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 To
start with a question: who is the foremost poet to have published and made his career
exclusively in Ireland’s capital city? Dublin has never lacked for poets, but cross
off Swift, Yeats, Synge, Clarke, Kavanagh, all of whom published in the UK at one point or
another, and who is there left? You won’t find him on the standard-issue poster of
literary greats displayed in Irish pubs, you won’t find him on the Irish school
syllabus, and you almost certainly won’t find him in Irish bookshops. He is James
Clarence Mangan, Ireland’s po�te maudit,
an opium-eating, hard-living and hard-drinking profligate to place alongside such figures
as Nerval, Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
Mangan wrote almost a thousand poems and, since the
collapse of Thomas Moore’s reputation, is recognised as the most significant Irish
poet of the nineteenth century. Yet beyond a handful of anthology pieces, his work is
scarcely known. Worse, for most of the hundred and fifty years since his death, it was not
properly in print. The multiplicity of variant texts in circulation made him, depending on
your point of view, a bibliographer’s dream or nightmare. To give one example: Thomas
Kinsella’s New Oxford Book of Irish Verse
includes a two-verse poem of Mangan’s called ‘Shapes and Signs’. A
presciently semiotic title, you might think, until you discover that Mangan in fact wrote
no such poem. What he did write was the thirteen-verse ‘Moreen: A Love Lament’,
which he presented as a translation from the Irish of the otherwise unknown Charles Boy
Mac Quillan. A seven-verse version of this poem was published as an original work in 1849,
now titled ‘The Groans of Despair’, while a later nineteenth-century printing
whittled away five more verses to give ‘Shapes and Signs’, as reprinted by
Kinsella.
A multi-volume scholarly Collected Works begun
in 1996 has helped clear up all this confusion, but the last paperback selection has been
out of print for decades.
Yeats elected him to his personal pantheon in ‘To Ireland in
the Coming Times’ (‘Nor may I less be counted one /With Davis, Mangan,
Ferguson’), and the undergraduate James Joyce delivered a lecture on him to his
fellow students. More recently Brian Moore wrote a novel, The Mangan Inheritance, about a returning immigrant
investigating his family connections to the poet, and (to compare great things with small)
I myself decided in 1998 to follow Mangan’s trail around Dublin for the purposes of a
sonnet sequence. In a time when few Irish writers’ tracks have not been followed and
signposted for the literary tourist, Mangan remains elusive: despite spending his entire
career in Dublin (he apparently left the city only once in his life, to visit neighbouring
County Meath) his poetry is almost entirely devoid of topographical detail. As the
MacQuillan example shows, he frequently presented original poems as translations, and in
the same way his truest portraits of Dublin can be found in poems ostensibly about
somewhere else entirely. Consider the exhilarating ‘Siberia’, written in 1845
just as Ireland was about to sink into famine:
In Siberia’s wastes
The
Ice-wind’s breath
Woundeth like the tooth�d steel.
Lost Siberia doth reveal
Only
blight and death.
Blight and death alone.
No
summer shines.
Night is interblent with Day.
In Siberia’s wastes always
The
blood blackens, the heart pines.
In Siberia’s wastes
No
tears are shed,
For they freeze within the brain.
Nought is felt but dullest pain,
Pain
acute, yet dead;
Pain as in a dream,
When
years go by
Funeral-paced, yet fugitive,
When man lives, and doth not live,
Doth
not live—nor die. […]
Mangan was born on Fishamble
Street along the quays to the south of the river Liffey, originally ‘Fish
Shambles’ after the local market. To one side loom Sam Stephenson’s Civic
Offices, erected amid much controversy in the 1980s after Viking remains were discovered
on their Wood Quay site. Conservationists waged a long-running but fruitless campaign to
stop the development, and perhaps in honour of their efforts the footpath round the
Offices is studded with plaques depicting axe-heads and other heritage placebos. On nearby
Winetavern Street tourists can have the full Viking experience in ‘Dublinia’,
where a thousand years of Irish history are given the audiovisual treatment in ye olde
Irish speak. ‘We’d rather have the iceberg than the
ship, although it meant the end of travel’ Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and where tourism
is concerned it often seems we Irish would rather have the interpretative centre than the
troublesome historical reality.
