‘Above all it is necessary that the lyric poet’s life be known that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man.’

W.B. Yeats

Part of the problem for any biographer of a poet is what the word ‘life’ means. It may mean what the poet himself or herself has sought to project or dramatize or distill. It may also mean what a biographer (or indeed the editor of a volume of letters) requires it to mean. It can be argued that James Joyce’s intimate love letters to his wife are genuinely our business if we are readers of Joyce’s books, especially the novel ‘Ulysses’. But the argument cannot be easily won. In what way do these letters throw light on Leopold Bloom’s relationship to women including his wife Molly in the novel? In what way do they help us to read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy?

Hardly at all has to be one answer. Or even worse - these letters may get in the way, suggest that scenes in the novel are merely masked versions of a real life that, for the length of a letter, might appear more vivid and energetic than the novel.

In the case of ‘Ulysses’, the text itself has an autonomy, pierced only by Joyce’s earlier novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and his collection of stories ‘Dubliners’.

But the autonomy of any work of fiction is delicate, fragile, open to question. Did that really happen? Who is Bloom based on? Did Flaubert know Madame Bovary? Was she based on his mother? What does it mean that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet? Did Yeats ever sleep with Maud Gonne?

Surely these are silly, idle questions?

Is it possible, in fact, that Joyce’s life is none of our business? Should we give up Richard Ellmann’s biography and his edition of Joyce’s letters as we might once have given up sweets for Lent?

The opposing argument would be that writing comes from the world, that it begins in life and then sets out to intensify its own source or complete it in some way. Does it matter that the flower began in soil? Only, perhaps, if we set our face against this as an uncomfortable fact.

The nineteenth century French critic Sainte-Beuve saw the connection between the text and the context as essential. He wrote: ‘I do not look upon literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man and his nature; I can savour a work, but it is difficult for me to judge it separately from the man himself. For me, literary enquiry leads quite naturally into moral enquiry.’

I suppose the idea intrigues us that Joyce’s fiction does not merely intensify some abstract notion of life but it comes out of an actual single life. Joyce’s work emerged not only from his imagination but also from a set of experiences and feelings and actions. J.M. Synge in his notebooks wrote: ‘Each work of art must have been possible to only one man at one period and in one place.’

Who was that man? What was that period like? Where was that place?

Recently, a biography of the poet John Montague (1929-2016) by Adrian Frazier has appeared, a book that raises questions about the relationship between poems and the untidy ‘life’ that caused them to come into being.

As though waiting in the long grass for a biographer, John Montague has a four-line poem called ‘Gossip’:

Learn from the hare;

avoid too much notice,

crouch low, and quiet,

until the hunt passes.

Now that the hunt, if that is not an unfair word, has passed, it might help us to look at the poems by Montague, perhaps to see if the biography has helped or hindered our way of reading them.

It happens on occasions that a poem – a single stray poem that the reader has come across by accident, a poem that is not an anthology piece – can hit the nervous system in a way that makes the poem not as much a response to an experience as an experience in itself.

As readers, we make our own anthologies. For me, there is a poem by John Montague called ‘The Point’. Years ago, I wrote to him to say how deeply the poem had affected me and he replied: ‘I re-read “The Point” and saw it anew. Thank you. Your email also made me consider again the anguish of parting but also the possibility of repair.’

I wonder if the power of the poem – if I look at it technically – comes from the use of two syllables that have an almost equal beat (‘Rocks jagged’, ‘Upstairs’, ‘Flag high’) at the beginning of lines and the refusal to allow a singing iambic beat to dominate or even intrude much.

This is hesitant music, someone whispering. Also, five-line stanzas allow for a kind of openness and do not demand, as a four-line stanza might, a closure, a completion of a thought or an image. A five-line stanza can enact a set of feelings that are tentative, uncertain, incomplete.

This is how the poem opens:

Rocks jagged in morning mist.

At intervals the foghorn sounds

From the white lighthouse rock,

He writes about a memory from childhood, the failure during a night-long struggle to save a calf. But that image is merely a kind of distraction, or a preparation for something more emotionally pressing. ‘This is different,’ he writes, as he addresses a lost love, his first wife, with tone of immense regret and a kind of resignation:

Upstairs my wife & daughter sleep.

Our two lives have separated now

But I would send my voice to yours

Cutting through the shrouding mist

Like some friendly signal in distress.

How can such an amount of expression come buried or be released from a line as simple and defenceless as ‘But this is different’? How can a statement as plain as ‘Upstairs my wife & daughter sleep’ have such unsettling power?

Adrian Frazier’s biography offers a helpful context, some signals. He makes clear how debilitating John Montague’s stammer was: statements and speeches were things he did not take for granted. Thus it is tempting to read ‘The Point’ as a stammerer’s poem with words and openings that cannot be easily said aloud, that might get stuck in the throat: ‘Rocks jagged’; ‘Groaning, belly deep, desperate’; ‘Cutting through’; ‘Flag high.’

