R.I.P. Paul Durcan

I just heard the news that acclaimed poet Paul Durcan has died at the age of 80. The couple of obits I’ve read have been fairly obligatory although I am sure there will be more in-depth pieces as the news spread. In the meantime Colm Tóibín wrote a beautiful piece on him last year when Durcan turned 80. I love this part:

But the poems can also be daring, directly personal as well as directly political. It is hard to think of another poet in these islands who has written such searing poems against violence and cruelty and the politics of hate. It is also difficult to think of another male poet who has written such brave works of self-examination. In his poems about his father, for example, or his marriage, or his solitude, Paul Durcan manages a desolation mixed with a fierce generosity of spirit, a hard-won sense of healing edged and tempered by an equally hard-won sense of loss and despondency.

Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, lots of voices, often hilarious. The titles are sometimes lengthy: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. The humor sharpens the points he was making. Like his poem “Tullynoe: Tete-à-Tete in the Parish Priest’s Parlour” … you yearn to hear him perform it.

Tullynoe: Tete-à-Tete in the Parish Priest’s Parlour
“Ah, he was a grand man.”
“He was: he fell out of the train going to Sligo.”
“He did: he thought he was going to the lavatory.”
“He did: in fact he stepped out of the rear door of the train.”
“He did: God, he must have got an awful fright.”
“He did: he saw that it wasn’t the lavatory at all.”
“He did: he saw that it was the railway tracks going away from him.”
“He did: I wonder if … but he was a grand man.”
“He was: he had the most expensive Toyota you can buy.”
“He had: well, it was only beautiful.”
“It was: he used to have an Audi.”
“He had: as a matter of fact he used to have two Audis.”
“He had: and then he had an Avenger.”
“He had: and then he had a Volvo.”
“He had: in the beginning he had a lot of Volkses.”
“He had: he was a great man for the Volkses.”
“He was: did he once have an Escort?”
“He had not: he had a son a doctor.”
“He had: and he had a Morris Minor too.”
“He had: he had a sister a hairdresser in Kilmallock.”
“He had: he had another sister a hairdresser in Ballybunion.”
“He had: he was put in a coffin which was put in his father’s cart.”
“He was: his lady wife sat on top of the coffin driving the donkey.”
“She did: Ah, but he was a grand man.”
“He was: he was a grand man…”
“Good night, Father.”
“Good night, Mary.”

He had a rather horrifying time of it as a young man. His father was a judge, and their relationship was very challenging. To please this difficult man, Durcan went to UCD to study law, but whatever happened his first year in college was traumatic and his family essentially kidnapped him and put him in an institution where the treatment for mental illness was barbaric. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said:

I ended up in St John of God in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it. I didn’t get a leucotomy, which would have finished me off completely, but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.”

The “cure” made him sicker. He was very open about his struggle with depression.

His mother was John MacBride’s niece. MacBride, of course, was one of the martyrs of the 1916 Irish revolution, who married Maud Gonne (after he was executed, she, famously, wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her wild life). Durcan was born into this mythical Irish atmosphere.

Once he got out of the mental institution, he was free to go his own way at last. He got married and had a couple of kids (the marriage fell apart in 1984: this “failure” haunted him and he continued to write beautiful love poems for his wife after they split). His wife worked in a prison, and so Durcan was the stay-at-home dad. He wrote poetry as the children played around him – and I think you can tell. (This is a compliment). He held the post of “Professor of Poetry” in Ireland, a national trust.

His live readings were legendary. Imagine hearing him read “Tullynoe: Tete-à-Tete in the Parish Priest’s Parlour”. I am so sorry I didn’t go to one of his readings at the Irish Arts Center, but there are clips of him on YouTube. Caitriona O’Reilly describes the effect Durcan had on an audience in this piece in The Guardian:

Hilarity has always been Paul Durcan’s stock-in-trade. Anyone who has attended one of his electrifying poetry readings and been reduced to hysteria (a common enough occurrence) can testify to the unique flavour of his work, especially when read aloud by the poet himself. That voice, with its peculiar, precise sibilance, its mock-solemnity, its quavering rise and fall, is the voice that remains in your head when reading his poems afterwards. He is one of the few poets honest enough to admit (as did the hieratic TS Eliot) that poetry is a form of entertainment, yet intelligent enough to know that entertainment does not mean “cheap”. His populism, his popularity, as a poet are unusual – comparable only to that favour enjoyed in Ireland by his venerated contemporary Seamus Heaney.

Here’s audio of him reading at the Irish Arts Center, in New York:

I love so many of his poems: There’s the one about the Pieta: how does he make it so funny? It’s about an overbearing mother’s love, where he says to Jesus, essentially: “You have got to get up, friend. Grow up.”

