A moral map?: a thematic study of the poetry of Paul Durcan
Name: Conor Farnan
Award: PhD
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick
Supervisor: Dr John McDonagh
Submitted to the University of Limerick April 2013
i
Declaration:
I hereby declare that this thesis represents my own work and has not been submitted, in
whole or in part, by me or any other person, for the purpose of obtaining any other
qualification.
Signed:
Date:
ii
Dedication
For Richard Ball – teacher, encourager, friend.
He knew that posterity has no use
For anything but the soul,
The lines that speak the passionate heart,
The spirit that lives alone.
– Patrick Kavanagh, ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’, 1953
iii
Thesis Abstract
This thesis is a thematic study of a representative selection of the poetry of
contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan (b. 1944). It seeks to investigate the extent to which
Durcan’s work might be interpreted as a ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44). The term ‘moral map’
was introduced by Eamon Grennan and names an interpretive approach to the poet’s work
approved by Durcan himself in interview with the current author (Appendix One). Central to
an interpretation of Durcan’s work as a ‘moral map’ is the question of individual freedom:
this is explicated fully in Chapter One and is present throughout the thesis. Following
Chapter One the thesis is developed with reference to seven major areas of his poetry:
Catholic identity; scapegoat imagery; politics; travel and transport; family of origin; chosen
relationships; and poems of self-fashioning / self-dramatisation. A General Conclusion
follows Chapter Eight. The transcript of an interview with Paul Durcan, conducted by the
current author, appears after the General Conclusion and is referred to as ‘Appendix One’
throughout.
Chapter One reviews Durcan’s academic and popular reception to date. A clear
working definition of the term ‘moral map’ is developed. The scope and aims of the thesis are
clearly defined as are the key terms invoked throughout the thesis.
Chapter Two is an examination of Paul Durcan’s writing on the subject of Irish
Catholicism. Firstly, poems in which Durcan orchestrates a clash between Church authorities
and individual figures are explored. Secondly, poems about clerics and Church insiders.
Thirdly, more celebratory poems which invoke the vocabulary and imagery of Catholicism
are central.
Chapter Three examines the interrelated subjects of the scapegoat and the mob in
Durcan’s work. A theoretical framework, invoking the scholarship of René Girard, is
developed. Durcan’s use of the scapegoat in two specific milieus is examined: firstly in
iv
situations where legal figures and trappings are present and secondly where the mob is more
embedded in social structure. Finally, attention is paid to the remedies proposed by Durcan’s
poetry in the face of this punishing dynamic.
Chapter Four examines a representative selection of Durcan’s political poetry.
Initially an examination of patriarchal control of the national narrative is conducted. The
second and third chapters respectively deal with the poet’s writing on the subjects of violence
against minority groups in the Irish Republic and violence in Northern Ireland.
Chapter Five focuses on the subjects of travel and transport in Durcan’s poetry. It is
proposed that both are central to his poetic. Extended attention is paid to Durcan’s volume
Going Home to Russia as representative of his work in this area. The chapter’s final section
deals with the effect of Durcan’s calculatedly broad and inclusive vision.
Chapter Six is an examination of Durcan’s writing about the family with a focus on
Daddy, Daddy and The Laughter of Mothers. Attention is paid to the socio-political status of
the family in Durcan’s lifetime followed by a brief overview of some relevant biographical
material. A close reading of representative poems from the two volumes named above is then
conducted.
Chapter Seven is a focus on the importance of relationality to Durcan’s ‘moral map’.
Specific reference is made to the particular manner in which male-female relationships have
become politicised during Durcan’s career. Close readings are then conducted of selected
poems from The Berlin Wall Café and Cries of an Irish Caveman.
Chapter Eight develops a concept named as Durcan’s theatre of the self. After an
initial outlining of the terms, attention is paid respectively to the long poem ‘Christmas Day’
(CD, 5) and to Durcan’s relationship to the works of Samuel Beckett. The chapter concludes
with remarks on some of Durcan’s later work, his development of a theatre of ‘mixed
feelings’ (GHR, 88).
v
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Dr John McDonagh for all his help and direction. His professional advice,
good humour and sense of perspective created the conditions which allowed my skills and
confidence to grow and this thesis to be completed.
My thanks are also extended to Dr Kathryn Laing and Dr Eugene O’Brien for their assistance
and advice during work on this project. I also take this opportunity to note my gratitude to Dr
Kathleen McCracken for giving so generously and invaluably of her time and experience.
I wish to extend my thanks to Paul Durcan for his warmth and kindness towards me and for
his diligent proofreading of my interview transcript which appears as an appendix to this
thesis.
Of the many friendships that have sustained me in the course of the preparation of this thesis
I want particularly to note those of Richard Ball, Michael J. Maguire and of Brendan
O’Donoghue, and the valued companionship of Billy Kenrick and of Sara Berntsson. They
have been of assistance to me in ways too numerous and varied to detail.
Most importantly, I express here my gratitude to my immediate family. To my aunt and
godmother, Eileen, for her loyal presence, support and Late Late chats. To my mother Mary
for her personal courage, subversive laughter, and unwavering belief in me. To my brother
Tommy: when they built you brother, they broke the mould. And finally to my late father,
Paddy, whose prodigious memory, appetite for quick and clever turns of phrase, and love of
music was the first poetry I ever knew.
vi
Table of Contents
Declaration.................................................................................................................................ii
Dedication.................................................................................................................................iii
Thesis Abstract..........................................................................................................................iv
Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................vi
Table of Contents.....................................................................................................................vii
Abbreviations............................................................................................................................xi
Chapter One:
General Introduction – Locating Durcan and defining the moral map
1.1 Introduction: context, perspectives and methodologies.......................................................1
1.2 The comedy of freedom1: an introduction to Paul Durcan’s moral map.............................8
1.3 Key terms in Durcan’s vocabulary explicated: reality, fiction, innocence, dream............15
1.4 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................23
Chapter Two:
Betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal – Durcan’s dialogue with Irish Catholicism
2.1 Introduction........................................................................................................................25
2.2 Contested reality: a violent hegemony and stifled subjectivities ......................................33
2.3 A nod and a wink: hegemonic crisis, negotiated subjectivities and open secrets..............42
2.4 Rendering vibrant subjectivities in Christian and Biblical imagery...................................49
2.5 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................56
Chapter Three:
Oddly commanding – the centrality of mobs and scapegoats to Durcan’s moral map
3.1 Introduction........................................................................................................................58
3.2.1 René Girard and the mimetic nature of human desire.....................................................65
3.2.2 The creation of the scapegoat by the mimetically constituted community.....................69
1
See BWC, 40. Many of the chapter titles listed here incorporate quotes from Durcan’s work or slightly altered
interpretations thereof. It has been chosen, for the sake of concision and presentation, not to include the
footnotes in this Table of Contents but rather to give the full reference as each respective quote is used in the
body of the text.
vii
3.2.3 Myth and the Gospels: justifying and exposing the scapegoat mechanism....................72
3.3 Pedigree ape: legal functionaries and the judicial structure in Durcan’s moral map.........74
3.4 His neighbours look askance: small-town mobs, social pressure and the judicial
structure in Durcan’s moral map..................................................................................84
3.5 Advocating amnesties: regarding innocence, ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89) and Durcan’s
counter-strategies to judicial structures in his moral map............................................94
3.6 Conclusion........................................................................................................................101
Chapter Four:
Whose reality? – Durcan’s interrogation of political narratives
4.1 Introduction......................................................................................................................102
4.2 The tyranny of weak men: patriarchy and control of the national narrative....................108
4.3 Fictions and factions: ideological and physical violence against minority groups..........116
4.4 Standing up for compromise or a compromised stance?: Durcan and political
violence in Northern Ireland.......................................................................................123
4.5 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................131
Chapter Five:
Is there any other history? – travel, transport and Durcan’s accommodating vision
5.1 Introduction......................................................................................................................132
5.2 Poetry and motion: the importance of travel and transport..............................................138
5.3 A man in search of his Russia: Russia as mirror and site of possibility in
Going Home to Russia...............................................................................................148
5.4 No such thing as a uniform Ireland: the subversive power of inclusivity
in Durcan’s poetry......................................................................................................162
5.5 Conclusion........................................................................................................................169
viii
Chapter Six:
The most subversive unit in society – depicting the family in Daddy, Daddy and The
Laugher of Mothers
6.1 Introduction......................................................................................................................171
6.1.1 Natural, primary and fundamental: the Irish family as private institution and
political entity.............................................................................................................173
6.1.2 En famille: a short sketch of relevant biographical details 1944-1971.........................176
6.1.3 Hermeneutic caution in a world where fiction is all that matters..................................179
6.2.1 Framing the father: on context and content in Daddy, Daddy......................................182
6.2.2 Burning to death speaking Irish: ‘Daddy’ and the family as postcolonial totems........188
6.2.3 Deposing the father and tentative reconciliations: portraying a man neither
an icon nor a demon...................................................................................................193
6.3 The first woman I ever knew: The Laughter of Mothers and the genesis of
Durcan’s feminism.....................................................................................................200
6.4 Conclusion........................................................................................................................207
Chapter Seven:
Symbiotic, yet fluid – the importance of relationality to Durcan’s moral map
7.1 Introduction: the centrality of relationality to Durcan’s moral map................................209
7.2 Authority and the eyes: the nature of Durcan’s writing about women............................213
7.3 The Pietà’s over: writing the male subject in the context of longer relationships in
The Berlin Wall Café..................................................................................................224
7.4 – Between the cow and the cave: the depiction of the love relationship in
Cries of an Irish Caveman........................................................................................235
7.5 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................243
Chapter Eight:
Interior design – Durcan’s self-fashioning and theatre of the self
8.1 Introduction to Durcan’s theatre of the self: framing the concept...................................245
8.2 Permission to be Frank: ‘Christmas Day’ as dialogue and self-portrait...........................248
ix
8.3 Giving Beckett the Gate: Durcan’s ambivalent attitude towards Samuel Beckett...........255
8.4 The theatre of mixed feelings: Durcan’s later dramatisations of the self.........................265
8.5 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................278
General Conclusion..............................................................................................................279
Appendix One: Transcript of interview with Paul Durcan, conducted by the author of
this thesis on October 24th 2012.............................................................................................285
Bibliography:
Primary Texts and Resources.................................................................................................301
Secondary Texts and Resources
Books..........................................................................................................................302
Chapters in Books......................................................................................................306
Articles in Journals, Periodicals and Newspapers......................................................307
Podcasts / Radio and Television Broadcasts..............................................................309
Internet Sources..........................................................................................................310
Dictionary...................................................................................................................310
x
Abbreviations
The following is a list of Durcan’s texts referred to in this thesis listed in the chronological
order of their publication. This is also a list of book name abbreviations here employed.
Throughout this thesis the Oxford English Dictionary is abbreviated as OED.
E
Endsville (with Brian Lynch)
OW
O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor
TB
Teresa’s Bar
SC
Sam’s Cross
JBF
Jesus, Break His Fall
SPD
The Selected Paul Durcan
AN
Ark of the North
JTA
Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela
BWC
The Berlin Wall Café
GHR
Going Home to Russia
DD
Daddy, Daddy
CW
Crazy about Women
SMP
A Snail in my Prime: New and Selected Poems
GMYH
Give Me Your Hand
CD
Christmas Day
GFB
Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil
CIC
Cries of an Irish Caveman
PDD
Paul Durcan’s Diary
AoL
The Art of Life
LM
The Laughter of Mothers
LD
Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007
P
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being
xi
Chapter One:
General Introduction – Locating Durcan and defining the moral map
1.1 – Introduction: context, perspectives and methodologies
Awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Trinity College Dublin in December
2009 and an honorary Doctorate of Literature by University College Dublin in 2011, Paul
Durcan has been publishing poetry for almost half a century. His first volume entitled
Endsville was a joint publication with poet Brian Lynch in 1967. Since then Durcan has
published upwards of twenty volumes of poetry with his latest large volume, Praise in Which
I Live and Move and Have my Being, arriving in his sixty-eighth year. He is a member of
Aosdána and was an early winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1974). His 1985
collection The Berlin Wall Café was a London Poetry Book Society choice and his 1990
Daddy, Daddy was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2001 he won a Cholmondeley
award. Durcan has been Writer in Residence at Trinity College Dublin and from 2004 to
2007 he held the prestigious Ireland Professorship of Poetry. At the invitation of the
institutions he has produced volumes of poetry written in response to paintings in the
National Galleries of Ireland and of Britain respectively. Since the 1980s Durcan has made
relatively frequent appearances on Ireland’s national television and radio stations. He has
written and recorded with the musician Van Morrison. Durcan has read his poetry in a great
variety of locations, both internationally and within Ireland – so committed is he to this act,
he saw fit to title his 2009 volume Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007. He
has, arguably, contributed richly to public life in Ireland and from 2001 to 2003 he delivered
a regular radio column on RTÉ’s ‘Today with Pat Kenny’ radio show. It might be contended
that, on the basis of these facts alone, an extensive exploration of Durcan’s work is merited.
Warm as Durcan’s public reception has been – his readings are much fêted –
academic analysis of and response to his work has been scant in volume. While as a Dublin1
based poet he might be said to have suffered critical neglect as a result of the focus on poetry
by Northern Irish poets in the course of his career, this neglect is perhaps disproportionate to
his significant body of work. There has not yet been published a single-authored book-length
study of Durcan’s work. 1996 saw the publication of a collection of essays about the poet –
The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan. While the ten contributors to the volume
cover much important ground, and many of their essays will be referred to frequently
throughout this study, the work neither sets out to be nor amounts to a systematic approach to
Durcan’s oeuvre. Durcan’s work is regularly included in anthologies. It has intermittently
been the subject of chapter-length book contributions: most often such attention is paid only
in a comparative context with other contemporary Irish poets. These chapter-length book
contributions – such as Lucy Collins’s 2003 ‘Performance and dissent: Irish poets in the
public sphere’ (Collins, 2003) – frequently focus more on Durcan’s reading style and public
persona than thematic concerns. These facts are noted not in order to find fault with previous
scholarship, merely to note the nature of the focus on Durcan heretofore. Maurice Elliott has
written an extensive 2004 essay on Durcan titled ‘Paul Durcan: Melancholy poet of love’
(Elliott, 2004), and Erik Martiny also has paid concentrated attention to the poet’s work
publishing three articles between 2006 and 2010. Kathleen McCracken, a long time
correspondent of the poet’s, has published four articles on his work to date. Of published
Durcan scholarship McCracken’s articles have usually gone furthest in their attempts to
understand Durcan’s work on his own terms. Again, this is not to suggest a lack of scholarly
objectivity, simply that the author has made demonstrable efforts to understand Durcan’s
self-conception as a writer and to incorporate that into her final analysis.
This thesis takes as its approach a close textual reading of Paul Durcan’s published
poetry in the period 1967-2012 as it appears in his printed collections2. It is not a
2
Most of Durcan’s poetry collections are referred to in the course of this thesis. However, In the Land of Punt
2
chronological reading of his poetry; rather it is structured around seven major themes or focal
areas to be found in his work. These areas, in outline, are: Catholic identity; scapegoat
imagery; politics; travel and transport; family of origin; chosen relationships; and poems of
self-fashioning / self-dramatisation. This thematic categorisation does not claim to be
exhaustive in its scope. The categorisation has been judged for the purposes of this study to
facilitate an examination of poems suitably representative of key areas in Durcan’s work.
Further, due to the comparatively large size of Durcan’s published corpus the choice of
individual poems to be analysed is similarly made on a necessarily selective and not
exhaustive basis. It should also be noted that the focus of this study is on Durcan’s poetry
alone, and not on his journalism, radio documentaries, radio diary, journal editing, print
journalism, music criticism or any other work. Further, this thesis does not seek to compare
Durcan with other poets or writers, past or present. When it is deemed necessary to reinforce
or to clarify a point, reference is made briefly to articles of print journalism by the poet,
interviews given and to his book of radio transcripts, Paul Durcan’s Diary. Finally it is useful
to note that Durcan has pursued what Kathleen McCracken has referred to as an ‘inter-art
aesthetic’ (McCracken 2013, 109), drawing inspiration from and conducting dialogues with
painting, visual art, cinema and other media. While this is fully acknowledged and is referred
to when necessary to illuminate certain points, the focus of this study is not primarily upon
this ‘inter-art aesthetic’ but rather on the seven thematic areas selected.
Following this introductory chapter the thesis is arranged in a thematic order with
seven distinct areas of Durcan’s work providing the focal points of the seven respective
chapters. Extensive preparatory reading was carried out before the writing of this thesis and
the seven areas focused upon were chosen partially because they naturally suggested
(with Gene Lambert) (1988) is not referred to here. It was examined during the preparation of this thesis and
was finally judged to contain little that might expand or add nuance to an understanding of the central themes
that this thesis explores through the consideration of other material. Significantly, no poems from In the Land of
Punt (with Gene Lambert) were collected by Durcan in his retrospective Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading
Poems 1967-2007.
3
themselves during this preparatory period. This thesis is an attempt to explore the ways in
which individual human freedom is understood by Durcan in these areas. The specific
concept of individual human freedom which is invoked will be expanded upon in the
following section of this introduction. This particular understanding of freedom, tracing the
inflections of which will provide narrative continuity to this thesis, is understood as the sine
qua non of moral action. Eamon Grennan’s description of Durcan’s work as ‘a moral map’
(Grennan, 44) is interpreted here as directing the focus to precisely this issue: the possibility
of and quality of individual human freedom. This point – specifically the connection between
freedom and morality as it impacts on Durcan’s work and is understood by this thesis – will
be elaborated upon at length in the second and third sections of this introduction. Before
proceeding, a further secondary inflection of the phrase ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44) should be
noted. The principle senses in which this study understands the word moral are as relating to
‘the principles of right or wrong behaviour’ and concerning ‘the nature of ethics and the
foundations of good and bad character’ (OED, 929). However, this sense of the word moral
shares an etymological root with the word mores. The Latin word mos, which translates as
‘custom’ and ‘convention of a community’ (OED, 929) is the common root of both moral and
mores in contemporary English. The modern sense of mores as referring to the ‘customs and
conventions of a community’ (OED, 929) should also be borne in mind as this study explores
Durcan’s ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44). As well as being interested in ‘the principles of right or
wrong behaviour’ (OED, 929), Durcan’s work can be read as a chronicle of the ‘customs and
conventions’ (OED, 929) of the Ireland in which it was created.
A central pillar of this study’s interpretive approach is attention to Durcan’s persistent
probing of the connection between a ‘vision of reality’ (from Durcan GHR, 61 and also
Yeats, 159) and human behaviour. Of absolutely primal importance for Durcan’s work, as
this study interprets it, is the axiom stated in his 1990 work Daddy, Daddy: ‘In reality fiction
4
is all that matters’ (DD, 71). This thesis studies how various ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) constitute,
shape and impact upon both individual and collective ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 61) and
thus inform actions. This central interpretive nexus is developed at length in the following
section of this introduction as it is the thread which unites each chapter of this study. The
primary investigative impulse of this study is, therefore, an investigation of the ways in which
‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) serve to shape and inform individual and collective ‘vision[s] of reality’
(GHR, 61) and consequent actions. Durcan’s career-long literary depictions of human action
– be it with a focus either on ‘the principles of right or wrong behaviour’ (OED, 929) or upon
‘customs and conventions’ (OED, 929) – are understood by this thesis to constitute what
Eamon Grennan has referred to as Durcan’s ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44).
This study is divided, following this introduction, into seven chapters. As each
chapter seeks to explore the ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44) in distinct yet interrelated areas, this
thesis employs a methodology of multiple critical theories. The necessity for multiple
theories is occasioned by the study’s commitment to a close reading of Durcan’s poems and
an intention to release rather than restrict the multiple meanings inherent therein. Each theory
invoked serves at least two functions, namely to amplify and clarify certain points within
each chapter but also to fruitfully complicate and elucidate the broader thesis itself. Seminal
thinkers in their respective fields, such as Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson,
Erich Fromm, René Girard, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous amongst others are quoted.
Their theories – encompassing existential, postcolonial, anthropological, feminist and other
interpretive paradigms – combine to create a theoretical framework that enables this thesis to
operate from a grounding, but not a limiting, perspective. On 24th October 2012 Paul Durcan
was interviewed in Dublin by the current author; a transcript of this interview is reproduced
after the eighth chapter and is referred to throughout as ‘Appendix One’.
5
The second and third sections of this chapter lay the foundation for the chapters that
follow. The second section fully clarifies and explicates what this thesis understands by
‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44) with specific attention paid to how freedom is conceived of
within this study. The third section of this chapter elaborates upon four key terms in Durcan’s
vocabulary, all four of which have a direct bearing on his ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44): these
four words are reality, fiction, innocence and dream. Chapter Two addresses Durcan’s
relationship to and his poetry on the subject of the Catholic Church. A dissenting believer,
Durcan is interpreted as registering and questioning many expressions of Catholic identity3.
Chapter Three explores Durcan’s use of the image of the scapegoat and its place in his moral
vision. His persistent writing in the voice of a scapegoat figure and references to or
implications of a scapegoating mob is proposed as seminal to his understanding of how
individual freedom is negotiated in any group context. Chapter Four examines a selection of
Durcan’s political poetry. Describing politics as a ‘game of the human animal mind’ (PDD,
139), Durcan is acutely conscious of the role of ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) in this area. Attention is
paid in this study to his political poetry that regards both Northern Ireland and the Southern
Irish state. Moving away from Durcan’s often claustrophobic and dark pictures of Irish
ecclesial and political public life, Chapter Five examines images of travel and transport in
Durcan’s work. Conscious of the centrality of ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) in human life, Durcan’s
work in this area will be interpreted as an attempt to use travel – its reality and its literary
representation – as a way of authoring and authorising the new fictions longingly described
by his work as ‘any other history’ (GHR, 70).
With Chapter Six the attention of this study turns towards Durcan’s extensive
depiction of domestic life in Daddy, Daddy and The Laughter of Mothers. After registering
the politically and socially central status of the family, attention is paid to the various roles of
3
The concept of identity as employed by this study will also be expanded upon in the following section of this
chapter.
6
‘fiction’ (DD, 71) in this area. He is arguably cognisant both of the power of imposed fictions
to structure and direct a person’s reality and also of the redemptive power of fictions as a
mechanism with which to reclaim individual freedom and authority. In Chapter Seven a
significant treatment is given both to the centrality of relationality to Durcan’s ‘moral map’
(Grennan, 44) and to his very knowing writing about and in the voices of women. Following
a commentary upon how Durcan writes about women in the politicised literary landscape
since the advent of mid-century feminism, close attention is paid to The Berlin Wall Café and
Cries of an Irish Caveman. Finally, in Chapter Eight the focus of the investigation is
Durcan’s self-dramatisations, with particular attention to his mature work. Much of the moral
protest of his early work had been defending the right and necessity of each individual to
shape and fashion oneself. This chapter investigates Durcan’s frequently dramatic
representations of his inner life, his constantly shifting centre of gravity. Perhaps his
crowning achievement, it will be investigated just how these poems cumulatively acquaint his
readers with the persona[lity] of a man who is ‘a bareheaded protagonist / In a vision of
reality’ (GHR, 61), centre-stage in the later acts of the ‘comedy of freedom’ (BWC, 40) that
his work has arguably always been. In this phrase ‘comedy of freedom’
much about
Durcan’s overall vision is suggested. The quote is from his 1985 poem ‘Around the Corner
from Francis Bacon’ (BWC, 40). He describes Dublin as a place ‘where the comedy of
freedom was by law forbidden / And truth, since the freedom of the State, gone
underground’. Arguably Durcan’s work enacts an impulse precisely opposite to the
repression connoted here. Refusing the doubtful securities of ‘law’ and ‘freedom of the State’
it can be read as counselling trust in the expression of the more angular and unpalatable truths
about human life. That the experience and expression of such freedom is ultimately the stuff
of ‘comedy’ – in the everyday sense, if not the narrowly literary-aesthetic sense –is finally an
act of faith on the poet’s part. It is this act of faith that makes Durcan not just a moralist, but
7
as Eamon Grennan has written, ‘a relentlessly buoyant’ moralist (Grennan, 44). It is to an
explication of some terms central to the interpretation of Durcan’s work as a ‘moral map’
(Grennan, 44) that the focus of this introduction now shifts.
1.2 – The comedy of freedom4: an introduction to Paul Durcan’s moral map
The central investigation of this thesis concerns Paul Durcan’s exploration of the
possibility and quality of freedom and moral authority for the individual human subject.
Reviewing his 2004 collection The Art of Life, Catríona Clutterbuck noted that since his first
publication Durcan has been concerned ‘with the damage done to Ireland and the Western
world by a prevailing scepticism and fear of free human nature’ (Clutterbuck, C11). Further,
Durcan was in wholehearted agreement when, in interview with the current author in October
2012, he was offered as two descriptions of his work Eamon Grennan’s assertion that ‘the
map he makes of the world is a moral map’ (Grennan, 44) and Lucy Collins’s statement that
‘he prompts us to see poetry as a vital element in our moral formation’ (Collins, 2011)5.
Rather than being concerned with formulating a rigorous moral code through his work,
Durcan has in fact been preoccupied more with defending and probing the very moral quality
of individual human actions: reinforcing this point, Durcan acknowledged in interview with
the current author the central importance of ‘the authority of my own eyes’ (CW, x) to the
moral landscape. The crucial link, for Durcan at least, between ‘the authority of my own
eyes’ and the ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44) is elaborated upon in this introduction.
This section of the thesis offers, in order to provide orientation, a series of comments
on some issues seminal to this thesis. First a working definition is formulated of the nature of
4
‘Around the Corner from Francis Bacon’ (BWC, 40)
From Durcan’s Doctoral citation, delivered by Dr Lucy Collins, from UCD, June 16 th 2011:
http://www.ucd.ie/news/2011/06JUN11/bloomsday-citations/200611-citation-04.html [accessed on 19th
February 2013]
5
8
individual freedom and moral capacity as it will be employed in this thesis. Secondly, it will
be suggested that the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre and Erich Fromm offer a further clarification
of Durcan’s particular conception of individual freedom. The second section moves towards
providing a conceptual vocabulary more suited to interpreting Durcan’s mature work. This
study will show how, particularly since 1985, he has added depth and nuance not only to
defences of human freedom but also to depictions of the often vexing experience of freedom
itself. Key terms and phrases which have an impact on Durcan’s more mature moral vision
will be introduced and glossed – particularly ‘in reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71)
and ‘life is a dream’ (GHR, 12). Two points of biographical interest, which this study takes to
be of seminal interest to the central question of the thesis, will also be introduced. Briefly,
these two matters concern the poet’s admission of his own habit of ‘making the wrong
choices’ (Dwyer, 2009) and his incorporation of a critique levelled at him in an early review
into his understanding of himself as a writer.
The connection between the notion of a ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44) and the question
of the possibility of and quality of individual freedom is addressed directly in a document
with which Durcan is surely conversant, The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Freedom makes man a moral subject. When he acts deliberately, man is, so to speak, the
father of his acts [sic]. Human acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a
judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated.
(Catechism, 391)
Thus, according to the Catechism, the only human acts which qualify for moral evaluation are
freely chosen acts. Freedom to choose, then, is the sine qua non of a moral act. In his 1999
broadcast for RTÉ on the subject of Pope John XIII – a personal hero of Durcan’s – the poet
singled out for particular comment the Pope’s 1963 encyclical Pacem In Terris. Later set to
music by the Jewish composer Darius Milhaud, the wide-ranging encyclical addressed such
issues as human freedom, social organisation and human rights and responsibilities in the age
of the Cold War. Although the encyclical seems aimed at both major Super Powers of the
9
age, it is worth quoting at length insofar as its moral vision can be interpreted as being echoed
in much of Durcan’s writing. If one of the prime targets of the Pope’s moral reproofs at the
time was the Soviet Union, it is interesting to note Durcan’s persistent comparison of Ireland
to ‘an east-European Soviet country in the fifties and sixties’ (Jaffa, 2012). It is arguable that
the poet interpreted the Pope’s message as being as subversively relevant in the Irish context
as it was intended to be in the Soviet:
Man's personal dignity requires besides that he enjoy freedom and be able to make up his
own mind when he acts. In his association with his fellows, therefore, there is every
reason why his recognition of rights, observance of duties, and many-sided collaboration
with other men, should be primarily a matter of his own personal decision. Each man
should act on his own initiative, conviction, and sense of responsibility, not under the
constant pressure of external coercion or enticement. There is nothing human about a
society that is welded together by force. Far from encouraging, as it should, the
attainment of man's progress and perfection, it is merely an obstacle to his freedom.6
The commitment that ‘each man should act on his own initiative, conviction, and sense of
responsibility, not under the constant pressure of external coercion or enticement’ is a central
theme operating as a subtext to much of the moral protest permeating Durcan’s work. His
poems steadfastly oppose forces in society and the family that are depicted as impinging upon
or diminishing this freedom. If freedom diminishes then, by the definition proffered above, so
does the very moral character of the action. Those who limit individual freedom in Durcan’s
work often do so in the service of questionable forms of identity and belonging ‘welded
together by force’, whether that force is expressed through clerical diktat, political violence,
social manipulation, or a father with ‘the face of the murderer’ (DD, 174).
However, the notion of freedom to be employed in this investigation must be given
further definition. In Durcan’s work, as this study seeks to interpret it, freedom is seen not
merely as a social aspiration but as an inescapable existential fact. This is best stated in the
words of Jean Paul Sartre, for whom Durcan wrote an elegy, ‘The Hole, Spring, 1980’ (JBF,
6
From John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem In Terris, 11 April 1963 [Website accessed 28th February 2013:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem_en.html]
10
61). Sartre, outlining a core tenet of his existentialist philosophy7 – namely that ‘existence
precedes essence’, writes in his book-length lecture Existentialism and Humanism:
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of
all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world. – and defines himself afterwards. If
man, as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is
nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.
(Sartre 2007, 29-30)
While this sense of self as forever coming into being expressed by Sartre seems on the one
hand loaded with possibility, there is also an undercurrent of profound insecurity and anxiety
latent in the situation. Sartre’s own paradoxical phrase, that man is ‘condemned to be free’
(Sartre 1958, 129), catches both nuances of this understanding of freedom. Durcan’s work,
insofar as the focus is on his moral vision, can be read as a chronicle of the various reactions
to this claim by Sartre – that of man’s condemnation to freedom.
Similarly grappling with this challenging prospect of freedom, psychiatrist Erich
Fromm charts two opposing responses to modern man’s reckoning with it:
Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated
and thereby anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is
confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new
dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom
which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.
(Fromm, ix)
The two opposing reactions to freedom suggested here by Fromm are applicable to a
significant amount of Durcan’s speakers and personae as this thesis seeks to interpret them.
Amongst those characterised by Durcan as having sought ‘escape from the burden of ...
freedom into new dependencies and submission’ can surely be counted those ecclesiastical
purveyors of ‘black and white’ (SC, 52) moral orthodoxies, those whose murderous bombs
cause ‘flying breasts and limbs / For a free Ireland’ (TB, 40) and unthinking members of such
mobs as appear in the dystopian ‘This Week The Court Is Sleeping In Loughrea’ (JBF, 50).
In the context of Durcan’s writing of family dynamics the domestic figure whose moral
7
In one of his frequent philippics against senior Church figures, Durcan critiques Desmond Cardinal Connell for
his hostility towards ‘the great modern philosophies and theologies of existentialism’ (PDD, 123) expounded by
‘Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Marcel, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Baum, Boff and John XIII himself’ (PDD, 123).
11
authority is coloured by ‘dependencies and submission’ is surely the judge with his ‘great
sense of orientation’ (LM, 88). However, Durcan’s work is also littered with his version of
moral exemplars – that is, figures like Polycarp (TB, 24) who has the courage to be ‘his own
sweet self’. In Fromm’s terms, Polycarp has perhaps advanced ‘to the full realisation of
positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man’ (Fromm, ix). As
Durcan has it in one of his zanier and most charming exhortative moments: ‘everybody /
Ought to be an eccentric’ (LM, 38).
The composition of the poems in The Berlin Wall Café, following his marital
breakdown in 1984, can be said to be the culmination of a new maturity in Paul Durcan’s
artistic style. They also mark a major advance and deepening of Durcan’s moral vision.
Reviewing Teresa’s Bar in 1977 Aidan Matthews commented that ‘Repeated expressions of
outrage are tedious. The angry young man stance can be self-indulgent’ (Matthews, 86).
While poems of protest at institutional impingement upon individual freedom have remained
a Durcan staple – enough for him to be dismissed as late as 2008 as ‘a pimply teenager who
sees all policemen as fascists’ (Lenihan, 2008) – his work has long since developed beyond
what Matthews referred to as ‘the angry young man stance’. This major development of
Durcan’s moral map was achieved, this study proposes, by extending his critical and
investigative gaze ‘inwards and downwards’ (Heaney, 41) as Heaney might have it.
Increasingly, instead of lampooning caricatures of Bishops, GAA stars turned politicians, and
the residents of ‘Respectability Hill’ (TB, 24), Durcan has turned his artistic gaze towards a
mapping of moral capacity and freedom through the medium of the first person lyric. Also
since both The Berlin Wall Café (1985) and Daddy, Daddy (1990), both of which chronicle
immense domestic suffering, Durcan’s moral tone has been refined and increasingly ‘refuses
the mortar of blame and guilt as he builds a vision of change’ (Clutterbuck, C11). This
development of moral vision – from ‘repeated expressions of outrage’ (Matthews, 86) to
12
refusal of ‘the mortar of blame and guilt’ (Clutterbuck, C11) – mirrors the development
counselled by Patrick Kavanagh in his 1955 poem ‘Prelude’:
But satire is unfruitful prayer,
Only wild shoots of pity there,
And you must go inland and be
Lost in compassion’s ecstasy,
Where suffering soars in summer air The millstone has become a star.
(Kavanagh 2004, 208).
That this quote, and its implications for his moral vision, means much to Durcan is reflected
in the fact that he repeated it in interview with the current author when questioned regarding
some of his satirical work. ‘I wish I could hang those lines up on my wall’, Durcan
commented (Appendix One). His deepening of moral vision, can be said to be a movement
from the ‘unfruitful prayer’ of satire to one aspiring to ‘compassion’s ecstasy’.
Though the focus of his artistic gaze may have shifted, the key question of individual
freedom and moral authority is as persistent a preoccupation of Durcan’s later work as his
earlier poems. Central to the understanding of human freedom explored by Durcan through
his later work is an idea again reflected in Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, quoted
above. Because, for Sartre, ‘existence precedes essence’ man’s identity can never be said to
be fixed, rather always in the position of being a working definition. Further, Sartre writes:
If man, as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is
nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.
(Sartre 2007, 29-30)
Sartre’s anti-essentialist conception of human identity – that man in his freedom is ‘nothing’
until he becomes ‘what he makes of himself’ – is reflected directly in both Durcan’s work
and that of his mentor Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh’s exhortation that ‘We must be nothing, /
Nothing that God may make us something’ (Kavanagh 2004, 190) is expressed in Durcan’s
work as ‘The necessity of being nothing, / The XYZ of being nobody’ (CIC, 19). A person’s
life and identity, for Durcan then, is not something received as fully formed but rather
something that he or she ‘fashions’ (GHR, 51) each day through a creative interplay of
13
memory, imagination, circumstance and improvisation. This existential task of selffashioning can be read as being, for Durcan, ‘The Art of Life’ (AoL, 92). Coterminous with
life itself, this task never reaches completion – in fact it is only in death, claims Durcan, that
‘a snail comes full circle / Into the completion of his partial self’ (SMP, 266). It is to the
double-edged fact of being essentially ‘nothing’ (Sartre 2007, 29-30) and the desire of each
person to ‘be what he makes of himself’ that Durcan’s moral vision responds.
This anti-essentialist acknowledgement of the necessity of ongoing self-fashioning
finds expression also in the work of cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall. Hall notes the
deconstructive attacks upon notions of unified identity within a variety of disciplinary fields,
each one ‘in one way or another critical of the notion of an integral, originary and unified
identity’ (Hall, 1). It is possible to read Durcan’s work as adopting the stance of one similarly
sceptical of such notions of identity. Determined to keep the question of identity amenable to
constant and ongoing renegotiation Durcan is, in Catríona Clutterbuck’s terms a:
Nationalist, Unionist, Catholic, Protestant heathen believer who frees those deathlike
absolute nouns of Irish identity back into the active connective flow of their use as verbal
adjectives. He shows that to be national-ist, union-ist, protest-ant and capaciously catholic
[sic] all at once is to clear the ground for the “soul in spate” that carries before it the
wastelands of the human spirit.
(Clutterbuck, C11)
In fundamental agreement with Stuart Hall’s contention that identities ‘arise from the
narrativization of the self’ (Hall, 4), it is possible to read Durcan’s comment that ‘fiction is all
that matters’ (DD, 71) as a commentary on identity-formation. It speaks richly both to the
ways in which groups narrate themselves and also to the conjunctions and disjunctions
experienced by each individual participating in such a process. Just as Hall affirms that the
‘necessarily fictional nature’ of narrativized identity ‘in no way undermines its discourse,
material, or political effectivity’ (Hall, 4), Durcan’s work too is conscious of this fact. It can
be argued, as Clutterbuck has done, that Durcan’s incessant toying with identities is in fact
calculated to draw the reader’s attention precisely to their fictive quality. Stated again in
14
Hall’s terms, Durcan’s undermining of the ‘absolute nouns of Irish identity’ (Clutterbuck,
C11) draws attention to the fact that identities are expressive ‘not of a natural and inevitable
or primordial totality’ (Hall, 5) but rather ‘[i]dentities are thus points of temporary attachment
to the subject positions which discursive practises construct for us’ (Hall, 6). Such
acknowledgements authorise Durcan’s work both to celebrate diverse and erstwhile
contradictory aspects of Irish identity and also to provide a convincing resistance to the ploys
of forces and agents seeking to peddle simplified notions of self-understanding in the public
square.
Although in his review of Teresa’s Bar Aidan Matthews acknowledged that Durcan
did ‘not lack aptitude and imagination’ he complains that the poet ‘has not designed a
metaphor equal to his manifesto’ (Matthews, 85). Though Durcan’s moral map neither
aspires to nor develops an overarching credo – ‘Unifying themes – oh I’d be very scared of
them’, Durcan remarks wryly in a 2004 interview (Dungan, 2004) – several tropes are
recurrent throughout his mature work. These approaches to the ‘art’ (AoL, 92) of individual
self-fashioning can be taken to be alternative ways of dealing with the ‘burden’ of freedom
(Fromm, ix) rather than resorting to the ‘dependencies and submission’ (Fromm, ix) required
by orthodoxies and fixed forms of identity. Key points with regard to Durcan’s more mature
responses to the fact of freedom are laid out in summary in the following pages.
1.3 – Key terms in Durcan’s vocabulary explicated: reality, fiction, innocence, dream
The speaker in Durcan’s 1987 poem ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ describes himself,
tellingly, as ‘A bareheaded protagonist / In a vision of reality’ (GHR, 61). This expression
links two key elements of Durcan’s moral vision: the individual’s self-awareness as an agent
who plays a part in the world – i.e. a ‘protagonist’ – and each individual’s ‘vision of reality’.
The question of the interrelatedness of each person’s ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) and the
15
nature and quality of their acts is a central concern of Durcan’s. ‘One lives by certain
quotations’, the poet said in interview, quoting Yeats and Wallace Stevens approvingly
(Appendix One). Such a statement is particularly useful to bear in mind when it comes to
dealing with this area. Two quotations by which Durcan lives and which are central to an
understanding of his moral map come from WB Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Yeats’ claim
that ‘art / Is but a vision of reality’ (Yeats, 159) and Wallace Stevens’ conception of poetry as
a ‘supreme fiction’8 (Stevens, 380) are blended in Durcan’s 1990 poem ‘Around the
Lighthouse’ (DD, 67) to create the paradoxical ‘In reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71).
Fiction here can – and must – be taken in at least two senses: as denoting both an arbitrary
invention and the action of fashioning. Related to the moral landscape, this quote can be said
to have two principle inflections. First, it can be read as referring to ‘fiction’ of the narrative
kind – stories, individual and collective, and how they structure our lives and psychological
make-up. Secondly, there is a broader – if slightly less immediately obvious – metaphysical
point being made. It concerns Durcan’s caveat regarding the limits of and provisional quality
of human perceptual capacities. It is a point gestured toward by his persistent interest in
writers to whom epistemology was a central concern, from George Berkeley to Wallace
Stevens to John Moriarty.
Firstly though, what Durcan’s line foregrounds is the importance of each person’s
individual fictions and fictive faculties – his or her self-narrations and capacities for selffashioning. He names them as ‘all that matters’. ‘I think we all have a desperate need, our
nature is crying out for fiction of some kind in our lives’ said Durcan in interview,
reinforcing this point strongly (Appendix One). Also, the quote from Daddy, Daddy can be
read as acknowledging the power of the structuring fictions of others – nations, families and
other forms of collective identity – over the lives of their constituent members and their
8
Durcan referred directly to Yeats and Stevens in interview (Appendix One).
16
outcasts: the ability of such fictions to structure ‘reality’. Finally, especially given the poem’s
appearance in Daddy, Daddy, it is valid to read it as an endorsement of the necessity of
imaginative fictions as ways of escaping a bitter and unpalatable reality or providing an
insulating protection from it. Sartre’s non-essentialist conception of the human person as
being ‘what he makes of himself’ can also be read in ‘fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71),
where ‘fiction’ is read, in the slightly archaic sense, as denoting the action of fashioning. If
this enterprise is coupled with the authority of the individual’s own eyes (CW, x), ‘in reality
fiction is all that matters’ can be read as emphasising the primal importance of self-narration
and fashioning to the achievement of the ‘full realisation of positive freedom’ (Fromm, ix).
The second, broader reading of ‘In reality fiction is all that matters’ also has a central
bearing on Durcan’s moral map. As ‘reality’ is often a hotly contested term in Durcan’s work
– see ‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography’ (SC, 52) or ‘National Day Of Mourning For
Twelve Protestants’ (SC, 59) – it is possible to read the words ‘reality’, ‘fiction’ and ‘matter’
in a more metaphysical light. Preoccupied by the interaction and interplay of perceiving
subject and perceived objects, philosopher George Berkeley published in 1710 A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in which he ‘presented and ingeniously
defended the astonishing thesis that there was no such thing as matter’ (Kenny, A. 559).
Denying the existence of a world entirely objective of human perception, Berkeley’s
immaterialist thought stated that objects in the world:
[A]re nothing but bundles of ideas, produced in our minds by God, whose own perception
of them is the only thing that keeps them in continuous existence.
(Kenny, A., 559)
Berkeley’s slogan esse est percipi [sic] – ‘to be is to be perceived’ (Kenny, A., 560) – which
‘was widely quoted and widely mocked’ (Kenny, A., 560) was taken up by Durcan in the
playful 1999 poem ‘Cissy Young’s’ (GFB, 110). In the poem Durcan describes his first year
in Cork city as a young man reading Berkeley’s Treatise. He describes how he learnt from
17
Berkeley that ‘reality is poetry, poetry reality’ in what was ‘a foundation year in my life as a
writer’. Given Yeats’ description of the philosopher as ‘God-appointed Berkeley that proved
all things a dream’ (Yeats, 232) it is intriguing to read Durcan rueing the fact that he never
became a ‘virtuoso university teacher’ who would have been ‘an attacking player on
Berkeley’s dream team’ (GFB, 110). If, for Berkeley, the only matter that can be known is
that which the mind has fictioned – be it man’s mind or God’s – it is perhaps unsurprising to
read of the poet for whom life is a dream (LD, title) wishing to join Berkeley’s ‘dream team’
(GFB, 110). This cross-reading of Durcan’s phrase with Berkeley’s now easily dismissed
ideas adds depth to Durcan’s vision. It widens the sense of what Durcan might mean by
‘fiction’ beyond poetry and narrative to encompass broader areas such as human perception,
cognition and memory. Northrop Frye, in his work on William Blake, names Berkeley (Frye,
14) as a philosophical fellow-traveller with the poet and notes that for Blake:
[N]othing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and hence there
are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men. “Every man’s wisdom is peculiar to
his own individuality”, and there is no other kind of wisdom: reality is as much in the eye
of the beholder as beauty is said to be.
(Frye, 19)
Durcan’s ‘In reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) reflects Blake’s belief distilled here by
Frye that reality is constituted by ‘the imaginative patterns men make’ and that ‘there are
exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men’ (Frye, 19). This acknowledgement in
Durcan’s work has profound implications for his moral vision, authorising as it does a
multiplicity of ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 61) and underwriting his claim that reality is ‘rich
and various’ (SC, 52)9. Crediting as he does the multiplicity of variables both in the
environment and the perceiver of that environment, it is possible to see summarised this key
aspect of Durcan’s approach in the work of William James. James, writing in 1902 about his
experiences under the influence of nitrous oxide, stated:
9
In ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52) can be read an allusion to ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice. MacNeice’s poem begins
‘The room was suddenly rich’ and includes a celebration of ‘[t]he drunkenness of things being various’
(MacNiece, 30)
18
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one
special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest [sic] of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through
life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch
they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably
somewhere have their field of application and adaption. No account of the universe in its
totality can be final which leave these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. ...
At any rate they forbid a premature closing of our account with reality.
(James, 308-309)
This injunction forbidding a ‘premature closing of our account with reality’ (James, 309) is
also a cornerstone of the work of John Moriarty10, a writer much admired by Durcan. In the
context of Durcan’s work the exhortation against closing ‘our account[s]’ with reality deeply
colours his moral map.
It is important to note two matters of Durcan’s personal biography, both placed on the
record by the poet, which inform the moral vision of his body of work. These two points
respectively concern comments made by Durcan regarding his marriage breakdown and also
regarding an early book review. Firstly, speaking in interview about the breakdown of his
marriage, a point which has already been noted as preceding an artistic breakthrough for
Durcan, the poet said:
I put the breakdown of our marriage down to my stupidity. ... Even now, I see myself still
making the wrong choices. I don't know what it is. It ranges from ridiculous, naive to
culpable. But that's an abstract way of talking about it [the marriage break-up]. I try to
depict what happened in the book.
(Dwyer, 2009)
According to the Catechism’s definition of moral action, moral acts are those ‘that are freely
chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience’ (Catechism, 391). A large part of the
pathos generated by Durcan’s later work, principally through use of the voice of a first person
speaker, can be linked to this personal admission of bewilderment regarding ‘still making the
wrong choices’. From his self-accusation on a grand scale in The Berlin Wall Café to his
annoyance about buying his cappuccino in the wrong coffee house (P, 2) Durcan has written
10
Moriarty, J. (1999, 2nd ed.), Dreamtime: Revised and Expanded edition, Dublin: Lilliput, p. 46
19
about his ‘advance to the full realisation of positive freedom’ (Fromm, ix) from the point of
view of a man ‘mechanically programmed to make the wrong decision’ [sic] (P, 2). What
appears as a vaguely distressing lack of self-possession in the interview with Dwyer is
transformed through Durcan’s later poetry into nothing less than ‘the comedy of freedom’
(BWC, 40), a large scale transcription of the inner life of a man with ‘mixed feelings’ (GHR,
88).
Secondly, reflecting in 2004 with the broadcaster Myles Dungan on the publication of
his first book Endsville, Durcan remembered a review received for that work:
When I brought out my very first book with Brian Lynch, Endsville, a very prominent
Irish academic said I was useless, particularly because I lacked what he called a coherent
view of the world.
(Dungan, 2004)
Remembered as it was thirty-seven years after its reception, it is possible that this same
review contributed to a 1993 poem which can be read as having import on Durcan’s moral
vision also. This poem is ‘The Dublin-Paris-Berlin-Moscow Line’ (SMP, 237) and it sees
Durcan blend the reviewer’s words with Yeats’s quote above in this aspiration: ‘May I lack
always a consistent vision of the universe / When I am saying my poems’. Paradoxically
then, it was perhaps this reviewer’s chastising Durcan’s lack of ‘a coherent view of the
world’ that lead him to develop his most coherent strategy: that of a willed disavowal of a
coherent and systematised ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) itself. This is coded in his aspiration,
also in ‘The Dublin-Paris-Berlin-Moscow Line’ (SMP, 237), to live ‘in the light of things as
they are’ rather than by the light of an imposed ‘consistent vision’ of the world.
The expression of self-doubt detailed above in Durcan’s interview with Ciara Dwyer
coupled with his aspiration to ‘lack always a consistent vision of the universe’ (SMP, 237) is
entirely consistent with Durcan’s existentialist ethic expressed clearly in Paul Durcan’s
Diary:
20
With the mystery of life you can only respond existentially to the day that is in it and
creatively through your conscience and your imagination working together.
(PDD, 19)
This statement suggests an approach to life and morality which is ‘open to the world of the
now’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330) and not captive to any preconceived code either aesthetically
or morally. Just such another statement often quoted by Durcan is the Wallace Stevens line
‘the poem is the cry of it occasion’ (Stevens, 473). In interview with Myles Dungan, Durcan
stated regarding this quotation: ‘That’s my credo. ... a poem that isn’t born of its occasion is
boring and phony’ (Dungan, 2004). What each of these statements points towards is Durcan’s
advocacy of an engagement with the present moment, the here and now, as both a moral and
aesthetic imperative. As this theme of being ‘open to the world of the now’ (Durcan in
Kearney, 330) is extended into the poetic realm it sees him characterise the ‘oral tradition’ of
poetry to which he belongs as ‘a woman keeping her man on his toes’ (SMP, 238). Yet
another corollary of Durcan’s fidelity to ‘the world of the now’ is his understanding of poetry
as having affinities with journalism and journal-keeping, remarked upon in interview with the
current author. Durcan also noted that certain of his poems were written to appear in
newspapers and in Magill magazine (Appendix One). As the same theme – openness to ‘the
world of the now’ – is examined with specific reference to his moral vision, it is interesting to
note Durcan’s exclamation in 1996’s ‘Christmas Day’: ‘I discover that conscience is the
courage to improvise’ (CD, 72)11. In each person’s fashioning of fictions and of the self,
especially in the realm of moral action, Durcan’s exhortation is ‘Improvise. Improvise’ [sic]
(CD, 76).
‘Life is a dream, Phoenix, life is a dream’ (GHR, 11) the father-speaker consoles his
daughter in ‘The Rape of Europa’ (GHR, 11). The spectacle of the dreamer persists
11
As with many of Durcan’s key poetic positions they can be read as interpretations of particular works by
Patrick Kavanagh. Of interest here regarding Durcan’s resistance to codified systems of aesthetic or moral
vision is Kavanagh’s ‘Mermaid Tavern’ (1955). Kavanagh counsels: ‘No System, no Plan, / Yeatsian invention.
/ No all-over / Organisational prover’ (Kavanagh 2004, 240).
21
throughout Durcan’s work, from 2007’s ‘female German child’ who is ‘a day-dreamer born’
(LM, 127) to the sectarian bigot with his ‘dream-gun blood smeared’ (SC, 56) and the lovers
in the Phoenix Park with ‘dreams of a green, green flag’ (SC, 47). Also in ‘The Rape of
Europa’ (GHR, 11) the father comments that:
Dream is life’s element and symbol – as the sea’s the eel’s;
We expire if we’re deprived of our element and symbol.
(GHR, 11)
An understanding of life as a dream clearly has potentially profound implications for the
freedom of human action – many of these inflections are chronicled in the course of this
thesis. However, the most significant point to be made in this section is regarding the lack of
control connoted by dream, the suggestion that life is something which each person merely
sleepwalks through. This sense of life as a purely unconscious state of self-absorption is
signalled in Durcan’s ‘“Windfall”, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ where the speaker is seen ‘Dreaming
that life is a dream which is real’ (BWC, 43). This is wholly in tune with the sense of
diminished awareness – typically rendered in ocular images – that pervades that entire
selection of poems. This interpretation of ‘life is a dream’ (GHR, 11) offers the double-edged
sense both of diminished capacity for free choice and diminished blame for wrongs inflicted.
Conceiving of life as a dream offers the ultimate ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89), making of all of life’s
seemingly free moral agents ‘day-dreamer[s] born’ (LM, 127). Durcan’s concession that life
is a dream is, by this interpretation, another way in which he ‘refuses the mortar of blame and
guilt’ (Clutterbuck, C11). Titling his collected poems Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading
Poems 1967-2007 can be interpreted as the poet perhaps offering a general amnesty to all
actors in the ‘comedy of freedom’ (BWC, 40) depicted between its covers. This is reinforced
by a point made by Durcan in interview with the current author. Asked if there was a
connection for him between his title Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007
22
and the title of the Tom Waits song ‘Innocent When You Dream’ – which Durcan has often
quoted, and even sung, in interview12 – the poet immediately assented:
Oh yes. Indeed if it had occurred to me I might have attempted to get permission to use
that as an epigraph. ... Yes, if one deserved to have an epitaph – which one surely usually
does not – I would have on my headstone those lines.
(Appendix One)
This linking of ‘innocence’13 and ‘dream’, if it does not authorise an amnesty for each figure
in Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007, is at least an acknowledgement
perhaps that each ‘bareheaded protagonist’ (GHR, 61) acts in accordance with his or her own
‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61). Read under the rubric of either of these interpretations, the
acknowledgment that life is the experience of innocent dreamers certainly stands in pointed
contrast to the spectacle of the judge which fills so many of Durcan’s poems.
1.4 - Conclusion
Many of the issues touched upon by this explication of some key terms in Durcan’s
moral vocabulary are manifestly present in his 2004 poem ‘Raftery in Tokyo’, the second and
final stanza of which reads:
From County Mayo to Greater Tokyo
Men with failing eyesight go
Serenading that crazy innocence
They see because they know.
(AoL, 113)
Claiming a special role for poets as celebrators of ‘crazy innocence’ – both ‘crazy’ and
‘innocence’ are major words in Durcan’s vocabulary – the poet attributes to himself and other
poets an almost missionary aspect. Crucially, the task of the poet is linked to the two faculties
discussed above: knowing and vision. That what poets ‘see’ is beyond ordinary human
12
See also ‘Man Circling His Woman’s Sundial’ (GFB, 79) which sees the poet reclining on a couch ‘listening /
To Tom Waits – “Innocent When You Dream”’ [sic].
13
Innocence, as Durcan agreed in interview, of course has Blakean resonances. William Blake, author of Songs
of Innocence and Experience used the lamb as a symbol of innocence. Durcan’s latest collection sees him ‘fall
into a deep, restful sleep with the lamb around my neck’ (P, 7).
23
perception is implied by the juxtaposition of their ‘failing eyesight’ with the fact that ‘they
see because they know’. Their seeing is enabled by the fact, Durcan claims, that ‘they know’
– with a difference being suggested between a poet’s ‘vision of reality’ (Yeats, 159) and how
everyone else experiences the world. Asked in interview whether he viewed such
‘serenading’ of ‘crazy innocence’ as a duty of poetry Durcan responded directly: ‘When you
frame it like that I say yes, of course’ (Appendix One). These introductory and summary
points regarding Durcan’s moral landscape having been made, the attention of this study now
turns to the first major area of investigation, Paul Durcan’s dialogue with Irish Christianity
and the Irish Catholic Church.
24
Chapter Two:
‘Betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal’ – Durcan’s dialogue with Irish Catholicism
Irish Christianity was the mother tongue of my soul and it remains the mother
tongue of my soul in spite of the institution of the Irish Roman Catholic Church.
(PDD, 121)
As if the Consecration was something
That occurs at every moment of the day and night;
As if betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal14
Were an every-minute occurrence.
(AoL, 62)
2.1 – Introduction
The publication by Paul Durcan in the Irish Times15 in August 2008 of an as yet
uncollected poem titled ‘Archbishop Dr Martin Lays Down the Party Line’ lead the
columnist Hugh Lenihan to compare the author to ‘a pimply teenager who sees all policemen
as fascists’ (Lenihan, 2008). Durcan’s poem celebrates ‘the free, creative, individual /
conscience’, satirises Diarmuid Martin’s reservations about ‘individualistic gestures’ and
describes the prelate as ‘Ratzinger’s man in Dublin, the / enforcer’s enforcer’. Lenihan’s
article goes on to counsel Durcan that he is free to ‘conceive of a world on which the Catholic
Church does not impinge’ and that the poet should cease contributing to ‘the unattractive
spectacle of ageing irreconcilables hurling juvenile insults at Catholic Bishops’ (Lenihan,
2008). In interview Durcan stated that he did not regret the poem’s publication, though he did
concede that ‘it’s quite likely that it’s too crude’ (Appendix One). While Lenihan’s
reservations regarding the literary merit of the poem can be read as echoed here, his broader
sentiments and advice to Durcan may represent quite a misconception of the poet’s position
in relation to the Church. While Lenihan perhaps conceives Church membership as akin to
14
Typical of Durcan’s oratorical style, this line – which encapsulates much of his attitude towards Catholicism –
was described by the poet in private correspondence as ‘given to me from above’ (Email from Paul Durcan to
the current author, 28th May 2011).
15
‘We’ll have none of your individualistic gestures’, Irish Times, August 19th 2008, p. 12
25
that of a golf club or tennis club, the issue is never framed that way for Durcan. Asked by
Myles Dungan in 2004 whether or not Christianity had a part in Durcan’s ‘landscape’ the
poet answered: ‘It’s not so much part of it – I’m at the heart of it and it’s at the heart of my
life’ (Dungan, 2004). Indeed, since his first publication in 1967 Durcan has written
passionately both about – and using the vocabulary of – Irish Catholicism. This chapter
analyses a representative selection of these poems. Following this first introductory section
the chapter is subdivided into three subsequent sections addressing distinct areas.
The second section of the chapter looks at the conflicts between the individual as
locus of moral freedom and authority and the generalising moral prescriptions and
proscriptions formulated by Church Hierarchy. The third section focuses on a selection of
religious personae – from clerics to faithful laity – seeking to negotiate the often
contradictory impulses and messages that stalk their moral landscape as practising Catholics.
This chapter’s final section examines a series of more exuberant and celebratory personae
which qualify for treatment in this chapter due to Durcan’s utilising of Biblical or
Christological imagery in their creation. The rest of this introduction focuses on two key
areas which will provide a conceptual orientation for the investigation. Firstly, the extent and
nature of Durcan’s engagement with the intellectual life of the Church will be noted.
Secondly, concepts drawn from Antonio Gramsci, Eric Fromm and Carl Jung will be
synthesised in order to better illuminate the stances adopted by Durcan’s speakers in many of
his Church poems.
When in 1999 Durcan was approached by RTÉ and asked to contribute to their radio
series ‘A Giant at my Shoulder’ – in which contributors were invited to speak about the
person who had most influenced their lives – the poet reports being torn between
‘Mohammed Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, and John XXIII, formerly Angelo Roncali’ (PDD,
122). He eventually produced a touching tribute to the Pope who called the Second Vatican
26
Council, a quote from whom he had also used as epigraph to Teresa’s Bar in 1976. Stating in
interview in 2012 that John XIII ‘is alive to me today – perhaps in some senses more so than
he was when he was actually alive’ (Appendix One), Durcan admitted to an anger and
melancholy regarding the Church’s direction since the 1960s. However, though these
sentiments are hardly unique, for Durcan they have not lead to the total disengagement
advocated by Hugh Lenihan above. Durcan appears in interview to be very much conversant
with intellectual trends in the Church – praising specific Church journals such as Doctrine
and Life and naming the Brazilian former Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff as ‘someone
whom I revere’ (Appendix One)16. In remarks which are more generally representative of
Durcan’s attitude towards Church politics he commented in interview regarding Boff and
how the priest was censured by the Vatican on account of his liberal teachings:
I had thought that Leonardo Boff had left the Church completely, but no, when I was in
Brazil I discovered that he has his own radio or television programme and was very well
known to the general population. That was ten years on [from the Vatican censure of
Boff], in 1995. What happened was when he went back he was a figure of enormous
controversy and in order to save his Franciscan brethren embarrassment and discomfort
he left the Franciscans. And some years later he married. In other words he laicised
himself, a horrible phrase. What did not only Ratzinger but Pope John Paul II think they
were doing driving the finest people out of their own Church?
(Appendix One)
As well as Durcan’s clear interest in the intellectual life of the Church, he regularly produces
poems drawing attention to the power of homiletics17. To this interest – public speaking on
matters of faith – should be added a part-accidental and surely part-deliberate alignment of
the poet with the figure of Saint Paul. It is probably more than coincidental that the title of his
first solo volume juxtaposes the birthplace of Saint Paul with Durcan’s spiritual homeland,
Mayo, while his latest collection incorporates a quote from Saint Paul in its title. The quote
16
Durcan’s interest in the work of Brazilian priest Boff – expressed energetically in interview with the current
author – adds an extra resonance to his 1999 title ‘Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil’ (GFB, 3) a poem which
describes a day spent with a priest friend of Durcan’s, Father Patrick O’Brien.
17
Homiletics is the ecclesiastical term denoting the art of writing and preaching sermons. See, for examples,
‘10:30 am Mass, 16 June 1985’ (BWC, 32), ‘The 12 O’Clock Mass, Roundstone, County Galway, 28 July 2002’
(AoL, 61) and ‘The Funeral of Tony O’Malley’ (PDD, 160). Of Fr Patrick O’Brien’s homilies, Durcan said in
interview ‘I’d give my two hands to see a big book of those homilies’ (Appendix One).
27
from Saint Paul which has been adopted and adapted into the book title Praise in Which I
Live and Move and Have my Being comes from the Acts of the Apostles. In its original
Biblical context the quote forms part of a speech given by the apostle on the Areopagus Hill
in Athens, the Athenian equivalent of an intellectual public square. Pressed on this point in
interview, Durcan notes first encountering this Pauline speech in the classroom as a teenager.
That he also has invoked the key phrase of the speech almost verbatim in 1982’s ‘Ark of the
North’ – praising a woman ‘in all her life, her movement and her being’ (AN, 17) – is further
evidence of the staying power of this speech for Durcan. It is not entirely outlandish to
suggest, then, that Durcan – himself also a passionate voice speaking in the public square on
matters of faith – might be read as at some level bearing resemblance to Saint Paul. Though
he claims the coincidences to be unintentional, the poet is surely aware of bearing some of
the apostle’s bristly righteousness as evidenced by self-chastising ‘Women of Athens’:
Come down, Paul, from your perch of pride,
Come down off the Areopagus Hill
And like the women of Athens become a free spirit [.]
(LM, 59)
Finally amongst influences on Durcan’s approach to the Church is the little-celebrated Kerry
thinker John Moriarty whose body of work defies easy classification but deals with many
questions of philosophy, religion, psychology and public imagination in an iconoclastic yet
learned manner. In 2001 Paul Durcan launched Moriarty’s autobiography Nostos and he has
referred to Moriarty as ‘Ireland’s most outstanding philosopher-theologian since Bishop
Berkeley in the eighteenth century’ (PDD, 19). Durcan’s latest collection includes two elegies
to John Moriarty who died in 2007: ‘Post-haste to John Moriarty, Easter Sunday, 2007’ (P,
27) and ‘On the First Day of June’ (P, 33). Both Moriarty and Durcan, throughout their
writing lives, have engaged in imaginative re-appropriation of their Catholic faith and its
vocabulary of symbols and rituals and Durcan openly acknowledged Moriarty’s direct
influence on his work in interview (Appendix One). What links Durcan and Moriarty is their
28
willingness to question hierarchical authority on the one hand yet to continue to grapple with
the conceptual vocabulary inherited from Catholicism. Given Moriarty’s subversive and
questioning stance towards the institutions of the Church, Durcan’s surprise that Desmond
Cardinal Connell ‘not only did not appoint John Moriarty as an advisor but also did not quote
Moriarty in his sermons and letters’ (PPD, 19) must, of course, be read as rhetorical.
Elsewhere in Paul Durcan’s Diary the author expands upon his objections regarding the
Church’s direction since the Second Vatican Council, lamenting the perceived hostility of the
Heirarchy to ‘the great modern philosophies and theologies of existentialism’ (PDD, 123)
expounded by ‘Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Marcel, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Baum, Boff and
John XXIII himself’ (PDD, 123).
More often than not, Durcan’s Church poems deal with issues regarding the relationship
between the experience of individual identity – especially individual moral agency, integrity
and independence – on one hand and the Catholic Church’s prescriptive and proscriptive
public stance on morality on the other. Durcan uses the Church’s role – as he would
simultaneously and later use the role of the IRA, the Southern Irish political establishment
and the often confused mores of the newly affluent middle class, to construct a poetic terrain
in which individual freedom and identity might be explored. The Ireland into which Durcan
was born has been described, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, by John Banville as a:
[D]emilitarised totalitarian state in which the lives of its citizens were to be controlled not
by a system of coercive force and secret policing, but by a kind of applied spiritual
paralysis maintained by an unofficial federation between the Catholic clergy, the
judiciary and the civil service.
(Banville, 147)
Similarly, Durcan has described growing up under ‘the Kremlin-like rule of Archbishop
McQuaid’ (PDD, 122) in an Ireland which was ‘a Celtic cross theocracy, a cocktail of Israel
and Iran ... controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and male politicians’ (Durcan, 1999a).
All members of Banville’s ‘unofficial federation’ are encountered less than favourably in
29
Durcan’s work. However, in the area of his work in which the issue of public institutions is
directly addressed, it is the Catholic Church which merits most of Durcan’s attention. If the
Ireland into which Durcan was born was one controlled from inception by ‘the Catholic
clergy, the judiciary and the civil service’, when Durcan came to publish his first solo
collection thirty one years later, those forces were already engaged in a battle against the
erosion of their power in society. Declan Kiberd, in Inventing Ireland, has written of the
1970s and 1980s as a time when ‘young Ireland went into a ferocious reaction against older
pieties’ and ‘it seemed no aspects of national tradition would be left unscathed.’ (Kiberd,
609). Durcan’s work can surely be seen as, among other things, part of this ‘ferocious
reaction’.
In the sense that it sought to control and dominate certain areas of Irish life, the Catholic
Church can be described as a hegemonic structure in Irish society. The idea of hegemony
most relevant here is that propounded by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. He writes of
the jostling of groups in society for supremacy and control of areas of public and private life:
‘[T]he supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as "domination" and as
"intellectual and moral leadership". A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which
it tends to "liquidate", or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and
allied groups.’
(Gramsci, 57)
In the Gramscian sense then, Durcan locates his poems which engage the issue of the
Catholic Church at the point where the relationship between Church and people is
demonstrating many more characteristics of domination than leadership. It is precisely the
oppression implied by this idea of domination that Durcan both abhors and mocks to comic
and dramatic effect. Often the very cornerstone of his poems is the tension between the
experience and identity of individual figures who are somehow marginal or disenfranchised
by hegemonic practises and the tendency on behalf of the Church authorities to issue
proscriptive moral imperatives. These imperatives appear to aspire towards a one size fits all
30
character: ‘we’ll have none of your / individualistic gestures’ Durcan has Diarmuid Martin
mouth in his 2008 poem referred to at the head of this chapter18. His poems use this tension to
direct the reader’s attention and sympathies towards individual experience in all its variety
and contradiction as the seat of both identity negotiation and moral agency. Durcan’s work
can be seen to be an artistic restatement of psychiatrist Erich Fromm’s assertion that ‘The
basic entity of the social process is the individual, his desires and fears, his passions and
reason, his propensities for good and evil’ and a sharing of Fromm’s aspiration for his fellow
man ‘to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness
and individuality of man’ (Fromm, ix).
In order to appreciate quite what Durcan is doing in his Church poems it is important to
focus on how he characterises the content of Church statements on morality. He depicts the
Church’s statements as overly-cerebral hubristic diktats which are hegemonic in character.
The statements, in the sense that they propose unvarying rules for infinitely varying
subjectivities, have a character which obliterates individuality and diminishes human agency.
In the world of a poet where ‘fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) it can be said to be
imperative that each person be afforded the authority of his or her own eyes in formulation of
individual fictions. A fitting comparison to this conflict is found in the work of Carl Jung
when he writes, on the subject of self-knowledge, about the relationship between individual
experience and scientific methodology:
‘Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help
very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less
capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is
necessarily statistical [sic]; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average [sic] which
abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.
This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality.’
(Jung, 4-5)
18
‘We’ll have none of your individualistic gestures’, Irish Times, August 19th 2008, p. 12
31
An analogous conflict takes place in Durcan’s early poems: the individual and the varied are
contrasted with each hegemonic pronouncement of the Church which, in Jung’s words,
‘abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean’.
This thesis will claim that for Durcan, the idea of an ‘abstract mean’ is antithetical to his art,
reflecting as it does Jung’s idea of ‘doing justice to the individual facts’. Durcan expresses his
desire to move away from ideas such as ‘an abstract mean’ through aspiring to live ‘in the
light of things as they are’ (SMP, 237) with all the variety this implies. Ridiculed clerical
attempts to calculate the moral or behavioural equivalent of an abstract mean see the Bishops
isolating Romeo and Juliet in fridges in different countries (BWC, 24) and claiming that
reality is innately black and white (SC, 52). In the poems in which Durcan addresses what
Kiberd has called ‘older pieties’ (Kiberd, 609) – principally with regard to the Catholic
Church and narrowly-interpreted Irish Nationalism – Durcan’s primary focus is on locating
freedom and moral authority in individual experience and emotion. This artistic move, with its
focus on individual agency, displays an affinity with the artistic preoccupations of three artists
in whom Durcan has repeatedly expressed an abiding interest: Francis Bacon, Francis Stuart
and R.B. Kitaj. In a journalistic piece for the Cork Examiner in 1981 Durcan says approvingly
of this triumvirate:
What all three share in both their art and words is a belief in a return to the figureconcentration of the Old Masters as the only path towards - to use Pound's vital dictum 'making it new'.
(Durcan, quoted in McCracken 1996, 110)
It is in attention to Durcan’s own ‘figure-concentration’ in the face of the monolith of the
Church and its often harsh pronouncements that provides the most fruitful line of enquiry
regarding these poems.
32
2.2 – Contested reality: a violent hegemony and stifled subjectivities
‘Pulpit Bishop Sickness, AD 1973’ (OW, 64) is a poem of two stanzas in the voice of a
third person narrator in which two figures are observed in a church: one is the Bishop of the
poem’s title, the other ‘an aged companion’ of the narrating voice. The two figures are drawn
in contrasting imagery, with the Bishop being described as a predator and the old lady as
prey. Durcan uses the traditional imagery of the Church – with the congregation as ‘sheep’
and the clergy as ‘shepherds’ in an inverted relation. The Bishop is described as having
‘carved out on his face an arch smirk’ and of harbouring a ‘benign contempt / For rude
humanity’. The particular contentious issue upon which the poem hangs is the issue of the
Catholic Church’s denunciation of artificial birth control. The Bishop is seen as denying the
mere possibility that people might discuss the issue of birth control in a civic (political)
forum and come to a reasonable consensus on the issue. Rather, he reasserts the Church’s
authority over moral matters with his edict that ‘Birth control is not in Ireland a political
question’ (OW, 64). The logic implied is deathly by Durcan’s lights, stifling all debate with
imposed consensus: birth control is not a political question but a moral one; and being a
moral question the Church has an opinion on it. Because the Church has an official opinion
on the matter it is no longer a matter for debate. The Bishop’s statement might well read:
there is no question of birth control in Ireland. The first ten lines of the poem go to
considerable length to paint the Bishop in a predatory, dominating stance. Adorned with ‘an
arch smirk’ he ‘condescendingly mews’ as he is seen to ‘clutch claws / About the cerebral
viscera of his sheep’. This inversion of the traditional imagery of shepherding gives us a
predatory clergy. In a technique typical of the early Durcan, the other figure in the poem
(lines 11-22) is drawn as a Christ-like figure. This is the second inversion of traditional
imagery in the poem, used again for ironic effect. The speaker’s ‘aged companion’ is seen to
have ‘crucifixes of anguish crucify her face’ in a marked contrast to the Bishop’s ‘arch
33
smirk’. The viciousness of the Bishop ‘cuts into her’ as her character is drawn in imagery of
both passivity and pain. His pronouncement
Makes of her daily life
A ritual in schizophrenia;
She has known nothing but dismay all her days
And now this last outrage –
(OW, 64)
This disconnection between the official position of the Church on sexual matters and the
lived experience of Irish people is experienced by her as ‘[a] ritual in schizophrenia’, with the
insistence of the clergy seen as ‘A knife in the ordinarily innocent face of life.’ This final line
puns on the word ‘ordinary’ which brings the two characters together in a final juxtaposition.
A Bishop, in official Church nomenclature is known as the ‘ordinary’ of his diocese, that is,
the one in whom Church legislative power is vested. This ecclesiastical sense of ‘ordinary’
plays off the primary sense of the final sentence which supplies the major emotional thrust of
the rhetorical question that constitutes the final four lines – readers are left in no doubt that
such episcopal pronouncements, with their failure to admit exceptions, are a ‘knife in the [...]
face of life’ (OW, 64). The woman has an ordinarily innocent face, the ecclesiastical
‘ordinary’ does not. Durcan champions ‘rude humanity’ which is ‘ordinarily innocent’. The
conflict for control of moral authority between the violent imposition of ideology and
‘ordinary’ innocence is a constant strain through Durcan’s work. Indeed his work can be said
to be a sustained defence of the voice of ‘ordinary innocence’ struggling in a theatre of voices
where, as Fintan O’Toole has suggested, ‘[t]he stage is furnished with political and religious
orthodoxies’ (O’Toole, 27).
The conceit behind ‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography’ (SC, 52) addresses
similar issues to those discussed above. Framed as a mock report from a fictional pressconference the poem states that the Irish [Church] Hierarchy ‘has issued a total ban on the
practice of colour photography’. The poem is again one in which Durcan works with
34
contrasts: the collective voice of the Bishops of Ireland against the general public. The
Bishops, (collectively known as ‘The Hierarchy’) meeting ‘in their nineteenth-century
fastness at / Maynooth’ are once again portrayed as an uncompromising lot, detached from
‘reality.’ Through their aptly-named spokesman, Fr Marksman, the Hierarchy are seen to be
detached, traditionalist, illogical, and woefully out of touch with the lives of ‘young people’
and the ‘general public’. The crux of the satirical drive of the poem stems from the
Hierarchy’s scandalised claim that:
Colour pictures showed reality to be rich and various
Whereas reality in point of fact was the opposite19;
The innate black and white nature of reality would have to be
safeguarded
At all costs [...]
(SC, 52)
Durcan is again noting the erosion of hegemonic control by both asserting the right of young
people to think for themselves and noting that not only is ‘[t]he general public ... expected to
pay no heed to the ban’, the country will deliberately act against the Bishops’ diktat to
become ‘The EEC’s largest money-spender in colour photography.’ Here can be observed
another foregrounding of the ‘rich and various’ over the hegemonic ‘innate black and white’,
another relocation of the authority over individual identity formation.
