The Unpublished Poems of Thomas MacGreevy; An Exploration Susan Schreibman

University College Dublin

First published in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s,
ed Patricia Coughlan & Alec Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995) p129-49.
This text has not been re-edited for this hypertext version.

Imagination is primarily the faculty of
relating the ephemeral to the unchanging

Thomas MacGreevy

Thomas MacGreevy wrote poetry steadily over a relatively short period of time, from 1924-1934. At the tail end of this period Poems, MacGreevy's only collection of poetry published during his lifetime, was brought out by Heinemann's. About ten years before this period, during the autumn of 1915, coming up to the second winter of the Great War, he wrote his first poem. It was about the 'beauty of the world and the tragedy of war', and although he had 'some appreciation' of the one, he (as yet) had no 'first-hand knowledge of the other'. Years later when coming across the poem in his family home in Tarbert, Co Kerry after his mother died in 1936 he discounted it as intellectually 'negligible'. His first inclination was to throw it away— but as his mother treasured it, he left it.¹ If that poem exists somewhere in MacGreevy's substantial collection of papers, it has not been identified.

Except for several references in MacGreevy's memoirs to poems written during the war, the earliest poem that can be dated with accuracy is six lines written during the Hilary Term 1919 while MacGreevy was enrolled as a student at Trinity College, Dublin. It was written in his logic notebook and, not surprisingly, began by positing the premise that God is a 'differential equation'. It was never published. It is one of about forty poems by and large catalogued under TCD MSS 7989/2 and 10381/183-203 which contain most of the typescript and manuscript drafts of MacGreevy's unpublished poems.² There are also many manuscript drafts of unpublished poems on the backs of letters, on envelopes and in notebooks scattered throughout MacGreevy's papers.

When Anthony Cronin wrote of MacGreevy in his 1982 essay 'Modernism not Triumphant' that 'assuming he began to write poetry in his early twenties what is remarkable is that he made no false starts'³ he was right— as far as he could have known. Even if Anthony Cronin had gone to Trinity College, Dublin to examine MacGreevy's papers (the bulk of which had been recently deposited by MacGreevy's executors⁴) he would probably only have had access— due to the massive job of cataloguing the collection— to a portion of the unpublished poems. Over ten years after Mr Cronin's book was published, and after many years leafing through notebooks, collections of letters and drafts of poems, I can confidently say that MacGreevy made 'false starts'. And he made a lot of them. What is extraordinary about MacGreevy is that unlike many a poet who rushes to get every scrap into print, he chose not to publish them.

When editing MacGreevy's Collected Poems for publication in the late 1980s, I also chose not to publish them, concentrating instead on his published work. This was decided because it was impossible to ascertain from MacGreevy's papers (and because nobody had thought to ask him in his lifetime) which of his unpublished poems he would have liked to see in print. In addition, before including his unpublished work in book form, there loomed the very real aesthetic quandary of how or whether to 'finish' many of MacGreevy's poems for him. The vast majority of his unpublished poems were left in varying stages of completion; and perhaps the only way to represent MacGreevy's unpublished poetry fairly would be in a facsimile edition. Yet, now that there is more interest in MacGreevy's poetry than there was five years ago, an exploration of some of his unpublished work, along with the publication of some of these poems in a diplomatic edition is not only appropriate, but timely.⁵

At some level, the selection of poems included in this article is somewhat arbitrary and should not be taken as representative of MacGreevy's unpublished oeuvre. In some cases, what seemed to be his most finished work (i.e. typescript with little or no emendations), and/or poems which seemed similar in spirit to the published work were chosen. In other cases poems which might not be considered amongst MacGreevy's best but, nevertheless, demonstrate a particular point were selected. Yet, even this small sampling of unpublished poems re-contextualises MacGreevy's published work, making it impossible to appreciate fully what MacGreevy chose to include in Poems without some understanding of what he chose to exclude. And perhaps by understanding what he chose to exclude, it is possible to inch that much closer in understanding the enigma of why he published so little in his middle years, and then virtually stopped writing poetry in his later years.

