The Executioner's Boots: The Ficton of John montague

peter I Executioner'sBoots: Fictionof John I The opposite shore unveils itself, Bright in detail as a painting, Alone, but equalto the morning. " The Point " not unusualfora poet to turn tofiction atsomepointin his career, finding in the scope afforded bynarrative an opportunity toextend contextualise the more atemporal focus of the poetry. Typically, he produce one or two novels characterized by easy elegance of language rather than by formal inventiveness: Christian romances, Kavanagh's Tarry George Barker's The Dead A Girl in Winter and These fictions are inevitably overshadowed by their writers' poetic achievements to the extent that it is nearly impossible to read the prose without referring it somepointtoour knowledge of the poems. The prose writings areat oncean alternative to anda glosson thepoetry. Wherethe poems deal in ellipses and in the emblematic or symbolic transformation which snatchesthe lyric moment out of time, the fictionsserve as documents of record and recall, and acknowledge temporality and history. While John Montague's poetry has tended towards the longer rhythms of the sequence, his favoured forms as prose writer have been theshortstoryandthenovella rather than themoreexpansive latitudes of the novel. Nine early stories were gathered in Death of a Chieftain and Other Stories followed over two decades later by The Lost (1987); there have also been occasional uncollected short stories.' Starting from the premise that the two bodies of writing are interconnected, it is the intention here to look at Montague's fiction in , the light of his poems. Montague's poems generally eschew narrative,even when, asin The Great they are presented as a group with a prefatory note , Death Chieftain and Stories (London: and Kee, 1964); TheLost Mercier Press, 1987); An Gael, (New York, Summer " A PrizeGiving " , The Irish Times, 26 August 1988, '. The Great Cloak (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978). IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW outlining the " Plot " of theevents towhich they refer and which their organization. The book remains an assembly of individual as does and When narrative is I into the poetry, it is associated with cruelty and dysfunction. In Wild Dog Rose " , first collected in Tides 3 and later included as the final section of The Field,', the old woman who is its has a story to tell; it constitutes the central section of the poem: And there where the shines in the hedge she tells me a story so terrible that I try to push it away, my bones melting. 17). It is a story of an attempted rape. The squalid encounter is redeemed only by the presence of the its beaten blossoms holding out symbolic token of necessary resilience in the face of violence. Proseisthe normal mediumof fictional narrative, but Montague , on a few occasions essayed the prose poem, most remarkably " Coming Events " (T, p. 26). This has as its subject a late sixteenth - century painting by the Flemish painter Gerard David which depicts " The Judgement of Cambyses " , with a character named being skinned alive in the presence of Cambyses. The scene is rich historical and narrativeassociations, allof which Montaguejettisons in his rendering of the picture. His description becomes as self - consciously detachedas an anatomy lesson: " a man being flayed " . Four craftsmen areconcerned with thefigureon the table: oneis openingtheleftarm,anotherliftingaway the right nipple, a third incising the right arm while the last (his knife caught between his . teeth) is unwinding the results of his labour so as to display the rich network of veins under the skin of the left leg. t The anonymity of the event hesitates between the universal and the , particular; the text itself is non - committal as to itssignificance: The whole scene may be intended as an allegory of human suffering but what the line of perspective leads us toadmireisthe browncalfskin of theprincipal executioner's boots. (T, p. 26) 3. Tides (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1970). Subsequent references to this edition text abbreviated to T. 4. The Rough Field (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1972). Subsequent references to edition in the text abbreviated to THE FICTION rejecting the historical and narrative aspects of David's painting, makes it a moment of violence and strippingbare, in the extreme sense. The executioners and onlookers are distinguished thevictims by their clothes, " richermine " and " browncalf - skin " , I by their serenity of expression: " mild admiration " . And, as we the paintingthrough Montague's commentary, wearealigned l with thoseexecutioners and onlookers;we too are invited " to admire " our attention isfinally directed not to the intricacies of flesh and the ofsuffering but to thecalf - skin boots, artefacts fromanother , more commonplace skinning, now transformed by the skill of a I , craftsman. If there isa companionpiece to " ComingEvents " in Tides, it is " Life which imaginativelyexplores the surfaces of a woman's body as poses for drawing students. An opposition is set up in the poem