Patrick MacDonogh (1902- 1961), a contemporary of MacNeice and Kavanagh but, unlike them, out of print for a generation, published five collections of poems between 1927 and 1958 and was highly regarded during his lifetime, with a modest international reputation based on a handful of recurrent anthology choices. Not an immensely prolific output and, despite what amounts to a cult following, he has recently seemed in danger of slipping through the cracks of literary history, which is one of the reasons he needs to be reissued. He is also a very fine poet indeed, which is its own argument.
The five collections were: Flirtation (G. F. Healy, Dublin, 1927), A Leaf in the Wind (Quota Press, Belfast, 1929), The Vestal Fire (Orwell Press, Dublin, 1941), Over the Water (Orwell Press, 1943) and One Landscape Still and Other Poems (Secker & Warburg, London, 1958) - a distinguished though not extensive body of work, one rendered even more exiguous by a self-critical severity which led him to discard, select and refine from volume to volume until, with the Secker collection, he arrived at an almost final text.
He was born in Dublin, where his father was founder and headmaster of Avoca School, Blackrock, and educated there and at Trinity College, where he read for an arts' degree, shone at athletics and subsequently took a Ph.D. with a thesis on Allingham. After graduation he worked as a teacher and commercial artist before joining the staff of Arthur Guinness Son and Company, where he later held a senior executive post.
The background is important. One of five children, he grew up in an earnest and convivial Protestant middle-class environment of tennis parties and hockey sticks, subsequently playing hockey for Ireland; a privileged environment also characteristic of his active and linear professional career, especially the prime-of-life years when he and his family lived at Cintra, a pleasant Georgian country house near Kinsealy, north County Dublin. Rod and gun, field and stream, featured at weekends; the artist and novelist Ralph Cusack was a neighbour. During his last years, when ill health obliged him to take early retirement,
MacDonogh lived in "reduced circumstances" at Malahide and Portmarnock. Both he and his wife, a well-known mezzo-soprano, broadcast frequently on Radio ╔ireann, she specializing in Schubert, he in sporting and literary matters. Hill walker, fily-fisherman, golfer, etc., he knew the country intimately from Wicklow to Mayo, from Antrim to Cork; but the customary landscapes of his poetry are those of north and south County Dublin and of County Meath. After a certain point they are even more specifically those of the Kinsealy woodlands and the Malahide estuary.
His friends included Lord Moyne, "Con" Leventhal and Seamus Kelly ("Quidnunc" of The Irish Times); in England, Betjeman and Laurie Lee, the author of Cider with Rosie. He drove fast cars, Sunbeam Talbot and Jaguar, co-founded the Galway Ooyster Festival, took a hand in John Huston's Youghal production of Moby Dick, and made frequent appearances in literary pubs like the Pearl Bar and the Red Bank. Brian Fallon, in An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930 - 1960, tells us this "sensitive, much-loved man" was one of the Dublin Magazine inner circle. He contributed also, as his acknowledgements indicate, to the books pages of large-circulation newspapers, like such as the Observer, and to New York magazines, including Harper's and The American Mercury.
Over the Water, published in 1943, is the culmination of his early work and remains a remarkable achievement by any standards. Here, collected for the first time, are the classic anthology pieces, the popular lyrics and several intriguing, and much more "modern" poems, like such as 'Dodona's Oaks were Still' and the title-piece itself. He is no longer writing tentative poems; nearly all will survive later inspection, and most are included here. How to explain this sudden burst of creative confidence and exactitude? An emotional settling, perhaps, with wife and family, and a new political awareness after a long silence during the 1930s - an awareness not quite explicit in the manner of Auden and MacNeice, but implicit in the situations of his "characters", released from tedium and galvanised into fruitful tension and flow by the wartime atmosphere both in Ireland and England.
Brian Inglis, the author of West Briton (1962), once explained that, on the outbreak of the Ssecond World War, he and his Malahide set joined the British armed forces "as a matter of course" though with the secret proviso, in his own case, that he would resign his RAF commission should Britain offer to re-invade "Eire". MacDonogh, older but from a not dissimilar social group, must have had similarly complex feelings about the whole business, especially in the light of his friendship with the English poet Phoebe Hesketh, the "war widow" in the poem of that title. But the wartime mood affected him in another way too, confirming a cultural identification with the Gael and issuing in the "folk" poems for which he became chiefly known, 'She Walked Unaware' and 'The Widow of Drynam'.