What strikes the reader of MacGreevy's unpublished poetry is that there are many poems which, while maintaining his poetic voice, differ substantially from the published work. One of the major differences is that the unpublished poems are what one might term unmediated: they do not rely on a narrator relating events from a self conscious socio-historical perspective. Yet, it is this very perspective which provides Poems with its remarkably cohesive narrative voice: MacGreevy, the Everyman, whose purpose is to witness (not necessarily to comment) and to record. Thus, the effect is of a narrator who moves freely through time and space to relate events from a perspective not unlike that in Titian's La Gloria. This disembodied narrative positioning concurrently creates the illusion of an '"aesthetic" distance'⁶ as Stan Smith implied in his 1978 article in The Lace Curtain 'From A Great Distance', which borrows a line from Wallace Stevens' tribute to MacGreevy 'Our Stars Come from Ireland'. The quote comes from Stevens' last stanza:

The stars are washing up from Ireland
And through and over the puddles of Swatara
And Schuylkill. The sound of him
Comes from a great distance and is heard

The focus of Smith's article, implicit in the last line of Stevens' poem, is not only that MacGreevy's poems travelled a great distance to reach Stevens (they were sent 'by registered ordinary post'⁷ from Dublin to Connecticut) but that the aesthetic distance MacGreevy maintained as a poet was not lost on Stevens. The notion that MacGreevy maintained such a distance in his poetry, however, is misleading as it reinforces our overlooking the immediate emotional response to so many of the incidents recorded in Poems:

Tired of sorrow,
My sorrow, their sorrow, all sorrow,
I go from the hanged,
From the women,
I go from the hanging;

'The Six Who Were Hanged'

In the absurdity of ugliness
Some found quick doom
And some of us
Saw.

'Crón Tráth na nDéithe'

And I find I am thinking:
Supposing I am drowned now,
This tired, tiresome body,
Before flesh creases further,
Might, recovered, go fair,
To be laid in Saint Lachtin's

'Recessional'

Yet, in these moments of heightened emotion, the self-realisation is often lost within a poem which draws the reader's attention to the perceived which is embodied in the historical, the literary, the political, or simply the obscure. The result is that the distance between narrator and narrative seems to widen resulting in a foregrounding in which the modernist doctrine of impersonality overshadows the intimate self-disclosure at the nucleus of the poem. 'Recessional' is a good example of this. Here MacGreevy locates his meditation on suicide in the breathtakingly beautiful Swiss alps where it is easy to be distracted from the event's emotional import by the first six lines:

In the bright broad Swiss glare I stand listening
To the outrageous roars
Of the Engelbergeraa
As it swirls down the gorge
And I think I am thinking
Of Roderick Hudson.

A reader unskilled at reading Thomas MacGreevy's poetry would immediately look for meaning through the perceived. Armed, however, with the knowledge that Engelbergeraa is a waterfall located about 30 km from Lucerne, and that Roderick Hudson is the protagonist in a novel of the same name by Henry James, the reader has been diverted by MacGreevy from what has triggered the impulse to write: 'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality'. MacGreevy, true to the dicta set out by T.S. Eliot in his 1919 essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', attempted to 'escape from personality'⁸ through poetic mediation. Yet, in many of MacGreevy's unpublished, expurgated poems, the mediation that he so artfully maintains in the published work breaks down and seems perilously close to the confessional, albeit, in a modernist sort of way. His unpublished 'Nel Mezzo' is a good example of this.

The poem was written in March or April 1930, during his father's last illness, or perhaps soon after his father's death on 19 April. His father's death touched a raw nerve with MacGreevy who, at the age of thirty seven, had not published a book, had no home of his own, nor had anything in the traditional sense resembling a career. That his father died before MacGreevy was able to demonstrate at least some outward signs of success, at least by Tarbert standards, in either his personal or professional life, must have weighed heavily on the younger man's mind. It's thus not surprising that he scribbled on the back of a letter sent to him by Stephen MacKenna, the Irish journalist and translator of Plotinus, (who was himself not in the best of health and would die four years later) notes for a poem beginning with the line, 'Of course you look sorry'. Raw and intensely personal, the poem, eventually entitled 'Nel Mezzo', was MacGreevy's statement about having 'journeyed half our life's way',⁹ about coming home, and about faith:

Nel Mezzo

Mein Auge und Herz

I know But I'm sure you feel sorry
You look sorry all right It's all right.
Only
But that was the last spark of kindling
Amongst the cold ashes
And the dreary cinders.
It has gone out.
You had no breath for it.

But perhaps you were right,
Knowing,
As I know,
That neither that chimney
Nor any in the house
Drew well
This half-a-man's lifetime.

Why should you be sorry?
Why should I be angry?
Blessed breath that may never inform me,
Blessed eyes whose beatitude I may not see with,
You were probably right.

(God, Father, Creator,
Let this house of my life
is
That, if fair, has been no house of joy,
Crumble quickly).

