The World of Derek Mahon

INTO AMBIVALENCE, PREVARICATION, FANATIcism , when confronted with the nightmare of Ulster. Derek Mahon, however, speaks of it with a poignant candour "The Protestants are the problem, not the Brits. The Brits for all their bluster, will go when they have to. But the Protestants are a terrified people; terrified and maimed Most societies are pretty sick, but Northern Ireland is sick unto death, perhaps because at a deep level it knows it shouldn't exist. The Ulster Protestant must be saved from himself; he will have to rethink himself or quit. If he can't rethink himself, well, there's plenty of room in Canada where he can preach to the caribou. The problem may be solved in our lifetime, given the speed at which thing change. Those who can't rethink themselves will have to go when they find themselves outnumbered; but there will be a substantial minority of Protestants willin to bow to the inevitable, and on them the future of the North will depend."
There are three or four exciting poets in Ireland today but one of them is different from the rest: the 43-year old Belfast-born Derek Mahon, poet, dramatist, essayist, broad caster and screenwriter. Recently when I was travellin north with Anthony Cronin, he recalled how when he first read Mahon's The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush he had reflected - "That's it."

The artists Mahon most literally resern bles are Rembrandt and Maes: poems such as The Mayo Tao, The Globe in North Cam lina, A Garage in Co Cork, Van Gogh in the Borinage, The Sea in Winter, A Disused She in Co Wexford, Beyond Howth Head, and Ovid in Tomis emerge from a dark canvas in a gold aura.

"
I have stood for hours watching a salmon doze
in the tea-gold dark,
for weeks watching a spider weave in a pale light, for months listening to the sob-story
of a stone on the road·
the best, most monotonous sob-story I have ever heard.
"
- The Mayo Tao

His is a romantic, metamorphic celebratory poetry; peremptory apocalyptic, droll; elegant, fasti dious, zany. He is the Teilhard d Chardin of modern poetry, maestro of incandescent banality He speaks as much to computer technicians in Peru as to hostesses in Paris. He is not 'an Ulster poet'.

Like a seventeenth century Dutchman he is a cultivato of life's rough edges, yet a fierce cherisher of domestic life He is an Elizabethan type of Irishman: courtly, yet arro gant ; gay, yet severe. Unlike Orangemen or Republicans there is nothing craven or bellicose about him.

Strangely not much is known about Mahon. Not eve the recent popular success of his play High Time thrc much light on him. We are familiar with the life and time of Francis Bacon but we are ignorant of Mahon's provenanc and career.

HE HAD AR RANGED TO MEET AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK IN THE morning at the Chelsea Arts Club. Founded in 1890 by Whistler, Orpen, and Sargent, paintings adorn the mustarddcoloured wood-panelled walls along with inscriptions Ø'Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away' - and bulletins - 'Would members and their guests please not throw their cigarette butts all over the lawn'. From the bar drift snatches of converse - 'I said to Nicola that if I saw her bottom again' - and from the parquet floor the click of billiard cues and from the leather settees cries of 'Bad luck, old chap'. Nothing has changed since 1890 and please God it never will.

In open-neck shirt, pullover and slacks, Mahon was standing at an enormous snooker table, playing with himmself; a sturdy, Napoleonic, ebullient figure; a cavalier rounddhead, so to speak, exhaling gaiety and gravity. He has the gaze of a man who has long ago laid aside his masks. We sat down in green wicker arm-chairs by a coal-fire. Behind us stood an enormous clock with no hands.

MAHON WAS BORN ON NOVEMBER 23,1941, THE ONLY child of a Belfast working-class family whose menfolk were employed in the shipyards. His father worked in the engiineering works and his boilermaker grandfather's five daughhters married five ships engineers. The boy's image of the Free State was "of a pastoral land without shipyards".

The Mahon family lived in a semi-detached red-brick terraced house in Salisbury Avenue in North Belfast, a cullde-sac off the Antrim Road in the shadow of Cave Hill. In the back garden there was a coal-shed in which Mahon kept his bicycle: a coal-shed destined to enter Mahon's poetry in many unforgettable lines such as in Tractatus. The little boy felt pity for the coal in the coal shed and each time he closed the coalshed door he felt regret, if not guilt. Why should all that glittering coal be shut away and live an imprisoned anti-social life of its own?

