A Review of John Montague’s The Pear is Ripe, A Memoir: Dublin, Liberties Press, 2007
by John Griffin
John Montague's latest and second installment of his memoir, The Pear is Ripe, has just come out and I've been reading it. His relationship with Samuel Beckett especially interests me, mainly because [knowing what Patrick Kavanagh thought of him] I'm curious to see whether any inkling of that poet’s reservations ever entered Beckett's mind. Beckett strikes me as a less-is-more in verdicts of this kind, while Kavanagh would make no bones of his more is more. Kavanagh castigated Montague [will he ever live that down] for his idiotic observation about his aesthetics 'that he liberated us into ignorance', to which he replied (quite justly) 'you cannot liberate a person into slavery, because that is what ignorance is.' Montague also enjoys the dishonor of having made that final woeful selection of Kavanagh's poems for the McGibbon & Kee edition of his Collected Poems. That selection was quickly cribbed together without regard to proper chronology or to reflecting the poet's actual evolution and maturity. It’s a work that would never have received the imprimatur of the poet himself, and his brother excoriated it to the end. Montague does extenuate his selection somewhat in this tell-all-but-tell-nothing reflection … But a bit late.
I would argue that Montague’s very poor sampling played as key a role in the impugning of Kavanagh's poetic legacy as the Collected Pruse cursed him as a prose stylist. He wasn't well served by either lazy selection and both books did his work more of a disservice than anything else. It was this same callous disregard that Peter, his brother, tried to undo in his own numerous publications, even to the point of setting up his own hand-press. And yet, somebody like Antoinette Quinn, a touted specialist still hasn't given Kavanagh’s prose its proper due. Any selection that excludes his RTE Guide entries, say, doesn't really understand his value as a master of prose. The Guide pieces show the essence of the man more than any others, even more than Kavanagh's Weekly, I would argue. But then I don't expect the Quinns or Woods or NiChuillineans of the world to grasp what so evidently eludes them. Montague isn't much better, and his observations stink of the boiler-plate.
What amazes me more is how Kavanagh still serves as the poetic standard for Irish poets wishing to ratify their pedigree: Whether it is Heaney taking issue to promote his own verse at Kavanagh's expense, an estimate he later wisely revised, or Kinsella giving him the old bum heave-ho in The Dual Tradition, or Donleavy affirming his Irishness via contact with Kavanagh in The History of The Ginger Man, or Eavan Boland remarking on his gentility in Outside History, or Paul Durcan claiming that he was appointed by Kavanagh to be his rightful successor, or even the other minor scribes regaling us with their anecdotal proofs of their own vatic importance, like Cronin's Dead as Doornails, or Kenelley's 'I-once-saw-Paddy-in-a-pub', or John Ryan's As Were Were, all of them know enough about the genuine article to boast some association, however tenuous. Kavanagh was and still is their measuring stick, and they were afraid for their poetic lives that he might call their bluff, as he did so often and so effectively to F.R, Higgins, Maurice Walsh, Austin Clarke, Frank O'Connor and Brendan Behan. Even Anthony Cronin did not pass the test, and John McGahern preferred to withdraw into his own family fog than deal with the caustic, acerbic truth-sayer.
Now Montague adds to this tradition. Kavanagh is still the watershed, the yardstick and the only realistic correlative for that generation. I would propose him as the only useful poetic standard for our time too, and I note that Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin both have that guarded reverence, especially the former whose verbal technics wouldn't have passed Kavanagh's muster, I suspect. No more indeed than Montague's ever did, and still don't. Montague's judgments are false and they ring hollow. He knew where he stood, where he still stands, and no amount of humming or hawing will rectify the essential antipathy and disapproval he got from Kavanagh. It's the point beyond which he hasn't progressed, and so he's still asking for the blessing he will never receive. Desmond Egan would never have to write this kind of loose, revisionist memoir and yet, for all his vociferous advocacy, I'd imagine Kavanagh wouldn't have had much to say to Egan either. There are few who could ever hope to be his equal, let alone take over the reins. I don't know any contemporary poet who fits this bill, and there are a few good ones, but none who have the goods. Poetry on this island is still in the Dark Ages -- it enjoyed a few brief glimpses of the sun, but nothing protracted enough for a photosynthesis to occur. Montague's Pear may be ripe but it wouldn't be my idea of a square meal. I've a hunch he suspects himself how lame he's become, and pulling Kavanagh out of his hat just didn't work its superannuated magic.
But, just to be fair, I reread Montague's account of his problematic association with Kavanagh. And my verdict’s unchanged – I still feel he labors that "liberation into ignorance" faux pas. It was an idiotic thing to say and Kavanagh's response was perfectly pitched — He put Montague’s remark in its proper place by making it impossible for him to squirm out of having said it. Kavanagh established for himself the higher ground in his response, but Montague refuses to be content to remain there, where he has actually remained ever since. All the intervening years still haven't erased the embarrassment of that put-down, and here he is now in his silver years still trying to grapple with and revise that exchange. It was a formative experience, but a costly and irreversible one, and that is why Montague is somewhat disingenuous in his perspective today, misquoting Kavanagh to corroborate his own 'nobler intention' back then.
He even goes so far as to quote a later Kavanagh poem out of context to corroborate his own dimming of character:
What am I to do
With the void growing more awful every hour?
I lacked a classical discipline. I grew
Uncultivated and now the soil turns sour ...