Now,
When those cold ashes
- This last poor ash too -
And the dreary cinders
Are covered at last
With dirt
And wet soot,
When the cold grate has rusted,
Is bent,
Broken in pieces,
By infalling masonry
And stones,
When damp mould is on all,
The departing inhabitant,
Not turning,
May say,
End,
End to death,
To half a life's death,
A death that came after
An uncomprehended youth
And so, unperversely,
Thanks be . . .
For release.¹⁰

Here there is no illusion of aesthetic distance: nothing to distract our attention away from the very intimate details of the poem— no hangings, no airmen being shot down, no alps, no literature, no burials: just one man contemplating about having 'journeyed half our life's way' and the concomitant struggles of that journey. And although there are several versions of 'Nel Mezzo' amongst MacGreevy's papers, the changes from the first draft to the nearly finished poem above, are, in fact, slight. Two final holograph changes in stanza five do, however, alter meaning, and continue to alter meaning as we can never be certain which version MacGreevy might have chosen had he published the poem. The revising out of 'my' life in line two seems to be typical of MacGreevy's revision towards impersonality; yet, the change to the much stronger 'is' in line three instead of the earlier 'has been' focuses the reader's attention in the opposite direction. The only part of the poem that did see its way into print was the line 'Blessed eyes whose beatitude I may not see with' which, in 'Ten Thousand Leaping Swords' was contextualised within the framework of a love poem.¹¹

It seems, however, that on two occasions the 'blessed breath' did inform MacGreevy. He attempted to record these experiences, but like 'Nel Mezzo', it was never published. Indeed, it never made it out of manuscript form. This untitled draft, like several early poems by T.S. Eliot (particularly one entitled 'Silence' in which the street Eliot was walking upon in Boston suddenly shrank and divided. All his 'everyday preoccupations, his past, all the claims of the future fell away and he was enfolded in a great silence'¹²) was aborted by MacGreevy before an editor (or a reader in the 1920s equivalent to the poetry workshop) could reject it. It was written and reworked on the back of a draft of 'Nel Mezzo', and is about an experience which Eliot later in life termed 'communion with the Divine' or 'temporary crystallization of the mind'.¹³ The joys which in 'Nel Mezzo' were absent are converted here into the joys of communion:

A translation of the altar at benediction time
A transport to an opening in the
pale starred
In a [?] night sky

The only joys I've had have been aesthetic
knowledge is
My vision of the City of God was limited
views
To two aesthetic-[?] seeming openings in the sky
though [?] first time shut
If the body fell away my eyes remained

The first time It was lemon yellow
The second silver white
And there was no substantial element
So why should I have shame before the Catholics
Of being aesthetic
Before those who are but the body of the Church
Not even the body
Merely the body's excrement¹⁴

In her critical biography of Eliot's early life, Lyndall Gordon ventures the opinion that for Eliot, 'the memory of bliss was to remain a kind of torment, a mocking reminder through the years that followed that there was an area of experience just beyond his grasp, which contemporary images of life could not compass.'¹⁵ These experiences for MacGreevy were of similar import. It is no coincidence that 'A translation of the altar' was penned on the back of 'Nel Mezzo'. These two poems work in counterpoint: 'Nel Mezzo', a dialogue between MacGreevy and his dying father, recounts the externality and divide between MacGreevy's and his father's lives; 'A translation of the altar' recalls the internality and divide between MacGreevy and his God. The ambiguous 'God, Father, Creator' of stanza five of 'Nel Mezzo' is a plea to them both:

(God, Father, Creator,
Let this house of life
That, if fair, is no house of joy,
Crumble quickly).

Yet in these two poems, neither God nor Father answer, unless the closing lines of 'Nel Mezzo' constitute one:

And so, unperversely,
Thanks be . . .
For release.

'A translation of the altar', on the other hand, closes, not by narrowing the divide, but by creating a new one: one between MacGreevy and society. The poem abruptly shifts at line eleven from a recollection of one of those rare moments in which 'our first world'¹⁶ is glimpsed, to an angry and somewhat pugnacious defence of the experience. Here, private significance is transmuted into a defensive dismissal of the experience itself. Lacking the cockiness of Joyce or the desperation of Beckett, MacGreevy began a retreat into silence. Perhaps his ultimate act of writing was his not writing. The poem left abandoned in manuscript form, too risky, too personal, to un-mediated to finish, no less publish. If MacGreevy's poetry is indeed, as Beckett described it, prayer, 'an act of recognition',¹⁷ it is the prayer of the 'anti-self'— the 'other self, of the studious "imitator", one who might disclose to him what he sought'.¹⁸