Halfway along Fishamble Street stands the George
Frederick Handel Hotel, named in honour of the first performance of Handel’s Messiah on the spot in 1742. Today the music in
the bar leans more to house and techno, though given the sampling of Bach’s Air in G
in a recent club hit there may be hope for Handel yet. Georgian Fishamble Street catered
for less elevated pleasures too: in 1764 Darkey Kelly was publicly burned to death for
keeping a notorious brothel. A total of one house has survived from Mangan’s time.
Standing in isolation until recently, it now rubs rooflines with an apartment complex of
the sort that springs up almost overnight wherever an old tenement or Georgian hulk has
been obliging enough to collapse.
Mangan wasn’t the only celebrated Dubliner to have born
here: there was also Henry Grattan (1746-1820), leader of the short-lived Irish parliament
abolished with the Act of Union in 1801, and Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), a
Protestant divine chiefly remembered for his claim that the world had been created on 23
October 4004 BC. At the foot of the street is St Michael and St John’s church, like
so many inner-city churches now deconsecrated. Like other po�tes maudits, Mangan nursed a passion for
theatrical self-abnegation (calling himself ‘a ruined soul in a wasted frame: the
very ideal and perfection of moral and physical
evil combined in one individual’), but unlike Baudelaire with his callow satanism,
Mangan remained a devout Roman Catholic all his life. His faith would often take him to
the cellar of the old Rosemary Lane chapel, where he would perform his penitential
exercises prostrate on the floor.
To one side of Fishamble Street is the city’s
cultural quarter, Temple Bar. When journalists reach for the most dreaded clich� of all
about contemporary Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, this is the place they have in mind. Fifteen
years ago, repertory cinema hardly existed in Ireland and Dubliner’s coffee flavours
of choice had yet to end in o, and Temple Bar was a down-at-heel collection of second-hand
clothes and record shops and car parks. There was talk of turning it into a central bus
station. Then something happened to the Irish economy, and today it packs in more
galleries, recording studios and cybercaf�s than many other counties combined.
In 1798 Ireland was convulsed by the rebellion of the
United Irishmen, a tragi-comic footnote to which unfolded in the month of Mangan’s
birth. On 23 May 1803 a raid on Dublin Castle was led by the twenty-five year old Robert
Emmet, one of Ireland’s most romanticized revolutionaries and almost certainly its
most inept. Emmet fled the scene after the murder of the Lord Chief Justice, was captured
almost immediately, and hanged and beheaded outside St Catherine’s Church on Thomas
Street. His speech from the dock (memorably travestied in the Sirens chapter of Ulysses), is one of the most stirring in the annals
of nationalist martyrology. ‘Let no man write my epitaph’, he told the
courtroom: ‘When my country takes its places among the nations of the world, then, and
not till then, let my epitaph be written’.
From his early teens Mangan lived across the river from
Fishamble Street in Chancery Lane beside the Four Courts, one of the city’s Georgian
masterpieces, and like the Custom House further down the quays, the work of James Gandon.
Vacant lots and defenceless old buildings make easy prey for property developers, but here
and there anomalous corners of the old city persist. One such is a large Victorian
redbrick structure around the corner from the Four Courts, bearing the legend ‘Dublin
Christian Mission’. Mangan’s Dublin was the site of intense evangelical
activity, throwing up colourful characters such as Charles Walmesley, author of The General History of the Christian Church, in
which he predicted that all Protestants in Ireland would be wiped out in 1825.