l between the grotesque sensual tormentedasceticism and celebratory acceptanceof the body's offerings. At the end, the " simply human " is drawn into an artful neutrality: On cartridge paper an armyof pencils deploy silently to lure her into their i I net of lines while from above her chilled, cramped body blossoms a late flower: her tired smile. t I In " Coming Events " the progress ofentry into the " rich network of veins " isdiverted towards the marginal contiguity of the executioner's boots; the possibility of lustful fear of a woman's bodyin " Life Class " resolves itself in a net of lines. The images of pain and violence which find their way into Montague's poetry through modes associated with narrative - story - telling,the useof prose - offera keytotheepigraphsfor his collection Death of a Chieftain. Its original epigraph was to have been a passage from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: REVIEW 7 I fear him. I fear his redrimmed hornyeyes. It is with him I must struggle all through the night till day comes, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by thesinewy throat. . . Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean him no This was dropped in favourofsome lines from John Hewitt's intimate world ofimagination and family: and the which also refer to a struggle, this time in the , I wrestled with my fatherin mydream, and in that dream remembered who we were, and why weshould not struggle, he and I . . . The stories in Death of a Chieftain are implicit with struggle conflict. Even when no harm is meant, even when there remembrance of why there should be no struggle, the world of stories is fragmentary and riven. In this they contrast with predominant movement of Montague's poetry, which is , towards recognition and integration; these may be achieved in - " Everything our casual morning to flow onedirection " ( " The siege of Mullingar " , ACL, p. 60) - or in sorrow, as in the affirmation nothing dies, that even bitter failure memory grows " in Winter " , ASD, p. 19). The tendency towards mythopeia in the poetry,in which the details of life take on symbolic or emblematic significance under some governing idea, finds its counterbalance in the stories. In " The Siege of Mullingar " Montague seemed to dance lightly on the grave of an old invalidated myth - " Puritan Ireland's dead and myth of and - while offeringa newonein its stead. But in Occasion of Sin " ,astory which is roughly contemporary with . that poem, a young French womanisconfronted by " PuritanIreland " notquite dead andgoneyet. " TheCry " tellshow asuccessful journalist , returns on a visit to his native Ulster and enters into the inbuilt small - town tensions of the place before being rebuffed as an outsider, , while another story, " The New Enamel Bucket " , also explores the divisions in Ulster society and the violence that. at the time of its 5. See Montague's comments in " Work Your Progress " , Irish University Review, 12, (Spring p. 49. 6. Montague had been working on Hewitt's poetry at the time of a Chieftain being prepared for the press, contributing an essay on Hewitt to Poetry in Spring 1964. THE FICTION was still largely And in the darkly comic title story, of a Chieftain " , the bitter failure of Coote's attempt to find connection between theearly Irish tumulus buildersand lost civilizations behind the Central American pyramids does not breed any redemptive memory; instead, he dies with pointless dignity an ersatz megalithic tomb. The opening story of the collection displays conflict graphically in heightened atmosphere of a boarding - school setting. It describes howa newlyarrived martinet Deanisbrought downbyaspontaneous of the boys under his charge. As in several of the stories, the focusof the narrative is uncertain; it rests fully neither with theDean's of view nor with thatofthepupils,but shifts fromonesideto the I other. In the curiously detached telling, only the confrontation is heightened; it enacts in narrative form what is found more acutely in Events " . The final stage of the rebellion against the Dean is by his singling out one particular boy as the object of his I contemptuous authority; the others react, and I I thedangerousaloofness which had been his power wasnowswept awayfrom him;hewas nolonger a priest ofa personinauthority, but merely someone who had humbled and hurt another past enduring. The boys' rebellion is at once an adolescent discovery of their own ability to withstand and subdue an unwarranted imposition, and an exposure of the shallow foundations of the restraints operating on them. The final moment of the story has the boys scattering outside " with wild and joyful cries " , but the sense is one of dispersal, not cohesion. For them the episode hasalready becomea partofthe past; it does not survive as a constituent of their future. Dispersaland disintegration underlie the stories. Thenineteensixties seemed to promisea loosening of the old restraints, and in " A Change of Management " Montague rehearses his favourite theme of a new Ireland coming into the ascendant, shedding the old pieties. Such release is gained only through resignation. As