Thus the anti-self is the narrating voice in many of MacGreevy's published poems; the self having retreated into a position of safety, though not a position safe enough to have stopped writing altogether. MacGreevy's poems are written from the point of view of the Observation Officer in his 'O Pip' (Observation Post) positioned at the verge of No Man's Land: ahead lies confession, behind lies silence. The emotion necessary to link reader to poem edited out by the poet as being outside the Observation Officer's range— a 'turning loose of emotion'. The opposite of a turning loose of emotions is like sleeping with one's boots on, and we are left with the impossibility of expression suggested by very Beckettian-type ellipses. Some of these ellipses appear in published poems, such as 'Seventh Gift of the Holy Ghost':

The end of love,
Love's ultimate good,
Is the end of love . . . and
Light

We never find the answer to what comes after 'the end of love'. It could possibly be the end of light, if the sentence is read syntactically as such. Yet, it is just as valid to read 'Light' as belonging to the sentence that follows, in which the narrator musing upon the end of love, also muses on the end of

Light
On a towering wall
Yellow villages
In a vast, high, light-beaten plain

in which the you and the I of the poem imagine

The pity we had to learn
And the terror—
The ultimate terror.¹⁹

Here, the 'pity we had to learn', leads not to light and the brilliance of the vision, but to the 'ultimate terror'. And it is here, at the juxtaposition of light and dark, at the ellipse, that MacGreevy comes closest to what he considers the true currency of poetic discourse: 'knowledge of life, personality and humility'.²⁰

Sometimes 'knowledge of life' is precluded in a world of fragmentation and discontinuity making right choice impossible. The absurdity of the absolutes of right and wrong might have had its beginnings in MacGreevy's war experience: in the Salient '[m]ost moving objects were under observation.'²¹ In No Man's Land, whether one goes left or right, towards the enemy or away, one is equally in danger of being hit by a five-nine. What seems like a contradiction, is not; it is simply an ellipse, the last bit of information necessary for understanding unstated, like the tacit agreements made between soldiers at war, or the closing lines of 'Sour Swan: "'Song is dead. Yes. Song / 'Is dead. Long live song!". Sometimes, on the other hand, 'knowledge of life', implying some degree of rationality, is sought in a communal past, such as in MacGreevy's unpublished poem, 'Diarmuid of the Beautiful Hands'.

Contemporary versions of Diarmuid and Grania's story were popular long after the Celtic Renaissance had ended. In 1917 Austin Clarke's epic poem The Vengeance of Fionn was published, and in 1928 Michéal MacLiammóir staged his own play, Grania in Galway. The idea of using Irish mythology as symbolic of a disaffected self, however, did not seem to be a particularly tempting poetic road for MacGreevy to travel down, particularly after 1927, the year which marked the beginning of his friendship and collaboration with James Joyce. Rather than locating his source of national identity in Irish mythology, MacGreevy gravitated towards the literary and the political. Thus it is no surprise to find that 'Diarmuid of the Beautiful Hands' is the sole experiment (at least amongst MacGreevy's remaining papers) in a manner derivative of Yeats's style. Yet, this poem could also be seen as an attempt, like Austin Clarke's poems of the mid-1920s, to reincorporate Irish mythology into a more self-conscious poetic style which acknowledged rather than ignored the sense of discontinuity between an irredeemable past and an uncertain future.²²

In MacGreevy's version of the myth, Diarmuid is on the run from Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the leader of the Fianna, after having eloped with Grania during her betrothal feast to Fionn. At first Diarmuid was reluctant to elope with her out of loyalty to Fionn, but when she threatened him with geis— a magical injunction or spell, the infringement of which could lead to death— he acquiesced to her demand. During the subsequent pursuit, Diarmuid is torn between two conflicting loves, that of Grania's and that of Fionn's:

the proffered
If I took Grania's body
I should have outward peace
But inward torment

Had I Finn's love again
I should have inner peace
But suffer torture
At Grania's instance

here I am lost
Alas that I may not have Finn's love

Alas for resentful
That I may not take Grania's

And am
That I must be always chaste
e
I who know love's delight
And alas And
That I must be wandering always
By tree and field and river
By blue-roofed white
By slate-blue white-walled towns
And on again
By level plains and lifted hills