The sense that the hegemonic structure of the Church exists and formulates policy in
splendid isolation from the experiences of everyday life – or ‘reality’ (SC, 52) – is enhanced
in ‘Archbishop of Dublin to Film Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘The Day Kerry Became Dublin’,
both from Durcan’s 1985 collection The Berlin Wall Café. ‘Archbishop of Dublin’ (BWC,
24) deals with an imagined press conference at which it has been announced that the
Archbishop of Dublin is to ‘direct a new film of Romeo and Juliet’ with the rather unusual
twist that the star-crossed lovers are to be refrigerated in different countries rather than seen
19
To add further depth to the interpretation of this poem the reader is directed towards the remarks made in this
study’s introductory chapter regarding the significance of the word ‘reality’ and the expression ‘in reality fiction
is all that matters’ (DD, 71) in Durcan’s moral lexicon.
35
in a scene together. Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, the film will be ‘Subtitled “The Age of
Ice”’. This piece again plays on the contrast between the aloof posturing of the clergy living
‘[a]t the Jesus Palace’ (with all its connotations of detachment and opulence) and the tender
image of the Shakespearean lovers. It also parodies attempts which the clergy sometimes
made to appear to be engaging with both modern technology and modern social realities on
the subject of relationships and sexuality. In a beautiful play on words Durcan gives his
readers an Archbishop who has a ‘passion / To stamp out sexuality and spread the gospel of
love’. The simultaneously perverse and jocose image of ‘Romeo in a refrigerator in Rome, /
And Juliet in a refrigerator in Armagh’ gives us the two lovers in wholly unexpected
locations as their image as paragons of romance is appropriated for use by the Archbishop ‘in
the Jesus palace / And on location in the Arctic Circle and Lough Derg’ (BWC, 24). The
contrast of images in ‘The Day Kerry became Dublin’ (BWC, 23) is no less stark or playful.
The poem, a first-person narration, has the speaker hear of a clerical promotion announced on
a news broadcast. This news, that ‘the Bishop of Kerry had been appointed the Archbishop of
/ Dublin’ is treated as an irrelevance which does not impinge upon the lives of ordinary
Catholics. Again the self-important movements of the Church Hierarchy are treated with
deflationary levity by the introduction of a scene of human intimacy as a counter-point:
Under her gas meter I get down on my knees
And say a prayer to the side-altars of her thighs,
And the three-light window of her breasts.
(BWC, 23)
This appropriation of devotional imagery in order to both elevate the quotidian scene and to
deflate the sense of importance conveyed by the newsreader is compounded in the final six
lines of the poem as the speaker boasts that ‘I go to Mass every morning, but I know no more
/ About the Archbishop of Dublin than I do about the Pope’. A poem which begins in the
humdrum of weekday work amid ‘keeled-over, weeping dustbins’ contrasted with clerical
promotions elevated to the importance of a news broadcast, is finished in a final flurry of
36
personal intimacy and the speaker’s desire to ‘go to bed forever with the woman of my
dreams, / And scatter the world with my children.’ Durcan achieves a lot in this simple, funny
poem, not least his staking of a claim to Catholic identity which is quirky, filled with
personality, and not dependant on a fixation with the machinations of the Hierarchy.
As was the case in ‘Pulpit Bishop Sickness AD 1973’, the scene depicted in ‘The
Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986’ (GHR, 27) is one of boisterous authoritarian clericalism.
A statement from ‘the Hierarchy’ on the subject of a forthcoming divorce referendum
intrudes on a placid, almost euphoric scene. The poem opens with allusions to Kavanagh,
with the speaker ‘adrift on a leaf of tranquillity’ and wishing only ‘[t]o feed praise to the tiger
of life’20. This peace is shattered by the statement read by the priest after his homily which,
expressing the wishes of ‘the Hierarchy’ in a move of arrogant hubris, ‘reminds’ the
congregation:
... that when you vote in the Divorce
Referendum
The Church’s teaching and Christ’s teaching are one and the
same.
(GHR, 27)
Turning the tables and assuming the voice of Christ himself, the speaker claims that ‘I knew
the anger that Jesus Christ felt’ and he pleads, in a shift of tone into a more formal, even
archaic, register: ‘I say unto you, preacher, and orators of the Hierarchy, / Do not bring
ideology into my house of prayer’. Durcan’s response proceeds then to be more
characteristic: he finishes the poem by juxtaposing a scene of tenderness and vulnerability
with the Hierarchy’s pronouncement. He focuses on ‘a small girl’ who, having received
communion, ‘flew back down the aisle / Carrying in her breast the Eucharist of her
innocence’. Once again as a counterpoint to ideology stands ‘innocence’ which is an echo
and a restatement of 1975’s ‘ordinarily innocent face of life’ (OW, 64) and a reprisal of the
20
See Kavanagh’s ‘Question to Life’: ‘So be reposed to praise, praise, praise / The way it happened and the way
it is’ (Kavanagh 2004, 221)
37
Blakean resonance of the word also. Durcan’s poem ends with a prayerful aspiration that the
girl will have ‘as many husbands as will praise her’ and that, by implication, she will not
have her private life invaded by ‘ideology’ or, as Eamon Grennan has named it, ‘the various
life-denying hypocrisies-in-residence of Church and State’ (Grennan, 47-48).
In promulgating general moral rules in these cases, the Hierarchy removes from the
individual a sense of moral activity and freedom, annuls the relevance of individuality and
makes an irrelevance too of subjectivity and circumstance. Durcan’s general preoccupation
with hegemonic denials of individuality in Irish society runs through his poetry and was very
clearly formulated by him in the context of a 1988 roundtable discussion with philosopher
Richard Kearney. Durcan bemoans:
[t]he manner in which divorce is often regarded as a moral evil thereby ignoring the
suffering that certain couples are actually going through. Violence can be sensed in the
very way words are used to deny the fact that people are human beings.
(Durcan in Kearney, 329)
This highlights once again Durcan’s problem with the generalising character of public
pronouncements (‘moral evil’) juxtaposed with the particular, subjective and infinitely varied
nature of life (‘the suffering that certain couples are actually going through’). It is not then an
unfair inference to claim that certain modes of language and discourse diminish us in
Durcan’s eyes – insofar as they have the effect of removing from the individual the selfpossession and self-determination implied by individual moral choice. This opinion is
perfectly consistent for a poet who writes ‘as if language itself were the very conscience of
reality’ (OW, 63).
‘Bishop of Cork Murders His Wife’ (SC, 53) from the 1978 collection Sam’s Cross, is
a telling example of how Durcan fuses his concern regarding broader social hegemonies with
his treatment of clericalism, a ‘conspiracy of the respectable’ and the abuse of women. The
poem is located, to borrow an apt phrase from Peggy O’Brien, at ‘bourgeois tables, Durcan’s
chosen battlefield.’ (O’Brien, 99) The poem, in the voice of a third person speaker, again
38
focuses on the interaction between two characters: a Bishop whose ‘mother suckled him on
porter’ and his murdered wife dubbed a ‘wicked trollop’. The conceit of this satirical poem –
written in a tone of feigned objection on behalf of the speaker – is that, although his wife has
been murdered by him, it is actually upon the Bishop that sympathy should fall. This is
epitomised in the final line of the first stanza: ‘Oh the wicked trollop – oh the poor old boyo’.
In what might by now seem a somewhat worn technique, the two figures are set in stark
contrast to each other. The Bishop, sure of the ‘loyalty of his flock’ is described variously as
‘a decent man’, ‘suckled’ on porter and fond of watching Match Of The Day ‘in the west
wing of the humble palace’. Contrastingly his wife is a ‘wicked trollop’, a ‘skivvy’, ‘chirping
up for women’s rights’ and a ‘thorn’ in her husband’s side. The Bishop is made seem like a
mock-Christ, pierced by and suffering his wife’s very presence in a kind of protracted marital
Calvary situation:
In latter years it had been well known
That his wife had long been a thorn
If not a spear
In the bishop’s side:
(SC, 53)
The violence of the hegemony exercised by the Church is seen to extend across a range of
other social functionaries in a ‘conspiracy of the respectable’ as the speaker, firmly tongue in
cheek, informs us that the Bishop will be given time to recover from his ordeal ‘[o]n an island
loaned to him by a government minister’. His murdered wife, on the other hand, will have her
remains ‘chucked into the River Lee’. Tellingly here it is the consensus of the crowd as much
as the viciousness of the murderer that is the object of scorn. Durcan criticises the crowd who
would rather look on or even actively endorse the hegemony rather than take the
uncomfortable step of taking the wife’s side. The further impression is given, from the
feigned protestations of the speaker, that this would actually be impossible – that the violence
carried out by the Bishop has been endorsed and authorised in an unspoken conspiracy.
39
‘Acapulco’ (BWC, 27), from 1985’s The Berlin Wall Café similarly criticises Church
hegemonic violence, setting it in opposition to human suffering in an imagined scene as
harrowing as it is satirical. The opening two epigrammatic lines set the scene: ‘While the
Bishop was being installed on one side of the field / His daughter was being crucified on the
other side of the field’. The Bishop refuses to acknowledge that he is her father and as ‘[s]he
began to perspire and gasp and bleed on the cross’ he merely ‘drove off in his bishopmobile’,
simultaneously disowning the reality of suffering and fleeing the scene of violence. The
major theme of the poem, is a kind of escapism or evasion on the point of the moral authority
figure, a shirking of responsibility in the face of ugly irrefutable facts and the uncomfortable
spectacle of human suffering. This escapism is summed up in the name Acapulco, the
fashionable holiday destination for the Hollywood elite of the 1950s to where the Bishop and
‘his new girlfriend’ retreat: ‘Acapulco’, says the Bishop, ‘is what life’s all about.’ The image
of the Bishop ‘Perambulating alone in his private aerodrome’ is set against that of his
daughter, yet again another Christ figure. She, a figure of victimhood and suffering is seen
‘crucified’ and letting ‘the cat out of the bag by crying “Father, Father”’. Another use of an
image of pathetic individual suffering to relocate the moral centre-of-gravity away from
power and hegemonic centres and root it in the lives of suffering individuals. The implication
is that those who ‘perspire and gasp and bleed on the cross’ are closer to ‘what life’s all
about’ than the satirised escapist persecutors.
To these major portraits of clerical figures as enforcers of hegemony and dictators of
moral precepts in Durcan’s work, can be added a group of poems containing lesser examples
of how the Church’s moral hegemony either did violence to individual freedom or stood aloof
of human suffering. ‘Mrs Crotty’, subject of ‘Fermoy Calling Moscow’ (SC, 42), is the centre
of a brief portrait of a quotidian life set against the major institutions of Irish society, as the
Church is listed alongside ‘gunmen’ and parliamentarians who ‘dissemble and bribe’. Rather
40
than be of material help, ‘Churchmice and churchmen scratch heaven; / But they’ll not knock
Mrs Crotty down’ [sic]. Again, presaging ‘Acapulco’, is the spectacle of the churchmen as
escapists from experience on the ground, preferring instead to ‘scratch heaven’. The chatty
tone of ‘Three Hundred Men Made Redundant’ (TB, 29) belies a more cutting edge as the
loss detailed in the title and repeated as a refrain through the poem is set against the spectacle
of the leisurely odd-jobs of a detached and moneyed middle class. Fun is poked at the bias
implied in the penultimate quatrain of the poem:
But we have bigger issues to thrash out
Than 300 men made redundant;
For example the evils of family planning –
Not to mention mixed marriages and mixed education.
(TB, 29)
Similar hegemonic ambivalence and cynicism towards the suffering of ordinary
people is chastised in 1978’s piece ‘National Day of Mourning for 12 Protestants’ (SC, 59)
who, the speaker tells us, ‘were burnt to death last Friday night’. Durcan ridicules what he
perceives as the hollowness of Church (and State) reaction in condemnation of such atrocities
and posits that such protests are merely formal gestures and political manoeuvres. This effect
is achieved with the suggestion in the final lines that the figures protesting the violence were
fact neither the real Taoiseach nor the real Archbishop, but imposters. It is speculated, in a
tone of mockery, that the real Church dignitaries and Statesmen were in fact ‘attending a
Gaelic football match somewhere in Corkery’, precisely the other end of the country from
where the violence occurred. In a typical sardonic counterpoint to such Church politicking the
poem’s final line reads: ‘Government officials stated that reality did not enter into the
matter’. This pointed use of ‘reality’ can be read as a further contribution to Durcan’s
depictions of many contested and competing ‘visions of reality’ (GHR, 61) that populate his
work.
41
2.3 – A nod and a wink: hegemonic crisis, negotiated subjectivities and open secrets
If, in his attempt to wrest moral authority for the individual away from the hegemonic
structures of the Church, some of Durcan’s pulpit-thumping clerics appear to be cartoonish,
one-dimensional figures, he has also drawn an amount of more nuanced and conflicted
clerical figures and Church insiders both from imagination and documentary of priests and
religious actually encountered. The focus of this section will be on imagined clerical figures,
but it is important to note that Durcan has celebrated many male and female religious in his
work, notably Father Patrick O’Brien (GFB, 3), Father Frank Murphy (GFB, 15) and
Leonardo Boff (Appendix One). The speakers of poems such as ‘The Archbishop Dreams of
The Harlot of Rathkeale’ (TB, 48) and ‘Archbishop of Kerry to have Abortion’ (BWC, 26)
are insiders who have been made responsible by the hegemonic structure in that they have
some amount of authority invested in them; but they also have to contend with an often
dramatic conflict in personal identity caused by their public roles. It is in the portraits of these
outsiders on the inside that Durcan further dramatises the identity crisis inherent in the
frequently failed attempt to reconcile Church doctrine with personal experience. It is also
made clear in these figures that the Church and Irish moral life is undergoing what Antonio
Gramsci termed a hegemonic crisis, a realignment of the locus of authority:
If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer "leading”, but only "dominant",
exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become
detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to
believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and
the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
(Gramsci, 256-257)
In a sense these characters which Durcan draws are also to some extent victims of
circumstance, perhaps victims who have indeed volunteered for holy orders, but somehow
victims nonetheless. Their very identities are sites of violent conflict, a conflict they
consequently project onto the world. In this way it is possible to see Durcan draw more
42
compassionate and humane portraits than his earlier satires. These portraits are, as Fintan
O’Toole puts it:
[M]ade, not by pure invention, but by loosening the tongue of a hidden Ireland, allowing
it to speak out its own unspoken complexities and richly contradictory possibilities.
(O’Toole, 34)
Interpretation of these poems is enriched further by noting the fact that Durcan began his
publishing career in 1967 (with the volume Endsville which was shared with Brian Lynch),
precisely at the point where the religious hegemony itself appeared at least to be becoming
less rigid and more open to the realities of the modern world. Durcan writes of his Catholic
childhood and young manhood:
[E]ven though I was a young Dubliner living under the Kremlin-like rule of Archbishop
McQuaid, I watched in amazement and delight as John XXIII with his mother-hen
personality went about practising his message of affection.
(PDD, 122).
The Church’s subsequent gradual return to more conservative attitudes after the Second
Vatican Council is something which Durcan has frequently lamented, satirised and
condemned. The inflection that this conservative turn took in the Irish Church – with its
perceived obsession with issues of sex and marriage-related morality – is the backdrop for
Durcan’s poems in which Church figures seem wracked by tension on these very issues. It is
sufficient to note that Durcan writes in a period when, in Gramsci’s words ‘the great masses
have become detached from their traditional ideologies’ and now ‘no longer believe what they
used to believe previously’. It might be possible to add some shepherds and Church leaders to
Gramsci’s ‘great masses’ as well as the many sheep connoted here. Many of Durcan’s clerical
voices appear to exist in an ‘interregnum’, as a moral caretaker-managers rather than regents
in the ‘Kremlin-like’ situation described by Durcan above.
Their attempts to cling to
hegemonic or dogmatic authority are often depicted as swamped by a swell of a different yet
undeniable kind of authority originating in private experiences of pain or desire.
43
The denial and suppression of sexual desire and its expression – and the perceived
crucial importance of this factor in each person’s psycho-sexual profile – is a key point of
tension in Durcan’s Church poems. The comedy and the tragedy which the poems often
simultaneously evoke is situated on the same fault line of human experience discussed earlier:
the place of tension between official Church policy with its attempts to repress or usurp
individual authority and freedom on matters concerning sexuality; and the lived experience of
individuals negotiating their own personal identities. As ever with Durcan the focus is on the
subjective experience of the person, with the connotation being that it is only in the individual
person that the true seat of authority and authentic action lies.
The speaker in ‘The Archbishop Dreams of the Harlot of Rathkeale’ (TB, 48) is a
conflicted clerical figure who confesses the contents of his dream. His opening lines, couched
as they are theological terminology, are both a satire of Church-speak regarding sexuality and
an oblique attempt to evoke pity for such a character: his ‘dream is non-committal – it is no
sin’. He disavows any, even mild, sense of self-assertion about his sexual desire, depicting
himself in a reclined and passive posture: ‘I am simply lying here in my double-bed /
Dreaming of the harlot of Rathkeale’. He dreams of a prostitute walking down a road in the
evening ‘[w]earing a red scarf and black high-heel shoes; / She is wearing nothing else’. This
striking dream-woman is passed on the road by a man in a car with whom the Archbishop
clearly identifies. The driver of the car doesn’t stop with her, but ‘he looks back aghast – / A
god-fearing man’. The Archbishop’s approval of his proxy’s actions quickly turns to grief and
rage when his dream ends just as the harlot is walking towards him. The two concluding lines,
in an allusion to the Greek minotaur as symbol of suppressed urges and desires, serve to make
a fundamental point about how Church hegemony on sex has become so literally incredible: ‘I
wake up in the morning feeling like an old bull / Plumb to charge through my brethren in my
sermon’. It is suggested that the Archbishop is simultaneously an object of derision and pity.
44
A similar conceit is developed in ‘Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel’ (GHR,
17). The announcement on the six o clock news ‘[t]hat our beloved cardinal [sic] has died / In
the arms of his favourite prostitute’ is, once the feigned shock of the speaker’s wife has
dissipated, greeted as a positive development, a ‘sign that the church of God is moving into
the light’. The thought of the Cardinal’s death in the arms of a prostitute is taken as a cause
for celebration – an occasion to be marked – as the speaker makes a private pilgrimage to the
local church, meditating on the tender scene of the Cardinal’s demise:
... I think again of the aged cardinal’s submission
To that lovely, ephemeral woman
And of her compassion which, by all accounts,
Was as tender as it was fiery.
(GHR, 17)
This key image, of the reversal in social and moral roles – where the Cardinal submits and the
prostitute is lauded for her compassion – is enough to allow the speaker to ‘depart the church,
feeling restored in body and soul’. It can be argued that the poem is not merely a swipe at
clergy, rather a comedic realisation of a deeper truth of what really is ‘lovely’ and
‘ephemeral’ in life: a re-centring on tenderness and human intimacy rather than power and
public authority. It should also be noted that the female objects of desire in both of these
poems are not just women, but prostitutes. The sense of ‘scandal’ or social shame aside, the
contrasting of two clerics with two prostitutes is apt: both sets of characters live lives fixated
on sex, albeit at opposing ends of a spectrum. Neither the social role of Cardinal nor that of
prostitute leave its act-or free of a certain cruel economy about sexual expression.
The issue of abortion was a very contentious political and moral issue in Ireland
throughout much of the final third of the twentieth century, often dividing society bitterly. It
would seem to be an exemplary flashpoint of conflict between the authority of a maledominated hegemony and the experience of individuality. Durcan has written both in poetry
and prose with regard to what, for him, are the important issues – not just regarding the
45
content of the debate, but rather how the debate itself is constructed, framed and conducted.
He recalls, sympathetically and approvingly, the attitude of a woman with whom he spent an
afternoon speaking about a forthcoming Abortion Referendum. She had, he wrote:
‘[A] determination to carry on with her life and all the day-to-day difficulties that daily
life entails and not to allow the weighing scales of her soul to be spilled by gusts of
hysteria or by boorish rhetoric or by icy formulations of lawyers and doctors or by the
antics of politicians in what she and so many women perceive as an atmosphere of cruelty
and ignorance’.
(PDD, 88)
Durcan here and elsewhere lampoons the crassness and vulgarity of the debate, the way in
which language can be used publically create a distorted representations of what is primarily,
if not ultimately, a private experience. For him the language of the debate as it has been
conducted and the subject of the debate are diametrically opposed: such a tender emotional
and physical state as pregnancy and the effect it might have on ‘the weighing scales of [one’s]
soul’ are only superficially addressed by the ‘icy formulations of lawyers and doctors’ and
‘the antics of politicians’. Durcan writes that ‘I dread the so-called Abortion Referendums for
the bad atmosphere they create: the bad language; the bad faith; the bad manners’ (PDD, 88).
The hysteria and bitterness of this ‘bad atmosphere’ are used to strong effect in two
well achieved poems on the subject: ‘Archbishop of Kerry to have Abortion’ (BWC, 26) and
‘Catholic Father prays for His Daughter’s Abortion’ (BWC, 30), both from Durcan’s 1985
collection The Berlin Wall Café. In ‘Archbishop of Kerry to have Abortion’ Durcan creates a
parody of the language of media reportage according to which an Archbishop, ‘[h]aving been
made pregnant by a devoutly pious, / Over-sensitive member of the Nuns of the Big Flower’
is to undergo an abortion at ‘the Vatican Abortion Clinic in Rome’. Writing the poem in the
register and punchy style of speech used by media pundits gives an extra comic edge to the
subversion of roles in the poem: the ‘Archbishop’ is to have the abortion, ‘[a] Ballyferriter
Sister is reputed to be the father’ and ‘Cardinal Ian Paisley’ is the head of the ‘Congregation
of the Propagation of the Defence of the Faith.’ Despite appeals to the contrary ‘from nuns all
46
over Kerry’ the Vatican is determined that the abortion should be carried out in spite of the
fact that the Archbishop in question is ‘scared stiff’ at the prospect. This sustained garbling of
roles and functions, replete as it is with official titles, proper names and the parodied language
of public debate, can be read as leaving the reader – and indeed the narrating voice – with an
abiding sense of confusion born out of the superficiality of the style of discourse. It also
mimics and re-enacts the confusion and media-fatigue attendant on such referendum debates.
The political subtext to the poem suggests that abortion is only a problem when it is carried
out on a woman; should a man ever become pregnant – and worse, a male cleric – then
abortion would not only be permissible, but mandatory. Once again the reader is treated to
individual sensitivities, both male and female, but particularly female, being sacrificed – the
‘Ballyferriter Sister’ and ‘nuns all over Kerry’ are considered unimportant in the face of the
wishes of ‘Archbishop Boethius’ (“Yellowface”) and ‘Cardinal Ian Paisley’.
‘Catholic Father Prays for His Daughter’s Abortion’ (BWC, 30) is markedly more
sombre in tone, though it addresses the same set of issues: the frequent callousness of men
and their refusal to compromise in the face of the difficult realities of pregnancy faced by
women. The apparent contradiction described in the poem’s title is an exemplary instance of
Gramsci’s notion of hegemonic crisis: such a scandalous contradiction as is contained in
‘Prays for His Daughter’s Abortion’ would be in many eyes so much a denial of the
hegemonic official line as to preclude the speaker from participating in any ‘Catholic’
identity. The speaker refers to two of his daughters in the course of the poem, one of whom
has become pregnant already and another who is in a relationship with ‘that bank manager
down in Connemara’. The centrepiece of the poem, which provides the emotional thrust and
counterpoint to Church dogma, is the experience of the speaker’s first daughter:
47
When my other daughter told her boyfriend she was pregnant
He was scared stiff, but not that she was pregnant –
He felt chuffed at being verified a virile, feckless fellow –
What he was scared of was that he might have to do
Something about the consequences of being a virile, feckless
fellow.
(BWC, 30)
In the cast of characters which populate this poem, Durcan’s men consist of a bank manager
who might ‘[m]ake my daughter pregnant and ditch her’, an irresponsible younger father who
is ‘a virile, feckless fellow’ and a parish priest who ‘[t]hrows me a stealthily murderous
scowl’. It is notable that the sexual pun on ‘scared stiff’ is used both for the feckless boyfriend
of this poem and the unfortunate cleric of ‘Archbishop of Kerry to have Abortion’ (BWC, 26).
Women are drawn as victims of an unnecessarily hostile and uncaring social arrangement in a
world ‘[w]here women are hard put to get away with life / But men get away with murder day
by day’. The gender divide is highlighted again as the father prays for his daughter’s abortion
in a home ‘[t]ended with compassion by nursing nuns’ suggesting a sympathy from female
church figures unforthcoming from their male confreres.
A final, light-hearted addition to Durcan’s poems dealing with the insider’s experience
of the fracturing of hegemonic authority is his ‘Sister Agnes Writes to Her Beloved Mother’
(SC, 48) from the 1978 collection Sam’s Cross. The poem, styled as a letter, is chatty and full
of subversive gossip. In a tone of affectionate yet excited confidentiality Sister Agnes relates
to her mother the ‘big news’ which is ‘that Reverend Mother is pregnant’, carrying the child
of ‘a lovely old Jesuit / With a rosy nose’. The poem sparkles with subversive humour as
‘Sister Agnes’ describes how:
When her time comes Rev. Mother officially
Will go away on retreat
And the cherub will be reared in another convent.
(SC, 48)
Agnes, herself ‘busy crocheting a cradle shawl’, swears her mother to delicious secrecy. Such
a poem about life inside the Church would not be complete without a reference to the
48
hegemonic figure; the embodiment of injunction, the one charged with maintaining
orthodoxy. All are said to be keeping silent on the matter ‘[i]n case the Bishop – that young
hypocrite – / Might get to hear about it’. The sense of hegemonic crisis, the disconnection
between the party line and the lived reality is epitomised in the line: ‘Nobody is supposed to
know anything’ for fear that the lie be exposed and the reality be seen not to match the
hegemonic script.
2.4 – Rendering vibrant subjectivities in Christian and Biblical imagery
For all the poems Durcan has penned in direct and indirect criticism of the
pronouncements and policies of the Catholic Hierarchy on psycho-sexual matters, his vision
as a poet retains a broadly Christian shape. As Durcan has said of his conceptual vocabulary:
‘Irish Christianity was the mother tongue of my soul and it remains the mother tongue of my
soul in spite of the institution of the Irish Roman Catholic Church’ (PDD, 121). The voices
and characters in his work who are enactors of friendship and communion; who are in
positions of accusation, persecution or suffering; or who hope for or enact a moment of
redemption or resurrection, are manifold. They can all be seen, given Durcan’s appropriation
of the grammar of Christian symbolism as other Christs: figures in an almost messianic
pattern who refuse to cede their individual integrity or freedom to group-think or hegemonic
positions. Kathleen McCracken has written in this regard that Durcan’s work:
[h]as championed the radically Christian values of charity, piety and the achievement of
sanctity through suffering, virtues epitomised in the figure of Christ.
(McCracken 1996, 97)
While Durcan himself may state that ‘I have my doubts about sanctity!’ (CW, 3) –
McCracken’s claim is apt in the light of Durcan’s persistent use of a Christian template to
direct attention to individual emotions and experiences and their importance in the formation
of identity and living authentically. The figure of the passionate Christ, an individual set
49
against the murderous and lynch-mob-like machinations of a crowd, is used as a template for
the naming of individual emotion and experience in the face of greater forces of conformity
and uniformity. It is this perceived disregard for the integrity of individual emotion and
experience, among other things, which is the downfall of hegemonic moral practises: their
tendency to generalise obliterates the very agency which Durcan sees as so important. It will
be fruitful to examine more closely some of the figures whose identity has been drawn by
Durcan on a Christian or Biblical template yet who, in their tenderness and openness of
character and in the positive values to which they give voice, stand as positive alternatives to
the narrow-minded and dogmatic ideologues encountered earlier. The following pages offer a
close reading of a selection of poems dealing with these modern day Biblical figures –
however, the full implications of Durcan’s use of the figure of the Christ-styled outcast
(which will be understood as the scapegoat figure) is treated in chapter three.
‘I was fostered out to a woman called Fat Molly’, begins the speaker in Durcan’s strong
revision of the Garden of Eden scene in the poem ‘Fat Molly’ from 1978’s Sam’s Cross (SC,
11). Durcan’s Adam shares his Eden with a woman of abundance who ‘lived all alone in a
crannóg’. The crannog is a symbol of insulation and security from political and military
violence (the speaker laments finally that due to the arrival of Vikings ‘there’s nothing but
blood in the air’); also standing untouched by institutional religious influence ‘on the other
side of the forest from the monk fort at Kells’. The forbidden knowledge which the speaker is
gaining in this Eden is of sexuality and sensuality as Molly – perhaps imagined as a sensual
sexually liberated precursor to Joyce’s Molly Bloom – herself becomes the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil in a prelapsarian internship spent
... eating her green apples
That hung in bunches from her thighs
And the clusters of hot grapes between her breasts
(SC, 11)
50
Molly exists in that place yearned for by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem ‘Advent’ (Kavanagh
2004, 110), a place which is not tyrannised by the compulsion to ‘ask for reason’s payment’.
Durcan’s playful double-entendre of ‘only a completely drunk man / Could successfully
negotiate Fat Molly’s entrance’ echoes Kavanagh by hinting at a more expansive
interpretation of drunkenness as a spiritual as well as a physiological state, a state which does
not ask for ‘reason’s payment’. The fusion of Eden and Calvary at the close of the poem’s
second stanza provides the rhapsodic high-point of the poem, its central image:
Completely drunk I used stagger home
And fall asleep in the arms of her laughter;
O sweet crucifixion, crucified on each other.
(SC, 11)
Just as in Christian symbolism it is possible to read of a tree being the instrument of both
humanity’s fall in Eden and redemption on Calvary, here Durcan offers us a fusion of Molly
as teacher and joyful lover. The poem’s final rueful stanza reflects the search for a lost Eden
which characterises much of Durcan’s poetry. The salvation which the speaker has achieved
through his education with Fat Molly is said, due to there being ‘nothing but blood in the air’
to be ‘perfectly useless’ with the prospect of emotional and sensual expression being once
again trumped by the prospect of violence.
The two protagonists described by the speaker in ‘The crucifixion circus, Good Friday,
Paris, 1981’ (JTA, 23) appear as passionate and compassionate figures in a landscape
populated by pistol-wielders, menacing sacristans and anecdotes of betrayed wartime
fugitives. The narrative action of the poem focuses on the husband and wife protagonists who
attend the Stations of the Cross ceremony on Good Friday afternoon. The dominant thread of
the poem sees the various characters react to the fact that the wife ‘[b]arely able to stand on
account of her age / Had urinated into her massive silk drawers’. This strange image – a very
visible public and dramatic occurrence of incontinence – functions as an exemplary instance
of human vulnerability as it is reacted to throughout the poem by various figures. The poem
51
moves through eight stanzas which work like sequential cinematic camera shots or
photographs from the scene, each one progressing the narrative action and detailing
something related to the embarrassing occurrence. This piece is a prime example of how, as
Kathleen McCracken has outlined:
[T]he essentially dramatic quality of Durcan's narrative monologues lends itself to a
format not unlike cinematic montage.
(McCracken 1989, 18)
The setting of the embarrassing scene at the Stations of the Cross ceremony serves to
underscore the alignment of these characters with the man who Durcan has described as ‘the
protagonist of the New Testament’ (Durcan in Kearney 2006, 330). As the woman’s urine
trickles across the floor of the church, ‘Delineating a map of Europe on the floor as it trickled
– / Trickled until it had become a series of migrations’, rather than becoming embarrassed or
ashamed, her husband merely ‘adjusted the lilac bonnet on her head / To make her look more
pretty’. Their fellow churchgoers view the couple with disdain rather than compassion and
ironically look ‘up at the radiant, tormented faces of the aged couple’ with condemnation,
oblivious to the irony that, in more ways than the literal way, this couple ‘stand by the side of
the subversive Christ’. In a touching image of compassion, the literal meaning of which is
suffering together, the speaker describes how ‘[t]he wife kept her eyes fixed on the Cross of
Jesus. / Her husband kept his eyes both on her and on the Cross’. This tenderness is
juxtaposed with that of a disinterested ‘family of Germans’ and a phallus-obsessed sacristan
who recommends the guillotine for this couple audacious enough to join Christ in his
‘[d]ifficulties with his bodily functions’.
The poem abounds with images of bodily realities often too embarrassing to detail. A
defiant description is given of the tenderness of the husband toward his wife: ‘[u]rine or no
urine / [They] were going to bear witness to today’s Via Dolorosa’. The sixth stanza contains
an anecdote from the Second World War of the discovery and execution of a fugitive German
52
soldier and his collaborator, recounted as a shared memory of the two protagonists. The
violence of the war and the cruelty of Church officialdom in this instance are recalled and the
reader is prompted to understand that these wartime victims bear an oblique correspondence
to the protagonists of the poem:
No Jesus Christ to make it a trio, or was there?
The parish priest murmured over his bread and wine
That such things happen, and have to happen, in war.
(JTA, 23)
Once again hidden, fugitive individual realities are seen to be expunged mercilessly in the
name of political violence and utilitarian expediency. The moral implication, of course, is that
the image of trust and human connection between soldier and charwoman, husband and wife,
is to be valued above political and ecclesiastical machinations; or, in the words of the second
stanza ‘[i]n spite of the living scandal of the warring churches, / On the map of Europe there
is a country of the heart’. As is often his technique, Durcan appropriates the imagery of the
oppressive Church force and puts it to subversive use: this is very evident in the final stanza
of ‘The crucifixion circus’. As the couple fall asleep together, the husband’s face is likened to
‘a face in a shrine / A gaunt embryo in a monstrance’, and as the poem reaches a final doubleimage of the couple at both vulnerable extremities of life: ‘A diptych of Madonna and Child –
at birth and at death’.
In the strikingly well achieved figure of the speaker in ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent
Inferno’ (GHR, 3) Durcan has written perhaps his most tender and celebratory poem dealing
with figures drawn with Christian imagery. The emotional effect of the poem is compounded
by the fact that the tragedy which is envisioned in the poem actually corresponds to a fire in
which six Loreto nuns, to whom the poem is dedicated, lost their lives.21 The poem’s speaker,
one of the nuns who perished in the fire, imagines herself and her religious sisters to be
21
The poem also alludes heavily to a work by Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’
(Hopkins, 98) which itself is dedicated ‘to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falck Laws,
drowned between midnight and morning of December [1875]’.
53
rebels, non-conformists, counter-cultural figures. As she compares herself to the ‘punk boys
and punk girls’ on Saint Stephen’s Green who are trying desperately to stand out from the
crowd yet who ‘looked so conventional, really, and vulnerable’, she conceives of herself as
‘the ultimate drop-out, / The delinquent, the recidivist, the vagabond’. The conclusion of the
first stanza and the entire second stanza are a description in the nun’s own terms of her selfimage, her perception of her convent and sister-nuns, all of whom have opted to choose ‘such
exotic loneliness, / Such terrestrial abandonment’. The voice depicts the women as isolated,
voluntary exiles from the world around them; ‘as eerie an aviary as you’d find’, and a ‘bony
crew in the gods of the sleeping city’. Their ‘sleeping at the top of the mast / Of a nineteenth
century schooner’ is a possible allusion and linking of them with the Hierarchy who meet ‘in
their nineteenth-century fastness at / Maynooth’ (SC, 52) – it is, arguably, the ideology as
well as the architecture which is being described in both cases as ‘nineteenth-century’. They
are collectively ‘weird birds, oddballs, Christniks’ who have ‘[S]urrendered the marvellous
passions of girlhood, / The innocent dreams of childhood’. This use of the phrase ‘innocent
dreams’ at once recalls the ‘ordinarily innocent face of life’ from ‘Pulpit Bishop Sickness,
AD 1973’ (OW: 64) and mirrors the line ‘the Eucharist of her innocence’ from ‘The Divorce
Referendum, Ireland, 1986’ (GHR, 27) published in the same volume as ‘Six Nuns Die In
Convent Inferno’.
In interview, Durcan has repeatedly named Tom Waits’ ‘Innocent When You Dream’ –
released, coincidentally, the same year as Durcan’s Going Home to Russia – as one of his
favourite songs (Armistead, 2009 and also Appendix One). The word ‘innocence’ is
evocative of a primal unspoiled mode or attitude of identity-formation, untouched by
ideology or hegemonic imposition. This poetic evocation of a life of celibacy here is a
pointed contrast to the figure in ‘The Archbishop Dreams of the Harlot of Rathkeale’ (TB,
48); in which the Archbishop is described as a bull, the nun as a bird. This sacrifice of
54
innocence, the life as a ‘weird bird’ is taken on in order to ‘follow a young man’ who lived in
the far distant past and ‘who died a common criminal upon a tree’. Having willed herself to
be marginal in society, in the third stanza the speaker describes her affiliation with a further
marginal, persecuted figure within the Church structure: Cardinal Mindszenty. Mindszenty
spent much of his career as a political fugitive and politico-ecclesiastical pawn in Eastern
Europe, finally being stripped of his titles by the Pope. The speaker, in the third stanza says
‘Any of us would have given our right arm / To have been his nun – darning his socks,
cooking his meals’, further aligning her, in a charming and idiosyncratic way, with the
outcast and fugitive element. Durcan also revisited the story of Mindszenty in interview with
the current author, reinforcing its importance to him (Appendix One).
The fourth to sixth stanzas of the poem’s first section accomplish a very striking fusion
of the images of the dying nuns with recollected memories of holidays passed, books to be
returned to their owners, words of praise for firemen. Some of the emotional impact of the
piece is achieved by the foregrounding of detail in the face of the overwhelming fact of
accidental death; but the major effect comes from the speaker’s attitude towards loss: how it
can be simultaneously a suffering and a relief. Without glorifying suffering, the reader is told
how this is for the speaker an experience which relieves her of much exterior trapping. The
speaker recalls how, one day at prayer:
I became aware that Christ is the ocean
Forever rising and falling on the world’s shore.
Now tonight in the convent Christ is the fire in whose waves
We are doomed but delighted to drown.
(GHR, 5-6)
This paradoxical feeling of being ‘doomed but delighted to drown’ infuses the fifth and sixth
stanzas as the speaker rhapsodises on how it is ‘a marvellous thing how your hour comes /
When you least expect it’ (a Biblical allusion, Matthew 24:44) and how it was ‘[T]he strange
Eucharist of my death - / To be eaten alive by fire and smoke’. This visionary poem about a
55
nun’s happy acceptance of what was a tragic death following a life of self-imposed sacrifice
stands as an example of emotional honesty and integrity: it maps out, by enfranchising one
individual voice, the countless paradoxes of each human life. These paradoxes, in their subtle
subversions of received beliefs – one-dimensional ideas of Church clergy, society’s ideas of
what a ‘rebel’ or ‘punk’ is, the Western world’s chronic avoidance of a reckoning with the
taboo of death – use the emotion of one voice to paint a nuanced and passionate portrait of
the poem’s life and death in the institution of the Catholic Church.
2.5 - Conclusion
Returning to the structuring goal of this study, a close examination of individual
moral freedom, it can be seen that Durcan’s writing on the Church is central to his ‘moral
map’ (Grennan, 44). Rather than offering mere protest and intransigence in the face of
clerical moral prescriptions, Durcan has developed a nuanced vision of how individual
freedom is experienced and negotiated in the context of Irish Catholic identity. Educated by
Jesuits, Durcan has retained throughout his life and publishing career an active intellectual
engagement with the life of the Church, which as well as being an institution and a social
structure provides the poet with the vocabulary in which he has formulated many of his own
‘fictions’ (DD, 71). Returning to the head of this chapter and to Durcan’s celebratory poem
‘The 12 O’Clock Mass, Roundstone, County Galway, 28 July 2002’ it is possible to read
Durcan celebrating a world in which it seems as if ‘betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal /
Were an every-minute occurrence’ (AoL, 62). In that particular poem the ‘betrayal’ in
question is that celebrated by Catholics at each Mass in remembrance of how, in Christian
theology, Christ was handed over to be crucified only to ‘overcome’ this betrayal. While the
phrase ‘betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal’ speaks to the broader tone of much of
Durcan’s commitment to engagement with the Church, its historical origins should not be
56
overlooked. The drama of the betrayal of Christ – interpreted by Christian theology as the
betrayal of an innocent man into the hands of persecutors – provides the template for much of
Durcan’s moral vision, far beyond poetry directly implicating the Church. It is arguable that
the spectacle of an innocently accused individual before an accusatory or restrictive paradigm
or group of people is the central dramatic tableau of Durcan’s poetry – the fuel for what
Kathleen McCracken has referred to as his fundamentally ‘oppositional disposition’
(McCracken 2013, 111). A further investigation of human freedom and moral authority as
encountered in such depictions is the direction in which this study now turns.
57
Chapter Three:
Oddly commanding - the centrality of mobs and scapegoats to Durcan’s moral map
22
‘Scapegoats multiply wherever human beings seek to lock themselves into a given
identity – communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious and so on’
(Girard 2001, 160)
3.1 - Introduction
The focus of this chapter is Paul Durcan’s various depictions of what might be called
the judicial pattern of human relationships, with a particular focus on the figure and voice of
the scapegoat. This chapter is an investigation of his depiction of how this judicial structure
operates, what role it plays in the formation of group and individual identity, and what impact
it has on the central issue of individual freedom and moral authority. Accepting what
Kathleen McCracken says, that ‘Durcan’s poetry is essentially dramatic’ (McCracken 1987,
108), then the focus must inevitably turn to the sizeable body of Durcan’s poems in which this
drama is given a judicial mise en scène. Before drawing the distinction along whose lines this
chapter has been divided, it is fitting to offer an operating definition of what is meant by the
term judicial. The term judicial is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘relating the
administration of justice; of or appropriate to a law court or judge’ (OED, 768). Although this
definition of judgement reflects the social role of the judge and the judicial system, it will be
suggested that for Durcan the very tendency in human beings to judge has an epistemological
and existential aspect. Such an interpretation may validly be made of the seemingly
throwaway remark in the 2007 poem ‘The Wrong Box’ [sic]: ‘The judge has a great sense of
orientation’ (LM, 87). It is possible to read in this quote the observation that judgement itself
is an intrinsic part of life, of sense-making, of story-telling, of ‘orientation’ in the widest
sense. As Durcan says in self-mockery and tacit acknowledgement of this in 1999’s
22
Eamon Grennan has written of how Durcan writes with ‘the oddly commanding voice of a comic scapegoat’
(Grennan, 59). This chapter suggests a double reading of this phrase, emphasising the surprising authority it
suggests but also the fact that the voice is calculated to command precisely through its oddness.
58
‘Mohangi’s Island’: ‘I said: But, Mohangi, you know that what I like best to do in / life is to
judge – to do lots and lots of judging’ (GFB, 191).
Essential as the exercise of judgement may be for orientation and sense-making,
Durcan becomes extremely exercised in critique of its social inflections. Invoking the
definition outlined above, it can be claimed that the inflection of judgement which most
exercises Durcan is seen in his depiction of representatives of group identities operating as a
self-justifying ‘law court’ (OED, 768) on the identity or behaviour of a single figure. Just as
an individual might hunger for ‘orientation’, so too might this be said to be true of social,
collective identities. These fixed and reified senses of identity, frequently underpinning the
sense of judgement in Durcan’s schema, can be interpreted as corresponding to Fromm’s idea
of psychic and social forms of ‘dependencies and submission[s]’ (Fromm, ix). Indeed they
provide the sense of ‘orientation’ to which each person can be said to aspire; however, they
frequently do so at the expense of individual freedom. Further, the search for collective
identities and orientations often leads to practises and institutions constituted through the
exclusion or persecution of undesirable people, narrative fictions or matters of fact. It is
precisely this function of judgement in the service of orientation which establishes the
‘arbitrary world of borders’ against which Eamon Grennan claims that Durcan’s poetic voices
cry out ‘in the accents of a refugee or a displaced person’ (Grennan, 50). Reinforcing this
point, Stuart Hall remarks regarding collective identities, that they are:
[c]onstructed within the play of power and exclusion, and are the result, not of a natural
and inevitable or primordial totality but of the naturalised, overdetermined process of
‘closure’.
(Hall, 5)
It is the failure of certain elements of society to acknowledge that these borders are indeed
ultimately ‘constructed’ (Hall, 5) and ‘arbitrary’ (Grennan, 50) that Durcan lampoons. This
critique, and Durcan’s persistent self-alignment with the figure of the scapegoat, finds a clear
echo in the work of anthropologist René Girard, quoted at this chapter’s opening.
59
Leaving in abeyance the epistemological claims regarding this innate tendency
towards judgement, this chapter will focus on the drama generated by Durcan from the social
realities of the judicial structure of identity formation. Expanding upon the claim of Durcan’s
poetry being ‘essentially dramatic’ (McCracken 1987, 108), it is possible to say that centre
stage is occupied, in many of his poems, by the figure of a scapegoat: a figure whose identity
is delineated through an antagonistic relationship with either an explicit or implied judicial
presence. Although according to French anthropologist René Girard ‘our society is the most
preoccupied with victims of any that ever was’ (Girard 2001, 161), general understanding of
the ways in which modern societies create scapegoats is often quite minimal. This is an irony
central to both Girard’s and Durcan’s work and one that will be investigated presently. Both
Eamon Grennan and Derek Mahon have drawn attention specifically to the manner in which
Durcan employs the scapegoat voice as an artistic tactic, with Grennan crediting Durcan with
‘the oddly commanding voice of a comic scapegoat’ (Grennan, 59) and Mahon describing
Durcan’s style as that of a poet ‘obscurely aware that he is temperamentally suited to the role
of sacrificial victim’ (Mahon, 167). However, neither Grennan nor Mahon – and, it would
appear, no other critic of Durcan’s work – has taken up this fruitful line of exegesis in a
sustained way.
Many critics have noted, correctly, that Durcan uses voices which are ‘very politically
incorrect’ (Goarzin, 172), ‘defy the courts of convention’ (Dawe 1995, 182-183) and are ‘outcasts, risk-takers, visionaries, teachers’ (McCracken 1996, 97). Few have described this
relationship as that of a scapegoat to a persecuting mob as is done here. Indeed, it is arguable
that Durcan himself is only obliquely aware of the motif of the scapegoat as a structuring
theme in his work. Asked specifically by the current author about the scapegoat’s role in his
work he replied:
60
It’s funny that you should say that because I had often thought – I’ve chosen the covers
of my books always – I know I thought about asking permission to use Holman Hunt’s
painting called ‘The Scapegoat’. I saw it recently for the first time in about twenty or
thirty years in an art gallery in Manchester. It’s of a scapegoat in the Dead Sea, it’s
stunning. I would have first seen a reproduction of that sometime in the late seventies or
circa nineteen eighty. And it was always in the back of my mind. But other than that I
can’t think of anything to say.
(Appendix One)
The fact that Durcan had little to say in interview regarding the scapegoat does not diminish
the presence or power of the trope in his work – it is clear, as per the poet’s admission, that
the spectre of the scapegoat ‘was always at the back of [his] mind’ (Appendix One). Of
course, not every accused or suffering person is a scapegoat, and to name a selection of
Durcan’s speakers as such is to propose the existence of a particular relationship between
them and the group by which they have been rejected or ostracised. It is the judicial shape of
this relationship – and the ways in which Durcan uses it to generate his peculiar brand of
comic pathos – that this chapter will address. It shall be shown, by interpreting his work
through a Girardian framework, that Paul Durcan writes with a sensibility which is acutely
aware that
[S]capegoats multiply wherever human beings seek to lock themselves into a given
identity – communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious and so on.
(Girard 2001, 160).
It is precisely this tendency in groups to ‘lock’ in to certain forms of identity – an apt image
for the work of a poet who employs images of imprisonment so frequently – that Durcan
critiques on the grounds that such identities, as noted above, are ultimately arbitrary. Also,
paraphrasing Fromm and Girard, to submit to a set identity in a spirit of dependency and
submission forecloses the possibilities of self-fashioning which are central in Durcan’s
schema. In this light it is possible to read ‘in reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) as an
imperative – an individual must simply persist with fashioning at all costs and never settle for
an identity promulgated on fixed or ‘arbitrary’ (Grennan, 50) borders.
61
In order to proceed fruitfully with this line of investigation it must first be explained
what precisely is meant by the term scapegoat and also what is implied in the claim that fixed
or reified forms of identity can be interpreted as having a judicial structure. The work of René
Girard, a significant portion of whose career has been invested in probing the phenomenon of
the scapegoat in anthropology and literature, will serve to provide a hermeneutic framework
for this issue. It is to Girard’s work on the relationship between individual scapegoats and the
forces which create and maintain what Grennan refers to as the ‘arbitrary world of borders’
(Grennan, 50) that this study will therefore turn before undertaking an exegesis of particular
Durcan poems. From Girard’s immense and profound explorations of this area it will suffice
to set out three interrelated strands: first, the mimetic and violent nature of human desire and
its role in structuring a community; second, how mimetically constituted communities create
scapegoats; and third, the difference between mythical accounts and Biblical accounts of the
creation of scapegoats. It will be shown that an understanding of these three areas serves to
greatly illuminate much of Paul Durcan’s artistic project and is offers a particularly useful
tool for understanding his ‘comedy of freedom’ (BWC, 40).
Having established this Girardian framework this chapter focuses on two interrelated
areas of Durcan’s work in his depiction of the role of the scapegoat in the judicial shape of
the individual-group relationship. The first area of focus is Durcan’s use of images of judges,
legal professionals and judicial process – all major signifiers in the formal structures of the
judicial and penal system. Durcan’s judges and legal professionals form one half of what he
terms ‘the legal and medical mafia’ (GHR, 65) and represent simultaneously the actual
judicial system and also the social tendency towards consensus, towards a self-justiying
prejudice. The spectres of judges, policemen, security guards and trappings of accusation,
trial and confinement are ubiquitous in Durcan’s work. It is claimed that the figures in whose
voices Durcan writes are often seen as guilty by a judge or judicial system, whereas Durcan
62
will want to imply that these guilty characters are in fact innocent scapegoats. His use of such
legal figures is varied and has developed over the course of his oeuvre. In this study what is
charted are some of the major examples of this artistic tactic including ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW,
29), ‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail’ (TB, 23), ‘This Week The Court Is Sleeping
In Loughrea’ (JBF, 50) as well as drawing interesting connections to some relevant poems
less central to this hermeneutic from across his body of work.
A biographical note is helpful here. Both of Paul Durcan’s parents were solicitors by
training. In 1950, when the poet was six years old, his father was appointed a judge of the
Irish Circuit Court. Durcan himself has commented that ‘from that day on, prison became a
twenty-four-hour reality in my home’ (PDD, 11). While this study does not employ a
dogmatically Freudian hermeneutic, any picture of Durcan’s poetic sensibilities in this area is
incomplete without acknowledging these biographical facts. Indeed, a more extensive focus
on the figure of the father and the domestic scene – and of the father as judge – will be
undertaken in a later chapter.
The second area of focus for this chapter is poems in which the spectre of a mob or
accusatory group is invoked but not given the trappings of officialdom. In these poems
Durcan invokes dramatic potentials inherent in the judicial structure of social realities without
the formal guise of the legal system. Durcan depicts forces in society itself – and their
processes of identity formation and policing – as having a judicial, penal or even persecutory
structure which is exercised through a mob. He draws attention to this reality through
portraits of the structure’s victims. It shall be demonstrated that, even when the identities of
the persecuting forces are unclear or ill-defined, their presence can still be detected in or
implied by the victims’ voices. In the mirror-like surface that is the speech of the scapegoat
can be seen reflected the figures and motivations of the scapegoaters. Poems such as ‘Semper
Et Ubique Fidelis’ and ‘The First Station, Perhaps’ from Endsville, ‘Nora and Hilda’ and
63
‘The Ballet Dancer’ from Sam’s Cross and ‘Polycarp’ and ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ from
Teresa’s Bar will be the subject of this subsection.
This chapter will suggest, finally, using the distinctions between myth and the Gospel
formulated by René Girard, that Durcan uses the relative innocence of the accused in order to
imply a projection of guilt back on the members of the judgemental mob. He uses the figure
and voice of the rejected scapegoat to expose the collusive and occlusive nature of the
narrative fiction which is told by the mob to justify the persecution which they undertake.
The implied moral imperative is that each individual must always resist taking the position of
the judge in the judicial drama of human relations. Personal and collective identity must
never be constructed on the persecution and definitive exclusion of others in society or even
of internally disquieting aspects of the self. This imperative is captured in Durcan’s 1999
poem ‘The First and Last Commandment of the Commander-in-Chief’ (GFB, 236), a
celebration of Mary Robinson. The ‘commandment’, which may be read as the exhortation to
accommodate both social difference and internal contradiction which underpins much of
Durcan’s moral vision, is simply: ‘First and last you must learn to love your different self’.
The point is reinforced by Durcan in 2007’s rendering of this exhortation in the style of the
Biblical Beatitudes: ‘The different shall inherit the earth, if there are any different left’ (LM,
55).
Finally, a close reading of his 1990 poem ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89), will be undertaken.
The poem will be read as a meditation on the appropriate, non-judgemental, response to
difference consistently advocated by Durcan even as early as 1983’s ‘The Rose of Blackpool’
which counsels: ‘You simply have to let the odd ball in’ (JTA, 13). This, it will be seen, is the
central factor contributing to what Eamon Grennan describes as ‘the instinctively Christian
interior of much of Durcan’s work’ (Grennan, 72) – a body of work which is structured ‘As if
betrayal and the overcoming of betrayal / Were an every-minute occurrence’ (AoL, 62). The
64
focus now turns to the work of René Girard in order to set out the hermeneutic framework for
this chapter.
3.2.1 – René Girard and the mimetic nature of human desire
In order to comprehend René Girard’s claims in relation to the creation of scapegoats,
an account must first be given of his understanding of how human communities are
constituted and maintained. Girard’s work emphasises that human behaviour is
fundamentally mimetic in structure. Human beings imitate each other, both deliberately and
non-deliberately, in almost all areas of life. Girard uncontroversially reminds us that
processes of education and socialisation would be impossible without mimesis. However,
where Girard’s theory becomes both particularly interesting and applicable to Durcan’s work
is in the area of human desire. It is Girard’s claim that, while each individual may operate
under the illusion that he or she desires an object directly and for reasons intrinsic to this
object, this is rarely the case in fact. Rather, objects of desire are mediated to us by a third
party: desire, too, is mimetic. As Chris Fleming puts it:
Girard’s basic hypothesis concerning desire is most aptly schematised by the triangle; it is
not, in other words, a theoretical schema which figures desire as a straight line of force
which extends between (desiring) subject and (desired) object, but a complex of lines
running from the subject to the mediator of desire and back again. The object is desired
neither because of its intrinsic value (like, say, the Freudian ‘maternal object’) nor as a
result of being consciously ‘invested in’ or ‘chosen’ by the will of an autonomous subject
– it is desired because the subject [...] imitates the desire of another (an Other), real or
imaginary, who functions as a model for that desire.
(Fleming, 11-12)
The particular area of Durcan’s work on which this chapter will focus are human desires for
objects the attainment of which have a limiting effect on individual freedom: those desires
which drive us to conform, to be seen as respectable and to unquestioningly uphold certain
social conventions. Given the always incomplete nature of human identity and selffashioning, as Durcan sees it, conformity – imitation of others for the sake of fitting in – can
be read as a major evil. In 1987’s ‘Doris Fashions’, a poem which can be interpreted as
65
central to Durcan’s understanding of the self as a fashioned thing, the poet longs to have ‘my
own logo – my own signature tune’ (GHR, 52). Six years later, in ‘A Cold Wind Blew in from
Lake Geneva’ (SMP, 262) Durcan explicitly and defiantly states his ‘logo’ to be ‘Never
Conform’. Such desires as the desire for conformity on behalf of a hegemonic power provide
the motor for the judicial structure of human relations in Durcan’s poems. Mimetic behaviour
and its cognates, though inevitable for the stability of social structures in Girard’s view, can
also have the effect of obliterating individuality in human society. The moral world which
Durcan presents as structured in this way is one whose status quo holds each member of the
society mimetically bound to the other members of the society, imprisoned in a loop of
imitation. It is a world in which – in areas of morality, behaviour, material wealth and much
more – society’s members are committed to playing at what is colloquially referred to as
keeping up with the Joneses in order to sustain the fictions which underwrite their shirking
from the ‘burden of ... freedom’ and their escape ‘into new dependencies and submission’
(Fromm, ix) of conformity.
The crucial factor here, in Girard’s schema, is that none of the imitating parties are
fully aware of the imitative character of their actions. Each member of society is convinced
that he or she desires the object (religious observance, sustaining social conventions,
upholding of moral norms) purely as a result of some good intrinsic to it. The intrinsic
goodness of these objects of desire – or any others – is always in doubt for Girard. However,
he does not deny the importance for each individual of developing a self-conception central to
which is the fiction of oneself as an autonomous, independent desirer. As Fleming
summarises:
[Mimesis] is invariably not conscious. That is, the imitation of models is dissimulated
behind self-representations of unique, object-oriented desires. ... The Girardian subject is
constitutionally imbricated in a public field of misrecognised beliefs and behaviours that
inheres between individuals and which, in turn, shapes them.
(Fleming, 35-36)
66
Just as Girard does, Durcan also understands human subjects to be ‘constitutionally
imbricated in a public field’ (Fleming, 36) – the sheer percentage of his body of work
addressing key human relationships is testament to this. Also, more poetically restating this,
he has written that ‘the figure of all energy is two’ (CIC, 78). This very fact is expanded upon
later in the thesis. However, the key point here is that for both Girard and Durcan this ‘public
field’ is principally one of ‘misrecognised beliefs and behaviours that inheres between
individuals’ (Fleming, 36). Seen in the context of Durcan’s ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44),
defined at the beginning of this study as being constituted by ‘acts that are freely chosen’
(Catechism, 391), it is key here to understand that often, for Durcan these ‘freely chosen’ acts
are mired in a ‘field of misrecognised beliefs and behaviours’. Many of Durcan’s personae, as
shall be demonstrated, are depicted as acting in a way which is ‘not conscious’ of their
mimesis and is in fact based on ‘misrecognised beliefs and behaviours’ (Fleming, 35-36) – for
these moral agents, whose freedom is understood through this definition as so confused and
diminished, surely ‘life is a dream’ (GHR, 12).
Given that such goals as Durcan lampoons are aimed at in this diminished dreamy
state of ‘misrecognised beliefs and behaviours’ (Fleming, 35-36), the very issue of their
illusory value is a central question in Durcan’s schema. Thus, unsurprisingly in Durcan’s
work, the subscribers to any given group identity can often not quite convince themselves that
there is some objective value to the objects of their desires and are, rather, depicted as
narrating their lives through tautologous and self-justificatory fictions. The prime example of
this comes in Durcan’s ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ when the figure of the
judge insists: ‘The law is the law and the law must take its course’ (DD, 140). That this ‘law’
is formulated by and used to justify the positions of those in power in any given group – and
invariably condemns or ostracises undesirables or misfits – is what Durcan chooses to
highlight by his use of the scapegoat figure.
67
Finally, what must be highlighted in order to understand how precisely the scapegoat is
created by a community is the fact that mimesis ultimately produces violent results. Girard
postulates that when two parties converge on one object of desire each party performs for the
other the role of both mediator and obstacle. The first party both designates the object as
desirable for the second party and also provides the primary competition for that object. This
establishes a structure of ‘conflictual mimesis, as it entails the convergence of two or more
desires on the same object’ (Fleming, 19). Mimetic behaviour draws people unwittingly into
conflict with each other. The objects of desire most potent in the judicially-shaped world
which Durcan critiques are all related to social phenomena and behavioural norms and are
again summarised in his ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ (DD, 140):
‘respectability, conformity, legitimacy, pedigree, / Faith, chivalry, property, virility’. That
these objects can never be conclusively attained but rather must be continually mediated by
the members of the community each to the other is the crucial point. In this way each member
of the society both mediates these so-called virtues to the others and stands in judgement of
the other members’ achievement of them. No member of the society is the originator of this
behaviour and all members of society are, to some extent or other, caught in the pattern. Each
member of the culture, to borrow a motif from Durcan, functions as both prisoner of and jailer
to his neighbour in this pattern of unquestioning conformity. That Durcan portrays Irish
society as caught in this mimetic bind is clear from the list of aspirations of which he implies
a critique in ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’23. Indeed, he claims that the
mindless pursuit of the faux-virtues listed above is nothing less than ‘the roots of fascism in
Ireland’ (DD, 140).
23
From ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ in Daddy, Daddy, page 140: ‘respectability, conformity,
legitimacy, pedigree, / Faith, chivalry, property, virility’.
68
3.2.2 – The creation of the scapegoat by the mimetically-constituted community
It has been claimed that in order to give a judicial shape to what Eamon Grennan calls
his ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44), Durcan shows us a world which is constituted by its pursuit
of the goals of ‘respectability, conformity, legitimacy, pedigree, / Faith, chivalry, property,
virility’ (DD, 141). Hopefully it can now also be seen how these goals can only survive in the
context of what might be termed a low level mimetic violence – in the light of which each
member of the society becomes both mediator and obstacle to the other members of society.
To put this more prosaically, such goals as conformity and legitimacy require a community of
members who constantly sit in vigilance and judgement of each other. To be part of a
community which constitutes itself in such a fashion is to have one’s acceptance always held
in abeyance. This sense of being watched and judged clearly has major implications for the
overall quality of human freedom and one’s engagement in self-fashioning.
It is important, in order to fully grasp the impact of both Girard’s theory and Durcan’s
use of this phenomenon in his poetry, to perceive the violence inherent in the structure
outlined above. The violence coded in this dramatic mise en scène is summarised thus by
Girard:
Each becomes the imitator of his own imitator and the model of his own model. Each
tries to push aside the obstacle that the other places in his path. Violence is generated by
this process; or rather violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to
prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or
other means.
(Girard 1979, 9)
Each member of the community will be convinced, in such cases, that their pursuit of the
signifiers of ‘respectability, conformity, legitimacy, pedigree’ is valid. Few members of the
community will be able to see that the power which structures their desires is mimesis itself.
Communities caught in such unconscious mimetic antagonism, Girard claims, are precisely
those most likely to create a scapegoat.
69
Girard’s theory claims that once this tension reaches a crucial and widespread level of
intensity it demands resolution: the reciprocal violence being meted out through the mimetic
actions of the antagonists must be neutralised, lessened or channelled elsewhere. If it is not
neutralised it threatens to destroy all imitating antagonists involved. The channelling of this
mimetic violence away from the imitators and towards an arbitrary, typically defenceless,
target is what Girard describes as the creation of the scapegoat. This study will claim that it
was precisely the operation of this phenomenon that contributed to Ireland becoming what
Durcan describes as:
[A] Celtic cross theocracy, a cocktail of Israel and Iran ... a prison where free speech was
not approved of and where any expression of public affection was frowned upon.
(Durcan: 1999a)
What Durcan’s work does is to reveal this dynamic of mimetic copying and
unacknowledged violent antagonisms buried in the landscape of mid- to late-twentieth century
Ireland. He shows us how, to adopt Fleming’s formulation outlined above, Irish society made
‘self-representations of unique, object-oriented desires’ (Fleming, 36) such as desires for the
outward trappings of social and religious piety: Mass-going, observation of the law, excessive
respect for legal and medical professionals and the lionising of patriarchal structure. However,
what Durcan also shows us, through the insight gained from the scapegoat’s position, is how
artificial and ‘arbitrary’ (Grennan, 50) the structures created in the pursuit of these desires
really are and how, lurking behind the story the community is telling itself to legitimise its
desire for such forms of piety and social structure, is little more than the dissimulated and
slavishly unquestioning imitation of models.
Girardian critic Gill Bailie has described the moment in which the scapegoat is chosen,
by the group which is constituted by little more than its own violent mimesis, in stark terms:
70
A number of acquisitive gestures made toward the same desired object set the conflict in
motion. At the supreme moment of violent dis-integration [sic], another gesture is
mimetically replicated with even more speed and ferocity than the numerous acquisitive
gestures with which the crisis got under way. At the moment when the social frenzy is at
its height, someone designates a rival with a startling accusatory [sic] gesture that has,
under the circumstances, an extremely intense mimetic effect. The melee becomes a
lynch mob.
(Bailie, 122)
With this ‘accusatory gesture’ – central to the judicial structure of much of Durcan’s poetry –
the scapegoat is chosen and the mob’s energy is redirected. This is perhaps the most crucial
point for an understanding of Durcan’s moral vision as it applies to the scapegoat dynamic:
that the redirection of the violent energies of the community is fundamentally a self-serving
misdirection of those energies. This gesture, a judgement of an individual by the community
in the service of ‘orientation’ (LM, 88), by which society creates its scapegoat-outcasts is one
that in effect facilitates an avoidance of self-examination and self-reflection. The community,
as though in a dream, chooses to engage in the scapegoat mechanism in order to avoid
examining its own mimetic structure and behaviour. It is this gesture (and the poet’s artful
appropriation of it) which will be shown to play such a key role in Durcan’s poetry, itself rife
with scenes of accusation, trial and judgement.
It will be instructive before going any further to say precisely on which grounds, in
Girard’s opinion, the mob goes about choosing its scapegoat. In the course of an extensive
probing of European fiction, anthropological reports and religious texts, Girard identified
what he terms ‘the stereotypes of persecution’ (Girard 1986, 12), typical justifications given
by the mob for the selection of a scapegoat. Girard’s exposition of these justifications is
extensive and deep, but the reason most significant and relevant to this study’s purposes here
is summarised thus by James G Williams:
Every culture is a differential system, which means that it coheres as a unitary complex of
differences or distinctions. Those bearing the signs of victims do not differ in the right
way – in a way in keeping with the system’s complex of differences or distinctions; they
are thus always potentially threatening and may be the object of persecution and mob
violence, or they may be set aside as a pool of sacrificial victims.
(Williams, 107)
71
In choosing to write in the voice of a scapegoat, a person who as James G Williams says fails
‘differ in the right way’, Durcan offers an insight into the community’s sense of itself, into the
myths by which it chooses to legitimise those forms of difference acceptable to it. By its very
way of being different the scapegoat shows the mob how provisional – or arbitrary, as
Grennan says – are its own internal differences and tools of orientation and selfunderstanding. If, as René Girard claims, ‘Difference that exists outside the system is
terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, its mortality’
(Girard 1986, 21), then it will be the aim to show how Durcan gently and artfully exploits this
position over the course of his entire body of work. The violence he repeatedly critiques and
laments comes invariably from institutions and sources which act with the conviction that
their legitimising system – be it political, ecclesiastical, social – has a transcendent truth
underpinning it. These groups act with such conviction regarding the truth of their position
that it blinds them to the judicial and persecutory structure of their stories and to the
innocence of the victim. What it will be claimed that Durcan does is to use the voice of the
scapegoat to expose the relativity, fragility and mortality of the persecutory system, all in the
context of a compassionate and comic theatre of poetic voices. To complete this analysis one
final but crucial point must be made.
3.2.3 – Myth and the Gospels: justifying and exposing the scapegoat mechanism
The lynchpin of both Girard’s theory of the scapegoat and of Durcan’s moral vision is
the fact of the innocence of the scapegoat. For Girard, and it will be suggested for Durcan too,
the clearest exposition of this essential element of the structure is contained in the Hebrew
Bible and the New Testament. Durcan’s work is saturated with Biblical imagery and themes.
To see the distinction which Girard draws between myths (stories which are used to legitimise
72
and regulate societies) and the Gospels is to appreciate the vantage point from which Durcan
also writes.
Girard claims that all myths have violent origins. He claims that following the killing of
a victim by a mob in a time of mimetic crisis – as described above – the community’s mimetic
antagonisms are diminished and assuaged temporarily. The community then proceeds, out of
an oblique sense of gratitude to the victim (for its death has brought about a momentary
peace), to revere the victim and to formulate a myth justifying its actions. For Girard this is
the origin of myth: they are structuring stories which justify a posteriori the foundational
murder on which all social order (he claims) is based. All such foundational myths have a
similar pattern, which may be summarised as follows:
(1) A theme of disorder or undifferentiation, (2) the presence of an individual who has
committed some kind of transgression (and who is thus responsible for the state of
undifferentiation), (3) the presence of certain stigmata or ‘victimary signs’ on the
responsible party, (4) a description of the killing or expulsion of the culprit; and (5)
regeneration or return of order.
(Girard 1996, 119)
Myths are formulated by communities that have structured themselves around the murder of a
victim which has received the projection of their collective violence. The myth is, therefore,
the false or deluded story which the community tells itself in order to avoid confronting the
fact that the victim it killed was chosen on very arbitrary grounds and the reasons for which it
was chosen were bound up with the mimetic desires of the members of the group. A myth, in
the Girardian sense, is a narration of the foundational murder or act of violence from the
standpoint of the persecuting majority who wish to self-legitimise – such a myth is to a
hegemonic group the only ‘fiction’ (DD, 71) that matters and can legitimate their ‘vision of
reality’ (GHR, 55). As Girard summarises neatly:
Traces of an act of collective scapegoating that has effectively reconciled a community
are elusive since the phenomenon is necessarily recollected from the deluded standpoint it
generates.
(Girard 1996, 15)
73
And therein lies the key difference between mythical accounts of persecution and
Biblical accounts. It is proposed here that both the Gospel texts and Durcan’s poems, while
they narrate the same events as myth, do so from the point of view of the scapegoated victim.
If this is accepted it is easier to understand the fact that Durcan writes as if ‘betrayal and the
overcoming of betrayal / Were an every-minute occurrence’ (AoL, 61). Such a hermeneutic
approach will be fruitful as it will highlight both Durcan’s and the Gospels’ capacities to
deconstruct the standpoint of the persecuting or judicial power structure. This, precisely, is
their subversive thrust – that they show what the myths cannot say and what the mob is
hiding from itself: that the cohesion of the community has been brought about by the murder
of an arbitrarily chosen victim. It can be seen that the innocence of the victim and what its
selection says about the persecuting mob is a central preoccupying question of Durcan’s
moral vision. Gil Baillie summarises that:
[What] myths fail to see is that the Gospels tell the story of the crucifixion from the point
of view of the victim [sic]. The Gospels make it perfectly clear that the righteous mob, and
the political and religious functionaries that kowtowed to it, were both morally wrong and
mentally mesmerised into believing otherwise.
(Bailie, 129)
It is arguable that the fruits of similar motivations – the taking of a dignified stand in the face
of ‘the righteous mob, and the political and religious functionaries’ – can be found to be
ubiquitous in Durcan’s work.
3.3 – Pedigree ape24: legal functionaries and the judicial structure in Durcan’s moral
map
In his explication of the theories of René Girard in relation to the creation of the scapegoat,
Gill Baillie makes the following statement:
At the moment when the social frenzy is at its height, someone designates a rival with a
startling accusatory [sic] gesture that has, under the circumstances, an extremely intense
mimetic effect. The melee becomes a lynch mob.
(Bailie, 122)
24
Adapted from ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29)
74
In Durcan’s poetry the movement described above by Bailie as the ‘accusatory gesture’ takes
many forms. Not least significant of these instances are poems in which Durcan incorporates
the figure of the judge or solicitor, the courtroom and the trappings of the legal system. This
examination will principally be focussed on two major poems in which he depicts the figure
of the legal professional: ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29) and ‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets
Jail’ (TB, 23). Following this, summary analyses of some poems which are open to a similar
hermeneutic will be made, before finishing with a survey of poems in which Durcan invokes
lesser legal figures such as policemen and security guards.
‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29) was written in response to a painting in Ireland’s National
Gallery. The painting is from the Circle of Riminaldi and was painted in approximately 1620.
The painting features the two Biblical brothers of its title and imagines the moment when
Cain, the first murderer in the Bible, is about to strike his brother, Abel. The victim, Abel, is
depicted as having been brought to the ground and having a posture expressive equally of
shock and protested innocence. Significantly, in relation to how Durcan uses the painting, the
figure of Abel is drawn with his back to the painting’s viewer which confronts the viewer
with a full frontal view of the incensed Cain who is poised to strike a blow. Durcan will
similarly make the character of Cain his focus while aligning the reader’s sympathies with the
victim, Abel. Both the drama of the painting and the Bible story (Genesis 4: 1-8) in which
Cain murders Abel out of jealousy, function as a subtext to Durcan’s poem. This jealousy is a
decisive motivating factor in Durcan’s ‘Cain and Abel’ just as in the Biblical narrative, yet
for dramatic effect it is entirely hidden from the poem’s speaker while being subtly exposed
for the reader.
The speaker in Durcan’s ‘Cain and Abel’ is the murderous brother, ‘Cain MacCarthy’
who narrates the events which surround his fratricidal act. Invoking the distinction between
the mythical and the Gospel point of view elaborated above, it is clear that Durcan is
75
adopting for purposes of satire the mythical view point. He chooses, in order to further
demonstrate the deluded nature of the murderer, both to narrate the events from his point of
view and to give the reader a detailed pen portrait of the victim. In this study’s interpretation
of the role of legal functionaries in the judicial pattern within Durcan’s poetic theatre, it is apt
that the voice of murder is also the voice of ‘a Senior Counsel, forty-nine years old. / A
bencher of the King’s Inns’. For Durcan, legal power and position are rarely depicted as
being used for good ends and are mostly seen to be dupes of mimetic expediency to some
extent or other. It is in Durcan’s artful drawing of these two brothers that interesting parallels
emerge. That these parallels remain unacknowledged by Cain and ultimately contribute to the
tension which fuels the act of fratricide is a key factor in the poem.
The opening three stanzas of the poem form a self-description by ‘Cain MacCarthy’
who is ‘a Senior Counsel’ earning ‘£700,000 a year before tax’. He gloats about his
courtroom performance as he boasts how the formality of legal surroundings accommodates
and legitimises his violence:
When I get a witness in the witness box
I imbibe the witness’s entrails
Only to spit them out again
(CW, 29)
This violence is further boasted of in his proclamation that ‘inside a courtroom I am pedigree
ape’. In Girardian terms this expression could not be more apt: ‘pedigree’ may be read as a
clear echo of Durcan’s list of mocked virtues in ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from
Pindar’ (DD, 140). Further, the verb to ‘ape’ can be read as having both a reference to an
animalistic brutality (i.e. carried out by an ape), but also to the human propensity to copy and
mimic which Girard claims is itself often violent. Cain’s brutality is not limited to the
courtroom, however, and extends into his private life as he boasts that ‘I married my wife for
the broad view of her hips’ and that she is a woman who would ‘jump over the moon / With
me gripping onto her breasts / With my teeth if I told her to –’.
76
The figure of Abel is drawn in interestingly interrelated terms. ‘Father Abel C.S.S.P.’
is a priest belonging to an order known colloquially as the Holy Ghost fathers. In Catholic
piety and in Biblical theology a significant role ascribed to the Holy Ghost is that of
‘advocate’ (John 14:16). Also, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the third gift of the
Holy Spirit is listed as the gift of ‘counsel’ (Catechism, 406). It is deliberately, it can thus be
claimed, that Durcan styles his priest as ‘a Holy Ghost’ in order to imply opposition to his
brother the ‘Senior Counsel’ and his brother’s friend who is considered ‘one of the most
patriotic advocates ever to grace the bar’. More galling for Cain than his brother’s alignment
with an alternative code of justice – one which sees Dublin’s beggars as ‘icons of the Holy
Mother and the Infant Jesus’25 – is quite how taken with Abel that Cain’s own wife seems to
be. The claim that Cain’s wife, who incidentally remains nameless and voiceless, ‘could not
have enough’ of Abel accentuates the contrast between the brothers. The alignment of Abel
with Christ via Cain’s wife’s invitation to him to ‘break bread with us’ identifies Abel with
Jesus, who is in Biblical terms the scapegoat par excellence.