‘Pastor Fido’ responded with a rival prophecy that the Pope was the Antichrist
and would be destroyed the following year. The precise theological position of the Dublin
Mission Christian must go unrecorded, since in spite of numerous visits I failed to find
it open for business even once. The only sign of life came when, squinting through the
curtains one day, I found myself looking at two blue and yellow parrots, one chewing
intently at his perch. Could there be more than a phonetics to connect the parakeet and
the Paraclete?
It’s a long time since Dublin’s northside was
the centre of Georgian high society. Our new-found affluence hasn’t had much effect
on the long-term unemployment and heroin addiction that cripple much of the north inner
city, with a ghoulish criminal underworld thrown in for good measure. Attempts to make the
northside fashionable have produced some garish pubs of barn-like proportions,
‘themed’ for maximum exoticism. Drinkers at Pravda are surrounded by Socialist
Realist kitsch and effigies of long-dead Soviet despots. Around the same time it opened,
if only for symmetry, a restaurant called Mao appeared on the southside. On the
city’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, a statue of the dying hero
Cuchulainn in the General Post Office commemorates the revolutionaries of 1916. In Samuel
Beckett’s Murphy, Neary ‘seized the
dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they
are’. Today the principal indignity he faces is the embarrassing Anna Livia fountain
in the centre of the street outside his window, seldom turned on and usually full of
discarded burger boxes from the nearby McDonald’s. Nelson’s Pillar, once the
focal point of the street, was blown up by the IRA in 1966, but is finally to be replaced
by a 120m ‘Twenty-first Century Light Monument’. Mercury
will pulse along the spiral designs on the side, while at the top the illuminated point
will sway gently in the breeze, producing Celtic ‘synergy’. No piece of public
statuary can be said to have entered public consciousness without being christened with a
derisive rhyming nickname (Anna Livia is better known as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi), and
early candidates for the new monument include the Spire in the Mire, the Pin in the Bin and the Hypo from
the Corpo and the Stiletto in the Ghetto.
Elsewhere on O’Connell Street, the statues form a
more traditional assembly of patriots and prelates. At the southern end of the street
stands Daniel O’Connell flanked by four lugubrious ‘Victories’, one
sporting a bullet hole through the nipple. O’Connell won Catholic Emancipation in
1829 with a series of mass rallies, stopping short of the revolutionary measures advocated
by the next figure down, Young Irishman William Smith O’Brien. O’Brien’s
abortive rising took place in 1848, earning him five years in Van Diemen’s Land.
Mangan was attracted to the Young Ireland movement, writing frequently for Thomas
Davis’s paper The Nation before moving on
to the more heated pages of John Mitchel’s The
United Irishman in his last years. Mitchel too served his time in Tasmania, escaping
from Australia for the US in 1859. Here he edited Mangan’s poetry, as well as serving
more time in prison, this time for his vehement pro-slavery views during the Civil War
(revolutionary idealism evidently had its limits).
Further along the street is Father Mathew, the
‘Apostle of Temperance’ whose crusade for total abstinence became a
nineteenth-century mass movement to rival O’Connell’s. At its height, in 1840,
it claimed five million people, much to the discomfiture of the devout but bibulous
Mangan. Wags claim that Father Mathew’s admonishing finger is in fact pointing in the
direction of Mooney’s bar on nearby Abbey Street. If so, it wouldn’t be the only
connection between religion and alcohol in Ireland. Until recently, all licensed premises
were obliged to close for an hour between 2.30 and 3.30pm in what was dubbed ‘holy
hour’, an attempt to dissuade feckless Irish menfolk from spending the entire day in
the pub. An old Dublin joke describes a man being refused a pint of stout by the barman,
holy hour having just struck. Glum-faced, he turns to leave, but the barman calls him
back: ‘Perhaps you’d like a drink while you’re waiting?’