I who despised Rousseau
And distrust the art of Orpen²³

The legend, long used as a story representative of male bonding, reflects a theme prevalent in MacGreevy's unpublished creative writing: the choice between artistic fulfilment or matrimonial vows. In few, if any of MacGreevy's unpublished writings, could the two cohabit successfully. The last three lines of the poem are representative of another uneasy cohabitation: the self-consciousness of these lines make a mockery of the inheritance of the Celtic Renaissance. For MacGreevy, the very act of retrieval only reinforced the futility of self-discovery within a shared past. Instead, the self consciousness of the narrative voice transcends the idea that self-identification can be found in either reality or a pre-christian mythology. The last two lines of the poem reflect the auto-destructive dimension of Dadaism or Surrealism— on second reading the poem, no longer bound by time and space, becomes decontextualised, and meaning (if meaning is to be sought)— must be gleaned within a self-referential context. It should also be borne in mind that MacGreevy's first impulse to write (and I would venture to add many subsequent ones) was as a direct result of the Great War: that so many of his poems mirrored the essential irrationality of war, and that no matter how heart-felt any attempts to recapture that idyllic past which proceeded the war (which may have only existed outside time as in a poem such as 'Homage to Marcel Proust') must, by necessity, end in failure.

Contrary to a poem like 'Diarmuid of the Beautiful Hands' are poems like 'Elections' and 'Homage to Ruteboeuf' which are patently bound by both time and space. They take as their inspiration the political. Yet, unlike MacGreevy's published poetry, these poems bespeak little outside a narrow political context. They were the medium, largely unsuccessful, through which MacGreevy worked out frustrations with Irish politics that never made the transition into a finished product: they just seem too personal or too private; too petty perhaps, or too angry. MacGreevy and politics were uneasy bedfellows, and by the late 1920s, political poetry was the last thing he wanted to write. Yet, he was drawn to it over and over like a moth to light. In an undated manuscript letter to W.B. Yeats,²⁴ written from Paris, most likely late in 1927 or early 1928 (around the time another version of Diarmuid of the Beautiful Hands' was being composed) MacGreevy tried to come to terms with the intertextuality of Irish politics and poetry, and his place within the Irish literary canon:

. . . I think the fact that my indignant poems demons which seem to me to have life show demonstrate in their bareness a certain belief that I in common with other writers of my generation have come to the belief that indignation in general politics in general and political indignationant politics in particular is are unsuitable material for poetry. . . . in spite of the marvellous improvement in treatment technique brought about by you in modern Irish poetry the [worldly?] preoccupations of Davis had are still dominateding all of us who were interested in literature and that I was anxious to get away from what unfortunately had dominated me as well as everyone else to something that was more fundamental material for poetry. You had pointed out the way in much in many a line and passage Mr Joyce had gone further along it but we in Ireland were all still too aware of the world. the world was too much with us. Poetry is not yet for us Irishmen. Poetry, Poetry independent one of the gifts of God to man as important as the desire for political liberty and entirely independent of it, a preoccupation for free and civilised people. We are not possibly freer under your Free State. Under English law we lost much of our civilisation but I think the time has come for us who care about [?poetry] to try and drop shed not Ireland the last vestiges of all political preoccupations from our writing. We may even drop Ireland. It is only when we have done so that we shall be truly Irish at last.²⁵

Here, MacGreevy prefigures much Irish writing that would emerge after the Second World War, as well as the current Postcolonial debate: some fifty years later David Lloyd, in the introduction to his Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, reposits MacGreevy's statement:

The problem is not the questioning of identity, a process which can . . . be imbued with quite radical consequences, but rather the way in which the theme of identity saturates the discursive field drowning out other social and cultural possibilities.²⁶

It is this 'drowning out' process that MacGreevy realised was the central theme of his generation. It was only when Ireland, in the narrowest of political constructs, whether the construction of national identity be through mythology, romanesque catholicism or as Beckett only half tongue in cheek put it, 'spook' was purged from the poetic imagination, that Irish writers could turn to what MacGreevy felt was the true nature of poetic discourse: 'relating the ephemeral to the unchanging.'²⁷

In his essay 'Imagination as Value', Wallace Stevens argued for something similar:

When we speak of the life of the imagination, we do not mean man's life as it is affected by his imagination but the life of the faculty itself. . . . The imagination that is satisfied by politics, whatever the nature of the politics, has not the same value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say the universal mind . . . ²⁸

MacGreevy's belief that 'indignant politics . . . are unsuitable material for poetry' is similar to Stevens' statement that the 'imagination that is satisfied by politics . . . has not the same value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say the universal mind'. In other words, poetry that does not bear witness to 'more fundamental material', what Stevens calls 'the universal mind', what Beckett calls the poet's 'unfailing salute to his significant',²⁹ what MacGreevy calls 'relating the ephemeral to the unchanging' is not worth writing. It is certainly not worth publishing.