In Durcan’s depiction of Cain’s occasion for violence the true heart of the discord
between the brothers becomes evident. Abel’s murder took place, Cain boasts, ‘the night he
criticised my colleague Mr Wyse Power’. The fraternal disagreement on the subject of ‘Wyse
Power’ (which must be read as wise power, of course), which has already been subtly
embedded in each of their characters, comes to a head. Without warning the ‘Senior Consel’
becomes judge, jury and executioner, delivering his brother to a gruesome and undeserved
fate. A highly sexualised description of Abel’s slaughter is devastating: Cain beats him to
death with ‘my youngest kiddie’s baseball bat’ and boasts that ‘As I thumped him / I
developed an erection’.
25
Durcan uses the same comparison in his most recent volume, remarking of the ‘Mother and Child, Merrion
Square West’: ‘With her infant son in her lap, who does she think she is? / I suppose she thinks she is the
Mother of God’ (P, 80).
77
However, it is in two particular elements of the final stanza that Durcan’s poem
becomes truly masterful. Firstly, Durcan enacts a dramatic shift in tone as Cain arrives at a
revelatory moment:
My beloved brother, I never knew you
Until this moment. I never knew
That deeper than my lechery for my wife
Was my detestation of you.
In Girardian terms, the poem at this point sits delicately poised between a Gospel and a
mythic account of this act of primal violence. In Cain’s abrupt change of tone – from
boastful narration to direct address – the reader might suspect that Durcan is allowing Cain to
emerge from the violence which underpins so much of his identity. A reader familiar with
Durcan might even anticipate a characteristically touching and tender encounter between the
murderer, his brother and the consequences of his violent actions. Cain seems finally to have
a slim chance of being party to the conceit which Durcan has shared with the reader in
drawing his character: the reasons for the deepest feeling in his life being the detestation of
his brother. However, Cain rejects this insight’s power to induce repentance or regret as his
speech takes a chilling turn in the opposite direction. An entire landscape of mercy,
repentance and true self-knowledge is foreclosed as Cain declares that he has ‘never known
such pleasure / As I have known in the liquidation of my brother’ and denies his brother’s
‘last gasp for mercy’.
A close reading of the final couplet of the poem completes the Girardian
interpretation. Cain, in a pair of statements which smack of hubris and yield much to a closer
reading, states: ‘When the police came I told them he had attacked me. / Naturally they
believed me’. This couplet can be interpreted as a depiction of the legal and professional
apparatus and penal structure as being fundamentally conspiratorial in character. The agents
of power in this particular instance – the ‘police’ and the ‘Senior Counsel’ – look only to
each other, and not to the facts, to establish guilt or innocence. Notably, in this particular
78
sector of Durcan’s moral map, the opinion of the wife is neither sought nor stated and is
notably absent. Since he has been murdered, the opinion of Abel cannot be sought of course,
making this the prime mythical situation in the Girardian sense. The very fact that Cain
describes the credulousness of the police as coming ‘naturally’ is the lynchpin of the deluded
structure which Durcan dramatises. Agents of the law acting in this way, as they do in so
many of Durcan’s poems, are depicted as little more than a smartly-dressed mob and display
all the characteristics of one. The blindness of the legal conspiracy to its own motivations in
‘Cain and Abel’ – and hence the reason why its principle actor is undisturbed by his
realisation of fraternal hatred – is summarised in Girard’s statement:
The crowd tends towards persecution since the natural causes of what troubles it and
transforms it into a turba [sic] cannot interest it’
(Girard 1986, 16).
If the legal mob can have no insight into its own constituting mimesis and the true motivating
factors for the violence it sanctions, then it can have no realisation that its victim is in fact a
scapegoat – an innocent victim. It is a measure of Durcan’s artfulness that he affords this
insight to his readers while drawing the voice of Cain so finely and convincingly that the
reality remains hidden from him. Here, to reframe this point central to Durcan’s moral vision,
it can be seen that Durcan has orchestrated a dramatised clash between two conflicting
‘fictions’ (DD, 71) and ‘visions of reality’ (GHR, 55).
It is another act of violence, another depiction of the legal system as conspiratorial
and another condemnation of an innocent victim that is encountered in ‘Wife Who Smashed
Television Gets Jail’ (TB, 23). Although the poem is essentially comic in tone and intent it
will serve as a further example of the role of the scapegoat in Durcan’s schema. The poem,
which is framed as a journalistic report of the trial alluded to in its title, is divisible into two
sections: a first section consisting of twenty one lines in the voice of the husband of the
eponymous wife; the second section consisting of a five line report of the judge’s opinion and
79
verdict. Significantly, the wife herself remains voiceless with her actions and words being
reported only in the context of the slanted monologue of her husband. As with ‘Cain and
Abel’, Durcan narrates the scene from the point of view of the persecutors and jailors: the
reader’s sympathy for the eponymous wife is generated once again by exposing the dramatic
delusions of both her husband and the judge.
What might be described as the comic motor of this poem is Durcan’s skilful
depiction of the contrasting characters who are party to the scene: the husband, his wife and
the judge. The husband seems a man thoroughly lampooned and derided by Durcan. Acting
as a witness in the matter of his wife’s prosecution, he protests that at the moment the act of
violence occurred ‘Me and the kids were peaceably watching Kojak’. He proceeds to
condemn himself by boasting that, instead of confronting his wife’s violence with genuine
concern, intimacy and husbandly affection, he ‘had to bring the kids around to my mother’s
place’ where they arrived ‘just before the finish of Kojak’. It comes as no surprise to read the
husband’s comment that ‘My mother has a fondness for Kojak, my Lord’ as readers have
already seen the husband introducing his own children to the detective. That this brand of
voyeurism of violence is not only what runs in families but also what structures them will be
seen momentarily in the judge’s speech.
The terms in which the wife’s character is drawn and the reasons for which she ‘gets
jail’ are as telling of the legal structure as anything in this poem. This is wholly in line with
the scapegoat pattern: by observing the scapegoat it is possible to see what it is that the
structuring authority cannot accommodate. The wife’s entire presence in the poem is
mediated through the speech of the judge and of her husband who begins by testifying that:
she marched into the living-room and declared
That if I didn’t turn off the television immediately
She’d put her boot through the screen.
(TB: 23)
80
Assertive and angry, the wife is identified as ‘Queen Meave’ by virtue of the fact that the
husband describes Kojak as ‘shooting a dame with the same name as my wife’. Her
identification as ‘Queen Maeve’ links her with a figure of archetypal female power in Irish
mythology – a queen of Connaught in the Ulster Cycle of Irish myths. Violent and assertive
as Maeve’s actions may be, the suggestion in the second third of the poem is that it is her
words which serve to justify her condemnation. Maeve boldly states, in opposition to the
image of the passive and incommunicative husband and children with which the poem
opened, that:
I didn’t get married to a television
And I don’t see why my kids or anybody else’s kids
Should have a television for a father or a mother
We’d be much better off all down the pub talking
Or playing bar-billiards
(TB, 23)
Maeve’s championing of human intimacy and interaction in the face of addiction to TV
violence has a similar irruptive and subversive force as does Abel’s questioning of ‘Wyse
Power’ in ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW: 29).
As is often the case with Durcan, it is in the hubristic speech of the legal figure
‘Justice O’Brádaigh’ that issues crystallise, the satire becomes intense and claustrophobic
moral certainty is mocked. Indeed the figures of the husband and judge might be seen as
merely representing different mimetic aspects of the same judicial structure: the deluded
rationale which structures the husband’s sense of offense is laid ridiculously bare in the
words and actions of the judge. Stating that ‘jail was the only place’ for transgressors such as
Maeve, the judge makes the astounding – but revelatory – claim that ‘television itself could
be said to be the basic unit of the family’. It is this statement, and its moral implications,
which will now be analysed briefly through Girard’s moral framework.
‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail’ may be read in a Girardian framework as
addressing the issues of legitimate and illegitimate violence in society. While the ostensible
81
subject of the poem is the violent actions of the eponymous wife, the true focus of the poem
is the conspiratorial – or mob-like – actions of the two male protagonists: the husband and the
judge. Much as Cain in ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29) finally gains partial insight into his own
violent dislike of his brother, the character of the judge in this poem also admits that the
conduit of acceptable violence, the television, ‘itself could be said to be a basic unit of the
family’. It is this contention – that families are simultaneously protected by the law and also
have as their ‘basic unit’ a form of violent entertainment in which a woman is killed and
‘snarled’ at – that provides the backdrop for the wife’s imprisonment. The judge’s unabashed
proclamation of the fact that certain types of violence have a rightful place at the heart of the
family (a point which was moot in the husband’s speech) serves to condemn both men. It is
from their ironic blindness to this point (or choosing to ignore it, perhaps) that they summon
the moral vim to scapegoat the figure of the wife. As with the legal figure of ‘Cain
MacCarthy’ (CW: 29) the true motor of the persecutors’ actions is not justice or issues of
right or wrong, but imitation, mimesis – the actions of the husband clearly shadow those of
Kojak and the actions of the judge clearly shadow those of both Kojak and the husband. Once
again, to paraphrase ‘Cain and Abel’, the judicial structure is driven by the impulse to be
‘pedigree ape’.
While this close reading of two Durcan poems serves amply to illustrate the point
regarding the role of legal functionaries in the judicial world of Durcan’s theatre, a summary
of other similar poems is now in order. ‘Two History Professors Found Guilty Of Murder’
(SC, 26) bears a similar structure to ‘Wife Who Smashed Television’ (TB, 23) in its depiction
of the legal apparatus as simultaneously providing the vehicle for persecution of an innocent
victim – in this case of ‘Jesus Trinidad’ – and remaining blind to its own structuring violence.
‘Bishop of Cork Murders Wife’ (SC, 53) also operates similarly, while a comparable
blindness or méconnaissance is at the heart of 1978’s ‘A Drunk Judge Looks At The
82
Accused’ (SC, 51). The dystopian view of a courtroom provided in ‘This Week The Court Is
Sleeping In Loughrea’ (JBF, 50) includes many of the players in the dramatic ensemble
invoked above: a legal team with a judge who ‘snores / Dreaming of the Good Old Days as a
Drunken Devil’, ‘Rev. Fr Perjury’, ‘Policemen stupefied by poitín’ and ‘An invisible mob’.
Complimentary to these poems, if slightly tangential, is Durcan’s frequent mention of
security guards. In seeing these security guards as objects of gentle scorn and derision it is
possible to interpret security itself as being yet another inflection of the claustrophobic
virtues chronicled in ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ (DD, 140). The kind of
security critiqued by Durcan, which can be read as the first step on a ladder towards
complacency and hubris, is analogous to that named in Shakespeare’s MacBeth when Hecat
says: ‘And you all know security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy’ (Shakespeare 1967, Act 3,
Scene 5). As well as being peripheral presences in many Durcan poems, security guards (and
cognate figures) are central to ‘Bewley’s Oriental Café, Westmoreland Street’ (BWC, 11),
‘The Cabinet Table’ (BWC, 22) , ‘Death Camp’ (BWC, 55), ‘On Being Required to Remove
My Trouser Belt at Dublin Airport Security’ (LM, 37), ‘Going Home to Russia’ (GHR, 65)
and ‘Golden Island Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 1) amongst others. Without having the power
and gravity of presence accorded to judges and solicitors in Durcan’s poetic economy, such
figures as the ‘Security Guard’ (BWC, 11) and the ‘small, bejoweled, red-headed, middleaged lady in black’ (AoL, 1) are minor injunctive presences on Durcan’s map. They serve, in
Durcan’s poetic theatre, as constant reminders – both jocose and serious – of the claim made
in ‘Going Home to Russia’ (GHR, 65): ‘that in Ireland scarcely anybody is free / To work or
to have a home or to read or write’.
In the introductory remarks for this chapter the theme proposed for examination was
the judicial shape of the relationship between the rejected individual (the victim or scapegoat)
and the rejecting social structure (frequently constituted as or acting like a mob). What has
83
been clearly shown, above, is the role which Durcan ascribes to legal professionals and
formal legal structures in the upholding of and perpetuation of such judicial structures. This
analysis now turns to examining the judicial structure of his map where no formal legal
professionals are explicitly invoked. In Durcan’s 1980 text ‘This Week The Court Is Sleeping
In Loughrea’ (JBF, 50) he critiques solicitors, barristers, judges, policemen and a priest
before noting that ‘up in the amphitheatre of the public gallery / An invisible mob are
chewing the cud’. It is to this ‘invisible mob’ and the judicial structure of its relation to the
individuals – who in the words of Girardian critic James G Williams ‘do not differ in the
right way’ (Williams, 107) – that this study now turns.
3.4 – His neighbours look askance26: small-town mobs, social pressure and the judicial
structure in Durcan’s moral map
From the beginning of Durcan’s oeuvre the depiction of the troubled relationship
between the individual subject and the ‘invisible mob’ (JBF, 50) has been paramount. That
this mob is not literally invisible is not at question – it is claimed here, adopting a Girardian
schema, that when human groups act collectively their constitution as a mob is invisible to
the individual actors. The voice of an individual subject who is ill at ease with collective
expressions of identity is the voice most frequently used by Durcan. Beginning with two of
his earliest poems from 1967’s Endsville and proceeding via examples from Teresa’s Bar
(1976) and Sam’s Cross (1978) it is possible to demonstrate how Durcan has variously
employed this scapegoat-mob motif to foreground individual subjectivity and imply critique
of forms of collective identity. Even though no legal functionaries or scenes may be explicitly
invoked here, the playing off against one another of a rejected individual and a mob may be
seen as a continuation of the judicial motif in Durcan’s works. The mob stands as a spectre of
judgement against the individual in the sense that it has prescribed and polices a set of
26
Adapted from ‘The Ballet Dancer’ (SC, 37)
84
behavioural or identity-related norms against which the individual is judged to have
transgressed. Invariably, it is shown here, the mob is depicted as somehow having betrayed,
rejected, stood in antagonistic relationship to or punished the individual on account of the
individual’s difference. All of these acts may be said to be of a judicial shape in Durcan’s
schema insofar as they mirror the arch-judicial scene of the Christian passion: the human
drama played out from the betrayal of Christ to his crucifixion on Good Friday. Echoes of
this Christian drama [analogous, of course to the Girardian schema laid out above] can be
found in each of the Durcan poems under examination here.
It will be instructive to make some summary reflections on two early Durcan
poems; ‘Semper Et Ubique Fidelis’ (E, 15) and ‘The First Station, Perhaps’ (E, 25) in order
to explore the very earliest stage in his use of judicial process as a dramatic motif. Neither
poem is as fully developed as either ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29) or ‘Wife Who Smashed
Television Gets Jail’ (TB, 23), yet both pieces resonate with the Girardian typology laid out
above. Both poems deliver to the readers a first person monologue in the voice of the victim
of a crisis figured as a judicial or penal process. ‘Semper Et Ubique Fidelis’27 (E, 15), whose
ironic title translates from Latin as always and everywhere faithful or loyal, details precisely
the opposite phenomenon: a failure of loyalty. The speaker of the four stanza lyric written in
rhyming couplets accuses his ‘friends’, the ‘Grand schoolmate, grand priest’ of swearing by a
code of loyalty and subsequently breaking it when it ceased to be convenient. The group
which the victim-speaker accuses once ‘said that to be loyal was all’, yet ‘in dark and
troubled times / Of my body and mind’ failed to remain loyal and in fact ‘plainly did not care
/ If I never again saw open air’. While what motivates the ‘schoolmate’ and ‘grand priest’ to
disloyalty is not commented upon by Durcan – here, through a purely Girardian hermeneutic
it is possible to argue that the poem is somewhat underdeveloped towards Durcan’s mature
27
This Latin phrase is the motto of Gonzaga College, attended by Durcan as a young man. It may be seen on the
Gonzaga College website www.gonzaga.ie [accessed on 6th March 2013]
85
style – the reader is left to surmise that the speaker’s rejection is intimately bound up with the
‘dark and troubled times / Of my body and mind’. The speaker’s concluding injunction to his
betrayers to ‘Keep back and keep your half crowns / Who passed me by when I was down’
may be read as an oblique reference to the betrayal of the Biblical scapegoat Christ by Judas
for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26: 14-16). Not only does it mirror Christ’s betrayal for
money but it also forecloses any attempt at redemption and repentance on behalf of the
betrayers in a way that mirrors a similar scene for Judas in Matthew 27: 3-5.
The epigrammatic couplet ‘The First Station, Perhaps’ (E, 25) can be fruitfully read as
a companion piece to ‘Semper Et Ubique Fidelis’ (E, 15). Its speaker laments: ‘Kissed and
whipped in my native town / I am a fish that wants to drown’. Even beyond the poem’s title,
a Biblical parallel is clear: Christ was betrayed by a kiss (Matthew 26: 47-50) and scourged at
a pillar (John 19:1). Also, one of the major symbols of the early Christian church and of
Christ amongst the early Christians was the fish. Parallel to the Biblical overtones the poem
may be read in the voice of a speaker who perceives their native environment as absolutely
fickle and hostile. Just as the speaker in ‘Semper Et Ubique Fidelis’ rails against being
disposed of by those who had promised loyalty, so too does the speaker of ‘The First Station,
Perhaps’ find himself in a situation in which the conditions most native and nurturing now
appear indifferent and even hostile. That the speakers’ discomfort and alienation is linked in
both instances to the cruelty or disloyalty of others (an obliquely judicial and penal situation
in both cases) allows both poems to be read fruitfully as early examples of the scapegoat
motif.
The judicial mise en scène which was nascent in Durcan’s first work develops further
in more expansive and daring poems such as ‘Nora and Hilda’ (SC, 22) and ‘The Ballet
Dancer’ (SC, 37) from 1978’s volume Sam’s Cross. In both cases here Durcan seems at pains
to draw attention to how a group has judged or ostracised an individual on the basis that, in
86
James Williams’ terms they ‘do not differ in the right way’ (Williams, 107). Both poems are
dramatic tableaux in which the figures of the individual characters are drawn in pointed
contrast to their invariably hostile surroundings.
‘Nora and Hilda’ (SC, 22) is a narrative poem in twelve four line stanzas. It details, in
a style which is half parable and half social commentary, the irruptive influence of the
presence of a lesbian couple on ‘the people of the village’ in a small-town Ireland. It is
possible to surmise that the subversive difference embodied in the couple has the same
puncturing effect on the moral uniformity and homogeneity of the small town as Durcan
sought to assert through the juxtaposing of individual freedom itself with political and
ecclesiastical hegemonies in other poems. Hilda, who moves in with Nora, is said to be
‘young and quiet and pretty and gay’, a ‘stranger’ who moves into the village which itself is
‘no pretty, gay place’. As has been seen with ‘Cain and Abel’ (CW, 29) and ‘Wife Who
Smashed Television Gets Jail’ (TB, 23), the introduction of an element which fails to ‘differ
in the right way’ awakens the violence which was hidden yet latent in the situation: ‘They
had always hated her but when Hilda arrived / Their hatred blossomed into a murderous
envy’. Once again, in Girardian terms, Durcan maps the escalation and transference of
ordinarily contained violence channelled from a group onto a pair of innocent victims.
Characteristically, this is done by drawing an analogy between the two lovers and the figure
of Christ. While the people of the village invoke the spectre of the dead patriarchal figure of
Nora’s father, Nora herself can be confident in her father’s assurances that ‘Christ lived not in
lamps and statues // But occasionally in human hearts made of flesh and blood’. The poem
falls at times into lyricism celebratory of the colour found in the couple with ‘dresses like
bunches of wild flowers’ and descriptions of how ‘they also slipped / Softly into one
another’s arms.’ The final stanza brings the penal structure of the mob’s relationship to the
couple into focus once again. The final couplet of ‘Whether or not they will commit suicide /
87
Is, unlike the village they live in, an open question’, might be read as a refiguring of the
‘murderous’ reality evoked above. Rather than succumb to some kind of lynching or social
expulsion, it is suggested that the couple may internalise the murderous violence in the
community and self-destruct. While, in line with the celebration of the two characters
throughout the poem it can be said that Durcan’s final couplet is ultimately an ironic and
satirical one, it nevertheless draws upon the spectre of scapegoat lynching in a different light.
‘And still his neighbours look askance at him’ (SC, 37) – the reaction of the
neighbourhood crowd to the subject of 1978’s ‘The Ballet Dancer’ – might well have been
written in relation to Abel, the television-smashing wife, Nora and Hilda or a host of other
Durcan ‘odd balls’ (JTA, 13). A brief lyric of three five-line verses, ‘The Ballet Dancer’ finds
its place in the now familiar judicial scene of the individual subject set in contrast to the moblike neighbours. The refrain quoted above and repeated in each of the poem’s stanzas details
the relationship of the group to the differing individual. In spite of the fact that he is also
embedded in the social fabric by some signifiers of respectability – his ‘sons are engine
drivers / with C.I.E.’, his wife sits ‘On church committees of all kinds’ – still the ‘Ballet
Dancer’ is viewed with the mix of ‘suspicion’ and ‘disapproval’ (OED, 77 definition of
‘askance’) connoted in the refrain. The nub of the disapproval felt by the mob for this
character is identified in the fact that his stereotypically effeminate behaviour uncomfortably
blurs boundaries between the accepted social roles of man and woman: ‘Oh how they dread
the woman in the man’. The championing of a false consensus which perceives woman and
man as immiscible elements and irreconcilable opposites is critiqued by Durcan as overly
simplistic and reductive. That this consensus is used to judge – or ‘look askance at’ –
nonconformists in order merely for the mob to bolster its own sense of identity and
orientation (‘The judge has a great sense of orientation’ (LM, 88)) is what is implicitly
lampooned.
88
In order to fully develop this analysis of Durcan’s use of the scapegoat figure and the
judicial structure of much of his poetry this analysis turns, penultimately, to an assessment of
two poems from 1976’s Teresa’s Bar: ‘Polycarp’ (TB, 24) and ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ (TB,
50). Anne Goarzin has recently written of ‘Polycarp’ (TB, 24) that it may be counted among
Durcan’s poems which ‘propose surrogate codes as an alternative to a tendency to mildly
accommodate established discourses in a corrupted Ireland’ (Goarzin, 168). While there is
clearly an element of truth to this analysis, this thesis will claim that poems such as Polycarp
have a cross-cultural truth which contains a deeper anthropological insight than a merely
cultural critique. ‘Polycarp’ and similar poems, as this study has been mapping, is drawn at
precisely the penal intersection between all group identities and individual experiences.
Therefore, to respond to Goarzin, it can be argued that ‘Polycarp’ does not so much ‘propose
surrogate codes’ as champion a sceptical stance towards the applicability of a code of any
kind to the myriad varieties of human life. It is the impulse to codify, to systematise, to
‘judge’ (LM, 88), which Durcan resists as frequently being at the root of destruction of
human freedom. Polycarp, who has ‘quit the priesthood’ (often a very socially circumscribed
role) and has the courage ‘to be his own sweet self’ finds himself looked askance at by
‘Respectability’s crew’ on ‘Respectability Hill’. His behaviour is odious to the mob which
bolsters its own identity by victimising the weak, speaking derogatively about women and
constituting themselves as a ‘crew’. To the faux virtue of ‘respectability’ – named, of course
in ‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ (DD, 140) – is added that of ‘decency’
against which Polycarp is judged by the mob to have transgressed. That the mob moves
towards lynching the cause of their disquiet – ‘they’ll put him on his knees / In the
amphitheatre soon’ – is consistent with Durcan’s vision. Indeed, as per Girard, this violent
antipathy was latent before the crisis and coded into Durcan’s characterisation of the two
antagonists. Polycarp is rendered in terms of organic vitality and abundance – ‘Foliages of
89
dark green oaks are his torsos; / And in the cambium of his bark juice lies’. Contrary to this,
‘Respectability’s crew’ have the opposite attitude to nature and organic vitality: they ‘make
their own coffins / Which they use first as coffee tables’. Polycarp’s quitting the priesthood
and ‘living back at home’ is figured as the same irruptive phenomenon – a trigger for the mob
– as is the arrival of Hilda and ‘Nora and Hilda’ (SC, 22). However, while the final note of
‘Nora and Hilda’ (SC, 22) may be one of dark ambiguity, ‘Polycarp’ ends on a celebratory
and even redemptive note as Durcan refuses the dynamic of scapegoating:
But his smile will wear them down
By the blood-light of the moon
And in summer’s golden rains
He’ll burst out in fruit all over[;]
(TB: 25)
In conclusion to these investigations of the judicial shape of Durcan’s depiction of
group-individual identity formation, it can be claimed that ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ (TB, 50)
represents a crucial juncture in the development of his art. ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ was taken
to be so representative of Durcan’s style that its name was appropriated as the title of a book
of essays released in tribute to the poet in 199628. Describing the predicament of modern
man, in a quote seminal to the hermeneutic framework of this study, psychiatrist Erich
Fromm formulates this insight regarding what he refers to as the ‘burden’ (Fromm, ix) of
freedom:
Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated
and thereby anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is
confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new
dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom
which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.
(Fromm, ix)
Much of Durcan’s later art might be interpreted as directly addressing the various facets of
the experience of being ‘anxious and powerless’ in the face of this freedom. His speakers
inhabit this anxiety and powerlessness and are depicted as grappling with its consequences. If
28
The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan (1996, Dublin: New Island) edited by Colm Tóibín.
90
Jean Paul Sartre claims that, in the ethical and existential sense man is ‘condemned to be
free’ (Sartre 1958, 129), it is useful to adopt a similar interpretation of Fromm’s predicament
outlined above in analysis of ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’. To postulate that man is condemned to
be free in the Frommian sense – condemned to choose and oscillate between ‘dependencies
and submission’ and ‘the full realisation of positive freedom’ – offers a particularly
interesting hermeneutic standpoint from which to read the refrain of ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’
(TB, 50): ‘Oh but it’s the small bit of furze between two towns / Is what makes the Kilfenora
Teaboy really run’ [sic]. This state of consciousness and identity depicted by Durcan – of
being forever ‘between two towns’ of ‘dependencies and submission’ and ‘the full realisation
of positive freedom’ – informs this poem and much of his later work.
‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ (TB, 50) is a first person monologue written in the persona of
the eponymous ‘Teaboy’. Its four eight-line stanzas are each followed by an italicised refrain
stated in the above paragraph. The refrain is altered slightly after the final stanza to begin
‘But Oh it’s the small bit of furze’ [sic]. A rhapsodic anti-hero, the Teaboy is at once boastful
and frustrated, contented and yearning, a figure of achievement and also servility. It would
seem that his entire character displays a type of ambivalence and ambiguity in relation to his
social identity. Standing in stark contrast to the typical alpha-male, the Teaboy ‘will not take
up the gun’, claims that ‘my dear wife beats me’ even though ‘I make all my tea for her’ and
‘I also thatch her roof’. His complaints regarding his servile position of being ‘her teaboy on
the hill’ are blended with declarations of oblique pride that ‘I am happy making tea’, ‘I sit out
and watch them all / Ring-a-rosying in the street’ and ‘I do a small bit of sheepfarming on the
side’. The Teaboy’s self-description as ‘sheepfarming on the side’ may also be read as
literary alignment of him with the Biblical scapegoat, Christ, who is often characterised as a
shepherd (John 10:11). The Teaboy’s self-description in the final stanza as an artist who
cannot make a living at his art continues his pained self-portrait. In drawing the Teaboy as
91
such a conflicted character, one about whom the readers can never quite make up their minds,
Durcan is artfully playing with the reader’s impulse to judge. His protest that ‘I’m a famous
caveman too; / I paint pictures by the hundred / But you can’t sell walls’ may be read as
somewhat ironically prophetic given the titles of Durcan’s successful later volumes Cries of
An Irish Caveman (2001) and The Berlin Wall Café (1985).
Durcan here positions his poem in full awareness of Erich Fromm’s observation that
‘It is important to consider how our culture fosters this tendency to conform’; that ‘the
suppression of spontaneous feelings, and thereby of the development of genuine
individuality, starts very early’ (Fromm, 208-209). It will be claimed that it is precisely the
tendency towards ‘suppression of spontaneous feelings’ which operates in a judicial structure
in Durcan’s later art. He makes us aware of the judicial, suppressive nature of this structure in
society not by naming it as a target (as in his early work), but by transgressing against its
proscriptions. His pointed refusal, aesthetically at least, to totally submit to the prison of this
suppression which, as Fromm continues, ‘often results in the elimination of spontaneity and
in the substitution of original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts, and wishes’
characterises the emotional tableaus which begin with ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ and continue
into his latest volume. His poems may be read as a battle-cry for the emotional and psychic
dignity of everyman, a desire to live with integrity in the light of the realisation stated in ‘The
Woman with the Keys to Stalin’s House’:
Can there be anyone in the world who has not got mixed
feelings?
Should there be anyone in the world who has not got mixed
feelings?
(GHR, 88)
Durcan’s earlier poems had a dramatic mise en scène in which the forces of individual
integrity were set against very clearly identifiable social, political or moral signifiers and
forces of repression. The dramatic motor of those earlier poems might be said to be the fact of
92
the innocence of the individual before the loaded and perverse charges of the group. Thus it is
claimed that his early individuals are often scapegoats, wrongly accused. So too it is now
claimed that Durcan’s later poems implicitly pit the individual speaker against a new, perhaps
more evasive and invidious, set of judging forces. The presence of such forces is delineated
in the following passage from Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom:
Many psychiatrists, including psychoanalysts, have painted the picture of a ‘normal’
personality which is never too sad, too angry, or too excited. They use words like
‘infantile’ or ’neurotic’ to denounce traits or types of personalities that do not conform
with the conventional pattern of a ‘normal’ individual. This kind of influence is in a way
more dangerous than the older and franker forms of name-calling. Then the individual
knew at least that there was some person or some doctrine which criticised him and he
could fight back. But who can fight back at ‘science’?
(Fromm, 213)
A close reading of Fromm here serves to illuminate much of Durcan’s later work. Fromm
claims that psychiatric and psychoanalytic generalisations with regard to normality
‘denounce’ types of personalities ‘that do not conform’. The movement from reaction against
the ‘older and franker forms of name-calling’ (in Durcan’s terms Church doctrine, political
dogma, small-town moral constriction) to the reaction against a faceless force which
denounces ‘traits or types of personalities that do not conform’, is, in many ways, the
movement of Durcan’s career. His art dramatises a comic protest against the restrictive and
prescriptive norms of society – which sit in judgement of us all. It is at modern man’s
ambivalent reactions to restrictive norms – which provide him simultaneously with a prison
and a sense of ‘orientation’ (LM, 88) – that Durcan’s work aims its dramatic thrust. The
profound human insight of his work is coded in the two possible interpretations of the refrain
from ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ noted in italics above. That which is ‘between two towns’ can
indeed make modern man run – both in fear because he craves the socially mediated identity
of the ‘town’ and in desire and exhilaration at being able to escape the town’s constrictions. In
order to draw a conclusion to this examination of the operation of judicial structure in
Durcan’s oeuvre attention now turns to a poem which may be read as a microcosm of
93
Durcan’s artistic journey in relation to this subject. It is a poem in five movements to which
he devoted a section of his prizewinning collection Daddy, Daddy. The poem’s title is
‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89).
3.5 – Advocating amnesties: regarding innocence, ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89) and Durcan’s
counter-strategies to judicial structures in his moral map
As has been demonstrated, a significant amount of Paul Durcan’s body of work is
preoccupied with the poetic dramatisation of a tendency in human beings, institutions and
cultures to judge and reject certain people or ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 55). However, this
study of this particular preoccupation cannot aspire to being comprehensive without
mentioning the remedial forces and corrective approaches which Durcan’s poetry proposes in
the face of this judgemental tendency.
Durcan’s poetry takes a stand against the condemnatory and accusatory paradigms
which structure forms of group identity, by declaring at every turn – often explicitly but more
often by implication – the innocence of his poems’ speakers and subjects. The word
innocence itself makes appearances in Durcan’s work too numerous to be exhaustively
chronicled, from the ‘crazy innocence’ of ‘Raftery in Tokyo’ (AoL, 113), and ‘the Eucharist
of her innocence’ of ‘The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986’ (GHR, 27) to the ‘I held on to
my innocence’ of ‘Saint Cecilia’ (CW, 41). Also, in frequently invoking an aesthetic pattern
loosely based on the Christian Gospels [as detailed above in section 1.1.2], Durcan further
emphasises the innocence of his speakers by aligning them with the archetypal Biblical
innocent, Christ. In order to supplement this detailing of his use of the word innocence and
to complete the reading of the operation of judicial structure in Durcan’s work attention now
turns to his 1990 poem ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89).
‘Amnesty’ is a five part poem, written in free verse, in the voice of a first person
narrator. It depicts snapshots of the speaker’s journey from childhood to his own experience
94
as father. Insofar as the poem depicts a movement over the period of the speaker’s life from
incarceration to exile and freedom, from constriction to movement, it may be read as both a
joyful counterpoint and understated allusion to Wordsworth’s lines in ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (Wordsworth, 299). Depicting an
epistemological and perhaps social reality, Wordsworth writes that:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
(Wordsworth, 299)
Durcan’s poem works in the opposite direction, beginning with the image of an incarcerated
child: ‘when he was born, he was born in prison, / A confinement within a confinement’. This
‘confinement’ denotes both a familial mise en scène – depicted through the claustrophobic
domestic scene and authoritarian father figure – and announces an allegory for the
individual’s relationship to oppressively paternalistic inflections of social identity. In this
sense the poem bears at least a superficial similarity to 1987’s ‘Doris Fashions’ (GHR, 51)
whose speaker begins with a movement towards confinement: ‘On the instructions of the
parole officer, I telephoned the / prison’. This use of prison as an existential allegory is an
often-used aesthetic technique most memorably perfected by writers such as Franz Kafka and
Albert Camus.
Durcan’s poem utilises three interrelated words of refrain to heighten its dramatic
tone: ‘Amnesty’ (used as both a noun and a proper name), ‘pardon’ and ‘oblivion’. The
etymology of these words and their significance will be noted shortly. It is worth noting,
before commencing a close reading of the poem, that its title ‘Amnesty’ is also the name of
perhaps the largest international human rights organisation, Amnesty International. Amnesty
International was founded in 1961 by Paul Durcan’s cousin and godfather Seán MacBride
(PDD, 100), together with Peter Bennenson, an English lawyer. Published in the volume
95
immediately following Seán MacBride’s death in 1988, ‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89) sits in
interesting contrast to the ‘Daddy, Daddy’29 poems in that eponymous volume.
‘Amnesty’ begins with the contrasting images of ‘a small boy’ and the ‘perimeter wall
of a prison’. In contrast to the following four sections of the poem, the initial seven line verse
is in the voice of a third person observer and serves to set the tone of the poem. Referring to a
young boy of less than ten years, the poem reads:
He does not know, and nobody is ever going to tell him,
That when he was born, he was born in prison,
A confinement within a confinement.
Pardon? Pardon.
(DD, 89)
The poem’s first three sections might be read as depicting stages in the growth of the
consciousness of the incarcerated child as he grapples to come to terms with the nature and
fact of his confinement. The father figure in the poem is depicted as a type of supreme
patriarch – a man who shapes and blesses the world of his child through his words. Durcan
equates the power of the father with his power of language. Through ‘Daddy’s’ habitual
tendency to ‘spin around from the driving wheel and explain’, the world of the child comes
into being. Through this very naming, the world is sanctified for the child as:
[T]he names of places and people
Are the signs by which he teaches me
That they are holy and precious.
(DD, 89)
However, it is in the refusal of the father to speak about or name the prison – ‘I am dejected
that Daddy does not name it’ – that the child’s consciousness begins to waken into a grim
realisation that ‘perhaps it is that prisoners are not holy and precious people’ and that ‘the
plankton of all human life is mercilessness’. This patriarchal refusal to name might be
interpreted as an echo of the forms of rejection and exile dealt with in earlier sections of this
29
The ‘Daddy, Daddy’ poems referred to here form a subsection (pp. 99-185) within Durcan’s 1990 collection
Daddy, Daddy.
96
chapter. Within the chapter’s hermeneutic, this clearly finds its most logical extension
‘Daddy’ is read as representing the dominant, overbearing and conspiratorial forms of
discourse which it has been claimed create scapegoats for their own benefit.
And yet, ‘Daddy’ is not merely the signifier of an abstract social or political
phenomenon. He is figured – most movingly in the end of the poem’s third and beginning of
its fourth sections – as a real figure with a defined physical and psychic presence. As Fintan
O’Toole has written more generally of Durcan’s work:
There is no real dividing line between the public and the private, the emotional and the
political in his work. The state has for him a local habitation and a name, an intimate
psychic presence that makes it far more than a collective abstraction.
(O’Toole, 31)
From the beginning of the third section of the poem – ‘I lie awake in bed at night fretting
about the prison’ – to the end of the fourth section’s first stanza, incarceration is rendered in
nightmarish depiction of the domestic space and players. In bed, the speaker watches ‘passing
cars toss shadows on the ceiling / That are cell bars’, lies to his father’s inquiry of ‘Are you
all right?’ and states that ‘The pink vomit of my big brother’s sarcasm is all over my face’.
While the mention of ‘big brother’ clearly has Orwellian connotations, it is the massive
failure of communication which characterises the incarceration. The father is a figure who
won’t name certain realities, the speaker-son tells lies in fear of his father and the speech of
the brother is marked with the ‘vomit’ of ‘sarcasm’. This is all compounded by the repeated
refrain quoted above: ‘Pardon? Pardon.’ This artful juxtaposition of the two words is
simultaneously a description of a reaction to something misheard and a plea for and granting
of ‘pardon’ which may be defined as ‘the action of forgiving or being forgiven for an error or
offence’ (OED, 1041).
It is necessary, in an effort to draw connections between this poem and the
specifically Girardian-Biblical hermeneutic framework of this chapter laid out earlier, to
consider the content of the poem’s third section. Here, the fact of the boy’s incarceration is
97
extended into the domains of spiritual and existential allegory. The young boy imagines a
figure as lofty and prominent as the Pope to be an incarcerated figure: ‘When the Vicar of
Christ’s / Standing out there, explaining things to the world, / What does he make of the bars
across his eyes?’ It can be suggested that this image owes something to the painting ‘Study
after Velasquez I, 1950’ by Francis Bacon, an artist for whom Durcan has publically
expressed admiration. If Durcan gives us the image of incarceration as existential allegory
applicable to everyone from a boy of ‘nine and a half’ years old and the ‘Vicar of Christ’ he
also prescribes solace in the form of solidarity with the Biblical innocent victim-scapegoat
Christ:
Yet Jesus is the patron saint of all prisoners
Because he was a prisoner himself,
Not a special-category prisoner
But a prisoner like the rest of us,
One of three.
(DD, 89)
This is perfectly in line with the aesthetic presuppositions of his work as they have been thus
far discerned through the Girardian framework; that all persons whose identities are fixed or
prescribed by forces beyond their control are in some sense innocent victims in a way
analogous to Christ.
The dramatic turn in ‘Amnesty’ comes with the speaker’s Luciferian disobedience of
his father at the beginning of the fourth section. The nature of the speaker’s offence is key:
‘Against Daddy’s wishes I courted a black girl’. ‘Black’ here can clearly be read in many
ways – in reference to skin colour surely, but also insofar as ‘black’ connotes the outsider and
the black sheep. Durcan has used this technique elsewhere implicitly and most explicitly in
‘The Black Cow of the Family’ (CIC: 97). Intriguingly, his 1975 piece ‘Black Sister’
similarly depicts the figure of a black woman as having a subversive and irruptive influence
on a penal situation as she bursts ‘into a country courthouse / Machine gun firing from your
thigh’ (OW, 40). In ‘Amnesty’, the punishment for this disobedience of the patriarch is
98
banishment. By now this theme of the punishment of difference and the realities of exile,
incarceration and scorn are familiar. However, it is in the final two sections of the poem that
Durcan offers us an alternative to the cruel realities of the judicially-shaped world of the
poem’s first three sections. If the incarceration was figured as a problem of language – ‘I am
dejected that Daddy does not name it’ – so too is freedom drawn in these terms.
The second stanza of ‘Amnesty’s’ fifth section details how the speaker ‘went to
another country and to a far place’, married, and himself became a father. Throughout the
second half of ‘Amnesty’ two words resonate: ‘oblivion’ and ‘Amnesty’ itself and these
words are worth dwelling upon. The adopted home of the couple is described as a ‘dark new
habitat in oblivion’. Oblivion itself is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the state
of being forgotten’ (OED, 987). The situating of the family in a place of deliberate forgetting
is a counteraction to the claustrophobic prison-like scenes depicted earlier in the poem.
However, it is in the word ‘Amnesty’ itself that this sense of ‘forgetting’ reaches its most
crystallised, rhapsodic expression. Having himself come from a family in which speech and
language were what framed his sense of incarceration, the speaker is described by Durcan as
engaged in a very pointed act of naming: naming his youngest child, a girl, Amnesty. Durcan
writes that his speaker heard the word Amnesty in the context of a radio broadcast ‘about
people who write letters to prisoners’. The appeal of Amnesty hinged on ‘the acoustic of the
word’ and the ‘etymology of the word’. The appeal of the ‘acoustic of the word’ is only
appreciable if a person is, unlike the overbearing patriarch of the poem’s first half, unafraid to
pronounce and name it. It is the etymology which is key here, though:
It was the word, and the acoustic of the word:
Amnesty.
The etymology of the word:
Amnesty.
All participle, all verb;
Oblivion.
(DD, 89)
99
Analogous to ‘oblivion’, the etymology of ‘Amnesty’ is precisely related to deliberate
forgetting. An amnesty is defined as ‘an official pardon for people convicted of political
offences’ (OED, 42). Etymologically ‘Amnesty’ is related closely to amnesia, connoting ‘a
partial or total loss of memory’ (OED, 43). Contrary to the overbearing and smothering
patriarch of the poem’s opening, the speaker chooses not to create a prison, but to name his
own child after ‘an official pardon’. This joyful naming and announcing of Amnesty – as
both his daughter’s name and an attitude towards power and judicially-influenced reality –
may be interpreted as one of Durcan’s strongest antidotes to the condemnatory and
accusatory paradigm which drives much of the drama of his poetry. In characteristic fashion
the words ‘Amnesty’ and ‘oblivion’ function as a type of refrain in the final, celebratory
section of the poem. The speaker, once frightened into silence by his overbearing father, now
names with abandon:
It is such a delight to reiterate her name
– Amnesty –
That I cannot pronounce it often enough
– Amnesty –
(DD, 89)
Durcan here sets out a stall, aesthetically at least, for a new type of discourse of authority –
one based on ‘innocence’, ‘oblivion’ and ‘Amnesty’ rather than the harsher and more selfdeluding paradigms (in a Girardian sense) of accusation, manipulation and condemnation so
critiqued throughout his work. Emerging from the manipulative mode of discourse associated
with the father in the opening to the poem, the speaker boasts of having ‘freed myself from
the dream of being his favourite son’. He is now released, in the same way Durcan’s poetry
can be read as releasing his readers, into a more generous, expansive reality in every sense:
My wife puts me back down into sleep,
Oblivion,
By seashelling into my ear the lullaby of our daughter’s name:
Amnesty
In the key of A minor
Into the seashell of my ear, the lullaby of my fate –
Amnesty.
100
(DD, 89)
This movement is typical of one of the major inflections of Durcan’s statement ‘in reality
fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71). Rather than being a literal captive to the fictions of the
father, the son manages by the poem’s end to have ‘freed himself from the dream’ of his
father’s fiction into a world where he remarks of the word ‘Amnesty’ that ‘I cannot
pronounce it often enough’.
3.6 - Conclusion
Girard’s claim, noted at the head of this chapter, that ‘[s]capegoats multiply wherever
human beings seek to lock themselves into a given identity’ (Girard 2001, 160) can be said to
be a central truth with many expressions on Durcan’s ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44). The
following chapter of this study extends the investigation of this dynamic into the political
realm. It is claimed that for various reasons many forces in Irish society in the twentieth
century sought to ‘lock themselves into a given identity’ (Girard 2001, 160). As ever with
Durcan, his work focuses on critiquing such ‘lock[ing] in’ by lampooning those in authority
and focusing his sympathetic gaze on characters who are, by implication, locked out in such a
process. It is to an examination of such patterns in Durcan’s political writing that this study
now turns its attention.
101
Chapter Four:
Whose reality? – Durcan’s interrogation of political narratives
Politics is a game of the human animal mind. It has no basis in reality. [...] In the end
there’s only one reality: the earth itself, its climate, creatures, vegetation and rocks. Why
did Sinn Féin IRA choose games – war games and word games – over the reality of life
on earth?
(‘Postscript: Letter to Gerry Adams’, PDD, 139)
4.1 – Introduction
Paul Durcan’s poetry contains a substantial amount of work which either directly
probes issues of political identity or lends itself to political interpretation. Taking as its
principle guiding light Durcan’s quote above, delivered in the context of a philippic against
Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, this section of the thesis seeks to interpret Durcan’s political
poetry in the light of his understanding of politics as ‘a game of the human animal mind’
(PDD, 139). Crucially, Durcan again invokes the word ‘reality’ – this time seeking to use it in
its most colloquial and hard-headed sense to chastise the Sinn Féin leader whose
organisation, in Durcan’s lexicon, has become synonymous with propaganda 30. Durcan’s
protest in the face of political propaganda frequently seems as exasperated as it is genuine –
his own expression that ‘in reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) can be read here as a
tacit acknowledgement of the very power of such political propagandas as he loathes.
Conceptions of such ‘fiction[s]’ of collective identity and exclusion are central to Durcan,
never more so than when he addresses the issue of politics, which he views ultimately as a
‘game of the human animal mind’ (PDD, 139).
As this thesis seeks to interpret Durcan’s work, the centre of moral authority is
primarily the freely acting individual as the seat of memory, action and narrative agency.
Thus, forms of identity or moral action prescribed or imposed by another person or a greater
30
‘If there were a Nobel Prize for propaganda, Sinn Féin would long ago have won that prize’ (Durcan in
Knowles, 22)
102
hegemonic force are impositions which overpower and override the individual’s exercise of
self-narration. His work strongly resists overarching narratives and fictions which seek to
subsume or stifle ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) of an individual and varied character. Drawing a
connection with the interpretive thrust of the previous chapter it is also possible to observe
Durcan depict how stronger, more culturally central hegemonic fictions conspire to scapegoat
or occlude the influence of minority narratives. In order to conduct a systematic investigation
of Durcan’s poetic renderings of political life in twentieth century Ireland, it is necessary to
first set out a fundamental interpretive framework drawing principally from Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Homi K Bhabha’s The Location of Culture.
Understanding the nation as ‘an imagined political community’ (Anderson, 4) is
crucial in order to grasp what Durcan sees as being at stake in the negotiation of political
identity between individual moral agents and hegemonic forces. Anderson’s explication of
the nation itself as an ongoing fictive process, a product of continuous imaginative
constructing, is perfectly consonant with Durcan’s understanding of identity portrayed in his
poems as this study seeks to interpret it. As Anderson writes:
My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of the
word’s multiple significations, nation-ness [sic], as well as nationalism, are cultural
artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully
how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed
over time, and why, today, they command such a profound emotional legitimacy.
(Anderson, 4)
Durcan is acutely aware of the power of conceiving of the nation as ‘cultural artefact’ and of
the imaginative process in identity formation: that in the game of the human animal mind
fiction is all that matters. This is an acknowledgement that all processes of identity formation
include at least some creative, fictive element. In Durcan’s work these acts of imagination are
themselves politicised acts and raise several key questions for him. This chapter explores the
imagery and vocabulary which is used in this imaginative process as well as interrogating the
privileged centres of imagination – most often male authority figures: fathers, politicians,
103
judges, clerics and stalwarts of cultural nationalism. However, a significant amount of
Durcan’s output in the first thirty years of his publishing career depicts a world in which
hegemonic moral and political authority – along with the narratives which were proffered to
justify such authority – were undergoing severe scrutiny and change. The generation in power
in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century may have, in the words of Declan
Kiberd, ‘consistently re-elected ex-gunmen who talked repeatedly of past gunplay’ and been
‘determined to commemorate themselves to death’, but, as Kiberd surmises:
That the nation is not [sic] being shaped is what this self-mythologizing is designed to
occlude: this type of hero, confronted with each crisis of statecraft, can do little more than
repeat the tale of his apotheosis. History, under such a dispensation, ceases to be
progressive, becoming instead an endless repetition of familiar crises.
(Kiberd 1995, 393)
Such pathological repetitions can be understood, in the context of this study’s broader
investigation of freedom, as a shirking of the responsibility to fashion and shape the nation
concomitant with the achievement of freedom. Such ‘ex-gunmen’ can thus be seen as using
stories of ‘past gunplay’ as a narrative expression of the ‘dependenc[y] and submission’
(Fromm, xi) formulated by Fromm and referred to in the introduction to this study. Faced
with the task of fashioning a positive ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 55) through which a future
might be imagined, this dispensation can merely submit to and depend upon ‘tale[s] of its
apotheosis’ (Kiberd 1995, 393). In Durcan’s work, however, a new note is sounded,
epitomised in a comment made by him in the course of an interview with Richard Kearney: ‘I
don’t want to debunk nineteenth-century nationalism. But for my generation things have
changed a lot’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330). Durcan’s attempts to register in poetry how Irish
reality has ‘changed a lot’ stand in contrast to the stalling described by Kiberd and to the
‘endless repetition’ of jaded pieties. As Edna Longley has said, Durcan’s work is ‘a liberating
relief from local hang-ups’ not simply because it flies clear of being dictated to by the various
orthodoxies of nationalism but also because in doing so it communicates ‘that the
104
international youth culture of the 1960s is also part of Irish literary history’ (Longley 1996,
112) The tensions experienced in Irish society – between collected identity mediated through
the symbols and stories of often regressive nationalist ideology and historiography and the
‘rich and various’ (SC, 52) realities of day-to-day living in an increasingly cosmopolitan
modern society – are exploited, often to hilarious ends, by Durcan.
Against the backdrop of coercive forces of culture and identity – Durcan often draws
analogies between Ireland and Fascist states – the importance of individual autonomy over
the creative process of identity is emphasised. Underlying his approach to political identity is
a suspicion analogous to that articulated by Homi K Bhabha in his work The Location of
Culture:
‘We may begin by questioning that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the
many as one [sic] – shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community,
and by theorists who treat gender, class or race as social totalities that are expressive of
unitary collective experiences.’
(Bhabha, 204)
For Durcan, for whom all identity is in some sense both provisional and in process, caution
must always be exercised because of the systemic violence latent in drives towards concretely
defined collective identity. In the same way as he resisted Church pronouncements which –
hegemonic in character and patronising in tone – usurped individual agency and annulled the
meaning and value of personal experience, so also he resists the typically macho, nationalistic
forms of state-orientated collective identity. John Goodby, in Irish Poetry after Kavanagh
states that:
In the age of electronic media and transnational capital which was dawning in the 60s it
would become more and more difficult for any individual to make his or her experience
to symbolise that of ‘the nation’ or ‘the tribe’
(Goodby 1996, 121)
This can be said to be true, even as it supposes quite a traditional view of the poet and his
relationship with the ‘nation’ or group. Durcan shifts the debate, contending that it is
‘precisely because it [was] a mass media society that it [was] more possible than ever to be a
105
poet’. For him, as ‘[t]he old division between art and popular culture is happily disappearing’
(Durcan in Kearney, 328), this helps to relieve the poet of responsibility of ‘making his or her
experience to symbolise that’ of a larger group. Interestingly, if his work resonates with an
audience it is precisely by generating an empathy in his readers through documenting the
struggles of an individual psyche against those hegemonic forces – Church morality, physical
force nationalism and social mores – which actually served as touchstones of collective
identity for previous generations.
The crucial distinction made by Homi K Bhabha in relation to ‘the nation’s
interrupted address’ (Bhabha, 211) serves to illuminate further the liminal space in which
Durcan locates many of his voices. The nation, in so far as it is a narrative construct and
somewhat of a rhetorical strategy, exists in perpetual oscillation between two narrative
functions or modes, asserts Bhabha. He identifies these as the pedagogical function and the
performative function. Bhabha claims that a reckoning with the existence of the nation as a
narrated construct demands from us an acknowledgment:
[o]f the nation’s interrupted address articulated in the tension between signifying the
people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed
in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and
pulsation of the national sign.
(Bhabha, 211)
An appreciation of this splitting is useful for this study. On one hand is the pedagogical
function of what Bhabha refers to as the nation’s ‘interrupted address’ (Bhabha, 211). This
pedagogical function must name and narrate the people as the subject of a national history
with all its attendant symbolisms and foundational stories. Vying for attention and collective
psychic energy there is also a mode and function of the national narrative which must
continuously announce the ‘‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national
sign’. As Bhabha has it, the nation is a ‘contested conceptual territory where the nation’s
people must be thought in double-time’ (Bhabha, 209). Durcan is exercised by the reality of
106
both of these fictive modes of national narrative. The moral thrust of his political poetry, as
will be claimed here, is towards an ever more capacious and accommodating tone in both
discursive operations. That is to say that he has championed a recovery of narrative positions
otherwise unpalatable to national pedagogy and also persistently striven to include a diversity
of contemporary expressions of ‘the repetition and pulsation of the national sign’ (Bhabha,
211). An example of the former can be seen in ‘The Night They Murdered Boyle Somerville’
(OW, 59); Durcan memorialises an old man’s account of his reaction to the 1936 IRA murder
of Boyle Somerville. At the time of his murder by the IRA the elderly Somerville had
reportedly been advising local young men in Cork about potential careers in the British Navy.
For Durcan, the pedagogical function of the nation’s address (Bhabha, 211), in
Bhabha’s nomenclature, in the Ireland of his youth is depicted frequently as petty or
selectively blinded as various political and patriarchal ideologues seek to impose a national
narrative based on a jaundiced historiography, emotional insecurity and narrowness of vision.
It is the thrust of this pedagogy in the direction of uniformity, with all its attendant blandness
and social conformity, which Durcan resists. Concomitant with his desire to enrich and
complicate the self-definition contained in mainstream pedagogies in Irish society is his
celebration of the variety of life visible in an Ireland greatly changed in his own lifetime. A
more extensive examination of the breadth of this chronicling and its effects is undertaken in
the next chapter on the subjects of transport and travel. The current analysis will begin with
an exploration of Durcan’s critique of the role of patriarchal figures in the politicoimaginative life of the southern Irish state. As a natural succession from this topic the focus
will then be directed at how Durcan addresses what he claims are the barely suppressed
totalitarian undertones implicit in Irish society with specific reference to the Protestant
population. The final section of this analysis of Paul Durcan’s political poems will address a
representative selection of his poetry dealing with political violence in Northern Ireland.
107
4.2 – The tyranny of weak men31: patriarchy and control of the national narrative
In many of Paul Durcan’s poems the interrogation of the formation of political
identity focuses on the figure of the so-called strong man, the domineering and dictatorial
patriarchal figure. Three examples are found in ‘Fjord’ from 1990’s Daddy, Daddy; ‘The
Perfect Nazi Family Is Alive And Well And Prospering In Modern Ireland’ from 1983’s
Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela; and the more playful ‘Making Love Outside Áras An
Úachtaráin’ from Durcan’s 1978 collection Sam’s Cross. In ‘Fjord’ the speaker addresses a
patriarchal figure directly. This patriarch, who comes in the final stanza to be explicitly
representative of Ireland, has been both teacher and judge for the poem’s speaker who is
taken to be representative of a more modern Irish generation. Introducing the word ‘fjord’,
the father figure is at once both imparting trivia to the son and is figured as a generator of a
wholly new place and language: ‘I’d gaze up at your icicle compacted face / As if you’d
invented Norway and the Norwegian language’ (DD, 106). In a conflation of geography and
ideology, the father-figure confides in the son that the fjords of Mayo provided shelter for
German submarines during the Second World War. This confidence is delivered in a way
which draws clear links between male phallic power and fascist violence as Durcan recalls
the father’s description of ‘The Killary fjord in the safe waters of whose deep, dark thighs /
German submarines had lain sheltering in the war’. The poem’s final, lyrical, accusatory
stanza is then addressed as much to the nation as it is to the father figure:
Look into your Irish heart, you will find a German U-boat,
A periscope in the rain and a swastika in the sky.
You were no more neutral, Daddy, than Ireland was,
Proud and defiant to boast of the safe fjord.
(DD, 106)
‘The Perfect Nazi Family Is Alive And Well In Modern Ireland’ (JTA, 33) is an early
example of a consistent tendency in Durcan’s work to draw comparisons and analogies
31
Adapted from a shorthand definition of patriarchy by Declan Kiberd, expanded upon in the course of this
section (Kiberd 1995, 391).
108
between Ireland and fascist or overtly racist regimes. Written in response to a painting
entitled ‘Peasant Family, Kalenberg, 1939’ by Adolf Wissel, the poem is a parodic
description of a seemingly exemplary citizen, a man who fills his life with all of the exterior
trappings of Irish cultural nationalism. These markers of prescribed cultural identity have the
effect of smothering any significant personal character. Given the name ‘Billo’, the subject of
the poem is described in a mock-adoring way that makes him seem a figure of scorn. A
summary, but far from exhaustive list of his achievements includes: an accomplished record
at Gaelic football, a pin to symbolise his abstention from alcohol, a stereotypically
indigenous Irish ‘bawneen sweater’, a position as a local government elected official, and
ownership of a thousand-seat pub on the side of the ‘Buggery Mountains’. An object of sheer
utility, Billo’s wife ‘Maeve Bunn from Sinchy’ has already given birth to five of the ten
children he hopes to have. That this man is a pillar of society and not an aberration is
enforced in the wonderfully sharp aside that ‘[t]here is a photo of him on every sideboard in
the county’. However, by far the most intriguing aspect of Billo’s character is displayed when
Durcan writes of his violent attitude towards minorities. Billo is a man who ‘don’t [sic] like
Protestants and he don’t like Artists; / Homosexuals –’ The nub of the problem is exposed in
his attitude towards lesbians as the reader is given an insight into his thought-processes:
Lesbians – My God,
A woman making love to a woman
Is as unimaginable and, therefore, impossible
As a woman having a period
(JTA, 33)
What Durcan is doing here, and which can be interestingly reflected in Anderson’s core
premises on nation formation, is claiming that for characters like ‘Billo’ the limits of
imagination are the limits of possibility. Billo’s murderous dislike of difference is attributed
by Durcan to an incapacity of imagination and not in any other positive view of the world.
The Ireland which he imagines – or which has, perhaps more kindly, been imagined for him –
is not one upon which variety of sexual orientation, religion or lifestyle will have much
109
imaginative purchase. Another key Durcan verb, ‘dream’ – which is often used to connote a
state of imagination and creation – is used negatively about Billo. The statement that ‘[h]e
does not dream – except when nobody is looking’ creates the impression of whatever small
imaginative and generative faculties he exercises being curtailed in obedience to a larger
social order and only being used ‘when nobody is looking’.
Durcan’s most memorable poem of resistance to nationalist patriarchy, it could be
argued, is his ‘Making Love Outside Áras An Úachtaráin’ (SC, 47). In this poem he uses the
very potent image of the then President Eamonn de Valera who was both a seminal figure in
the foundation of the Irish State and a dominant influence over its ideological and cultural
development for at least the first thirty years of its existence. Also invoked in the poem’s title
and refrain is the residence of the President of the Irish Republic which has multiple
significances, not least of these is that it was at the time remembered as the Viceregal Lodge,
a residence of the King’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. Durcan uses the connotations of the
public significance of the residence to create a sense of division between the symbols and
meanings associated with political power and the lives of intimate and affectionate young
lovers who exist excluded from these centres of power in the performance of their identities.
Thus the very title and refrain – ‘Making love outside Áras An Uachtaráin’ - is emblematic of
this distinction. The divisions which are signified in this title are multiple, primarily between
the founding generation of the State and the youth of the 1960s, and between the language
and structures of officialdom and the experiences of two young individuals who are in every
sense ‘outside Áras An Uachtaráin’. The poem’s narrative is a juxtaposition of the two young
lovers – one of whom provides the voice of the poem – with the aged President de Valera.
The lovers, who ‘both revered Irish patriots’ and ‘dreamed [our] dreams of a green, green
flag’ as they ‘used lie in the grass / Making love outside Áras An Uachtaráin’, stand in sharp
contrast to De Valera ‘Inside in his ivory tower’. The image of De Valera as enclosed ‘in his
110
ivory tower’ has all the connotations of seclusion and detachment which it can be surmised
are as much ideological and attitudinal as they are architectural. The walls of an ‘ivory tower’
separate those who draw their energy and imaginative thrust from the symbols and
significances of the more traditional nationalist pedagogy and those engaged in a modern,
cosmopolitan negotiation of identity. As the poem progresses De Valera is portrayed in a
menacing light, hunting the young lovers who have merely dared to dream ‘our dreams of a
green, green flag’32:
I see him now in the heat-haze of the day
Blindly stalking us down;
And, levelling an ancient rifle, he says “Stop
Making love outside Áras An Uachtaráin.”
(SC, 47)
Thus, one of the nation’s progenitors and dominant imagining forces is depicted as having his
‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 55) obliterated in a state of literal and imaginative blindness. De
Valera becomes the subject of satire and scorn as, rather than endorse the cultural
significance of the reality embodied by the presence of the couple, he reacts violently with
that most phallic symbol of male aggression: the gun. The psychology of such heavy-handed
patriarchal reaction to acts of [pro-]creativity, which neither emanate from nor endorse the
political centre as the privileged place of imagination, is perhaps best caught by Declan
Kiberd in his 1995 work Inventing Ireland:
Patriarchy is, rather, the tyranny wrought by weak men, the protective shell which guards
and nurtures their weakness. Ireland produced more than its fair share of conservative
rebels and very few revolutionaries imbued with a vision of an alternative society. After
independence, a fear of the bleakness of freedom had so gripped the people that autocracy
and censorship were the order of the day.
(Kiberd 1995, 391)
The ‘fear of the bleakness of freedom’ named by Kiberd might well be said to account
for some of the imaginative paralysis and redundancy of which Durcan accuses the early
32
John Moriarty, a writer much celebrated by Durcan, was quite preoccupied by the generative and formative
impulses at work in culture. Significantly, invoking an Australian Aboriginal myth which postulates that the
world was created in a prehistoric dream time, Moriarty in 1994 published Dreamtime (Dublin: Lilliput). Also,
expanding on the socio-political interpretation of Durcan’s Life is a Dream, another possible inflection of
‘dream’ (SC, 47) is that connoted by Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech ‘I Have A Dream’.
111
generations of Irish political and cultural leaders. Extending the reading offered in this study’s
preliminary remarks on freedom and moral action, it is possible to claim that in reaction to
this ‘bleakness of freedom’ (Kiberd, 391) Ireland’s leaders lapsed into ‘dependencies and
submission’ (Fromm, ix) to inherited forms of governance. Whatever the cause, the results
depicted by Durcan of the actions of ‘conservative rebels’ and those who believed that
‘autocracy and censorship were the order of the day’ are inscribed into the subjectivities given
voice to in his poems. Two quite contrasting instances of oppressive imaginative dysfunction
are explored by Durcan in his poems ‘The Persian Gulf’ and ‘The Mayo Accent’, both from
his 1990 collection Daddy, Daddy, a book which to quote Peggy O’Brien is:
[A]s a cultural record is very much about being a male in the generation after that which
created Ireland’s independence.
(O’Brien, 100)
While Daddy, Daddy as a collection will be examined in more detail in Chapter Six, close
readings of these two particular poems will prove useful in developing a fuller picture of
Durcan’s politico-moral vision. ‘The Persian Gulf’ begins with the image of a family kneeling
together to say the Rosary in Irish after supper. The speaker of the poem is the family’s son,
who becomes bored and confesses his inability to:
visualise the prayers we are saying
In a language in which we do not converse
And which is as strange to me as French or German
(DD, 110)
His inability to imagine (to generate a vision of reality) in the imposed language of his father
– Irish, a keystone of the cultural nationalist ideological makeup – is juxtaposed with the
extended vivid daydream which begins in the second stanza and comprises the rest of the
poem. The daydream pictures the family home as on fire and the family members climbing
‘up the fire escape to safety’. In the second stanza the poem’s conceit broadens as the house
becomes a representation of the nation and the particularly narrowly-interpreted and
patriarchally enforced cultural nationalism exemplified in the father’s dogged insistence on
112
the use of Irish. This boy who, through the medium of Irish experienced imaginative
blockage, now gives us images such as ‘the great Ferris wheel of the Rosary’, ‘our threestorey house going up in flames’ and ‘Daddy in his blue and white pyjamas, / With the cord
tied in a dicky bow over the fly’. As the fire progresses and the emergency services arrive the
father-figure seems a progressively more ridiculous figure as he ‘stands by a chimneypot,
admiring the night sky, // Looking like Danny Kaye in The Court Jester’ [sic]. The variety of
images invoked by Durcan through the boy’s imagination – the Ferris wheel, an image of
Danny Kaye from a movie, a rendering of the family home engulfed in apocalyptic fires –
would seem to be in stark contrast to the father-figure’s very single-minded fixation with the
Irish language. The penultimate stanza explores a rather darker aspect of the patriarchal
determination to continue speaking Irish regardless of the consequences. In the father’s
refusal of help from the fireman it becomes clear that the adherence to Irish is not merely a
personal foible to be expediently dispensed with: it is an issue of ideological adherence for
which he is willing to sacrifice his family’s lives. Indeed, seen through the interpretive lens of
Bhabha’s work, the father’s refusal of outside help represents a fixation on performing
identity through an outdated interpretation of the pedagogical self-image which, in these
circumstances, will prove fatal. The departure of the firemen, ‘Leaving us to burn to death
speaking Irish’ is a mix of comedy and tragedy characteristic of Durcan’s best work. This
imaginative paralysis – the insistence on a particular expression of cultural nationalism – can
be interpreted as a mask for deeper insecurities in the patriarchal figure. Indeed, as Peggy
O’Brien notes regarding ‘The Persian Gulf’: ‘The child fails to see the anxiety that eats away
at the tyrant and the remoteness that results from denial of this fear’ (O’Brien, 89). Such a
fetishist attitude towards the Irish language is perhaps part of a cultural reaction warned
against by Frantz Fanon:
113
Persistence in following forms of cultures which are already condemned to extinction is
already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to
the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships.
There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and
more shrivelled up, inert and empty’
(Fanon, 191).
It is easy to see Durcan’s father figure’s attitude as ‘a throw-back to the laws of inertia’ and
an instance of blindly following an ideology which is fast becoming ‘shrivelled up, inert and
empty’. The anxiety of the father regarding his own voice – for which we may read
imaginative potency and generative power – is showcased very well once again in Durcan’s
poem ‘The Mayo Accent’ (DD, 139) which reads as an interesting counterpoint to ‘The
Persian Gulf’. The first of the poem’s two stanzas is a sensual description of ‘the voice of a
Mayoman’, replete with images of natural beauty and playful conflations of the voice with
landscape images. The speaker rhapsodises that ‘Words are bog oak sunk in understatement’
and that, in the Mayo accent, ‘Conversations are smudges of bogland under cloudy skies’.
Evoking a potent image from Irish history, Durcan writes of the voice of the Mayo man: ‘In
his mouth the English language is sphagnum moss / Under the bare braceleted feet of a pirate
queen’. This deployment of rich imagery in which natural landscape, modes of thought and
styles of expression are all organically enmeshed is used to launch an attack on the particular
direction of post-independence patriarchal authority in Ireland:
Why then, Daddy, did you shed
The pricey antlers of your Mayo accent
For the tree-felling voice of a harsh judiciary
Whose secret headquarters were in the Home Counties or
High Germany?
(DD, 139)
Where the Mayo accent was praised in images of natural abundance and organic richness, the
father-figure’s adopted voice is given the opposite hue as he sheds his ‘pricey antlers’ and
adopts a ‘tree-felling voice’. This adoption of a voice originating in Britain or Germany
accuses the generations who ruled Ireland after independence of imaginative poverty, of
114
failing to see the trap outlined by Declan Kiberd – albeit, it must be admitted, a posteriori – in
his description of how:
[M]any people would mistake a repressive colonial machine for nature itself and proceed,
unbidden, to employ many of the old categories of thought upon themselves
(Kiberd 1995, 551)
Examining ‘The Persian Gulf’ and ‘The Mayo Accent’ side by side gives an insight into how
a certain kind of Irish patriarch was willing to imagine an Ireland which, though it be to an
extent culturally distinctive, would be otherwise philosophically derivative, constricted and
vacuous.
‘Two History Professors Found Guilty of Murder’ (SC, 26) from Durcan’s 1978
volume Sam’s Cross is a satirical piece which takes as the object of its satire the
conspiratorial nature of patriarchal control of national identity through control of national
history. It is a vivid demonstration of the application of Durcan’s axiom that ‘in reality fiction
is all that matters’ (DD, 71) to the political realm. With substantial use of the vocabulary of
reportage, the speaker relates to us the details of a case in which ‘Two Professors of History at
the University of Mullingar’ were ‘found guilty of the murder of Jesus Trinidad’, a dissident
fellow-academic. It is clear from the outset that Durcan’s choice of the murder trial of two
history professors charged with murdering a junior colleague will function as an allegory for
the control of the historiography of the nation. The narrative of the poem reads, in satirical
tones, like the description of a post-lynching sham trial. The conspiratorial connection
between the murderous historiographers and the judiciary charged with bringing them to
justice is inscribed in their very names, respectively Columba A. Cantwell and Columba B.
Cantwell for the professors, and Columba C. Cantwell for the judge. The motive for the
murder of the history tutor is stated to be the fact that Jesus Trinidad ‘had consistently
encouraged his students to ascertain the true facts / Of the history of Ulster, despite constant
warnings not to do so’. The primal importance of control of the story, even and perhaps
115
especially when it contradicts uncomfortable or inconvenient matters of fact, is said to justify
in the minds of the conspirators the most extreme actions. Jesus Trinidad is dismissed as ‘both
a foreigner and a fool’ and the professors are excused by the court as having had ‘no choice
but to apply a final solution’ in a chilling though satirical invocation of the Nazi euphemism.
The naming of the victim as ‘Jesus Trinidad’ serves to underpin the Biblical resonances of the
murder of an innocent victim by a conspiracy of administrators and vested interests. Likewise,
the surnames of the conspirators reinforce their roles in the affair: the respective Cantwells are
merely interested in maintaining their position and authority to ‘Cant[-]well’. As if it was
needed, a denouement of the scandal is given in the poem’s final three lines:
The court expressed sympathy with the two murderers
And wished them continued, further success in the green fields
– In the green, green, green fields – of their academic endeavours.
(SC, 27)
The alignment of Durcan’s sympathies with the figure of ‘Jesus Trinidad’ is merely a political
expression of his technique of identifying with the scapegoat figure introduced in the previous
chapter. It is this scapegoat or minority group which is often overlooked in overly-simplified
pedagogical narratives of the nation, obsessed as it frequently is with developing a narrative
which has unity and uniformity as its goal33. If this section has demonstrated how issues of
insecurity and violence underpin the patriarchal drive to whitewash and control aspects of
national narrative, what will now be investigated is Durcan’s treatment of how this
ideological violence found practical expression. It is to Durcan’s treatment of Irish attitudes
and behaviours towards members of the Protestant community that this study now turns.
4.3 – Fictions and factions: ideological and physical violence against minority groups
Particularly in Durcan’s earlier poetry the conversation on how the nation is imagined
is often suffused with fears of a barely suppressed tendency towards discrimination and
33
Against this lamented tendency to obliterate differences internal to the nation – whether in the telling of the
nation’s past story or surveying of the present day variety of identities – Durcan protests in 2004’s ‘Rosie Joyce’
(AoL, 56): ‘No such thing, Rosie, as a Uniform Ireland / And please God there never will be’.
116
victimisation of minorities. In an extension of the scapegoat theme, Durcan invariably –
though never in a wholly predictable or formulaic way – aligns himself with these persecuted
minority persons and groups. His poetic voice, in Peggy O’Brien’s description, is one which
may be ‘identified with all forms of branded otherness’ (O’Brien, 92). Recounting his
experience of hearing fellow contributors – Scottish and Welsh respectively – address a
conference in Turin on the subject of their experiences of the Second World War, Durcan
reflects that:
I saw my own country not as a neutral defender of peace unaffected by the ‘outside’
world, but as harbouring its own fascism with its own brand of violence.
(Durcan in Kearney, 328)
How the voices – and even presences – of minorities are enfranchised, silenced or ignored in
the national narrative is of crucial importance for Durcan. The particular ‘brand of violence’
criticised by him in the interview with Richard Kearney quoted above is detailed in more
explicit and nuanced terms in many of his poems which focus on the treatment of minority
identities by hegemonic or privileged controllers of the national[ist] story. He is acutely
aware of, and may even be said in some sense to have formed his political sensibility around
a principle analogous to the claim made by Homi K Bhabha:
Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalising boundaries
– both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which
‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities.
(Bhabha, 213)
It is the idea of ‘essentialist identity’ – with all its attendant totalising violence – against
which Durcan consistently rails, which he tries to subvert and which he uses to satirical
effect. Indeed, reading Bhabha’s quote alongside Sartre’s notion of essence being a fashioned
and shaped thing with an always provisional character (as outlined in this study’s
introduction) redoubles the point. As Eamon Grennan has written of Durcan, recalling
Bhabha’s ‘totalising boundaries’ (Bhabha, 213) of the nation:
117
When I read or hear the poems of Paul Durcan it is like listening to a man standing at a
boundary and, in the accents of a refugee or a displaced person, crying out over our
arbitrary world of borders.
(Grennan, 50)
It is a recognition of the very arbitrary nature of these borders which gives Durcan’s voicing
of the minority, the displaced and the refugee its force. His work recognises that these
boundaries are complex narrative constructs contingent on particular human circumstance
rather than eternal truths. His work does not deny the power of these narrative forces or
‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71), even as it questions their legitimacy. Durcan attempts to disrupt all
totalising systems – or, it can be said, he shows how they are always already disrupted –
through speaking in a range of voices. Of the many and varied treatments Durcan makes of
‘branded otherness’ (O’Brien, 92) it is to the Southern Irish State’s relationship with those
who identify as Protestant that he devotes his most sustained attention.
Declan Kiberd describes a young Irish State in which its Protestant minority tended
‘to have an arms-length relationship with the institutions of the new state’ (Kiberd, 416).
Nevertheless, the official ambivalence of the Irish State towards its Protestant minority is
caught well in Kiberd’s contrasting of two official gestures made by agents of that state:
When he [De Valera] unambiguously announced in a broadcast to the United States two
years after the passing of his Constitution by popular vote that “we are a Catholic
nation”, the members of the religious minority who had been reassured by the elevation
of a co-religionist to presidential office might have been forgiven for wondering which of
the gestures to take the more seriously.
(Kiberd, 416-417)
This ‘ambivalence’, Durcan contends, is a mere thin disguise for a more sinister (if perhaps
somewhat suppressed) wish on behalf of the nascent Irish State: cultural homogeneity
through the removal from Ireland of its Protestant population. For many seeking to propagate
a national narrative based on a culturally homogeneous pedagogy, the very presence of a
Protestant population was assessed to be a historical anachronism and political
inconvenience. This ambivalence is seen clearly in two poems to be explored here: ‘Poem
118
Not Beginning with a Line From Pindar’ from Durcan’s 1990 collection Daddy, Daddy and
‘National Day Of Mourning For Twelve Protestants’ from his 1978 volume Sam’s Cross.