This verse does not translate into that "sense of not knowing: not knowing how to husband his energy, not knowing friend from foe, not knowing where to turn in literature or life to renew his resources, in the void of post-Emergency Dublin". This is a completely revised estimate both of his silly thoughtless statement, of its original intent, its intended impact, and Kavanagh's more sensible dismissal of it. Besides, it's a revision that has the luxury of 4 decades of hindsight, as well of course of the fact that Kavanagh is no longer around to challenge it. It's interesting too that he never actually cites Kavanagh's original response. He alludes to it, granted, but he makes no effort to treat it on its own terms. As I said, I think he's being disingenuous here, definitely not fair, and still the 'lesser poet' he was when Kavanagh first called his bluff.
Not to belabor the point, I suppose it's tragic in a way that this elderly poet still feels the need to clear his ‘reputation’ of an old acerbic ghost. There it is still haunting his place in the scheme of things, still damning him, but more to the point, he's still acceding to it and still trying to earn that approval, if only single-handedly now. Kavanagh would not bless him, so he's still wrestling with the ghost, not that he needs to, or maybe ever needed to. This is why Montague is not his own man, why he's flawed as we all are flawed. He still hasn't learned that not bothering to not live that down doesn't define him as a poet. He wants to get the passing grade, but he expects the affirmation to come from without. Someone else must affirm in him what his own work has failed to do. But isn't that the essence of failure — not to succeed or to recognize success on one's own terms? Montague has learned nothing. This is why his poetry is condemned by its own terms. The reader is only a voyeur at a self-mutilation. That pleases some audiences, I suppose, but not this one.
But I struggled on for another 200 pages. I really don't know what induced me to continue reading after I resolved who this Montague fellow was. I suppose his Berkeley remembrances were of interest to me since he moved in the same circles as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and especially Jack Spicer. These gossipy tidbits kept me glued to an otherwise sophomoric tale. I hoped for a clue into that myriad-minded sage, Jack Spicer, but all I got was the usual disappointing cliché about his inscrutable prophetic personality. There's nothing really insightful here, no intuitions into the poetic creed, no great observations or aesthetic judgments, not even a soulful intersection with his very interesting times. Montague is the least introspective poet I've encountered. Surely, if he only asked it of himself, he'd realize what profound and mysterious specimens we are. And to be a poet is to be a monstrous mystery. To be a good poet is to know the full extent of one's monstrousness. Poetic genius is surely the confluence of self-knowledge and self-awareness – the apperceptive sublime applied to the other.
But Montague simply flits from one locale to another, one country to another, and one pseudo-revolution to another. He is in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, but all we get are snide remarks about free sex, drugs and his self-serving hubristic displays. The same is true of his sojourn in Paris during the '68 student uprising and Algerian crisis — nothing of interest to report but whether and when he might get laid next; and his disdain of J-P Sartre without ever actually engaging the encyclopedic-minded philosopher. Compare his trite gloss on the complex sensibility of Sartre with that of another poet, say, Octavio Paz's portrayal in his excellent, On Poets and Others, and you'll get a very good sense of just how vacuous Montague's navel gazing really is. We get very little, just visceral likes and dislikes. The same tale permeates his recall of the North of Ireland during its most troubled decade: He prefers to rat on Hewitt, claim ownership or paternity of Heaney, of sorts, paint Charles Haughey as the human and political travesty he was, and jabber on about his ramblings with Garech Browne, one of the founders of Claddagh Records. There's no real substance beyond the anecdotal narrative, nothing to sink one's teeth into, no meat, just the airy ennui of an inflated and sex-starved ego.
I mean to say, how many times is he going to boast of infidelity to his French wife? Who really cares in the end? Even these sordid distractions haven't enough grit to be more than blasé interpolations in an already tiresome, jaded tale. Montague is an utterly shallow individual, totally devoid of a spiritual centre or belief system, and as lost in his muddied angst as he is incapable of sincere feeling. He has a definite poetic facility alright, but it doesn't extend much beyond an effete comprehension of his phallic needs. He strikes me as a soulless itinerant, the kind of journeyman who will apprentice his ego to whatever reality prevails at the moment, but without a residue of self upon which to found a substantive poetics. His character and personality are as lean as his poems, brief, abbreviated, narcissistic verbal formulae that answer the equation of his own vanity and vacuity but little else. He said he spent 10 months writing that 'Obstacles' poem which I must force-feed to my students. Would that he had not, but I couldn't help musing if that's what 10 months will do for him, then he might have applied himself more assiduously to hash and sex and brandy. His poetry is scuttery, watery leakages of an airy head. It is half-baked dough, dead-weight on the pan, lead in the belly of the beast. No wonder Kavanagh repudiated his offerings, and no wonder he holds that poet in reciprocal contempt. These two were poles apart: Kavanagh was the real article; Montague is still a rank amateur.
Finally, and to be fair, the finest vignette of this tedious memoir is his portrait of Samuel Beckett just a few weeks before he died. Montague went to visit the great man to have his contribution for some museum piece on Irish writers; so, he came armed with parchment, fountain pen, special ink, the whole shebang. Beckett did his four line verse in that diminutive slanted script of his, then summarily swept all the accoutrements of his trade into the trashcan. A beautiful and modest gesture, as if to say [more or less] now all that's that done and dusted. Poignant. Then he produces the whisky and they share a drop of the crater. Beckett was without the vanity of his guest, and the contrast is glaring, not so much here and then, in this scene, in that room, since Montague was on his most reverent best, but the contrast between what preceded this moment and the scene itself. Beckett was a high noble soul right to the end. And he embraced that imminent end with the fitting resignation of a man and writer who was without sentimentality. He was officious for the very life so many mistakenly argue he repudiated. He did not reject life. He embraced it, and he asserted its positive and optimist force via his negativity. But I never felt that Beckett despaired, and the dignity he displayed in that final meeting with Montague is exactly what I would have expected from such a prince of the word. And he was a princely fellow. Pity it didn't rub off on his immodest visitor.
John Griffin is a writer living in Ireland