Inside the house there was the Boxroom for which also he felt an affinity. There he and his cousin Connacht had a high time getting up to no good. "When the weather was bad which it usually was" they played with a Hornby train set which consisted of two halves which when you slotted them together became a circle and they sat on the floor watching the train go round.

The dreaded grown-ups made homemade animals: an uncle set out to make a monkey which became a donkey ~ "between the desire and the shadow fell the reality".

The front parlour was reserved for visitors. A cold, clean room: china on the sideboard; upright piano, rarely played, with sheet music in the stool and on the rack a Chopin Prelude; newspaper in the grate with a sprinkling of soot, a brass poker and tongs with claws.

When he was 17 his family moved to a bungalow in the new estate of Glengormley where his grandparents lived in a farmhouse and where as a boy he had played among the hens.

Glengormley was devoid of what Mahon calls Barraka - an Arabic word meaning the holiness that household utensils acquire through age. "The culture I grew up in was devoid of barraka. I was brought up deprived of a sense of the holiness of things. Protestantism is a rejection of barraka. The historical sources of Protestantism are rooted in a fear of disease, syphillis and plague. Cleanliness is next to Godliness or, rather, Cleanliness is Godliness."

Mahon's indignant, passionate identification with the created earth (the basis also of the writings of Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Aquinas, and the Pre-Socratics) maniifests itself magically in poems such as Another Sunday Morning, Table Talk, Rock Music, Rathlin Island, The Apotheosis of Tins, Glengormley , A Kind of People, and The Mute Phenomena.

"
Deprived of use, we are safe now from the historical nightmare
and may give our attention at last to things of the spirit,
noticing for example the consanguinity of sand and stone,
how they are thicker than water,
and the pebbles shorter than their shadows.
"
- The Apotheosis of Tins

Around the corner on the Antrim Road there was a dereelict haunted house with a difference: it was a modern haunnted house with perhaps a haunted car in the garage.

The Mahon household practiced a form of transhumance which accorded well with their shipyard ethos. Wintering beside the shipyards, they shifted in summer to coastal resorts at Bangor, Co Down, Portrush, and Cushendun in the Glens of Antrim. His Grandmother took a house for August in Bangor: "Ballyholme Beach in Bangor was the first beach I ever saw."

Then his parents, together with his cousin Connacht's parents, began an annual visitation to Portrush, staying in guest houses: the Portrush coastline that was to become as primary a contour in Mahon's poetry as the tubular furniiture in Bacon. From the same mesolithic coastline also hails his wife, Doreen Douglas from Portballantrae, whose mother was headmistress of the Giant's Causeway Primary School and whose father was a sea captain who died at sea.

There were cycling holidays in Donegal and when he was 15 he cycled to and from Dublin in one day.

AFTER SKEG" ONEILL PRIMARY SCHOOL MAHON PROGRESSED TO grammar school at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Inst). Founded in 1794, its first batch of masters belonged to Wolfe Tone's Belfast Chapter of United Irishmen:

Thomas Russell, Henry Joy McCracken. Although today a staunch Protestant school, it had a radical tradition from the beginning and Derek Mahon must be accounted as one of its most radical alumni. "It was a very rough, yet intelllectual sort of school with some remarkable teachers:

Charlie Fay, a Quaker, was Head of Classics and taught me Latin; John Boyle, a Dubliner, taught me English, French and History."

Mahon recalls Boyle with affection: "It was he who gave us the Irish dimension. It was he who gave us the feeling that we were Irishmen first of all. Although C of I he was a member of the old Irish Republican Labour Party headed by Harry Diamond. In the 1930s he had a flat off the Malone Road and the RUC raided it and took away a copy of The Republic - Plato's. He talked a lot about James Connolly and the 1913 Lock-out."

Mahon was not a 'rugger bugger' although he did play serum-half on the third fifteen. "Team games bore me." Golf he enjoyed because "it gives you a chance to have a long walk with pleasant interruptions."