new structures are , established, the free spirit of Cronin,a writer who might - justmight - cross over from potentiality to achievement, quits his job in the public service, and is spun off from the centralized cohesion of economic progress; but for people like the protagonist there was no real escape left, not even here: the most they could hope to find was someone under whose direction they might give their best. Besides, was it such a criminal thing to wish to lead an ordinary life? IRISH REVIEW A childhood yearning to transcend the ordinariness of farm life isat the basisof " TheOklahoma Kid " ,asadly of an expedition to the local town see a cowboy film. young narrator, three or four enthusiasts hire a l excursion; the evening is a fiasco, and the greatexpectations end with the child and his companions making their under the scornful eyes of the townsmen. is, far,oneof successful stories in the collection. But Montague I something other of it, by addinga postscript. right the there, and anything further will only spoil it " , says the I to tell how seventeen years later " life a codicil " mid - way through a journey down the centre of the grown man suddenly recognised himself as " the Oklahoma CountyTyrone " . l Thisdelayed recognition leads to a certain dispersal of the thestory,movingitfromfiction toanecdote by its I It is an unusual turn for a short story, but not for a poem, similar turn is often used, although to different effect. In I poetry, he frequently describes a remembered incident from the andthen,in thefinalstanzaorlines, shiftsabruptly toa latertime, I l " The Water Carrier " and " Like Round My Childhood " , " TheCountryFiddler " ,' " The Cage " and " A , Tongue " In these, theturnopens up thepoem's significance;it an efficient way of achieving the transformation of the particular, allowingitsauratocarryover to a timeoutsideits own.Montagueuses that technique of " carry over " to something approaching the same purpose in his novella The Lost Notebook. The recollection of anevent thirty years before is told first as a story, but then tailed by aftermath. The value of the story rests not in itself but in its formative impact on the narrator. The final story in Death of a Chieftain, " A Ball of Fire " , also anticipates The Lost Notebook in some respects. Brought to an awareness of the life and death of a neighbour, the artist Michael Gorman finds himself disturbed by the undirected energy of the monthsin theman's life. Hefirst sees the man on November, day on which he leaves a painting unfinished, not seeing any fitend - pointfor the flow of colouron to hiscanvas. Onlyafter and withdrawn neighbour has been found dead his basement flat doesGorman face intothe painting again. Chosen Light (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967). Subsequent references edition in the text abbreviated to THE FICTION He placed it on the easel; its living spaces stared back at him, a chaos of unfulfilment.Then he reached for a brush and began to work. Across the darkexpanseof the canvas, a line began todevelop. At first frail,likeand electric wire, itgrewstronger, more defined. It became a dancing, independent line, full of weird energy, and softly radiating light. It ran right across the canvas until, completingandculminating thepicture, itfinished in a smothered I explosion of colour, like a ball of fire. (p. 174). I movement towards artistic completion is, however, a strategy of just as much as is the forced concentration on the calfskin boots in " Coming Events " ;Gorman isseeking to assuage thefeelings by his encounters with his neighbour. The title of Lost Notebook refers to a journal, since lost, which I written during the summer of 1950 while the narrator was a visitor to Florence; the novella represents itself as a recollection of thatlost season. The narratorlooks back knowingly to moment when he began to put on knowledge. More than the notebook has been lost, it is suggested: inhibition and ignorance have beenshed in thecourse of a passage from innocence to experience. The notebook is twice lost in the story. Shortly after the young man returns to his family home in Ulster the journal goes missing for a few days, to be read bysomeone unknown. It again disappearsduring the ensuing three decades, leaving the events to be retold in the form of fiction, with retrospection substituted for introspection. The account we are given is understood to be at once a re - exploration of that . summer and a reconstruction that overlays the raw telling of the original.The accountends protectively with indications as to how the lost notebook, and by transference The Lost Notebook, should and should not be read. I The idea of it being read by the wrong person, by someone i unsympathetic to the extreme feelings displayed in the commentary and the drawings, the scrawls of two young people so involved with each other, sometimes in anger, sometimes in pleasure, filled me with rage and dismay. . . . the idea that someone should look at our joint efforts with censorious eyes was almosta sacrilege. Love or lust, loathing or friendship, it was ours, a thrusting from our so differing worlds