Both of these poems address the attitudes implicit in the reaction of the southern Irish
political establishment to political violence carried out against Protestants in Northern
Ireland.
‘Poem Not Beginning with a Line from Pindar’ (DD, 140), chronicles the reported
reaction of Durcan’s father, Judge John Durcan, to the murder by the I.R.A. of ten Protestant
workmen. In a contrasting of the private and public elements of the father’s character so
characteristic of Daddy, Daddy, Durcan sets the man’s private appellation of ‘Daddy’ against
his public credentials as ‘The President of the Circuit Court / Of the Republic of Ireland’.
After the deeply pathetic murder scene is described in the opening stanza – ‘such prismatic
carnage, / Bodies yearning over bodies’ – it is understood that the boy speaker is seeking the
solace of an empathetic elder who will share his moral outrage at the scene. What the fatherfigure provides, rather than paternal comfort and assurance, is mere amoral recourse to
legalism and procedure – confirmation that he is a man who ‘Does not dissemble’ and who
‘Does not prevaricate’. This emotionless legalism, typified in the repeated tautologous
expression ‘The law is the law and the law must take its course’, is accompanied by the father
figure’s smug and disturbing contention that the atrocity would ‘Teach the Protestants a
lesson’. Addressing the second half of the poem to a possible future ‘Oxford University
Reader in History’ Durcan proceeds to detail the ‘roots of fascism in Ireland’ in a list
comparable and complimentary to the one contained in ‘The Perfect Nazi Family Is Alive
And Well In Modern Ireland’ (JTA, 33). Fascism in Ireland operates through a particular kind
of social and religious conformity, it is claimed – one which privileges socially defined forms
of identity over individually negotiated ones – as Durcan has his speaker enumerate its
119
constituent elements in the style of a litany: ‘respectability, conformity, legitimacy, pedigree,
/ Faith, chivalry, property, virility’. It even has its own language:
the language of men – bullshit, boob, cunt, bastard –
And – teach the Protestants a lesson.
The law is the law and the law must take its course.
(DD, 141)
The prejudiced and selective reaction by members of the Southern Irish establishment to
politically motivated violence in Northern Ireland is highlighted by Durcan. As Edna Longley
has so succinctly put it: ‘With a particular eye on Irish nationalism, on his own crowd,
Durcan manipulates and exposes the reflexes of selective sympathy.’ (Longley:1996, p. 106)
This statement by Longley is a restatement of a comment made fourteen years earlier in her
introduction to a selection of Durcan’s poems: ‘No other Southern Irish poet has so painfully
and continuously responded to the Ulster Troubles’ (SPD, xiii).
‘National Day Of Mourning For Twelve Protestants’ (SC, 59), touched on before in
relation to Durcan’s poems on Catholic Church hegemony, is a further exploration of what he
perceives as selective lack of sympathy towards the Protestant population of Ireland. The
poem is written in a biting satirical style and implicitly laments the lack of proportionate
reaction on behalf of many in the Southern establishment – clergymen and politicians alike –
to the killing of ’12 Protestant dog-lovers and junior motor-cyclists / At the La Mon House
Restaurant in Comber, Co. Down’. Just as the brutality towards Protestants was seen in the
above poem to be implicitly endorsed, so too here the Archbishop of Armagh and the
Taoiseach are depicted as having no genuine interest in the tragedy but rather as going
through a formulaic and merely gestural process of marking the passing of the tragedy’s
victims. It is possible to read here an implicit explanation of their actions as the excuse that to
perform any act of sympathy towards the slain Protestants would be to break ranks with the
implied image of Ireland as a homogeneous culture. The difference represented by the
Protestants is by no means to be welcomed, implicitly or explicitly. The poem’s final line:
120
‘Government officials stated that reality did not enter into the matter’ is a satirical
showcasing of the Southern establishment’s hubris which drove such a cynical move as
declining to mark the atrocity of members of a minority group. At least one implication of the
line is that no matter what facts could be demonstrated about the brutality of the murderers or
the innocence of those killed, because of the ethnic background of the victims nothing would
have been done differently. Their presence had been so expunged from the national
imagination that when the murders took place it too could not be recognised. This invocation
of ‘reality’ once again has the effect of highlighting the deathly characters of some political
‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) of the ‘human animal mind’ (PPD, 139).
The pervasiveness of hidden or suppressed discrimination against Protestants can be
felt in Durcan’s playful and self-mocking poem ‘What Is A Protestant, Daddy?’ (TB, 52) The
question which comprises the title of the poem, with its address to the father-figure as
generator of meaning and announcer of identity, would seem unanswerable in any simplistic
sense. The title of the poem corresponds to a question asked of Durcan by his six-year-old
daughter, Sarah, upon hearing on television that ‘a Protestant man was shot dead in Newry’
(PDD, 132). The impossibility of the parent’s position before such a question – born out of
the reduction of identity to a mere label such as ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ – leads to a
reflection on how such reductionism had been taking place in Ireland long before the
outbreak of political violence in the North. The poem itself is a playful juxtaposition of one
anti-Protestant stereotype after another as the speaker describes people who ‘used scurry
about / In small black cars’ and who ‘Were conspirators; / You could see it in their faces’.
The Ireland in which the poem’s speaker grew up ‘way back in the 1950’s’ was one in which:
Protestants were Martians
Light-years more weird
Than zoological creatures;
But soon they would all go away
For as a species they were all dying out,
Soon there would be no more Protestants ...
(TB, 53)
121
The ability to repeat such racist attitudes – with their impulse towards ethnic cleansing
comically couched in the vocabulary of science fiction and zoology – was in the 1950’s,
argues Durcan, the mark of ‘a proper little Irish Catholic boy’. That the childish conceptions
of the identity of the other are so over-simplified, partial and malformed is a source of
humour in the poem. The fact that much political violence took place in reaction to scarcely
more complex notions of identity is the tragedy which is the subtext to the poem. Indeed,
there remains, of course, an implied criticism of elements of Irish society which seem to be
content with such simplified notions of identity. Just as Durcan had received notions of
national identity – with their boundaries serving both to include and exclude – from his
father-figures, so too he is conscious of his own generation’s role as mediators of history to
the coming generation. There is, in the final three self-mocking lines of ‘What is a Protestant,
Daddy?’ an implicit exhortation of the reader to question received histories, to recognise the
ideological power latent in all fictive narratives of collective identity. What this poem and
each of Durcan’s other poems critiquing anti-Protestant bias and behaviour does is attempt to
broaden and complicate the contracted imaginative scope of the national narrative. Durcan is
conscious that, in the words of Bhabha;
The very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous
transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities – as the grounds of
cultural comparativism [sic] – are in a profound process of redefinition.
(Bhabha, 7)
It is this knowledge which frees Durcan to use such oversimplified markers of identity as
‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ as objects of satire and irony. The striving towards such an
ideological chimera as a culturally homogeneous state is, it can fairly be inferred from
Durcan’s work, an unconscionably reductive process in the service of an undesirable goal.
Ever in resistance to violence, Durcan’s work finds an echo in Bhabha’s critique of those who
would seek to:
122
purify’ the nation through removal or suppression of a section of the population. Such a
vision of ‘a pure, ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through the
death, literal and figurative, of the complex inter-weavings of history, and the culturally
contingent borderlines of modern nationhood.
(Bhabha, 7)
It is precisely the recognition of the ‘cultural contingency’ of borderlines, coupled with those
‘complex inter-weavings’ which Durcan’s work seeks to celebrate rather than efface.
4.4 – Standing up for compromise or a compromised stance?: Durcan and political
violence in Northern Ireland
Throughout his writing and publishing career Paul Durcan has consistently addressed
the complex subject of political violence in Northern Ireland. For him this violence falls into
two inextricably linked categories: physical force violence and the violence of words or
propagandistic ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71). Durcan’s own careful attention to the violence of
language, ideology and propaganda is a confirmation that he recognises the power of the
fictive element of identity formation, that there is an act of imagination inherent in such a
process. Attempts by factional interests – physical force nationalists receive the brunt of
Durcan’s ire – to propagate a narrative which is often a propagandistic over-simplification of
reality are criticised heavily by the poet for a number of key reasons which will be explored.
Writing directly and publicly to the leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, via a broadcasted
radio diary, Durcan bluntly states:
But I cannot accept your Thirty Years War – not only the killing of people but also the
killing of language, the abuse, manipulation of words. My soul is coated with the
excrement of thirty years of propaganda.
(PDD, 132)
The importance of the narrative which accompanies and is used to justify political violence –
especially in the context of mediation through television, newspapers and other media – is key
for Durcan. [Interestingly, it can be fairly surmised that the propagandists on behalf of those
committing political violence are operating with the same recognition if not the same ethical
or ideological assumptions.] In his first solo volume, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor,
123
he addresses this relationship between violence and narrative directly in a homage to RTÉ
reporter Liam Hourican entitled ‘Tribute to a Reporter in Belfast, 1974’ (OW: 63). Through
praise heaped upon the journalist, Durcan sets the standard of responsibility against which his
own writings on Northern Ireland might be judged.
In ‘Tribute to a Reporter in Belfast, 1974’ (OW: 63) Durcan proposes tentative ethical
coordinates for dealing with a situation as complex as that which exists in Northern Ireland.
He lauds Liam Hourican for his dedication, for operating ‘As if language itself were the very
conscience of reality’. The skill of being able to present the ‘other side’ of a conflict in a
manner which would allow the reader or viewer to establish genuine grounds for empathy is
also praised. Hourican’s style brought about an effect on his readers by virtue of which ‘you
were made to look out of the eyes of another / Even as the other shot you dead in the back’.
The ‘integrity of his words’ and his ‘verbal honesty’ should be recognised, Durcan wrote in
1974, as being perhaps ‘A poetry more / Than poetry is’. If Durcan describes Ireland as a
country in which ‘words have died an unnatural death / Or else have been used on all sides for
unnatural ends’ this makes it all the easier to understand his own personal commitment to ‘a
kind of poetry that does not abuse reality by abusing language’ (O’Toole, 34). It is this
commitment which is named by Fintan O’Toole as ‘the essential commitment of all of
Durcan’s work’. His claim, applicable to each Durcan poem, is never more relevant than in
relation to the contested site of Northern Irish politics, especially in the context of the
narration of political identity.
Durcan has consistently resisted the option of assuming a partisan position in relation
to Northern Irish politics – even if his family history and sympathies align him, broadly
speaking, with the nationalist community – this issue will be addressed directly here.
However, it is first worth noting Durcan’s attempt to address two crucial characteristics of the
violence in Northern Ireland, and indeed perhaps all violent conflict: its reciprocal nature and
124
the tendency for the antagonists to come to resemble or mimic each other. In many instances
Durcan addresses the ideological ‘mirroring’ taking place between the protagonists in the
Northern Irish conflict – the reader is directed towards ‘Postscript: Letter to Gerry Adams’ in
Paul Durcan’s Diary for a fine example of this tendency. The mimetic nature of the
behaviour between the two ideologically deadlocked forces, in this case The IRA and
Margaret Thatcher’s government, is described perfectly in the words of French
anthropological theorist René Girard:
The unchanneled mimetic impulse hurls itself blindly against the obstacle of a conflicting
desire. It invites its own rebuffs, and these rebuffs will in turn strengthen the mimetic
inclination. We have, then, a self-perpetuating process, constantly increasing in simplicity
and fervour.
(Girard 1988, 157)
The most striking example of this critique is his fine comic poem ‘Margaret Thatcher Joins
The I.R.A.’ (SC, 60). In this poem Durcan describes an imagined scene set in a fairy ring fort,
near the burial place of an icon of Irish Republicanism, Theobald Wolfe Tone. The macabre
scene is described as one in which the two antagonists of the Northern conflict finally join
forces with each other, admitting their previously suppressed similarities. The event is
described as a debauched post-marriage party at ‘which a historical union was consummated’
and during which ‘Gunmen and High Tories crawled on all fours / Jangling their testicles’.
Durcan, by writing this poem in a style which draws attention to the way in which both
antagonistic parties seemed secretly pleased to be taking part in a performance of political
theatre, depicts a conflict driven by performance more than substantive issues. By describing
the ‘marriage’ of Margaret Thatcher and the IRA he posits a moral and ideological
equivalence of the two. It is arguably fair to infer that, arising out of the realisation of the
moral equivalence and even the unrecognised ‘mirroring’ of the antagonists, Durcan is
justified in stating ‘that pacifism is not an option but a necessity’ (Durcan in Kearney, 331). It
is in the context of what Girard has described above as a ‘self-perpetuating process’ that
Durcan resists assuming a partisan position. Indeed, insofar as he shows a sustained focus on
125
nationalist violence, he does so merely in order to attempt to break the mimetic bind which is
a corollary of the violence itself.
A basic conceptual cornerstone of Durcan’s poems on this subject is that perpetuation
of political conflict relies on either neutralising objecting spectators or aligning them with
partisan positions. This equates to rendering the performance of interruptive or ideologically
inconvenient and uncomfortable opinion ‘invisible’ through dismissing the objections or
categorising them under a pre-existing partisan category. This particular issue is addressed
directly in Durcan’s poem from Sam’s Cross (1978), ‘In Memory: The Miami Showband:
Massacred 31 July 1975’ (SC, 56). Durcan records a conversation between the speaker of his
poem and an interlocutor whom he describes with irony as ‘patriotic’. The interlocutor is
direct and dogmatic in his ideological injunction: ‘You must take one side / Or the other, or
you’re but a fucking romantic’. This is precisely the position which will fuel and perpetuate
conflict: the imperative to be partisan. It is a position associated by Durcan with the male sex,
with phallic, authoritarian power:
It is a whine in the crotch of whose fear
Is fondled a dream-gun blood smeared;
It is in war – not in poetry of music –
That men find their niche, their glory hole;
(SC, 56)
Crucially, the crux of the problem is stated by Durcan to be an imaginative one, a problem
with the ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 55) held by the ‘patriotic’ speaker and by implication his
community. The patriot’s problem, states Durcan’s speaker, is that ‘Like most of his fellows /
He will abide no contradiction in the mind’. Nationalism as here expressed, it is suggested,
has lapsed into being – or perhaps always was – an ideology, a set of fixed ideas with limited
flexibility which is incapable of weaving its imaginative fabric, as Homi K Bhabha writes
‘between the shreds and patches of cultural signification and the certainties of nationalist
pedagogy’ (Bhabha, 204). It is precisely those ‘shreds and patches’ which suggest
126
heterogeneity and difference internal to the state that prove most difficult for those who ‘abide
no contradiction in the mind’. While Bhabha encourages a culture in which the ‘patches and
rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into signs of a coherent national culture’ (Bhabha,
209), it seems beyond the imaginative range of the sectarian interest to envision a space in
which ‘coherence’ (Bhabha, 209) and ‘contradiction’ (SC, 56) are not mutually exclusive
realities.
To consider certain of Durcan’s poems on Northern Ireland is to consider an
interesting conceptual paradox. This paradox arises directly from the contested site of
republican-nationalist historiography and iconography. While Durcan has never supported the
use of any violence on either side of the conflict in Northern Ireland – physical force violence
or propagandistic – his criticisms of the Nationalist violence have been most vehement and
consistent. In the words of Edna Longley, Durcan works: ‘With a particular eye on Irish
nationalism, on his own crowd’ (Longley 1996, 106). The reasons stated by Durcan for this
admitted bias of focus are that:
I did not care what the loyalist gangsters did; all I cared about was what we [sic] did – we
[sic] being the republican nationalists of Ireland whose roots go back to Pearse,
MacBride, MacEoin and to Davis, O’Connell and Parnell.
(PDD, 136)
While his work which criticises both Sinn Féin and IRA policies and actions packs a satirical
punch and no doubt makes a point, it relies on his making of a hotly contested distinction.
Durcan, who describes himself as being ‘from a West of Ireland nationalist republican family’
(PDD, 135) seems to base his critique of IRA violence on an alternative interpretation of the
narrative central to traditional nationalist historiography. For an illustration of this point it is
necessary to return to the final stanza of ‘Margaret Thatcher Joins The I.R.A.’ (SC, 60),
discussed above. The fact that the poem is set near the cemetery which holds the remains of
the putative father of Irish republicanism Theobold Wolfe Tone, sets the macabre and
perverse actions of the poem’s protagonists in the context of the lineage of nationalist lore.
127
His statement that such a gathering of violent parties as Margaret Thatcher and the IRA was
sufficient to produce a scene in which ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone was to be observed / Revolving
sixty revolutions a minute’ is, finally and fundamentally, a question of creative interpretation.
The poem’s satirical punch is significant, but a deeper probing exposes certain problems. One
should not of course ignore facts extant in relation to Wolfe Tone – but recounting a partial
selection of these facts will not stand as a bulwark to the kind of propagandistic
misappropriation of such historical figures and moments by those seeking to legitimise
violence. It is not merely from bald facts – but rather from a complex overlay of
historiography and interpretation – that nationalist narrative is able, as Benedict Anderson has
written, to ‘command such a profound emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson, 4) The nationalist
narrative which legitimises violence by cherry-picking history will not, it can be fairly
suggested, be defeated by a similarly partially justified rebuttal.
Durcan’s arguments – in poetry and in prose – against Sinn Féin and the IRA also
claim that there is a break in the ideological and ethical legitimacy between ‘the humane,
soldierly values of Pearse, MacBride and MacEoin’ (PDD, 139) and the Northern Irish
physical force nationalists. This contention is put at its most powerful in Durcan’s 1978 poem
‘The Minibus Massacre: The Eve Of The Epiphany’ (SC, 57) as Durcan writes that:
The graves of the 1916 leaders
Have all been dug up
By Irish-speaking Chicago-style gangsters
With names like Ó’Brádaigh, Ó’Connaill;
And Pearse’s skull used as a hurling ball
On O’Connell Street Bridge
(SC, 58)
These poems which showcase Durcan’s desire to disinherit the Northern Nationalists from the
broader narrative of Irish nationalism – precisely by describing the older tradition as ‘humane’
and ‘soldierly’ – expose a certain tension which is not easily reconciled. The thrust of the
debate which is opened up by distinctions of this nature is one in which the different contexts
128
of violence are debated and respectively deemed legitimate or illegitimate. While there may
be something to be said for Durcan’s attempts to re-appropriate or to re-imagine these
nationalist icons such as Pearse and Wolfe Tone, attempts to criticise physical-force
nationalism by doing so are never entirely convincing.
Perhaps, in fact, the strongest of Durcan’s works on political violence in Northern
Ireland are those recounting the human cost of such violence: displaying how the individual
experience is impacted upon by impersonal, ideological and totalising violence. ‘In Memory
Of Those Murdered In The Dublin Massacre May 1974’ (TB, 40) critiques political violence
by registering the disparity between ideological fictions and the human cost of terrorism. The
reader finds the poem’s speaker ‘in the downtown wimpy bar’ [sic] contemplating what
effects a terrorist attack would have at precisely that place and time. An idyllic, almost
painterly scene is drawn with ‘early morning sunlight’ and waitresses who are ‘happy and
gay’. In a beautiful inversion of effects of the bomb which is contemplated in the second
stanza, the ‘early morning sunlight carries in the whole world from outside’ as if the beauty of
the morning was exploding inwards towards the speaker. Such idyllic thoughts are juxtaposed
with politically motivated violence based on very fixed understandings of identity as the
speaker thinks: ‘of the labels / That freedom fighters stick onto the lost destinies of unborn
children’. The final four lines of the poem juxtapose, with a bitter sarcasm, the human cost of
terrorism with its stated ideological aims:
She’d make a mighty fine explosion now, if you were to blow her up;
An explosion of petals, of aeons, and the waitresses too, flying
breasts and limbs,
For a free Ireland.
(TB, 40)
Poems which also read well as indictments of the human cost of political violence include
‘Ireland 1977’ (SC, 42), ‘Ireland 1972’ (OW, 61) and ‘The Brother’ (SC, 41) which depicts a
man whose very identity has been fixed by an act of violence he himself has not committed.
129
This may be read as being emblematic of the position of many residents of Northern Ireland
who were – literally and figuratively – caught in the crossfire.
Finally, a suitable bridge between two conceptions of identity is found in Durcan’s
poem ‘The Dublin-Belfast Railway Line’ (DD, 60) from his 1990 collection Daddy, Daddy.
Addressing the issue of IRA violence, based as it was on a static and partial concept of
identity, Durcan’s speaker states:
What I want is free rail travel
For the heroic democrats of the IRA.
What I want is to put them aboard
The Dublin-Belfast train for six months;
Have them travel up and down the line
Six times a day for six months.
(DD, 60)
This image, of reductionist forms of identity forced to undergo a disorientating engagement in
movement can be read as encapsulating Durcan’s attitudes towards political identity. It is a
rhetorical attempt to push ‘the heroic democrats of the IRA’ in the direction of more complex
truths regarding identity, formulated in the quote below by Stuart Hall. Speaking of his
understanding of identity as ‘not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one’ he
describes it, rather, as aware that:
[i]dentities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and
fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and
antagonistic discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical
historicisation, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation.
(Hall, 4)
Understandings of identity as unified and static – based on fixed narratives or labels of origin
and belonging such as Protestant or Catholic – are, as has been seen, easily used for
justification of political violence. Identity which, in Hall’s and Durcan’s formulation is
transitory, which is defined and redefined in movement from place to place through time and
space, is, by its provisional nature, not a construct through which violence may be easily
justified.
130
4.5 – Conclusion
The suggestion of ‘free rail travel / For the heroic democrats of the IRA’ examined
above may be read as a satirical attempt to unseat them from their point of ideological fixity
and rigidity. It is also wholly in line with Durcan’s conception of the self as ‘fashioned’
(GHR, 51) and always coming into being rather than existing in stasis. It is to Durcan’s use of
images of ‘the other place’, to travel and movement as leitmotifs of identity that this study
now turns its attention. In fact, images of movement – the defying of the often lampooned
static positioning – are ubiquitous in Durcan’s work. This study seeks, particularly in its
coming chapter, to propose that images of travel and transport serve in Durcan’s work to
disturb deadening and habitual habits of mind as well as reductive paradigms of identity. Such
images of movement – often born out of the actual experience of travel to a foreign country –
authorise for Durcan a questioning of ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) often taken for granted. They
allow the poet to ask, in the words of his 1987 poem ‘The Red Arrow’: ‘Is there any other
history?’ (GHR, 70). The question of ‘other history[ies]’, in a world where ‘fiction is all that
matters’ (DD, 71) is a central one for Durcan – both the act of searching for them and the
consequent developing of new ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 55) serve as something of a
counter-attack to the reductionism and small mindedness frequently railed against in his work.
It is to a consideration of this motif in his work that this study now turns its attention.
131
Chapter Five:
Is there any other history? – travel, transport and Durcan’s accommodating vision
– History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
(Joyce 1986, 28)
In the history of transport – is there any other history? –
The highest form of transport is the Red Arrow
(GHR, 70)
5.1 – Introduction
In a dialogue in the final chapter of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the
young aesthete Stephen Dedalus exclaims in typically verbose fashion:
When the soul of man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from
flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
(Joyce 1992, 220)
Whereas Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus opts for an escapist form of foreign exile, the poetry of
Paul Durcan might be said to represent the sustained negotiations of an artist engaged in
simultaneously interrogating and flying by these ‘nets’ from an altogether differently
conceived position of exile. Joyce’s thinly-veiled alias Stephen Dedalus planning his escape
to continental Europe pledges himself to a life of ‘silence, exile and cunning’ (Joyce 1992,
269), whereas Durcan, in a line which resonates through much of his work, has written: ‘May
I, a Dubliner, live always in exile / In the village of Ringsend between the Drain and the Gut’
(SMP, 238). Previous chapters have examined Durcan’s engagement with the ‘nets’ of the
ecclesiastical, political and legal systems and their respective impacts on individual moral
freedom and authority. In this chapter sustained attention is given to one of the major
corrective measures offered by Durcan in the face of such oppressive forces: his particular
approach to travel, place and landscape. While forces oppressive to the individual subject are
frequently rendered in imagery of accusation, entrapment, imprisonment or constriction, the
counterpoint to this can be found in images of travel, movement and the artful estranging of
132
the otherwise familiar. This tactic can be seen to permeate both Durcan’s choice of subject
and his particular style as a poet, both of which areas are explored here. Indeed it is no
coincidence that, as confirmed by the poet himself, many of Durcan’s book titles contain
place names and references to travel.34
‘History’, as Stephen Dedalus complains about it in the second episode of Ulysses,
has connotations of collective psychic trauma and of unstoppable powers before which the
individual human subject is relatively impotent. Durcan’s readers are often given the
impression that his poetic voice grapples with similar demons as he engages with an Ireland
whose life is ‘imbued with political, religious and psychic myths’ (O’Toole, 30). However,
his suggestion in 1987’s ‘The Red Arrow’ (GHR, 70) that all history is a history of transport
– and by implication one of movement, flux, flow, journeying – is key. ‘History’ for Stephen
Dedalus may well be a ‘nightmare’, but Durcan’s art asserts against all odds that life is a
dream. If Durcan’s ‘The Red Arrow’ implies that all history is a history of transport, it also
subtly delivers an imperative to search for alternative histories. His rhetorical question ‘is
there any other history?’ may be read as the cry of a voice weary of and stultified by the
monolithic ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) of church, state and family lore. This implied plea for ‘any
other history’ is given an extra nuance when it is taken into account that the poet’s third level
education is not in literature but in archaeology and mediaeval history. That he is hyperconscious of the impact of stories and historiography on our lives – that ‘in reality fiction is
all that matters’ (DD: 71) – also adds a certain force to his rallying cry for ‘any other history’.
Durcan’s tactics for delivering his world from the monocular prisons of restrictive personal
and public histories are many. They include satire, persona poems, engagement with painting,
portraiture and cinema, celebrations of notable public figures and his writing about travel,
34
See Durcan’s contribution to Richard Kearney’s Navigations: Collected Essays 1976-2006 pp. 327-331
133
movement and the estranging of the otherwise familiar. This chapter deals principally with
three areas related to travel and topography, outlined below.
This chapter begins with an exploration of the importance of travel for Durcan – both
as experience and as poetic allegory. Having lived for brief periods in London, Barcelona and
Paris as a young man, Durcan has continued to travel widely. In interview with the current
author he was quick to note the important impact upon him that travel has made:
[P]ublishing the books over the years – even if, like T.S. Eliot said, I may have paid too
high a price for poetry – I feel very fortunate in that regard. Poetry has brought me to
parts of the world I would never have been without it. Brazil. Jerusalem. Japan. New
Zealand. ... I was so fortunate to see the Soviet Union, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Estonia,
Yugoslavia – such terrific culture shocks, to coin a cliché. Real shocks. The greatest one
of all was probably Japan.
(Appendix One)
He frequently documents in poetry the experience of international travel itself – a significant
number of poems are set in airports, from 1975’s ‘Gate 8’ (OW, 4) to 2007’s ‘On Being
Required to Remove my Trouser Belt at Dublin Airport Security (LM, 37) – as well as his
encounters with foreign cultures. For Durcan, the very act of travel itself can be said to
function as an extended allegory in the service of his resistance to restrictive and reductive
paradigms and fictions such as those detailed in the opening three chapters of this study. This
utilising of images of movement and transit is precisely the one named at the conclusion of
the preceding chapter when ‘The Dublin-Belfast Railway Line’ (DD, 60) was examined. In a
2001 radio broadcast on the subject of the Travelling community, the transcript of which was
published in Paul Durcan’s Diary, the poet posed two rhetorical questions that are germane
to this investigation:
Are we human beings not all of us longing to make ‘the Journey’ ... Are we not all of us
Travellers, in our deepest, buried, innermost human feelings?
(PDD, 23)
Writing about travel, then, might be said to be a mode of dispensing with the labels of
religious orthodoxy and political tribalism and unearthing our ‘deepest, buried, innermost
human feelings’. Following this initial examination, the focus will move to Durcan’s poems
134
chronicling his international travels. Though Durcan has described to various degrees trips to
the United States, South America, Japan, Italy, France, Britain and many other countries in
continental Europe, particular attention will be paid here to the volume Going Home to
Russia, published in 1987. It is a major and sustained meditation on a series of trips to Russia
and will serve as representative of Durcan’s general approach to describing foreign travel. It
will be claimed that these poems of foreign travel are representative of an axiomatic tactic of
Durcan’s, a tactic that is coded in the title of his first solo collection O Westport in the Light
of Asia Minor (1975). This drive – to see the familiar world ‘in the light of’ another
unfamiliar world – is a key in Durcan’s work. In his introduction to Crazy about Women
(1991) the poet complains about the ‘punitive monomania’ of many art critics. This
complaint might well be levelled against any of the targets of Durcan’s ire; the very ill he
laments is a certain incapacity or unwillingness in people and institutions to accommodate a
plurality of perspectives. Previous chapters have already catalogued how this ‘monomania’
has indeed proven punitive in the areas of church, politics and social pressure respectively.
This fixation on restrictive dogma and doctrine – a ‘monomania’ with regard to ‘vision[s] of
reality (GHR, 55) – is precisely what is torn asunder by the invitation in Durcan’s approach
to see the familiar world ‘in the light of’ something else. His work, thus interpreted,
unsteadies the sure hand of the dogmatic, cocksure alpha-male. Through his writing on travel
and encounters with other cultures he destabilises the mono in ‘monomania’ by introducing a
second angle, an external point or points of reference.
If ‘the judge’, whom Durcan
frequently sets up as a target of ridicule, ‘has a great sense of orientation’ (LM, 88), his tactic
here can be said to be one of pleasant disorientation, of making his readers less sure of what
they had taken for granted.
135
At the beginning of the 1970s the newly-married Paul Durcan returned to Ireland and
enrolled at University College Cork. Of Durcan’s study of archaeology with MJ O’Kelly at
this time Colm Tóibín has written:
It brought him back to the world of place names, to the magic nature of rural Ireland; it
brought him back to the golden world of Mayo. MJ O’Kelly was giving him back his own
country: it was magic, absolute magic
(Tóibín, 15-16).
Tóibín’s gushing praise of O’Kelly, echoed by Durcan in interview with the current author in
2012, points towards an area of Durcan’s work which forms the subject of the final major
section of this chapter: his particular way of naming and describing modern Ireland, with
particular emphasis on the poet’s ability to accommodate varied and often seemingly
contradictory realities. Complimentary to his sizeable body of work describing international
travel Durcan has produced many poems involving travel within Ireland. This motif is so
pronounced that it is fair to surmise that ‘in his poems, Irish life from conception to death is
lived in transit. Almost every poem takes place on the hoof – walking, driving, in a train’
(O’Toole, 40). Not only are Durcan and his personae constantly moving over the Irish
landscape, Ireland itself is rendered in such a way as to make it seem far from a fixed and
recognisable place. Durcan’s Ireland is one which includes ‘Ronald Reagan Hill’ (BWC, 4),
‘The children of Hiroshima, Dublin 7’ (JTA, 65), ‘A French Ireland’ (SC, 16) and the ‘On the
Run filling station on Strand Road’ (LM, 5). This study will show how Durcan refuses the
restrictive notion of Ireland as a ‘fixed frame for experience’ (O’Toole, 30) and re-imagines
Ireland and Dublin as just his stop on the ‘Dublin-Paris-Berlin-Moscow Line’ (SMP, 237).
On how to classify his particular techniques of defamiliarising Ireland Durcan’s critics so far
have been split – some naming his art as surrealist, others refusing the label. While aiming to
‘fly by the nets’ of such labels as surrealism this study will note the capaciousness of
Durcan’s range of subject matters and how ‘when he holds more or less ordinary events up to
the light, they glow in odd ways, revealing facets of meaning most of us could never imagine’
136
(Grennan, 44). Following the earlier conjecture about Durcan’s use of the phrase ‘in the light
of’, Grennan’s use of ‘light’ here is more than apt. Durcan’s technique seems always eager to
reach for new ‘light’ on his subjects, with all the Biblical resonances of freedom, revelation
and the dispelling of blindness that ‘light’ entails. Moreover, his art is reluctant to exclude or
disqualify any element of Irish reality – be it the vestiges of traditional religion or Irish
people’s penchant for Continental mini-breaks – Durcan’s art, as a mirror of his Ireland,
holds each of these factors ‘in the light of’ the others. These poems will be seen as a further
attempt, analogous to the foreign travel poems, to loosen the bonds of entrapment –
imaginative and literal – against which Durcan’s art always strains. They attempt to create a
more representative ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 55) than that accommodated in more restrictive
paradigms – to register the fact of Irish reality being ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52). If Durcan
has argued for a freedom of the individual subject from oppressive influences, he effects a
similar movement in respect of the sheer range of his subject matter and the scope of his
attention to detail. As Fintan O’Toole comments, Durcan’s Ireland seems at times so plural,
so diverse as to be ‘ambiguous, infinitely capable of reinvention’ (O’Toole, 37). Like an Irish
Whitman, both Durcan’s poetic persona and the Ireland which he describes are large,
containing multitudes.35 In the service of his question ‘is there any other history?’ (GHR, 70)
Durcan seems to pay close attention to the peculiarities of Irish life and idiosyncrasies of Irish
people in order to include and elevate precisely what is excluded or neglected by grand
ideological narratives of history and nationalism. In his attention to detail he has, in a
significant sense, given us an ‘other history’ of Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth and
first half of the twenty-first centuries.
The issue of the primacy of movement and aqueous flow in Durcan’s work – between
Ireland and foreign countries, between an actual Ireland and an imagined Ireland, between
35
See Walt Whitman’s, ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am
large, I contain multitudes.)’ (Whitman, 66)
137
tradition and modernity – provides an intriguing intersection with the theories of Homi K
Bhabha. In the introduction to his The Location of Culture Bhabha offers a reflection on an
installation by contemporary African-American artist Renée Green. The site-specific art-work
in question – called Sites of Genealogy – features a stairwell as one of its central elements.
Bhabha writes:
The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the
process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference
between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and tither of the stairwell, the
temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from
settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications
opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an
assumed or imposed hierarchy.
(Bhabha, 5)
Bhabha’s comments and implied compliments towards Green are just as apposite in relation
to Durcan’s persistent use of imagery and themes of motion, travel and liminality. Durcan’s
poetic voices similarly refuse easy definition, thriving in ‘the connective tissue that constructs
the difference’ between fixed and recognisable forms of identity. He creates, in his own
incessant ‘hither and tither’ – between Dublin and Mayo, Ireland and Russia – a moving
target for the predators of orthodoxy and fixity. He refuses, in line with his non-essentialist
understanding of identity, to be imprisoned or pigeonholed as part of a ‘primordial polarity’.
His 1991 poem ‘Man Walking The Stairs’ speaks to Green’s work and Bhabha’s commentary
very clearly as its speaker claims not only that ‘all my life I have been saying / ‘Man walking
the stairs’’ but that ‘The whole point of my home / Is the stairs. Can you conceive / Of a life
without stairs?’ (CW, 115). The attention of this study now turns to an analysis of the
importance of travel and transport as both realities and poetic allegories in Durcan’s work.
5.2 – Poetry and motion: the importance of travel and transport
Images of travel and transport are so ubiquitous in Durcan’s work as to have acquired
a primal significance. It has been noted earlier that Durcan himself has, as an adult, lived in a
138
variety of places – mainly in Dublin and Cork, and also briefly in London, Paris and
Barcelona – but memories of travel seem to reach further back in his biography. He has noted
that ‘As far back as I can remember, journeys to places were powerful experiences’ (Durcan
in Kearney, 330). Further, he has written of his childhood as divided between two places –
Dublin and Mayo – both of which have assumed a major importance in his work. His sense of
divided loyalty and fractured belonging is reflected in comments made in interview with
Arminta Wallace:
I was fostered, for want of a better word, to my aunt and grandmother and my earliest
memories are actually of those places, though Dartmouth Square was officially home. In
a funny way I’m neither one thing nor the other, Dublin nor Mayo.
(Wallace, 1999)
Two poetic representations of this journey between Dublin and Mayo will be analysed
momentarily as examples of the ways in which Durcan uses movement and travel as
allegories for deeper realities. It is important to note that Durcan claims his childhood
experience did not gift to him two places of belonging, rather it left him feeling ‘neither one
thing nor the other’. This kind of melancholic observation is typical of Durcan and wholly in
accord with the persona which permeates his poems – a potentially rich experience leaves the
poet feeling quite at a loss, having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Frequently
restless and failing to feel at home in any one place, Durcan’s poetic persona seems always to
be either yearning for home or ‘going home’ – to Russia, to Mayo, to Ringsend or to his
marital home in Cork as recorded in the touching ‘‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ (BWC,
43). As he writes in his pithy ‘Self-Portrait ’95’:
When he was in Copacabana he was homesick for
Annaghmakerrig;
When he got back to Annaghmmakerrig
He was homesick for Copacabana.
(GFB, 119)
Having taken this factor – an internalised sense of displacement and journeying – into
account, it is easy to see why Durcan might be drawn towards artistic kindred spirits such as
139
Marc Chagall and R.B. Kitaj, for both of whom the notion of exile and diaspora is of major
importance. It is also important to note that Durcan’s obsession with travel is not merely a
personal idiosyncrasy; Ireland during his lifetime has experienced at least two waves of
heavy emigration and is currently experiencing a third. That this is reflected in the poet’s
preoccupation with movement is noted in Fintan O’Toole’s comment: ‘Emigration, in his
work, is both a political fact and a spiritual state’ (O’Toole, 40).
Turning now from biography to poetry it is possible to gather a representative
selection of Durcan’s work which invokes images of transport and travel as allegories of
social and spiritual states and modes of consciousness. Both social status and existential state
are connoted by the Kilfenora Teaboy’s running ‘between two towns’ (TB, 50) as has been
noted in a previous chapter. The symbolic ‘Girl with the Keys to Pearse’s Cottage’ who has
‘no choice but to leave her home’ and is ‘America-bound at summer’s end’ (OW, 75) seems
to sit well beside the speaker in ‘Lord Mayo’ (TB, 18) who ‘had to go and work in
officeblocks in Shepherd’s Bush’ while hungering for ‘the dark depths of Beltra and Conn’.
Both of these poems can be read as commentaries on the issue of emigration with particular
emphasis on its detrimental effects on people and implied detrimental effects on society’s
fabric. Modes of transport as signifiers of social status and class are also prominent as
evidenced by ‘The Day of the Starter’ (OW, 74) who daily ‘revs thrice for the wife’ as she is
‘beaming from the rear’, and in the conversational ‘Tullynoe: Tête-a-Tête in the Parish
Priest’s Parlour’ (JBF, 29) in which a man’s life is remembered through the cars he owned. In
‘Tullynoe’ especially, Durcan seems able to encapsulate a certain truth about Ireland and
modernity through the use of modes of transport as symbols: a man obsessed with car
ownership dies after he ‘fell out of the train going to Sligo’ and arrives for his funeral ‘in a
coffin which was put in his father’s cart’. Durcan gives us an Ireland where children are
conceived onboard ‘while the Dublin-to-Cork train was stationary’ (JBF, 55); widowers are
140
afforded grief-renewing epiphanies on the bus (SC, 30); offers by hitchhikers of extramarital
sex are made en route to ‘Auntie Gerry’s Favourite Married Nephew Seamus’ (CIC, 45) and
the driving style of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney becomes worthy material for poetry
(SMP, 243).
If for Durcan the only history is ‘the history of transport’ (GHR, 70) it is worth noting
the connotations of this word. Etymologically transport means to carry across, to trans-port
(OED, 1534). History then may be said to be the story of that which is carried across from
generation to generation, with all the connotations of miscommunication, broken connections
and rich accidental hybrid meanings. To be transported has also had the meaning of being
banished as a criminal or slave, a meaning which feeds richly into both Durcan’s meditations
on emigration and also the sense of exile as existential allegory. However, perhaps the most
fruitful secondary meaning of transport in relation to Durcan is the Romantic use of the word.
William Wordsworth in his ‘Surprised by Joy’ (Wordsworth, 334) writes of how he ‘turned
to share the transport’ that was a moment of spiritual ecstasy. This sense of ‘transport’ as
being carried away with some emotion or being enraptured speaks richly to Durcan’s use of
the word. Reading Durcan’s transport through Wordsworth’s, it is possible to surmise that the
former’s poem implies that the only worthwhile history is that which relates to moments of
spiritual and emotional ecstasy, momentary releases from ‘monomania’. This might help to
account for Durcan’s linking of literal movement and transportation with Wordsworthian
transport. For example, by situating the action of his masterful ‘Man Smoking a Cigarette in
the Barcelona Metro’ (BWC, 18) in a train station Durcan might be interpreted as making a
statement about the revelatory and transformative potentials of travel. The poem’s speaker
who is ‘waiting for the rush-hour train to take me home’ is given the chance to glimpse a
vision of ‘a human being metamorphosed’. The image of the man-beast appearing in the
Barcelona metro – perhaps underground – evokes the image of the Minotaur in the Cretan
141
labyrinth. However, rather than an incarnation of repressed negativity, Durcan’s horse-man is
an emblem of and catalyst for spiritual transformation and ends the poem ‘circled round by
all of his newly equipped fans’ who are ‘no longer hooked on trains, or appearances, or loss’.
The assembled crowd of commuters who have been waiting for one form of transport are
treated to another much richer form. This poem, published in 1985 and still read by Durcan
publicly today, can be said to be an avatar for the artistic and spiritual potentials associated
by the artist with experiences of travel. Poems which similarly link transport with the
fantastical include ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3),
‘High-Speed Car Wash’ (BWC, 10) and the later ‘Golden Mothers Driving West’ (LM, 126).
‘Self-Portrait, Nude, with Steering Wheel’ (DD, 17) sits at the summit of a whole subgenre of Durcan poems. In these poems, whose raw material seems more recognisable as
drawn from the poet’s biography, the ability to drive – to be mobile – is used as an allegory
for and mirror of certain moods of the self. Just as paralysis and entrapment of the spirit are
drawn by Durcan in images of imprisonment – from the ‘prison’ and ‘cell bars’ (DD, 89) of
childhood to the ‘cave’ of adult loneliness (CIC, 83) – states of freedom are reflected in
images of movement and mobility. There is quite a sizeable collection of motoring poems,
with examples including ‘Golden Island Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 3), ‘Asylum Seeker’ (AoL,
40), ‘Admission’ (AoL, 53), ‘Fetherd’ (CIC, 118) and ‘Golden Mothers Driving West’ (LM,
126). Durcan’s tendency to use car journeys as mirrors of inner states will be probed here by
examination of three poems: ‘Self-Portrait, Nude, with Steering Wheel’, ‘Going Home to
Mayo, Winter, 1949’ (SC, 9) and ‘Rosie Joyce’ (AoL, 56). Self-deprecating and self-mocking
poems are a standard of Paul Durcan’s repertoire at least since The Berlin Wall Café in 1985.
In ‘Self-Portrait, Nude, with Steering Wheel’ (DD, 17) he takes the same approach, using
motoring as his extended analogy. For his persona, which embarks on a series of humorously
self-effacing comments, to be unable to drive is to be ‘nude’, to be socially deficient. Unable
142
to transport himself, the speaker has endured ‘45 years of creeping and crawling about the
earth’. The motif extends and builds through a rhythmical and repetitive pattern of selfcastigating observations. Unable to drive, the speaker doubts his status as ‘cultured’ and a
‘Homo sapiens’, mocking his ‘courage and self-reliance’ and his status as ‘liberated’ and
‘articulate’. In typical Durcan fashion the poem builds to a simultaneously hilarious and
pathetic denouement as the speaker finally appears ‘Nude, with a steering wheel in my
hands’. In the symbolic economy of Durcan’s poetry it should be noted that the speaker here
is precisely opposite to the all-powerful father-figure of ‘Amnesty’ who is fully empowered
to ‘spin around from the driving wheel and explain’ (DD, 89) the world to his son. If the
persona ‘Paul Durcan’ as it appears in ‘Christmas Day’ (CD, 5) is to be credited, then some
time in his late forties Paul Durcan learned to drive a car. Interestingly, even this standard
rite-of-passage is rendered in terms which echo judicial and legal tribulation as the poem’s
protagonist remembers practising for his driving test in these terms: ‘The streets of Navan
town are a trial’ (CD, 49). In order to show the range of contrasting emotions performed by
Durcan through his motoring motif it will be helpful to perform a comparative reading of two
Durcan road poems - ‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949’ (SC, 9) and ‘Rosie Joyce’ (AoL,
56).
Published twenty six years apart in Sam’s Cross (1978) and The Art of Life (2004)
respectively, these two poems open themselves to a rich comparative reading on a number of
levels. Both poems detail two car journeys between Dublin and Mayo, the earlier journeys in
1949 and the later over fifty years after. The emotional tenor of the poems is in such stark
contrast it is possible to read them as opposites, yet both invoke travel and landscape as
mirrors of their emotional content. ‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949’ (SC, 9) is a two
stanza poem, the first of twenty lines and the second of nine. Its title and first line read as
counter-intuitive to an audience with even a rudimentary grasp of Durcan’s biography. Born
143
in Dublin, he nevertheless describes ‘Going Home to Mayo’ and leaving the ‘alien, foreign
city of Dublin’. Durcan is travelling west with his father – the poet is but five years old, his
father is in every sense in the driving seat. With childish joy the boy tries to vicariously
participate in the driving experience: ‘“Daddy, Daddy” I cried “Pass out the moon”’.
Unremarkable place names become ‘magic pass-words into eternity’ until the pair arrive in
‘the heartland of Mayo’. Durcan has brought us on a thirteen line journey from the ‘alien,
foreign city’ to ‘the heartland’. Significantly, father and son have arrived in a matriarchal
paradise: ‘my father’s mother’s house, all oil-lamps and women’. This paradisal world of
‘Life’s seemingly seamless garment’ is disturbed only by sounds of the natural world. In the
light of Durcan’s later collection Daddy, Daddy (1990) it is tempting to attribute a special
importance to the fact that the poet describes how:
... 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.
(SC, 9)
The fact that this was ‘an unheard-of thing in the city’ is perhaps the only superfluous note
struck in the poem, implied as it is in the poem’s overall tone. Just as easily as paradise
seemed gained in the first stanza, it is lost in the second. As if echoing the incongruity within
the title and first line, the second stanza begins ‘But home was not home’ and an expulsion
from the garden of nature imagery is initiated. The Eden of Mayo ends, and along with it
filial harmony it might fairly be assumed, as ‘the daylight nightmare of Dublin city’ beckons.
Just as he did of the journey westwards, Durcan’s description of the journey eastwards blends
emotional state and physical surroundings. In an echo of Wordsworth’s ‘Shades of the prisonhouse begin to close / Upon the growing Boy’ (Wordsworth, 299), on the journey back to
Dublin ‘each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom; / And railings and palings and asphalt and
traffic-lights’ shatter the peace and expectation of the opening stanza. The city to which
144
father and son return, rather than a living, breathing landscape, is described as ‘Thousands of
crosses of loneliness’.
A suitable counterbalance to ‘the narrowing grave in the life of the father’ and the
‘wide cemetery of the boy’s childhood’ is found in the addressee and hopeful tone of
Durcan’s later poem ‘Rosie Joyce’ (AoL, 56). The poem celebrates the arrival of the poet’s
granddaughter in May 2001 (PDD, 93) by recalling a Mayo-Dublin journey made at that
time. As with the 1978 piece, in ‘Rosie Joyce’ landscape and travel imagery are reflective of
a mood, this time one of immense hope and celebration. If the poem’s subject is a new human
life, then this newness is reflected in nature all around him. This poem takes place on a
‘Sunday afternoon in May’ rather than ‘Winter, 1949’ and while this may be mere statement
of fact, it also reflects the poem’s tone. On Achill on the day of Rosie’s birth the poet notices
‘Yellow forefingers of Arum Lily – the first of the year’, ‘the first rhododendrons’ and the
‘first hawthorns powdering white the mainland’. In his earlier poem his very childhood is a
‘wide cemetery’ whereas here is visible ‘Burrishoole cemetery shin-deep in forget-me-nots’
at the birth of the child. Even celestial bodies are implicated in the celebration as ‘a hot sun
pushed through the clouds / And you were born!’ Just as the poet had enumerated the towns
on his journey to Mayo with his father in 1949, he is similarly rhapsodic here:
I drove Tulsk, Kilmainham, the Grand Canal.
Never before had I felt so fortunate
To be driving back into Dublin city;
Each canal bridge an old pewter brooch.
(AoL, 58-59)
In an image totally in keeping with the Biblical references throughout the poem, Durcan
alludes to Christ’s walk on water and claims it for himself: ‘I rode the waters and the roads of
Ireland, / Rosie, to be with you, seashell at my ear!’ In a pointed revision of his ‘Going Home
to Mayo, Winter, 1949’ Durcan remembers taking this same journey ‘in my father’s Ford
Anglia half a century ago’, a journey during which the poet’s father styled himself as a
145
Biblical patriarch ‘relishing his role as Moses’ and dividing the land they crossed ‘Between
the East and West’. It is possible to interpret the second half of ‘Rosie Joyce’ – and indeed
perhaps the entire poem – as a gentle undoing of these patterns of patriarchal power. If
Durcan’s father relished naming the river Shannon as ‘the Great Divide’, then the poet uses
the occasion of the new birth – and the opportunity to address new life – as a chance to issue
a spiritual corrective:
No such thing, Rosie, as a Uniform Ireland
And please God there never will be;
There is only the River Shannon and all her sister rivers
And all her brother mountains and their family prospects.
There are higher powers than politics
And these we call wildflowers or, geologically, people.
(AoL, 58)
Here, at the introduction of a new life to his own family, Durcan fuses familial sentiments
and the natural world to enunciate a new paradigm in opposition to one based on ‘the name of
the Great Divide // Between the East and the West’. The newborn is named as literal saviour
to the poet – ‘you saved my life’ – who ‘For three years / ... had been subsisting in the slums
of despair’. This religious motif is brought to a crescendo as the poem ends with a line which
is part poetry, part prayer: ‘Thank You, O Lord, for the Descent of Rosie onto Earth’.
This writing of movement and journeying as a reflection of and allegory for emotional
states is common in Durcan’s work. In many cases travel is depicted as a mode of selfrenewal, or of release from the preoccupations of loneliness typified in the image of the cave.
Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Prelude’, in a phrase which Durcan has repeated like a mantra in
interview – including interview with the current author in October 2012 – counsels that ‘you
must go inland and be / Lost in compassion’s ecstasy’ (Kavanagh 2004, 208). An equivalent
of Kavanagh’s ‘ecstasy’ – which etymologically means to stand outside oneself (OED, 454) –
might be found in Wordsworth’s ‘transport’. Travel then, for Durcan, even at its most
fraught, might be said to be a mode of ‘ecstasy’. Durcan’s ‘The Far Side of the Island’ is
146
somewhat of a meditation on this issue as he celebrates self-forgetfulness brought about by
his journey: ‘I am brooding neither on what lies ahead of me / Nor on what lies behind me’
(AoL, 11). Richly allegorically he continues: ‘The middle of the journey is what is at stake – /
Those twenty-five miles or so of in-betweenness’. The importance of the journey, of
movement, is celebrated as the poet records a series of minor revelations and insights – about
mortality, landscape and the human need for company – before posing the rhetorical question
which frames this chapter even as it alludes to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Questions of Travel’:
‘Could I have known, / Had I not chanced the far side of the island?’ The ‘island’ in question
seems to refer to Achill Island, but might just as easily be interpreted as the island of Ireland
or indeed the island of the self. All islands, Durcan implies, have ‘a far side’ worth
journeying towards.
Given travel’s potentials for surprise and pleasant disorientation, Durcan’s rhetorical
‘could I have known’ (AoL, 11) can also be read in a metaphysical and epistemological light
in relation to his broader project of enfranchising multiple ‘visions of reality’ (GHR, 55). The
implied answer, of course, is no – without the act and experience of travel out of one’s
conceptual comfort zone it is impossible to ‘know’ (AoL, 11) another ‘vision of reality’
(GHR, 55). In a reprising of this theme Durcan’s 2012 volume Praise in Which I Live and
Move and Have my Being contains the observation that ‘Having the get-up-and-go to make
the journey is what matters’ (P, 46). Thus far this chapter has established the importance of
the actual act of travel to Paul Durcan and charted some of the ways in which he employs
motifs of travel as allegories for emotional states. The next area of focus will be on Durcan’s
destinations, particularly Russia and on the poems which constitute the fourth section of his
1987 collection Going Home to Russia.
147
5.3 – ‘A man in search of his Russia’36: Russia as mirror and site of possibility in Going
Home to Russia
‘Russia is the fashionable obsession of the moment’ reported Professor John Busteed
of University College Cork in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review (Busteed, 531). Returning
to Ireland from Russia, Busteed commented on Irish people’s inquisitiveness in relation to his
trip: ‘Everyone wants to know "What about it all?" A poet or a dramatist would have
fashioned a complete answer’. Professor Busteed’s comments, published in December of
1932, were strangely still relevant as Paul Durcan published his Going Home to Russia in
1987. Fashionable obsession or enduring preoccupation, Russia has appeared in the works of
many of Durcan’s Irish contemporaries including Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Séamus
Deane, Paula Meehan and Medbh McGuckian. While Going Home to Russia is the most
sustained treatment that Durcan has given to the country in his poetics, it is worth noting that
he frequently invokes the spectre and climate of Russian state power elsewhere in his work to
add weight to critiques of his native country. The Catholic Church seems to suffer most
pointedly from this comparison, particularly when the poet addresses ‘the Kremlin-like rule
of Archbishop McQuaid’ (PDD, 122). Durcan has also specifically mentioned Pushkin’s
poem The Bronze Horseman as an influence on his conception of life as a dream (Appendix
One). The subjects of focus here are the poems which comprise the fourth section of
Durcan’s 1987 volume. They offer a sustained meditation on the poet’s trips to Russia, in
1983, 1985 and 1986 respectively (Tóibín, 18-19). Of the first of these trips Durcan has
written:
I had been reared by Church and State here in Ireland to fear all Communists, especially
Soviet Communists, as evil people with cloven hooves, even more sinister than
Protestants.
(PDD, 175)
36
‘Hymn to my Father’ (GHR, 95)
148
Rather than a nation of demonic socialists, Durcan instead records finding a Russian world as
rich and various as any other, with ‘kindly, decent, hardworking, playful, spiritual people, as
well as heard-hearted, stony-faced men and women’ (PDD, 175). Rather typically, at least
one immediate similarity is found: ‘As for the Kremlin old boys, they were a replica of the
Maynooth Hierarchy’.
Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Questions of Travel’ asks: ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us
come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?’ (Bishop, 93) This quotation may be read as
speaking directly to this investigation into Durcan’s use of Russia as a mirror for Ireland. It is
perhaps too harsh accuse the poet of a ‘lack of imagination’; rather, it can be said that Durcan
uses Russia – both as he encounters it and idealises it – as a way in which to provoke his
imagining of a richer, freer Ireland – of deepening his ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 55). This
much was acknowledged by the poet in his 1988 collaboration with Richard Kearney:
[T]here is some kind of homecoming in the ‘other place’ ... You see things when you
return from the journey that you had not seen before. You are filled with new outrages,
new dreams.
(Durcan in Kearney, 331)37
This observation seems to point towards a way in which Durcan uses Russia as a site in
which to generate stimulating critiques of Ireland, a place which might help to destabilise the
‘monomania’ noted earlier. Kim Boey Cheng has written that in Durcan’s work Russia plays
a ‘blatantly subversive role as a negative elsewhere targeting the myths in which Ireland
wraps itself. Russia is an Other which challenges Ireland's myths of itself’ (Cheng, 365).
Similarly, comparing Durcan’s tactic of writing in women’s voices with his use of Russia as a
comparative other, Ruth Padel has written:
If a woman’s voice is a backhand way of seeing self from the other side of the veil, a
foreign country, the other side of an iron curtain, is a great way of writing about home.
(Padel, 125).
37
Interestingly in interview with the current author in 2012 Durcan seemed sceptical about his earnestness in the
context of the Kearney interview. However, applicability of his quoted comments to this line of interpretation is
still significant, especially given the fact that the interview was conducted in 1988 a mere year after the
publication of Going Home to Russia.
149
The poet is neither trying to tap into his inner Russian nor claim a profound personal change
as a result of his trips. This is the work of a poet who will render himself in 1993’s A Snail in
My Prime as the eponymous snail. A creature which carries its home on its back is an apt
image of the poetic voice found in Going Home to Russia. Durcan may take himself and his
readers to Russia, but he does so with a tone and a subject range which is more than familiar
– chatty, self-effacing pieces on well-worn subjects such as the poet’s obsession with women,
self and society, fatherhood, artistic role models and the notion of home. What the book
delivers then, is Ireland in the light of Russia, Durcan’s poetic consciousness in the light of
the strangeness of a foreign land. This double-vision – seeing Ireland while looking at Russia
and vice versa – enacts a creative interplay of perspectives and an epistemic richness.
The title poem of the collection, ‘Going Home to Russia’ (GHR, 65), is a significant
poem of thirty two four line stanzas containing most of the section’s thematic preoccupations
in embryonic form. Its title might be read, of course, as a pointed revision of the earlier title
‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949’. As with the earlier poem the speaker is ‘going home’
to a place not literally home to the poet – the primary meaning from the outset then of ‘Mayo’
and ‘Russia’ is as imaginative, spiritual home. The technique of the poem is part description,
part fanciful imaginative invention of a journey from Shannon airport to Moscow on the
‘Havana-Moscow Illushin 62’. Just as the poet moves from Ireland to Russia, so too the
poem’s register moves from travelogue, broadside and invective to the tenderness and
intimacy of a lover’s plea. In many ways the poem reads like an account of a jailbreak, as the
speaker moves from characteristic images of isolation, imprisonment and constriction to
freedom, erotic love and companionable asylum. As elsewhere in his work, Durcan renders
Ireland as a prison at the poem’s opening. The speaker is ‘waiting for the Havana-Moscow
Illushin 62’ in a country where ‘scarcely anybody is free’ and even an airport official eyes
him as a ‘hostage or convict’. Attacks are launched on ‘Church and Party’ and ‘the legal and
150
medical mafia’. Indeed, few elements of Irish life seem immune from critique as Durcan’s
verse takes lyrical, rhythmical flight:
Goodbye to the penniless, homeless, trouserless politicians;
Goodbye to the pastoral liberals and the chic gombeens;
Goodbye to the gobberloos and the loodermauns;
Goodbye to the wide boys and their wider wives.
(GHR, 66-67)
So prison-like does Durcan render Ireland that his tone seems a blend of hyperbole and
paranoia: ‘At the last moment I might be taken off – / Not until we are airborne will I be
free’. Whereas in Ireland nobody is ‘free to have a home’, the poet is ‘going home’ to Russia.
Indeed, homes are literally the first thing the speaker sees in Russia as ‘A block of flats lights
up out of nowhere – / The shock in a lover’s eyes at the impact of ecstasy’. Here again can be
seen the combination of ‘transport’ and ‘ecstasy’ referred to earlier. Russia is imagined as the
very opposite of Ireland, even in a slightly predictable and programmatic way. Ireland’s
‘mournful’ immigration officer is replaced by a ‘smiling’ militiaman on the Russian side. To
move from Ireland to Russia is to go ‘from godlessness into faith’. Free of ‘clerical leg-men’
and ‘Bishop Comfy’ the speaker surmises that this is what ‘it must feel like to be going down
into heaven – / To be going home to Russia’. Released from the limbo of ‘hanging about’
and ‘waiting’ the speaker is relieved on arrival in Russia of his status as ‘solitary passenger’
and passes into a state of comfort with utterances such a as ‘My dear loved one, let me lick
your nose’. ‘Russia’, real or imagined, is a place of belonging, a ‘home’ containing ‘a kitchen
lit for lovers’ and a settee upon which the speaker can ‘become with you / Creatures of the
forest’. Interestingly, the central passage of the poem – the description of travel from Ireland
to Russia – is an extended erotic motif with love-making as a metaphor and simile for the
journey. The pilot, ‘a man much loved by his wife and friends’ knows his route as well as a
bus driver might know a more local journey. He ‘knows every bend in the road’ intimately
and lets ‘Asia run her fingers through our hair’ after climbing above the ‘pores of the
gooseflesh of Ireland’ and her ‘wet, unrequited yearnings’. If Ireland’s yearnings are
151
‘unrequited’, Russia’s will not be, as the pilot begins ‘going down’ into Russia, delivering ‘a
prolonged kiss’ and carrying out his duty ‘like a man / Who has chosen to make love instead
of to rape’. The motif comes to a crescendo when the destination appears like ‘the shock in a
lover’s eyes at the impact of ecstasy’. If to travel is to make love and to arrive is to climax,
then to know oneself in another country is in some way to be born again. This is coded in the
opening line of the third last stanza as the poet wishes ‘To live again with nature as before I
lived’ which expresses sentiments of rebirth and return to prelapsarian bliss just as its syntax
mirrors Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘grow again with nature as before I grew’ in his ‘Canal Bank
Walk’ (Kavanagh 2004, 224). However pure the poet’s intimations of rebirth, the experience
mediated through the poems which follow is much more complex.
Women feature prominently in the poems under consideration. Saviours, sexual
playmates, victims of circumstance and images of the divine, Durcan’s Russian women are a
representative selection of his overall depiction of women and a strong continuation and
development of his mature style first seen in The Berlin Wall Café (1985). ‘The Red Arrow’,
‘The Woman with the Keys to Stalin’s House’ and ‘Zina in Murmansk’ will be considered
here. In ‘The Red Arrow’ (GHR, 70) Durcan’s speaker recalls making love with ‘Svetka’ on
‘the night train from Leningrad to Moscow’. He appropriates the train’s title, and uses the
image of its motion as metaphor for the lovemaking he describes – the poem builds towards
the moment when ‘the Red Arrow shot into Moscow’. Svetka seems altogether more able for
the activity in which the two are engaged, with the Irish poet symbolically ‘falling out of
bed’. Svetka excuses her lover before the inquisitive ‘wagon-lady’ on the grounds that ‘These
foreigners – / They cannot keep from falling out of bed – / Always needing to be treated like
babies’. The poem ends with the infantilised, retrospective and lovesick poet licking his own
wounds:
‘My dear, dear man, she kept murmuring over and over.
Although that was all of seven years ago –
152
She who shot the Red Arrow through my heart.’
(GHR, 71)
Rather than a radical departure brought about by his arrival in Russia, Durcan’s depiction of
lovers here is wholly in keeping with The Berlin Wall Café: his men seem to be ‘always
needing to be treated like babies’ just as in the earlier volume his speaker-alter-ego engaged
in ‘Messiahing about in his wife’s lap’ (BWC, 52). ‘Zina in Murmansk’ (GHR, 84) and ‘The
Woman with the Keys to Stalin’s House’ (GHR, 88) are two portraits of lonely women.
‘Zina’, once the pride of her parents, dodges university to take a job as a ‘grade-A typist’ in
Murmansk solely because she hoped she might find there the ‘old-fashioned man she yearned
for’. In a piece which seems to be oddly misjudged romanticism, Durcan describes how she
longed for a man with ‘a drop of Mesolithic sexuality’ who would ‘read to her from Tolstoy’.
Having failed to find such a man, she has ended up ‘typing out the correspondence of the
chairman’ – who himself, of course, is on his fourth wife – whilst wondering to herself ‘Am I
the last woman left alive in the world?’ It can be argued that the poem is an attempt at literary
primitivism – the primitivist school of visual art is alluded to repeatedly in the Russia poems
– however, it perhaps fails to convince. The altogether more uplifting and arguably betterachieved ‘The Woman with the Keys to Stalin’s House’ (GHR, 88) may be read as a
recapitulation, via Russia, of Durcan’s earlier ‘The Girl with the Keys to Pearse’s Cottage’
(OW, 75). Both women stand as corrective presences against the hubristic ideologies of
nationalism and state-worship respectively. However, unlike the Galway girl, ‘Galya’ has not
emigrated but ‘has lived all her life in the town of Gori / Under the statue of Stalin’. In
opposition to the brutality both denoted and connoted by the name ‘Stalin’, Galya is ‘buxom,
humorous, lugubrious’. Though she claims to be ‘the saddest woman in all Georgia’, by the
end of the second stanza she has ‘opened the buttons of her blouse, / Beckoning me to follow
suit’ as the two fall into an erotic reverie ‘making big love and little love’. The contrast
between the intimacy and life-affirming reality of love-making with the oppressive and cold
153
abstractions of political ideology and violence is affirmed in the third stanza: ‘how lucky I
was to have been her Adam; / And Yaweh – that old Stalin on his plinth – / Had failed to cow
us’. This conflict between the political and the private is latent through much of Durcan’s
work and occurs most explicitly elsewhere in his ‘Making Love Outside Áras An Úachtaráin’
(SC, 47) as the intimacy of lovers is again depicted as being ‘stalked’ by a political patriarch.
It is imperative in Durcan’s schema – if life must be lived ‘under the statue of Stalin’ – to
have him ‘fail to cow’ you, just as it is to live in the Ireland of ‘blind’ de Valera and continue
to make love ‘outside Áras an Úachtaráin’. As Kim Boey Cheng states about these two
poems, in ‘both poems, the act of love subverts the symbols of nationalist ideology by being
performed on hallowed grounds’ (Cheng, 367).
The intimacy of setting and voice in Durcan’s Russian love poems carries into his
meditations on fatherhood and patriarchy in ‘The Prodigal Son’ (GHR, 92) and ‘Hymn to my
Father’ (GHR, 95). In both pieces the poet reckons with a father figure; both poems too are a
form of ekphrasis38. As a section of a subsequent chapter will be dedicated solely to an
exploration of Durcan’s writings on his father, it is sufficient here to treat of the father in the
broadest, most symbolic terms as being representative of history, tradition and patriarchy. In
‘The Prodigal Son’ the speaker is brought, by an incident in the street, into confrontation with
a psychic reality – ‘the Bogey Man’ – by which he claims to have been terrorised for his
entire adult life. The first stanza recalls his parents’ warning that ‘He is coming to eat you’
before the second stanza describes the terror inspired in the child by such a spectre:
I stare out aghast at the silhouette of the coal pit,
Waiting for the Bogey Man to make the first move,
To uncrumple himself and come swaying into the window,
To affix his spikes to my shoulderblades, his pot-belly to my
skull.
38
Ekphrasis is understood, for the purposes of this study, to refer to poems which take as their subject or point
of departure paintings or other art works. An artistic enterprise frequently engaged in by Durcan, it can also be
seen commonly amongst his peers as well as notable precursors such as John Keats (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) or
WH Auden (‘Musée des Beaux Arts’). See also Heffernan, J., (1993), Museum of Words: The Poetics of
Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
154
(GHR, 92)
With the child paralysed by fear, Durcan interposes between second and third stanzas an
italicised quotation from the gospel of Luke, referring to the parable of the prodigal son. This
simultaneously connects the reader with the Rembrandt painting and marks a turning in the
poem’s narrative. Stanza three is set ‘tonight, past midnight, thirty-five years later’ as the
poet crouches on his bed ‘in my third floor waterfront room in the Hotel Leningrad’. The
speaker has had an encounter which produced in him the realisation that ‘all my life I have
been waiting / For the Bogey Man at the bottom of the back garden’. This realisation, which
as a change of heart and mind mirrors obliquely the prodigal son’s decision to return to the
father in the gospel, seems to have come about as a result of an encounter on a dark street
during which ‘a small old man in fur and felt / Stepped out of the lurking shadows’. Nervous,
edgy and ‘waiting / for the Bogey Man’ the speaker is relieved instead to find a diminutive,
relatively friendly and benign character who exclaims jovially ‘How are you there!’ This
pattern – of finding an ultimately harmless character where a demon had been feared – can be
read as representing both a personal psychic reality but also as having a bearing on the
posturing of Cold War politics where both sides played for the other the role of ‘Bogey Man’.
This poem might be read as representative of a certain shift in his treatment of patriarchal
figures which occurs in Durcan’s work around this time. Especially in his output between The
Berlin Wall Café (1985) and Daddy, Daddy (1990) a shift in tone, technique and range is
achieved. There is a discernible movement, particularly in relation to his writing of male
figures, towards compassion, irony and nuance and away from some of the more bitter satire
which characterises his earlier work. This is not, of course, to claim that his later work is
devoid of satire, but his male portraits from this point onwards seem better achieved, more
multifaceted and ultimately more believable.
155
‘Hymn to my Father’ (GHR, 95) reads well both as a companion piece to the spiritual
realignment achieved in ‘The Prodigal Son’ and as an introductory poem to Durcan’s next
volume Daddy, Daddy (1990). Just as the prodigal son in the gospel comes to an
accommodation with his father, so too Durcan seems to seek an understanding of his own
‘Father[s]’ in ‘Hymn to my Father’. In fact he advocates that his dying father undergo the
same journey – conceptually if not literally – that the poet is undergoing in Russia, a stepping
outside the familiar as a striving for genuine self-knowledge. Just as he described himself in
‘Going Home to Russia’, Durcan describes his father as imprisoned, this time in a ‘top-story
sarcophagus, / Chained to your footwarmer and your pills’. As well as addressing his own
father, Durcan surely addresses the ‘Father[s]’ of Irish culture: ‘You made me what I am – /
A man in search of his Russia’. Durcan’s acceptance here of the fact that fatherly presences –
biological, cultural, hegemonic – ‘made me what I am’ is yet a further acknowledgement of
the ‘fiction[s]’ that are ‘all that matter’ (DD, 71) and of how identity is ‘fashioned’ (GHR,
51). The Irish culture personified by ‘Dear Daddy’ can be read as being too cosy, insular, and
self-contented: ‘You had a story for every milestone, / A saga for every placename’. Though
he does not directly reference the artist, it can be surmised that Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1878
painting ‘A Knight at the Crossroads’ informs the final image of the poem. For an Ireland on
its ‘last legs now’ the poet has only one piece of advice: ‘Knight at the Crossroads / You
would go home to Russia this very night’. Reading these poems side by side it can be
surmised that the exhortation implied in ‘The Prodigal Son’ and ‘Hymn to my Father’ is
towards a departure from the comfortable familiarities of patriarchy and literal home and
engagement in a process of self examination in the mirror of another place. Writing about
these Durcan poems Peter McDonald comments thus:
[T]hey are not reports from Utopia by any means, but they are affirmative poems in
which an escape is an escape into an unconstrained self, able to face up to its own
obsessions and fears.
(McDonald, 106)
156
Indeed, despite some poems in which Durcan seems to engage in oversimplification for
stylistic reasons, his effect is arguably not to establish Russia as a shining example for Ireland
but rather to set one ‘in the light of’ the other so that possibilities before unseen become part
of a new ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61).
This treatment of Durcan’s Russia poems will conclude with an examination of three
pieces related to public figures: ‘The Kindergarten Archipelago’, ‘The Return of
Solzhenitsyn’ and ‘Peredelkino: At the Grave of Pasternak’. In these pieces Durcan implies
an affinity with two Russian artists who suffered political persecution at the hands of the
Russian state: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). ‘The
Return of Solzhenitsyn’ (GHR, 76) sees Durcan speak in the voice of a middle-aged man
pleading with the exiled writer to return to Russia: ‘for how much longer / Will we have to
wait for you to come home?’ Solzhenitsyn, in a continuation of a motif which spans the entire
selection, is named as the ‘Prodigal son whom we revere and cherish’. In a clever twist the
author’s exile is described as being a ‘sentence’ which not only he but his own country has
had to serve – as if, without its Nobel Laureate (1970), Russia is itself imprisoned:
‘Alexander Isayevich, we have served our sentence: / Have mercy on us and, if you please,
come home’. ‘The Kindergarten Archipelago’ (GHR, 83) takes the title of Solzhenitsyn’s
major work ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and inverts it in a dreamy, utopian vision. Walking the
streets ‘as wet dusk filters into a remote Russian town’ the poet is afforded an epiphany of
sorts:
I am aware of being watched as I scurry
Down Marx Prospekt towards my room – watched
By a schoolgirl with a hamster in her hand[.]
(GHR, 83)
As in ‘The Prodigal Son’ (GHR, 92), where the poet presumed to find a ‘Bogey Man’ – the
invasive invigilating presence of the state – he finds himself watched only by ‘a schoolgirl
with a hamster in her hand’. This leads to the fulsome observation that ‘what is strange about
157
the Soviet Union / Is that it cherishes all the children of the union equally’. The reader here
may hear here a jibe at the seminal document of Irish state, the Proclamation of the Republic.
In it the rebels sought to found a state ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally’. One
might also read here an allusion to the prodigal son motif: the tension present at the end of
Christ’s parable emanates from the father’s failure to treat ‘all the children of the union
equally’. However, simple comparisons of Ireland with a utopian Russia are complicated by a
juxtaposition in the poem’s final quatrain. ‘While Alexander Solzhenitsyn tramps the
marches / of his walled-off home-in-exile in Vermont USA’, Durcan, an Irish tourist and
poet, is free to roam Russia: ‘Under the flying black skies of Ryazan / I am sailing the streets
of the Kindergarten Archipelago’. While not ‘all the children of the union’ are cherished in
either jurisdiction then, Durcan relocates the centre of attention away from obvious focal
points of political power and onto ‘children’: ‘Surely a fellow needs help who does not see
that nothing / Is of consequence except the children of the union’.
Of all the ‘legendary, mythical, prodigal father[s]’ (GHR, 100) to whom Durcan
imagines himself as adopted son in Going Home to Russia, it is to the author of Doctor
Zhivago that he pays most extensive and moving tribute. Just as with the title poem ‘Going
Home to Russia’, many of the collection’s preoccupations are gathered in ‘Peredelkino: at the
Grave of Pasternak’ (GHR, 77). While the tone of the earlier title poem was one of
journeying and expectation, here the subject and tone is of arrival, acceptance and
reconciliation of projection with reality in Durcan’s characteristically self-mocking style.
