Derek Mahon's troubles

The dangers attendant in writing about war, or politically volatile situations generally, are the opposite extremes of letting the violence pollute the mainspring of the poem, or a humane liberal scepticism that can only regret that those people - whoever those people are - are doing those things in the name of their beliefs. An example of the latter is James Fenton's war poetry since 1983, which has been bland even when, as in “Jerusalem,” it has been exciting to read.

So it is bracing to come across “Spring in Belfast” the first poem in Derek Mahon's Collected Poems, first published in 1964 when he was 23. For Mahon, who has studied in Dublin and Paris, there can be no easy identification with his (Ulster Protestant) tribe. But equally he sees the limitations of the tendency to patronise the place. “[T]his desperate city,” he concludes,

Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity.

Mahon regains the possibility of a more than anthropological sympathy with his tribe, while coolly rejecting the violence of the “squinting heart”. Read on 22 pages, to “Ecclesiastes,” and see the loss of that opening. What struck me on rereading this poem is its violence, its spitting consonances, its blank-verse harangue:

God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God-
chosen purist little puritan that,
for all your wiles and smiles, you are...

The poem was originally published, as Hugh Haughton points out in The Poetry of Derek Mahon, on the resonant date of 1st May 1968, in The Honest Ulsterman. In England, it was published as “Ecclesiastes Country,” and once again Mahon is writing of his Ulster Protestant tribe. The Civil Rights Assocation had been set up the previous year, and no doubt Mahon could sense that hard-line unionists felt nettled. Violence was in the water, and dismally seeps into the poem.

Mahon adopts the voice of a Paisleyite preacher, and addresses himself in stern self-condemnation. This has its uses as a poetic tactic. (Good poets blame themselves, bad poets blame other people.) But Mahon is too hard on himself: the only thing he and the Rev. Paisley have in common is that they spring from the same Planter stock. And Mahon acknowledges this when he depicts himself carrying "that red / bandana and stick, that banjo". So the only reason why Mahon could have these disturbing authoritarian tendencies is that he's an Ulster Prod. Certainly, Gerald Dawe has no doubts about this when he disappointingly writes in his collected criticism that in this poem “[Mahon] came closer to an understanding of the nature of that community than any other poet I know”.

As for the motives he presents for himself to follow the path of the Loyalist preachers, Mahon writes, “this is your / country, close one eye and be king”. The trouble is: nobody does this. You can accuse the Rev. Paisley of any number of things, but you couldn't say that he was regal, or in it for the money. Rather, the problem was that he did believe what he believed. One of his eyes was always closed.

Most people don't believe what they believe very much, but, as Mahon writes on much firmer ground in “Spring in Belfast”

yield instead to the humorous formulae,
The spurious mystery in the knowing nod...

The community offers a way of living, “a perverse pride”, which can be taken on without necessarily acceding to all its pieties. This allows the poem to intimate that the difference between the community and the ‘alienated’ intellectual like Mahon is not one of blindness and sight, but of perspective. Neither attitude is wrong: both can see the “spurious mystery”, and both should be able to see its value. It couldn't even be said that this ironic distance in members of the community is politically or personally liberatory, but it is always there. I'm told of one old man who, when the parish priest is mentioned, smiles and says laconically, “Ah, Father Keogh…” And despite this common attitude, priests were nevertheless able to eat people in the streets for much of his life. Does anyone doubt that many Protestants felt the tied-up swings on Sundays as an oppression?

In politically volatile situations, the priests have the run of the streets. They get that by creating havoc on the streets. They can harness other people's enjoyment in doing horrible things. And if fear can't keep people quiet, violence will.

Why does this matter? After all, a good poem can make up for any number of bad poems. It matters partly because “Ecclesiastes” was on the Irish Leaving Certificate syllabus the year I did the exam (rather, the first of two years, alas) and again last year. Apart from being an inferior work, it passes on large assumptions about the people the students will share the island with. And the atmosphere of a Leaving Cert classroom isn't always one of asking fundamental questions. See here and here for example.

It matters also because some academic critics have been slow to ask important questions. Hugh Haughton, in what has already become the standard work (and deservedly so) on Mahon, treats it merely as an autobiographical assertion. He then shows its rhetorical structure, its consonances and so on, full of unnecessary bold and italicisations to clinch the point. He says it's a rejection of rhetoric, but not to see its unironic rhetorical violence is not to have read the poem. Dawe also, as we have seen, makes things easy for himself in the ‘Irish Studies’ world, and easy for nationalist critics to assent to his broad sweep of the Protestant community. His criticism might have some value in a Protestant context, but the way things are, nationalist critics can have a Field Day with it.

Finally, irony is the proper poetic course between violence and liberal scepticism. Mahon writes - not really meaning it - of how he might

love the January rains when they
darken the dark doors and sink hard
into the Antrim hills...

But, refusing to grant the extremists final proprietorship of the Antrim hills, and seeing their beliefs as a freakish human product, not an eternal truth, Mahon writes much more strongly - more truly ironically - in “Spring in Belfast”,

We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill
At the top of every street, for there it is,
Eternally, if irrelevantly visible.