I publish in London, but the English tradition is not ultimately home. I live off another hump as well.

Two Elizabethan poets enforce this realization. Edmund Spenser’s view of the state of Ireland, among other things, puts me at a distance from him. From his castle in Cork he watched the effects of a campaign designed to settle the Irish question. ‘Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not carry them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.’ At that point I feel closer to the natives, the geniuses of the place. And a little after that, Sir John Davies, that silver poet of the sixteenth century, arrived in Ireland as Queen Elizabeth’s Attorney-General with special responsibility for the Plantation of Ulster, playing a forward-looking colon to my backward-looking colonisé.

Obviously, these incidental facts do not interfere with my responses to their poetry. One half of one’s sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one wants to call it. But consciousness and quarrels with the self are the result of what Lawrence called ‘the voices of my education’.

Those voices pull in two directions, back through the political and cultural traumas of Ireland, and out towards the urgencies and experience of the world beyond it. At school I studied the Gaelic literature of Ireland as well as the literature of England, and since then I have maintained a notion of myself as Irish in a province that insists that it is British. Lately I realized that these complex pieties and dilemmas were implicit in the very terrain where I was born.

Our farm was called Mossbawn. Moss, a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters, and bawn, the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses. Mossbawn, the planter’s house on the bog. Yet in spite of this Ordnance Survey spelling, we pronounced it Moss bann, and bán is the Gaelic word for white. So might not the thing mean the white moss, the moss of bog-cotton? In the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster.

Mossbawn lies between the villages of Castledawson and Toome. I was symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between ‘the demesne’ and ‘the bog’. The demesne was Moyola Park, an estate now occupied by Lord Moyola, formerly Major James Chichester-Clark, ex-Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. The bog was a wide low apron of swamp on the west bank of the River Bann, where hoards of flints and fishbones have been found, reminding me that the Bann valley is one of the oldest inhabited areas in the country. The demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken; the bog was rushy and treacherous, no place for children. They said you shouldn’t go near the moss-holes because ‘there was no bottom in them’.

Mossbawn was bordered by the townlands of Broagh and Anahorish, townlands that are forgotten Gaelic music in the throat, bruach and anach fhíor uisce, the riverbank and the place of clear water. The names lead past the literary mists of a Celtic twilight into that civilization whose demise was effected by soldiers and administrators like Spenser and Davies, whose lifeline was bitten through when the squared-off walls of bawn and demesne dropped on the country like the jaws of a man-trap.

Yet I also looked across our fields to Grove Hill and Back Park, names that fetch the imagination in a different direction. They insist that this familiar locale is a version of pastoral and I am reminded of Davies’s response to the landscape of Fermanagh—‘it is so pleasant and fruitful country that if I should make a full description thereof, it would be rather taken for a poetical fiction than a true and serious narration.’ Grove is a word that I associate with translations from the classics, a sunlit treeline, a tonsured hillock approached by white-robed priests. The literary word and the earthwork sentried by Scotch firs sit ill together. My illiterate ear isn’t totally satisfied, as it is by another name, The Dirraghs, from doire as in Derry, also usually Englished as ‘oak grove’. Grove and park, they do not reach me as a fibre from a tap-root but remind me of the intricate and various foliage of history and culture that I grew up beneath.

Recently at a poetry reading in Cork a student remarked, half reproachfully, that my poetry didn’t sound very Celtic. The verb was probably more precise than he intended. His observation was informed by an idea of Irish poetry in English, formulated most coherently by Thomas McDonagh, a professor of English at University College, Dublin, who was shot for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. In his view, the distinctive note of Irish poetry is struck when the rhythms and assonances of Gaelic poetry insinuate themselves into the texture of the English verse. And indeed many poets in this century, notably Austin Clarke, have applied Gaelic techniques in the making of their music and metres. I am sympathetic to the effects gained but I find the whole enterprise a bit programmatic.

Certainly the secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise, lies in the summoning of the energies of words. But my quest for definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape I was born into. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awarenesses nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience.

Guardian, 1972