Over the course of the poem’s twenty-five four line stanzas the poet journeys from being
‘self-engrossed and paranoid’ to rhapsodically celebratory. As if returning as prodigal son the
speaker begins: ‘After all these years, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, / I have found you’. In
the description of his dress – ‘A blue corduroy cap on my head / That I purchased in a West
of Ireland village’ – Durcan is setting up a meeting of the Irish and the Russian. The lineation
158
and word order suggest the slightest duplicity of meaning in the couplet, allowing us to
believe that not only was the ‘cap’ purchased ‘in a West of Ireland village’, but his ‘head’ too
has its origins there. Having made it to Pasternak’s grave the speaker imagines himself as
encouraged by ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ to ignore ‘bombast and humbug’ and
to ‘paint my soul with leaves of mud’. The poem’s second half opens with the speaker’s selfdescription as ‘a naïf’, which is telling. As applied to artistic technique, ‘naïf’ – which is the
male form of the word naive – evokes the collection’s sometime preoccupations with
primitivism. Indeed, the etymology of naive and of naïf is the Latin word nativus meaning
native or natural (OED, 950). Further, ‘naïf’ is also wholly consistent with Durcan’s
preoccupation with childlike freshness of perspective typified by his persistent use of the
word innocence or its derivatives. The sight of Pasternak’s grave sets the poem’s speaker
thinking about an Irish grave, that of Arthur Leary, an eighteenth century nobleman killed for
his political principles, about whom one of the most celebrated poems in the Irish language is
written. This is ‘Kilcrea in West Cork’ in the light of ‘Peredelkino’ as Durcan describes
Pasternak as one who ‘dies for the right to ride a white horse’ just as Arthur Leary had. Faced
with the fact of death, the poem’s tone becomes more reflective as thoughts turn to the
primacy of love: ‘A man without his woman is a right hand without a left’; and the horrors of
war: ‘the fresh grave next to yours of a nineteen-year-old boy / Slain in the Afghanistan
wars’. Self-mockingly, in one of his very finest lines, Durcan asks rhetorically: ‘Isn’t it
heartbreakingly funny how relentlessly / Pretentious men are’. The poem draws towards a
close with the poet’s bald statement that ‘I have a two-hour conversation / With myself and
the trees’ which might be read as a keynote of the entire ‘Russia’ selection – ultimately the
poems of Going Home to Russia constitute just that, a ‘conversation with myself’ as opposed
to a Whitmanesque ‘Song of Myself’. This agon, in the process of which Durcan has pitted
elements of Irishness against his Russian experience, has reached a conclusion in his visit to
159
Pasternak’s grave, seen in his decision to destroy the symbol of an idealised Ireland: ‘Next
morning under Shevchenko’s statue by the Moskva River / I set fire to my cap’. That it
combusts in an ‘orgasm of gentleness’ is confirmation that the correct decision has been
made after his encounter with Pasternak as father figure.
Durcan’s ‘Russia’ poems, rather than giving us a utopia against whose standards
Ireland might be judged, construct an interplay of motifs and symbols which speak richly to
both countries. While the jacket blurb for Going Home to Russia might have been a little
more than optimistic in declaring it ‘a manifesto and a challenge to East and West’ it
certainly reads as speaking to both contexts while being captive to neither. If Durcan gives us
a utopia he does it in the strict etymological sense of the word u-topos, meaning no-place
(OED, 1594). His utopia is an imaginative reality, a potent creative fiction, a dream which
rises into being only through the blending of his Russian and Irish experiences. Seen in the
light of this chapter’s introduction – as one of a number of strategies by which to fly by the
‘nets’ of ‘nationality, language, religion’ – these poems are themselves an imaginative mode
of ‘transport’ out of the fixity of the familiar. They answer in the affirmative the question ‘is
there any other history?’ The Russia poems form part of a poetic strategy of liberation from
‘monomania’ by enacting an extended imaginative gambit. As Martin Mooney has written in
his review of the volume: ‘These poems testify to the validity of the analogical imagination –
as if everything in the world was linked to everything else through a web of symmetries and
resemblances’ (Mooney, 23). These poems speak directly to Homi K Bhabha’s assertion that:
‘What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond
narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or
processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in between’
spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood.’
(Bhabha, 2)
For Durcan then, utopia might be thought of not as a place but a process – it is conceived as
motion, travel and ‘transport’ rather than location or defined space. To see Ireland – or
160
oneself as Irish poet – ‘in the light of’ Russia is to engage in Bhabha’s ‘focus on those
moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’. Finally
released from the controlling myths of either society, Durcan moves at least momentarily
‘beyond the obsession with identity’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330) and its grand narratives in
order to affirm something at once more fragile and humane. Referring to the generation of
which Durcan forms a part Richard Kearney has written:
Disillusioned with ‘hard ideologies’ that have defined us according to a single,
unadulterated ‘identity’ (nationalist, unionist, Catholic or Protestant), this new generation
of Irish artists affirms the positive value of confusion, uncertainty, homelessness,
migrancy, questioning, questing for ‘another place’.
(Kearney, 332)
This ‘positive value of confusion, uncertainty’ is a keynote of Durcan’s entire body of work.
It is this epistemological precept – a kind of scepticism before all totalising forms of human
knowledge – which is central to each of the poet’s essentially humanistic critiques of power.
In Going Home to Russia the ‘positive value of confusion’ is asserted in many realms, from
the image of the poet ‘lost in the snow’ (GHR, 68) and the assertion that ‘there is nothing
necessarily ignominious about anything’ (GHR, 94) to the rhetorical flourish of ‘Can there be
anyone in the world who has not got mixed feelings? / Should there be anyone in the world
who has not got mixed feelings?’ (GHR, 89). What Durcan achieves in Going Home to
Russia is a brand of imaginative ‘con-fusion’, the etymology of which is from the Latin verb
confundere meaning ‘to pour together, mix, mingle’ (OED). The poems of this volume pour
together and mix images of Russia and Ireland – albeit mediated through the poet’s psyche –
to offer a check on the totalising narratives of both societies. Having considered these poems,
born out of what Peter McDonald has termed ‘a kind of principled self-exile’ (McDonald,
107), the focus of this study will turn now to a representative selection of poems in which
Durcan writes of Ireland itself; its landscape, place names and changing realities in his search
for ‘any other history’ (GHR,70).
161
5.4 – No such thing as a uniform Ireland39: the subversive power of inclusivity in
Durcan’s work
Even in his many poems which deal with arguably more prosaic, everyday aspects of
Irish reality, Durcan’s focus remains wholly in tune with his search for ‘any other history’
(GHR, 70) explored in the earlier sections of this chapter. A short summary of certain
elements of this approach, with reference to specific poems, is given here. To claim that
Durcan seeks an ‘other history’ or another mode of historiography is to suggest that he breaks
with established modes and orthodoxies of representing Ireland. This much is registered by
two of his critics, Gerald Dawe and Fintan O’Toole. Dawe, commenting on the prescribed
range of subjects, angles and vocabularies inherited by Irish poets of Durcan’s generation,
has written thus:
If, in Ireland, we have accepted the notion of a ‘poetic language’, we have also accepted a
certain way of looking at the world – an ordinance of mystery, self-sufficiency and moral
responsibilities assumed by those who ‘know better’ and who thereby control our world.
The poetic language, the language of myth, sanctities and obligated truths, colludes with
the conventionalised versions of History, the significant Events – 1690, 1916.
(Dawe, 15)
What Durcan’s oeuvre registers is a break with this prescribed ‘poetic language’ as well as
accepted ‘conventionalised versions of History’. Readers of Durcan will also be familiar with
his wholesale slaughtering of the tribe’s sacred cows and his pointed distrust of those who
‘know better’, be their knowledge legal, ecclesiastical, political, journalistic or otherwise.
Complimentary to Dawe’s 1980 observations, almost two decades later Fintan O’Toole
commented that Durcan:
[i]s in thrall to none of the inherited orthodoxies of Irish writing – the preference for the
country over the city, the belief in Ireland as a fixed frame for experience, the assumption
that mundane reality is not fit material for poetry
(O’Toole, 30)
Indeed, in Durcan’s work can be seen a poet whose poetic agenda is not dictated by any of
‘the inherited orthodoxies’ but proclaims, not altogether ironically, that ‘I am the centre of the
39
Paraphrase of a statement contained in Durcan’s 2004 poem ‘Rosie Joyce’ (AoL, 56): ‘No such thing, Rosie,
as a Uniform Ireland / And please God there never will be’.
162
universe’ (DD, 14). Rather than a programmatic over-intellectualised working out of identity,
what Durcan’s reader finds is a compassionate, fallible, tragicomic view of Ireland filtered
through the organising principle of the poet’s own experience and imagination. In spirit this
approach seems as close to Walt Whitman as to any of Durcan’s Irish forerunners, with the
possible exception of Patrick Kavanagh. Seeking to qualify and contextualise his comments
on the question of democracy, Walt Whitman wrote in his ‘Democratic Vistas’ that:
‘[T]here are opposite sides of the great question of democracy, as to every great question
... I feel the parts harmoniously blended in my own realization and convictions, and
present them to be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim and assertion
modified and temper’d by the others’
(Whitman, 396)
This spirit of generosity and inclusivity also informs Durcan’s work as his poetic personae
momentarily become ‘the centre of the universe’, a site in which the many flavours of the
realities of Irish life in his lifetime are blended in the poet’s realization and convictions and
presented to be read in such oneness. Some of the major inflections and nuances of Durcan’s
particular way of blending are catalogued here with reference to specific poems.
Foremost in any survey of the way in which Durcan imagines Ireland must be a
reiteration of the point made by Fintan O’Toole when he remarks on the poet’s ‘care for Irish
reality’ (O’Toole, 36). By ‘care’ O’Toole is referring to something quite specific, namely the
‘naming of places that would otherwise have remained unnamed in poetry and therefore have
been denied recognition of their preciousness’ (O’Toole, 36). This stylistic and thematic
preoccupation in Durcan’s work is so ubiquitous as to make it difficult to survey in any
systematic way. However, a connection might fairly be drawn between Durcan’s seemingly
obsessive naming of otherwise unimportant places and a similar tactic employed, albeit to a
lesser degree, by Patrick Kavanagh. Durcan himself has acknowledged a debt to Kavanagh
and to Anthony Cronin in this regard claiming in a 2009 interview with Pat Kenny that:
163
Anything I have or have done I owe to, amongst other people, Patrick Kavanagh and
Anthony Cronin because they taught us young fellas when we were eighteen, nineteen,
that everything was grist to the mill. You could write about anything.
(Kenny P., 2009)
This encouragement to ‘write about anything’ – which appears at times to have been taken as
an imperative rather than a nod of permission by Durcan – is mirrored in the final line of
Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Epic’: ‘Gods make their own importance’ (Kavanagh 2004, 184). Aside
from his many book titles which mention specific places – from Westport to Berlin, Cork to
Brazil – Durcan assiduously collects the place names and minutiae of a daily life spent
travelling to and fro in Ireland. Here, the term ‘care’ is valid in a second way, beyond the
sheer range of places named by Durcan. Care in this context also marks a kind of carefulness,
an attention to detail, an immense specificity in his naming. While it would be tedious to
enumerate a large amount of examples it is important to note that Durcan’s Ireland is one
broad enough to encompass ‘the Shangri-La Hotel’ (OW, 3), ‘the Asahi synthetic-fibre plant’
(SC, 17), ‘Hiroshima, Dublin 7’ (JTA, 65), ‘the great snail cairn of Newgrange’ (SMP, 265),
‘Ronald Reagan Hill’ (BWC, 4), ‘Misery Hill, The Gut, The Drain, / The Three Locks –
Camden, Buckingham, Westmoreland’ (GHR, 60) and ‘the barber shop [...] in Baggot Street’
(P, 16).
To describe Durcan’s approach to Irish reality merely as one of ‘care’ – as if his was
just a case of studious cartography – is to see but part of the picture. Indeed, Durcan’s care
has a particular tone, one which seems to want to convince the reader of the value of naming
in and of itself. It is possible even to interpret Durcan’s style as religious in character, much
as his public readings are often conducted with a type of liturgical solemnity. In his work the
‘naming of so many places ... is thus an act of blessing and of mercy’ (O’Toole, 36). His
careful recording of the particular – from his early ‘Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin /
Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghadereen, Ballavarry’ (SC, 9) to 1996’s ‘the Bolies and
Stamullen, / The Naul and the Bog of the Ring’ (CD, 70) – seems to be aimed at creating a
164
certain kind of aural effect, akin to a mesmeric litany. Indeed, it would seem fitting to
interpret the tone of his naming as a form of secular prayer, a chanting of place names by a
poet familiar with ‘the great Ferris wheel of the Rosary’ (DD, 110). In Durcan’s unique
style, novelist Colm Tóibín claims that ‘places in Ireland are offered a sort of sanctity and
holiness which is given to the towns of the New Testament, or the places invoked in the
Psalms’ (Tóibín, 10). Useful comparisons – of subject and style – might be made to the
poetry of Whitman’s American inheritor, Allen Ginsberg, particularly to the incantatory
powers of his ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’. Durcan uses this technique – in this particular case an
explicit blending of poetry and prayer – to memorable effect in his poem for the victims of
the terrorist atrocity at Omagh in 1998 (GFB, 199). Whatever the realities of the poet’s
private character, Durcan seems to have cultivated a public persona which is a blend of
priestly shaman, circus clown and judge. His seemingly obsessive naming of places is of a
piece with this public persona, which is itself an increasingly ironic and self-conscious mirror
of that of his ‘Father’ figure in ‘Hymn to my Father’ (DD, 95). As did his ‘Father’, Durcan
seems to have ‘a history for every milestone, / A saga for every placename’.
Registering in interview with Richard Kearney how little the milestones of Irish
nationalism such as 1966 mean to him, Durcan turns the attention to what nourishes him
instead. ‘Patrick Kavanagh and I shared a common interest in Jack Kerouac, the Rolling
Stones and Bob Dylan’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330). Indeed, coded references to Bob Dylan’s
songs are frequent in Durcan’s work, with the singer meriting explicit mention in 1985’s
‘Bob Dylan Concert at Slane, 1984’ (BWC, 20). This strain in Durcan’s work marks a further
poetic break with the inherited range of preoccupations deemed appropriate for Irish poets.
Refreshingly, Durcan takes the world as he experiences it as normative and produces from it
a body of poetry that affirms, in the words of Edna Longley, ‘that the international youth
culture of the 1960s is also part of Irish literary history’ (Longley 1996, 112).
165
Thus far here, two seemingly opposing forces have been registered in relation to
Durcan’s work: the ‘poetic language’, ‘obligated truths’ (Dawe, 15) and ‘inherited
orthodoxies’ (O’Toole, 30) of Irish writing on one hand and the variety and mix of both
traditional and modernising cultural influences to be encountered in Ireland in Durcan’s
lifetime on the other. The key point to be made here is that the true skill and value of
Durcan’s art is to destabilise or dissolve this opposition, to create a body of work capacious
enough to register all tones of Irish reality. His ability to hold together seemingly disparate
and contradictory realities is what makes Durcan, in his depictions of Ireland, such a
consummate realist. It has been noted that Durcan uses motifs and images of motion – cars,
planes, trains – as allegories for social change and movement. He also catches many of the
major strains of social change in Irish life in pithy yet ingenious manners. The backward
insularity of the Irish state, caught in ‘A Vision of Africa on the Coast of Kerry’ (GHR, 39)
as an elderly Irish woman rhapsodises over the ‘wet, shiny, rubbery neck’ of an African
doctor is placed beside the image of ‘an eleven-year-old Ethiopian girl / Running in the
green-and-red top / of the Westport Athletic Club’ (AoL, 42). The rising tide of materialism
and consumerism – and its impact on human relationships – is marked through a husband
who:
has given that woman everything – every
Conceivable gadget on this earth –
Walkie-talkie dish washer, clothes washer, carpet washer[.]
(OW, 74)
and again in the case of another husband who seeks to ameliorate a stagnant marriage with
the gift of a weekend away alone for his wife (BWC, 4). Durcan’s Ireland is one in which
Catholic clerics stand as a ‘knife in the ordinarily innocent face of life’ (OW, 64) and yet, as
he persists with Mass-going, the poet describes experiencing a ‘congregation splashed into
laugher / And the church became a church of effortless prayer’ (AoL, 61). The phenomenon
of emigration, frequently lamented in earlier poems, is registered in a different light in
166
Durcan’s latest collection. In a poem about a returned Irish emigrant musing on how he had
missed his creature comforts from home while in Australia, Durcan offers us an Ireland from
which emigration is not so final a move as once was the case. The poem’s speaker muses on
his beloved batch loaf of bread:
The women of Perth, O Jasus, forgive me,
But there’s nothing – not even a Perth
woman –
To beat a batch.
(P, 88)
Two of Durcan’s sharpest poems are also two of his most brief, both are couplets in the
format of a question and answer. ‘Ireland 2001’ (AoL, 14) and ‘Ireland 2002’ (AoL, 15)
stand on opposing pages of his collection The Art of Life and both register disparate but
coexisting strains of Irish life. ‘Ireland 2001’ reads: ‘Where’s my bikini? / We’ll be late for
Mass’. The poem – as well as being an object of humorous whimsy – reads as a record of
two impulses in tension with each other, two competing desires; to honour the flesh and
honour the spirit. ‘Ireland 2002’ reads: ‘Do you ever take a holiday abroad? / No, we always
go to America’. This might obviously be read this as a satirical snipe at a certain moneyed
class for whom America does not qualify as ‘abroad’. It also speaks to the ways in which – as
Ireland is in fact so culturally influenced by America, from fashion to television – America is
not, in any significant sense, ‘abroad’. Both of these poems, epigrammatic and humorous,
achieve something characteristic of Durcan’s work: an accommodation of seeming contraries
in relation to Ireland. This interpretation is reinforced by Derek Mahon’s assessment that in
his ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 61):
Durcan is not a surrealist but a Cubist, one transfixed by the simultaneousness of
disparate experience, all sides of the question, the newspaper headline, the lemon and the
guitar – a man with eyes in the back of his head.
(Mahon, 166-167).
167
In a 1993 lecture reproduced in The Irish Writer and the World Declan Kiberd comments on
the attempts by post-colonial peoples to modernise. It is what he calls a ‘painful and uneven’
process.
[For] ‘a traditionally religious people, secular modernity is not something that flowers
naturally out of a prior experience: rather it seeks to blot out much previous history and to
insist that past memories will serve mainly to confuse and disqualify those who wish to
become modern’
(Kiberd 2005, 256)
Faced, as a poet, with both Ireland’s ‘religious and psychic myths’ (O’Toole, 30) and the
onslaught of modernity and postmodernity since his teenage years, Durcan has not sought to
‘disqualify’ one in favour of the other in his art. Instead he asserted the positive value of this
‘confusion’, giving us a pouring together of tradition and modernity. Just as, to paraphrase
Kiberd, Durcan refuses to allow modernity to disqualify his reckoning with and celebration of
the odd, antiquated, angular realities of Irish life, he will also publish a thoroughly modern
paean ‘To Dympna Who Taught Me Online Banking’ (P, 72). Often, when interviewed,
Durcan will approvingly quote other poets or significant figures to strengthen his point on a
certain issue; two of these quotations seem apposite here. The first is from the future Pope
John XXIII, Angelo Roncali, when he had become Patriarch of Venice in the 1950s. Roncali,
quoted alongside Bob Dylan as the joint epigraphs to his 1976 volume Teresa’s Bar says: ‘As
does any other man on earth, I come from a family and from a particular place’ (TB, 11).
Durcan has also quoted approvingly in interview, is noted in the introduction to this study,
the W.B. Yeats line from his 1919 poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ that ‘art / Is but a vision of
reality’ (Yeats, 159) It is through his fidelity of description – his accommodating ‘vision of
reality’ – of the peculiarities, contradictions and consonances of his own ‘particular place’
that Durcan offers us his strongest undermining of the grand narratives which dominate much
of the psychic, political and social life of Ireland. Durcan’s vision of reality, his collection
and preservation of the often discordant minutiae of daily life, operates as a counterpoint both
168
to oppressive and totalising contemporary narratives and the avalanche of generalisations
which seem destined to fill the history books to be written about late twentieth century
Ireland. Finally, his works themselves contribute significantly to this ‘other history’ he yearns
for. Durcan’s ‘history’ flows from the pen of a citizen who wishes to ‘lack always a
consistent vision of the universe’ (SMP, 238) and is the fruit, as Whitman writes, ‘of the
ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men ... these stirring years of war and peace’
(Whitman, 396).
5.5 – Conclusion
In Paul Durcan’s 1985 poem ‘The Pietà’s Over’ the poet describes himself as
‘suffering fluently’ (BWC, 52). Having surveyed in the opening chapters Durcan’s
‘suffering’ under the restrictive forces of the Catholic church, violent political ideologies and
the legal system and social pressure, this fourth chapter has turned the attention towards one
of the major remedial measures which Durcan posits in the face of these restrictive forces.
For Durcan, it has been claimed, the experience of travel and movement and their depiction
in poetry are counterpoints to images of the prison in his life and work. Transport, travel and
observation of the varied experiences of daily life are ways of:
[L]oosening the tongue of a hidden Ireland, allowing it to speak out its own unspoken
complexities and richly contradictory possibilities.
(O’Toole, 34)
His particular way of allowing Irish reality to announce its ‘unspoken complexities’ which
otherwise might have remained buried beneath the forces of religious, political or even
literary dogma, is his way of both recording and creating an ‘other history’ (GHR, 70).
Beneath the radar of Ireland’s grand narratives and national psychic preoccupations Durcan’s
poetry stands as a type of documentary history of the struggles, joys, sorrows and frustrations
of an Irish everyman, delivered as ‘a patchwork of many scraps – slogans, reportage, standup comedy, the liturgy, proverbs, letters-to-the-editor’ (Rumens, 48). If Durcan has ‘suffered’
169
– and as a poet made his suffering representative of that of others too, or at least available to
us as readers – he has indeed done so ‘fluently’. The notion of fluency, with its obvious
connotations in regard to language and speech, also implies a kind of aqueous freedom and
flow in the face of restriction, analogous to travel and transport. In interview with Arminta
Wallace in the year in which Daddy, Daddy was published the poet stated:
To me everything that is good in the end is water-connected or based, even attitudes to
life – flowing into things rather than being rigid or sustained.
(Wallace, 1990)
It is to more of Durcan’s attempts to depict the ‘flow’ of life – the amorphous, angular,
elevating and infuriating realities of everyday experience upon which Church, politics,
society and the psyche vainly seek to impose ‘rigid’ and ‘sustained’ forms that the following
chapters now turn.
The sixth chapter of this study will seek to survey Durcan’s depiction of his family of
origin. In many senses, as he seeks to chronicle the largely hidden and private realities
internal to the family, his work in this area might also be seen as an attempt to unearth and
commit to the record an ‘other history’ (GHR, 70). This is particularly true considering the
historically exalted place of the family in the Irish psyche, reflected in the state’s 1937
constitution and the often divisive and rancorous debates on the subjects of divorce and
reproductive rights in the final thirty years of the twentieth century. In his 1985 poem
‘‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ (BWC, 43) the poet states that ‘The most subversive unit in
society is the human family’. With particular attention to Daddy, Daddy (1990) and The
Laughter of Mothers (2007) the focus of this study now turns to the family, that ‘most
subversive unit’.
170
Chapter Six:
40
The most subversive unit in society – depicting the family in Daddy, Daddy and The
Laugher of Mothers
6.1 - Introduction
Depicted as the site of both profound nurture and dark menace, the family is a central
preoccupation in the art of Paul Durcan. Even before the publication of 1990’s Daddy, Daddy
– which will form the central focus of this chapter – Eileen Battersby could write of the
family as one of Durcan’s ‘most developed themes’ (Battersby, 1990). With the publication
of Daddy, Daddy this theme arguably found its most poignant and artistically achieved
expression. Writing autobiographically at various points in his career in the voice of a son,
husband, father and grandfather – as well as through alter-egos in family situations – Durcan
executes a remarkable range of voices and standpoints in relation to the family. Further, his
focus is not merely on the nuclear family: he maps and celebrates an extended family of
aunts, uncles, cousins, sons-in-law and grand-children. Just as varied as his many poetic
voices are his opinions on the potential of the institution: for him the family is celebrated as
both ‘the most subversive unit in society’ (BWC, 46) and that of which he can write ‘I know
that I will be killed by my family / In Ireland, that is our way’ [sic] (LM, 50). In interview
with this author Durcan insisted on his positive intentions in declaring the family ‘the most
subversive unit in society’ (BWC, 46) – however, he did acknowledge the family as a source
also of an equally subversive menace (Appendix One).
Following the introduction, this chapter will have two main areas of focus: Daddy,
Daddy and poems relating to Durcan’s father; followed by The Laughter of Mothers and
poems relating to Durcan’s mother. It should be noted that the focus of this chapter is further
narrowed to just one large section in each book: in Daddy, Daddy the focus is on the book’s
seventh section and in The Laughter of Mothers the focus is on the second section. This
40
‘The most subversive unit in society is the human family’ (BWC, 46)
171
pragmatic subdivision follows Durcan’s own and allows the focus to be narrowed to poems
dealing specifically with the mother and father figures respectively. A later chapter of this
thesis explores in more depth the poems which constitute The Berlin Wall Café, dealing
directly as they do with the poet’s own role as husband and paterfamilias. In this introduction
it will be instructive to draw attention to three relevant matters. Firstly the particularly
elevated and protected position of the family in the Irish Constitution will be noted, as well as
the challenges to this during Durcan’s poetic career. Secondly, although Durcan is by no
means a writer of straight-forward autobiography, it will be useful to outline some of his
biography as it pertains to the technique and content of his poetry. Thirdly, and bound up
with the second area of focus here, will be a reflection on Durcan’s accomplished blending of
fact, fiction and fantasy to create what Bruce Woodcock has called ‘the bizarre fictionality’
of his work (Woodcock, 138). What Woodcock refers to as the bizarre fictionality of his
work can be interpreted as a product of Durcan’s particular writing process, described by him
in interview thus:
Poetry, for me, is a combination of those two things – fiction and documentary. Fiction
in Wallace Stevens’ sense of ‘supreme fiction’. It’s no one thing, it’s where the
imaginative part of you takes over. But there are stages: the basis of making art of any
kind is the making of notes, sketches. Keeping a journal or diary – that’s the basis of it.
Out of that, to coin a cliché, a writer quarries his or her poetry or fiction or drama.
(Appendix One)
Although this thesis is primarily a thematic study of his poetry it is, considering the nature of
the material dealt with, important to note the particular way in which Durcan incorporates
objectively verifiable biographical fact within his artistic edifice. Such matters of fact impact
upon, it might go without saying, the creation of his particular ‘fiction[s]’ which are, for the
poet ‘all that matter’ (DD, 71). Two interpretations of ‘fiction’ (DD, 71) are of particular
interest here. First, of major interest are the frequently patriarchal fictions which served to
structure the domestic reality about which Durcan writes. Secondly, this thesis seeks to
interpret Durcan’s writing on the family as a fictive endeavour to challenge imposed or
172
oppressive ‘vision[s] of reality’ (GHR, 61) and to propose an alternative, arguably more
humane, vision of human freedom and moral action.
6.1.1. – Natural, primary and fundamental41: the Irish family as private institution and
political entity
Accorded an exalted status in the 1937 Constitution, the family is defined as being the
‘fundamental unit group of society’, as providing ‘the necessary basis of social order’ and as
‘a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior
to all positive law’ (Article 41, 1937). Whether the Constitution signalled an elevation of the
family’s status or merely a confirmation of a commonly acknowledged social reality is
perhaps a moot point. However, as Diarmaid Ferriter has noted, Article 41 guaranteed that
‘the family was not a private institution but a political entity’ too (Ferriter, 5). Writing of
domestic violence in mid-century Ireland, Ferriter hints at the unwritten and often unspoken
codes of behaviour which permitted a vast range of questionable practises behind closed
doors. His placing of the blame for these issues on ‘the culture of the family, and the strict
belief in non-interference, cemented by Catholic social theory and the Catholic sanctity of
marriage vows’ (Ferriter, 327) accords with the remarks of Colm Tóibín in his essay on
Durcan. Tóibín registers how, ‘[i]n Ireland, what happens in the family remains so secretive,
so painfully locked within each person’ (Tóibín, 22) – the implication being that ‘what
happens’ is often too painful or shameful to be named in public. That there is often a vast
divergence between the frequently painful and shame-covered happenings within family
settings and the constitutionally exalted position of the family is what needs to be highlighted
here; it fuels much of the subversive and satirical power of Durcan’s work. Indeed, the only
time in Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland that Durcan is mentioned by name is precisely in
this regard: as one of a group of writers who found it ‘fashionable to rewrite the key
41
From article 41 of the 1937 Constitution: ‘The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and
fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights,
antecedent and superior to all positive law’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland)
173
documents of Irish nationalism in bitter acts of dismissive parody’ (Kiberd 1995, 609). A
prime example of this often quite funny approach is Durcan’s repeated reworking of the
Constitution’s determination that the family is ‘the natural primary and fundamental unit
group of Society’ (1937: Art. 41). Alongside his parodic contention that the family is in fact
‘the most subversive unit in society’ (BWC, 46) Durcan also registers a similar sentiment in
the voice of a burgeoning modernity in his satirical ‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail’
(TB, 23). The eponymous wife, eager to undermine the television culture promoted by her
husband and mother-in-law, finds herself as a defendant in court having ‘smashed-in the
television’. She is, of course, implicitly exalted by Durcan even as the judge condemns her:
Justice Ó’Brádaigh said wives who preferred bar-billiards to family
television
Were a threat to the family which was the basic unit of society
As indeed the television itself could be said to be a basic unity of the
family
(TB, 23)
If Ferriter can claim that by the end of the last century ‘what constituted the traditional Irish
family unit had been transformed’ (Ferriter, 719), then it was not without a fight – or several
of them. Although Ferriter credits economic necessity as the most persistent driver of social
change, several other socio-political factors which also find representation in Durcan’s work
must be credited. From the late 1960s and early 1970s onward, more strident debates began
on the issues of women’s rights, contraception, abortion and divorce. No doubt each of these
debates had an impact both on legislation and public perceptions in relation to the family. A
more extensive treatment of Durcan’s writing about women is undertaken in the seventh
chapter of this study. While the issues of women’s rights and gender relations are represented
ubiquitously in Durcan’s work, he has written occasional poems reflecting other topical
family-related debates. Attention here should be drawn to poems such as ‘Priest Accused of
Not Wearing Condom’ (GHR, 19), ‘Catholic Father Prays for His Daughter’s Abortion’
(BWC, 30) and ‘The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986’ (GHR, 27) as well as prose pieces
174
including ‘Celia Larkin’ (PDD, 5) and ‘The Referendum Blues’ (PDD, 87). While
acknowledging these events – debates and referenda – as a backdrop to Durcan’s writing of
the family, the primary focus of this chapter will be on his writing of intimate family
relationships in Daddy, Daddy (1990) and The Laughter of Mothers (2007). These books
provide, rather than a mere mirroring of the public record, a voice for otherwise unrecorded
emotional realities. They may be taken as speaking from the same territory claimed by
contemporary American poet Sharon Olds when she writes of her parents in her poem ‘Satan
Says’:
I love them but
I’m trying to say what happened to us
in the lost past.
(Olds 1980, 4)
When the novelist John McGahern, Durcan’s acquaintance and contemporary, was
interviewed in 1990 on the publication of his award-winning Amongst Women, he spoke of:
[E]ach family as a kind of independent republic ... a kind of half-way house between the
individual and society. The clichés we use about the family have the force of law: ‘you
know how he is’, ‘you’ll never change her’. They condone everything but they mean
nothing.
(McGahern, 1990)
Acutely conscious of these evasive modes of speech employed in discussions of and within
families – ‘Every family in Ireland has its own family euphemism’ quips one of Durcan’s
more celebrated alter-egos, a haulier’s wife (BWC, 6) – Durcan’s work can have a
penetrating, revelatory and even shockingly frank quality. It seems to seek to avoid losing his
own story in what Sharon Olds refers to as ‘the lost past’ through techniques which bypass
the clichés and evasions spoken about by McGahern. Rather than leaving emotional realities
‘locked within’ (Tóibín, 22), Durcan delivers, in the words of his older contemporary
Brendan Kennelly, ‘blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable’ and ‘hypnotic
repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare to utter once’ (Kennelly, SMP cover).
175
6.1.2 – ‘En famille’42: a short sketch of relevant biographical details 1944-1971
Teresa’s Bar, Durcan’s 1976 volume, has two epigraphs: one from Bob Dylan, one
from Pope John XXIII. The pontiff’s words are useful with regard to Durcan and the family:
‘As does any other man on earth, I come from a family and from a particular place’ (TB, 11).
In this quote may be read two impulses in tension with each other: to be from ‘a family and
from a particular place’ is both a statement of belonging and also one which acknowledges
limitation. Durcan is perhaps implying through this quote an intention of fidelity towards his
own circumstances of origin while acknowledging that they may be more idiosyncratic than
they are broadly representative. Before turning to the matter of Durcan’s particular style –
what Bruce Woodcock has referred to as the ‘bizarre fictionality’ (Woodcock, 138) of his
work – it will be useful to set down some facts in relation to Paul Durcan and his family. In
2007 Durcan collaborated with filmmaker Alan Gilsenan to produce a stylised biopic of his
first twenty seven years, during which he spoke candidly about the relationship with his
father, amongst other subjects. The project’s title Paul Durcan: The Dark School 1944-1971
is taken from his 1980 couplet ‘En Famille, 1979’, which appears in A Snail In My Prime
simply titled ‘En Famille’:
Bring me back to the dark school – to the dark
school of childhood:
Where tiny is tiny, and massive is massive.
(JBF: 42)
In the course of the documentary, which is candid and harrowing, the poet often appears
distressed, especially as he speaks of his relationship with his father. In interview with the
current author, Durcan remarked at length when questioned regarding the making of the film.
Most telling of his remarks relate to the fact that the poet could not, in preparation of filming,
manage to write a script for the film as had been agreed. Rather, what was finally settled
upon was for the poet to be asked questions by Alan Gilsenan, the answers to which would
42
The title of Durcan’s 1980 poem on the family is ‘En Famille, 1979’ (JBF, 42).
176
form the content of the programme. For this reason, with one very minor exception, Durcan’s
voice is the only one to be heard in the course of the film.
The 2007 collaboration with Gilsenan seems to have triggered a new – if temporary –
willingness in Durcan to speak autobiographically in interview about issues treated indirectly
and artfully in his poetry.43 Paul Durcan is the eldest of three children – two sons and a
daughter – born to John Durcan and Sheila Durcan. Both of Durcan’s parents – but neither of
his siblings, Ivan and Rosemary – are significant presences on his poetic landscape. Both
John and Sheila Durcan were legal professionals – as are both of the poet’s siblings. Having
failed by a narrow margin to be elected to the Dáil in the late 1940s, John Durcan was made a
judge in 1950 when his older son was six. As Judge Durcan was a judge on the Western
Circuit while living in Dublin’s Dartmouth Square, his weekly routine involved long spells
away from home (LM, 107). Of his father’s time as a judge, Eileen Battersby draws a
thumbnail sketch after an interview with the poet:
‘... an introverted father who was temperamentally ill-suited to the legal profession.
Dubbed “Granny Durcan” by some cynics at the bar, Judge Durcan was considered as
overly conscientious, reluctant to engage in the competitive friendships of his peers, and
spent most of his nights on the Western Court brooding alone in hotel rooms.’
(Battersby, 1990)
The poet describes his father to interviewer Nicola Tallant as a ‘laughing, convivial man and
a great storyteller’ with whom he shared ‘many rich moments’ in early childhood. However,
it seems that in the mid-1950s ‘the picture darkened’ and Durcan recalls how from age ten his
father subjected him to ‘gratuitous beatings and he was incredibly severe about things like
examinations’. A lifelong sports enthusiast, Durcan’s youthful enjoyment of running was cut
short by a serious bone disease which he contracted at thirteen years old. Released from
43
The biographical details supplied here were all either on the public record or supplied by Durcan himself in
the context of the following interviews: ‘A completely original voice, whether genius or showman’ in interview
with Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times, November 10th 1990; ‘Poetry and Emotion’, interview with Patricia
Deevy in The Sunday Independent, February 21st 1999; ‘Kidnapped by his family and put in a mental home’,
interview with Nicola Tallant, The Sunday Independent, May 6th 2007; and ‘Laughter lines that come with a
dark side’ interview with Ciara Dwyer in The Sunday Independent, October 18th 2009. Interviews are cited
within the text by interviewer name year of publication i.e. (Battersby, 1990) for the Battersby interview etc.
177
hospital for the Christmas period, he attempted to smash the plaster cast on his leg in order to
be allowed back to the ‘warmth and affection he got from the nurses’ in hospital (Tallant,
2007). This episode may be the backdrop to Durcan’s ‘Hopping round Knock shrine in the
falling rain, 1958’ (JBF, 25) and is certainly alluded to in his paean to nursing as he
remembers being nursed as ‘a boy of thirteen from a / dysfunctional family’ (P, 9). Durcan
records his discomfort with the broader male-dominated social world of his childhood and
adolescence, again in dialogue with Nicola Tallant:
From a fairly early age I was aware that certain kinds of people disapproved of me –
particularly certain kinds of male. These men had the idea that boys had to be soldiers,
chaste soldiers, and had to fit into a mould and if they didn't there was something not
quite right. My father would say: 'Paul is a sissy. Come on, be a man.' I was aware of his
deep disapproval.
(Tallant, 2007)
In his late teens the poet was committed against his will by his family to a mental hospital.
This particularly painful period finds artistic expression both in Daddy, Daddy and The
Laughter of Mothers, although the poet had been reluctant to speak about it in interview until
the release of Paul Durcan: The Dark School 1944-1971 in 2007. In interview with Ciara
Dwyer he recalled the events of that time:
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.
(Dwyer, 2009)
Blame for the drastic action of committal to a mental hospital is laid at the feet of his family,
his father and the particularly male-dominated culture of the time. He records his mother’s
discomfort at that time regarding the father’s decision to have him committed: ‘I knew my
mother was uneasy about it but the way he looked on it was that a doctor had said it so it must
happen’ (Tallant, 2007). Though Durcan recalls being championed at home by Sheila Durcan
– ‘My mother, my mother in spite of everything’ (Deevy, 1999) – he also comments
178
morosely, but without further elaboration, that ‘I am a major disappointment to my mother’
(Deevy, 1999). Nevertheless, it is the pattern established in this key constellation of
relationships – the female voice of scepticism, unease and compassion in the face of male
hubris – that constitutes one of the major themes of Durcan’s entire body of work. It is central
to the shape of much of the dramatic action of his poetry and will be one of the central
concerns of this chapter.
6.1.3 – Hermeneutic caution in a world where ‘fiction is all that matters’44
Although Durcan has for most of his career denied or downplayed the distinctions
between journalism and poetry – even once calling journalism ‘a poetry more / than poetry is’
(OW, 63) – it would, of course, be a mistake to accord to his seemingly autobiographical
work a merely documentary intention. It is, in fact, a blending of experience and imaginative
interpretation. As well as his contention in ‘Around The Lighthouse’ (DD, 67) that ‘in reality
fiction is all that matters’ – a quote which is a cornerstone of the interpretive endeavour of the
current study – Durcan has fired several shots across the bows of those who would read his
work on the family as naively autobiographical. His 1999 parodic poem ‘Notes Towards a
Supreme Reality’ counsels that ‘the supreme reality in life is fiction’ while lamenting that
‘fiction is scarce as water in poetry’. The same poem warns that
There is no necessary linkage between the egoist who is
overweight and vain
And the magic connections, dreams, constructions of his brain.
(GFB, 112)
And yet, Durcan’s seemingly autobiographical work is often taken at face value. Perhaps too
easily, Ciara Dwyer excuses Durcan’s evasiveness in the face of her questions about his life
with the following comment: ‘But why would he be responsive to direct factual questions
when he has laid himself bare in his poems for decades? All his life is there’ (Dwyer, 2009).
44
Daddy, Daddy p. 71
179
While Dwyer can be forgiven a certain critical naivety, her comments are an indirect tribute
to the poet’s talent for verisimilitude. James Simmons, in his review of Daddy, Daddy is
closer to a more nuanced appreciation of Durcan’s treatment of personal material:
One of the interesting paradoxes in Durcan's work is that he achieves his range and
universality by being extraordinarily personal. Or so it seems. When a poet is so vivid
people presume he is being autobiographical; but it is really none of our business, as long
as we experience the significance of his details.
(Simmons, 30)
It is with this interpretive caution, encapsulated in Simmons’s ‘or so it seems’, that a reading
of any of Durcan’s first person narrative poetry must proceed. Indeed one might read the
opening poem of Daddy, Daddy in precisely this spirit. Written in the two years following his
father’s death in January 1988, Daddy, Daddy begins with a poem about a funeral. However,
the funeral described is not that of John James Durcan (1907-1988), the book’s dedicatee.
The funeral, a pitiful affair at which the poem’s speaker is conscripted as the only mourner, is
of a man known only as ‘Paul’. About the deceased the priest confides to the poem’s speaker:
‘He was about the same age as yourself, / All we know about him is that his name was Paul’
(DD, 3). This couplet may be read as a direct warning against flights of critical supposition or
fanciful inference. While this backhanded self-portrait is just one of many which span
Durcan’s career, its particular import and positioning are instructive. The death of ‘Paul’,
along with the real-life demise of the poet’s father commemorated by the book, may be
interpreted as releasing both the author and his father from the fixities of fact into the
imaginative potentials of ‘fiction’. Complimentary to these observations, the epigrammatic
couplet ‘Leave the Curtains Open’ from 2004’s The Art of Life reads:
I like people looking in at me.
I am proud of my privacy.
(AoL, 13)
It is yet another gesture towards a working definition of Durcan’s particular blend of fact and
fiction. At once an acknowledgement of his reputation for being ‘extraordinarily personal’
(Simmons, 30), its title reveals something deeper and more knowing. While a reader might
180
primarily think of the title’s curtains as those covering the window of a domestic space, they
might equally be read as being the curtains of a theatre stage. The sense of the domestic space
and conventionally private realities being imbued with theatrical resonances is apt for an artist
who, in Eamon Grennan’s words has:
[F]ound a strange, satisfying way to perform the full range of his feelings – to go public
with them, to dramatise them, and at the same time to convince of their absolute privacy,
their intimate actuality.
(Grennan, 49)
That Durcan’s work is not a strictly documentary record of a family, but rather a
poetic rendering of impressions, memories and experiences of that family is reinforced in the
poem which with ‘Paul’ (DD, 3) bookends Daddy, Daddy. ‘Our Father’ (DD, 181) follows the
poet making a journey across the city to see his mother to whom he is bringing a bunch of
flowers. The poem will be remarked on in more detail in the following section of this study,
but the key lines of note here are the final three, which refer to the poet’s mother:
She says she does not understand my new book of poems
Which are poems I have composed for my dead father.
‘But’ – she smiles knowingly – ‘I like your irises’.
(DD, 185)
The celebration of the iris – meaning of course both flower and part of the human eye, with all
of the latter’s connotations of subjective interpretation and the importance of personal
experience – is key. This focus on the human eye overlaps with comments later made by
Durcan in the introduction to his volume Crazy about Women. After recording how, in 1980,
he visited every day for three weeks the R.B. Kitaj curated exhibition titled ‘The Artist’s Eye’
at the British National Gallery, he states that it ‘changed my attitude to art – expanded it and
revolutionised it and gave me back the authority of my own eyes’ (CW, x). The authority of
the eye – and of course, by punning connotation, the authority of the I – is a key concern of
Durcan’s entire body of work, particularly central to Daddy, Daddy. The importance of
crediting and celebrating subjective experience was again noted by Durcan in an article for
181
the Cork Examiner in celebration of the French film Les Enfants du Paradis in 1980. Writing
of how he underwent electroconvulsive therapy shortly after seeing the film for the first time
in the 1960s he writes:
[A]n acquaintance (a doctor, believe it or believe it not) had electrocuted me the day after
I saw the film and not only did I nearly lose my life but – much more important – I nearly
lost my memory. Life is but a dream, memory is reality.45
Not only does the title of Durcan’s 2009 collection – Life is a Dream: 40 years reading poems
1967-2007 – make an embryonic appearance here; the poet marks also the paramount
importance in his work of individual experience. It should be noted, also, that the emphasis
upon ‘irises’ in ‘Our Father’ (DD, 185) recapitulates one of the central themes of this thesis:
that is the importance of each person’s ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61). Having made these
preliminary notes on the respective subjects of the status of the family, the poet’s biography
and of his particular style, the focus of this study now turns to a consideration of Durcan’s
writing of his relationship with his father, primarily through the poems of 1990’s Daddy,
Daddy.
6.2.1 – Framing the father: on context and content in Daddy, Daddy
In his introduction to twentieth century Irish poetry for the Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing Declan Kiberd comments that an ‘obsession with father-son relations’ has been
‘mandatory for almost every poet from Anthony Cronin to Séamus Deane’ (Kiberd in Deane
[ed.], 1312). While Durcan’s 1990 volume Daddy, Daddy certainly seems to fall into the
category outlined by Declan Kiberd, it would be wrong to see it as either obligatory or
formulaic in tone or execution in the sense implied by Kiberd. Nor does Daddy, Daddy
represent either the beginning or the exhaustion of Durcan’s artistic preoccupation with his
father. From the 1967 character ‘Seabreeze’ (E, 8) who fears ‘some sort of judge / With a
needle up his sleeve’ to the seemingly-autobiographical rawness of 2004’s ‘On the Road to
45
Cork Examiner, 19th August 1980
182
the Airport’ (AoL, 114) which begins ‘The most terrible person I ever met was my father’,
the theme is persistent. Indeed, it is not limited to literary expression: in 2007, as has been
noted, Durcan collaborated with filmmaker Alan Gilsenan to produce a biopic of his first
twenty seven years, during which he spoke candidly about his relationship with his father. In
the light of this career-long preoccupation it is important to see Daddy, Daddy not as an
isolated piece but as the culmination of a theme which has found many expressions in
Durcan’s work. Not least of these is his focus on the figure of the judge and of the moral and
social implications of judgement. Variously labelled by critics and reviewers as ‘over-rated
verbosity’ (Smith, 35) or ‘simply one of the most profound meditations on a filial relationship
that has ever appeared in verse’ (Elliott, 146), Eileen Battersby offers the assessment that
Daddy, Daddy:
[W]hich offers the narrative cohesion of a novel, presents a surgically detailed
examination of what has been held as the most important influence on Durcan’s life – his
relationship with his father.
(Battersby, 1990)
Though the spectre of ‘Daddy’ haunts Durcan’s entire poetic landscape it is in Daddy, Daddy
that Durcan’s voice most closely resembles that of the priest in his 1985 poem ‘10:30 am
Mass, 16 June 1985’ (BWC, 32) who declares ‘I want to tell you about my own father /
Because none of you knew him’.
From Durcan’s allusion to Sylvia Plath’s now canonical line46 in titling his book to its
references to Joyce’s Ulysses, the poems which comprise the seventh section of Daddy,
Daddy seem deeply aware of being situated in a certain subgenre named by Peggy O’Brien as
‘courageous investigations of identity through the paternal line’ (O’Brien, 83). Just as Joyce’s
Ulysses seeks to effect a meeting between the contradictory temperaments of Leopold Bloom
and Stephen Dedalus – loosely representative of the Judeo-Christian and Greek traditions
respectively – perhaps it is no coincidence that the ‘Daddy, Daddy’ section of Durcan’s book
46
‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.’ (Plath, 52)
183
begins with ‘Ulysses’ (DD, 99) and ends with ‘Our Father’ (DD, 181). In this way Durcan is
gesturing in the direction of the two great literary father-son relationships underpinning
Western culture: Odysseus and Telemachus and God the Father and Jesus. Likewise these
thirty eight pieces are a remarkably concentrated example of Durcan’s engagement with and
incorporation of other artworks. They draw on or respond to such diverse artists as Joyce,
Giacomo Manzù, Lucien Freud, Andrea Mantegna, and Francis Bacon, while acknowledging
the significance of a disparate collection of influences from popular culture including Charlie
Chaplin, The Beatles, Barry McGuire and the BBC World Service. With a unique
concentration, these poems bear out a major preoccupation of Durcan’s own style and ethos,
that ‘art is not a prison with poetry in one cell, picture-making in another cell and so on’
(CW, xi). Eileen Battersby, as quoted above, has suggested that Daddy, Daddy has the
‘narrative cohesion of a novel’. The analogy however has its limits. It is, perhaps – especially
given the large amount of visual artists alluded to by Durcan – more fitting to imagine the
seventh section of the work as a selection of independent but related literary portraits of the
father-son relationship. This way of reading Durcan was expressed well comparatively early
in the poet’s career by Kathleen McCracken: ‘Reading the poetry of Paul Durcan might be
likened to moving through a portrait gallery where each of the figures utters his or her story’
(McCracken 1987, 107) and echoed by the poet himself in his introduction to his 2009
collected volume: ‘For as long as I can remember I have regarded the publication of each
volume of my verse as being akin to an exhibition’ (LD, xix).
Fintan O’Toole’s contention that because of Durcan’s father’s very public role there is
‘no real dividing line between public and private, the emotional and the political in his work’
(O’Toole, 32-33) has been invoked before in this study. However, never has it been more
appropriate to bear in mind than in the consideration of poems related directly to Durcan’s
father. In certain areas of Durcan’s work domestic and political spaces seem interchangeable
184
– he can both picture ‘The President of the Circuit Court ... / Scooping porridge into his
mouth’ (DD, 140) and compare the experience of observing a stormy Dáil debate to that of
being ‘like a terrified child watching my parents quarrelling’ (PDD, 88). The figure of the
father in Daddy, Daddy is a palimpsest of sorts, a surface on which can be written private
domestic traumas and joys as well as more public corruptions and inflexibilities. Laying aside
momentarily this biographically rooted and essentially inextricable interweaving of private
and public strands in relation to Durcan’s ‘Daddy’ this section of the study will be further
divided in two. Initially attention will be paid to the father’s more public aspect, particularly
through the lens of postcolonial theory. This analysis will, amongst other things, extend and
expand upon many of the points made in this study’s earlier analysis of male control of the
national narrative in chapter three. The focus will then shift to a consideration of the more
private agon between the poet and his father, marking various points on the father’s journey
from ‘murderer’ (DD, 174) to ‘wounded angel’ (DD, 171). Before conceding to this arbitrary
public-private distinction, a reading will be undertaken of perhaps the keynote poem in the
collection. It is a poem in which almost every other theme and mood is present in embryonic
fashion: ‘Ulysses’ (DD, 99).
‘Ulysses’, a dramatic narrative poem, introduces what might be taken to be a
representative domestic spat in the fictionalised Durcan household. The dispute is over
whether or not the speaker will be afforded the freedom – moral and monetary – to buy a
copy of Joyce’s Ulysses47. It should be noted with regard to Durcan’s ‘Ulysses’ (DD, 99) that
the poem takes for its title both the title of Joyce’s book and also the name of a literary
character, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Just as Joyce did in his Ulysses, so too Durcan
claims a mythological backdrop for his father-son agon. By implication John Durcan
47
It should be noted that, in interview with the current author, Durcan named Joyce’s Ulysses as his favourite
novel. Durcan noted: ‘I guess if I was asked what my favourite novel is I would have to say Ulysses’, noting
especially Joyce’s ‘understanding of women’s feelings, of the way in which women often look at things
radically differently’ (Appendix One).
185
becomes the wandering Odysseus, long estranged from his son; the narrator is aligned with
Telemachus the father-hungry adolescent; and the triangle is completed with Sheila Durcan
as the modern Penelope. The first lines of the poem – as well as establishing this deeply
allusive alignment – are also a bold claim of literary pedigree on Durcan’s part. His opening
sally, ‘I am hiding from my father / On the roof of Joyce’s tower’ aligns the speaker at once
with Telemachus, with Hamlet, with the aesthete Stephen Dedalus, and with Joyce himself
who stayed in the tower in 1904 while he too was in some senses ‘hiding’ from his father.
The sense of doubt regarding the post-independence politico-moral legitimacy of the Irish
state is also implicit in ‘Ulysses’. Bearing in mind that the ‘green, satanic novel’ (DD, 101)
was published within a few months of the signing of the treaty between Ireland and Britain it
might be admitted to Durcan’s gallery of alternative leaders, founding documents and moral
guidelines. Durcan has repeatedly invoked Ulysses as a touchstone of humanistic tolerance in
the face of the fanatical violence of Republican terrorism: a prime example of this is ‘The
Bloomsday Murders, 16 June 1997’ (GFB, 178) where he has his poem speak in the voice of
Leopold Bloom in an address to Gerry Adams. It is possible to extend this Durcan-Bloom
parallel through a close reading of the fifteenth chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which while
undergoing a trial at the hands of his peers Leopold Bloom protests his innocence directly
with the phrase: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. ... I am a man misunderstood. I am
being made a scapegoat of’ (Joyce 1986, 373).
The contrast between the bodily jouissance and emancipatory thrust of Joyce’s novel
and the censorious deference to clericalism of the judge seems to imply a tale of two Irelands.
The picture of the angry judge with ‘the Irish Independent under his arm’ (DD, 100) is
calculated of course to suggest its opposite, a lack of independence of mind or spirit. Joyce’s
Ulysses itself is about fatherhood, about fathering and the potentials and limitations of
substitute fathers. It is fitting then that ‘Ulysses’ exemplifies a similar genre of Durcan poem,
186
in that it pays tribute to one of the poet’s many alternative fathers: Michael Hartnett. Hartnett,
who was just three years Durcan’s senior, is commemorated both in Durcan’s Ireland
Professor of Poetry lectures and also in 2004’s piece ‘Michael Hartnett, the Poet King’ (AoL,
64). ‘Ulysses’ strikes several other key notes which resonate throughout the Daddy, Daddy
selection. It is a prime example of Durcan’s well honed gift for comic pathos, his ability to
affect an emotional crescendo through an accumulation of seemingly prosaic details. To this
end, his final couplet ‘Daddy, Daddy, / My little man, I adore you’ is a fine reworking of
Plath’s bitter and accusatory final line quoted above. Durcan’s ‘Ulysses’ also displays a
somewhat prurient interest in his parents’ sleeping arrangements, which is representative of a
broader preoccupation. In his work, as Carol Rumens has commented, the family is often
pictured either ‘touchingly or terrifyingly displaying its Freudian underwear’ (Rumens, 49).
A final point which should be made regarding the significance of ‘Ulysses’ in the
book is a perhaps admittedly more incidental parallel between ‘Daddy’ and Homer’s
Odysseus. In the Odyssey a major epithet for Odysseus is that of being many-angled, meaning
of many tricks or of many ways48. It might also be loosely translated as having many faces.
Generally used in the Odyssey to denote the guile and slippery nature of the protagonist’s
character, it might be said to apply to Durcan’s ‘Daddy’ in a different but no less significant
way. Durcan’s ‘Daddy’ is not just one, but many men: at once ‘my little man’ (DD, 102),
‘Abraham’ and ‘Jesus’ (DD, 106) ‘Danny Kaye in The Court Jester’ (DD, 111) and ‘a baby
dinosaur’ (DD, 157). As such, it is fair to draw a correspondence with the many varied and
contradictory depictions of ‘Daddy’ and Odysseus polytropos. The implications of Durcan’s
multiple daddies will be expanded upon later in the chapter. Now the attention of this study
turns to the more public face of ‘Daddy’, the man who:
48
See Gifford’s commentary on how, in ‘The Odyssey, Odysseus is repeatedly treated to an epithet that can be
translated “the great tactician”, “man of many counsels” or simply “wise”’ (Gifford, 631).
187
served the State
Unconditionally
For twenty-eight years.
(DD, 153)
6.2.2. – Burning to death speaking Irish49: ‘Daddy’ and the family as postcolonial
totems
Durcan has registered what he estimates to be the impact of his father’s job in graphic
terms. The poet recalls how, from the moment of his father’s appointment as Circuit Court
Judge ‘prison became a reality in my home’ (PDD, 11-12). He goes on to record how, in the
carrying out of his duties, John Durcan ‘grew sadder and sadder – and sadder and sadder still.
The toll darkened his soul’ (PDD, 12). What is found in the pages of Daddy, Daddy then, is
not only the presence of prison as a domestic reality, but also the State as a palpable presence
in domestic life. Durcan’s work here blends both realities – private and public – so that the
family and domestic space is drawn as a kind of Rorschach inkbot. Seen one way ‘Daddy’ is
merely ‘old man’ (DD, 105), seen another he is ‘saint and murderer’ (DD, 174). Likewise the
Durcan family is at once a pitiful band of people ‘tagging along behind’ the public judge
(DD, 165) but also microcosm and testing ground of the young Irish state as seen in ‘First
Place in Ireland’ (LM, 107). Though remarks have been made earlier in this study on the
male control of the national narrative in the wake of independence, it will be useful to
summarise some of the principle inflections of postcolonial aspects to ‘Daddy’s’ character
here. This will first be done through a selection of the poems from the seventh section of
Daddy, Daddy. The later part of this section will entail a close comparative reading of two
poems: ‘1966’ (DD, 124) and ‘The Wrong Box’ [sic] (LM, 87). Just as Declan Kiberd
claimed that under British rule the Irish family became ‘a haven that, in every respect,
reflected the disorder of the outside colonial dispensation’ (Kiberd 1995, 381) so too does
49
See ‘The Persian Gulf’, a comic conceit in which the paterfamilias refuses help from the Anglophone
emergency services (DD, 110). The father, preferring to speak Irish rather than converse in English with the
emergency services, leaves his family ‘burning to death speaking Irish’.
188
Durcan make his family reflect many of the dysfunctions of post-independence life. The term
postcolonial is thus invoked in this study in a very specific sense. In the context of this
study’s overall preoccupation with human freedom, Durcan’s father and mother’s generation
are understood as the generation which came to power immediately ‘after that which created
Ireland’s independence’ (O’Brien, 100). This generation is described by Declan Kiberd as
one ‘determined to commemorate themselves to death’ as a way of self-mythologizing in
order to occlude the fact ‘[t]hat the nation is not [sic] being shaped’ (Kiberd 1995, 393). This
reaction to the fact of the achievement of much-sought-after national freedom can be
understood, invoking once again the terminology of Erich Fromm, as an ‘escape from the
burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission’ rather than an attempt, at a
collective level, to ‘to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom’ (Fromm, ix).
Durcan’s ‘Daddy’ is depicted as a character judgemental in every sense, but having
scant sense of inner authority. He is someone who defers to clerical authority when it comes
to reading material, even as he storms out of the room carrying, ironically, the ‘Irish
Independent’ under his arm (DD, 100). ‘Daddy’ keeps his books – and by inference his
creative, intellectual life – under lock and key in the drawing room where his son ogles them:
‘I gawp through the panes at the spines / Gazing out at me through their prison bars’ (DD,
115). These books then become symbolic of a store of creativity and potential which is, in
every sense, locked away – the suggestion being that they are unused. In a collection of
poetry where the ability to name things, to assume the role of the storyteller is paramount and
equated with potency, the father’s relationship with language is fraught. In ‘The Mayo
Accent’ the speaker appears perplexed as to why ‘Daddy’ exchanged the ‘pricey antlers of
your Mayo accent’ for the ‘tree-felling voice of a harsh judiciary / Whose secret headquarters
were in the Home Counties’ (DD, 139). Further, the father seems determined to persist in
speaking the Irish language – even when that persistence takes on the characteristics of
189
farcical fanaticism – as evidenced by the wonderful comic conceit ‘The Persian Gulf’ (DD,
110). The vision of the father as postcolonial patriarch – Durcan’s father became a judge less
than thirty years after the State’s establishment – is summed up in the poem ‘Bank Clerk’
(DD, 165). ‘You were a great judge / Because you were a great clown’ contends the speaker,
implying by the metaphor that the father had given over his entire moral and spiritual
authority to do other people’s bidding. As well as a ‘Daddy’ who is intellectually rigid and
stagnant, darker tones are registered. In his persistent writing of the vulnerable individual
subject, Durcan has always been interested in ‘the roots of fascism in Ireland’ (DD, 141) 50. In
Daddy, Daddy at least some of these roots are easily discernible in a domestic setting.
‘Daddy’s is a man who:
Pronounces the word ‘Apartheid’
With such élan, such expertise,
With such familiarity, such finality,
As if it were a part of nature,
Part of ourselves.
(DD, 117)
His reported response to the horrific Kingsmills massacre of 5 January 1976 was simply
‘teach the Protestants a lesson’ (DD, 140). At a rugby match in the first instance, at the
breakfast table secondly, Durcan shows us how such harsh political opinions permeate
domestic and familial scenes. The definitive levelling of this accusation by Durcan is given a
distinctive intertextual twist with an allusion to Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Neutrality’ (1942).
MacNeice, angered by the neutrality of the southern Irish state during the Second World War
wrote:
But then, look eastward from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shore the mackerel
Are fat – on the flesh of your kin.
(MacNeice, 202)
50
Although this fear is clearly present in Durcan’s poetry, he reiterated it in his 1988 interview with Richard
Kearney, reproduced in Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006: ‘I recalled Primo Levi’s warning that it
could happen again. At that moment I saw my own country not as a neutral defender of peace unaffected by the
‘outside’ world, but as harbouring its own fascism with its own brand of violence’ (Kearney, 328).
190
Rather than directing the attention of his father and the generation he represents eastwards to
a continent under fascism, Durcan directs the accusatory glance, as Heaney might have it,
‘inwards and downwards’ in the Irish psyche (Heaney, 41). In ‘Fjord’ Durcan commands:
Look into your Irish heart, you will find a German U-boat,
A periscope in the rain and a swastika in the sky.
You were no more neutral, Daddy, than Ireland was,
Proud and defiant to boast of the safe fjord.
(DD, 106)
It could be argued that it takes a writer of unusual vision to turn a simple scene of domestic
pedagogy in to a literary sequel to the Nuremburg trials; however, his points are not easily
refuted. The only apologia given for the political and social harshness meted out by ‘Daddy’
is the poem ‘Dovecote’ (DD, 142). The poem, which contains the word ‘evict’ or ‘eviction’
fifteen times in its five stanzas – frequently as a refrain – seems to originate in a family story
pertaining to Paul Durcan’s great-grandfather.51 Although this suffering seems rooted in
Durcan’s ancestry, it is used to construct an apologia for the father’s harshness in the form of
an imagined dialogue between the father and the poet, of which the following is
representative:
Why did you worry your mother into the grave?
Eviction.
Why did you stitch money into your trousers belt?
Eviction.
Why did you hate landlords?
Eviction.
Why did you become a landlord yourself?
Eviction.
(DD, 142)
The overlap of private and public postcolonial worlds finds its most intense
expression in the two poems ‘1966’ (DD, 124) and ‘The Wrong Box’ [sic] (LM, 87). The
subject of both poems is rooted in the poet’s stay in an English mental hospital in 1966; both
51
See Poetry and Emotion, interview with Patricia Deevy in The Sunday Independent, February 21st 1999: ‘John
Durcan's grandparents were evicted from their holding in Mayo and his grandmother gave birth to her son,
John's father, on the side of the road. When that son (Paul's grandfather) grew up, he made money in England
and came home with it determined never to be poor again. He married a like-minded woman and they had
“about ten” children.’
191
may be read as stinging critiques of nationalist hypocrisy. The fiftieth anniversary of the 1916
rising, 1966 assumed an aura of talismanic significance in the lore of southern nationalism
and was celebrated with ‘seemingly unbridled triumphalism’ (Ferriter, 147). Both ‘1966’ and
‘The Wrong Box’ [sic] describe a day out of the mental hospital for the young speaker. ‘1966’
sees him navigate a nightmarish scene in which he is socially exiled to ‘Epsom of the
thoroughbreds’ and has for his company ‘Terry Hardwick’, a far-right sympathiser and
Terry’s friends ‘Cliff and Cheryl’ who keep a ‘baby alligator’ named Peter in their bath.
Though ‘Cliff and Cheryl’ are what pass for family in Terry’s life, the visit to their home is
drawn in darkly comic dystopian tones, with the couple being obsessed by the Moors
murderers and by the apocalyptic chart song ‘The Eve of Destruction’. The poem finds its
only moment of relief with a typically fantastical reference to the couple’s ‘baby alligator’
that lives in their bath. In the fourth stanza the poem reaches its allusive crescendo. ‘Back in
the leucotomy ward’ amongst the lobotomised patients the speaker yearns for his father. With
Durcan’s characteristic capacity for the visual, the scene is cast as reminiscent of Calvary:
I grip tight the headrail
Behind my head
To stop myself screaming,
So tight I can feel
My knuckles whitening.
I dream of my father.
Who is my father?
Will I ever see him again?
(DD, 127)
This image of a young Irish man in an English mental hospital, cruciform and longing for his
absent father, is clearly an allusion to the dereliction experienced by Christ on the cross. That
Durcan titled the piece ‘1966’ serves to connect the dereliction experienced by the speaker in
a subversive way with the triumphalism of the fathers of Ireland in that year. The critique is
strengthened all the more, of course, when it is taken into account that the Easter Rising itself
eventually drew much of its symbolic power from its calculated alignment with the death and
resurrection of Christ. The alignment of the speaker with Christ as sufferer and sacrificial
192
victim is a trope that Durcan has utilised in multiple registers, from the erotic to the pathetic
and, here, the political. In ‘The Wrong Box’ [sic] (LM, 87) the subject matter is similar, the
focus shifted. Written in the third person, the poem describes a trip undertaken by Sheila
Durcan to see her son in London at ‘Easter, 1966’, the very peak of the triumphalism. More
direct insight is given into the Irish family here, as he depicts a father who ‘did not want to
know about it’ and a mother who ‘alone ... took the plane to Heathrow’. The mother figure, as
in ‘Ulysses’ (DD, 99), is cast once again as intermediary between warring men. The poem
takes its title from that of a film which the mother and son see together; its repetition four
times during the poem serves to reinforce its ominous implications in the world of the family.
Both mother and son are depicted in pathetic terms at their parting:
When they came out of The Wrong Box the sun had
gone in,
The wind was chilly, her eyes blurred with tears
As she kissed him goodbye, he running for the Epsom
train
Back to the mental hospital, she going down into the
Underground [.]
(LM, 88)
While the judge is proud to boast that he ‘always had a great sense of orientation’ (LM, 88),
both mother and son are condemned to the wrong box. Thus, in both poems, through a
foregrounding of personal pain on a canvas of national celebration, Durcan depicts an
alternative to the celebratory self-congratulation of official Ireland in 1966. He exposes a
more nuanced and complex private reality existing beneath the triumphalist facade. Having
considered some of the public inflections which Durcan gives to his depiction of the family
and father-son relationship the attention turns now to depictions of their more intimate,
private world.
6.2.3 – Deposing the father and tentative reconciliations: portraying a man neither an
icon nor a demon
‘Everybody’, wrote psychiatrist Anthony Clare, ‘needs a caring and involved father’
(Clare, 161). Even as he makes this claim, Clare, a contemporary of Durcan’s at the Jesuit
193
Gonzaga College, concedes that scientifically ‘such research as has been done has persuaded
some influential commentators to argue that fathers don’t matter at all’ (Clare, 161). Durcan’s
Daddy, Daddy is a tender testament to the importance of the father in the affective and
functional life of the family. Far from being made as a didactic assertion by the poet, this is a
truth which emanates from and is implied by the scope of emotional terrain covered by the
poems. This section, concluding this study’s focus on depictions of the father, charts two
major inflections of Durcan’s book: firstly the struggle of the son against the father for
narrative authority and secondly the effect of depicting the father in so many disparate and
often contradictory guises.
Daddy, Daddy can, to a significant extent, be read as the chronicle of the struggle of a
son to assume control from the father, most especially narrative control. Peggy O’Brien has
written that Durcan’s agon with his father is very much ‘an old fashioned Oedipal crisis’
(O’Brien, 93). This is most explicit in ‘Two Little Boys’ (DD, 134) as father and son, both
reimagined as children, are ‘put to sleep by mother’; in ‘Mother’s Boy’ (DD, 121) where the
father’s jealousy towards his son is coded in the derisive nickname of the poem’s title; and in
‘Susannah and the Elders’ (DD, 137) where the tables are turned and the elderly judge craves
the affections of his son’s wife. Indeed the father may be read as actively encouraging his
own replacement in the most directly Oedipal of ways in poems such as ‘Bare Feet’ (DD,
151) and ‘Stellar Manipulator’ (DD, 131) in which the patriarch is alternately a man who was
‘scandalised / That I would not step into your shoes’ and who ‘wanted / Your eldest son to be
a lawyer’. This parental desire for the son to follow his judicial father is often given an ironic
twist by Durcan in his work, usually to mock his own tendency towards judgementalism –
seen for example in ‘Mohangi’s Island’ (GFB, 191). Daddy, Daddy also chronicles numerous
– often awkward – attempts at connection by father and son in ‘Ulysses’ (DD, 99), ‘The OneArmed Crucifixion’ (DD, 105), ‘Crinkle, Near Birr’ (DD, 107) and ‘Birthday Present’ (DD,
194
128) amongst others. However, given the father’s public role as a judge and the son’s
professed interest in poetry, it is perhaps inevitable that much of the tension between the two
centres on language. Language, and the father’s command of it, is depicted as a mode of
blessing, of mapping and of orientating in the world – from the ‘Daddy’ of ‘Amnesty’:
Who is a great namer of things;
For whom the names of places and people
Are the signs by which he teaches me
That they are holy and precious
(DD, 89)
to the language-giver inspiring devotion in his son in ‘Fjord’ (DD, 106). Instances such as
depictions of the boy gazing at his father ‘as if you’d invented Norway and the Norwegian
language’, claim for language and its use a profound significance and generative power.
From the father’s fascination with the outmoded Irish language (DD, 110), to his shedding of
his Mayo accent and vocabulary when elevated to the judiciary (DD, 139) much of the
intergenerational conflict depicted has language as a touchstone. From the moment that
‘Amnesty’ (DD, 89) depicts the all-powerful father naming the world for his son and thus
enthroning the power of language itself, the book charts a struggle in which the father’s
powers will be questioned and decrease just as the poet-son’s powers increase. Indeed, taking
the appearance of Daddy, Daddy as extra-textual evidence, the very book itself might be
interpreted as the result of the growth of the son’s command of language. This much is
suggested in the poems which chronicle the father’s demise and death, with the son assuming
the mantle of patriarch and generator of narrative. In the poignant ‘Cot’ (DD, 157), as the
Durcan family huddle around the patriarch’s deathbed, the speaker of the poem is struck by a
realisation:
I realised that you were my newborn son.
What kind of a son will you be to me?
Will you be as faithful a son to me
As you have been a father?
(DD, 157)
195
Faced with the prospect of his dying father becoming a memory rather than a physical
presence, the speaker registers the fact that this memory will be as open to reshaping and as
malleable as the impressionable life of a child. As such it acknowledges the potency of
memory and imagination: the poet now is father to John Durcan’s future existence – as
memory and psychic and literary spectre. This meditation on how the dead assume a presence
in the psychic and emotional landscape of their survivors is revisited in Durcan’s 1999 poem
‘Meeting the President (31 August 1995)’ in which he depicts his father’s intrusive
reappearance en route to a meeting with Mary Robinson. The father ‘steals my place; /
Shoulders me aside’, Durcan complains before musing that ‘as I get older my dead father gets
younger’ (GFB, 239). However valid this broader point about the persistent power of
memory, in Daddy, Daddy some momentary relief is achieved towards the end of the work.
The father who begins the section as a powerful and dominant public man invested with
public and private authority is reduced to concocting a ruse in order merely to be noticed in
the bank in a later poem. Once ‘Your Lordship’ (DD, 100) now he hankers for the bank clerk
to ‘caress your identity, fondle your identity’ (DD, 167). The son, on the other hand, who had
begun the section ‘hiding’ (DD, 99) after a literature-sparked domestic spat ends it by
discussing his latest volume of poetry in his mother’s home (DD, 181).
Without negating the points made above with regard to narrative progression and
unity, the reader might justifiably remain suspicious of projecting a sense of ultimate triumph
onto the poems in Daddy, Daddy. Further, the sense of such books as The Berlin Wall Café
and Daddy, Daddy as contributing to an emotional catharsis was shied away from by the poet
(Appendix One).While there is a certain discernible narrative arc, the work – and Durcan’s
myriad depictions of his father – are equally well understood as standalone portraits of events
and emotional states. If these portraits seem often contradictory this is, as Derek Mahon has
claimed, because Durcan is ‘transfixed by the simultaneousness of disparate experience, all
196
sides of the question’ (Mahon, 166-167). The conclusion of this short section will be an
investigation of the implication of this effect in Daddy, Daddy. In the space of less than forty
poems Durcan gives to his father a remarkable range of sub-personalities and alter-egos. A
representative – but not exhaustive – list must include ‘Your Lordship’ (DD, 99), ‘Abraham’,
‘Jesus’ (DD, 106), ‘a TV personality in Yorkshire’ (DD, 107), ‘Danny Kaye in The Court
Jester’ (DD, 110), ‘Saint Sebastian’ (DD, 115), ‘The President of the Circuit Court / Of the
Republic of Ireland’ (DD, 140), ‘Carolan of the Moy’ and ‘Raftery of Turlough’ (DD, 173).
While critics such as Peggy O’Brien have argued for the power of a cumulative reading of
these poems – she plausibly claims that the many ‘idiosyncrasies align themselves into the
detailed portrait of a real man, neither an icon nor a demon’ (O’Brien, 91) – another reading
is possible. It may be argued that rather than aligning itself as part of an ultimately unified
portrait of John Durcan each poem serves to highlight merely one aspect of an essentially
chameleonic and ultimately evasive character. This much can be inferred from Durcan’s
equation of his father with the Homeric figure of many-faced Ulysses, famed for his trickery.
Indeed, even as the book’s title Daddy, Daddy is a reference to Sylvia Plath, it also has the
effect of naming or calling the father twice. It may be argued that this double naming reveals
a scepticism inherent in the writing of the book as to whether or not a complete or definitive
account of this relationship can ever be achieved. Perhaps the poet is inferring that a doubletake is always necessary: this might be read as a further extension of implied need for a
plurality of ‘fiction[s]’ in individual and collective approaches to ‘reality’ (DD, 71). Durcan
himself has acknowledged the very incompleteness of the portrait of the relationship in
Daddy, Daddy in interview with Patricia Deevy:
I didn't get to say this in the book ... my father was, I feel he was a kind of oddball
himself. Although he wound up becoming a judge of the circuit court, although he in
many ways allowed himself to be forced into representing this world I'm talking about, he
loved books.
(Deevy, 1999)
197
Almost ten years after the publication of Daddy, Daddy it is interesting to observe Durcan
make an indirect plea for clemency on behalf of his father. His admission that ‘I didn’t get to
say this in the book’ is perhaps an attempt to redress an overly dark picture of their
relationship. This tendency towards overly dark emphases more generally in his work was
ruefully acknowledged by the poet in interview (Appendix One). Interestingly, read in the
light of Girardian and Biblical hermeneutics, both a condemnation and reprieve of his father
are beautifully contained in the opening line of the poem ‘Fjord’ (DD, 106): ‘You were
Abraham but you were also Jesus’. Both Abraham and Jesus, in Biblical hermeneutics, were
involved in an act of sacrificial scapegoating; and as has already been argued, scapegoating is
an issue central to Durcan’s moral map. Abraham is the figure called upon to sacrifice his
son, Jesus himself is a sacrificed son – naming John Durcan as both is simultaneously an act
of accusation and of merciful understanding. He is both the man who would incarcerate his
son in a mental institution but also a man who was forced by circumstance into a role and
social position which itself was deadening and draining.
The concluding poem of the collection, ‘Our Father’ (DD, 181), is a humorous,
cathartic antidote to much of the emotional heaviness in the book. The narrative action of the
poem details a bus trip taken by the speaker as he is ‘going over to Mummy’s place for
lunch’. The poem’s comic impetus comes from a dialogue between the speaker and a
botanically-minded bus conductor on the subject of the flowers which are being carried as a
gift for the speaker’s mother. The focal point of the poem is the word ‘irises’, describing both
the type of flower being carried and the part of the eye. ‘I like your irises’ the bus conductor
intones before launching into an extensive description of his own love of gardening. The
poem, of course, contains a typical Durcan trope: a moment of quasi-metaphysical transport
or ecstasy while being transported in the literal sense. The book’s earlier horror of an
198
imposed misdiagnosis of mental illness is now entirely deflated and tamed in the blithe
conductor’s statement:
‘My wife says I’m mad and of course I am.
