When Montague went back to Brooklyn

Two Ulster writers, Brian Friel, left, and John Montague, spoke when the latter was conferred with an honorary doctorate in UCD on Bloomsday 2011. ROLLING NEWS.IE

He died on Dec. 10 in Nice, France, at age 87, but John Montague was also born far from the County Tyrone of his childhood and youth. In 1985, journalist Jim Mulvaney spoke with the poet for this New York Newsday article when he returned to the city of his birth.

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John Montague, one of the most highly acclaimed 20th-century Irish poets, was walking down Rodney Street in Brooklyn, accompanied by the ghosts of his father, mother, uncles and cousins who danced beside him, listening to the imagined sounds of his uncle's fiddle playing a reel and the brogues that became Brooklynese.

It was fear of disturbing those images, or discovering they were not quite as he remembered them, that had kept Montague away from the place of his birth for 52 years.

"I am well known in Ireland, and I am known as an Irish poet," he said. "Now I have a concept that I am an Irish-American poet as well. It has been on me for three years or so. I used to think that you don't have to confront fragments of memories if you have them written down. But it is so easy to falsify your memories. Maybe I was frightened."

Montague overcame his fright on the first night of Yom Kippur this year. Walking down the street, he peered through open windows at bearded men with white, black and silver prayer shawls, reading the Scriptures. "It is quite extraordinary to see them praying," Montague said. "It is just as I remember it, but when I was a child those rooms were speakeasies filled with Irishmen."

When the speakeasies closed, the Irish assimilated and moved away from Rodney Street. Most moved to Queens and Long Island. Some, like Montague's mother, saw the Great Depression as the failure of the American dream; she sent her family back to Ireland. Blacks moved in and were later replaced by Hispanics and Hassidic Jews.

Meanwhile, Montague grew up in Ireland and became a poet. He has published 26 books of poems and stories, including "Death of a Chieftain," which gave the name to the famous Irish folk group. He won scholarships to Yale and the University of Iowa Poetry Workshop, received a Fulbright Fellowship and visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley and in Vincennes, France. He came back to America this fall as a Writer in Residence at the Writers Institute of the State University at Albany. This week, he began a six-week stint as Poet in Residence at Berkeley.

Last month, Brooklyn's forgotten poet returned to find his roots.

James Montague, the poet's father, was the son of a wealthy Catholic shopkeeper and farmer; he joined the Irish Republican Army in County Tyrone during the Irish uprising in 1916. The war ended in 1921, and six counties, including Tyrone, remained British and hostile to former rebels.

"There wasn't much hope of a job in Northern Ireland for a former IRA man," John Montague said. James Montague set off to join his brother in America. In 1928, his wife, Mary, and two children, Seamus, 6, and Turlogh (Terence), 4, followed. They moved into an apartment in a brownstone building in Williamsburg, where Uncle John, a bootlegger, had a speakeasy. The next year, John, the future poet, was born at St. Catherine's Hospital.

It was a difficult time. The Great Depression hit the immigrant community hard. "My father was on [supported by] St. Vincent De Paul and dependent on his brother's generosity," Montague said. "I presume he was drinking. He was a barroom tenor and could always find someone to buy him a drink. My mother did not like the New World. It was not respectable. It was insecure. There were Italians, who weren't real Catholics, and Jews. From the day she arrived in America, she was unhappy."

Montague wasn't aware of his mother's unhappiness until later. "Brooklyn was all quite exciting as a young boy," he said. "We didn't notice the Depression. It was Prohibition and my uncle's speakeasy was always jumping. There was the park, the cinema and the library. What else does a child need?"

By 1933, things had gotten desperate. Uncle John's fondness for his own bathtub gin resulted in fatal liver disease, and with him went the speakeasy and the family's only means of support. Young John's mother contracted tuberculosis and, unable to care for the children, sent them to Northern Ireland. The two older boys were taken in by their maternal grandmother. "She didn't want me," Montague said, "so I was plopped down with two maiden aunts on the farm in Garvaghey in what had become the province of Northern Ireland."

"My mother came back in 1937," he said. "I was called in from the field to meet a woman I didn't recognize. She had sweets. I didn't want to have anything to do with her. She was dressed in black; she smelled of a small town. The mother I wanted should smell like Brooklyn." He was reared by his aunts while his mother lived in a nearby town with his two brothers. His father stayed in America, working for the IRT and mailing his paychecks home to send the boys to school.

John, meanwhile, went to University College Dublin, James Joyce's alma mater. He worked as a movie critic for the Standard, a newspaper published by the Catholic Church, and later for the Irish Times, a Dublin daily newspaper. He moved to Paris in 1961, but split his time almost evenly between Berkeley, Ireland and France for the next decade.

His poetry brought him great critical acclaim and relative financial success - that is to say, he managed to make a fairly comfortable living. He joined the Irish civil rights movement in Tyrone in the late 1960s and was with Bernadette Devlin on the first march. While many of his childhood acquaintances joined the IRA, Montague has kept a polite distance. "One has got mixed feelings about the IRA," he said. "One has to accept the historical IRA of the struggle of freedom of 1916 and 1922. Now, there are all kinds of shades."

In 1971, he and his wife, a French patchwork quilt artist, moved to Cork, where they live with their two daughters, Oonagh, 11, and Sibylle, 5. Montague is a lecturer at University College Cork and is now editing an anthology of recent Irish poetry for Macmillan, titled "Bitter Harvest," scheduled to be published in 1987.

In Brooklyn, he did not find the building he once lived in. It was apparently on one of the three blocks demolished when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was constructed.

The memories were weak until he doubled back to Broadway and saw the El. His blue eyes sparkled in the darkness. "This is it!" he shouted. "I recognize this. This makes me feel quite queer; it goes quite deep into my memory. The noise of the subway is bringing me back to four years old."

He looked down from the platform and watched a young boy whiz by on a plastic tricycle. "That could have been me," he said. "The American years didn't count much for my brothers, but they did for me. It is the fascination of an alternative existence. What would I have become? A priest, schoolteacher or bum? What would it have been?"

He spoke quickly, without a trace of the stutter he has had most of his life. It was, perhaps, a sign that he had returned home. "I was slow to speak as a child, but there was no stammer," he said. "When I was in school [in Ireland], I ran across a [teacher] who loathed my family, who mocked my accent. She gave me a horrible passage to read in front of the school, and I started to stammer because I was publicly embarrassed in front of a live audience . . . I don't know why it has stopped this evening. Returning home may be a sound theory."

 

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