He was a choir-boy in St Peter's on the Antrim Road and attended church on Wednesdays and twice on Saturdays. Unlike Catholic children, to whom the Bible is as unfamiliar as the Koran, Mahon was steeped in the Bible, particularly the New Testament and the Hymn-Book. This aspect of his Protestant heritage gave to his poetry a texture which is absent from the work of his Catholic contemporaries.

As a boy of eleven, Mahon didn't know what a Catholic was. When his playmate Sheila said she had to go someplace, he asked "Can I come too?" Sheila replied: "No, it's only for Catholics." The little boy wondered what class of a creature a Catholic might be. When in Cushendun he asked another girl the name of her school and she replied: "Crosssand-Passion," he agonized as to what kind of erotic acaademy she attended.

Catholic and Protestant children played together but, as they grew older, parents and educators separated them. At eleven all contact ceased. When Derek would say "I think I'll go call for Sean," a grown-up would say, "No, go and see Cecil."

Priests were men who kidnapped little boys: stout, ruddy-faced, with hair growing out of their ears. Protestant clergymen were more like aged angelfaces.

Dublin was a foreign city: a hive of German spies. But Mahon is impatient with myths about the War Years:

"Proportionately, more Southern Irishmen fought in the British Army than Ulster Protestants."

He was 14 when he discovered poetry. "Yeats's The Stolen Child - that was the first poem that really turned me on. Then Thomas's Fern Hill, and A Hunchback in the Park." At 17 in Fifth Form he was awarded the Forrest Reid Prize for poetry.

A clique of school aesthetes congregated in a coffee bar, The Piccolo, Belfast's equivalent to the New Amsterrdam in Dublin. Girls from Victoria College also roosted there and although everyone yearned for the excitements of one another's bodies, each group considered the other far too high-falutin' for such passions. The Piccolo Clique read the First World War poets, Yeats, Thomas, Eliot, MacNeice, Salinger, Orwell, and, especially, Graves: "The ultimate artistic feat is to make the romantic cry in classiical form."

By 1960 when he entered TCD on a scholarship "I had rumbled Belfast for the bigoted corrupt dump that it was and I was delighted to get out of it." He read French and English: "I had the benefit of knowing and being taught by Con Leventhal, Owen Sheehy Skeffington and Alec Reid."

One day in the Post Office in Suffolk Street the old white-haired lady behind the guichet said: "D'ye know you've the face of a saint but the pity of it is you're probbably a Protestant." Only Catholics could be saints. However it was during his TCD years that he "kicked the habit" of automatically segregating people, on sight, into Prods and Taigs.

After TCD, life seemed over. Inspired by Kerouac's On the Road Mahon visited his cousin Connacht in Canada. For two years he roamed North America: living and working in Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Cammbridge, as xerox operator, night-telephonist and itinerant schoolmaster. He read contemporary American poetry and went on swimming parties to Cape Cod: "Gin at dawn pScott FitzGerald sort of thing." But he was "not a doctriinaire hippy."

In 1968 he tried Belfast for the last time and taught for a year at Belfast High School. He wrote Ecclesiastes and moved to Dublin where he lived in Monkstown and wrote Beyond Howth Head.

"
And here I close; for look, across
Dark waves where bell-buoys dimly toss
The Baily winks beyond Howth Head,
And sleep calls from the silent bed;
While the moon drags her kindred stones
Among the rocks and the strict bones
Of the drowned, and I put out the light
On shadows of the encroaching night.
"
- Beyond Howth Head

In 1970 he moved to London where he has lived and worked ever since, except for a stint as poet-in-residence in Coleraine and a sojourn in Surrey when his children were infants. Oxford University Press has published his collecctions of poetry, most recently Poems 1962-1978 and The Hunt By Night. He has also earned his living as featureewriter, book-reviewer, film-critic, and editor for Vogue, The Listener, and the New Statesman. More recently he has turned his hand with much success to adapting stories and novels for television: Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on our Skin and How Many Miles To Babylon ;John Montague's The Cry; Turgenev's First Love with Paul Scofield; and

Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon-Lover with Dorothy Tutin which will be shown on Granada in the new year.

