Reclaiming a lost Irish poet

This collection of essays on an under-rated yet highly influential Irish poet, Michael Hartnett, retrieves him from obscurity. Seamus Heaney and Declan Kiberd are among the twelve contributors. Reviewed by Eamon MaherRemembering Michael Hartnett. John McDonagh and Stephen Newman (eds)
Four Courts Press, hardback, €45

The picture on the cover of this set of essays on the west Limerick poet, Michael Hartnett, displays the face of a wounded man who looks as though he doesn't feel comfortable in his skin. The contents of the book reveal some of the reasons why this was so. Hartnett endured much trauma during his life due to his struggle with alcoholism, the pain of a failed marriage and his uncertainty as to what language, English or Gaelic (he insisted on this form rather than Gaeilge or Irish), best suited to the articulation of his inner voice. What emerges from Remembering Michael Hartnett is the strong conviction that this poet has not to date received the critical attention his talents deserved, partly because of his compulsion to abandon English at a critical point in his career in order to immerse himself in the language of his ancestors, and in particular that used by his grandmother, whose vocabulary was shot through with Irish expressions. In their short biography at the start of the book, the editors spell out how such a decision was fraught on many levels: “When Hartnett turned to the Irish language he was automatically in danger of being branded a ‘Gaeilgeoir', which in Irish simply means a speaker of the language but when used by English-speakers it tends to be pejorative signifying a narrow nationalism infused with a heavy-handed Catholicism.”
The poet is often a marginalised figure, fighting with his/her inner demons and seeking a form that might reflect that struggle. Seamus Heaney's excellent introduction quotes a letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in which he extolled him as being “the real thing”. He went on to explain: “When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I've never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.” Heaney figures that Hartnett's poetry had a similar “ring of truth in the medium”, that every time he published a new collection: “things quickened and shone”. But, for a multiplicity of reasons, his achievements went largely unnoticed. The publication of the 12 essays in this book will fill that void to some extent. They are written by well-known academics such as Declan Kiberd, Louis de Paor and Eugene O'Brien, but it is good to observe also the inclusion of pieces by fellow poets like Gabriel Rosenstock, Gabriel Fitzmaurice and Declan Collinge.
Declan Kiberd is ideally suited by training and temperament to assess Hartnett's writing in both English and Irish. He notes Hartnett's penchant for translation came from his fascination with carrying something over from one code to the other: “His true reality was not that of a man securely established in Irish or in English, but that of a nomad forever crossing between the two.” Quoting Beckett's explanation for his decision to turn to French early in his career: “parce que c'est plus facile d'écrire sans style” (“because it's easier to write without any specific style”), Kiberd recalls how the Nobel Laureate reverted in old age to English, as Hartnett himself did in his collection Inchicore Haiku. Most of the essays refer to A Farewell to English, in which Hartnett announced his decision to find once more “the Gaelic marrowbone”. Róisín Ní Ghairbhí mentions that Farewell was written to counter the marginalisation of Irish from issues of Irish culture and identity following Ireland's accession to the EEC: “Hartnett's description of English in the title poem as ‘the perfect language to sell pigs in' angered some critics, bemused others and led many to miss the point.” Liam de Paor, in a finely argued chapter, observes that “the poems in Irish are a more radical attempt to cross the linguistic and cultural divide that has been a defining feature of Irish literature in the twentieth-century”.
The first collection in English after the Irish experiment, Inchicore Haiku, is the subject of a superb chapter by Declan Collinge, who links the genesis of these poems to the poet's feeling of dislocation:
Now in Inchicore
My cigarette-smoke rises
– like lonesome pub-talk.
Collinge provides the following analysis: “His displacement is on many levels: as dispossessed Gaelic poet in an English-speaking world; as a separated man who feels he has betrayed his wife and family; as a Gaelic poet who has betrayed his tradition by reverting to the languages of the colonial power and, as drunkard, who fails to engage socially”. The close reading of some of the poems is aided by the empathy felt by a fellow poet and friend, someone who obviously understood his subject very well.
Eugene O'Brien, borrowing on the theories of the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, discusses the politics of translation in Hartnett's work and draws a parallel with Homi Bhabha, for whom translation is a place of hybridity where the final source of meaning is “neither the one nor the other”. According to O'Brien, “Hartnett's English is itself a translation, a series of movements between diverse influences, which enact Derrida's idea of movements between points of origin and arrival that are always being deferred”. This is an effective means of summing up Remembering Michael Hartnett. There can be no definitive assessment of the success or failure of Hartnett's literary odyssey, no certainty as to whether his decision to renounce English and then return to it later in his career was beneficial or detrimental to his evolution as a poet. What we do get from this book is a serious appraisal of a poet who fell between stools and who suffered from the inevitable tension of never quite knowing what language best suited him:
My English dam bursts
And out stroll all my bastards.
Irish shakes its head.
This book is a significant first step towards rehabilitating the image of a shamefully neglected Irish poet. There are some caveats, however. The various essays too often deal with the same material – quotes from individual poems and interviews with the poet recur a bit too frequently. There are also some typographical errors which one would not usually expect from Four Courts Press. But these are minor points and should not dissuade readers from delving into an illuminating and very satisfying collection of essays.π