“A Quiet Life”: Journals, 1974–2014 Thomas McCarthy (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 23:3. thomas mccarthy (b. 1954) lives in Cork with his wife. He is the author of several collections of poetry and prose and the recipient of both the Patrick Kavanagh and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Awards. He attended University College Cork, where he studied under John Montague and was classmates with what Thomas Dillon Redshaw has called “that remarkable generation” of writers who attended UCC at the time. AUGUST 10, 1974 Michael Hartnett has decided to write exclusively in Irish. I can understand the politics of his decision, but from the point of view of poetry it is a huge mistake. Paul Durcan thinks he’s our greatest Southern poet, more lyrical and beautiful than Kinsella, more disciplined than Kennelly. But why is he so easily pushed from the podium of his own voice? English poetry offers endless possibilities, and it can embrace even the most eccentric and parochial kinds of Irishness. So why this rush into the Irish language? Is it a spiritual pursuit of Caitlín Maude or an emotional escape from Seamus Heaney? Perhaps the Irish language will be like a second wife to him: . . . As gold-green mossclose to the barkwhen the winds tossmy limbs to tragedy and dark. But it is sad to lose such a good Munster poet in English. Almost like Ledwidge, but very primary and angry and raw. The delicacy of Anatomy of [a] Cliché is [End Page 145] beautiful, poised, elegant. And this is the problem with switching from English to Irish: is his Irish vocabulary equal to all the suffering and pain of human consciousness? Will he be able to carry our existential grief like Seán Ó Ríordáin? And it took Ó Ríordáin at least twenty years to develop an all-embracing Irish vocabulary—and he was only stung into a purposeful, Dunquin-based learning of this by Máire Mhac an tSaoí’s stinging critique of his work. And will Hart-nett have a patient audience, an audience that will wait for his vocabulary? As patient as Theo Dorgan, for example, who thinks his decision is a marvel. Or has he merely committed an act of linguistic piety, thereby creating an imaginative dead-end like Daniel Corkery? Corkery’s embrace of the Gaelic League marked the end of his career as a serious artist. Middle-aged Irishmen often embrace “The Language” with the same hopeless abandon that certain English writers embrace Roman Catholicism—and their decision is defined not by what they’ve embraced but by what they think they’ve abandoned. AUGUST 15, 1974 In his Wintering Out Seamus Heaney breaks away from the mere material of Ireland like a greyhound out of a trap. He has found an impersonal personal voice and method, something beyond our national, conventional voices. His year in California has changed him, loosened him and enlarged him; though it does make him sound more like Ted Hughes: the Hughes of Wodwo and Crow. Heaney still hasn’t reached Hughes’ intensity or precision. The linguistic precision, the calculated emotional weight, in every phrase of Hughes is simply astonishing. There is still too much of pietistic Irish Catholicism and too little of hard Pen-nine granite in Heaney, but, still, he has his own material: he has Ireland, he has Ulster. Heaney is surely the poet of eels as Hughes is the poet of eagles. And, poetically, Hughes is Heaney’s great technical rival. I wonder is Hughes, over there in England and making a completely English life, aware of Heaney yet? Does he think of him with fear and contempt, the way Montague does? Or is he unaware of this powerful, unwavering Irishman, the way Lord Byron was unaware of the real power of Shelley? Can one poet ever really feel the force of another poet’s future? A poet can only imagine his own success, never another’s. The continuing resentment H. generates in Montague is so wild and intense. Pat Crotty and I have to be careful not to talk of Heaney when John is...
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Nov 30, 2023
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