Yet, MacGreevy was the first to realise that the world was too much with him to retreat from it. As a survivor of the Great War, he never forgot that it was only by chance he was not in a British graveyard somewhere in Flanders. 'If you have been placed suddenly on the other side of the grave and left there for months and years, you do not forget it'.³⁰ Like that moth that flies into the light until his wings get so singed he can no longer fly, MacGreevy gravitated towards 'indignant politics'. In several of his unpublished poems, such as this fragment from 'Elections', he was not able to relate post-civil war politics to anything outside his immediate feelings of frustration:

Up the Republic!
Up the Free State!
Trade Unionists
Up the Clergy! Socialists Farmers
No hate
For those patriots either
Who make of the race-course, the card-room, the slum pub
Their hub . . . ³¹

MacGreevy felt betrayed by the treaty, the civil war, and its aftermath, and indignation is the predominating expression in the opening lines of 'Homage to Ruteboeuf':

I ought to write a whereas
To the perjured civil warriors
Who set up to be God's just men
Loving their enemies
With the loves of cravens
And letting down their friends
In the very best tradition
Of the self-righteous puritans they revere . . . ³²

MacGreevy quite rightly withheld these poems from publication. They do not, as do some of MacGreevy's most successful poems, negotiate with deftness his engagement with the private, the historical and the political to transform them into near perfect poetic expression, as in 'Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill'. In this poem, MacGreevy's futile search for the dead prince's grave in Valladolid reveals the 'painful consequences of action imagined and the painful consequences of inaction felt',³³ while 'Elections' and 'Homage to Ruteboeuf', grounded in 'impotent rage' never lift themselves out of limited social possibilities; never achieve 'grace of humility "founded"— to quote from Mr McGreevy's T.S. Eliot— "not on misanthropy but on hope"'.³⁴

There are other poems which MacGreevy chose not to publish, or republish in Poems, although it is not clear why. One such poem, 'For an Irish Book, 1929', was first published in transition in November 1929, and although it is as skilfully executed as the other poems comprising Poems, MacGreevy opted not to include it in the collection. While looking through his unpublished work I discovered what seems to be a companion poem, 'La Calunnia e un Venticello'. Like 'For an Irish Book', the poem is an apologia for Joyce. It is also an attack on Wyndham Lewis. It was written in the late spring or early summer of 1928, and as Geoffrey Taylor pointed out to MacGreevy, 'The poem indeed is good. Obscurish of course unless you explain it's about Windam Luis [sic]. . . '³⁵ And in its final typescript form there is no allusion to Lewis, except for one small but exceedingly evidential detail: '[t]he apes'.

For several years before Lewis published The Apes of God (1930), apes figured predominately in his work. To Lewis, they represented the pseudo artists, particularly those working between the wars.³⁶ Lewis, who had once been a literary admirer of Joyce, around 1927, became a foe: the change of tactics resulted in many bitter attacks on Joyce, cumulating in 'An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce' first published in The Enemy (Vol II) in February, and in September of that year in Time and Western Man.³⁷ And by the late 1920s, it might have indeed seemed to Joyce that Lewis had the upper hand, particularly when Time and Western Man received praise from 'nearly all' its reviewers.³⁸ When Joyce chose to counter-attack, he couched it in the night language of his most difficult literary work, Finnegans Wake (then known only as Work in Progress) making it thus accessible to a small readership. His most famous reply was published in the March issue of transition (in which Work in Progress was then being serialised) in the form of a fable about the Ondt (a composite character predominately made up of Lewis) and the Gracehoper (Joyce). But when counter-attacks were to take the form of literary criticism, Joyce, always wary of covering his left flank, did not respond directly, but made sure his captains and lieutenants were at the front line. The final product was a group of essays (the writing of which was directed by Joyce himself) collected under the title Our Exagmination round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress. MacGreevy's contribution, 'The Catholic Element in Work in Progress', was written during the same period as 'La Calunnia e un Venticello', and its closing lines reposits the premise of MacGreevy's poem:

The London master of spaces should read Mr. Joyce's fable. He might learn from it that Gracehopers, for all their seeming time-ness are much more in space than the Ondts who decide that they will 'not come to party at that lopps." . . . If he would read the story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, not impatiently but patiently he might learn from it how to write satire not like a barbarian, ineffectively but like an artist, effectively.³⁹

La Calunnia e un Venticello

The apes of the fanaticisms
Grow facetious
And think to confuse the issue
By whispering blackhearted othernesses
in obscure galleries.

But that is not the end.

