Michael Hartnett: Political Poet and Parent - by Niall Hartnett

My father’s ‘rebel act’ in 1975 to abandon English as a 'language to sell pigs in', as well as to write poetry in, still has a legendary feel to it today:

I have made my choice
And leave with little weeping
I have come with meagre voice
To court the language of my people.

Almost as legendary was his fall from rebel grace to once again pen in English as well as Irish. Many looked upon this as a break of trust and a casual shaming of their support for my father in embracing his Gaelic roots. He discusses this with obvious regret in the RTE documentary ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ (1999) where he alludes to “thinking in English, dreaming in Irish” as a lead up to his return to English. There is no doubt that this struggle must have plagued him for those years before he wrote Inchicore Haiku (1985), after-all , he had written beautifully in English for most of his writing life and it had catapulted him to fame and praise.

So why then such fanfare to abandon that initial fame potentially for Gaelige only to dilute the initial statement later on? The answer is, there is no connection between why he departed English in 1975 and returned to it in 1985. Michael Hartnett’s immersion in Irish was a pure statement of love and respect that celebrated the language, the Irish culture of which it was born and the heroes who had championed it over time. Figures such as Ó Rathaille, Ó Bruadair and Haicéad loomed large in Michael Hartnett’s own mythology and he dearly wanted to emulate them for as long as he could in the quiet of poets’ country - Co. Limerick. It was a sort of monastic retreat to conjure up the same magic that those masters had and live close to a land similar to the one in which they dwelled. For a time this exodus was fruitful, with writing in Irish and experiences in the country that were sacred to him. However, finding the Irish language itself was somewhat challenging: he once heard an old man’s voice keening on the wind down a country lane. Fascinated, he followed this sound hoping at last to witness a traditional air in its home setting. As he approached the old man sitting in his doorway, he discovered to his horror that the old farmer was in fact singing: “Yes, we have no bananas; we have no bananas todaaay...” Luckily there were plenty of bilingual scholars and writers willing to drop in on our remote perch on a wet hill of Glendarragh over the years to satisfy my father’s yearnings for the language.

The retreat from the cosmopolitan sirens of Dublin to the glens of limerick was not an accident either. It was a comfortable return to roots both historical and familial with his own family: his wife and two children. Over time, the victory of this return would be bittersweet as these familial bonds decayed in the corrosiveness of alcohol. This “domestic crisis” as my father put it would eventually up-heave in 1984 with no consideration of my father’s original vow and triumphant exodus from public life. Ironically, the upheaval would necessitate his return to Dublin once he could stay no more in limerick. After Limerick, Dublin was his second home and his point of contact with the literary world.

Once back in Dublin, out of the wilds of the country, in a bed-sit on Tyrconnell Road, Inchicore, my father was assaulted once more with the urban rhythms of the working-class life which of course was mediated through the language of English:

31
All the flats cry out:
"Is there life before Dole day?"
The pawnshops snigger.

Of course, Irish was to be found on certain occasions and venues but mostly his environment was now a clanging maelstrom of English with no hint of the Irish roots he had sought in Limerick. Coupled with this fact was his struggle to express his emotions and thoughts on having to abandon his family, his vow, and indeed his dream, back in the green fields of possibility. This struggle was the epicenter of his experience of dreaming in Irish and thinking in English and many restless nights. Inchicore Haiku emerged as both a meditation on life in working class Dublin and a reflection on how he found himself there as a result of the fractures in his personal life that in effect made him estranged from both.

The book was a return to English forced by estrangement and the need to talk about that estrangement to the ones who could only understand through English: his family. Ironically, with my father’s reputation as a Gaelgeoir, he did not speak it in the home to his children or wife. A lot of callers to our house in Glendarragh spoke fluent Irish and would address my father in it without translation and my father decided that was not fair to my mother. So, he never pushed Irish as a language in the home. This baffled my teachers at school who assumed I’d be an automatic Gaelgeoir myself, but alas they were disappointed. My Irish was always mediocre! Thus, when my father began to meditate on his estrangement from us up in Dublin, the only sensible language given the context was English. He kept it cryptic, using a haiku form, but I see this at least in part as a direct expression of his feelings about his separation and his loss:

1
Now, in Inchicore,
my cigarette-smoke rises -
like lonesome pub-talk.


2
Down in Glendarragh
noises wake an anxious house.
I hear the doors slam.

The estrangement and loss is palpable:

50
My beloved hills,
my family and my friends -
my empty pockets.

This a man bereft of his land, his people and his stability- a jarring return to an unfriendly world where only one voice can be heard - the English voice, but it is a guilty surrender my father was not proud of:

8
My English dam bursts
and out stroll all my bastards.
Irish shakes its head.

Although feeling bereft, there are lingering signs of his connection to nature in the spiritual reassurance and comfort he seemed to find in birds:

11
On a brick chimney
I can see all West Limerick
in a jackdaw's eye.

46
Sanctifying grace:
a seagull and a jackdaw.
They kiss in the sky.

They punctuate the haikus like heralds of a new epoch and indeed it was- a painful period both humbling and revolutionary. Were it not for this time of flux, it is debatable whether or not the great bilingual work A Necklace of Wrens (1987) would have emerged celebrating and crystallizing his duality rather than wrestling with it.

A Necklace of Wrens was a gesture to both languages, to the two loves of his life that entwined his soul since his youth of magical encounters. They could entwine on paper also and his dual mastery of them both at this time allowed him free rein to move on to broader and more epic endeavours such as An Phurgóid (1989), Poems to Younger Women (1989), The Killing of Dreams (1992), Haicéad (1993), and Ó Rathaille (1998). Up until his death in 1999, he sought to both express himself in English and celebrate his literary heritage within the Irish tradition by translating the great poets exhaustively. No one knows how much he truly toiled over his translations of Ó Bruadair (1985), Haicéad (1993), and Ó Rathaille (1998) but without a doubt he spent the vast majority of his formidable intellect and emotional currency in these later years on breathing life back into his ancestral forbearers.

They were his constant companions and haunted him much like the wraiths that challenged Ebenezer Scrooge as he worked through endless sleepless nights trying to perfect their legacy while unwittingly solidifying his own. They were as familiar to me as talk about an uncle or cousin through my teenage years and demonstrate my father’s enduring commitment to the Irish Language that some may question. Indeed, in his final year, he often talked of an epic poem he was conceiving called Ocras (hunger). The planned work had some connection to the historical hunger-strikes of the North but more and more I see the metaphorical implications of such a poem that would have examined the interplay of themes of hunger with the eternal conflict between the English and Irish within Ireland. This was a struggle he knew well, sown in his youth by a nest of possibility:

I mo bhuachaill óg, fadó fadó
d'aimsíos nead.

Niall Hartnett, February 2006