towards freedom, towardsease. Whathappened betweenuswasa stumbling towards something without which two equal beings cannotsurvive,somethingcalled honesty. IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW These embedded instructionson how to read suggest that honesty hard - won privilege, not to be understood by outsiders. Theaccount surrounded by self - awareness, gained through the shedding of awkward adolescent self - consciousness. Now, where the had been ingenuous, the novella is artful. The incident at the end, when the notebook is taken and its intimacies looked over by some indeterminate other, is a reworking of an action to be found in Montague's poetry. It occurs most at theendof " AllLegendary Obstacles " , when the old lady clearsa on the train window to look out at the lovers on the platform as the:, Move into the wetdarkness Kissing, still unable to speak. (ACL, p. 16) The individual experience of love or sexuality or suffering is given force by the presence of an excluded onlooker. The burgomeisters both " ComingEvents " and " The Massacre w ,*thegiggling hotel - maids in " Tracks " (T, toframe theevents andemotions,giving them detachment and distance. In The Lost Notebook the initiatory eroticism of the experience which constitutes the is transformed into an eroticism of recall in the sjuzet. The narrator too, by virtue inexorable temporality and reconstitutive memory, has become an observer of thoseevents through which, asa participant, he had freed into adulthood. The Florence journal had been a production; in addition to the jottings and poems by the young there were the girl's line drawings and comments. These offered another perspective and were, Montague suggests, perhaps the more honest part of the document. As rewritten by the narrator, her viewpoint is occluded by his need to try again, shaping the eventsand emotions in the light of an acquired wisdom. In the process she is marginalized, if not quite written out. But maybe she does not need a secondgo; there isthe implication thatshe had been abletoget right the first time. For her the affair was an episode rather than an epoch, at best a remission in the course of " a kind of despoiling. an endless disappointment " (p. 95). He, on the other hand, is absolved from any guilt in this defilement, for it had been initiated before they met; it has its originsin her family,andparticularly in her unhappy c forherbrother. There, whereshe had lookedforfullintimacy,she had been rejected andsupplanted. Thesexual and artisticenergy of her life isgenerated by the failure of thatlove. 8. A Slow Dance (Dublin: The Press, 1975) p. 41 7 THE FICTION A persistent sub - text in The Lost Notebook is the uneasy between the Irishman, cowed by his sense of the past, I the energetic present of America as embodied in Wandy; it is an encounter which takesplacein Florence,asetting which epitomizes the I wealth of continental Europe. This fictionalaccountcan beset the reportorial telling of a contemporary and parallel In an article for The Bell, " Fellow Travelling with America " , Montague described his participation in a seminar on I American at Salzburg in 1950, organized by American academics for delegates drawn from a variety of European countries. The excitement the opportunity it affords is tempered by an ambivalence regarding the hegemony which the U.S. exerts over Europe. Montague represents himself as being inadequately equipped I todeal with the situation. (I think he modestly included himself as an " average " student.) I The average Irish student, as produced by our universities, is far behind in fluency of languages, humility before achievement, or just plain savoir vivre. He is gauche, eager perhaps, but more I arrogant and precious than his counterparts abroad. His faults l are reflected in the cultural atmosphere of a country: there is no active sense of European culture, but a kind of self - conscious, isolated bravado with the artist in the invidious position of spiritual director to the Itisa situation related to that on which Montague draws for The Lost Notebook; the artistic richness of Europe becomes an arena in which the Irish and the American, cultural outsiders both and alien to that richness, can meet and react. In the unsettled and unsettling world of their passion, the two are surrounded by the mute fixities of painting and sculpture. The names tumble through the text: Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Titian, Della Robbia . . . some twenty or more, references actingasasortoffixative on experience.Theart - workshave a history, and it becomes the young man's stratagem tolearnand relay it to his companion. She, on the other hand, is more attracted to the paintings of Mondrian, too comtemporary to have a history, too inscrutable to tell a story. The girl has already undergone an emotional and erotic wounding, and is the less vulnerable of the two. The culminating moment of their relationshipis hisanalpenetration of her body,but this is immediately followed by Wandy's accountof herpast. Theeffect of what she hasto say is to exclude the man. Even in that culminating moment he has The Bell. (June p. 25.