Several hostelries known to have been frequented by
Mangan remain in business. On Camden Street there is The Bleeding Horse, with its maze of
interconnected rooms, upstairs and downstairs. There is Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street,
an eighteenth-century coach house within whose walls confines the smoke of centuries
appears to have lingered, griming over everything not already grey, dark brown or black in
colour. A perverse testimony to Mulligan’s authenticity is the complete absence of
the literary tat with which so many Irish pubs are now accessorised. Mangan and Joyce may
have drunk here, but you’ll have to go elsewhere if you’re looking for portraits
of either on the wall.
Mangan’s first employment was as a scrivener, that
peculiarly hopeless profession shared by his fictional contemporaries Akakii Akakievich
and Bartleby. Kendrick’s office on York Street where he worked was only a few doors
away from the Dublin residence of Charles Maturin, author of the Gothic classic Melmoth the Wanderer. Across
from York Street in St Stephen’s Green Mangan confronts us again, in a handsome bust
by Oliver Sheppard commemorating the tow-haired young poet rather than the alcohol- and
consumption-ravaged specimen he became by the end of his life. Also on the southside is Trinity College, where Mangan
worked in the library in the early 1840s. Although it produced such patriots as Wolfe
Tone, Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis, Trinity was (with Dublin Castle) the epicentre of
Unionist hegemony in Ireland. There is more than a little irony, then, in Mangan’s
contributing simultaneously to the Dublin University
Magazine and Thomas Davis’s paper The
Nation, as he did during this time. John Mitchel has left a memorable description of
the poet in the library: ‘an unearthly and ghostly figure, in a brown garment: the
same garment, to all appearance, which lasted to the day of his death; the blanched hair
was totally unkempt, the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was in his
arms, and all his soul was in the book’.
His job at the college didn’t last, and
Mangan’s last years were spent in increasing destitution. There were also, however,
his years of greatest artistic triumph. There are few phenomena in Irish literature to
compare with the torrent of verse he produced between 1845 and 1849, including
‘Siberia’, ‘Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Sarsfield’,
‘O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire’, ‘To the Ruins of Donegal
Castle’, ‘The Deserted Mill’ and the outstanding ‘A Vision of
Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’. A collection of translations, Anthologica Germanica (1845), was the one and only
book of Mangan’s published during his lifetime. A second volume of translations, The Poets and Poetry of Munster, appeared shortly
after his death from cholera-related malnutrition in June 1849. Also from his last years
is the Autobiography, written at the request of
his confessor. Like so much of his oeuvre, this had been unavailable for many years before
the completion of Irish Academic Press’s edition of his Collected Works But even now
that he is in print again, to speak of Mangan’s canonisation seems less than
accurate. On the contrary, it is part of Mangan’s disruptive genius to place such a
concept under serious strain. If order and stability (textual or otherwise) are
prerequisites for admission to the Arnoldian or Eliotic canon, on both counts he remains
recalcitrant and unassimilable. The textual history of his work is only the most obvious
symptom of his fundamental apartness from the mainstream of Victorian verse. Readers who
take the trouble to seek him out will not be entering a Celtic adjunct to Tennyson and
Browning, but a strange and uncharted region like nothing else in nineteenth-century
poetry. My sonnet sequence done, I walk from Fishamble Street to the derelict and
atmospheric Misery Hill on the Dublin quays, and think of the end of Mangan’s
‘Siberia’:
In Siberia’s wastes
Are
sands and rocks.
Nothing blooms of green or soft,
But the snow-peaks rise aloft
And
the gaunt ice-blocks.
And the exile there
Is
one with those:
They are part, and he is part,
For the sands are in his heart,
And
the killing snows.
Therefore, in those wastes,
None
curse the Czar.
Each man’s tongue is cloven by
The North Blast, that heweth nigh
With
sharp scymitar.
And such doom each drees,
Till
hunger-gnawn,
And cold-slain, he at length sinks there,
Yet scarce more a corpse than ere
His
last breath was drawn.
Editor's Note: David Wheatley is currently preparing a selection of
James Clarence Mangan's poetry for Gallery Press.
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