They whispered similarly
About Molière
Who routed them
And about Racine
And about Cézanne

Two who defeated them
By allowing them immediate victory.⁴⁰

This poem also has much in common with the best of MacGreevy's published poetry in its juxtaposition of sound and meaning, its modulation of verse libre, and its ability to encompass the inevitable whorl of history. Unlike Lady Gregory's belief that MacGreevy possessed 'the Roman Catholic soporific . . . [which excluded him from speculating] on the ideas of things and to use poetry to express' those speculations,⁴¹ he might have only been waiting, as Beckett remarked, 'for the thing to happen, how not to beg the fact of this "bitch of a world"— inarticulate earth and inscrutable heaven'.⁴²

The question still remains. Why didn't MacGreevy publish 'La Calunnia e un Venticello' or 'Nel Mezzo', or for that matter republish 'For an Irish Book, 1929'? Perhaps MacGreevy himself best described the reasons for his holding back so many poems from publication, and the reasons why he, by and large, gave up writing poetry after the mid-1930s. Some of MacGreevy's unpublished poems might best be described as poems that he felt unworthy as the quintessence of poetic discourse as they ran counter to a theory that MacGreevy spent his most artistically productive years developing. The most concise definition of this poetics is set out in his monograph of Jack B Yeats (published in Dublin in 1945, but completed [except for a short postscript] in London a year before the outbreak of the Second World War) as a means of identifying some of the technical and thematic changes in Yeats's paintings after 1924. According to MacGreevy's thesis, it was only when Yeats's paintings sought to represent, not the externality of Irish life— its politics and its social problems— but what Beckett identified as its 'great solidarity . . . its insistence upon sending us back to the darkest part of the spirit that created it'⁴³ — that Yeats found his mature style. Writing in terms of the Irish artist, MacGreevy divided art into the 'objective' and the 'subjective'. Objective art located its source in the temporality of literary or political affairs; in the need 'to insist on . . . a definitive solution of Ireland's political and, more particularly, social problems'. This bifurcated concept of objective and subjective echoes MacGreevy's earlier letter to W.B. Yeats in which he advocated shedding 'the last vestiges of political preoccupations from our writing'.

Subjective art, on the other hand, used 'such liberty [from the post-Civil War period] as has been achieved to attain greater abundance of individual life'.⁴⁴ Thus, after 1924 the 'artist particularises less, generalises more. At times he will make some quite humble scene look positively apocalyptic.'⁴⁵ This is not unlike the method MacGreevy himself employed in several of his published poems including 'Homage to Hieronymus Bosch' and 'Sour Swan'. After MacGreevy's distinction between objective and subjective art in Jack B Yeats, he continues with his most concise definition of the role of the imagination in the creative process: 'Imagination is primarily the faculty of relating the ephemeral to the unchanging.'⁴⁶ Yet, if the task MacGreevy aspired to in his art was relating 'the ephemeral to the unchanging' why were such poems as 'Nel Mezzo', which MacGreevy might himself have categorised as 'subjective art', held back from publication? Could it be that they were simply too raw, too 'unmediated', too counter to the modernist cult of the impersonal that MacGreevy, at least superficially, subscribed to? MacGreevy was not, as Wallace Stevens speculated in his second letter to MacGreevy, 'a man eager to be at the heart of his time', but, as Brian Coffey knew, someone who has known the 'love of Ireland / withering for Irishmen and 'the pain between' / its fruiting and the early dream'.⁴⁷

MacGreevy's early dream, filled with both personal aspirations and his aspirations for a newly independent Ireland, knew by his fruiting, his artistic maturity, 'the pain between'. There is no doubt that a more thorough exploration of his unpublished writings would reveal the extent of 'the pain between', and the enormity of the task he set himself as a artist aware of the public discourse of a nation struggling towards renewed self-definition:

Though I may appear to have defaulted,
I still hope -
More— let me not be dishonest, I believe-
That, in time,
My name will serve as a rampart
To the integrity of an Ireland
Which appearances are always against.⁴⁸

This last stanza from the unpublished poem, 'Appearances' demonstrates how firmly MacGreevy tied his own personal fortunes to Ireland's. Yet, as confessional, as free from the 'intolerable wrestle with words and meanings' as it sounds, is 'Appearances' just another guise for 'indignant politics'? That old monster kept rearing its head in MacGreevy's poetry. It is however, here, at the juncture of 'the pain between' and 'indignant politics' that much of MacGreevy's unpublished poetry exists. Both their similarity to and differences from MacGreevy's published poetry must, by necessity, recontextualise our reading of the published poems. Why they were never published can only be partially teased out in an essay of this length and scope. Their fortunes were, no doubt, tied to the wider issue of MacGreevy's small poetic output, and to that enigmatic cupid in 'Breton Oracles' 'crouching at the foot of a renaissance wall . . . / Weeping over a lost poetry.'

