‘Strandhill, the Sea’ is about the poetry of the prosaic and ends with a poetic riff to the mundane transformed in the eye of the beholding narrator. In ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, one of McGahern’s most ‘Frenchified’ tales, reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre’s shorter fiction, the Dublin-based lovers’ first encounter with each other is mediated through the presence of ‘a poet’ as they sit in Mooney’s Bar in Lower Abbey Street, eating beef sandwiches with their glasses of stout:
Soon, in the drowsiness of the stout, we did little but watch the others drinking. I pointed out a poet to her. I recognised him from his pictures in the paper. His shirt was open-necked inside a gabardine coat and he wore a hat with a small feather in its band. She asked me if I liked poetry.
‘When I was younger,’ I said. ‘Do you?’
‘Not very much.’
She asked me if I could hear what the poet was saying to the four men at his table who continually plied him with whiskey. I hadn’t heard. Now we both listened. He was saying he loved the blossoms of Kerr Pinks more than roses, a man could only love what he knew well, and it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the accident. The whole table said they’d drink to that, but he glared at them as if slighted, and as if to avoid the glare they called for a round of doubles. While the drinks were coming from the bar the poet turned aside and took a canister from his pocket. The inside of the lid was coated with a white powder which he quickly licked clean. She thought it was baking soda. Her father in the country took baking soda for his stomach. We had more stout and we noticed, while each new round was coming, the poet turned away from the table to lick clean the fresh coat of soda on the inside of the canister lid.12
Poets and poetry, language and literary allusion abound in McGahern’s shorter fiction. His characters and narrators often refer to their own education (as in the ending of ‘High Ground’)13 and in drawing upon that experience they sometimes allude to various influences such as Church language, which appears in conversation in ‘The Wine Breath’.14 In the same story discussion takes place about the understanding of ‘common names’ and how this links in with the poetry inherent in the naming of things – flowers, townlands and religious ceremonies. In this extract the exchange opens with reference to the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Little White Rose’:
‘And, no doubt, the little rose of Scotland, sharp and sweet and breaks the heart,’ he heard his friend quote maliciously. ‘And it’s not the point. The reason the names of flowers must be in Latin is that when flower lovers meet they know what they are talking about, no matter whether they’re French or Greeks or Arabs. They have a universal language.’15
And when his characters are not thinking aloud about such language matters, reference can be made to how religion and poetry combines in their minds, such as poor old McMurrough, who in ‘The Recruiting Officer’ ‘now lay in the Sligo madhouse reciting poetry and church doctrine’.16 McGahern also draws attention to the cultural space of ‘books’ as the physical embodiments of a kind of imaginative freedom, from the autobiographical opening of his essay ‘The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands’17 and his praise of the Moroney’s Library of his young boyhood, to his experiences of reading Kavanagh and Beckett in 1950s Dublin.
Literature, and its quintessential beat, poetry, are material things which matter to McGahern, and the essays collected in Love of the World reveal as much. Here, McGahern’s indebtedness is clearly expressed in an extraordinary range of poets, many of whom he refers to with pleasure and real enthusiasm. W.H. Auden, William Blake, Louise Bogan, George Mackay Brown, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Graham, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, D.H. Lawrence, Louis MacNeice, Eugene Montale, Edwin Muir, Richard Murphy, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stevie Smith, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, David Wright, Yeats and the poet’s father, John Butler Yeats, whose correspondence with his son McGahern abridged.18
What McGahern drew from these varied poetic sources – American poets, less well known British poets such as Gascoyne, Wright and Graham, fellow Irish writers – and his use of quotation in his fiction from Burns, Matthew Arnold, and Shakespeare, among others, is the subject of a study all to itself. If I can isolate a few quotations, however, it might show how the figure of the poet and the power of poetry were integral to the very fabric of McGahern’s fiction-making and also, possibly, to the Ireland out of which he came.
As I’ve already mentioned, of the two living writers who meant most to the young McGahern in 1950s Dublin, Patrick Kavanagh and Samuel Beckett, Kavanagh was pre-eminent, and recollecting the time McGahern writes: ‘I wish I could open a magazine now with the same excitement in which I once opened Nimbus: “Ignore Power’s schismatic sect/Lovers alone lovers protect.”’19 The two lines McGahern quotes here are from the ending of Kavanagh’s poem ‘Prelude’ included in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems,20 a book of poems that will figure large in McGahern’s own writing. In a 1987 review of Peter Kavanagh’s portrait of his poet brother, McGahern considers how Patrick had such a powerful ‘individual vision, a vigorous gift for catching the rhythms of ordinary speech, and … was able to bring the images that move us into the light without patronage and on an equal footing with any great work.’21 In the same review, McGahern identifies Kavanagh’s Kitty Stobling as a ‘new world’ recovered:
These later poems are steeped in space and time while still happening in one clear, specific place. What they have in common with the early poems is the genius that restores the dramatic to the ordinary and the banal. I remember well the excitement of reading poems like ‘Prelude’ or ‘Auditors In’, or ‘Kerr’s Ass’ or ‘The Chest Hospital’ for the first time in manuscript.22
Incidentally, McGahern tells us in ‘The Bird Swift’,23 a memoir of the painter Patrick Swift, that the manuscript he read was a typescript of Kitty Stobling made for Kavanagh by another member of the Swift family. It was through Patrick Swift that McGahern met in London the ex-South African poet David Wright, who with Swift was editing the magazine X, which had accepted for publication McGahern’s first piece of prose.24
In the closing (and uncharacteristically rhetorical) flourish to the review of Peter Kavanagh’s book, McGahern paints a picture of Patrick Kavanagh that is both homage and echo of the slightly earlier representation of the poet in ‘Bank Holiday’,25 which is such a key focus to what happens emotionally in the story:
His extraordinary physical presence, whether seated in a chair or walking up a street with his hands clasped behind his back, always managed to convey more the sense of a warring crowd than of a solitary person. He was also a true poet and I believe his violent energy, like his belief that people in the street steered by his star, raised the important poems to permanence. They have now moved from Mucker by way of the Grand Canal and the Chest Hospital to their own place on Parnassus.26
‘Bank Holiday’ is a richly seductive portrait of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a 50-year-old civil servant, who has in quick succession lost both his parents and seen his marriage dissolve. His bachelor life is conveyed in quick flashes of wit, while a sense of Larkinesque pique attends his lonely existence. In Webb’s Bookshop, the poetically named Patrick McDonough27 is discomfited by the brown-overalled manager as he peruses some books before leaving, hot and bothered, only to discover back in his flat that an old friend, James White, has suggested to Mary Kelleher, a young visiting American academic (her research is mediaeval poetry), that she should look up McDonough when she is in Dublin. They meet and start to fall in love in Bernardo’s Restaurant in Lincoln Place. The story circles in and out of a poetic vortex of walking and talking which takes them through the Bank Holiday heat towards the East Wall and strand:
‘Oh, it’s cold.’ She shivered as she came out of the water, and reached for her sandals.
‘Even in heatwaves the sea is cold in Ireland. That’s Howth ahead – where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas Athena.’28 He reached for his role as tourist guide.
‘I know that line,’ she said and quoted the verse. ‘Has all that gone from Dublin?’