PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Not long after beginning to work on the life of John Montague, eight years ago, I was asked Why are you writing about him? Why not Seamus Heaney? Isn't he more famous? A little snort of laughter might have been heard on the slopes of Parnassus, whether it was John elbowing a ghostly Seamus in the ribs, or the other way round. Not to detract from the merits of Seamus Heaney, as gentleman or poet, but there are advantages to John Montague as a subject for a literary biography.

His course in life offers a full view of post-war poetry, not just poetry in Ireland, but a vantage-point on modern poetry in America, Britain and France. Do you know the parlour game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?' The actor was in everything, or next door to it. Montague is the same among poets. Allen Ginsberg? In 1955 Montague was in Medieval English class with him at Berkeley, just a month before the first reading of Howl. Harold Bloom? Montague was his classmate at Yale University in 1953, when Bloom talked endlessly and with rabbinical profundity.

At the Iowa Writers Workshop, the other student poets included Robert Bly, W.D. Snodgrass, Philip Levine and James Dickey; one of his instructors was John Berryman. In Berkeley, he had an affair with a woman running an art gallery; one of the artists she represented was 'Jess', who turned up at her dinner party with his partner, the poet Robert Duncan.

Poetry, of course, is not a matter of who you know. That's the point made by Patrick Kavanagh's poem 'Epic': 'I have lived in important places, times/ When great events were decided,' such as a neighbour shouting, 'Damn your soul!' as another farmer raises a potato spade in anger. Nonetheless, Montague's nose for cosmopolitan literary life makes for a narrative that illuminates not just his own poetry, but modern poetry in general. When important things were just breaking into flower, he was often a witness, a participant, a change agent, sometimes even the leading contributor. That was in New Haven, Iowa City, Berkeley, Dublin, Paris, Cork city, Belfast and New York. Particularly in his home country, he was a path-breaker.

2

To write a proper literary biography you need more than just a writer of interest. It is necessary to have the materials, the traces of works-in-progress, living witnesses, observers in the past who left memoranda, and a full archive of correspondence. Where Montague is concerned, the evidence is there. Conscious of what Yeats's archive looked like (from Allan Wade's 1955 edition of the Letters), he became a professional curator of his own papers. He kept letters he received, and drafts of many that he sent. Then he sold off his so-called 'complete archive' not once, or twice, but four times. Poetry had in that period acquired status; it was, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot, the definition of culture.

When Montague was starting off in university, serious literature was rising towards this peak of prestige. In America the GI Bill sent veterans to college. To help them, in the late 1940s Harvard's president Robert Maynard Hutchins created a Great Book publishing scheme. The seeds of Western Civilization - recently rescued from Nazism at the cost of fifty million lives - were thought to be found in literary works: the best that has been thought and said. From the early 1950s, partly due to the nature of New Criticism, lyric poetry acquired the highest status of all literary forms.

In a cultural parallel of the Marshall Plan, a group from Harvard, often led by Jewish literary critics and writers like F.O. Matthiessen and Saul Bellow, set up the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. This was meant to be an introduction for Europeans to the new post-war world: a high-minded combination of American literary modernism with constitutional democracy and free speech. Montague was a scholarship boy at this seminar in the summer of 1950. In his own words, he became a 'fellow-traveller' of these American anti-communist liberals.

From the mid-1950s he kept up a number of literary correspondences - chains of letters back and forth that may be ten pages long. On his own side, Montague would often do an outline, and then a first draft, before producing a legible and coherent fair copy of the letter posted. Some of his key correspondents were the following:

Donald Fanger, met at Berkeley in the 1950s, later Harvard professor of the European novel;

Serge Fauchereau, French critic and cultural historian;

Robin Skelton, English poet, magician, anthologist and Yeats scholar, later professor at University of Victoria in Canada;

Thomas Kinsella, fellow Dolmen Press poet and rival;

Tim O'Keeffe, London editor and publisher, at MacGibbon and Kee;

Thomas Parkinson, poet, historian of Beat poets, and Yeats scholar at University of California, Berkeley;

Barrie Cooke, Anglo-American painter long resident in Ireland;

Richard Ryan, Irish poet and diplomat;

Liam Miller, printer and publisher at The Dolmen Press;

Barry Callaghan, Toronto poet, journalist and editor of Exile.