Notes:

1. Thomas MacGreevy's Memoirs, private collection, p278. Back to text.

2. TCD MS 7989/2 contains a majority of unpublished poems, while 10381/183-203 contains a mixture of published and unpublished poems. Back to text.

3. Cronin, Anthony, 'Modernism not Triumphant' in Heritage Now Irish Literature in the English Language, Brandon, Dingle, Co Kerry, 1982, p156. Back to text.

4. MacGreevy's executors deposited MacGreevy's papers at TCD over a thirteen year period, first in 1976, then in 1978 and most recently in 1989. Back to text.

5. The conventions used throughout this essay are as follows: strikeout indicates a holograph crossout; smaller typeface indicates a holograph correction in the case of typescript, or in the case of manuscript, an addition to the original text. Back to text.

6. Smith, Stan, 'From a Great Distance: Thomas MacGreevy's Frames of Reference' in The Lace Curtain, No.6 (Autumn 1978) p50. Back to text.

7. Letter from Thomas MacGreevy to Wallace Stevens 27 April, 1948. Property of The Huntington Library. Back to text.

8. T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p43. Back to text.

9. Dante, The Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, Bantam Books, New York, 1982, p3. Back to text.

10. TCD MS 7979/2/8. Back to text.

11. Susan Schreibman, Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition, Anna Livia Press and The Catholic University of America Press, Dublin & Washington D.C., 1991, p29. Back to text.

12. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, Oxford University Press, 1977, p15. Back to text.

13. Gordon, p15. Back to text.

14. TCD MS 7989/2/6. Back to text.

15. Gordon, p15. Back to text.

16. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Complete Poems and Plays, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p118. Back to text.

17. Samuel Beckett, rpt. 'Humanistic Quietism' in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, John Calder, London, 1983, p68. Back to text.

18. Thomas MacGreevy, Nicolas Poussin, The Dolmen Press, 1960, p15. Back to text.

19. Schreibman, p33. Back to text.

20. MacGreevy, T.S. Eliot, Chatto & Windus, London, 1931, p16. Back to text.

21. MacGreevy, memoirs, p345. Back to text.

22. I am indebted to Mary Thompson for her comments on Austin Clarke, and the use of mythology in post-Irish Renaissance poetry and drama. Back to text.

23. TCD MS 7989/2/42. Back to text.

24. It is not clear whether MacGreevy ever posted this letter. It does not seem to have been preserved in Yeats's papers now deposited at the National Library of Ireland, nor does it appear in Letters to W.B. Yeats. Back to text.

25. TCD MS 8068. Back to text.

26. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993, p3. Back to text.

27. Thomas MacGreevy, Jack B Yeats, Victor Waddington Publications, Dublin, 1945, p28. Back to text.

28. Wallace Stevens, 'Imagination as Value' in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, Faber and Faber, London and Boston, 1984, pp144-5. Back to text.

29. Beckett, Disjecta, p68. Back to text.

30. Thomas, MacGreevy, Richard Aldington: An Englishman, Chatto & Windus, London, 1931, p6. Back to text.

31. TCD MS 7989/2/37. Back to text.

32. TCD MS 7989/2/48. Back to text.

33. MacGreevy, T.S. Eliot, pp29-30. Back to text.

34. Beckett, Disjecta, p68. Back to text.

35. TCD MS 8117/94. Back to text.

36. Paul Edwards, 'The Apes of God: Form and Meaning' in Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, ed Jeffrey Meyers, London, Athlone Press, 1980, p134. Back to text.

37. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, p135. Back to text.

38. Meyers, p136. Back to text.

39. MacGreevy, Thomas 'The Catholic Element in Work in Progress in Our Exagmination round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress rpt. New York, New Directions, 1962, p127. Back to text.

40. TCD MS 7989/2/47. Back to text.

41. Letter from Thomas MacGreevy to Wallace Stevens, 26 May 1948. Property of The Huntington Library. Back to text.

42. Beckett, Disjecta, p74. Back to text.

43. Samuel Beckett, 'Hommage a Jack B Yeats' in Jack B Yeats: A Centenary Gathering ed. Roger McHugh, The Dolman Press, 1971, p75. Back to text.

44. MacGreevy, Jack B Yeats, p26. Back to text.

45. MacGreevy, Jack B Yeats, p28. Back to text.

46. MacGreevy, Jack B Yeats, p28. Back to text.

47. Brian Coffey, Poems and Versions: 1929-1990, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1991, p70. Back to text.

48. TCD MS 7989/2/49. Back to text.

  © Copyright 1995 Susan Schreibman.