The passages in Frazier’s book about Montague’s stammer, a stammer that came and went all his life, interested me. I myself began to stammer when my father became ill – I was eight years old then – and I think I got it under control more or less by the time I was sixteen or seventeen. But I knew it was always there, underlying everything I said, lurking like an undercoat of paint, waiting for the topcoat to peel off. In New York more than a decade ago, it came back bad. For that semester, I began stammering in the classroom, astonished that I was unable to say words that began with a hard syllable.

Since I was in correspondence with John Montague at that time, I mentioned this to him and he replied: ‘I am sorry you were beset by the stammer again, but not surprised. Both Elizabeth and I had a strong feeling from “Nora Webster” [a novel I had just published] – it seems to literally emanate from the pages – that you were travelling to an essential source (what you call “the place”) in the writing of it. Of course you explore that source in all your books but this time it seemed more immediate, more “urgent”, as you say about “The Point.” No wonder the wound was re-opened. After my mother died, I stupidly went on a US reading tour, thinking this would help me get over the grief. But I stammered so badly, it was as if I was drowning in my own unuttered words. So I sympathise with your astonishment in the Columbia classroom.’

It is only on reading John Montague’s poem ‘The Point’, having finished Frazier’s biography, that I noticed those words in the poem that might be difficult to say. But everyone’s stammer is different, and those particular words might not have been so hard for John Montague. Suggesting that a poem as powerful as ‘The Point’ came from a single source is, in any case, to sidestep the levels of complex emotion and suggestion in the poem, to miss the point, so to speak.

It is here that Frazier’s biography becomes not merely helpful but almost essential as I try to read the poem more clearly, or allow its mysteries to emerge more effectively.

I am not sure it would help to see a good photograph of the woman – Madeleine de Brauer, John Montague’s first wife – to whom ‘The Point’ is addressed. And it doesn’t do much for the poem to learn that Madeleine’s grandfather was the Duc d’Auerstadt and see a picture of the vast family house in Normandy, all wings.

But in the new biography we briefly hear Madeleine’s voice. A letter she wrote to a friend from Dublin in 1959 when she was married to Montague is quoted at some length. She and Montague had been spending time in a large house outside Dublin owned by the American painter Morris Graves.

‘Now John has a great desire to write to you,’ she wrote to the friend. ‘But he is very long about these things and has to make spiritual preparations. So I thought I would write first to send you the most ardent love the American Post Office can bear…We spent three weeks in Morris Graves’s Manor, magnificent, spacious, silent, just before winter came. He came back (from the States, as I expect you know) just in time to save me from commuting on a sleigh. His America sounded brilliant, anxious and glittering. John felt very provincial and a bit downcast. But I, brought up as you know along lean Spartan lines, taught from the cradle never to complain, told him like a Victorian Governess that by the time he was Morris’s age he might deserve all the glory…There have been poetry readings, at which Mrs. Yeats Junior played the harp and sang shrilly during the intervals. John was very brilliant…at any rate that’s what most people thought, and he first among them. But I can’t decently blow his trumpet, if you see what I mean (this quite virtuously, and none of your dirty double-entendre).’

This tone – sardonic, witty, amused – casts light also on one of John Montague’s best pieces of prose fiction, the title story of his collection ‘An Occasion of Sin’ in which a young Frenchwoman in Dublin, married to an Irishman, finds her habitual south Dublin beach visited regularly by a number of seminarians who seem to enjoy her company.

In the poem ‘The Point’, the speaker misses her, and writes in the knowledge that she will not come back.

Until Frazier’s book, I wondered about the actual precise landscape of the poem. It is dangerous to put mist and fog into an Irish poem unless mist and fog were fully visible, as it were, no symbols where none intended:

The fog is lifting, slowly.

Flag high a new ship is entering.

The opposite shore unveils itself,

Bright in detail as a painting,

Alone, but equal to the morning.

Frazier describes the location where John Montague and his second wife Evelyn Robson lived in 1973 after the birth of their first daughter: ‘The couple had found an idyllic place to live, Fortview, a coastguard cottage on Roche’s Point, County Cork. They took up occupancy a few weeks after Oonagh’s birth. It was a spectacular site, a curving lane with a row of two-storey houses on one side, the sea cliff on the other and at its end a whitewashed lighthouse. The foghorn would sound in the night and when the wind blew, foam “scudded over the house like snow”.’

In ‘The Point’, there is no strong wind, instead something more gradual and mild begins to clear the air in the final stanza. It is all slow process – ‘lifting’ and ‘entering’ – and will end with a surround sound that is liquid and unstressed – ‘painting’ and ‘morning’ – with one solid word standing out, more powerful in its sound than ‘equal’, the word ‘alone’.

Not the poet alone in a landscape, but a married man, a father, living in real time, finding a voice to let himself and one listener – the woman to whom the poem is addressed, its first reader – know that ‘this is different’, time will not relent, even if ‘the anguish of parting’, as Montague put it, comes with ‘the possibility of repair.’

Colm Tóibín (November 2024)

(John Montague: A Poet’s Life, by Adrian Frazier is published by Lilliput Press. ISBN: 9781843519102)