Montague's letters are occasions for self-examination, with point-by-point plans for improvement. A biographer would never have access to such hours of self-invention if the letter had not been written, and having been written, saved.

The poet was himself a magpie, snatching up bits and pieces to make his nest bigger and bigger, but the eggs over which he brooded often took a long time to hatch. He collected preparatory materials - newspaper articles, photographs, phrases written on a bank statement or bus ticket, false starts. He kept all these bits and pieces in a sheaf, and would go back over them time and again - in pencil, ballpoint, or fountain pen. 'What is the point of this?' he might ask himself, or 'Why not end this here?' An early habit was to list two or three models for the work in progress, often the work of a contemporary, such as Charles Tomlinson, Thomas Kinsella, Robert Lowell, or Robert Duncan. He kept abreast of what his contemporaries were doing.

Montague is a peculiarly conscious and scholarly poet. He sometimes states the intended theme of the poem on the manuscript page. On occasion, he would then cross it out, and suggest to himself a different theme; he had misunderstood his own poem in progress - it was going somewhere else. Composition is fluent, molten, bubbling, sometimes going to sleep for months or years, before reawakening and erupting again. It is not uncommon in the case of a Montague poem for eight or ten years, even fifteen years, to pass between a poem's first appearance in a notebook and its publication in a volume. 'All Legendary Obstacles' was eleven years in the making from first to last.

In the archive, one may see the poet at work. That is the meat and drink of a literary biography.

3

At the origin of Montague's poetry is his motherless loneliness as a small boy in Garvaghey, County Tyrone, away from parents and brothers, enduring a stammer that arose suddenly and mysteriously. Although he turned out to be a bright lad, coming at or near the top in several subjects in national scholarship competitions, the doors to many professions were closed to him simply because of his inability to speak up. He was not going to be a priest, a barrister, a medic, or any public-facing occupation. All through university he never spoke in class.

The laborious perfection of a spoken utterance is the very definition of poetry. Montague came to see that he could sort out his feelings by way of meditation, organize his thoughts, then fix them word by word on paper. This was the medicine for what ailed him. It was also a way of making himself intimately understood, first to himself, and perhaps some day graspable and attractive to another.

In the lecture rooms of University College Dublin and around the portico of the National Library, any student with a taste for verse could sense the loitering ghost of James Joyce. Someone like them - Catholic, Irish, nearly penniless, but bookish - had from this very place begun a journey to recognition as a hero of European letters. Dublin was beginning to see the traffic of American professors looking for clues on to how to understand Joyce. They were noticed in the pubs and bookshops, people like Hugh Kenner and Richard Ellmann. And asking about Yeats too; in fact, especially Yeats. To be a poet in ways only the elite could completely appreciate, that would be a very fine thing, and evidently not impossible for an Irishman.

But how was one to do it? Nowadays, a person could apply for instruction in a writing programme, or buy a how-to manual in paperback. In the late 1940s, when Montague was becoming serious about his poetry, there was just one guidebook, and it was a most eccentric one. Published at Faber by T.S. Eliot, The White Goddess addressed itself specifically to young men who wanted to know how to write a great poem. There was only one way to do it, according to this book. Robert Graves had boiled down the story of Yeats's life into a formula. The secret was to fall in love with a woman not your wife, a woman in whom the Moon-goddess has taken up residence. This superior, whimsical being will break your heart to pieces. You will try but you will never master her, yet she will give you the training and experience you require to write a great poem. In her you will encounter the tragic, beautiful mystery of life itself.

The White Goddess was a formative book not just for Montague, but for Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Ted Hughes, and...