I am mad about flowers.
Lovely irises you have – let me touch them.’
(DD, 182)
With his casual chattiness, his refusal to collect the bus fares and his repeated complimenting
of the speaker’s ‘irises’, the bus conductor serves as a counterpoint to the judicious, broody
and undermining father figure. If Daddy, Daddy is open to an Oedipal reading then another
comparison of the poet-speaker with the Greek character is apt: while Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex ends with the protagonist blinding himself with his dead mother’s dress pins, Durcan’s
volume concludes with his mother’s reiteration of the bus conductor’s ‘I like your irises’
(DD, 185). A final level of significance is coded in the word ‘irises’, uttered by both the bus
conductor and the speaker’s mother. In Greek mythology Iris is the goddess of the rainbow.
A seminal use of the rainbow as a literary symbol is the Biblical book of Genesis (verse 9:13)
in which we read that the rainbow was God’s sign to Noah that the flood had abated. Given
Durcan’s extensive knowledge of and use of the Bible, it is reasonable to suggest a direct
allusion here. Perhaps the Dartry bus can be read as Durcan’s ark; after all he does take the
bus on the recommendation of his father (a parallel to the Biblical Father) who ‘when he was
alive, appeared to be perplexed / That I never came home by the number 14 route’ (DD, 181).
This, then, supplemented by his mother’s approval, can be read as representing the
achievement of a fragile peace between the son and the memory of the father. Heretofore this
focus on the family has deliberately downplayed a key element: Durcan’s artistic treatment of
his mother. It is to this, to his writing of ‘the first woman I ever knew’ (LM, 94), that the
attention of this study now shifts.
199
6.3 – ‘The first woman I ever knew’52: The Laughter of Mothers and the genesis of
Durcan’s feminism
Durcan’s 2007 volume, The Laughter of Mothers, constitutes his most extended
treatment of his relationship with his mother Sheila MacBride. It is by turns celebratory,
subversive and elegiac but an overall tone of melancholic loss pervades the latter section of
the book. The title poem of his earlier work The Art of Life (2004), published in the months
after his mother’s death, is a meditation on the mother-father-child relationship. It concerns a
French family pictured strolling outside the Uffizi Gallery ‘under the noses of Giotto and
Dante’ (AoL, 92) during a holiday in Florence. The child, eager to have his caricature drawn
by a street artist, beseeches his parents and is met with the following reactions:
Papa hesitates (as papas do),
But Maman immediately acquiesces.
When the question is her unique son
A mother will always trumpet
Where a father fears to coo.
(AoL, 92)
While this piece is at once a pithy picture-postcard reflection on the interaction between life
and art, it also contains a thumbnail sketch of the family in which the parents appear in
postures typical of Durcan’s poetic vision. The hesitant father, the eager and celebratory
mother, are keynotes in The Laughter of Mothers as through much of his work. It is also
notable that, in such a poem as invokes mother, father and child, a principle underlying theme
is that of life as a shaped or fashioned thing: an enterprise to which there is an ‘art’ (AoL,
92). This section’s focus is on investigating some of the major nuances in his depiction of his
mother and her role in both family and society. It has three subdivisions – first, mapping the
psychic closeness between mother and son; second, charting his depictions of how the
mother’s life is circumscribed by a predominantly male world; and third, a reading of the
subversive implications of the book’s title.
52
‘Mother Playing Golf in a Bikini’ (LM, 94)
200
In marked contrast to the antagonism which dominates the father-son relationship in
Daddy, Daddy, The Laughter of Mothers records the unique and nourishing psychic bond
between mother and son. Its overarching spirit can be summed up in the characteristically
intimate conclusion to ‘Golden Mothers Driving West’ (LM, 126) which sees the speaker
declare ‘Thank you, O golden mother, / For giving me a life’. Not only does the gratitude
here merely cover biological life; it may also be extended to imply the life generated through
encouragement, affirmation, acceptance and approval. This is the kind of ‘life’ so yearned for
and so missing from the relationship with the father. The sense of mother as celebratory
affirmer of the nascent self is clearly evident in the mother-figure of ‘The Art of Life’ (AoL,
92) above. It may also be read – in a Lacanian framework – in the 1990 poem ‘Exterior with
Plant, Reflection Listening’ (DD, 177). This piece, like many in the later collection The
Laughter of Mothers, involves Durcan, his mother and a disapproving male figure – a
thoroughly Freudian / Lacanian tableau. While mother and son are waiting for a bus on
O’Connell Street a stranger approaches, ‘gapes’ at the poet and ‘howls’:
‘My wife and daughters are admirers of yours
But I have to tell you that I am not
An admirer of yours’
(DD, 177)
In what might be read as a maternal effort to deflect the blow from her son, ‘mother beside
me laughs that crazy laugh of hers / That is her birthmark’. The speaker proceeds to produce
a pocket camera with which he takes ‘the most elegiac photograph ever taken’ of his mother.
Once developed the photo transpires to include not only the laughing mother but also
... over her shoulder you can see a man with a pocket
camera,
His reflection,
In the passenger window of a passing Nissan Bluebird.
(DD, 178)
This scene depicts, in a manner too telling to be coincidental, an echo of the Lacanian mirror
stage of child development. In Lacan’s theory of child development the mirror stage is that
201
moment at which the infant first sees its own reflection in a mirror and conceives of itself as a
whole person for the first time. This moment is typically, as Lacanian exegete Lionel Bailly
describes, experienced in the company of an affirming parent – most often the mother. Bailly
describes the interaction between the two at this moment:
She talks to the child, often guiding it: ‘Look, who is that in the mirror?’[sic] In this
emotion-laden exchange, the child is overwhelmed with the excitement of suddenly
realising who the image represents, and turns back to look at its mother: its victory is
dedicated to her, it wants to share the triumph with her.
(Bailly, 36)
This constellation of factors – firstly, the son being insecure in his sense of self and
contemplating his own image; secondly, the mother adopting a posture of protective
affirmative regard; and finally the fact that the poem is a response to a painting by Sigmund
Freud’s grandson Lucien – elicits direct parallels with Freudian-Lacanian hermeneutics.
Moreover, it is a thematic line which is developed far into The Laughter of Mothers. The
tripartite cast of characters – mother, son and some form of disapproving or arrogant
patriarch – all appear or are invoked in ‘Par for the Course’ (LM, 69), ‘Mother’s Altar Boy’
(LM, 77), ‘Crime and Punishment’ [sic] (LM, 80), ‘War and Peace’ [sic] (LM, 82),
‘Philadelphia, Here I Come’ [sic] (LM, 84) and ‘The Wrong Box’ [sic] (LM, 87). Each of
these poems, as though variations on a major theme for Durcan, depict the mother-figure in a
posture protective of or interceding on behalf of her vulnerable son. Insofar as it
acknowledges a subversive truth about family dynamics, this, of course, has its humorous
parallel in the poet’s early poem ‘Hopping round Knock shrine in the falling rain: 1958’
(JBF, 25) which gives to this trait a religious dimension. Durcan’s aunt Sarah wryly advises
that ‘while to Know God was good, / To get the Ear of his Mother was a more practical step’.
The depiction of Durcan’s mother as defender and intercessor – which is to be expected
during the years of childhood and adolescence – is perhaps most astonishing when
encountered in the poem ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ [sic] (LM, 87), a poem alluding to the
202
dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel. The backdrop is the disintegration of Durcan’s
marriage in early 1984; the emotional energy which drives the piece emanates from the
mother’s fidelity to and belief in her son, epitomised in her reprimand:
Have you forgotten that for all forty years of your life
I have prayed for you as well as supported you
First against your father and then against everyone else?
(LM, 91)
Connected to this strong mother-son bond is Durcan’s attempt in The Laughter of Mothers to
expand upon the theme of his matrilineal heritage, offering several reflections on the
MacBride family from which his mother came. This is done principally in ‘The MacBride
Dynasty’ (LM, 71), ‘Major John MacBride’s Early Morning Breakfast’ (LM, 73) and the two
companion pieces ‘Clohra’ (LM, 99) and ‘Cleena’ (LM, 102). Recourse to this aspect of his
heritage has also been made in Durcan’s more political poetry and radio diaries, with the
legacy of his mother’s family’s politics being invoked as a stick with which to beat Gerry
Adams in Paul Durcan’s Diary (PDD, 135). This is thoroughly in line with Luce Irigaray’s
exhortation in her text The bodily encounter with the mother:
It is also necessary, if we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, for us to
assert that there is a genealogy of women. There is a genealogy of women within our
family: on our mothers’ side we have mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
(Irigaray in Lodge and Wood, 539)
Finally of note in relation to Durcan’s celebration of the mother-son bond is his entry in Paul
Durcan’s Diary titled simply ‘Sheila MacBride’ (PPD, 180) in which he details a visit to his
elderly mother in an Alzheimer’s nursing home. Though his mother is diminished and
ravaged by the disease, still a tender equivalence between her and the poet is depicted: they
are ‘two hurt hawks eyeing one another in afternoon sunlight’ as they both brave the
‘sandstorm of mother-son implications’ (PDD, 131).
Frequently labelled a feminist author, it should be no surprise that one of the
structuring themes of The Laughter of Mothers is the ways in which male actions, institutions
and mores served to circumscribe much of his mother’s desire and potential. Whether the
203
mother is dependent on the whim of an alcoholic gynaecologist (‘Par for the Course’, LM,
69) or standing up to a bellicose priest (‘Crime and Punishment’, [sic] LM, 80), the subtext of
resistance is rarely hidden. And yet, the abiding tone of the collection – melancholy mourning
for lost opportunity and unlived life – is best caught in the allusive ‘Philadelphia, Here I
Come’ [sic] (LM, 84). A report on the experience of seeing the play with his mother in early
1964, Durcan’s poem draws parallels between Friel’s split character Gar O’Donnell and the
split life lived by Sheila Durcan in her attempts to accommodate both her warring husband
and son. As the poem builds to a crescendo, the speaker allows himself to be seen on the
back foot, admitting that in his self-absorption he missed the parallels between his mother
and the play’s protagonist. She is shown to be trapped, hemmed in by the male game, by ‘the
two males in her life whom she loved, / Yet who caused her nothing but grief’. Concluding,
Durcan treads a fine line between artful expression and excessive emotionalism:
A forty-nine-year-old mother in Dublin in 1964
Had not a slave-girl’s chance in Egypt of emigrating
anywhere.
Ahead of her another forty years in Dublin
Listening to the same old argument, the same old incestuous
nightmare.
(LM, 86)
It is important to note a major Durcan trope at work here in his depiction of his mother’s
entrapment. It is a recapitulation of his ubiquitous use of Biblical tropes to render bondage
and restriction. Though Biblical themes and motifs have extensive use in his work elsewhere
– see chapter two on the scapegoat figure – it is notable that it often finds use in his depiction
of women who are mothers. In 1985’s The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near
Moone (BWC, 3) the wife of the title remembers a journey with her children in the marked
absence of their father as occurring at a time ‘when they were little and we were on one / Of
our Flight into Egypt jaunts to Dublin’ (BWC, 6). Similarly a Biblical scene depicted by the
painter van der Werff as ‘The Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ (GMYH, 92) is reworked by
Durcan in the voice of the suffering mother of an Aids victim. Once again appears a doting
204
mother and a suffering son who ‘goes out as he came in – / On a woman’s arm, alone’; once
again the conspicuous absence of the father is marked. In ‘The Virgin and Child’ from his
celebrated 1991 collection Crazy about Women, mother and son appear together as Biblicalstyle exiles:
Out on a limb,
Outcasts in terracotta;
Refugees in clay.
(CW, 9)
The theme of mother as sacrificial victim to a patriarchal social order persists throughout the
latter half of The Laughter of Mothers. In the bitterly ironic ‘First Place in Ireland’ (LM, 107)
Durcan dramatises how, having graduated at the top of her year in law, Sheila MacBride was
‘compelled by law’ to resign her job on marriage to a man who developed an ‘Ireland-in-theFifties face / A brolly of pessimism’. Her enumerated list of sacrifices is tantamount to a
feminist manifesto:
Never again to have her own money,
Never again to know
The pleasure of a day’s work,
Of being a good professional,
Of being independent,
Of enjoying the company
Of her peers,
The camaraderie of her colleagues,
To watch her husband
When he became a judge [...]
(LM, 108)
Instead of being afforded the opportunity of ‘altering society by applying / Her mind to these
questions’ (LM, 109), these creative energies are sublimated into cooking, cleaning and the
acquisition of washboard, mangle and dishwasher. Later, the Biblical sacrificial victim motif
takes on a more darkly existential aspect with his mother, stricken by Alzheimer’s, compared
to ‘a sheep on the shelf’ (LM, 122) and after her death being viewed as ‘a sheep’s skull on a
slab’ (LM, 128). The sense of loss and socially mandated sacrifice in these poems – which
cause the mother to become in later life a lady ‘spilling / Over with rage’ (LM, 110) –
205
resonate through the collection and can fairly be postulated as a major source of Durcan’s
political and literary feminism.
The final focus of this chapter is upon the resonances of the book title The Laughter of
Mothers. Durcan has spoken in interview about his mother’s laughter53 - no doubt it was a
consolatory presence in a childhood world where ‘men in authority were never seen to smile
and presumably never did smile – de Valera never smiled and Pope Pius XII never smiled’
(Durcan, 1999a). Whatever the reality of Durcan’s life with his mother, instances of laughter
within the book’s second section itself are few. Indeed, while the laughter spoken about in
interview seems to be that of a genuinely nourishing joviality, it is arguable that the book’s
title implies an entirely more subversive laughter. Taking into account the predominance of
boorish and power-obsessed patriarchal males in the book and in Durcan’s oeuvre more
generally, laughter here can be read as implying derision, resistance and subversion. In
interview with the current author Durcan entirely endorsed this interpretation of his title,
noting with regard to male circumscription of his mother’s life: ‘Yes, she was very hurt by
that’ (Appendix One). Arguably, it is precisely this mode of laughter which is suggested by
Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One:
Isn't laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn't the phallic
tantamount to the seriousness of meaning?
(Irigaray, 163)
Irigaray champions laughter as a mode of undermining the very seriousness which is one of
the defining characteristics of the male game.54 Reading the mothers’ laughter through the
lens of Irigaray’s interpretation offers a deflationary escape from the hubristic male battle
over language described in the earlier sections of this chapter. This interpretation of laughter
as deflating patriarchy gains weight when twinned with Durcan’s persistent deployment of
53
See interview with Nicola Tallant, The Sunday Independent, May 6th 2007.
It is also arguable that Durcan’s book title is a direct allusion to 1975 text by Hélène Cixous titled La Rire de
la Méduse translated to English as The Laugh of the Medusa. The text itself – written in an entertaining and
combative style – offers Cixous’ manifesto with regard to what has become known as écriture feminine, a
distinctively feminine mode of writing.
54
206
deflationary and ironic laughter against patriarchal pretentions across the span of his career,
with prime examples including ‘The Man with Five Penises’ (BWC, 13) and ‘Member of the
European Parliament’ (DD, 52). While the very self-conscious tone of Durcan’s writing about
women will be investigated more fully in Chapter Seven, it is worth making one final point
about his treatment of woman as mother. While Durcan’s mentor Patrick Kavanagh could
find ‘God in Woman’ (Kavanagh 2004, 185), for Durcan the bond appears strongest between
‘God’ and mothers. This is clearly to be seen in some of the guiding images of his work such
as his exhortation to the newly-elevated Desmond Cardinal Connell to be with his flock as ‘a
mother with her chicks’ (PDD, 21) as well as the epigraph chosen for his 2012 collection
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being. It comes from the writings of prolific
Jesuit priest André Manaranche and serves as an intriguing and fitting coda to Durcan’s
treatment of family, especially the mother’s central role therein:
Despite all, when all hope is lost, what actually reappears is the motherly image of a
oneness recovered at last: God is only father when he promises a mother’s love.
(P, epigraph page)
Intriguingly, Durcan appeared in interview with the current author to derive particular joy
from this epigraph. Although not used until 2012, the poet noted first encountering it in a
book by Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff in 1984 (Appendix One).
6.4 - Conclusion
It can be argued that Durcan’s naming of the family as ‘the most subversive unit in
society’ (BWC, 46) has two major justifications, both of which subvert the rather reverential
and two-dimensional notion of the family invoked in public discourse and enshrined in the
Constitution. The first of these reasons has been outlined in this chapter – the family has been
seen as a place where a father’s will and whim seemed omnipotent, a mother’s desires and
abilities were sacrificed to the jealous gods of duty and social convention, and the child ran a
gauntlet of menace mixed with nourishment. In this way Durcan can be said to have offered
207
his readers a thoroughly more nuanced view of family – its darker aspects especially – and
might fairly be assessed as having enriched public discourse on the subject. The following
chapter of this study focuses on two major selections of Durcan poems: those which form the
title sections of The Berlin Wall Café and Cries of an Irish Caveman. In these books
individual freedom is explored on a different terrain: that which registers the importance of
intimacy and chosen relationships as opposed to those with one’s family of origin. These
relationships also harbour, as shall be argued, their own types of subversive power. The
importance of a love relationship and of creating a family as a site of nurture, joy and
challenge for the subject is beautifully summarised in Durcan’s couplet ‘Epistemology’ (LM,
63):
If there is nobody to share the world with,
There is no world.
What this poem does, it can be argued, is summarise the central preoccupation of much of
Durcan’s work since The Berlin Wall Café. It is to this epistemological truth, and its centrality
in the poet’s understanding of freedom and self-fashioning, that this study’s focus now turns.
208
Chapter Seven:
55
Symbiotic, yet fluid – the importance of relationality to Durcan’s moral map
7.1 – Introduction: the centrality of relationality to Durcan’s moral map
The focus of this study’s seventh chapter is Durcan’s writing of the individual subject
in the contexts both of chosen relationships and their painful disintegration. The specific
focus is upon the title sections from The Berlin Wall Café and Cries of an Irish Caveman.
While treatment of the relationships with his parents has been central to his art – as evidenced
by both Daddy, Daddy (1990) and The Laughter of Mothers (2007) – of equal critical interest
is his work which deals with chosen relationships. This chapter focuses on poems relating to
Durcan’s marriage and a significant later romantic pairing which is chronicled in Cries of an
Irish Caveman. The next and final chapter will focus on the importance for Durcan of
relationships more generally and their key role in what will be referred as his ‘theatre’ of the
self56. However differing may be the tones in which Durcan writes various relationships with
parents, lovers and friends, cumulatively they point to a central truth – that relationality itself,
or its absence, is a key factor in his moral map. While this fact could be deduced from 1978’s
Sam’s Cross where a speaker laments ‘I’ve become so lonely, I could die’ (SC, 42), the
damaging effects of loneliness and isolation have become a central preoccupation in the
poet’s later work. The 2001 poem ‘Early Christian Ireland Wedding Cry’ (CIC, 75), written
for the occasion of his daughter Sarah’s marriage, puts this central truth in understandably
celebratory tones:
All things come in twos – which is why
Marriage is the paradigm of science.
The code of all physics and all chemistry is marriage;
The figure of all energy is two.
(CIC, 78)
55
‘Our children swam about our home / As if it was their private sea, /Their own unique, symbiotic fluid’ (BWC,
45)
56
David Hume’s conception that ‘the mind is a kind of theatre’ (Hume, 165) will provide the guiding image for
this investigation. It will be expanded upon at the beginning of this study’s final chapter.
209
This of course echoes the Talmudic epigraph chosen for 1985’s The Berlin Wall Café: ‘The
world is a wedding’ (BWC, epigraph) which has a particular poignancy given the central
subject of that volume – the disintegration of Durcan’s own marriage. Similarly, his 1994
work ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ (GMYH, 11) after a painting by Jan van Eyck, might be read
as a thinly veiled acknowledgement of the centrality of this thematic preoccupation to the
poet himself. The couple in whose voice the poem is spoken boast that ‘The most relaxing
word in our vocabulary is “we”’ as they declare their faith in the artist:
To do justice to the plurality,
Fertility, domesticity, barefootedness
Of a man and woman saying ‘we’[.]
(GMYH, 11)
It is Durcan’s own attempts to do justice to these realities in his own life – and to lament their
absence – that constitute the structuring theme of this chapter. Indeed, in the context of the
overall interpretive endeavour of this study, Durcan’s The Berlin Wall Café and Cries of an
Irish Caveman can be seen as attempts to arrive at a ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) with regard
to the two relationships. It shall be claimed, especially in the context of his writing about
women, that Durcan’s mode of writing is particularly aware of the very politicised nature of
each ‘fiction’ (DD, 71) that he employs to describe his relationships. Specific attention is paid
in this chapter to the ways in which relationships – particularly male-female relationships –
became politicised in a new way in the course of Durcan’s writing career.
The poet’s view of the self and subjectivity as being relationally constructed has been
commented upon directly by Kathleen McCracken in her review of the 1999 collection
Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil. Remarking on Durcan’s conception of poetry as being, to
some extent, a documentary record, McCracken writes:
210
While the poems are on one level an impressively accurate record of events in Irish public
life from 1990 onwards, at the same time they comprise a subjective, idiosyncratic
'chronicle or journal' of one person's ... 'soul-making' during the course of those years.
The chief implication of this interface is that one's engagement with, one's 'take' on, all
that is not, or other than, one's self is what in fact bestows one's sense of self/selves.
Repeatedly in the poetry we are shown how the individual is impinged upon, defined by,
yet responds to society and the world. Yet it is in that symbiotic exchange that being
human is understood.
(McCracken 1999, 146)
McCracken’s comments on how the self is formed and understood only in relationship and
‘engagement’ with other people and events are perceptive. Indeed, her claim that being human
is best understood as a ‘symbiotic exchange’ directly echoes a telling piece of wordplay on
Durcan’s own behalf. His 1985 poem ‘“Windfall”, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ (BWC, 43), to which
Durcan drew attention particularly during interview and which he has chosen to be
anthologised as representative of his best work,57 contains the following lines:
Our children swam about our home
As if it was their private sea,
Their own unique, symbiotic fluid
Of which their parents also partook.
Such is home – a sea of your own –
(BWC, 45)
There is in these lines a clear and deliberate confusion of the phrases ‘symbiotic fluid’ and
amniotic fluid. The echo of amniotic fluid, crucial to the development of a child in the womb
during pregnancy, creates a sense of the Durcan household as a nurturing womb itself. The
sense of house as womb is reinforced by the frequent repetition of the assonantal ‘home’
which is the key word of the poem. This image at once allows the family home to become a
safe and sheltering place and also presages the point made by McCracken above regarding the
centrality of interconnectedness and symbiosis in Durcan’s understanding of human
development and identity. That human need for relationship is not merely one desire among
many others in Durcan’s schema, but rather of axiomatic importance, has been stated and
57
See McDonagh, J. (ed.) (2008), A Fine Statement: An Irish Poet’s Anthology, Dublin: Poolbeg Press
211
restated in interview, most recently following the launch of Praise in Which I Live and Move
and Have my Being to Ciara Dwyer in April 2012:
People are the air that you breathe and that's how it is with me ... I've noticed it in recent
years. I've always come alive when I've been with people and consequently, in isolation I
tend to dwindle and almost die.
(Dwyer, 2012)
This perhaps throwaway remark, albeit of a dark hue – ‘in isolation I tend to dwindle and
almost die’ – is a clear mirroring of ‘I’ve become so lonely, I could die’ (SC, 42) quoted
above and appears reformulated in Durcan’s most direct poem on this subject, the couplet
titled ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63):
If there is nobody to share the world with,
There is no world.
To append such a title to this couplet may to some readers seem hyperbolic. However, it can
be argued that the hyperbole is risked in order to foreground the importance of this tenet in
Durcan’s concept of the self. Indeed, for good or for ill, the centrality in the poet’s oeuvre of
poems dealing with the key people with whom he shares the world, surely cannot be
disputed. For Durcan, then, the world is perceived and known primarily in and through
relationships or lack thereof. The eighth and final chapter of this study will chart how Durcan
develops this theme of the importance of relationship with other people to encompass
relationship with oneself through the ‘fiction’ (DD, 71) of poetry and self-narration.
Durcan’s preoccupation with interpersonal relationships has created a rich arena in
which much of his poetry is situated. Arguably the most central and deserving of critical
attention of these poems are to be found in the second section of The Berlin Wall Café (1985)
and the final section of Cries of an Irish Caveman (2001) – both of these selections will be
explored in this chapter. It is valuable to note that, supplementary to these more celebrated
collections, this type of Durcan poem involving two people also includes a book-long
celebration of male friendship, Christmas Day (1996), the title poem of Greetings to Our
212
Friends in Brazil (1999), a performance work for two voices named ‘Nights in the Gardens of
Clare’ (1990)58 and an extensive unpublished piece titled ‘Lady Newgrange and the Ringsend
Caretaker’59. He has also written an unfinished play for multiple characters which bears as its
title the name of the painter Balthus and runs to 140 pages (NLI catalogue, 35). Before an
analysis is undertaken of The Berlin Wall Café and the Cries of an Irish Caveman poems it
will be necessary to set out some of the major coordinates in Durcan’s writing about women.
Like his mentor Patrick Kavanagh who declared ‘Surely my God is feminine’ (Kavanagh
2004, 185) Durcan claims with regard to women that ‘I am preoccupied with fundamentally
nothing else’ (CW, 127). While Durcan has consistently written in support of women’s rights
and is self-declared as being ‘crazy about women’ (CW, 127), some critics have levelled the
charge that his writing on the subject can be interpreted as exploitative – of particular note in
this regard is Edna Longley. These concerns will be addressed directly in this chapter. As
noted above, such an investigation is merited given the centrality of the role of ‘fiction[s]’
(DD, 71) to Durcan’s understanding of how each of us develops the ‘vision of reality’
(DD,61) central to our moral life.
7.2 – Authority and the eyes60: the nature of Durcan’s writing about women
Writing in the year 2000, James Lennon remarked upon how political and social changes in
the relationship between the sexes towards the end of the twentieth century had been reflected
in the works of Irish poets. He notes how:
58
‘Nights in the Gardens of Clare’ (DD, 75), a work for two voices, is described in the catalogue of Durcan’s
deposit with the National Library of Ireland as ‘a performance work produced by Durcan in collaboration with
Micheál O Suilleabháin and performed on various dates’ (NLI catalogue, 64).
59
The catalogue of Durcan’s deposit with the National Library of Ireland records a deposit of a 69 page draft
unpublished typescript with the title ‘Lady Newgrange and the Ringsend Caretaker’. It appears to have been
written while Durcan was working on Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil and is dated 1997-1998 (NLI
catalogue, 24).
60
An allusion is intended here to Durcan’s mention in his introduction to Crazy About Women of how RB Kitaj
‘gave me back the authority of my own eyes’ (CW, x)
213
After years of stultification, the women’s movement boomed in the 1970s, responding to
international feminism and to the changing cultural climate in Ireland. Women
successfully pressured the government to overturn some of its anti-woman legislation.
Such dramatic changes in gender roles affected not only how women saw women, but
how men saw women and how men saw themselves.
(Lennon, 623)
Relationships with women play a central role in Paul Durcan’s art. Most prominent among
these women are ‘Nessa’ (OW, 3), a ‘whirlpool’ in which the poet ‘very nearly drowned’,
Durcan’s ‘golden mother’ (LM, 126) and his daughters Sarah and Siabhra – ‘two golden
girls’ (GFB, 134). With few exceptions, Durcan’s writing about women follows the spirit of
Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘God in Woman’ (Kavanagh 2004, 185): ‘While men the poet’s tragic
light resented, / The spirit that is Woman caressed his soul’. Durcan begins his ‘Acis And
Galatea’ with a double entendre: ‘Not long after we became lovers, when she was appointed /
Minister for the Environment there was a brouhaha’ (CW, 33). This is typical of his particular
ability to incorporate chattiness, a gossipy tone and content of absolute seriousness: for
Durcan, women – especially women as life partners – are always ‘Minister for the
Environment’. They, and his relationships with them, create the environment in which he
lives. This point was strongly made by the poet in interview when questioned regarding the
writing of Daddy, Daddy:
I don’t think other poets and professors understand the importance of this. I myself
know it for a personal fact with regard to the time during which I wrote not only the
section ‘Daddy, Daddy’ but all the other poems in that book. About four months after
my father died I had the great good fortune to meet a woman whose friendship and later
companionship – we lived together later, on and off – there was an atmosphere of peace
and contentment and affection at that time. There are a number of reasons why and how
Daddy, Daddy got written but the fundamental one is just that, which is a totally private,
personal thing.
(Appendix One)
This acknowledgement notwithstanding, Durcan’s significant departure from Kavanagh is to
accommodate and reflect the developments in gender relations referred to in the quote from
James Lennon at the head of this section. His poetic voices seek to negotiate the
complications of gender identity and relations introduced by the advent of intellectual and
214
political feminism since the 1970s. The broader tendency in culture towards examination of
gender roles61 and the questioning of traditional binaries occasioned by the advent of
feminism – as per Lennon above – is reflected in Durcan’s work in both serious and playful
ways. Durcan makes pointed reference to each of the sexes in and of themselves as well as to
the shifting cultural ground on which their interactions take place. A short treatment of
Durcan’s often mocking attitude to men is merited and offered here, followed by a discussion
of his very self-aware writing about women. While Lennon remarks that ‘Often male writing
is not even treated as gendered, but rather as a standard or universal voice’ (Lennon, 620),
when writing about women Durcan is very much aware of the gendered and politicised nature
of the act. This is best reflected in two poems which can be read as meditations on this
subject expressing opposing impulses in his own work – 1982’s ‘Ark of the North’ (AN) and
1985’s ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3). A reading of
these two poems will comprise the second part of this section. Finally, arising from the
analysis of these poems, remarks will be made with regard to the interpretive approach which
will be taken in this chapter’s third section.
In interview and in his poetry Durcan has lamented the binary notions of gender
current in his childhood and young manhood. In this painful reflection on the issue, reported
in a 2007 discussion with Nicola Tallant, the point is well illustrated:
From a fairly early age I was aware that certain kinds of people disapproved of me –
particularly certain kinds of male. These men had the idea that boys had to be soldiers,
chaste soldiers, and had to fit into a mould and if they didn't there was something not
quite right. My father would say: 'Paul is a sissy. Come on, be a man.' I was aware of his
deep disapproval.
(Tallant, 2007)
This prescribing of a normative male identity is something much of Durcan’s work lampoons,
from 1978’s ‘The Ballet Dancer’ (SC, 37) which comments of town gossips ‘Oh how they
61
This examination of gender roles can be said to be part of a broader tendency still – encompassing several
analytic approaches such as Marxism, ethnically and psychoanalytically driven critiques – described by Stuart
Hall as performing ‘an anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial, and national conceptions of cultural identity’
(Hall, 1).
215
dread the woman in the man’, onwards. To this can be added such pieces as ‘The Man Who
Thought He Was Miss Havisham’ (BWC, 16) and ‘Golden Island Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 1)
as well as Erik Martiny’s observation regarding the fact that ‘Durcan’s subversive tendency
toward self-feminization with respect to his actual father is a feature of many of the Daddy,
Daddy elegies’ (Martiny 2007, 100)62. He frequently satirises a type of hubris and selfassuredness which he describes as being particular to males. Aware in this sense of the
frequent inseparability of ‘ego and ego’s willie’ (AoL, 71) Durcan mocks his own ‘penispurse’ (CIC, 8) and his ‘pink, black rod’ (CIC, 124). The parallel between the penis and male
hubris appears intermittently throughout his work, with the punning ‘Member of the European
Parliament’ (DD, 53) described as ‘self-righteous and scornful’. This trope reaches its most
extreme, albeit highly comic, expression in the 1985 poem ‘The Man with Five Penises’
(BWC, 13). The inclusion of the word ‘more’ in the final line – ‘Unquestionably, one penis is
more than enough’ – can be read as imagining a world in which logically, if one penis is
‘more’ than enough, then perhaps to have no penis at all is ‘enough’ or even the ideal. This
playful reading of Durcan’s text is entirely in the spirit of the poem and indeed of his general
mocking of male phallic power. Beyond specific reference to the penis, Durcan’s criticism of
the self-assuredness and arrogance of men is also of note. ‘Isn’t it heartbreakingly funny how
relentlessly / Pretentious men are’ (GHR, 79) he asks rhetorically at Pasternak’s grave – this
sentiment is compounded by 2012’s ‘Thinking about Suicide’ (P, 22): ‘Men are such po-faced
bores / Each one of them an editor in chief.’ Further, Durcan’s reversal in Crazy about
Women of the Roman playwright Terence’s maxim homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum
puto63 is his strongest statement of this type: ‘I am a man; / All that is human is alien to me’
[sic] (CW, 137). His failure to qualify such statements – frequently referring disparagingly to
62
See for example ‘Crinkle, near Birr’ (DD, 107): ‘Daddy and I were lovers / From the beginning’.
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, which has its origin in a play by Roman playwright Terence. The
Latin title of the play Heauton Timorumenos is translated as The Self-Tormentor The quotation parodied by
Durcan is translated as ‘I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ (Barsby, 186).
63
216
‘men’ (GHR, 79) in general – is, of course, open to the same charges of essentialism,
reductionism and stereotype as the macho view of men which he himself seeks to undermine.
However, taken in a spirit of satirical caricature and appreciated in their respective contexts,
Durcan’s lampooning outbursts are difficult to counter.
Celebrated for his writing about women – major poems wholly in the voices of women
include ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3) and ‘Six Nuns
Die in Convent Inferno’ (GHR, 3) – Durcan has not been without his critics in this area. Most
notable and direct has been Edna Longley with her 1994 charge against Durcan’s The Berlin
Wall Café (1985). Longley’s charge is that while his earlier poems celebrating women ‘may
simply invert more austere representations of Cathleen Ní Houlihan’, The Berlin Wall Café
sequence ‘might be seen as exploitative, despite the male protagonist’s self-abnegation’
(Longley 1994, 216). The inference here seems to be that the ‘male protagonist’s selfabnegation’ is in fact not entirely genuine, that in practising self-effacement Durcan is in fact
seeking a type of elevation. While the authorial intention to exploit can never be wholly
proven or disproven – critical arguments regarding authorial intention being a particularly
fraught area – it would seem inconsistent with Durcan’s general approach to women,
especially towards narratives surrounding his marriage.
Nevertheless the question Longley poses must be seen as valid and Durcan must
surely be aware of how elements of his work might be read in this light. Indeed he seems to
wish, without external prompting, to defend himself against allegations over his relationships
with women several times. Notably in ‘A Snail In My Prime’ – ‘I am not a womanizer, / I am
a snail’ (SMP, 267) – and also in ‘Christmas Day’ (CD, 61) where he claims, before God’s
judgment, that all his life he ‘made love’. God’s retort, having checked the record, is simply
‘‘That’s not what it says here’’ (CD, 61). Though these points are slightly oblique in their
connection to Edna Longley’s charges regarding The Berlin Wall Café, it is interesting to note
217
Durcan’s desire to orchestrate within his own work a self-accusation and defence on the
subject of women. He is clearly aware of a certain school of opinion which might describe
him in the same playful manner as he described Francis Stuart in ‘The Toll Bridge’ (SMP,
246): as ‘a man with a question mark over him’. This poem for Stuart’s ninetieth birthday
features a male speaker and a female toll collector who meet at ‘The Toll Bridge / ... / Our ark
of the north on the south bank of the Liffey’ (SMP, 248). Here is found a repetition of the title
of Durcan’s earlier poem for Stuart published eleven years beforehand in 1982, ‘Ark of the
North’ (AN). This poem itself is the first significant dramatisation of Durcan’s self-awareness
regarding his writing about women. As such a close reading of the poem will be instructive.
‘Ark of the North’ (AN), published on the occasion of Francis Stuart’s eightieth
birthday, is the first of two such tributes to the older writer. The second, which was produced
ten years later as noted above, was titled ‘The Toll Bridge’ (SMP, 246). Interestingly, praise
has also flowed in the other direction, with Stuart favourably comparing Durcan to
Kavanagh, Wordsworth and Blake in an article for The Cork Review titled ‘A special kind of
writer’ (Stuart, 28). Both ‘Ark of the North’ and ‘The Toll Booth’ incorporate motifs of
transport and travel, a Durcan staple, with the significant action of the earlier poem taking
place on ‘the Belfast-Dublin train’ (AN, 8). The poem is divided into ten sections, the first
and tenth of which have a judicial setting – yet another Durcan staple. While the final section
details the protagonist’s trial and condemnation, the poem opens with the imprisoned speaker
making reference to ‘the woman of my dreams’ while resolving to ‘trace the moment’ (AN,
1) of his downfall for his hearers. The poem’s opening line – ‘Last night I faced the woman
of my dreams’ (AN, 1) – places it firmly within both the central framework of this chapter
and also establishes it as a ‘parody of the aisling [sic] form’ (Lennon, 639). The speaker
appears at the poem’s beginning a solitary figure – accused, condemned, incarcerated. He is,
as Kathleen McCracken has written ‘lonely, poor, romantic, a clown bewildered by some
218
vaudevillean twist of fate’ (McCracken 1996, 100). Intriguingly, his only three possessions
are listed thus:
A solitary paperback, The Life of Buster Keaton,
And a broken looking-glass fixed-up with splints of pencils,
And a black-and-white photograph of an Egyptian woman
At Drogheda Railway Station on All Soul’s Day,
The Day of the Dead.
(AN, 1)
The biography in question is significant given the earlier comments regarding Beckett and
Durcan’s vaudeville influences: Buster Keaton eventually assumed the role in Beckett’s Film
for which Charlie Chaplin had been approached (Knowlson, 523). Also, the motif of the
‘looking-glass’ recurs – just as it does in ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near
Moone’ (BWC, 3) and ‘Christmas Day’: this will be explored further in the final chapter.
However, it is the ‘black-and-white photograph’ which is most significant here. Explaining
its significance the speaker describes how he had seen the Egyptian woman at Drogheda
Railway Station64 and ‘had captured her with a Kodak Instamatic’ (AN, 1).
With this use of the key verb ‘captured’ and reference to the camera ‘as atrocious as
Dresden bombers’ the main motif of the poem is introduced. For ‘Ark of the North’, as much
as it is a tribute to Francis Stuart, is also a meditation on ‘the colonizing effects of the male
gaze’ (McCracken 1996, 103). McCracken continues that the poem is ‘fundamentally
concerned with methods and limits of perception, in particular visual perception’ (McCracken
1996, 103). It is possible to interpret Durcan’s round-about self-accusation regarding a
transgression of perception as marking a line in the sand with regards to his writing about
women. His repeated use of the word ‘captured’, with all its connotations, coupled with the
naming of the Egyptian female as ‘Defiance’ [sic] (AN, 23) emphasise the dynamic of force
64
There is an intriguing allusion here. Many of Ireland’s railway stations take their names from the leaders of
Ireland’s fight for political independence from 1916-1922. Drogheda station bears the name of John MacBride,
Durcan’s mother’s uncle. Further, John MacBride himself was named by Yeats in connection with a reputedly
violent and abusive male-female relationship: ‘He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my
heart.’ (Yeats, 178) This relationship was with Maud Gonne whose daughter Iseult married the dedicatee of The
Ark of the North, Francis Stuart.
219
and resistance, violation and vulnerability in the poem. The pointed description of the
photograph as ‘black-and-white’ (AN, 1) recalls, also, Durcan’s 1978 lampooning of the Irish
Bishops whose spokesman insists on the ‘innate black and white nature of reality’ (SC, 52).
To be ‘captured’ in ‘black-and-white’ then, in at least this Durcan poetic conceit, connotes a
serious violation. Drawing further upon the contrast laid out in ‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour
Photography’ (SC, 52) it is possible to say that such black and white photographing of a
person obliterates their innately ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52) nature. As is fitting for a poet to
whose work the notion of a ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) is central, references to sight abound
in ‘Ark of the North’. The narrator notes that he himself ‘fall[s] into the file indexed “Sighted
Persons”’ (AN, 8), he feels his ‘eyes like a pair of elevators’ (AN, 10) and confesses
regarding his attempts ‘to keep my eyes / From violating her’ (AN, 12). The three pages
which comprise the poem’s fifth section see the two persons in the poem draw closer
together, finally achieving some type of union, in spite of the male protagonist’s selfconsciousness regarding his role as violator. Their union, such as it is, ends as ‘the guillotine
fell’ (AN, 16) just after this fittingly defiant taunt from Defiance:
“It is harder” she began to whisper
“For a man to make love to a woman
Than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”
(AN, 16)
The crime for which the speaker receives ‘thirty years in prison’ (AN, 22), alluded to in the
opening section, is detailed in section eight. If to look at some one is to violate them in this
poem’s terms, then the crime of which the speaker is guilty is the capturing of Defiance’s
image:
She came walking towards me, nearer, nearer;
I stood up and clicked the Kodak Instamatic;
She clasped her hand on her heart as if shot;
(AN, 20)
The violence of being ‘captured’ in ‘black-and-white’ (AN, 1) is emphasised if this poem is
again read in conjunction with another aspect of the earlier ‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour
220
Photography’ (SC, 52), the principle personage of which is one ‘Father Marksman’. If, as per
the conceit of this particular poem to capture a person’s image is to violate them by a form of
reductionism, it might be argued that such violation is risked by all types of artistic
reproduction. That this speaks directly to Durcan’s own sense of self-accusation with regards
his portrayal of women is evidenced by an allusion in the poem’s sixth section. The following
lines can be read as dreamy aspirations on one hand, self-accusing irony on the other:
Before the guillotine fell my last thoughts were as follows:
That [sic] she in all her life, her movement and her being,
All in whose nostrils is the breath of life,
Is – in proportion – perfection in the eyes of God
(AN, 17)
Durcan here elevates the woman to the status of ‘perfection’. That this elevation is itself
another form of capture is embedded in the specific allusion itself. The second line of the
above quoted passage is a mirror of two other texts: Durcan’s own title of thirty years later
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being and Saint Paul’s warning on the
Areopagus Hill (Acts, 17:16-34). The apostle, whose name Durcan shares of course, warns
the Athenians against the worship of idols. Following the hermeneutic framework of this
chapter it is fair to say that Durcan in ‘Ark of the North’ is raising the issue of his tendency to
literally idolise women. This accusation is levelled directly again in his recent poem
‘Idolatry’ (P, 13) in which the poet appears a love-hungry buffoon after his amorous conquest
‘Running in front of her every five metres / Like Groucho Marx, bowing to her’. What
connects these two examples, of course, is the production and worship of images – be they
photographs, Athenian statues or fixed images in the mind. In other terms, ‘that perfection,
whether in life or art, is not a thing that can be fixed or defined; the vision is fluid,
multivalent, effectively imperceptible’ (McCracken 1996, 104). It is at least partially to
illuminate this danger and demonstrate his awareness of it that Durcan conducts in ‘Ark of
221
the North’ such an extended and elaborate self-accusation regarding the nature, role and
power of art.
Quite an opposing self-portrait in relation to his writing about women is achieved in
the 1985 poem ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3). The
speaker of the poem is the Christ-like ‘thirty-three years old, / In the prime of my
womanhood’ (BWC, 3), ‘quite dramatically beautiful’ and married to ‘a popular and a
wealthy man, / An alcoholic and a county councillor’. There even seems an eerie parallel
with the public figure of John MacBride – a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ criticised by Yeats
in his poem ‘Easter 1916’ above (Yeats, 178). Her suffering is rendered in Christological
overtones, from the very pointed mention of her age to her picnic with her momentarily
father-abandoned children at ‘the Cross at Moone’ (BWC, 6). The principal persona in the
poem is celebrated by Edna Longley as representative ‘of the distressed gentle women who at
least personify his poetry’s recoil from patriarchal violence’ (Longley 1994, 216). Durcan’s
pathos-laden and profoundly sympathetic portrait of the woman reaches its peak when the
Haulier’s Wife encounters a strange man, coming alive in his company. Falling into a
‘daydream’ – a favourite Durcan trope – she meets ‘Jesus’ who is a ‘travelling actor’ (BWC,
6). The portrait of Jesus seems a little too well drawn, too pointed a revision of the violating
attitudes found in ‘Ark of the North’ not to qualify as another Durcan self-portrait:
Jesus turned out to be a lovely man,
All that a woman could ever possibly dream of:
Gentle, wild, soft-spoken, courteous, sad;
Angular, awkward, candid, methodical;
Humorous, passionate, angry, kind;
Entirely sensitive to a woman’s world.
(BWC, 6)
This reading is supported by Durcan’s mocking self-depictions as Jesus elsewhere, notably
his ‘messiahing about’ in ‘The Pietà’s Over’ (BWC, 52). Significantly, in ‘Ark of the North’
it is the male who dreams, in the later poem it is the female – this might lead the reader to
222
conjecture that what is met in the other sex is merely a dream or projection. This reading is
reinforced by the title of Durcan’s 2009 Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 19672007. However, the importance of this 1985 poem and indeed the final line quoted above
became apparent during the interview given by Durcan for this thesis (Appendix One).
Having praised James Plunkett’s writing from the points of view of women in Strumpet City
he very happily consented to the description of Plunkett as ‘entirely sensitive to a woman’s
world’ (BWC, 6). It can be argued that with this backhanded self-portrait as ‘Jesus’, Durcan
is aspiring to a similar verdict regarding his own writing about women.
It is not intended to suggest here that either ‘Ark of the North’ or ‘The Haulier’s Wife
Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3) exhausts Durcan’s range with regards to his
writing about women. Nevertheless they do set out crucial points of orientation with regard to
the issue. What is hopefully clear is that Durcan is aware of what McCracken has called ‘the
colonizing effects of the male gaze’ (McCracken 1996, 103) which he himself refers to as
‘my swastika eyes’ (BWC, 38). While it is important that Durcan’s texts be made answer the
charges of exploitation (Longley 1994, 216), this interpretive line should not obscure the
positive values and achievements of his work – principle among which is his frank
exploration of male interiority in relationships. The centring of critical focus on the
dramatised interior landscape of the gazing male, which will inform the next two sections
strongly, is best stated by Joseph Lennon in his agreement with studies by S.H. Clark and
Peter Middleton65:
Psychoanalytic critics such as S.H. Clark and Peter Middleton have expounded on the
importance of understanding and appreciating male idealizations, even misogynistic ones,
as the poetry of male desire, rather than the poetry of female objectification. Such a shift
is not intended to limit the discussion of gender and poetry but rather to expand it in order
to explore both the workings of male desire and the sexist effects of it.
(Lennon, 621-622)
65
Lennon references Sordid Images: The Poetry of Masculine Desire by S.H. Clark (New York: Routledge,
1994) and The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988)
223
What is evident in Durcan’s work and can be seen reflected in Lennon’s quote here is that he
accepts that much poetry and art generates ‘idealizations’ (Lennon, 621). This can be read in
‘Idolatry’ (2012) or in the much earlier 1976 poem ‘The Difficulty That Is Marriage’ (TB, 15)
in which the speaker claims ‘You must have your faults but I do not see them’. This
acceptance of the inevitability of the beloved’s imperfections while simultaneously admitting
blindness to them presages the extended use of the eyes as device in ‘Ark of the North’. It also
centres the dramatic attention on the machinations of the male speaker’s interior life, making
it, as Lennon has said, ‘poetry of male desire, rather than the poetry of female objectification’
(Lennon, 622). It is possible to read such cautious politicisations of the male gaze as further
inflections of Durcan’s moral map: the freedom of the male as a perceiver and fashioner of his
‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) is, in Durcan’s later writing, a highly qualified, politicised and
complicated freedom.
‘If there is nobody to share the world with’, the couplet ‘Epistemology’ claims, ‘there
is no world’ (LM, 63). One of the most startling and resonant aspects of Paul Durcan’s work
is his talent for depiction of the emotional and psychic joys and trials experienced when there
is somebody female with whom the world can be shared. The attention of this chapter now
turns towards a treatment of Durcan’s two most extensive selections of poems related to
particular relationships: section two of The Berlin Wall Café (1985) and part four of Cries of
an Irish Caveman (2001).
7.3 – ‘The Pietà’s Over’66: writing the male subject in the context of longer relationships
in The Berlin Wall Café
The third and fourth sections of this chapter respectively address the sequences of
poems which chart two of the longer love relationships of Durcan’s life and their
disintegration. The first sequence comprises the second section of The Berlin Wall Café
66
‘The Pietà’s Over’ (BWC, 53)
224
(1985) while the other sequence to be considered constitutes the fourth section of Cries of an
Irish Caveman (2001). This latter sequence is the title sequence of this 2001 work. Before
embarking on analysis of the way in which Durcan writes these relationships it is important
to note that he has frequently taken as his subject matter the very fact itself that relationships
are a site of much evasion and miscommunication. Within relationships, in Durcan’s schema,
communication is frequently garbled or frustrated. Examples of this theme include ‘Ireland
1977’ (SC, 42) where the exasperated speaker asks ‘Do you hear me bawling to you across
the hearthrug?’ and the italicised refrain of his 1991 ‘Man Walking The Stairs’:
Odd to overhear that you think I am saying
‘Man walking the stars’
When all my life I have been saying
‘Man walking the stairs’.
[sic] (CW, 115)
Added to these miscommunicating couples, Durcan has written a number of poems marking
the impact of materialism on love relationships which might be read as meditations on how
love and material possessions can become confused with each other. 1975’s ‘The Day of the
Starter’ (OW, 74) depicts a husband who has given ‘every / Conceivable gadget on this earth’
to a wife pictured ‘beaming from the rear’. Similarly, in ‘Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish
Priest’s Parlour’, though the protagonist is an automobile-obsessed ‘great man for the
Volkses’, his wife pointedly chooses to travel to his funeral ‘on top of the coffin / driving the
donkey’ (JBF, 29). Whilst for the emotionally distant Haulier it may seem a valid romantic
gesture to pay for his wife’s new outfit and theatre trip, this pattern is pointedly reversed in
Durcan’s humorous later poem ‘The Man with a Bit of Jizz in Him’ (AoL, 3). In this later
piece the husband proves the hero of the day, whisking his wife away on a weekend break to
‘a three-star hotel in St-Paul-de-Vence’. In the nineteen years between the publication of The
Berlin Wall Café (1985) and The Art of Life (2004) the female protagonist may have
developed from a woman ‘quite dramatically beautiful’ (BWC, 3) to an ‘attractive middleaged housewife’ (AoL, 3) – the equation of affection and material possessions, however,
225
persists. So too Durcan has lamented the way relationships are spoken about in public
forums, from his amusing evasion-chronicling later poem ‘The Wilds of Discretion’ (AoL, 5)
to descriptions of darker social trends such as ‘the way some of our legal and medical
professionals speak in a way which dehumanizes the people they are dealing with’ (Durcan in
Kearney, 329). Durcan is speaking pointedly in this last instance about marriage itself and the
way in which ‘divorce is often regarded as a moral evil thereby ignoring the suffering that
certain people are actually living through’ (Durcan in Kearney, 329). In keeping with this
theme and with his particular eye for the coincidence of the idiosyncratic and the apt is the
epigraph chosen for Cries of an Irish Caveman. The epigraph is taken from the film Arctic
Blue: ‘Ecology. Folks use that term for everything but what it means: who’s eating who’
(CIC, epigraph). This use of words for everything but what they mean is a persistent bugbear
of Durcan’s – from the depiction of relationships as here to journalism and the realms of
public discourse and politics67. Indeed such abuses of language can be interpreted as
hampering human freedom through distortions of language which render an accurate ‘vision
of reality’ (GHR, 61) unachievable. It is in this spirit that Durcan’s poems should be read, as
seeking to offer a corrective to what he perceives as the evasiveness and distortion of much
public discourse. Rather than resort to expressions which are ‘recherché’ [sic] (CW, 45),
Durcan has repeatedly stated his aspiration that his poetry be in Yeats’s coinage ‘a vision of
reality’ (Yeats, 159).
Paul Durcan’s marriage of sixteen years ended in early 1984. While it will not be at
odds with the critical approach of this thesis to leave some of the biographical detail of this
difficult time obscured, it is relevant to note at least some of what the poet himself has put on
the record regarding the breakup. Having met in Dublin in August of 1967, Durcan and his
future wife Nessa O’Neill soon moved to London and later to Cork as they ‘lived together
67
Attention should be drawn here particularly to ‘Tribute to a Reporter in Belfast, 1974’ (OW, 63) where
Ireland is described as ‘a country where words also have died an unnatural death’ and also to what Durcan has
described as Sinn Féin’s ‘killing of language, the abuse, manipulation, murder of words’ (PDD, 132).
226
sixteen years / Rearing two golden girls’ (GFB, 134). With Nessa to a large extent the family
breadwinner, Durcan spent much time at home with his daughters, ‘in the presence of that
original lost innocence’ (Dwyer, 2009). Asked directly by Ciara Dwyer about the end of his
marriage Durcan responded frankly:
Hardly a day goes by that I don't think about our marriage. Though our marriage ended at
the beginning of 1984, when I'm talking to myself, which is what I mainly do, I put the
breakdown of our marriage down to my stupidity. ... Even now, I see myself still making
the wrong choices. I don't know what it is. It ranges from ridiculous, naive to culpable.
But that's an abstract way of talking about it [the marriage break-up]. I try to depict what
happened in the book.
(Dwyer, 2009)
This spirit of self-accusation pervades The Berlin Wall Café (1985). It can be read as an
extension and modulation of Durcan’s judicial tropes analysed earlier in this study. In his
1985 work the sense of self-accusation is delivered in a variety of tones from comic to serious
as ‘the pain of separation and its inevitability are seen from various perspectives and with
compelling imaginative range’ (Brown, 81). In interview for this thesis Durcan was
particularly eager that his epigraphs be paid attention to and seen as an important element of
his work; with this in mind The Berlin Wall Café’s epigraph is instructive. Taken from the
Talmud it reads simply ‘The world is a wedding’ (BWC, epigraph). Playing the heartbreak of
marriage breakup against such a celebratory statement from the Talmud creates an
overarching tone loaded with pathos and potential for dark comedy. This juxtaposition echoes
the earlier proposal that Durcan’s poetic personae are typically found in postures of indecision
and contradiction. Such poems both dramatise and evoke in the reader contradictory emotions
akin to those dramatised in the figure of the new mother referred to in ‘Paul’ (DD, 3) who
intuits:
[...] that everything is going to be all right
But that we are all aliens in the cupboard,
All coat hangers in the universe.
(DD, 3)
227
This analysis will proceed with a reading of a selection of the poems from The Berlin Wall
Café which can be taken to be demonstrative of significant points.
As does Daddy, Daddy (1990), the eighteen poems comprising the second section of
The Berlin Wall Café bear out the truth of Derek Mahon’s assertion that Durcan is best read as
‘a Cubist, one transfixed by the simultaneousness of disparate experience, all sides of the
question’ (Mahon, 166). While they feature figures and personae identifiable to a certain
extent as Paul Durcan, his children and his ex-wife, Durcan’s art is such that in these poems
his particular family become more universally representative in a dramatic sequence
‘allegorical of the woe and wonder that is in marriage’ (Grennan, 49). Persistent deployment
of techniques such as allegory, poetic masks, ekphrasis and extended metaphors seem to
sufficiently distance the reader from the biographical rawness behind the poems in a manner
surely aware of Patrick Kavanagh’s counsel:
The self is only interesting as an illustration. For some reason, whenever we talk about
our personal lives they turn out to be both irrelevant and untrue – even when the facts are
right, the mood is wrong.
(Kavanagh 2003, 306)
This selection of poems might be read cumulatively as eighteen gestures towards a selfportrait – an extended meditation on the state of the male psyche during a marriage and its
disintegration. In an interview in which he discussed his writing of ‘Christmas Day’ – about
which more will be noted in the final chapter – Durcan claimed to have used the persona
‘Frank’ (CD, 5) as a literary prop:
[T]o write about other than one’s self, to get out of the trap of one’s self into the whole
wide world and try and make a picture a portrait.
(Murphy, 1996)
It is possible to read the collection’s many alter-egos as a modulation of this technique. In
them the male partner is described variously as a crucified Christ (BWC, 52), ‘Romeo’
(BWC, 48), ‘the artist’ (BWC, 49), ‘Camp Commandant of Treblinka’ (BWC, 55), a
‘xenophobic psychopath’ (BWC, 61), a ‘stag’ (BWC, 69) and a foot-soldier of ‘God the
228
Führer’ (BWC, 69). The wife of the selection, on the other hand, appears as the Virgin Mary
(BWC, 52), ‘Juliet’ (BWC, 48), a ‘feckless ... wife of the artist’ (BWC, 49), ‘The Jewish
Bride’ (BWC, 38), a hunted wife (BWC, 69), a girl ‘playing with boys’ (BWC, 57) and
‘incarnate coincidence of the beautiful and the true’ (BWC, 59). By these seeming
indirections – ‘cubist’ in Derek Mahon’s sense above – Durcan finds direction out.
‘The Pietà’s Over’ (BWC, 52), one of only two poems in the female voice, strikes the
keynote of the selection. It uses the seminal Christian image of Mary cradling the body of her
dead son Jesus as an image of Durcan and his wife. Written in the voice of Nessa / Mary, the
piece opens with a stark statement:
The Pietà’s over – and now, my dear, droll husband,
As middle-age tolls its bell along the via dolorosa of life,
It is time for you to get down off my knees
And learn to walk on your own two feet.
(BWC, 52)
The state of enlightened rebirth achieved by Kavanagh on the banks of the Grand Canal – ‘I
lost my messianic compulsion’ (Kavanagh 2004, 292) – is urged upon the hapless Durcan by
his wife’s mixture of cruelty and kindness:
A man cannot be a messiah forever,
Messiahing about in his wife’s lap,
Suffering fluently in her arms68
(BWC, 52)
The paschal pattern strongly suggested by the poem’s title is continued in the voice of the
wife who states that ‘it is Easter over all our lives’ (BWC, 52) and encourages her husband to
‘stop looking back’ (BWC, 53) and work towards a level of emotional maturity where they
can ‘become at last strangers to one another, / Ready to join up again on Resurrection Day’
(BWC, 53). The upending of the Pietà image by the voice of an assertive woman is a key
moment in Durcan’s work. It mirrors, as has been noted above in the comments regarding
social change in the 1970s, a more general shift in sexual politics and their literary
68
In interview for this thesis Durcan credited John Moriarty with this phrase ‘suffering fluently’ (BWC, 52).
Moriarty’s own literary works are replete with reinventions and reimaginings of central Christian imagery.
229
presentation. This particularly male hubris – ‘messiahing about’ – is the central target of
scorn in ‘Raymond of the Rooftops’ (BWC, 49), the only other poem of the selection to be
written in a woman’s voice. The poem is set ‘the morning after the night / the roof flew off
the house’ as the female speaker is seen ‘up to my fat, raw knees in rainwater’ attempting to
repair the family home. The butt of the joke is the husband, entirely blind to the practicalities
of domestic life, absorbed in ‘writing for a women’s magazine in London’. Both of these
poems, with their approaches of assertive feminism and man-mockery, demonstrate Ruth
Padel’s claim that for Durcan ‘A woman’s voice is a backhand way of seeing self from the
other side of the veil’ (Padel, 125).
Durcan’s strategy for depiction of the male psyche veers from one extreme to the
other, alternately drawing his male as a fascistic control freak or helpless and narcissistic. Of
the latter mode poems include ‘The Turkish Carpet’ (BWC, 56) in which the husband breaks
fidelity to his wife in order to have an affair with ‘Sweet Despair’, being found by her to be
preoccupied by ‘the infidelity of unhope’. Similarly, his wife’s assertions of independence are
met with the most alarmist of reactions typified by the title ‘The Day My Wife Purchased
Herself a Handgun’ (BWC, 50). Once again feeling his narcissism interrupted, his centrality
displaced, the male figure opines: ‘If there’s one thing a wife must not do, it’s to grow up: / A
man will endure anything – except a grown-up woman’. Likewise the assailed speaker of
‘Cleaning Ashtrays’ (BWC, 48) describes his wife’s persistent smoking as evidence of her
determination to ‘ontologically annihilate me’. Durcan’s reactions to the spectacle of Nessa
as a ‘grown-up woman’ provide occasion for the most excoriating of self-critiques in the
selection: the self-description as a Nazi or predatory presence. In ‘The Jewish Bride’ (BWC,
38) the newly-separated female is described as:
230
Free at last of my swastika eyes
...
Free of the glare of my jackboot silence;
Free of the hysteria of my gestapo [sic] voice;
(BWC, 38)
Similarly the speaker in ‘The Vision of St Hubert’ (BWC, 69) having ‘decided to hunt down
my wife’ resolves to ‘put the fear of God the Führer into her’ and to ‘smear the walls of her
bedroom with the blood of her children’. ‘The Vasectomy Bureau at Lisdoonvarna’ (BWC,
63) reads as though the author’s spirit of social satire on sexual morality had been allowed,
momentarily, to permeate his own domestic space. Rather than lampooning Bishops or
priests, Durcan’s ire on the question of reproductive choices turns inwards towards ‘men such
as myself who prescribed the pill / Until my wife’s heart almost stopped beating’ (BWC, 62).
The most extreme example of this trope of self-description occurs in ‘Death Camp’ (BWC,
55) where the ‘xenophobic psychopath’ of ‘The Marriage Contract’ (BWC, 61) is imagined
as acting on that xenophobia as ‘Camp Commandant of Treblinka’. The speaker’s wife, in
‘Death Camp’ was ‘turned into lampshades six months ago / On my say-so’ as the speaker
locked himself ‘into a tiny white world of pure evil’ (BWC, 55).
What marks each of these poems is a characteristic extremity and extravagance of
metaphor, remarked upon perceptively by Eamonn Grennan. Figures seem rendered in
extreme terms here, even while each is allowed to remain fundamentally recognisable as
representative of husband and wife. Depictions of a domestic landscape filled with Nazis and
Jews, xenophobic psychopaths and incarnate coincidences of the beautiful and the true are, as
Grennan has said, ‘Durcan’s way of getting beyond the limits of representation and touching
those of revelation’ (Grennan, 54). In an attempt here to extend and further substantiate
Grennan’s point, an analogous technique to Durcan’s can be shown described by Francis
Bacon in interview with David Sylvester. Speaking of his desire as an essentially figurative
painter not to produce a directly illustrational art, Bacon expressed his intentions thus:
231
One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive
or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration. ... I think that the
difference [between illustrational and non-illustrational form] is that an illustrational form
tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.
(Francis Bacon in Sylvester, 56)
The analogy with Durcan’s art – Durcan has frequently cited Francis Bacon and his
interviews as a major influence69 – is perhaps loose, but nonetheless useful. Instead of writing
a directly and transparently autobiographical chronicle of a marriage it is possible to surmise
that Durcan employs such calculatedly extreme images as Nazis, Holocaust victims,
psychopaths and innocent dreamers in order to be momentarily non-literal or ‘nonillustrational’ in Bacon’s terms. Indeed such a collection of potent images as those just cited
‘works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back to the fact’ (Bacon in Sylvester, 56). It
is precisely this which is referred to in Grennan’s description of how Durcan pushes beyond
representation towards revelation. Just such a revelation is achieved in the poem ‘‘Windfall’,
8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ through extensive use of aqueous imagery; an analysis of this has been
undertaken by Grennan in The Kilfenora Teaboy (Grennan, 53-54). The point can be
strengthened by a close reading of any of the extended images which are scattered throughout
the work – ‘Wives May Be Coveted but not by Their Husbands’ (BWC, 54) uses wildlife
imagery to reveal aspects of sexual and territorial instinct impossible to express in prosaic
terms. ‘Death Camp’ (BWC, 55) depicts the murderous possessive instinct in some male
psyches, an extension perhaps of the impulse to ‘capture’ critiqued in ‘Ark of the North’
(AN, 1). In the book’s title poem ‘The Berlin Wall Café’ (BWC, 60) domestic space and
psychic space within the confines of marriage are allegorised in the form of the then divided
city of post-war Berlin.
69
See, among many examples, ‘Interviewing Bacon’, The Cork Examiner, 24th February 1981: ‘'[David
Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon] rank with the letters of Van Gogh, the essays of R.B. Kitaj, and the
writings of Francis Stuart.’ The Berlin Wall Café contains a long poem celebrating the couple’s early life
together ‘Around the Corner from Francis Bacon’ (BWC, 40).
232
In this chapter’s previous section, when setting out some interpretive coordinates,
reference was made to an early poem titled ‘The Difficulty That Is Marriage’ (TB, 15) in
which the speaker claims ‘You must have your faults but I do not see them’. This point is
extended in a number of The Berlin Wall Café poems as Durcan meditates on the blind spots
inherent in subjective experience in the context of marriage. Emerging from marriage in ‘The
Jewish Bride’ (BWC, 38) the husband and wife meet ‘at the black canvas of estrangement’
where the male speaker claims ‘I see, as if for the first time, / The person you were, and are,
and always will be’. The emphasis here should be laid on ‘as if for the first time’, as though
before and during the marriage the speaker could only see through his ‘swastika eyes’. This
precise phrase – ‘as if for the first time’ – is used once again in ‘Girls Playing with Boys’
(BWC, 57). Again, in ‘The Vision of St Hubert’ (BWC, 69) the speaker chastises himself:
In the seventeen odd years
Since we’d first met and married
I had never listened to her voice,
Listening only for the voice of my wife.
In ‘Cleaning Ashtrays’ (BWC, 48) the speaker chides himself for not being ‘more ethical, less
romantic’, echoing his wife’s expression of desire to shake off ‘the addiction of romantic
love’ (BWC, 37) in ‘Hymn to a Broken Marriage’. This extended motif of marriage as a state
of habit, blindness or impaired judgement in which it is not possible to perceive things in
correct proportion or perspective is echoed in the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize winning collection
Stag’s Leap by American poet Sharon Olds. In it she writes, just as Durcan has, as a poet
whose spouse has ended their marriage. Of her husband she notes in the volume’s title poem:
Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep.
(Olds 2012, 15)
This description of marital fidelity as ‘a state / Of partial sleep’ is entirely analogous with
much of Durcan’s description of the married state above. It also, of course, echoes Durcan’s
233
2009 title Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007. The awakening from habitual
and deadening modes of perception in relation to marriage is most touchingly written about in
Durcan’s ‘At the Funeral of the Marriage’ (BWC, 65). Another extended conceit, the poem
sees the separated couple attend the funeral of the title, go to a film together, and end up
making love. Its poignant final line, recapitulating the theme, is ‘O my darling, who on earth
are you?’ (BWC, 66).
For all its darkness and self-accusatory harshness, The Berlin Wall Café can
ultimately be read as a celebration both of family life and of ‘the most natural game of all – /
The number one game in the world’ which is ‘Girls Playing with Boys’ (BWC, 57). The title
of this poem catches two senses of ‘playing’: the playing which is playful and life-giving as
well as the playing which amounts to teasing, toying, torturing. That the poem is an important
one for Durcan, in what it says about the tone of male-female relationships, is reinforced by
two later poems through which the motif of ‘Girls Playing with Boys’ echoes. Firstly, ‘The
Beautiful Game’ (AoL, 46) chronicles a visit by Nessa to her former husband. At first the poet
fails to recognise her, then acknowledges that ‘We’d been married for fifteen years / A long
time ago’. Nessa stays a brief twenty minutes after which the speaker states:
I do not switch back on the TV.
I have had more than enough,
For one afternoon, of the beautiful game.
(AoL, 47)
The titling of the poem ‘The Beautiful Game’ and the repetition of this phrase three times in a
brief poem lends a similar mantra-like quality to that expression as had been found in ‘Girls
Playing with Boys’. The third poem joining these two figures by means of sporting imagery is
‘The Wisdom of Ex-Wives’ (AoL, 50). Its three stanzas detail a telephone conversation
between Paul Durcan and his ex-wife during which Durcan admits to loneliness. His wife’s
advice that he might take up playing golf, even alone, to assuage the loneliness, draws this
pointed rebuke from the poet:
234
I hooted down the phone:
“Playing on your own is an oxymoron!”
I wanted to change the subject and to say goodbye
And to stand up and cry.
(AoL, 50)
The second line of this stanza echoes the point Durcan was to make in his later
‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63) and which is a lynchpin of this study’s critical approach to Durcan’s
work on relationships: ‘If there is nobody to share the world with / There is no world’. In a
study published in the year 2000 John Goodby wrote of Durcan’s poem ‘The Vision of St
Hubert’ (BWC, 69) that it articulates a ‘view of possessiveness as innately masculine and
fascistic’ (Goodby, 245). Based solely on the evidence of The Berlin Wall Café it is possible
to give a qualified assent to Goodby’s claims. However, Durcan’s love poems in Cries of an
Irish Caveman – published in 2001 – serve to extend the franchise of possessiveness and
control within relationships to the female sex also, complicating Goodby’s assertion. In these
poems can be observed the poet ‘subside into the four-legged beast / That I am and always
have been’ (CIC, 96) before a woman whose final verdict upon him will be the haughty ‘I
disremember you, ox’ (CIC, 153). A reading of a selection of these Cries of an Irish Caveman
poems will be undertaken in the next section of this study.
7.4 – Between the cow and the cave: the depiction of the love relationship in Cries of an
Irish Caveman
In an interview given during his tenure as Ireland Professor of Poetry (Knowles, 22),
Paul Durcan made the following comments which have much resonance when applied to the
final section of Cries of an Irish Caveman:
I always try to become the other, and this is true of all of us. The writer has to become the
other. It's a truism to say that only by becoming the other, do you become yourself.
Whereas if you dwell entirely [on yourself], if you live in a sort of cocoon, you may
weave incredible arabesques of language, but I find it boring, that kind of thing.
(Durcan in Knowles, 22)
235
Published four years previous to the interview, the selection of poems which is discussed here
sees Durcan use the figure of a cow named ‘Tulip’ (CIC, 123) as an extended metaphor for
the self in a significant romantic relationship. The forty seven poems which comprise this
section represent a uniquely concentrated intensity in Durcan’s work generated by his
extension of the bovine metaphor over so significant a number of poems. Indeed, at such a
large number of poems it may be argued that the volume somewhat exhausts its subject
matter. This section undertakes a close reading of a selection of representative poems as well
as commenting upon two major images in the work. The two images to be commented upon
are the dominant images of the cow and the cave, while reference will be made to ways in
which Durcan alludes to, borrows from, or pays indirect homage to John Moriarty and
Francis Bacon.
Drawing from the quotation which heads this section, and also once again from
Durcan’s comments in interview with Mike Murphy regarding ‘Christmas Day’, it is possible
to interpret Durcan’s extended use of the image of the cow and bovine terminology as an
innovative – not to mention comic – mode of self-description. While ‘to become the other’
(Knowles, 22) is a well worn path to freeing creative potentialities, to imagine that ‘other’ as
a cow is to open a unique emotional and psychic landscape. The use of the cow image
provides a simultaneously visceral and comic way ‘to get out of the trap of one’s self into the
whole wide world and try and make a picture a portrait’ (Murphy, 1996). Although in the
interview given for this thesis Durcan claims not to have been conscious of frequently writing
in the voices of animals (Appendix One), this is in fact a recurring trope in his work.
Examples include works in the voice of ‘a basset hound’ (AoL, 17), ‘A Robin in Autumn
Chatting at Dawn’ (AoL, 7), a talking tortoise (LM, 68) and ‘A Snail in My Prime’ (SMP,
265).
236
‘I am a middle of the road cow’ states the speaker of ‘Bovinity’ (CIC, 91). From the
perspective of gender criticism, particularly of Durcan’s critique of normative ideas of
gender, it is interesting to briefly catalogue the precise terms the poet uses to situate his
persona in the bovine family. While the main appellation is that of a ‘cow’ (CIC, 91), Durcan
also employs some bovine variations, often leaping across the divide between the sexes. He is
variously ‘a stray cow amok in her flowerbeds’ (CIC, 93), a ‘bull bowing to a masked groin’
(CIC, 95), ‘a bullock / Who worships his mistress with dung’ (CIC, 102), ‘your stud bull’
(CIC, 156) and ‘an ox’ (CIC, 129). Although it is not necessary to be overly concerned in the
context of this study with the particular details of bovine gender and fertility, it is interesting
to note that the word ‘cow’ most frequently chosen by Durcan technically applies to the
female of the species. Even if it is used intermittently, the word ‘bull’ (CIC, 156) would seem
too loaded with connotations of male hubris to be employed as a significant alter-ego for the
poet. The extension of the bovine image throughout the collection allows for a probing of the
male-female relationships in a way which is uniquely illuminative. Kitt Fryatt in her 2003
paper70 attempts to draw connections between Durcan’s book and two major allegorical uses
of cattle in the Irish literary tradition – the Táin Bó Cúailnge and the eighteenth century
Jacobite poems which render Ireland as the Lost Heifer – in a manner which even she
ultimately admits is not entirely successful. Finding it difficult, in conducting the comparison
‘to find substantial parallels’ (Fryatt, 171) between Durcan’s work and either earlier piece,
Fryatt nevertheless usefully surmises the following:
These traditions are concerned above all with the power of ownership and the
consequences when that power is disrupted. The cow or bull represents that which is
owned, but also the right to ownership itself. ... Durcan’s cow poems also deal with
ownership: the powers of family and society to possess the individual, the power of lovers
to possess one another, and crucially, the right of self-possession [sic].
(Fryatt, 167)
70
Fryatt, K (2003), ‘‘Bovinity’: Paul Durcan’s Cattle Mythology’ in New Voices in Irish Criticism 4 eds.
Dillane and Kelly, Dublin: Four Courts Press
237
Certainly Durcan’s poems serve to map the darker and more visceral areas of love
relationships. As noted earlier the power-balance seems to have shifted in the opposite
direction to that described in The Berlin Wall Café, with the male now appearing as an animal
‘led by the ear’ (CIC, 93) by a female partner described as ‘Lady with Portable Electric
Fence’ (CIC, 102). This contrast of male and female, rendered in agricultural terminology,
operates throughout the collection with the male appearing as ‘tagged for blame’ (CIC, 96), a
‘hermit of the meadow’ (CIC, 137) and possessed of ‘cursed-of-God poetry-scribbling
hooves’ (CIC, 153). In contrast the female is ‘in a wigwam / Of admirers, friends, colleagues,
family’ (CIC, 96), ‘Woman of the Black Cow’ (CIC, 137) and displaying ‘balletic neglect’
(CIC, 153) of her partner. This constellation of themes around depictions of possession,
control and desire – which speak directly, if idiosyncratically, to this study’s central
preoccupation with human freedom – is better demonstrated by a close reading of two pieces:
‘The Cattle Dealer’s Daughter’ (CIC, 111) and ‘Desert Island Bull’ (CIC, 139).
Written in the voice of a cow ‘The Cattle Dealer’s Daughter’ (CIC, 111) strikes a tone
of abject yearning and supplication. Addressing the ‘Daughter’ of the poem’s title in a way
calculated to exalt and emphasis lineage – ‘Daughter of the Island Fields’ – the poem pleads
for attention on behalf of those who ‘muck about in our dying’. The poem focuses on the
carnal aspects of cattle, acknowledging that ‘you will eat us and that / Will be that’ but also
stating that:
what we’d like
Is for you to know also our outsides
As well as our insides.