The success of Field Day's production of High Time (the text is due shortly from Gallery) has encouraged him to attempt another adaptation for the stage: Schiller's Maria Stuart, first produced in Weimar in 1800. Mahon's version will be modern idiom in blank verse.

In 1981 Mahon was elected a member of Aosdana: "I thought it was a wonderful idea." As for the cynical beegrudgery: "Nothing ever happens in Ireland without ranncour and factionalism. It's a matter of course."

Mahon has a defined political stance: "I find convenntional socialism as short-sighted as conventional conservaatism. There has to be another alternative. I approve very highly of the Greens. The Eco-Feminist Lobby is very immportant. There's a basic truth in Feminism and it could be the saving of us all. Some kind of tradition has to be reefound. Some kind of social tradition with its roots in the period before the Industrial Revolution. Some kind of return to the lost but not entirely lost past." Thus Mahon has created in his poetry a world of his own like Balthus: he is one of the few poets in the world today who is at once visionary and yet modern post-industrial.

"
And I too have suffered Obscurity and derision,
And sheltered in my heart of hearts
A light to transform the world.
"

The 1916 Rising was a disaster. "Had it not been for the 1916 debacle we would have got Horne Rule at Versailles." Pearse was "a half-baked fascist". Britain's interest in Ireeland is strategic. The Americans too are dangerous. "If the Americans would cut it out, the Russians would cut it out too. My first allegiance is to Europe."

What makes Mahon such an exciting poet in the world today is his brand of Zen Buddhism as depicted in such poems as Leaves, The Voice, The Snow Party and, most of all, The Hunt by Night, in which life is pictured as a celeebration whose morality is celebration. Evil arises out of an absence of the morality of celebration.

OUR DAY'S TALKING DONE, WE TOOK A CAB ACROSS KENSINGGton to Mahon's studio flat high in the rooftops overlooking Kensington Palace Gardens on one side and Holland Park on the other where he lives with his wife Doreen, formerly a news announcer with UTV and currently an editor with BBC Radio, and their children Rory and Katie who are their father's chief preoccupation: "I want Rory (9) to be a banker and Katie (7) a doctor but I've a terrible foreboding he's going to be a writer and she an artist."

The apartment block stands on the site of Sir James South's 1830 Observatory which housed the world's largest telescope. The windows of Mahon's workroom in the mannsards look south to the towers of Battersea Power Station and, on a clear day, the Surrey hills. The large workroom is as memorable for its spareness as Francis Bacon's studio is for its clutter. The vast worktable is bare except for an anglepoise lamp, typewriter, tippex, stapler, dictionary, ruler, and alarm clock. American, Russian and French books adorn the shelves. If marooned for two months, he would reread: The Magic Mountain, Mann; The Singapore Grip, Farrell; Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon; The Doctor's Wife, Moore; Swann's Way, Proust; The Beckett Trilogy; Dr Zhivago, Pasternak; The Balkan Trilogy, Manning; The Fall, Camus; The Man Without Qualities, Musil.

Apart from Kermode, Ricks, and Steiner he has no time for literary criticism. Influences? Heraclitus; Ovid; King James Bible; The Beano; Stevenson; Crane; Lowry; FitzzGerald; Jaccotet; Bonnefoy; Uccello; Vermeer; Monet; Munch; Dufy; Max Ernst. A crucial kindred spirit is Camus who appears in the poem Rage for Order. Mahon identifies with the pied noir background: "a very Belfast sort of perrsonality." In the morning Mahon is flying to Paris to lecture at the Sorbonne.

Recently Mahon published a poem in praise of his neighhbourhood entitled A Kensington Notebook (Anvil Press) recalling his forebears in the quartier: Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound with whom the poem concludes:

"
Un rameur, finally
Sur le fleuve des mots
Poling his profile toward What further shore?
"

London is the machine Derek Mahon knows best: "I know which buttons to press." But "my spiritual home is Ireland," and his dream is to find a house in Ireland and settle there with his family. •