He writes elsewhere of the Irish poetic genius as "at once spiritual and sensuous", qualities we associate with, say, Clarke's 'The Straying Student' or Padraic Fallon's 'Mary Hynes', and which he too combines here. These dramatic monologues, rural in setting, their speakers respectively a love-lorn youth and a proud old woman, are beautifully crafted and in some ways characteristic utterances, artiefacts even, from the much-maligned Yeats and de Valera era of traditional sanctity and comeliness, which produced so much of the finest Irish art and literature. A centuries-old tradition of aisling and cailleach lives on in both, together with an unregenerate eroticism and radical defiance. Here are Synge's "wild words", the garrulous narration, dramatic self-awareness and aristocratic peasant pride, the wandering lines and "planted" off-rhymes, the concrete imagery and emotional realism of ╙ Rathaille and Eibhl∅n Dhubh N∅ Chonaill. If 'Be Still as You Are Beautiful' seems to recommend, shamelessly, that the recipient "look good and say nothing", the heroic and vital note in 'The Widow of Drynam', as so often in Gaelic poetry, is struck by a woman, in the voice of an Ireland most of us have forgotten or never knew; for one not really familiar with what Jennifer Johnston calls "my own unspoken language", his re-creation, in a modern setting, of the intonations of the Gaelic eighteenth 18th century is the more remarkable.
One of the last in whom a "Revival" texture and aesthetic are evident, he risked inclusion among the "twilighters" and "antiquarians" to whom his friend Beckett gave such a hard time in the 1934 essay "Recent Irish Poetry". The adopted personalities and archaic coloration of the folk poems might seem to incriminate him, together with F.R. Higgins and early Clarke, in "the flight from self-awareness" and even a yearning for "the wan bliss at the rim"; but the pathos of these poems springs from a very personal romanticism. The son in 'Drynam' has gone to "the war", perhaps an older war; but with 'Over the Water' and 'War Widow' we are definitely in the 1940s. These belong to a whole genre of wartime love-and-separation poetry, fiction and film, a genre to which MacNeice and Elizabeth Bowen were only two of the most vivid contributors.
'War Widow' is addressed to Phoebe Hesketh, with whom MacDonogh conducted a fruitful friendship then and later; while the magnificent 'Over the Water', one of his finest achievements, inscribes their relationship in another of his dramatic monologues, though dramatic in a more complex fashion than hitherto. As in 'Drynam', an adopted personality speaks. A soldier, in London during the Blitz, thinks of his lover in Ireland and wishes her beside him: a displacement of the poet, in Ireland, thinking of his lover in England and wishing himself there. A frequent visitor, he knew the London atmosphere, and picks up on the "apocalyptic" mood of the time; for example, despite obvious differences, he thought highly of the work of Dylan Thomas. There is a comparable exhilaration here, though the subtext is one of loss, failure, unfulfilment: his final theme, if one redeemed by his gift for clarity of design and aphoristic closure.
MacDonogh fell prey to psychiatric problems and spent increasing periods in mental hospitals. One of these coincided with the arrival of the Secker proofs, which he had no opportunity to correct; so that volume, his life's work, is full of misprints. Hand-written corrections appear, fortunately, in copies of the published book and are, of course, incorporated here.
Besides the three previously unpublished typescripts, an old Guinness ledger survives where, carefully inscribed in fountain-pen blue ink, he sketches a perfunctory fragment of autobiography dwindling to diary entries and disconsolate reflections on the Cold War: "If this misery was caused by the pressure of these or similar enormous anxieties it would at least have some dignity and honour about it... but as it really springs instead from an incorrigible ignorance of the value of money and from the impotent creative desire of one more emasculated soul, I find it merely mean and despicable." If, with the re-invasion of Ireland and other vulnerable societies by "global capital", and the resulting devastation, the work of the Revival has to be done again, MacDonogh and others may yet come into their own.
Obsessed with youth and novelty, we sometimes patronise previous generations, imagining them to have been more na∩ve than they were; for, of course, everything has been done or thought before in one form or another, though our historical provincialism tends to ignore the fact. We patronise, too, their difficult achievements - limited, like ours, but available to us if we're interested. They too thought themselves too smart for their own good; they too thought themselves cursed by wised-up meta-consciousness; indeed, it was one of their favourite themes.
MacDonogh needs to be looked at again. Retrieval can resolve much, even in an age of humoristic deconstruction, and the ecstasy and frustration of an occluded talent can have the power of shaming a fluent posterity accustomed to much greater exposure. A good part of his example, paradoxically, will lie in his built-in "obsolescence"; also in the amateurish, extra-curricular, unfinished air which, innocent of calculation and bright with idiosyncrasies (prosodic slippages, late jokes best overlooked, an addiction to "w" sounds), confirms the authenticity of the enterprise. But caveat emptor: too often, revisiting the past with sophisticated hindsight and superior technical means, we lose the original aura, the poignant sense of imperfect, lost reality; we cease to "walk unaware".
So much the worse for us if we can no longer praise without irony, as MacDonogh does in a prose piece, "Out of the Night" (The Dublin Magazine, 1958), those things, real or imagined, to whose dispersal his own work stands as such courageous testimony: "religious faith, love between man and woman, nobility of conduct, unexplained gaiety of heart, order and beauty in the natural world".
Poems by Patrick MacDonogh, edited and introduced by Derek Mahon, is has just been published by Gallery Books: £13.95 hbk; £8.95 pbk.