(CIC, 111)
This accusation against the female of ignoring certain aspects of her partner inverts the
typical outsides / insides dichotomy where what constitutes the ‘insides’ is typically the
emotional landscape, personality, soul. Essentially the accusation is comparable to that often
made in love poetry – of one spouse being interested merely in a superficial part of the love
238
object and not his or her entirety – but the employment of the cow metaphor helps to
defamiliarise and thus refresh the sentiment. Again, as in The Berlin Wall Café, the image of
eyes and their role in connoting attitude and approach is reiterated. Instead of the male
resenting his ‘swastika eyes’ (BWC, 38) here the speaker states his lament for missed
connection:
What I regret is your not looking
Into the milky bogholes of my eyes.
Will you look ever into my eyes?
The cow, in concluding its aspirations, reprises the title of Durcan’s 1994 book as it longs for
the day when it ‘can low / “She said nothing: but she gave me her hand”’. ‘Desert Island
Bull’ (CIC, 139) sees the male speaker appraised again merely as meat by his lover. Not a
meeting of two equals in love, it is rather a dark celebration by the poet of the female with
‘Her Ray-Bans high up in her hair, / She on her mobile’ that ‘she selected me to be / Her
desert island bull’. Speaking as an animal, almost an object, the ‘bull’ relates how ‘the
helicopter pilot winched me down / Onto the hotplate shore’. Although in her company ‘no
bull was more contented’ the speaker is soon abandoned as ‘without a “Ciao” she sauntered /
Away from me’. The poem’s second half, in which the speaker resignedly accepts himself as
‘a machine with a finite number of programmes’ (CIC. 140) also sees an emotional
counterblast as a magnificent curse is hurled in the direction of the beloved and her ‘new
beau’:
May his skipping ropes self-destruct in your sarongs.
May you choke on his tail.
May both your carcasses be washed up in a fifth-hand
bicycle knacker’s yard in a back street off the Castlebar
road in Ballyhaunis.
(CIC, 140)
Self-depiction as an animal, particularly a cow before his ‘cowlady’ (CIC, 91) is
surely to some extent for Durcan ‘employed to express a feeling of estrangement, a
239
melancholic sense of dehumanising abjection’ (Martiny 2010, 414). However, there is an
element within Cries of an Irish Caveman – and in Durcan’s work more generally – which
seeks to register the animal element of human life itself. This theme – the lack of clear
distinction between human and animal – is a major one in the work of John Moriarty, a
thinker much celebrated by Durcan. Repeatedly throughout Moriarty’s autobiography Nostos
– referred to on its jacket by Paul Durcan as ‘one of the most remarkable autobiographies I
have ever read’ (Moriarty, 2001)71 – the following quotation from Nietzche72 appears:
I have discovered for myself that the old human and animal life, indeed the entire
prehistory and past of all sentient being, works on, loves on, hates on, thinks on in me.
(Moriarty, 583)
The sense of ‘old human and animal life’ living on in human beings is often expressed in
Durcan’s work here in the guise of sexual and territorial impulses. The first person speaker is
seen engaged in ‘the agribusiness of the bed’ (CIC, 123) and as an outsider ‘bleeding my
foreignness’ under ‘the family tree’ (CIC, 130). A further inflection of the man as animal
trope can be registered if the Durcan selection is read side-by-side with some comments of
Francis Bacon on the subject. With characteristically provocative bluntness he states:
Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher shop I
always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal. ... When you go into
a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can
think of the whole horror of life – of one thing living off another.
(Bacon in Sylvester, 46-48)
This statement by the painter is mirrored twice in Durcan’s collection. Firstly, and most
obviously, in the dark sonnet ‘Abattoir’ (CIC, 152) as the love-pledge is figured as a
desperate gesture against the prospect of annihilation: ‘In the vast, black emptiness of the
abattoir / I clap my lips with your lips, abstemiously’. The darkness of what is referred to by
Bacon as ‘one thing living off another’ is registered in the epigraph chosen by Durcan for the
71
Durcan, who spoke at length during the interview for this thesis about Moriarty, and has published in 2012
several elegies to the Kerry thinker (P, 27 and 33), also launched John Moriarty’s Nostos on 21st March 2001.
72
This approving reference to Nietzche should be balanced against Durcan’s rather caustic observation in
‘Flower Girl, Dublin’ (CW, 127): ‘I read all of Nietzche when I was seventeen. / Then it was time to grow up’.
240
book. It comes from the film Arctic Blue: ‘Ecology. Folks use that term for everything but
what it means: who’s eating who’ (CIC, epigraph). Finally with regard to the cow image,
that it is often darkly comic in its appearance should also be noted. In a statement which
speaks to the previous point and also to this one, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has noted of
Francis Bacon’s painting:
‘[W]hat Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or indecidability [sic]
between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming
spirit at the same time ... It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact:
the common fact of man and animal.’
(Deleuze, 16)
Likewise, it is possible to say that Durcan’s animal alter-egos, particularly the cow in Cries of
an Irish Caveman, are located in this ‘zone of indiscernibility or indecidability [sic] between
man and animal’. While the effects of Bacon’s blending of human and animal may be
decidedly dark and pessimistic, Durcan’s often take on a comic hue. The exhortation to the
reader to conjure the image of a speaking, loving, weeping cow – Durcan’s combination of
human and animal attributes – is what creates the oddly elevating comedy within these poems
that in the end makes them bearable. That each of these cow poems presents a clear
contradiction – poems from the mouth of a cow – is the principle demonstration of this comic
blending or juxtaposition of human and animal. But the contrast is most pointedly visible in
lines evocative of almost cartoonish images such as ‘I arise to my hooves in a crux, and bawl
out my bifocals’ (CIC, 126), reference to Durcan’s ‘poetry-scribbling hooves’ (CIC, 153) and
many others throughout.
‘I’m a famous caveman too’ claims one of Durcan’s earliest and more celebrated alter
egos ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ (TB, 50). This poem was noted in interview with the current
author as one which means a lot to the poet; he remarked particularly that ‘[t]hat poem is
many things, but one of the things it is, is a hymn to my wife, Nessa’ (Appendix One). This
1976 self-description as a ‘caveman’ is reiterated twenty five years later in the title poem of
the collection under consideration here, Cries of an Irish Caveman. The selection itself,
241
comprising forty seven poems, begins and ends with the image of the poet in his ‘cave’
pining for the lost beloved. At once self-deprecatory and raw, imagining the self as a
caveman again conjures cartoonish images such as those made familiar by the 1960s series
‘The Flintstones’. Offering some reflections on the image of the cave during interview for
this thesis, Durcan noted that caves were very much in his mind during his travels in
Australia recounted elsewhere in the book. Also, of course, Durcan’s academic qualification
is in the field of archaeology and he was eager to note the significance of caves in Irish
prehistory (Appendix One). But the cave, particularly in the pointed way in which Durcan
uses it, has other resonances worth noting. As noted above, his first self-depiction as a
‘caveman’ occurs in 1976 – pointedly it is a depiction of himself as a cave artist. ‘I paint
pictures by the hundred / But you can’t sell walls’ (TB, 51) opines the Teaboy. This motif is
reinforced in Cries of an Irish Caveman with images which picture the speaker ‘every
afternoon at the cavedoor alone / drawing you, colouring you in’ (CIC, 87); exclaiming that
‘drawing on my walls keeps me sane’ (CIC, 89) and boasting that ‘in the starry dark / I draw
my words on my cave walls’ (CIC, 90). The image of the a figure making art on cave walls,
coupled with Durcan’s repeated public assertions about the primal role of art in human
society and flourishing,73 is evocative of the creators of prehistoric art in such caves as are
found in Lascaux and Altamira. It is practically impossible that, as a student of archaeology
and a poet acutely aware of the visual arts more generally, Durcan would not be aware of this
allusion.
Another intriguing fact regarding the collection is that initially twenty three images of a
Minotaur – some picturing the half-man half-bull figure with a woman – were produced as
potential covers for Cries of an Irish Caveman (NLI Catalogue, 28-29). Durcan’s image of
himself as both a ‘cow’ (CIC, 97) and a ‘man’ (CIC, 133) hidden away in what sometimes
73
‘Art is not something exterior to our lives, something that if we’re reasonably affluent we can indulge in in
our spare time – it’s to do with what we are. Blood and bones and life and death. It is sustenance’. Paul Durcan
in interview with Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times, Feb 10th 1990
242
seems a subterranean residence – where it is not until ‘around 12:30 bits of light / Squirrel
about on my wall’ (CIC, 159) – can be read as allusive to the image of the Greek myth of the
Minotaur in the labyrinth. The Minotaur, symbolic of the repressed and shameful impulses in
humanity, is a fitting symbol for a poet whose poetic speciality is in Brendan Kennelly’s
words ‘expositions of the seemingly unthinkable’ (SMP, cover). More substantially relevant
to this particular collection, Durcan’s parading of the Minotaur of the ugliness, power-play
and exploitation inherent in some romantic relationships, arguably serves to rehabilitate and
enfranchise such an emotional landscape as fit material for poetry. A point connected to this
was made by Kit Fryatt in her paper on Cries of an Irish Caveman. Extending her speculation
on the theme of possession and dispossession in the collection she notes that:
Durcan deals genuinely with dispossession, that is, with the dispossession of certain
modes of expression – the emotive, the tasteless, the sentimental – and his project is one
of their recuperation to civilised discourse.
(Fryatt, 176)
That the same point is reinforced through collecting allusions to and inferences from two
disparate literary sources – the Táin Bó Cúailnge and the Greek myth of the Minotaur –
reinforces the claim that the theme of ‘recuperation to civilised discourse’ of certain
suppressed modes of expression and emotional states is the key achievement of the
collection74.
7.5 - Conclusion
The final poem of Cries of an Irish Caveman, ‘A Day in the Cave’ (CIC, 159),
pictures the speaker alone and longing for his beloved, musing rather unhopefully ‘Maybe
74
An interesting gloss on this theme of ‘recuperation to civilised discourse’ (Fryatt, 176) of various suppressed
impulses and modes of expression can be found if Durcan’s work is read alongside John Moriarty’s 2006 work
Night Journey to Buddh Gaia. It is an extended meditation on one of Moriarty’s preoccupying themes, of which
Durcan is surely aware. Seeking to address some of the suppressed impulses in Western humanity, Moriarty
laments that ‘Dragon-slaying, repression, lobotomy and extramural exclusion have been our Western way. It
hasn’t worked’ (Moriarty 2006, 7). What draws the two works closely together is that Moriarty’s book begins
with reproductions of Picasso’s Minotaur etchings (Moriarty 2006, 7-13) and a commentary upon them. The
etchings bear a distinct similarity to those considered for the cover of Cries of an Irish Caveman and donated to
the National Library of Ireland.
243
Cita will call’. This self-portrait of a man by turns comic and pathetic ‘combing my hair,
straightening my collar – / Booming about the cave’ is a characteristic note of Durcan’s later
work. Quoted above, Patrick Kavanagh said in his own ‘Self-Portrait’ (1962) that ‘the self is
only interesting as an illustration’ (Kavanagh 2003, 306). Thus far what Durcan has
illustrated through his own often thinly fictionalised dramas of the self is the veracity of his
claim in ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63). The final chapter of this study, in order to fully explore
Durcan’s ‘fiction[s]’ (GHR, 55) of the self, takes as its focus a selection of his later poems. In
developing what this study will refer to as a theatre of the self – this term will be fully
expanded upon in the introduction to chapter eight – the central investigative endeavour will
explore the ways in which, as Eamon Grennan has written:
Durcan has found a strange, satisfying way to perform the full range of his feelings – to
go public with them, to dramatise them.
(Grennan, 48-49)
If Durcan’s earlier moral vision sought to protest against forces external to the self attempting
to enact a reductive fixing of identity or diminishing of individual freedom, his later work
enacts a similar resistance to fixed positions. What can be observed in Durcan’s later work is
arguably the expression of a poet who, in Kavanagh’s terms, aspires to ‘a sense of repose,
beyond the obsession with identity’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330). Operating, as was stated in the
introductory chapter of this thesis, with an existentialist and non-essentialist conception of
identity, Durcan’s highest virtue with regard to the inner life is epitomised by the rejoinder
‘flow with the stream’ (AoL, 54). It is to such treatments of the individual self ‘suffering
fluently’ (BWC, 52) that the final focus of this study now turns.
244
Chapter Eight:
Interior design – Durcan’s self-fashioning and theatre of the self
The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and
situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different;
whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.
– David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature75
‘The whole business of Kavanagh’s life was not to have an identity. ... He called for a
sense of repose, beyond the obsession with identity, of being open to the world of the
now. ‘To look on is enough in the business of love’, he once put it. How difficult it is, this
way of dispossession, of getting out of oneself and listening.’
– Paul Durcan, 1988 (Durcan in Kearney, 330)
8.1 – Introduction to Durcan’s theatre of the self: framing the concept
The moral protest of much of Durcan’s work is, it is claimed, predicated on a nonessentialist conception of identity. Durcan has persistently reserved for the individual subject
the prerogative of self-definition and self-fashioning. This final chapter will explore Durcan’s
own depictions and dramatisations of inner emotional and psychological states. It was
suggested, in this study’s introduction, that the belief regarding human nature which
underpins Durcan’s resistance to oppressive and prescriptive forces can be said to be
analogous to Sartre’s existentialist conception of the person: ‘that man first of all exists,
encounters himself, surges up in the world. – and defines himself afterwards’ (Sartre 2007,
29-30). Sartre continues with his belief that man is literally essentially indefinable: ‘If man,
as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will
not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself’ (Sartre 2007, 2930). So too, this study contends, each person is also constantly undergoing this process of
becoming ‘what he makes of himself’ (Sartre 2007, 29-30). This can be read as simply a
philosophical iteration of Durcan’s maxim that ‘in reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71).
75
From Book I, Part 4, Section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 165)
245
The structuring image for this chapter’s interpretation of Durcan’s writing of the self is
a theatre. It is invoked in the very specific sense outlined above by David Hume: that the self
is a location in which there is ‘properly no simplicity ... at one time, nor identity in different;
whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity’ (Hume,
165). A comparable understanding of identity has been articulated by Stuart Hall with regard
to the broader field of cultural politics – identity, claims Hall, is ‘never unified and, in late
modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed’
(Hall, 4). This chapter contends that Durcan’s work registers in a capacious way the lack of
‘simplicity’ (Hume, 165) and the ‘increasingly fragmented and fractured’ (Hall, 4) character
of identity. However, it will not be sufficient to claim that Durcan merely accommodates such
contradictions inherent in identity and self-understanding – extending Hume’s image of the
theatre, it is possible to say that Durcan actually dramatises these contradictory aspects of the
self. Eamon Grennan has noted in relation to Durcan’s persona poems how he engages in ‘a
deliberate dramatising [sic] ... of a world of other voices’ (Grennan, 64). More pertinent to
this study, Grennan also comments with regard to The Berlin Wall Café upon how:
Durcan has found a strange, satisfying way to perform the full range of his feelings – to
go public with them, to dramatise them.
(Grennan, 48-49)
In order to trace the ‘strange, satisfying way[s]’ (Grennan, 48-49) in which Durcan conducts
this theatre of the self, this chapter is subdivided into four sections. Following this
introduction attention will be paid to a close reading of Durcan’s 1996 poem Christmas Day.
A third section looks at length at Durcan’s sometimes antagonistic relationship to the works
of Samuel Beckett. The fourth and final section of this chapter investigates some poems
representative of Durcan’s later work to date, with a focus on loneliness, isolation and his
tragicomic self-depictions, what Seamus Heaney has referred to as Durcan’s ‘copious bittersweet clowning’ (P, reverse dustjacket).
246
The remainder of this introduction addresses, briefly, the tone of Durcan’s unique
poetic voice: by this is implied voice in the more traditional poetic sense but also the
undeniably dramatic manner in which Durcan delivers his poems. In an interview which
appeared under the title ‘Poetry and Emotion’76, Patricia Deevy wrote frankly of her
experience of the poet: ‘Durcan is recklessly raw about what it is to be a man and to be
wanting. He shakes off the lineaments of masculine convention and exposes need’ (Deevy,
1999). This reckless rawness, typically characterised by a pointed display of vulnerability in
the voice of a first person speaker, has become central to Durcan’s art since The Berlin Wall
Café. What Brendan Kennelly refers to as ‘his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of
the seemingly unthinkable’ (SMP, back cover) – coupled with the poet’s declamatory,
oratorical reading style – serve to create a voice of unusual and intermittently unnerving
directness. Maurice Elliott, writing in 2004, commented regarding the effect of this particular
style that ‘the entertainment always takes on the sense of engagement, as though these were
long and considered conversations into which the reader is lured’ (Elliott, 152).
Though Durcan has doggedly resisted descriptions of his readings as performances, it is
difficult to deny Kathleen McCracken’s direct assertion that ‘Durcan’s poetry is essentially
dramatic’ (McCracken 1987, 108). Indeed, even while the dangers of solipsism and selfabsorption are preoccupying themes in his later work, the impression created by Durcan’s
reading style is that the reader is being engaged, addressed directly and entertained. It has
been noted by Colm Tóibín that the poet himself has taken acting classes (Tóibín, 11) and
mentions of theatre and actors are common in Durcan’s work. Frequent direct and indirect
tribute is paid to particular playwrights, from Tom Murphy in ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets
Jesus on the Road near Moone’ (BWC, 3) to Brian Friel in ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come’ [sic]
(LM, 84) and elsewhere as well as to actors including Barry McGovern (GHR, 55), Tom
76
‘Poetry and Emotion’, interview with Patricia Deevy in The Sunday Independent, February 21st 1999
247
Hickey (BWC, 5), Donal McCann (CIC, 26) and David Kelly (P, 64). Capable of being
acerbic about theatre culture too, Durcan has written the satirical ‘What Shall I Wear,
Darling, to The Great Hunger?’ (GHR, 23). It is important to note the centrality of these
influences in any assessment of the tone of Durcan’s later work for it is this ‘essentially
dramatic’ urgency that underpins the production of his poetry’s unique voice and helps to
achieve what Lucy Collins has referred to as ‘the studied centrality of the speaker’s voice, on
paper and in performance’ (Collins, 219). Coupled with this appreciation of and influence
from acting and theatre are the poet’s repeated admiring mentions of homilies given by
various priests – clearly another mode of public address which interests him greatly. Amongst
the strongest statements of his admiration are ‘10:30 am Mass, 16 June 1985’ (BWC, 32),
‘The 12 O’Clock Mass, Roundstone, County Galway, 28 July 2002’ (AoL, 61) and ‘The
Funeral of Tony O’Malley’ (PDD, 160). With particular reference to Father Patrick O’Brien,
who delivered the homily referred to in his ‘The Funeral of Tony O’Malley’ (PDD, 160), the
art of sermon-writing and delivery was specifically remarked upon in the course of the
interview given by Durcan for this thesis (Appendix One). At the head of this introduction
Durcan is quoted as registering the importance of ‘getting out of oneself and listening’ (Durcan
in Kearney, 330). In poetry and interview this is a recurrent theme of Durcan’s later
discourse: an attempt to escape the self-pity and solipsism which is often occasioned by
living alone. It is to one such artistic attempt to get ‘out of oneself’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330)
– ‘Christmas Day’ – that this study’s attention now turns.
8.2 – Permission to be Frank: ‘Christmas Day’ as dialogue and self-portrait
Published with a companion piece in honour of Seamus Heaney, ‘A Goose in the
Frost’ (CD, 79), ‘Christmas Day’ is Durcan’s longest published single poem by some length.
It celebrates a Christmas Day spent in the company of actor and friend Donal McCann, who
appears under the name Frank in the poem. Though the poem ostensibly depicts a Christmas
248
Day spent by two characters, ‘Paul’ (CD, 5)77, the speaker, is clearly central. The poem
operates as a chronicle of his state of mind before, during and after the day of companionable
togetherness with his friend Frank. That the poem is as much – if not more – a self-portrait as
a portrait of two people was acknowledged by Durcan in interview with Mike Murphy shortly
after publication of the book:
As I was writing this piece over two years or so, I had a particular self-portrait by Lucien
Freud in my mind right from the start, and then other self-portraits came and went, such
as Stanley Spencer’s self-portrait in the Tate in London. And I was trying consciously in
language to do what painters do in painting, to maintain the unflinching gaze…to ‘tilt’ it
so as to write about things like loneliness without self-pity, to write about other than
one’s self, to get out of the trap of one’s self into the whole wide world and try and make
a picture a portrait.78
Here may again be observed Durcan artfully using another persona to ‘write about other than
oneself, to get out of the trap of one’s self’. The question of the otherness of the second
person in the poem – ‘Frank’ (CD, 5) – is complicated and enriched by a disclosure made by
Durcan in personal correspondence with the current author. Questioned as to why this
particular name was chosen as an alias for Donal McCann, Durcan revealed that his own
middle name is Francis. This fact, coupled with Durcan’s comments above regarding how
‘Christmas Day’ was written as a somewhat painterly self-portrait, opens up a wealth of
interpretive possibilities. The poem may then be read in at least two significantly differing
ways. Primarily and most obviously a direct reading of the poem as a documentary of a day
spent by two friends is possible and rewarding. The second possible reading, given the
coincidence of Frank and Paul Francis Durcan, is of the poem as a light-hearted dialogue of
self and soul.79 The crucial factor central to both interpretive approaches is that it is only by
77
In order to avoid the repetitious use of inverted commas here, where the poem’s two main personae are being
made reference to they will be named simply Paul and Frank. Where the poem’s author is being referred to the
name Durcan will be used as is consistently the case throughout this study.
78
From an interview Durcan gave to Mike Murphy on The Arts Show, RTE Radio 1, 13 December 1997,
7:02pm. First broadcast RTE Radio 1, December 1996. I am indebted to Dr Kathleen McCracken for bringing it
to my attention in the context of her paper titled 'Paul Painting Paul: Self-Portraiture and Subjectivity in
Durcan’s Poetry’ (McCracken 2013).
79
Information regarding Durcan’s middle name plus the fact that Frank is in fact Donal McCann supplied in
personal correspondence between the current author and Paul Durcan, 30th November 2012.
249
introduction of a second point or person, somehow external to the self, that the negotiation of
the subject can be conducted and sufficiently dramatised. Even in the art of self-portraiture it
seems ‘the figure of all energy is two’ (CIC, 75). This sense of needing an external locus
through which the self might be echoed and viewed with a modicum of objectivity or
perspicacity is a frequently occurring trope in Durcan’s work, most memorably at the
beginning of The Berlin Wall Café (1985). The Haulier’s wife muses:
I appear to myself a naked stranger,
A woman whom I do not know
Except fictionally in the looking glass,
Quite dramatically beautiful.
(BWC, 3)
It is arguably this element of drama, deliberately constituted by the introduction of an
external point related to the self, which is crucial for Durcan. Whether the second presence in
‘Christmas Day’ is ultimately the bawdy, cigarette-smoking McCann or an element of
Durcan’s writerly apparatus, the choice of ‘Frank’ as a moniker is apt. In his presence – his
conversation is a mix of irreverent chit-chat and comedic-serious meditations – permission
seems granted for the central speaker to slip out of self-conscious loneliness and into the
frankness of dialogue often called forth by good company. Indeed the suggestive resonance
of the name Frank – as opposed to the more formal Francis – may have seemed irresistible to
a writer of Durcan’s playful tendencies.
‘Christmas Day’ which may be read as ‘a miniature Divine Comedy, at least as an
egurgitation [sic] of all kinds of oppressive concerns, a purgation’ (Elliott, 153) begins and
ends with the same italicised quatrain, an unattributed quote from the biblical prophet Isaiah
(Isaiah 62:4):
No longer are you to be named ‘Forsaken’
Nor your land ‘Abandoned’,
But you shall be called ‘My Delight’
And your land ‘The Wedded’.
[sic] (CD, 5, 78)
250
The relationship of this quote, coupled with the book’s epigraph from Sophocles – ‘For
kindness it is, that ever calls forth kindness’ (CD, epigraph) – to the poem itself is, as pointed
out by Bernard O’Donoghue, not an ironic one (O’Donoghue, 58). The sentiments of both
quotes provide a consoling backdrop for the emotional rawness permeating much of the
work. The fact that the poem itself is divided into fourteen sections has ominous overtones
also, mirroring the fourteen Stations of the Cross. This resonance is reinforced by Frank’s
playful musing on the Christian Passion in the poem’s ninth section which includes the
punning observation that ‘Christmas Day is not as good as Good Friday’ (CD, 59). At the
poem’s outset Paul laments having spent many Christmases ‘alone / In my cave’ (CD, 6)
playing a favourite audio cassette ‘to drown out neighbour-noise’ (CD, 6). Having been
invited to spend Christmas with Frank however, Paul elects to skip Christmas Mass, even
though ‘Mass is the only chance / One has to be in company’ and he regrets turning down its
opportunity ‘to be choral. / Dumb is nobody’ (CD, 10). After invoking and praising friends –
Derek Mahon, Francis Stuart – Paul, whose ‘hair is grey from woman-hunger’ (CD, 10) sets
out to take up his invitation for ‘the Feast of St Loneliness’ (CD, 11). While a paraphrase of
the entire poem would be unnecessary, not to mention tedious here, some key elements
should be noted.
Permeating the central sections of the poem is a tone of mutual care between the two
male characters. Paul shows concern over Frank’s drinking – ‘I am staring at the empty
drinks cupboard’ (CD, 19) – just as Frank gently goads his visitor ‘you could do with a little /
Murder in your soul, Paul’ (CD, 44). In this congenial spirit the only social faux pas of the
afternoon is Paul’s failure to bring a Christmas card to accompany his gift to Frank, the
realisation of which leads to a typically heavy-handed insight regarding his ‘selfishness: / The
savagery of selfishness’ (CD, 52). Apart from Christmas television and radio, the major
shared preoccupation driving the conversation between the characters is ‘womanloneliness’
251
(CD, 58). Repeatedly the men speak of romantic encounters with women, both failed and
successful. The poem’s eighth section sees Frank describe making love to a curtain
saleswoman – he states that ‘Except for making love standing up / Shopping for curtains is
the crème de la crème’ (CD, 53) before divulging, comically, how:
I made love to her standing up
As if I’d been doing it all my life.
She said that she hadn’t felt like this
Since her first visit to the Giant’s Causeway
After the start of the Peace Process.
(CD, 54)
Frank’s longing for a woman ‘in whose drift / to get bogged down’ (CD, 24) is matched by
Paul’s, for whom:
My idea of Heaven as a man
Is to be lying on my back
Smiling up into the eyes of a woman
(CD, 55)
The most poignant meditation on desire regarding women is achieved by an inter-textual
sleight of hand on Durcan’s part. Preparing the dinner in the adjacent kitchen, Frank entreats
Paul to ‘Chant me a new anthem’ (CD, 28), a challenge to which Paul rises with the
delightfully appropriate piece ‘An Item Once Again’. At once a scathing self-parody and a
classic piece of Durcanesque playfulness, ‘An Item Once Again’ has a syntax and rhythm
which invites comparison with his early piece ‘Nessa’ (OW, 3). ‘Nessa’ began thus:
I met her on the First of August
In the Shangri-La Hotel,
She took my by the index finger
And dropped me in her well.
‘An Item Once Again’, with its parody of the Thomas Davis ballad and its undisguised plea
for relationship, echoes his earlier work:
I met her on my birthday
In the Berkeley Court Hotel;
She sat me down and slapped my face
And said, Well, now, are you well?
(CD, 28)
252
Read alongside the quote from Isaiah which opens and closes the piece this comic parody
adds depth and texture to the ‘womanloneliness’ (CD, 58) which is threaded through the
poem. Yet another layer of nuance is added to the particularly male flavour of the loneliness
by Durcan’s allusion to Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ (1914). Donal McCann – the Frank of
‘Christmas Day’ – most famously played the male protagonist in John Houston’s celebrated
film of Joyce’s short story80. Never stated directly in the poem, an allusion is clearly
established with the repeated mention of ‘galoshes’ (CD, 16) as Paul is welcomed to Frank’s
flat. The word appears, in one form or other, seventeen times in two pages. This may be read
as a mirroring of the arrival of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy at the home of Gabriel’s aunts in
Joyce’s short story. ‘And what are galoshes, Gabriel?’ (Joyce 1993, 162) asks one of the
spinster aunts, leading to a conversation on the subject. If Joyce’s Gabriel seems sadly
blinded by his own hubris to the significance of a woman’s interior life, no such accusation
can be levelled at the protagonists of ‘Christmas Day’. When, later in the poem the Biblical
theme of Gabriel and the Annunciation is revisited, Frank exclaims with another pun:
‘Women are God’s chosen creatures, I agree. / The Annunciation is a fantastic conception’
(CD, 59). To this credo Paul adds his own Joycean-Marian act of faith in women:
For Christ’s sake, Frank, the Annunciation
Is the ultimate yes-saying to life.
Mary leaves Molly Bloom sitting up in bed.
(CD, 58)
Though both men may only have each other for Christmas Day this is, it seems, at
least a partial redemption from absolute loneliness. Even as the pain of being without a
partner is the backdrop to the poem its tone is light, comic, often bordering on hilarity. Frank
can just as easily say ‘Did you ever smell another man’s seed?’ as ‘Would you care for a mug
of celery soup?’ (CD, 30) while the persona Paul gleefully boasts the perhaps less reputable
80
This fact is noted again in Durcan’s later poem about McCann’s death included in Cries of an Irish Caveman.
The poem, simply titled ‘Donal’ (CIC, 28), ends with the couplet ‘A smile is general / All over Ireland’ echoing
the final melancholy scene of Joyce’s short story which includes the observation that ‘snow was general all over
Ireland’ (Joyce 1993, 198).
253
aspects of his family tree boasting his identity as ‘a Protestant Tinker’ (CD, 35). ‘Christmas
Day’ speaks richly to the theme of this chapter and to many of Durcan’s central concerns.
The effect of leaving Frank, with whom he has all day been ‘choral’ (CD, 10), is brought
sharply into focus on Paul’s return home from dinner to his ‘sheepfarm in Ringsend’ (CD,
65). Once more alone, out of company, he begins to doubt his very presence:
Glancing in mirrors.
Checking in mirrors.
Am I here?
Am I there?
(CD, 65)
And further, in a recapitulation of both the marriage motif announced in the poem’s opening
quotation from Isaiah and the mirror image discussed above in relation to the Haulier’s wife,
Paul comments:
What am I
But a young girl myself
Before my looking glass
Pining for marriage?
(CD, 69)
Whatever of his self-description as a young girl, Paul here bears striking resemblance to the
Haulier’s wife who also stood before the looking glass pining for a revivified marriage.
Indeed it is possible to read the ‘looking glass’ itself as a poor substitute for what might be
found in marriage – a fulfilment of the human desire for companionship, external validation
and affirmation. Reviewing ‘Christmas Day’ in 1997 Bernard O’Donoghue made comparison
with another major dramatist with whom Durcan has had an ambiguous though not
insignificant relationship: Samuel Beckett. Noting the ‘desperate spiels throughout’ the poem,
O’Donoghue commented that ‘as in Beckett, the characters keep talking out of fear of
silence’ (O’Donoghue, 58). This chapter continues with a reading of the Beckett-Durcan
relationship and assessment of its significance in Durcan’s work with a particular focus on
the 1987 poem ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ (GHR, 55).
254
8.3 – Giving Beckett the gate: Durcan’s ambivalent attitude towards Samuel Beckett
The extent of Paul Durcan’s engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett is a matter
of some critical debate. Though Erik Martiny81 has speculated at length about the relationship
between the two men – his reading is informed by Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence –
Fintan O’Toole has claimed that ‘there is, in Durcan’s work, no meeting with Beckett, no
literary influence at work’ (O’Toole, 28). Although Durcan – who appears to freely
acknowledge and celebrate his artistic influences and precursors – has never directly credited
Beckett as a major influence on his own work, mentions of the older writer are significant
and pointed. His 1978 poem ‘Gogo’s Late Wife Tranquilla’ (SC, 21) shows at least an early
willingness to acknowledge Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which ‘Gogo’ (Beckett 1990, 13)
is a pet name for Estragon, one of the two main characters. The 1985 piece ‘Archbishop of
Dublin to film Romeo and Juliet’ (BWC, 24) takes a satirical sideswipe at reverential
attitudes to Beckett, referring to him as ‘Saint Samuel Beckett’. Alluding again to Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot in a dark poem titled ‘Thinking about Suicide’ (P, 21) in his latest
collection, Durcan challenges Beckett directly: ‘How is it that you do not see it, Samuel, /
That I do not want to go on for the sake of going on –’. Writing of his time spent in Paris in
1981 he boasts ‘How lucky I was never to meet Samuel Beckett’ in a poem which seems too
direct and earnest a protest to be taken entirely seriously. Even if a literal meeting of the two
men never took place, literary influence is not all that easily avoided. This point is reinforced
if read in conjunction with the mantra-like title of Durcan’s most significant poem on Beckett
– it points to the fact that much of Durcan’s art takes shape in full awareness that ‘there’s a
Beckett / at the gate’82 [sic] (GHR, 62). Parallels with Beckett, if not direct influences, may
81
Martiny, E (2006), ‘Demonic Forefather: Portraits of Samuel Beckett in the Poetry of Paul Durcan’ in Nordic
Irish Studies, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. 149-156
82
The poem’s title ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ refers to a performance of Beckett at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. The
final italicised quatrain alternates ‘Gate’ with ‘gate’ which clearly strengthens the sense of Beckett as a
threatening presence in Durcan’s art; always figuratively ‘at the gate’ (GHR, 62).
255
be detected at the level of both content and tone in Durcan’s work. Symbiosis and codependence are significant preoccupations of two of Beckett’s major plays: Waiting for
Godot (1955) and Endgame (1958). Just as Durcan’s speakers, in their tone of dramatic
neediness imply an essentially relational outlook on life, so too the interdependence of
Vladimir and Estragon and Hamm and Clov respectively is stressed by Beckett. ‘There are
times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part’ complains Estragon in Waiting for
Godot, only to be met by Vladimir’s double-edged rejoinder, ‘You wouldn’t go far’ (Beckett
1990, 17) – mocking both Estragon’s lack of desire to leave and highlighting their
interdependence.
For all their darkness, of course, Beckett’s plays are shot through with laughter, albeit
of a tormented variety. Indeed it is often in this mix of laughter and suffering – of gravity and
levity – that the most striking parallels with Durcan reside. The statement by Nell in
Endgame that ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (Beckett 1990, 101) is a line worthy of
Durcan and its seeming paradox might be read as informing much of the dramatised
melancholy of his later work including ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ (GHR, 55). It is apt that
this line was seen by Beckett himself as the most important sentence in Endgame (Salisbury,
120). This point is key for an understanding of Durcan’s mature tone and merits some
explication. The seeming contradiction of nothing being funnier than unhappiness accords
with Beckett’s subtitling of his play Waiting for Godot as ‘a tragi-comedy in two acts’
(Beckett 1990, 7). Central to Durcan’s emotional tableaux is an incessant oscillation between
the two poles of this dichotomy: funniness and unhappiness, tragedy and comedy. It is this
oscillation and shuttling between poles – ‘between two towns’ [sic] in the coinage of ‘The
Kilfenora Teaboy’ (TB, 50) – that characterises Durcan’s own dramatic voices. Beckett’s
character Watt, in a celebrated comic monologue, begins a diatribe against fate and
immutability thus:
256
Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a
need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a
lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no
place that I do not regret, exceedingly.
(Beckett 1976, 44)
The humour here is generated through the dark doggedness of the sentiment coupled with the
manic repetitions of verbal form with only slight alterations of content. Durcan however, in
his 2012 poem ‘Paris, Bloomsday 2009’ (P, 44) can be read as conducting a gentle send-up of
the older writer in his and Joyce’s adopted city while generating his own characteristically
comic pathos:
Life is an ice cream in a summer breeze!
I regret almost everything!
Stand and rejoice!
(P, 44)
The final couplet here is representative of Durcan’s particular comic genius – the generation
of sympathy and laughter in his readers by taking the risk to ‘leave the curtains open’ (AoL,
13) on the stage of his conflicted inner life. It is this characteristic mix which sees him in
Going Home to Russia ask ‘Can there be anyone in the world who has not go mixed feelings?
/ Should there be anyone in the world who has not got mixed feelings?’ (GHR, 88). When
Durcan was asked about his comic influences by Naomi Jaffa in August 2012 he repeated
Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion from the author’s notes to his Collected Poems in 1964 that
‘Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born’ (Kavanagh, 2004, 292). Durcan claims
that, following Kavanagh, it has been his aspiration all through his career to ‘hit the comic
note, the hardest thing of all’ (Jaffa, 2012). This arguably has been the engine behind
Durcan’s characteristic ‘comic note’: the dramatising of the subject caught between the twin
competing impulses of ‘I regret almost everything!’ and ‘Stand and rejoice!’ (P, 44). His
mature speaking subject is one torn between whether to take life as a tragedy or comedy. Out
of negotiating this dilemma itself is generated his characteristic style. If, as Eamon Grennan
has said, Durcan’s work has manifested ‘a drive towards a different world of expanded moral,
257
spiritual, and emotional consciousness’ (Grennan, 59) this is perhaps part of the expansion
Grennan intends to name. It is in his situating his speaking voice in a space of dramatic and
dramatised indecision that makes his work, in the words of contemporary Dublin poet Paula
Meehan, ‘a poetry for the befuddled, the disorganised, the demented, the muddling through,
the most of us’ (P, reverse dust jacket).
Before examining closely ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ (GHR, 55) one more significant
point of interest regarding Beckett and Durcan should be made. It concerns what might be
termed the comedy of the body and the coincidence of influences acknowledged by both
men. Asked in interview by Naomi Jaffa in August 2012 about his comic influences, Durcan
at first named Patrick Kavanagh as has been noted. However, intriguingly, he also continued:
Going back to childhood the very first films that I ever saw were Charlie Chaplin and
then Laurel and Hardy. And then of course the Marx brothers – I couldn’t have enough.
(Jaffa, 2012)
According to his biographer and friend James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett was also influenced
by – amongst others, of course – the same constellation of actors and styles. Noting his liking
for Charlie Chaplin films (Knowlson, 57), Knowlson writes of how Chaplin was approached
unsuccessfully for a role in Beckett’s Film (Knowlson, 522). Similarly, regarding Beckett’s
most celebrated piece of theatre Waiting for Godot, Knowlson notes as influences the
combination of:
[t]he more laboured delivery of Laurel and Hardy and the comic repartee of English or
Irish music-hall comics to produce the sombre, though lively exchanges of Estragon and
Vladimir.
(Knowlson, 260)
Finally with regards to these influences, Knowlson suggests not mere allusion to but actual
incorporation of elements of Marx Brothers routines in Waiting for Godot with the adoption
of ‘many music-hall ‘gags’ and rhythms’ including ‘the ‘three hats for two heads’ routine
from the Marx Brothers’ film Duck Soup’ (Knowlson, 609). So too Durcan’s ‘bitter-sweet
258
clowning’83 as Seamus Heaney has termed it (P, reverse dust jacket) incorporates much
comedy of the body reminiscent of the striking visual effects created by Beckett, Chaplin and
the Marx Brothers especially. A partial summary of more glaring examples includes the
following. In ‘Christmas Day’ the speaker with ‘gums stinging’ and ‘green underpants
inclining / To sag’ (CD, 36) says ‘Physically I am standing here / In Frank’s kitchen vertical’
but in fact ‘Mentally I am flat out on the lino, / Eked out, stutter-spliced’ (CD, 31). Similarly
the ‘Man Walking The Stairs’ has a comparable problem remaining vertical:
When I conquer the top of the stairs
I fall down the stairs,
All the way down to the foot of the stairs.
(CW, 116)
Whether Durcan appears as ‘Nude with Steering Wheel’ (DD, 17), ‘crying just a little bit into
my black tee shirt’ (DD: 15) or yanking ‘down my trousers to expose black briefs – / Too
brief, really’ (CIC, 4) his very bodily generation of humour and pathos is analogous to that of
Beckett et al. Most common seem to be Durcan’s references to trousers and their removal,
trousers as a token of male potency and authority. ‘Take off your pants, she said to me, / And
I very nearly didn’t’ says the speaker of the early ‘Nessa’ (OW, 3). Later, the amusingly titled
‘On Being Required to Remove My Trouser Belt at Dublin Airport Security’ (LM, 37) sees
the speaker ‘Holding up my trousers with my hands’ before describing an exact comic
parallel with Beckett. Towards the close of Waiting for Godot the following stage directions
are given and are here set beside three lines from the above named Durcan poem to
emphasise the point regarding the comparability of their respective bodily comedies:
‘Estragon loosens the cord that holds up his trousers which, much too big for him, fall
about his ankles’. [sic]
(Beckett 1990, 87)
83
Durcan, via ‘Frank’ in ‘Christmas Day’ can be read as referring to himself directly as a clown, praising
‘women who simply like you for the clown that you are’ (CD, 59). Also, notably, he has referred to his father as
a clown in Daddy, Daddy’s ‘Bank Clerk’: ‘You were a great judge / Because you were a great clown’ (DD,
166).
259
I let go.
I let my trousers drop to the floor, let
Them think I am an eccentric, everybody
Ought to be an eccentric.
(LM, 38)
It is fitting then, that Durcan’s 1987 poem ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ (GHR, 55)
mirrors many of the issues explored here and themes seminal to this chapter. The poem reads
as a long monologue, sections of which have a conversational almost prose-like diction while
other sections lapse into lyrical and rhythmical repetition. The narrative action of the poem,
almost all of which is related through the thoughts of the speaker, details a reluctant visit to
The Gate Theatre for a performance of a work written by Samuel Beckett and acted by Barry
McGovern84. Once again, the dramatis personae of the poem comprises two figures: the
speaker and a lady named ‘Michelle’ (GHR, 57) who happens to be seated beside him in the
otherwise almost empty theatre. Significantly, the action of the poem – in spite of its title –
takes place in the audience seating and on Dublin’s streets rather than onstage. This pointed
shift of focus is comparable to what Durcan does in ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the
Road Near Moone’ (BWC, 3). The protagonist in that piece is on her way to the Abbey
Theatre thrilled with ‘the prospect of Tom Hickey / In a play called The Gigli Concert’
(BWC, 5). Never making it to the play but instead falling into a ‘daydream’ (BWC, 5) she
meets ‘Jesus / ... a travelling actor’ who is ‘entirely sensitive to a woman’s world’ (BWC, 6).
Their evening together is guiltily juxtaposed in the mind of the poem’s speaker with the one
‘empty vacant seat at the Abbey’ (BWC, 7) just as ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ invites
juxtaposition of the intimacy between the speaker and Michelle and the ‘Outrageous piece of
malarkey / By Beckett-McGovern’ (GHR, 59) onstage. Read this way, with the focus on
stalls rather than stage, perhaps a sense of direct homage to Beckett can be read in Durcan’s
84
Interestingly, in 2012 - twenty five years after Durcan’s publication - The Gate Theatre’s ‘Watt’ by Samuel
Beckett was once again performed at the Edinburgh International Festival by Barry McGovern.
[http://www.gatetheatre.ie/section/NewsWATTbySAMUELBECKETTatthe2012EdinburghInternationalFestival
. Website accessed on 16th January 2013]
260
poem. It suggests that the action between the speaker and Michelle itself constitutes a kind of
Beckettian drama, a ‘Beckett at The Gate’. This reading is reinforced by Durcan’s alignment
of himself and Beckett at the poem’s outset when he responds to a questioner ‘as if it was I /
Who was the weary, put-upon virtuoso of bathos’ (GHR, 55). Similarly, this blurring of life
and art is played with in ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone’ (BWC,
3). When asked by her husband her opinion of the play at The Abbey Theatre the Haulier’s
Wife replies that it was ‘a phenomenal concert’ (BWC, 7). This response is of course meant
to be heard on the double, as referring to both the unseen Abbey production and to her
evening with ‘Jesus’. This relocating of attention from stage to stalls and streets, as though
Durcan himself was living in a Beckettian landscape, is commented upon directly by Fintan
O’Toole:
There is, in Durcan’s work, no meeting with Beckett, no literary influence at work. But
there is something much more striking – a continual series of random encounters with
Beckett’s world, encounters that are not just theatrical ones, but that take place on the
streets, at bus-stops, in the hustle-bustle of the city. Beckett will not leave him alone [.]
(O’Toole, 28)
For Durcan then, drama is not simply the preserve of the theatre stage, his personae
themselves are imbued with a sense of living lives which are ‘quite dramatically beautiful’
(BWC, 3).
Just as Durcan has stated with regard to his slightly later poem ‘Christmas Day’ (CD,
5), it is possible to read the interplay between his speaker’s voice and the actions of
‘Michelle’ in ‘The Beckett at The Gate’ as an attempt:
[T]o write about things like loneliness without self-pity, to write about other than one’s
self, to get out of the trap of one’s self into the whole wide world.
(Murphy, 1996)
The poem is a type of travelogue of the emotions, charting the speaker’s trajectory from
before the play to his return home afterwards. The poem opens with the speaker in a dour, if
compromising, mood ‘fed up with people barking at me: ‘Have you not seen Barry
McGovern’s Beckett?’ (GHR, 55) and conceding ‘in spite of myself’ to attend the play. The
261
speaker is relieved to find the auditorium near empty as he arrives early, having allowed
‘ample time / In which to work up an adequate steam of anxiety’ (GHR, 56). His discovery of
a young woman already seated in the seat beside his prompts a meditation on his own state of
mind which begins with him feeling a ‘right, roaring idiot / Crouched there in all that silence’
(GHR, 56) beside Michelle who reads the aptly titled One Hundred Years of Solitude by
Gabriel García Márquez. Once the play begins, the contrast between the two presences in the
poem’s central section is heightened. The reader is thoroughly exposed to the often comic
machinations of the speaker’s mind as he conducts a quasi-erotic meditation on Michelle’s
actions. The speaker marvels at Michelle’s enjoyment of the Beckett piece, comparing her to
‘all those females / In the Old Testament, ... / Not to mention the New Testament’ (GHR, 58).
The contrast between art and life, stage and stalls is further complicated as readers are
informed how well Michelle ‘gave herself over’ to ‘her own performance’ and was ‘entirely
inside it’ (GHR, 58). This will be compounded later with the speaker’s self-description as ‘a
bareheaded protagonist’ (GHR, 61). Michelle’s self-possession and refreshing intimacy is
praised as in ‘crimson red booties, blue skin-tight jeans’ she began ‘tucking her legs in under
her bottom’ before she ‘leaned her head on my shoulder, / As if we had been espoused for
years’ (GHR, 59). The central point of ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63) is restated gently as
Michelle’s hair brushes the speaker’s cheek:
Many years had elapsed since last
I had been made aware of my cheekbone –
Her mousy hair brushing against it,
(GHR, 59)
Once again the subject is seen coming to self-awareness through the agency or presence of
another person or outside influence. Durcan’s particular comedy of oscillation and
contradiction is in full flow throughout the poem with its rhythmical saying and unsaying of
things as well as comments such as those regarding how ‘I laughed myself so sorry’ (GHR,
262
58). Most pointedly it is seen in this surprising volte-face, calculated to humorously wrongfoot the reader:
Well, obviously, things
Had got quite out of hand
And I wanted to say to her
‘Please please please please
Go on doing what you’re doing’
(GHR, 59)
Rather as might be expected, the discovery that shortly after the play’s end Michelle ‘had
slipped away’ (GHR, 60) leaves the speaker at a loose end, intending as he had to ‘gaze / In
rapture’ at her. However, in the surprisingly upbeat, even rhapsodic, conclusion to the poem
lies a definitive break in tone between Durcan and Beckett. The speaker, who elects to walk
home from Parnell Square to Ringsend, is decidedly positive as he passes ‘the east European
parts of Dublin city’ and ‘hand-painted signs of the local public houses’ which seem
‘childmade in the lamplight, homely’ (GHR, 61). His dreamy state of consciousness
culminates thus:
As I balanced in a trance on the humpbacked bridge,
On a fulcrum of poignancy,
And I felt like a stranger in a new city,
An urchin in a New Jerusalem,
A bareheaded protagonist
In a vision of reality.
(GHR, 61)
The final quoted line here is almost a direct quotation of one of Durcan’s favoured lines by
Yeats, from the poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, wherein Yeats claims that art ‘is but a vision of
reality’ (Yeats, 159). The invocation in such close proximity by Durcan of ‘trance’ and
‘vision’, coupled with Michelle’s disappearance, is clearly evocative of Keats’s ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: – Do I wake or
sleep?’ (Keats, 177). The tone of the poem’s conclusion – after the speaker glimpses Michelle
at a bus stop in Ringsend – has an air of resolution about it. His speaker has travelled from
263
the introspective broodiness of ‘I am not mad / About going to the theatre’ (GHR, 55) via a
transformative experience with Michelle, to one who resolves:
Next year in Carrickmines
I’ll play tennis with whatever
Woman will play tennis with me
And I’ll never be never again.
(GHR, 61)
This transformative experience has distinctly Biblical overtones about it, invoking as it does
‘rapture’ (GHR, 60) – a term from Christian eschatology85 – and ‘a New Jerusalem’ (GHR,
61) referred to in the Book of Revelation (Revelation, 21:2). The connotations are of
psychological breakthrough and something of a spiritual transformation brought about by this
chance meeting with Michelle. This theme is recapitulated, as indeed is the central theme of
this chapter reinforced, by Durcan’s apostrophic appeal to Michelle to play tennis with him
the next year as he repeats a key word four times in two lines:
Why you, Michelle, why you –
Will you join me? Join me?
If you’re the joining kind, please join me.
(GHR, 61)
The speaker pleads with Michelle to ‘join’ him, expressing both fear and desire in the poem’s
final italicised four line stanza. Into these lines can be read two motivations for the speaker’s
plea. He wishes to be joined by Michelle following the enjoyment of seeing with her ‘The
Beckett at The Gate’, but he also yearns for the transformative company and solace of her
presence – affirmation and warmth in the face of the dark, menacing vision of ‘a Beckett / at
the gate’ (GHR, 62).
The final poem of 2001’s Cries of an Irish Caveman, ‘A Day in the Cave’ (CIC, 159),
pictures the speaker alone and longing for his beloved, musing rather unhopefully ‘Maybe
Cita will call’. This self-portrait of a man by turns comic and pathetic ‘combing my hair,
straightening my collar – / Booming about the cave’ is a characteristic note of Durcan’s later
85
Eschatology is defined as ‘the teaching concerning last things, such as the resurrection of the dead, the Last
Judgement, the end of this world, and the creation of a new one’ Coogan, M, and Metzger, B. (eds.), 139).
264
work. Quoted in the previous chapter, Patrick Kavanagh said in his own ‘Self-Portrait’ (1962)
that ‘the self is only interesting as an illustration’ (Kavanagh 2003, 306). Thus far what
Durcan has illustrated through his own often thinly fictionalised dramas of the self is the
veracity of his claim in ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63). Both ‘Christmas Day’ and ‘The Beckett at
The Gate’ acknowledge the veracity of its claim that: If there is nobody to share the world
with, / There is no world’ (LM, 63). The final section of this chapter will be given over to an
analysis of a selection of Durcan poems in which he uses a first person speaker to illustrate a
disparate selection of postures and moods of the spirit. These representations, it is claimed,
all play a part in the creation of one of Durcan’s finest achievements – what is referred to
here as Durcan’s theatre of the self.
8.4 – The theatre of mixed feelings: Durcan’s later dramatisations of the self
The final section of this chapter examines a selection of poems in the voice of a first
person speaker who can be read as more closely identifiable with the poet Paul Durcan than
many of the more stylised personae and alter-egos which populate his work. The selection of
poems for examination here is made in full knowledge of Durcan’s attempts to complicate the
relationship between writer, poetic persona and reader – from the inclusion of a figure named
‘Paul’ (E, 5) in the very first poem of Endsville onwards. This area of Durcan’s work has
been explored in a paper by Kathleen McCracken86. What is proposed by the current study,
through close reading of a selection of representative poems, will be referred to as Durcan’s
creation of a theatre of the self. The concept of a theatre of the self acknowledges
McCracken’s insights regarding Durcan’s tendency towards self-inscription and his probing
of ‘the reflexive possibilities of writing, and of the often serious implications of comedy and
self-parody’ (McCracken 2013, 105). However, in the present context of exploring Durcan’s
work as a ‘moral map’ (Grennan, 44), the interpretive line followed by this thesis proceeds
86
McCracken, K (2013), 'Paul Painting Paul: Self-Portraiture and Subjectivity in Durcan’s Poetry,' ABEI
Journal - The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies [Number 14, November 2012] pp. 103-114
265
via a reading of Durcan’s theatre of the self as providing an antidote to reductive and
restrictive paradigms of human individuality and interiority.
This theatre of the self accommodates two principle often interconnected themes in
the poet’s work: the essentially fluid nature of self-experience and the imperative of escaping
the trap of solipsistic self-preoccupation typically referred to by Durcan as ‘ego’ (SMP, 267).
Before proceeding with further analysis the term theatre of the self requires some explication
and definition. The very word theatre is loaded with meanings and resonances, especially
given earlier remarks regarding Durcan and Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Donal McCann and
others. However, what is intended here is to use the word theatre in the specific sense in
which David Hume employs it in A Treatise of Human Nature as quoted above. Hume’s
analogy between the mind and a theatre is apt and will be shown to be an appropriate guiding
image with which to explore a body of work including such disparate poems as ‘Doris
Fashions’ (GHR, 51), ‘Televised Poetry Encounter, Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa’ (GFB,
27) and ‘Golden Island Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 1). It will be suggested that a theatre in
Hume’s sense – accommodating within one person or speaking voice varied moods and
inflections of personality – is the logical result of a working out of an identity understood in
terms of ‘The Mixture’ (SMP, 264): a non-essentialist conception of self-understanding87.
What such poems as those named above display is the power of Durcan’s ‘robustly
dramatised self’ (Grennan, 62).
These diverse poems can believably coexist within the context of one poet’s inner
landscape because of what Lucy Collins has referred to as ‘the studied centrality of the
speaker’s voice, on paper and in performance’ (Collins, 219). His work affords readers a
front row seat in the theatre of his inner life. If the American Whitman claims to ‘contain
multitudes’ (Whitman, 67), Durcan implies a similar claim through dramatic re-enactment of
87
Likewise, as Kathleen McCracken states about Durcan’s use of heteronyms: ‘[T]his flirting with heteronyms
contributes to Durcan’s portrait of the poet as multi-dimensional, poly-vocal, fluid rather than fixed, his identity
capable of “emptying out” and dextrously metamorphosing into multitudes’ (McCracken 2013, 111).
266
often contradictory states of mind. Now elated, now dejected, now paralysed by indecision,
the various Paul Durcans are one by one invited centre stage at his ‘incantatory and often
self-mocking’ (Collins, 216) readings. This type of stylised emotional exhibitionism is, of
course, quite conscious as is acknowledged in his playful couplet ‘Leave the Curtains Open’
(AoL, 13):
I like people looking in at me.
I am proud of my privacy.
Before conducting an exploration of the two themes listed above – the fluid nature of selfexperience and the imperative of escaping the trap of the ‘ego’ (SMP, 267) – a close reading
of a poem seminal to this section will be undertaken: ‘Doris Fashions’ (GHR, 51).
Though Durcan has been deliberately non-prescriptive with regard to the question of
identity – ‘May I lack always a consistent vision of the universe’ (SMP, 238) he aspires –
‘Doris Fashions’ is arguably as close he comes to a statement of belief on the issue. Reprising
the legal and prison-related imagery visited earlier in this thesis, the poem begins with its
speaker who, having phoned the prison service, is now waiting for the parole officer to ‘send
a prison van in to collect me’. He catches a glimpse of himself in the window of a shop, the
‘Doris Fashions’ of the title. As does the Haulier’s wife (BWC, 3), the speaker experiences a
moment of estrangement from himself as he ‘glimpsed a strange man whom I do not know’88.
At the end of the poem’s first stanza Durcan begins to play with the title of the poem, which
is also the name of the shop – as he does so the poem shifts its ground from the musings of a
flâneur to a playful meditation on the theme of self-creation. The conceit of the poem hinges
on the word ‘fashions’ and its ability to connote shaping and designing as well as its more
primary meaning in the commercial context. The speaker celebrates:
88
This theme of self-estrangement is reprised in a playful way in the epigraph to Durcan’s 2009 Life is a
Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007. The epigraph, from Arthur Hugh Clough reads: ‘I am, I think, the
most perfect stranger present’ (LD, epigraph). One might even imagine Durcan enacting a similar triumph of
wordplay with Clough’s ‘perfect stranger’ as he does with ‘Doris Fashions’.
267
That there is that much
To be salvaged from the wreckage of the moment –
That Doris Fashions.
(GHR, 51)
Admitting that ‘all my life I’ve dreamed of having a motto of my own – / My own logo – my
own signature tune’ the speaker becomes rhapsodic in a typically offbeat Durcan moment:
In the window of Doris Fashions I see through myself
And adopt as my logo, my signature tune,
Doris Fashions.
Trying it out on myself on the road out to the prison:
Doris Fashions Paul Durcan – Paul Durcan Doris Fashions.
(GHR, 52)
This poem draws many strands together, from the image of the incarcerated poet to the
central theme of this and the previous chapter – the symbiotic nature of the process of identity
formation. ‘Doris Fashions’, as Kathleen McCracken has noted, is above all an
‘acknowledgement of the constructed or ‘fashioned’ nature of identity’ (McCracken 2013,
108). The fact that Durcan claims ‘I see through myself’ and that identity – an individual’s
‘signature tune’ – is a thing which one fashions rather than inherits is his strongest statement
in support of the anti-essentialist view of identity that underpins so much of his work. As
Cries of an Irish Caveman has it about the attribute ‘Bovinity’ ‘It’s not something you’re
born with’ but rather, following Doris’s example ‘It’s something you detect and cultivate - /
It’s something you divine’ [sic] (CIC, 91). Our identity and self-understanding are thus never
complete but rather, in Durcan’s schema, always in the process of being formed, created,
shaped, fashioned.
In 1952 the final issue of the short-lived Kavanagh’s Weekly concluded with a poem
titled ‘Having Confessed’ (Kavanagh 2004, 190). In it Kavanagh counsels openness to the
fashioning powers of the Divine upon one’s nature:
God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
268
In this quote from Kavanagh are named two aspirations central to Durcan’s work and directly
applicable to the subject of identity formation. The necessity of staying ‘in the unconscious
room / Of our hearts’ in order to create and be created has a direct parallel in Durcan’s
conception of the creative process as being a dream-like state. In interview for this thesis
Durcan said, somewhat humorously:
It’s the dreaming state of consciousness that you have to be in. It is that state of dreaming
consciousness where you’ve managed to escape the ego. The ego is the Cardinal
Ratzinger who is constantly at your side. It’s all the time interfering, it never lets you go.
(Appendix One)
Durcan’s desire to mock and escape the obstacle of the ego – to ‘stay in the unconscious
room’ as Kavanagh might have it – is reiterated passim throughout his work and in
innumerable interviews. Durcan variously implores ‘Let my ego die’ (CD, 85); muses over
‘ego and ego’s willie’ (AoL, 71) and describes how ‘I trundle my bundle of ego’ (SMP, 267).
Returning to Kavanagh’s exhortation that ‘We must be nothing, / Nothing that God may
make us something’ (Kavanagh, 2004, 190) Durcan has reiterated this theme throughout
much of his work. ‘To be a writer is to be nothing’ claims the speaker in ‘The Toll Bridge’
(SMP, 248); just as the speaker of ‘My Daughter Síabhra in Moscow, 19 August 1991’ states
that ‘All that I aspire to be is Nothing’ (SMP, 259). Having barely survived a near drowning
on Bondi Beach the speaker of ‘Give Him Bondi’ (CIC, 3) is contrite:
Praying once for all
I am gutted of ego;
That I have at last learnt
The necessity of being nothing,
The XYZ of being nobody.
(CIC, 19)
Remarkable though the parallels and the intertextual allusions are, there is one significant
difference of note between the two men – for Kavanagh it is ‘God’ who ‘may make us
something’ while Durcan exclaims in mock-religious syntax: ‘Doris made the world – / And I
believe in Doris, and in Doris only’ (GHR, 52). Here again the process of self-creation, of
269
fashioning, is conceived as a symbiotic endeavour reinforcing that ‘If there is nobody to share
the world with, / There is no world’ (LM, 63).
Wary then of the ‘obsession with identity’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330) and cognisant
that our sense of ourselves is always subject to slippage and renegotiation Durcan employs a
number of approaches to writing the self through which he seeks to establish an alternative
paradigm. If the artificial securities of ‘ego’ (SMP, 267) are commonly symbolised by things
such as the snail’s shell in ‘A Snail in my Prime’ (SMP, 265), the cave in Cries of an Irish
Caveman (CIC, passim) and the ‘Berlin Wall’ (BWC, 59) – not to mention the gallery of
hubristic politicians, alpha males and clergy who populate his work – then an opposing,
redeeming force is found in Durcan’s employment of images of water, flow, movement and
‘transport’ (GHR, 70) with its Wordsworthian connotations. In a 1990 interview with
Arminta Wallace the poet stated that:
To me everything that is good in the end is water-connected or based, even attitudes to
life – flowing into things rather than being rigid and sustained.
(Wallace, 1990)
For ‘rigid and sustained’ here can be read the cave, the snail shell, the ‘Berlin Wall’ (BWC,
59) – all that which results in self-absorption and ‘the savagery of selfishness’ (CD, 52).
Contrary to these images ‘The Pietà’s Over’ (BWC, 52) sees the poet ‘suffering fluently’,
‘The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986’ (GHR, 27) begins with its speaker ‘adrift on a leaf
of tranquillity’, a happy home is ‘a sea of our own’ (BWC, 45) and Donal McCann –
answering a prayer from the dead – advises the poet to ‘flow with the stream’ (AoL, 54).
Complimentary to this notion of ‘flow’ (AoL, 54) as an approach to identity, Durcan has used
self-descriptive images of movement and rootlessness to connote deeper states of feeling and
being. For example, he may be seen ‘creeping and crawling about the earth’ (DD, 17), as a
man ‘doing nothing else / Except walking the stairs’ (CW, 118), pronouncing himself ‘a
Protestant Tinker’ (GFB, 88), ‘taking a vagary’ (CD, 50) and singing the praises of David
270
Gascoygne’s pointedly named ‘A Vagrant’ [sic] (OW, 48). It is the contention of this thesis
that Durcan’s insistence on the ‘necessity of being nothing’ (CIC, 19) 89 – a negation of an
essentialist view of identity rather than a will for self-annihilation – is what enables him to
create his unique poetic speaking voice in which ‘several perceptions successively make their
appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and
situations’ (Hume, 165). The attention of this chapter will now move to a close reading of
three Durcan poems, each demonstrative of a key mood in his writing of the self: ‘Televised
Poetry Encounter, Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa’ (GFB, 27), ‘The Dublin-Paris-BerlinMoscow Line’ (SMP, 237), and ‘Golden Island Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 1).
‘Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul’ (Pessoa, 9) exhorts
Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. A writer greatly taken with the exploration of
contradictory inner states of mind and soul, Pessoa was a persistent designer of aliases, masks
and pseudonyms. His exhortation quoted above can be read as speaking richly to the
conception of Durcan’s later work as a theatre of the self. It is telling that the record of one of
Durcan’s encounters during his 1995 journey to Brazil contains a playful meditation on the
very topic of pseudonyms and their possibilities: ‘Televised Poetry Encounter, Casa Fernando
Pessoa, Lisboa’ (GFB, 27). A brief and playful poem in two sections, the first of which
begins with the poet being questioned: ‘what means it to be / The Irish poet of the twentieth
century?’ Acknowledging that he is at the ‘Casa Fernando Pessoa’ Durcan’s response
accommodates the richly contradictory nature of identity, describing himself as ‘an Irishman
playing for England in Brazil!’ The poem’s second section describes how, although ‘Born
Paul Durcan’, following his exposure to ‘Theatre and blue jeans, / Religion and film’ the poet
began to ‘undergo / A change / Of name’. He claims, although born Paul Durcan that ‘Paul
89
An intriguing connection can be made here between Durcan’s conception of identity and the theology of Saint
Paul. In his letters Saint Paul expounds upon how Christ ‘made himself nothing’ (Phil, 2:7) in order to fulfil the
will of God. Durcan makes frequent allusion to Saint Paul in his work from the early mention of the saint’s
birthplace – Asia Minor (OW) – to quoting his speech on the Areopagus in the title of his 2012 collection.
271
Durcan’ is merely now a pen name for his secret inner self – the director of the theatre,
perhaps, in which all the disparate influences listed in the poem are gathered, shaped and find
voice:
I write
Under the pen name
Paul Durcan
But my real name –
Like Balthus
Or William Trevor –
Is Tinkerly Luxemburgo.
(GBF, 28)
The controlling agent here, the presence behind the ‘pen name / Paul Durcan’ is charmingly
named ‘Tinkerly Luxemburgo’. While evocative of Durcan’s moniker as a ‘Protestant
Tinker’ (GFB, 88) it also, of course, contains the verb tinker. Read as a verb it is comparable
to Durcan’s use of the verb fashion in ‘Doris Fashions’ (GHR, 51) and signals an active
process of identity formation and shaping. Reinforcing the sentiment that ‘the figure of all
energy is two’ (CIC, 78) yet another pairing is announced – if ‘Doris fashions Paul Durcan’
(GHR, 51) then ‘Tinkerly Luxemburgo’ tinkers with him, mending, repairing and shaping all
those disparate influences into ‘the pen name / Paul Durcan’ (GFB, 28). This playing on
names and identity is in typically mischievous Durcan spirit: the very fact that it seems
contrived to resist intrusively logical explication is perhaps the broader point about identity.
Though perhaps one of a surely small number of works being referred to by Eamon
Grennan when he complains that ‘sometimes Durcan doesn’t seem quite to know how to end
a poem’ (Grennan, 49), ‘The Dublin-Paris-Berlin-Moscow Line’ (SMP, 237) contains some
useful reflections on the subject of self-understanding and self-formation. ‘I want to live with
you / In the light of things as they are’ states the speaker, inviting his listener into relationship
both with him and with reality. It is an invitation to and an exhortation towards a shared life,
again recapitulating the theme of ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63) in the phrase ‘I want to live with
you’. Remarks have been made earlier in this study regarding this poem and especially the
272
key phrase ‘in the light of’ which introduces a point central to Durcan’s epistemology – the
importance of comparison and of perspective in escaping ‘punitive monomania’ (CW, xi).
Crucially, of the litany of things named in the poem’s second stanza, Durcan wishes to live
‘In the light of my anonymity; / In the light of my non-identity’ (SMP, 237). The very use of
the phrase ‘In the light of things as they are’, coupled with the stated desire to live ‘in a world
without rhetoric’ seems to echo once again Durcan’s favoured lines from Yeats’ ‘Ego
Dominus Tuus’90. This Yeatsian allusion becomes most pointed in the almost creed-like
fourth stanza:
May I lack always a consistent vision of the universe
When I am saying my poems;
May I remain always inarticulate
When I am composing my poems;
May I belong always to the oral tradition
Who is a woman keeping her man on his toes:
She permits him to speak only from memory.
(SMP, 238)
If art, in its Yeatsian conception, ‘is but a vision of reality’ (Yeats, 159), then Durcan’s poemprayer is to ‘lack always a consistent vision’ of that reality. This is central to Durcan’s
conception of the self and of his art. Framed here as a willed lack of consistency of vision it
elsewhere appears in a more positive guise, understood as a capacity rather than a ‘lack’. This
lack of a consistent vision is, it can be argued, an essential part of what Durcan referred to as
‘being open to the world of the now’ (Durcan in Kearney, 330). It is a kind of attitudinal
resistance to the judgement connoted in his mocking ‘The judge has a great sense of
orientation’ (LM, 88). It, in Durcan’s estimation, helps to insure that there is ‘No such thing,
Rosie, as a Uniform Ireland’ (AoL, 58) – if only each of her citizens has the courage to
‘belong always to the oral tradition’, to ‘speak only from memory’ (SMP, 238) and to
‘Improvise. Improvise’ (CD, 76). Durcan’s observations regarding the absence of uniformity
at the national level mirror Hume’s comments regarding the individual mind, with
90
‘The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, / The sentimentalist himself; while art / Is but a vision of
reality’ (Yeats: 159)
273
‘simplicity’ read in its intended and slightly archaic sense as denoting an absence of
compositeness:
There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural
propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.
(Hume, 165)
The imperative to resist imposing or devising a ‘consistent vision of the universe’ (SMP, 238)
is reinforced by a conception of poetry articulated by Wallace Stevens and repeated regularly
in interview by Durcan. In his work ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ Stevens notes that
‘The poem is the cry of its occasion’ (Stevens, 473), a statement that for Durcan seems at
times to have the power of a mantra. It dovetails perfectly with Durcan’s conception both of
himself as an artist and the underlying spiritual openness towards reality that he advocates.
The final poem to be examined at some length here is the 2004 piece ‘Golden Island
Shopping Centre’ (AoL, 1). Representative of a significant selection of later poems – in
which the first person speaker can be presumed to be the author Paul Durcan – it is a piece in
which ‘humour is the baseline’ (McCracken 2013, 111). Durcan selects a scene from
everyday life in which a particular emotion within his ‘theatre’ (Hume, 165) can be
highlighted in sharp relief. In the poem under consideration, simply a record of receiving a
parking ticket, the poet protests his innocence – changing his sex in the process – in order to
avoid being ticketed. The bedraggled protagonist, trawling a car park ‘in circles for quarter of
an hour’ [sic] finally decides to park in a space marked ‘GOLDEN ISLAND EXPECTANT
MOTHERS’ (AoL, 1). After shopping he returns to his car ‘With high-altitude sickness; /
Dazed, exhausted, apprehensive, breathless’ only to find a ‘middle-aged lady in black’
issuing him with a parking ticket. The speaker’s attempt to bargain his way out of the ticket
goes horribly wrong as he feigns hurt and then indignation:
I rumble into an avalanche of offended dignity:
“How dare you!
I am a Golden Island Expectant Mother! [sic]
I am a fifty-eight years old male of the species
And I have been expecting for nineteen years[”] (AoL, 2)
274
Here Durcan is generating a type of comedy from the intrinsic drama of the situation – a
disproportionate emotional outburst coupled with a manifestly false claim of innocence from
the speaker, sharply contrasted with the small-minded ‘barks’ of the car warden. However, in
the overall career-spanning range of Durcan’s self-depictions this poem can be read as a
pointedly self-mocking revision too. Depicting himself so demonstrably in the wrong yet
protesting to the contrary, it pokes fun at his frequently self-pitying self-descriptions as
falsely accused, put-upon, ‘messiahing about’ (BWC, 52). Research regarding Durcan’s
biography throws up some information irresistible when conducting a reading of this
particular poem. The poet’s birthday, 16th October, is the Catholic feast of Saint Gerard
Majella. An eighteenth century Redemptorist priest, Saint Gerard Majella91 is patron saint
both of pregnant women and also of falsely accused people, both themes which allow
supplementary levels of meaning to be found in this rather humorous self-mocking revision.
Given Durcan’s penchant for alter-egos and pseudonyms, coupled with his lifelong adherence
to Catholicism, it is not inconceivable that these admittedly obscure factors influenced his
self-depiction here.
Utilising the fluid and malleable nature of self-experience to dramatise a whole
‘theatre’ (Hume, 165) of self-representations, Durcan has created a distinctive poetic brand
associated with his name. Within a few short pages of his latest collection he portrays himself
variously: self-restraining ‘from playing hopscotch with myself’ (P, 18), ‘Thinking About
Suicide’ (P, 21), having ‘waxed ecstatic’ about the lady who replaced his watch strap (P, 76),
channelling his inner Angel Gabriel (P, 79), ‘sat up in bed with the sweats’ imagining Pope
John Paul II is chasing him (P, 83), and ‘Riding the docklands of Dublin like Don Quixote’
(P, 154). If contrasts of mood are demonstrable across the collection so too are the trademark
‘mixed feelings’ (GHR, 89) visible within certain poems: ‘Sick of Acquaintances Who are
91
See for details http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=150 [website accessed on 12th February
2012]
275
Know-Alls’ sees him on a cliff 300 metres above the sea musing ‘How idiotic it would be to
jump. / How idiotic it is not to jump’ (P, 131), while in ‘Paris, Bloomsday 2009’ he
juxtaposes his emotion thus:
Life is an ice cream in a summer breeze!
I regret almost everything!
Stand and rejoice!
(P, 45)
All of Durcan’s self-dramatisations, his pseudonyms, alter-egos and personae offer
cumulative evidence of a point stated prosaically in interview by the poet: ‘I think we all have
a desperate need, our nature is crying out for fiction of some kind in our lives’ (Appendix
One). Though the focus of this chapter has been predominantly on ‘Christmas Day’ and ‘The
Beckett at The Gate’ it is possible to read Durcan’s many poetic self-depictions as themselves
addressing, in some perhaps substitutive way, the need for another person or external
stimulus or reflection announced in ‘Epistemology’ (LM, 63). Conscious of Durcan’s
statement that ‘in reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) and of his 40 Years Reading
Poems (LD, title) it is notable that Durcan has repeatedly described the writing of poems and
their reading as a mode of self-escape. In interview for The Spectator magazine in 2012 he
stated: ‘That’s what poetry is about: getting out of your miserable self and opening your
eyes’92 (O’Malley, 2012). The consolations both of male-female relationships and of poetryas-escape are set against the dark spectre of suicide in 2012’s ‘Thinking About Suicide’ (P,
21):
I want to stand still by the water’s edge.
I want to hold a woman’s hand for the last time.
I want to fill my pockets with Palaeozoic stones.
I want to open my eyes.
(P, 22)
92
Another allusion to and tribute in the direction of Kavanagh who exhorts: ‘Irish poets open your eyes, / Even
Cabra can surprise’ (Kavanagh 2004, 170)
276
Indeed since the mid-1980s, with the exception of the two National Gallery volumes, each
collection has contained at least one meditation either upon Durcan’s role as poet or on the
phenomenon of poetry readings. His 1987 ‘The Poetry Reading Last Night in the Royal
Hibernian Hotel’ (GHR, 25) describes such events as ‘a type of esoteric social ritual /
Peculiar to the cities of northern Europe and North America’. Similarly the advertisement for
the eponymous ‘Tullamore Poetry Recital’ (DD, 37) amusingly counsels ‘Bring Your Own
Knitting’. The poet is sighted touring Brazil, angrily communicating with his publisher
‘through the condensed perspiration of my hysterical whispers’ (GFB, 17) and at home in
Ireland unwrapping a gift from a well-wisher: a tea cosy on which has been stitched ‘CRAZY
ABOUT PAUL’ (GFB, 115). Durcan dramatises his insecurities about his abilities as a poet
too, variously referring to himself as ‘the middle-aged, minor-major poet Paul Durcan’ (GFB,
92) and relying on a speaking tortoise for confirmation that ‘after all these multifarious years
/ You are entitled indeed to call yourself a poet’ (LM, 68). Whatever may be his own selfestimation or the long-term judgement of literary criticism or canon formation regarding
Durcan’s output there can be little doubt regarding his commitment to the art. Possessed of a
strongly vocational sense of poetry and his role as poet, Durcan pictures himself as a man on
a mission, carrying the Blakean ‘Lamb around My Neck’ (P, 6):
Through knacker’s yards and university cloisters,
Gutters and podiums, dosshouses and tea rooms, dives and
idylls
With the lamb around my neck.
