I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer,
Stephen Enniss, last night - as he was
interviewed by Vincent Woods on Arts
Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself,
in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems.
Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but
also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the
public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his
birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney.
The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book
will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the
foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that
although the poems speak for themselves.
Whatever his own reasons, such as he knows them, Derek Mahon himself,
however, has not only done the right thing in withdrawing but given the
greatness of his commitment to serving poetry; he has, arguably, taken the only
possible option open to him. This is, I predict; what the greats of his
generation, his early friend Evan Boland, perhaps, and friends Michael and Edna
Longley - along with other present and future great writers will say, or may
have already said privately or in public.
There is a paradox at the centre of a culture of awards and
prizes. True poetry and art is beyond such things – there can be no single
winner, given the diversity of poems and poets
- yet they are crucial to maintaining a framework that ensures it can
continue to be formed. The humanness at the centre of it, also paradoxically,
requires sufficient recognition to battle on in the face of few material
rewards. The greatest prize in literature was awarded – to Heaney. The only thing left to a true poet and
candidate of similar stature is to transcend that culture, put himself beyond
the question of current acclaim and leave it to history.
It is important that Seamus Heaney was awarded and accepted
the Nobel Prize. It was important that in the year of his seventieth birthday
the laureate could be heard on radio at the centre of Irish life reciting his
poems - in the midst of the collapse of so much. He held, and held us, to
poetry. It is equally in the service of
Irish and all poetry that Derek Mahon has not second-placed himself by
accepting less prestigious awards, however honourable in themselves, but rather
holds for us the space in poetry that is beyond all such.
In the greatness of time in Northern Ireland it will not be
the creeds and identities of the relatively petty wrangling that will be remembered but the
bloodshed. Neither will it be awards of literature, whatever gratefulness is
felt that the artist received recognition in their time. It is poetry that
endures. The words and the due honour inherent in the manner it has been
served.
Book: After the Titanic: The Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen
Enniss. Gill & Macmillan.
*http://www.rte.ie/radio/utils/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10440736%3A1538%3A%3A
*First broadcast Autumn, 2014
.
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