There’s also this one.

Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949
Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin
My father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,
His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,
The rexine seat of red leatherette,
And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.
‘Daddy, Daddy,’ I cried, ‘Pass out the moon,’
But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.
Each town we passed through was another milestone
And their names were magic passwords into eternity:
Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,
Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;
Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,
The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,
And my father’s mother’s house, all oil-lamps and women,
And my bedroom over the public bar below,
And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:
Life’s seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rent
By their screeches and bellowings. And in the evenings
I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river
Talking with him – an unheard-of thing in the city.
But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflanked
Than the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:
Back down along the canal we chugged into the city
And each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;
And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic-lights,
And blocks after blocks of so-called ‘new’ tenements –
Thousands of crosses of loneliness planted
In the narrowing grave of the life of the father;
In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy’s childhood.

Durcan wrote a long tribute poem to Micheál MacLiammóir, a man I have written about before, usually in connection with his lifelong friend Orson Welles. (MacLiammóir was Iago to Welles’ Othello in Welles’ film.) MacLiammóir was a fascinating man: he founded the great Gate Theatre in Dublin, to compete with and rival the revered Abbey. He came from a new generation, with new ideas about theatre. The Gate is still going strong, and is just one of this man’s legacies. I once posted the text of his fantastic essay about film acting. A brilliant actor who basically adopted Ireland as his homeland by force of will and imagination. A fabulist, because he wasn’t Irish.

MacLiammóir died in March 1978, and Paul Durcan wrote this poem immediately as a tribute. It is in MacLiammóir’s voice, and it is glorious.

Micheál MacLiammóir

‘Dear Boy, What a superlative day for a funeral:
It seems St Stephen’s Green put on the appareil
Of early Spring-time especially for me.
That is no vanity: but – dare I say it – humility
In the fell face of those nay-neighers who say we die
At dying-time. Die? Why, I must needs cry
No, no, no, no,
Now I am living whereas before – no –
‘Twas but breathing, choking, croaking, singing,
Superb sometimes but nevertheless but breathing:
You should have seen the scene in University Church:
Packed to the hammer-beams with me left in the lurch
All on my ownio up-front centre-stage;
People of every nationality in Ireland and of every age;
Old age and youth – Oh, everpresent, oldest, wished-for youth;
And old Dublin ladies telling their beads for old me; forsooth.
‘Twould have fired the cockles of John Henry’s heart
And his mussels too: only Sarah Bernhardt
Was missing but I was so glad to see Marie Conmee
Fresh, as always, as the morning sea.
We paid a last farewell to dear Harcourt Terrace,
Dear old, bedgraggled, doomed Harcourt Terrace
Where I enjoyed, amongst the crocuses, a Continual Glimpse of Heaven
By having, for a living partner, Hilton.
Around the corner the canal-waters from Athy gleamed
Engaged in their never-ending courtship of Ringsend.
Then onward to the Gate – and to the rose-cheeked ghost of Edward Longford;
I could not bear to look at Patrick Bedford.
Oh tears there were, there and everywhere,
But especially there; there outside the Gate where
For fifty years we wooed the goddess of our art;
How many, many nights she pierced my heart.
Ach, níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin: ¹
The Gate and the Taibhdhearc – each was our name;
I dreamed a dream of Jean Cocteau
Leaning against a wall in Killnamoe;
And so I voyaged through all the nations of Ireland with McMaster
And played in Cinderella an ugly, but oh so ugly, sister.
Ah but we could not tarry for ever outside the Gate;
Life, as always, must go on or we’d be late
For my rendezvous with my brave grave-diggers
Who were as shy but snappy as my best of dressers.
We sped past the vast suburb of Clontarf – all those lives
Full of hard-working Brian Borús with their busy wives.
In St Fintan’s Cemetery there was spray from the sea
As well as from the noonday sun, and clay on me:
And a green carnation on my lonely oaken coffin.
Lonely in heaven? Yes, I must not soften
The deep pain I feel at even a momentary separation
From my dear, sweet friends. A green carnation
For you all, dear boy; If you must weep, ba(w)ll;
Slán agus Beannacht:² Micheál.’

March 1978

¹ But there’s no place like home.
² Farewell.

And so we say, like the second footnote to that poem, “farewell” to Paul Durcan, whose work encompasses the complicated problems affecting our world and us, but the lightest of touches – hilarity, really, as Caitriona O’Reilly observes – not just wit, or sarcasm. He wasn’t caustic, and still his critiques of what we do to each other in the shadow of the institutions that rule our lives could not have been more clear. How Durcan pulled this off – plus his notoriously riotous live readings – was a gift.

 
 
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