(P, 7)
Although ‘around my neck’ (P, 7) has a more than slightly oppressive feel to it, Durcan
agreed in interview that carrying ‘the lamb’, with its Blakean association of innocence, is
central to his conception of poetry. Asked in relation to his 2004 poem ‘Raftery in Tokyo’
which sees him ‘serenading that crazy innocence’ whether this is a duty of the poet he replied
simply: ‘When you frame it like that I say yes, of course’ (Appendix One).
277
8.5 - Conclusion
Much of the earlier thrust of this study probed the ways in which Durcan sought to
defend individual autonomy of action, self-description and self-fashioning from oppressive
social and domestic forces. As is claimed in this study’s opening chapter, the core of this
defence is Durcan’s existentialist and non-essentialist conception of the human person.
Conceiving of human life as a never completed process of identity negotiation and selffashioning – for which the prerequisite is individual freedom – Durcan has resisted such
restrictions as clerical diktats or the machinations of those who seek to reduce complex
political realities to the ‘deathlike absolute nouns of Irish identity’ (Clutterbuck, C11).
Durcan’s work displays a gradual movement away from much of the harshness of his early
satire, some of which he now expresses reservations about (Appendix One). This movement
away from satire has been achieved, it is claimed, by deepening and adding nuance to his
depictions of human interiority. Durcan has, it is argued, not only claimed in principle that
the self is fluid and plural, he has convincingly demonstrated the case through his
development of what has been referred to here, after Hume, as his theatre of the self (Hume,
165). It is finally through this theatre of the self that Durcan not only definitively refutes
reductive paradigms but also simultaneously moves both himself and his readership closer to
a humane and humanising ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61).
278
General Conclusion
The statement in Sam’s Cross that reality is ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52) – especially
given its juxtaposition in its context with the Church Hierarchy’s view that reality is ‘black
and white’ (SC, 52) – is a fitting, if pithy, summation of Durcan’s ‘vision of reality’ (GHR,
61). The centrality of each person’s vision of reality to his or her moral map has, it is
claimed, been demonstrated in a selection of areas in relation to Durcan’s work. Central to
this investigation has been Durcan’s contention that ‘reality’ (SC, 52) is as much mental
construct as it is irrefutable fact. As Northrop Frye had it in his summation of William Blake:
‘[N]othing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality’ (Frye, 19). This
contention or one closely analogous to it, it has been implied throughout, is central to
Durcan’s moral map and is summed up in his 1990 statement ‘[i]n reality fiction is all that
matters’ (DD, 71). This conception of reality as ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52), coupled with a
non-essentialist understanding of the self, has been traced through its many inflections in
Durcan’s work throughout this study. Durcan’s ‘[i]n reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD,
71) has been seen to have three major expressions. First of these has been the importance of
each person’s individual fictions and fictive faculties – their self-narrations and capacities for
self-fashioning. Second, Durcan’s statement has been read as acknowledging the power of the
structuring fictions of others – nations, families and other shapers of collective identity – over
the lives of their constituent members and their outcasts: the ability of such fictions to
structure ‘reality’. Finally, ‘[i]n reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD, 71) has been read as an
endorsement of the necessity of imaginative fictions as ways of escaping a bitter and
unpalatable reality or providing an insulating protection from it.
Chapters Two and Three dealt respectively with Durcan’s engagement with the
Catholic Church and the figure of the scapegoat. These chapters are, in a sense, all of a piece
in that they deal with Durcan’s ongoing preoccupation with both the institution of the Church
279
and the symbolic vocabulary inherited from Catholicism. Those two chapters mapped the
psychic terrain and moral vision of a poet who concedes that ‘the Church has come / To the
end of its historical life’ (CD, 12) and yet admits that ‘I am loath / To abandon the sinking
ship’ (CD, 12). Central to Durcan’s moral vision, it has been claimed, is a deep respect for
and affinity with the ‘great modern philosophies and theologies of existentialism’ (PDD, 123)
and especially the figure of John XXIII who stated that:
Each man should act on his own initiative, conviction, and sense of responsibility, not
under the constant pressure of external coercion or enticement.
(John XXIII, 1963)
Such plainspoken directness speaks to Durcan’s recoil before propaganda and evasiveness as
much as it does his moral vision. This papal notion of the primacy of the individual was
fleshed out through invoking Sartre’s existentialist definition of man as a being who ‘first of
all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world. – and defines himself afterwards’
(Sartre 2007, 29-30). Coupled with this Christian-existential conception of morality, this
study also charted Durcan’s use of the scapegoat figure as a tool with which to goad those
who might unthinkingly accept and enforce hegemonic conceptions of belonging and
identity. Acting as mock-Messiah with regard to his moral map, Durcan is aware of the
artistic and moral power coded in depictions of characters ‘dying on the side’ (TB, 51) and
‘suffering fluently’ (BWC, 52). Central to his vision is an understanding of the complex
impacts of collectively-held ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) upon individual freedom as well as the
impact of expressions of individual freedom upon collectively-held fictions. This interaction,
central to much of Durcan’s work, was explicated through reference to the theories of René
Girard for whom the individual ‘subject is constitutionally imbricated in a public field of
misrecognised beliefs and behaviours’ (Fleming, 36).
Charting Durcan’s political poetry the attention of this study again focused on the
primary importance of ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) in the world of a poet who conceives of politics
280
as ‘a game of the human animal mind’ with ‘no basis in reality’ (PDD, 139). The sense of
identities as ‘never unified’ but rather ‘in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and
fractured’ (Hall, 4) was seen to be central to Durcan’s poetic enterprise in this area in Chapter
Four. Contesting the fictions of both hegemonic patriarchal power in the Southern Irish state
and physical force nationalism in the North of Ireland, Durcan’s work was read as aiming
toward several goals. Primarily, as has often been noted by the poet in interview, he wishes to
chronicle his reactions to violent atrocities – to register in Wallace Stevens’ term the cry of
the occasion (Stevens, 473). Secondarily, Durcan sought to expand and enrich the narrative of
the Southern Irish state by challenging both the passivity and indifference in the face of
violence of those in authority and also tacit, if muted, discrimination against members of the
Protestant population in the South.
This impulse towards expansion of perspectives and complication of narratives was
expanded into Chapter Five. Travel and transport – as realities and as poetic motifs – were
examined as Durcan’s way of questing for ‘any other history’ (GHR, 70), of accessing a
richer and more varied set of ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71). This rich complicating of fictions was
envisioned as both augmenting individual freedom and, by implication, enriching
impoverished or contracted visions of Ireland. Through charting Durcan’s use of Russia as a
mirror and site of comparison, it was suggested that there was a paradigm of comparison at
work in Durcan’s poetry typified by his 1975 title phrase ‘in the light of’ (OW, title). This
comparative impulse, it was suggested, breaks for Durcan the restriction of freedom connoted
by the ‘punitive monomania’ (CW, xi) of set paradigms and stagnant ‘vision[s] of reality’
(GHR, 61). This chapter also registered yet another expression of Durcan’s desire to reflect a
reality which is ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52). What was claimed in this regard is that Durcan’s
inclusion of such a variety of seeming oddities, scraps of everyday detail, place names and
people simply pushes beyond tit-for-tat arguments with purveyors of a ‘black and white’
281
reality (SC, 52) and creates for his readers an image of the richness and variety of
contemporary Irish life.
While borders between private and public life are frequently calculatedly ambiguous
in Durcan’s work, the focus of Chapter Six turned decisively towards the domestic realm
with a focus on Daddy, Daddy and The Laugher of Mothers. Through a close reading of
poems in the earlier collection it was possible to observe the ways in which the father’s
presence [readable as a Durcan shorthand for patriarchy] and his ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) had the
double effect of both nurturing and profoundly restricting the freedom of the son-author. The
book itself was then interpreted as a fictive attempt – part biographical, part fantastical – on
behalf of the poet to reckon with the intimidating spectre of the father-figure. A close
examination of The Laughter of Mothers observed a collection at once an intimate portrait of
a mother-son relationship and also a portrait of a woman whose life was circumscribed by a
particularly male-oriented ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61). This portrayal of his mother’s
subversive spirit – for which her ‘laughter’ (LM, title) can be taken as shorthand – was read
both as one of Durcan’s ‘other histor[ies]’ (GHR, 70) and an attempt to locate the roots of his
broadly feminist approach to the world in his relationship with ‘the first woman I ever knew’
(LM, 94).
In Chapter Seven an extended attempt was made to chronicle Durcan’s writing of
mature chosen relationships with women as found in The Berlin Wall Café and Cries of an
Irish Caveman. Acknowledging Durcan’s own self-awareness as a man writing about women
in an era when sexual relations had become highly politicised, attention was paid to the very
nature of such ‘fiction[s]’ (DD, 71) as politicised. The Berlin Wall Café saw Durcan portray
himself as persecutor, restrictor of his ex-wife’s freedom even as he implied throughout – by
the sustained images of blindness and misrecognition – that his own freedom was impaired
during the relationship. The poet’s extended self-depiction as a cow was assessed as yet
282
another way to authorise further subversive expressions of feeling in Cries of an Irish
Caveman – in this work it is decidedly the poet-speaker who is seen as not free, as enslaved
animal. As with Daddy, Daddy, the tone of much of the material invited the interpretation
that the very fact of his authoring a selection of fictions about the relationship is a way of
reclaiming ‘the authority of my own eyes’ (CW, x). Specific attention was paid to the
inventive quality, particularly the imaginative extremity, of some of Durcan’s fictions, with
analogies drawn between his work and that of Francis Bacon.
Through investigating what this study referred to as Durcan’s theatre of the self,
Chapter Eight charted some expressions of individual freedom in the poet’s later work.
Durcan had dealt extensively in his earlier work with forces which menace individual
autonomy and freedom to self-fashion from the outside, as this study has shown. Claiming
that this non-essentialist concept of the self assumes a particularly theatrical expression in
Durcan’s later work, attention was paid to the poet’s dramatisations of his inner emotional
life. The Humean image of the mind as a theatre proved – read alongside references Durcan
himself has made to theatrical milieus and actors – a guiding image capable of
accommodating this investigation. For Durcan it was argued, as for Hume, the nonessentialist self is a location – comparable to a theatre stage – across which:
[S]everal perceptions successively make their appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away, and
mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
(Hume, 165)
This acknowledgement of the ‘infinite variety of postures and situations’ (Hume, 165) which
may be assumed by the mind both underpins Durcan’s view of the world as ‘rich and various’
(SC, 52) and serves to ‘forbid a premature closing of our account with reality’ (James, 309).
In 1978 Durcan lampooned the Church Hierarchy for its adherence to black and white
photography as most suitable for representing what it perceived as the ‘innate black and white
nature of reality’ (SC, 52). The poet, opposing, advocated colour photography because
283
‘[c]olour pictures showed reality to be rich and various’. It can to some extent be argued, on
the grounds of the progression observable in his work, that Durcan’s poetry has also made an
analogous transition from ‘black and white’ to ‘colour’ representations of the world. The
development of his approach to the moral map – from Kavanagh’s ‘satire’ to ‘compassion’s
ecstasy’ (Kavanagh 2004, 208) – is akin to an acknowledgement by the poet himself that
reality is ‘rich and various’ (SC, 52). Indeed there is something irrefutable in Aidan
Matthews’ judgement of Durcan’s earlier work as the underdeveloped production of an
‘angry young man’ (Matthews, 86). Such ubiquitous early outbursts, typically against father
figures, can ironically be seen as examples of the very ‘black and white’ (SC, 52) view of
reality that Durcan was simultaneously slamming. However, as has been shown, Durcan’s
moral outlook – reflecting increasing nuance and complexity in his conception of human
freedom and individual self-fashioning – has been greatly developed since The Berlin Wall
Café. The moral map deducible from Durcan’s later work is an infinitely more complex
document, the work of an artist who, in Catríona Clutterbuck’s terms increasingly ‘refuses
the mortar of blame and guilt’ (Clutterbuck, C11). In the introduction to Crazy about Women
Durcan wrote that ‘[p]icture-making is the air I breathe’ (CW, xi) and reinforced this
coupling of poetry and painting in the introduction to Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading
Poems 1967-2007 by commenting:
For as long as I can remember I have regarded the publication of each volume of my
verse as being akin to an exhibition.
(LD, xix)
That Durcan has persisted in challenging ‘black and white’ (SC, 52) pictures of the world
wherever in public and civic life he found them is laudable; that he has ultimately
transcended such black and white representations in his own art is a true mark of his
achievement. His moral map is, arguably, a faithful ‘vision of reality’ (GHR, 61) as he has
known it – a true colour picture capturing life in all its richness and variety.
284
Appendix One
The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Conor Farnan with Paul
Durcan on Wednesday 24th October 2012. The interview took place at The Davenport Hotel,
Merrion Street Lower, Dublin 2 between 10:45a.m. and 3p.m. Before the interview Paul and I
had been speaking about John Moriarty. Paul and John Moriarty were personal friends and on
21st March 2001 Paul launched the first volume of John Moriarty’s autobiography Nostos.
Our conversation, before the interview formally began, had been about the film Dreamtime,
Revisited by Julius Ziz and Dónal Ó Céilleachar on the subject of John Moriarty which both
Paul and I had recently seen. I began the interview by mentioning the early working title of
this thesis, ‘‘Suffering fluently’: Paul Durcan’s theatre of the margins’93.
PD: That phrase (‘suffering fluently’, BWC, 52) comes almost directly from John Moriarty.
We’re talking about John Moriarty now and you’ve just reminded me of your title. And I, of
course, have been thinking a lot about John in the last two weeks. And I was thinking a lot
about the Andy O’Mahony interviews which were broadcast on RTÉ on 31st January and 7th
February 1985 because that’s the first time John said anything in public. Those two
interviews with Andy O’Mahony on Dialogue, he started them by saying ‘My guest tonight is
one of the most exceptional people I have ever met’ – that’s most unusual language for Andy
O’Mahony, a very professional, sober broadcaster.
In those interviews he spoke about Buddhism and Christianity and a great deal of what he
ended up writing about in Serious Sounds twenty years later. But he spoke about Christ
flowing fluently with the cross, and flowing fluently with his nightmares in the Garden of
Gethsemane. I took notes of those interviews, and the poem you are referring to was written
not long after I heard those programmes. So it’s almost certain that that comes from listening
to John Moriarty. I’m sure John in later books – perhaps in Nostos, I feel – he would have
used that expression again.
CF: And you have another poem in the collection, ‘High-Speed Car Wash’, in which you
speak of the two lovers ‘Flowing into one another like Christ flowing into the Cross’ (BWC,
10).
PD: Yes, well again, it was written at the same time ... Yes, because those two interviews – I
can remember where I was when I heard them. I can remember telling people about them.
And I made notes of them. But the fact is I know I wrote those two poems in the following
months.
CF: I have gone through a lot of material written about you as well as your own work.
Eamon Grennan, in his essay in The Kilfenora Teaboy says about you that ‘weird as his
projections are, the map he makes of the world is a moral map’ (Grennan, 44) and similarly
the UCD doctoral citation in 2011 said that ‘he prompts us to see poetry as a vital element in
our moral formation and the writing of it as a redemptive act’94. Does that resonate with you?
PD: Well, I’d say yes to all of those things, those statements. But, of course, when I set out
writing from boyhood and all along – as I am not a philosopher or indeed scholar of poetry as
93
The phrase ‘suffering fluently’ is taken from Paul’s 1985 poem ‘The Pietà’s Over’ (BWC, 52)
Paul Durcan was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by UCD on Bloomsday, 16 th June 2011. The citation
may be accessed online here: http://www.ucd.ie/news/2011/06JUN11/bloomsday-citations/200611-citation04.html [accessed successfully on 18 November 2012]
94
285
such – you know when you’re writing poetry you’re not thinking at that level. You’re not
thinking of those kind of programmatic ideas of your vocation. You’re just sitting down
completely involved in the business of trying to make a poem – you don’t think beyond that.
It’s something like sleeping and walking. From boyhood it’s been my way of life.
CF: How do you mean about sleeping and walking?
PD: I mean that sleeping and walking and I suppose eating and drinking – this is how we are,
it’s part of our nature. You know John [Moriarty] also in those interviews spoke about nature
and personality and the difference between the two. And why he suddenly left the academic
world in Canada is because he felt his personality – to use the current jargon, there had
developed a disconnect between his personality and his nature. He said about his personality
as an academic teacher in Winnipeg that it was like putting on shoes that were two sizes too
big for him or too small for him. And it’s very painful to your nature if you’re doing that.
And so, I’m just saying that from early on that became my way of life. So I didn’t encounter
the crisis that John Moriarty did because trying to write poetry – even though it involved and
continues to involve some hard living conditions and other things – it was, to be very prosaic
about it, what I liked doing. And I know to this day, if I’m ever at peace with myself – if my
nature that I was given when I was born is simply allowed to flow it’s when I am writing.
Then the converse has to be acknowledged, namely that long periods of not writing can be
very, very painful and distressing.
CF: In the interview you gave to Pat Kenny promoting Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading
Poems 1967-2007 in 2009 you spoke about the radio diary which you did for his show. You
said that both the diary and the poetry essentially grow out of the same thing.
PD: Yes, that’s true.
CF: Could you say a little bit more about that? Some academics might draw a genre
distinction between poetry and other genres of writing, but a strong current in a lot of your
interviews seems to be the notion of poetry as a documentary record. In what sense do you
see the poetry and the diary growing out of the same thing?
PD: Poetry, for me, is a combination of those two things – fiction and documentary. Fiction
in Wallace Stevens’ sense of ‘supreme fiction’. It’s no one thing, it’s where the imaginative
part of you takes over. But there are stages: the basis of making art of any kind is the making
of notes, sketches. Keeping a journal or diary – that’s the basis of it. Out of that, to coin a
cliché, a writer quarries his or her poetry or fiction or drama. In my case it’s what’s called
verse, which is a very different art to novel writing or playwriting. But all of them share that
basis of note taking.
CF: In the introduction to Crazy about Women you write about visiting the RB Kitaj curated
exhibition in London in 1980. You say that the exhibition gave you back the ‘authority of my
own eyes’ (CW, x). It seems to me that this sense of having the authority of your own eyes
has a broader resonance in your work – in the sense that if there is a moral thrust in the poems
it can often be towards reclaiming that authority. Does that [interpretative approach] make
sense?
PD: Yes, it does. It’s just another way of saying the same thing as far as I’m concerned. The
problem is we spend so much of our – I say we, I should speak of myself. I am constantly
286
aware that I’ve not been looking when I should’ve been looking. My eyes have not been
open. Even coming here this morning. That’s why Patrick Kavanagh was such a great
teacher, that’s what he was teaching even though he didn’t see himself as a teacher. ‘To look
on is enough / In the business of love’ (Kavanagh 2004, 222). That’s how he felt for a very
long time, in fact I think you can see it in his early poems, but most obviously in the latter
part of his life. But then Kitaj’s selection of paintings, his accompanying catalogue essay – it
was so powerful that I went back every day for nearly three weeks to look at his selection at
the National Gallery. I reread his essay hundreds and hundreds of times. Patrick Kavanagh
obviously had a huge effect on me. So did RB Kitaj although in fact I only met him once and
that was some years later. By that stage I had read all the catalogues of his own work. I met
him in 1983 in his studio in London, a very quiet, pleasant man. And above all a man of
books, particularly of poetry. And he had done portraits of many of the American poets who
were friends of his like Robert Duncan, Robert Creely. He was a kind of Ezra Pound-like
figure in London, an American in London. There was a retrospective exhibition of Kitaj in
1994 in what is now Tate Britain and I went over to see it with my daughter Sarah who is a
painter herself. The most ghastly thing happened then; the critics in London with one or two
exceptions such as Timothy Hyman, slaughtered him. He had invited myself and my daughter
to call to see him, but he rang up to cancel it because of the state he was in which was all too
understandable. [The reviews] were very personal. One of the things they criticised him for,
amongst other things, was that he was a literary painter, that the influence of books and the
world of books was far too great and was completely out of fashion. Also that there was too
much of the relationship of man and woman in his paintings. Some observers of this
nightmare have said that, whether they knew it or not, there was something anti-Semitic
about the whole tone of the reviewing. Critics deny this of course, but what I do think is true
is that they resented him: he liked being a polemicist, he wrote a lot about painting, he said a
lot of things. But he was inspiring. Not only did he give me back the authority of my own
eyes – as I feel Francis Bacon had done, in fact years before that when I first saw his
paintings in the same Tate Gallery in the sixties. Brian Kennedy95 may have said that the
Kitaj exhibition affected me and how Crazy about Women was very influenced – and
consciously influenced, I was following Kitaj in the way I did it.
I was incredibly fortunate, and in a way I have to thank my wife, Nessa. She was a full time
remedial teacher who had set up the educational unit in Cork prison some years previously. I
had been working very hard at that time on a particular commission. I was very tired and
went to London for three weeks which was most inconvenient for my wife, but she
encouraged me. She was extremely supportive.
CF: Much of your writing on the subject of the Church seems to display an anger and a
melancholy arising from the Church’s direction since Vatican II. Can you comment on this?
PD: Again, that’s just totally true, that observation. Everyone has from childhood some
heroes and heroines. Unquestionably one to me is Pope John XXIII. He is alive to me today –
perhaps in some senses more so than he was when he was actually alive. In fact I did a radio
programme about him. Other heroes are Mohammed Ali ... John Moriarty of course. For such
a small country there are a number of very fine writers who have been writing in my lifetime
in Ireland, and some of them very fine people. There’s only one of those people that I would
call a hero in that sense of the word – or two of them – Patrick Kavanagh and John Moriarty.
95
Kennedy, B (1996) ‘Crazy About Women: Poems About Paintings’ in Tóibín, C. ed The Kilfenora Teaboy: A
Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island pp. 155-163
287
There are two aspects to it [his writings on the Church] I suppose. There’s the satirical, like
‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography’ (SC, 52) – I feel even more angry now than I did
then, and God knows I felt angry then. Though a lot of it now I put a big question mark
opposite because the older I’ve got I believe more and more in Patrick Kavanagh’s line
‘Satire is unfruitful prayer’ ...
CF: ‘Only wild shoots of pity there, / And you must go inland and be / Lost in compassion’s
ecstasy, / Where suffering soars in summer air - / The millstone has become a star’
(Kavanagh 2004, 208).
PD: Exactly. I wish I could hang those lines up on my wall. That’s the criticism I would
make of some of the things I published in the seventies and the eighties. But I’d still say, by
and large though, that I’m glad I published what I published. Christianity is my mother
tongue, as John Moriarty said. That’s how it is with me, even if I fall down of course in all
sorts of ways. These are the prayers I say, or try to say: the psalms, I try to follow the
scriptures of the day or of the Sunday if not the days. So what the Bishops and the
Archbishops get up to – and the Popes since John XXIII – I just ignore them as best I can.
But there are times when anger gets the better of me.
One of the writers who had a big effect – and I can see it in some of my poems, but I couldn’t
quote you a line or direct quote from him – is the Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff. Does
the name mean anything to you?
CF: Yes, a liberation theologian?
PD: Yes and for that reason summoned to Rome in 1984 by Cardinal Ratzinger to be
interrogated. The upshot was that he was silenced: banned from teaching and publishing. I
was never quite sure what happened afterwards until I went to Brazil myself under the
auspices of the British Council to give a reading tour in 1995. I spent a month flying up and
down Brazil which was wonderful except that it was so exhausting that I couldn’t keep the
kind of diary that I was mentioning to you. Nevertheless I did get a glimpse of that country
and the incredible people. My poem for Father Frank Murphy, the priest in Recife96, that’s an
example of another kind of poem to do with religion and the life of a priest. He was an
extraordinary and wonderful man.
But Leonardo Boff, as a result of what Ratzinger did – I find it distasteful that he has the
name of Benedict and the Benedictine Rule which is such a wonderful document: to me he is
Cardinal Ratzinger. I had thought that Leonardo Boff had left the Church completely, but no,
when I was in Brazil I discovered that he has his own radio or television programme and was
very well known to the general population. That was ten years on, in 1995. What happened
was when he went back he was a figure of enormous controversy and in order to save his
Franciscan brethren embarrassment and discomfort he left the Franciscans. And some years
later he married. In other words he laicised himself, a horrible phrase. What did not only
Ratzinger but Pope John Paul II think they were doing driving the finest people out of their
own Church? Phrases like ‘Liberation Theology’ ... I asked Father Frank Murphy about the
subject and he didn’t want to talk about it. Not because he had anything to hide but what he
96
‘Recife Children’s Project, 10 June 1995’ (GFB, 15)
288
said was ‘My life here is a 24-hour life, looking after my parishioners. I haven’t time to be
thinking about Archbishops and Popes. That’s another world. Let them get on with it.’
CF: In August 2008 after your poem ‘Archbishop Martin Lays Down The Party Line’ was
published in the Irish Times Hugh Lenihan wrote an opinion column in which you and others
were referred to as ‘aging irreconcilables’ who should just let the Church go its own way 97.
What keeps you passionate about Church Hierarchy?
PD: Well, I’m a human being, the anger hasn’t subsided. I felt this kind of anger before all
the terrible reports came out, and so on. I haven’t read that poem since. My memory of it is
that it’s quite likely that it’s too crude. The same thing as what Patrick Kavanagh said (see
comments above regarding satire). And yet I don’t regret having published it. Patsy McGarry
was the journalist who took responsibility for getting it published – not the literary editor.
All I can say is with regard to four or five of the citizens of Ireland that I know – just take one
of them who I have admired all my life and that is Father Patrick O’Brien. Have you come
across him at all?
CF: Not outside your own work. You dedicated Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil to him?
PD: No, the title poem is about him. And I name him in the poem and quote his homily and
describe having dinner together and watching the Kerry-Mayo All Ireland Final. So that’s a
portrait of Father Patrick O’Brien. At that stage he was a curate in Kilmeena, County Mayo.
A poet all his life himself, he did publish one book with Dedalus Press called A Book of
Genesis and I’m sure he has written hundreds of poems since then. Like Father Murphy in
Brazil his parish is the centre of his life, ministering to everybody but especially people who
are ill or elderly. And his homilies – every Sunday is an occasion. I’d give my two hands to
see a big book of those homilies. He was a great friend of John [Moriarty]’s, and of John
O’Donoghue – he knew them both very well. There’s one room in his house, wherever his
house happens to be, devoted to Tony O’Malley. He was a lifelong friend of Tony O’Malley
and Jane O’Malley. He said Tony O’Malley’s funeral mass – in my radio diaries I have a
piece about the funeral of Tony O’Malley and I name Father Pat O’Brien there98.
There’s also Father Kevin Hegarty in north Mayo who became infamous when the Hierarchy
perpetrated another atrocity typical of their own tiny minds. That was when he was editor of,
I think it was, Intercom. He was axed as editor and sent to a parish not far from Belmullet. He
has been so kind as to come to some of my readings in Westport, County Mayo.
CF: What was his particular crime, do you remember?
PD: Oh ... well as you know, they never will say. We’re using the phrase ‘Liberation
Theologian’ – for being too liberal I suppose. Occasionally you’ll find an article by Father
Pat O’Brien in The Furrow and Father Kevin Hegarty, you might find him also. Or in
Doctrine and Life which is a terrific journal. Father Bernard Tracey OP, a Dominican, is
editor of that.
97
98
Lenihan, H, ‘Poetry or Polemic?’, The Irish Times, 23rd August 2008
‘The Funeral of Tony O’Malley’ (PDD, 160)
289
CF: On the subject of Church journals, your poem ‘Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour
Photography’ hinges on the word ‘reality’. Is that a nod to the Redemptorist magazine of the
same name?
PD: It’s not, no. In fact John F Deane, sometime in the seventies he had some connection
with Reality. That’s how I came to be published there. Anyway, as usual I think I have
concentrated on the dark side – namely the Archbishop up in Drumcondra – when you think
of wonderful people like Bernard Treacy ...
CF: In the poem where you mention Father O’Brien99 you mention borrowing his
commentary on the Bible. You used Asia Minor, which obviously is the birthplace of Saint
Paul, in the title of your first solo collection. You then return to Saint Paul with Praise in
Which I Live and Move and Have my Being. Do you like to play with that a lot?
PD: No ... you’re the first person to make that connection which even I wasn’t conscious of.
O Westport in the light of Asia Minor is obviously a long time ago and actually for a long
time I disliked – or thought I disliked – the person of Saint Paul. I disliked the harsh
monosyllabic tone of the name. But then I was in Greece in 2006, in Athens – there’s a poem
‘Walking with Professor Dillon in the Old Agora in Athens’ (LM: 66) – he was incredible
company to be with. But as a result of his guided tour around the Agora – climbing up and
down the Areopagus Hill and the Acropolis Paul became a very vivid person to me. And I
reread of course, and have since reread many, many times the Acts of the Apostles.
CF: In your poem ‘Women of Athens’ (LM: 59) you address yourself and say ‘Come down,
Paul, from your perch of pride, / Come down off the Areopagus Hill’. Are you self-criticising
there, or ...
PD: No, I’m not. I’m playing on the name there, but I’m addressing myself. I’m not thinking
primarily of the apostle. But of course it’s all born of the fact that he did what he did on the
Areopagus Hill.
I want to say something here about (my teacher) Joe Veale – you couldn’t exaggerate the
effect he had on us boys from twelve to seventeen. Officially he taught English literature but
he taught philosophy, economics, theology. He had a huge effect and that great line and
whole passage from the Acts of the Apostles about the altar to the unknown God100 - that’s
where I would have first heard that, hearing him quoting it. Somewhere roughly between
1958 and 1962. He was absolutely obsessed by the Nixon-Kennedy television debates: so
much so that I actually start to think I saw them myself. He would come in to class every day
and tell us about them. He died about seven or eight years ago.
CF: I have written a chapter on your use of the image of the scapegoat. Does that mean much
to you?
PD: It’s funny that you should say that because I had often thought – I’ve chosen the covers
of my books always – I know I thought about asking permission to use Holman Hunt’s
painting called ‘The Scapegoat’. I saw it recently for the first time in about twenty or thirty
years in an art gallery in Manchester. It’s of a scapegoat in the Dead Sea, it’s stunning. I
99
‘Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil’ (GFB, 3)
Acts, 17:23
100
290
would have first seen a reproduction of that sometime in the late seventies or circa nineteen
eighty. And it was always in the back of my mind. But other than that I can’t think of
anything to say.
CF: The Biblical idea of the scapegoat seems to be quite prominent in the way that I’ve read
your work at least. And tied in with this is your repeated use of the word innocence. The
word obviously has a tremendous amount of resonances from Blake’s Songs of Innocence
and Experience down to Tom Waits’s ‘Innocent When You Dream’.
PD: Yes, if one deserved to have an epitaph – which one surely usually does not – I would
have on my headstone those lines ...
CF: ‘It’s memories that I’m stealing / But you’re innocent when you dream...’101?
PD: Yes. Because to come back to what you were asking me in the beginning about writing –
chronicle, diary, fiction and documentary – it’s the dreaming state of consciousness that you
have to be in. It is that state of dreaming consciousness where you’ve managed to escape the
ego. The ego is the Cardinal Ratzinger who is constantly at your side. It’s all the time
interfering, it never lets you go. I’ve always felt that it’s the bane – but more importantly you
know it in your blood. If suddenly an afternoon has gone by in a few seconds while you’ve
been trying to write a stanza or two or three pages. So, ‘Innocent When You Dream’, when I
first heard it I knew that says it all.
CF: Do you feel a connection there between ‘Life is a Dream’102 and ‘Innocent When You
Dream’?
PD: Oh yes. Indeed if it had occurred to me I might have attempted to get permission to use
that as an epigraph. I’ve brought my copy of the book along to remind me of some other
things in this regard. There’s a poem in The Berlin Wall Café called ‘Windfall’103 which
contains the line ‘Dreaming that life is a dream which is real’ – so that’s something that goes
way back in my own life. That feeling about life and writing. Anthony Cronin came back
from living in Spain either at the end of 1962 or 1963 and I overheard him one night quoting
the title of Calderon’s La Vida Es Sueño. He had been living in Spain for some years and as I
overheard him saying it it struck me dumb on the spot. It stayed with me all these years and I
end up using it in the title of this book. I bumped into Roddy Doyle one day and he reminded
me of something that he said was part of everyone’s childhood:
Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream.
He felt sure that I had heard that at my mother’s knee. And then a poem – since I first read it
in translation by D.M. Thomas in 1982 – namely Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’. When I
first went to the USSR in 1983, with Anthony Cronin as it happens, I came to read Pushkin’s
‘The Bronze Horseman’ and there are these lines in it which ask is all our life an empty
101
Waits, T, Frank’s Wild Years, Island Records, 1987.
Durcan, P, Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007, London: Harvill Secker
103
‘“Windfall”, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ (BWC, 43)
102
291
dream. So that definitely affected me. And only recently I’ve been reminded of one of
Prospero’s speeches near the end of The Tempest –
CF: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’104?
PD: Yes. Which of course is an incredible speech. I’d be telling a lie if I said that that was in
my mind, because it wasn’t. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read The Tempest, I’m sad to say. But it
was just wonderful to come upon them recently, those lines.
CF: So when you heard Anthony Cronin say the title of the Calderon play (La Vida Es
Sueño), it seemed to strike a deep chord with you. Did it name something you had already
felt?
PD: Yes. And the same thing later when I heard ‘Innocent When You Dream’. The feelings
and ways of looking and seeing that you have from childhood through adolescence, right
through your twenties – well, that entire childhood is definitely over in its straightforward
sense by the age of thirty.
A film that had a huge effect on me, a bit like the Tom Waits song, was Wings of Desire
made by Wenders. It came out sometime in the eighties. But the whole idea of life being a
story – that the human being has to have a story in which to live, this is something John
Moriarty was very eloquent about – that’s the theme of Wings of Desire.
CF: Your 2004 poem ‘Raftery in Tokyo’ (AoL, 113) you speak about poets ‘serenading that
crazy innocence’. Do you see that as a duty of poetry?
PD: When you frame it like that I say yes, of course. But when it comes up as a gift of a line
in poetry I’m very grateful – I remember writing that. As a painter makes a stroke that was
not preordained, you recognise that that says what I’ve been struggling to say.
The child goes along, approximately to eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and then that – as
John Moriarty might say ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘cataclysmic’ – process begins. So you become not
a different creature, but a radically transformed creature. Only yesterday I was reading in The
Irish Times an article about the Hungarian revolution of 1956 – I was exactly twelve years of
age when that happened. And I can see myself literally sitting at my mother’s knees while my
mother was knitting. Before me spread out on the floor were the newspapers with an
enormous number of black and white photographs of the streets of Budapest. The name of the
new Prime Minister was Imre Nagy. To me that’s more vivid than things that have happened
in the last year. That was being a child, you experience things so immediately. Those
photographs had a hell of an effect on me. Cardinal Mindszenty105 went into hiding in the
U.S. legation.
CF: In relation to Cries of an Irish Caveman there are a selection of paintings included in
your deposit with the National Library in 2006. They were proposed covers for the book – do
you remember the context in which they were produced. They were minotaur figures, halfman and half-bull.
104
See Prospero’s speech in The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Act IV Scene I.
See the speaker of ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno’ who states ‘He was a great hero of ours, Cardinal
Mindszenty’ (GHR, 5).
105
292
PD: No, I remember the cover that was used – it is by Robin Law. He was the man behind
Spitting Image – but a lot of people, including myself, didn’t know that he was also a very
fine artist. An Australian. But it was thanks to my publisher that I discovered that particular
painting.
CF: Can you say something about the significance of the image of the cave in your work –
the cave as your description of your dwelling?
PD: Well unfortunately where I live is very cave-like. I think it was probably because of my
journey in Australia. You know there’s a feeling in that poem – ‘Give Him Bondi’ (CIC, 3) –
that in nearly drowning I was being punished by the Aboriginal people for being a bit too
casual about engaging in discussions about their position in Australian life. I more or less say
that in the poem. For many years before that I had read a lot of Bruce Chatwin, particularly
his book The Songlines and heard a lot about him. Because caves literally were very much
part of surviving in the desert, in the bush. I got a train – known as The Ghan – from the
south to the north of Australia to Alice Springs. From there I got a bus to Ayers Rock or
Uluru. The cave has been very much part of the life of the Aboriginal people for forty-two
thousand years. Not to mention here in Ireland, in so-called prehistory.
Also, talking of heroes, another one was Professor MJ O’Kelly in UCC, he was a terrific
teacher. As I tried to say several times, he gave me back Ireland. I’d been living in London
for years and he was a wonderful teacher. But in teaching Irish archaeology you begin in the
ice-age and the first remains of creatures you come upon are in caves. Caves in Waterford
and also to the north-west of Boyle. Also human beings in Ireland at various stages lived in
caves. Then to jump to me in Ringsend ... When my marriage collapsed, that was one of the
worst times in my life, as it is for most people when that happens. And also grim things
happened then, as I wandered around Dublin basically homeless in 1984. But wonderful
things also happened then – I ended up getting the use of a dwelling in the most easterly
extremity of Ringsend, right down in the depths of the docks. I had a roof over my head but it
was a tiny shoebox. It’s incredibly dark, a kind of Coronation Street-like terrace. But there’s
more to it than that ...
CF: It’s in your work as early as ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’ who boasts of being a ‘famous
caveman’ (TB, 50).
PD: That’s good, thank you for reminding me of that. That poem is many things, but one of
the things it is, is a hymn to my wife, Nessa. It was written while I was still studying
archaeology, while I was still in the orbit of Professor O’Kelly.
CF: This is the man who uncovered Newgrange ...
PD: That’s right – the ‘box’. He excavated at Newgrange for twenty or thirty years. It was his
life. His wife, Claire O’Kelly, also a professional archaeologist, she published a book on the
art of Newgrange. But he was the excavator up there, certainly through all the sixties. He
spent his life up there. He would bring his students up there to Townley Hall which at the
time was owned by Trinity. Did you ever read [Robert Lloyd] Praeger’s classic book, The
Way That I Went? Praeger, who was a great botanist and archaeologist, literally walked
Ireland. He would have been in his heyday sometime around the turn of the century.
293
CF: You wrote a column for The Cork Examiner for some years and have commented in
various pieces of poetry and prose on journalism itself. Do you read much journalism these
days?
PD: Probably too much. I think we all have a desperate need, our nature is crying out for
fiction of some kind in our lives. I spend too much time reading newspapers and looking at
television. Though I have cut down hugely on the television. I buy the Telegraph on a
Tuesday for the art criticism of Richard Dorment. He’s been the art critic there now for
maybe twenty-five years. And also in the Telegraph I’ve always admired their obituary page,
you read great stories there.
CF: You have a poem in O Westport In the Light of Asia Minor which is a tribute to Liam
Hourican106. It seems to speak very highly of the possibilities of journalism, describing it as
‘a poetry more / than poetry is’.
PD: Yes, I meant every word of that. Only yesterday I was reading an article about Marie
Colvin, the American journalist who was killed in a bomb in Syria. There are journalists,
Lara Marlowe is another. George Orwell, I think that’s how he felt, even though he wrote
books of fiction – I think he regarded the ultimate calling to be that of a journalist with a
conscience, using language as it should have been used like Liam Hourican did. John
Bowman reproduced my poem in his history of RTÉ television with a photograph of Liam
Hourican.
CF: Then there is another strain in your work – typified by pieces such as ‘Liam Lawlor’
(PDD, 9) in Paul Durcan’s Diary – which seem disturbed by backroom agendas in media
circles, seem troubled by the ways in which public discourse is conducted.
PD: Yes, on the one hand you have rare people like Liam Hourican or Lara Marlowe, people
of massive integrity and courage. And on the other hand you have all of these people who are
... it’s hard to avoid horrible, negative language about them. They scurry about this very town
as we speak, just looking for anything malicious they can say about anybody. And of course
politicians are in the front line of that, David Norris is a very dramatic example of just how
rotten things are in the state of Denmark at that level. The older you get too the less tolerant
you become of the whole celebrity thing.
CF: I didn’t live through the Ireland in which the Church acted as moral police, but
sometimes when I hear that time described I feel our current media occupy a strangely
analogous position.
PD: Oh yes. Unquestionably there are agendas that they control and manipulate. And the
trouble is if you say a word against them they’re prepared to destroy you.
Friendship is very important in the life of an artist or a poet – I’ve already said this in relation
to the first friends I had like Michael Hartnett, John Moriarty, Anthony Cronin, Leland
Bardwell, Macdara Woods, Brian Lynch and a number of other people whose names are not
coming straight to mind. But another person, from the mid-seventies, was Michael D
[Higgins]. The Arts Council started a scheme approximately 1974 or 1976 called the ‘Writers
in Schools’ scheme where a school could invite a writer to come. The Arts Council would
106
‘Tribute to a Reporter in Belfast, 1974’ (OW, 63)
294
pay half the fee plus the expenses and the school would pay half the free. The main
breadwinner in our house was my wife but I managed to pay the bills with what I got from
the ‘Artists in Schools’ scheme and being a freelance journalist and member of the NUJ.
Another journalist I also hugely admire is Vincent Browne. We have known each other since
we were eighteen. I was editor of a magazine in Cork which came into existence in 1978, The
Cork Review. I accepted the position of editor on the condition that contributors were paid
NUJ rates. At the time Vincent Browne had founded and was editing Magill magazine. He
offered to devote a page of Magill to my poetry every issue for the next year at NUJ rates,
proper money. And he did just that. I’d say a lot of those poems ended up in Sam’s Cross.
Then he later employed me as a journalist to do small reports and interviews in Cork.
CF: You have, in the past travelled quite a lot to give readings. Is that still as big a part of
your life now?
PD: I have done. This year my new book came out in April – I have been driving up and
down Ireland and I find that hard. But publishing the books over the years – even if, like T.S.
Eliot said, I may have paid too high a price for poetry – I feel very fortunate in that regard.
Poetry has brought me to parts of the world I would never have been without it. Brazil.
Jerusalem. Japan. New Zealand.
CF: At the end of the 1980s you did a roundtable interview with Richard Kearney which was
published in his book Navigations. But in that interview you said that when you return from
travel you are ‘filled with new outrages, new dreams’107. Is it still like that?
PD: I suppose it is. That [the Navigations quote] doesn’t mean an awful lot. I was so
fortunate to see the Soviet Union, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Yugoslavia – such
terrific culture shocks, to coin a cliché. Real shocks. The greatest one of all was probably
Japan. And so many of the people I met along the way were kind and hospitable – especially
as I am someone who cannot speak any second language. That’s possibly the only thing I
share with William Butler Yeats, and I’m not being coy about poetic ability there. He too
couldn’t speak anything, he took lessons in French. I’ve tried all my life, I’ve spent years
trying to learn Russian.
CF: Do you read much contemporary poetry?
PD: I’ve read Marie Howe108, her latest book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. There was one
poem in particular in it that was a knockout, a short poem called ‘Courage’.
CF: The writing of your two collections The Berlin Wall Café and Daddy, Daddy took place
immediately after the major life events depicted in them, namely the break-up of your
marriage in 1984 and the death of your father in 1988. Do you see writing as a catharsis?
PD: No, I don’t. But obviously when you look at it from the outside that’s one of the things it
inevitably can be. But I just simply wanted to write those poems, not knowing whether I
would wind up with a book or not. Another thing which should be remembered about books
of poetry is the conditions in which they are written. I find much more poetry in fiction these
days, for instance in the work of Richard Ford. His work, especially The Sportswriter, I feel it
107
p. 331, in Kearney, R. ed., Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006, Dublin: Lilliput
Paul Durcan shared the stage with Marie Howe and Imtiaz Dharker at the Poetry Proms in Snape Maltings
Concert Hall, Suffolk on 23rd August 2012.
108
295
had a huge effect on me. Some of the novels of Colm Tóibín, particularly The Heather
Blazing – but also The Master and Brooklyn – I feel I come closer to poetry there than I often
do reading verse.
Everybody, every writer and artist at least, needs to have good fortune. In that sense Yeats
was very fortunate that Maud Gonne did not marry him and that he married Georgie HydeLees, because I feel that he wouldn’t have written the great poems of the later part of his life
had it not been for the context and conditions that Georgie Hyde Lees provided. Not only
people in the street, but I don’t think other poets and professors understand the importance of
this. I myself know it for a personal fact with regard to the time during which I wrote not only
the section ‘Daddy, Daddy’109 but all the other poems in that book. About four months after
my father died I had the great good fortune to meet a woman whose friendship and later
companionship – we lived together later, on and off – there was an atmosphere of peace and
contentment and affection at that time. There are a number of reasons why and how Daddy,
Daddy got written but the fundamental one is just that, which is a totally private, personal
thing. Patrick Kavanagh said that poverty is not so much a matter of not having sixpence in
your pocket today – which it is, of course – but the real poverty is the anxiety of what’s going
to happen to you next week. That was a year in which I was completely free of that anxiety
and also blessed by the companionship and friendship of the woman I’m speaking about. In
my new book I refer to her name, namely in the poem ‘Kate La Touche’ (P, 85). And that
particular year was 1989.
CF: In your poem ‘“Windfall”, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’ (BWC, 43) you refer to the family as
‘the most subversive unit in society’. Obviously in that context the subversion is a positive
thing and you are celebrating the family. But reading that statement across your work there is
a way in which the family could be said to be subversive in an altogether darker way.
PD: Yes, but when I said it there I meant it in a totally celebratory way. But yes, there are
other poems where the family is destructive.
CF: ‘The Seal of Burrishoole’ (LM, 50) for example?
PD: Yes, it’s very explicit there. Sadly that’s the way things go in Ireland, or perhaps all over
the world. But in that poem [‘Windfall’] I meant it in a completely celebratory sense.
CF: Your collection The Laugher of Mothers and particularly the poems in the second
section about your mother – if you’ll excuse me for saying it – there doesn’t seem to be a lot
of laughter in them.
PD: Looking back on it now, I feel there are probably not enough poems in it. My mother
had – especially the older she got – a kind of black humour. For example, the poem about the
trapeze110. And the last poems, the poems in which she is touching eighty years of age. I can
hear her laughing anyway. She had a very distinctive laugh. One of the poems which means a
lot to me particularly is ‘Treasure Island’ [sic] (LM, 74), about going to the cinema. There
may not be much straight-forward comedy in it, but there’s a lot of warmth and light in it.
109
It should be noted that ‘Daddy, Daddy’ is a subsection of the book of the same name pp. 99-185. When the
book as a whole is being referred to this is done in italics i.e. Daddy, Daddy.
110
‘Little Old Lady’ (LM, 118)
296
CF: Yes, that’s agreed. Given that so many of the poems detail how much your mother had
to give up, to sacrifice as a captive to a particular male world, it strikes me that the laughter
of the title can be interpreted as derisory – that she is laughing at the male game.
PD: Yes, she was very hurt by that.
By the way, some of my favourite lines – one lives by certain quotations – are Yeats’s lines
in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ about the rhetorician deceiving his neighbour, the sentimentalist
himself, and art being a vision of reality111. That’s something I have tried to live by, simply.
Journalists often mock poets as living up on the moon, but in fact real poetry is a vision of
reality and journalism all too often is anything but.
CF: In Daddy, Daddy you have a line which reads ‘In reality fiction is all that matters’ (DD,
71).
PD: Yes, it meant an awful lot to me just saying that. And I’m sure Yeats’s line was in my
mind when I wrote that. I distinctly remember feeling that that line as very fitting, but no
doubt Yeats was in my mind. Another quotation which I don’t think ever came into a poem
quite as succinctly as that was the Wallace Stevens line ‘the poem is the cry of its occasion’.
CF: The film that you made with Alan Gilsenan112, can you tell me a little about the making
of that? As I remember it there was a camera shot on yourself and no actual dialogue in the
film, just your voice.
PD: No, just once at the very end you hear his voice for about three seconds.
CF: Who made that decision?
PD: A number of TV and film producers down the years had suggested making a
documentary and just at the last moment I never felt at ease with it. But Alan Gilsenan was
somebody whose work I admired, and I admired him personally. Most importantly of all I
just trusted him totally. So after a few preliminary meetings and lunches discussing the idea
we fixed on a date and time. I agreed and signed a contract to go ahead with it. Even at that
point we had left it on the basis that I was going to write a script. We both agreed we had no
interest in a conventional film of the poet walking through the fields or meeting the poems
with matching images. The most memorable readings I had ever seen on television by a poet
were Tony Harrison on Channel Four.
CF: Was it of his poem ‘V’?
PD: Yes. He read in what they call ‘black limbo’, that’s the technical phrase for just seeing
the head and shoulders and just black. For some reason most TV producers don’t like to do
that. Recently I was asked by a company who are making a documentary about cinema for
RTÉ – they said they wanted to use my poem ‘Treasure Island’ [sic] (LM, 74) – and they
gave the impression that they wanted to use the whole poem. And because the poem means a
lot to me I told my agent I was very interested but that I would only do it on condition that it
111
‘The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, / The sentimentalist himself; while art / Is but a vision of
reality’ (Yeats, 159)
112
Gilsenan, A, (2007) Paul Durcan: The Dark School 1944-1971, Dublin: Yellow Asylum Film Productions
297
was not edited and that I would read it straight to camera in the very same way, to autocue in
‘black limbo’. But they only wanted to use parts of it, and to illustrate it – so that was the end
of the story. I just couldn’t do it.
But Alan Gilsenan fixed a date and hired a studio in Ardmore for two or maybe three days.
And we just spent all of those two days in the place which was like a giant airport hangar. I
hadn’t come up with a script I was happy with. So the way we agreed to do it was as a
documentary of my boyhood up to the age of twenty seven. That he would ask me questions
which would not appear on the film and I would talk. He had made a documentary film of my
poem ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno’ (GHR, 3) which was broadcast on one of RTÉ’s
books programmes in the late nineties. He used archival footage, some of it black and white –
I remember he got footage of nuns running across a strand. I was quite moved by that and
other archival material used.
One thing I have been told recently is that one can now download any of RTÉ’s radio
documentaries from their website. There you’ll find a documentary called ‘Woodbrook’,
relating the book of that name by David Thomson. It’s about the Big House between Carrickon-Shannon and Cootehall. One of the first times I met Michael Longley in Henchy’s pub in
Saint Luke’s Cross in Cork he recommended it very highly to me. I was the narrator then on
the radio documentary which was made in 1986.
CF: You make extensive use in your poetry of alter-egos and personae, frequently animals –
a dog, a cow, a snail ...
PD: It’s funny, it has never occurred to me that that’s happened more than once. But yes,
you’re right. But again it’s a child’s affinity with animals. The elephant is the creature I
originally felt most affinity with, the one in Dublin zoo. In the last ten years, for reasons
unbeknownst to me, it changed from the elephant to the giraffe. I’ve no idea why. But you
know how a child identifies – to use the jargon – totally with creatures. It’s that kind of thing.
I wasn’t being programmatic and I hadn’t even been that conscious of the range of animals
until you mentioned it just now.
CF: Can you expand upon what you have said in Paul Durcan’s Diary about the painter
Balthus?
PD: Again it was very like Kitaj, but I never met Balthus. When I first saw a Balthus in
August of 1980 I was absolutely stunned by anything by him. So much so that in 1983 there
was a retrospective in Paris and I went to Paris for a couple of weeks to visit it every day.
And I have subsequently seen some of the famous paintings in New York and Washington
and one or two other places. I used to get into quarrels with some people about him – it was
suggested at one stage that he was some kind of abuser of young girls – I was shocked that
this had even been suggested. I knew that he had been a great friend of Camus between and
after the wars, even working as a set designer for a play Camus did.
CF: I’m particularly interested in Balthus as a self-mythologiser, someone who relentlessly
played with biographers. Would you be aware of, or attracted to, that side of him?
PD: No, I wouldn’t be attracted to that side of anybody if they were doing that. The only
biography of Balthus that I have read is by a man called Nicholas Fox Weber – and that to me
is one of the most atrocious books I’ve ever read. It’s vile. But it seems for people like
298
Balthus – no matter how much money you have, or fame – you cannot defend yourself
against certain types of people who are going to worm their way into your life. I felt duped
and disgusted by that book. But it was the work of Balthus I got to know really well – I mean
physically, the way he put paint on canvas. It came as no surprise to hear that he had spent
months, if not years, standing at the frescoes of Pierro della Francesco. You can see that in
Balthus.
About his painting of young girls – in a way it comes back to what we first talked about. I
was talking about that line somewhere between childhood and adolescence – moving from
that dream time into the next time. There’s a border area there. In a funny way everything
seems to come down to borders, to the spaces in between. But that preoccupied Balthus
virtually all his life. One of the last paintings he ever did is of a figure, obviously himself,
opening the curtains of a room, and behind him is a girl kneeling, playing. I can remember
my own daughter lying on the floor before that painting, drawing. To me those paintings of
Balthus were just things of intense beauty. I spent hours with them, as I did with the paintings
of Bacon and listening to certain songs. You’re not calculating anything, but they enter the
bloodstream.
CF: I was thinking particularly about his introduction to an exhibition of his in London in the
middle-1960s. He was asked to give some biographical information for the exhibition’s
catalogue and wrote back simply that ‘No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of
whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures’ (Néret, 31).
PD: I would be totally in sympathy with him. But I’m sure he could be accused of being
arrogant.
CF: Which part of you would be in sympathy with him?
PD: To me the work is what is important. That is why I feel our conversation is fruitful,
because you have concentrated for so long, and so deeply and so intensely on the work itself.
In that context the artist – and I dare say this may be true of Balthus too – would speak with
somebody. I have often found myself in the situation, not just in Ireland but in Canada and
other places around the world, where I am being interviewed – sometimes live on radio – and
I become aware almost instantaneously that the interviewer neither has knowledge of nor
interest in my work. It’s agony. But Balthus too was of genuinely aristocratic background, so
I’m sure he could be a bit uppity at times.
CF: The statement by Balthus reminds me of a line in your poem ‘Paul’ (DD, 3), the first
poem in the collection Daddy, Daddy. The line is ‘All we know about him is that his name
was Paul’.
PD: Yes, that’s fair enough.
CF: Can I ask you about how much care and time you invest in the ordering of the poems in
any particular collection?
PD: I do put in a lot of time to it. And usually with that, after the publication – as with the
poems themselves – you think this should have gone before that or vice versa.
299
CF: I’m looking particularly at the ‘Daddy, Daddy’ section of your 1990 collection which
begins with ‘Ulysses’ and ends with ‘Our Father’.
PD: Indeed, well that was very deliberate. I was just lucky that I had those poems to begin
and end it with. I guess if I was asked what my favourite novel is I would have to say
Ulysses. Though recently I’ve been rereading Strumpet City and at first I was saying to
myself that it was up there with Ulysses. The RTÉ production, which I have been watching
again recently, is their finest hour. David Kelly’s performance is Tolstoyan in its depiction of
comedy and suffering. The book is perhaps closer to Charles Dickens, and apart from the odd
cliché here and there it’s great writing. He’s up there with Joyce in relation to his
understanding of women’s feelings, of the way in which women often look at things radically
differently.
CF: ‘entirely sensitive to a woman’s world’ (BWC, 6)?
PD: Yes!
CF: I want to ask you about the epigraphs to your books – does the epigraph act as a guiding
principle for the writing of the book or is it usually appended after the completion of it?
PD: After the completion of it. But I always felt it was a very important thing. But not one
single critic or reader has made any mention of the epigraph of my new book113. I don’t know
anything about the author –
CF: Manaranche? He is a French Jesuit priest I believe.
PD: Yes. I came upon that quotation in a book by Leonardo Boff. Therefore I presumed that
he was a Liberation Theologian but I know nothing about him whatsoever. But Leonardo
Boff, whom I revere, had quoted him. It makes my day to hear that he’s a Jesuit. That
quotation means the world to me.
CF: When did you come across it first?
PD: Many years ago. I first read Leonardo Boff in 1984, that same year that he was silenced.
But it was during the writing of the book that I came upon it again. I was very moved by it.
113
‘Despite all, when all hope is lost, what actually reappears is the motherly image of a oneness recovered at
last: God is only father when he promises a mother’s love.’ André Manaranche, O Espírito e a Mulher, São
Paulo, 1976 (P, epigraph)
300
Bibliography
Primary Texts and Resources:
Books:
Durcan, P (2012), Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being, London: Harvill
Secker.
Durcan, P (2009), Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007, London: Harvill
Secker.
Durcan, P (2007), The Laughter of Mothers, London: Harvill Secker.
Durcan, P (2004), The Art of Life, London: Harvill Secker.
Durcan, P (2003), Paul Durcan’s Diary, Dublin: New Island.
Durcan, P (2001), Cries of an Irish Caveman, London: The Harvill Press.
Durcan, P (1999), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil, London: Harvill Secker.
Durcan, P. (1996), Christmas Day [including ‘A Goose in the Frost’], London: Harvill
Secker.
Durcan, P (1995), O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (incorporating poems from
Endsville), London: The Harvill Press (first published 1975).
Durcan, P (1994), Give Me Your Hand, London: MacMillan [in association with National
Gallery Publications].
Durcan, P (1993), A Snail in my Prime: New and Selected Poems, London: HarperCollins.
Durcan, P, (1991), Crazy about Women, Dublin: The National Gallery of Ireland.
Durcan, P (1990), Daddy, Daddy, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.
Durcan, P (1987), Going Home to Russia, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.
Durcan, P (1985), The Berlin Wall Café, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.
Durcan, P. (1983), Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela, Dublin: Raven Arts Press.
Durcan, P (1982), Ark of the North, Dublin: Raven Arts Press.
Durcan, P (1982), The Selected Paul Durcan (ed. Edna Longley), Belfast: The Blackstaff
Press.
Durcan, P. (1980), Jesus, Break His Fall, Dublin: Raven Arts Press.
Durcan, P (1978), Sam’s Cross, Dublin: Profile Poetry.
Durcan, P (1976), Teresa’s Bar, Dublin: Gallery Press.
Durcan, P (1967), Endsville (with Brian Lynch), Dublin: New Writers Press.
301
Newspaper articles:
Durcan, P. (2008), ‘We’ll have none of your individualistic gestures’, Irish Times, August
19th 2008, p. 12.
Durcan, P. (1981), ‘Interviewing Bacon’, The Cork Examiner, 24th February 1981.
Durcan, P. (1980) ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’, The Cork Examiner, August 19th 1980.
Radio broadcasts:
Durcan, P (1999a), ‘A Giant at My Shoulder: Pope John XXIII’ RTE Radio 1, 13 Aug.
1999, 10:30-11:00 pm.
Interview with the current author:
Durcan, P. and Farnan, C (2012), Paul Durcan was interviewed by the current author as part
of preparation of this thesis. The interview, a full transcript of which is included here as
Appendix One, was conducted in Dublin on 24th October 2012.
Other:
After 2006 Paul Durcan made a substantial deposit of literary papers with the National
Library of Ireland. The catalogue for this deposit – Collection List 144 / Accession no. 6618
– is accessible here: http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/144_PaulDurcan.pdf [website
accessed successfully on 8th February 2013]. Where referred to in this study the National
Library Accession Catalogue is abbreviated as ‘NLI catalogue’. The exact date of the deposit
is not noted by the library.
Secondary Texts and Resources:
Books:
Anderson, B (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London & New York: Verso.
Baillie, G (1995) Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, New York: Crossroad.
Bailly, L. (2009) Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide, Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
302
Barsby, J. (trans.) (2001), Terence: ‘Heauton Timorumenos / The Self-Tormentor’ in The
Woman of Andros, The Self-Tormentor and The Eunuch, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Beckett, S. (1990), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber.
Beckett, S. (1976), Watt, London, Montreuil, New York: John Calder.
Bhabha, H (1994) The Location of Culture, Oxford: Routledge.
Bishop, E (1983), Complete Poems, London: Chatto and Windus.
Cathechism of the Catholic Church (1994), Dublin: Veritas.
Clare, A. (2000) On Men: Masculinity in Crisis London: Chatto & Windus.
Coogan, M, and Metzger, B. (eds.) (2001), The Oxford Guide to Ideas and Issues of the
Bible, Oxford University Press.
Dawe, G (1995) Against Piety: Essays In Irish Poetry, Belfast: Lagan Press.
Deane, S (general editor), (1991) The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing vol. III, Derry:
Field Day Publications.
Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London & New York:
Continuum.
Ferriter, D. (2005) The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, London: Profile Books.
Fleming, C. (2004) René Girard: Violence and Mimesis, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin.
Fromm, E. (2001) The Fear of Freedom, Oxford: Routledge.
Frye, N. (1969), Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Princeton University Press.
Gifford, D. (1988), Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses: Revised and expanded edition,
University of California Press.
Girard, R (2005) Violence and the Sacred, London & New York: Continuum.
Girard, R. (2001) I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. from French by James G Williams,
New York: Orbis Books.
Girard, R (1986) The Scapegoat (translated by Yvonne Freccero), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
303
Girard, R (1979) Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism, first published in
1979 in Berkshire Review, reproduced in The Girard Reader (1996), New York: Crossroad.
Goodby, J. (2000), Irish poetry since 1950: From stillness into history, Manchester
University Press.
Gramsci, A (1971) Selections for the Prison Notebooks (translated and edited by Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith), London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Heaney, S. (1998) Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, London: Faber and Faber.
Heffernan, J., (1993), Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hopkins, G.M. (1996), Selected Poetry, Oxford World’s Classics.
Hume, D. (2000), A Treatise of Human Nature eds. Norton D. and Norton M., Oxford
University Press.
Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which is Not One (transl. Porter and Burke) New York: Cornell
University Press.
James, William (1985), The Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Joyce, J. (1993), James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition (Wyse Jackson and
McGinley eds.), London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Joyce, J (1992), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Penguin.
Joyce, J (1986), Ulysses, London, The Bodley Head / Random House.
Jung, C.G. (2002) The Undiscovered Self, Oxford: Routledge.
Kavanagh, P. (2004) Collected Poems, London: Penguin (Allen Lane).
Kavanagh, P. (2003), A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose (ed. Antoinette Quinn), Dublin:
Lilliput.
Kearney, R. (2006) Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006, Dublin: Lilliput.
Keats, J. (1998), Selected Poetry, Oxford World’s Classics.
Kenny, A (2010), ‘Berkeley’ in A New History of Western Philosophy, Oxford University
Press, pp. 558-561.
Kiberd, D (2005), The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
304
Kiberd, D (1995) Inventing Ireland, London: Vintage.
Knowlson, J (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.
Lodge D. And Wood, N. (2008) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (3rd edition)
Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Longley, E (1994), The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle:
Bloodaxe Books.
McDonagh, J. (ed.) (2008), A Fine Statement: An Irish Poet’s Anthology, Dublin: Poolbeg
Press.
MacNeice, L. (1979) The collected poems of Louis MacNeice, London: Faber and Faber.
Moriarty, J. (2006), Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, Dublin: Lilliput Press.
Moriarty, J. (2001), Nostos: An Autobiography, Dublin: Lilliput Press.
Moriarty, J. (1999, 2nd ed.), Dreamtime: Revised and Expanded edition, Dublin: Lilliput.
Néret, G (2005) Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus): The King of Cats 1908-2001, Köln
and Los Angeles: Taschen.
Olds, S. (2012), Stag’s Leap, London: Jonathan Cape.
Olds, S. (1980) Satan Says, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Pessoa, F. (2010), The Book of Disquiet (de Lancastre, M.J. ed.), London: Serpent’s Tail.
Plath, S (1985) Selected Poems (selected by Ted Hughes), London: Faber and Faber.
Salisbury, L. (2012), Laughing Matters, Comic Timing, Edinburgh University Press.
Sartre, J.P. (2007), Existentialism and Humanism, London: Methuen.
Sartre, J P (1958) Being and Nothingness, Oxon: University Paperbacks trans. Hazel E
Barnes.
Shakespeare, W (1995) The Tempest, London: Penguin Popular Classics.
Shakespeare, W (1967) Macbeth, London: Penguin.
Stevens, W. (1955) The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, London, Faber.
Sylvester, D. (1987), The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames
& Hudson.
305
Williams, J.G. (1996) Introductory and editorial passages in The Girard Reader (1996), New
York: Crossroad.
Yeats, W.B. (1956), The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, New York: Macmillan.
Wenham, G. (1987), ‘Genesis 1-15’, in Word Biblical Commentary, Barker, G. and Hubbard,
D. (general editors), Nashville, Dalllas, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Bejing: Thomas
Nelson.
Whitman, W (2004), The Portable Walt Whitman ed. Michael Warner, New York and
London: Penguin (Classics series).
Wordsworth, W. (2000), William Wordsworth: The Major Works ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford:
Oxford World Classics Series.
Chapters in Books:
Collins, L. (2003), ‘Performance and dissent: Irish poets in the public sphere’ in The
Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry ed. Matthew Campbell, Cambridge
U.P.
Goarzin, A (2010) ‘Paul Durcan’s Unsettled Poetry’ in Ross, C ed., Subversions: TransNational Readings of Modern Irish Literature, New York: Rodopi.
Goodby, J. (1996) ‘New Wave 1: ‘A Rising Tide’; Irish Poetry in the 60s’ in Dorgan, T. ed.,
Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 116-135.
Grennan, E. (1996) ‘Prime Durcan: A Collage’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The Kilfenora Teaboy: A
Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, 42-74.
Hall, S. (1996), ‘Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?’ in Du Gay, P. and Hall, S. Questions
of Cultural Identity, London: Sage.
Kennedy, B (1996) ‘Crazy About Women: Poems About Paintings’ in Tóibín, C. ed The
Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island pp. 155-163.
Longley, E. (1996) ‘Paul Durcan and the North: Recollections’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The
Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, 102-113.
Mahon, D (1996) ‘Orpheus Ascending: The Poetry of Paul Durcan’, in Tóibín, C. ed., The
Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, pp. 163-170.
O’Brien, P. (1996) ‘Your Daddy, My Daddy’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The Kilfenora Teaboy: A
Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, 75-101.
O’Toole, F. (1996) ‘In the Light of Things as They Are: Paul Durcan’s Ireland’ in Tóibín, C.
ed., The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, 26-41.
306
Padel, R (1996) ‘Spin’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan,
Dublin: New Island, pp. 114-132.
Tóibín, C. (1996) ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Spring Lamb’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The Kilfenora
Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, pp. 7-25.
Woodcock, B. (1996) ‘Tea with Paul Durcan at Dusty’s café’ in Tóibín, C. ed., The Kilfenora
Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin: New Island, pp. 133-143.
Articles in Journals, Periodicals and Newspapers:
Battersby, E (1990) ‘A completely original voice, whether genius or showman’ Irish Times,
November 10th 1990.
Banville, J. (2005) ‘The Ireland of De Valera and O’Faoláin’, The Irish Review no. 17/18
(Winter 1995), 145-152.
Brown, T (1985), review of The Berlin Wall Café in The Poetry Ireland Review, No. 15
(Winter, 1985/1986), pp. 78-81.
Busteed, J (1932), ‘Soviet Russia’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol 21, No, 84,
December 1932, pp. 531-548.
Cheng, K.B. (2006) ‘The Dublin-Moscow Line: Russia and the Poetics of Home in
Contemporary Irish Poetry’ in Irish University Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Autumn – Winter
2006), pp. 353-373.
Clutterbuck, C (2004) ‘Autumn Gold’ [review of The Art of Life] in The Irish Times, October
30th 2004, p. C11.
Cixous, H (1976) The Laugh of the Medusa translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in
Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893.
Dawe, G. (1980) ‘Writers from the South of Ireland 2: The Poetry of Paul Durcan’,
Fortnight, No. 177 (Jul. - Aug., 1980), pp. 15-16.
Deevy, P. (1999) ‘Poetry and Emotion’ The Sunday Independent, February 21st 1999.
Dwyer, C (2009) ‘Laughter lines that come with a dark side’ The Sunday Independent,
October 18th 2009.
Dwyer, C (2012) ‘Poems of love and loneliness’ in The Sunday Independent, April 8th 2012.
Elliott, M. (2004) ‘Paul Durcan: Melancholy poet of love’ Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 3,
Contemporary Irish Poetry, pp. 137-155.
307
Fryatt, K. (2003), ‘‘Bovinity’: Paul Durcan’s Cattle Mythology’ in New Voices in Irish
Criticism 4 eds. Dillane and Kelly, Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Hunter, C (1986) ‘Paul Durcan – suitably morose’ [interview with the author] in The Irish
Times, April 15th 1986.
Knowles, J. (2005) ‘It’s all about forgetting yourself’ (interview with Paul Durcan) in
Fortnight, No. 435 (Apr. - May, 2005), pp. 20-22.
Lenihan, H. (2008) ‘Poetry or Polemic?’, The Irish Times, 23rd August 2008.
Lennon J. (2000) ‘Man writing: Gender in late twentieth-century Irish poetry’ in Women’s
Studies: an interdisciplinary journal, Volume 29, Issue 5, 2000 pp. 619-649.
Matthews, A (1977), Review of Teresa’s Bar in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 66,
No. 261 (Spring, 1977), pp. 83-86.
Martiny, E (2010), ‘Comic Abjection in the Poetry of Paul Durcan’ in English Studies Vol.
91, No. 4, June 2010, pp. 412–424.
Martiny, E (2007), ‘Anxiety, Apprenticeship, Accommodation: Paul Durcan and his Poetic
Forefathers’ in New Hibernia Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Geimhreadh / Winter 2007, pp.
92-106.
Martiny, E (2006), ‘Demonic Forefather: Portraits of Samuel Beckett in the Poetry of Paul
Durcan’ in Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. 149-156.
McCracken, K (2013), 'Paul Painting Paul: Self-Portraiture and Subjectivity in Durcan’s
Poetry,' ABEI Journal - The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies [Number 14, November 2012]
pp. 103-114 (accessed online on 10th April 2013 at:
http://www.abei.org.br/images/ABEI_JOURNAL_14.pdf).
McCracken, K. (1996) ‘'Talking to One of the Old Masters': Paul Durcan's Response to
Francis Stuart in "Ark of the North"’, Writing Ulster, No. 4, Francis Stuart (1996), 95-114.
McCracken, K. (1989) ‘Canvas and Camera Translated: Paul Durcan and the Visual Arts’,
The Irish Review no. 7 (Autumn 1989), 18-29.
McCracken, K (1987), ‘Masks and Voices: Dramatic Personas in the Poetry of Paul Durcan’,
in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 13 No. 1 (June 1987) pp. 107-120.
McDonald, P (1988) ‘Home and Away (review of Going Home to Russia)’, The Irish Review
(1986-), No. 4 (Spring, 1988), pp. 106-109.
McGahern, J (1990) ‘The family as independent republic’ (interview with Fintan O’Toole)
Irish Times, October 13th.
Mooney, M. ‘The Book of Analogies (review of Going Home to Russia)’, Fortnight, No. 257
(Dec., 1987), pp. 22-23.
308
O’Donoghue, B (1997), ‘Fear of Silence’ [review of Christmas Day], The Poetry Ireland
Review, No. 53 (Summer, 1997), pp. 56-59.
O’Malley, J. P. (2012) ‘Interview: Paul Durcan on poetry and art’ in The Spectator Magazine
(online edition), Friday 25th May 2012 [interview online accessed on 13th February 2013 and
is available here: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/05/interview-paul-durcan-onpoetry-and-art/ ].
Rumens, C (1993) ‘Untitled (Review of A Snail In My Prime)’, Fortnight, No. 318 (Jun.
1993), pp. 48-49.
Simmons, J (1990) untitled review of Daddy, Daddy in The Linen Hall Review, Vol. 7, No.
3/4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 29-30.
Smith, D (1992) ‘Playing to the gallery’ (review of Crazy about Women) Fortnight, No. 304
(Mar. 1992), p. 35.
Stuart, F. (1981), ‘A Special Kind of Writer’, The Cork Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (March 1981),
pp. 27-28.
Tallant, N. (2007) ‘Kidnapped by his family and put in a mental home’ The Sunday
Independent, May 6th.
Wallace, A (2012) ‘Songs of dark experience, and innocence’ (interview with Paul Durcan)
in The Irish Times, April 5th 2012.
Wallace, A (1999), ‘It’s the body speaking’ (the Thursday interview: Paul Durcan), Irish
Times, February 18th 1999.
Wallace, A (1990) ‘Live-in Poet (interview with Paul Durcan during his residency at Trinity
College Dublin)’, The Irish Times, February 10th 1990.
Podcasts / Radio and Television Broadcasts:
Armistead, C. (2009) Interview with Paul Durcan on ‘The Guardian Books’ podcast, Friday
27th November 2009, [accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/nov/27/
books-podcast-paul-durcan-eleanor-catton on 27th October 2010].
Dungan, M (2004) ‘Rattlebag: Paul Durcan 60th Birthday Celebration’ [Interview with Paul
Durcan before a live audience at Dun Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre, October 2004. Though
the precise broadcast date is uncertain, Durcan’s 60th birthday fell on 16th October 2004],
RTÉ 2004.
Gilsenan, A. (2007) Paul Durcan: The Dark School 1944-1971, Dublin: Yellow Asylum
Film Productions.
309
Jaffa, N (2012) Interview with Paul Durcan at The Poetry Trust, recorded in August 2012
[accessed at http://www.thepoetrytrust.org/poetry-channel/archive/ on December 4th 2012].
Kenny, P (2009), Interview on RTÉ’s Today with Pat Kenny, Radio 1, 4 November 2009.
Murphy, M. (1996), Interview with Mike Murphy on The Arts Show, RTE Radio 1, December
1st 1996.
Waits, Tom (1987) ‘Innocent When You Dream’ on Frank’s Wild Years, Island Records.
Internet Sources:
Collins, L (2011) Paul Durcan was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by UCD on
Bloomsday, 16th June2011. The citation, delivered by Dr Lucy Collins, UCD School of
English, Drama and Film may be accessed online here:
http://www.ucd.ie/news/2011/06JUN11/bloomsdaycitations/200611-citation-04.html
[accessed on 18 November 2012].
Department of the Taoiseach (2012), Bunreacht na hÉireann / The Constitution of Ireland,
available at http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/upload/publications/297.pdf [accessed 13 October
2012].
Roncali, A. [Pope John XXIII] (1963) Pacem in Terris, a Papal encyclical encyclical Pacem
In Terris, 11 April 1963 [Website accessed 28th February 2013:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jxxiii_enc_11041963_pacem_en.html].
The website of Dublin’s Gate Theatre is referenced in the course of this thesis. The website,
successfully accessed on 16th January 2013 can be found at www.gatetheatre.ie.
The website of Durcan’s Jesuit secondary school, Gonzaga College, is referenced in the
course of this thesis. The website, successfully accessed on 6th March 2013 can be found at
www.gonzaga.ie.
The authoritative Catholic website www.catholic.org was consulted for details of the
biography of Saint Gerard Majella. The particular webpage, successfully accessed on 13th of
March 2013 can be located at: http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=150.
Dictionary:
Concise Oxford English Dictionary 12th edition (2011), eds. Stevenson, A. And Waite, M.,
Oxford University Press.
310