This week Miriam O Callaghan meets poet John Montague and his wife, writer Elizabeth Wassell.
John Montague’s first collection of poems Poisoned Lands appeared in 1961, his Collected Poems in 1995. His most recent volume of memoir is called The Pear Is Ripe.
The couple were in Dublin to mark the publication of Elizabeth’s fourth novel Dangerous Pity (liberties press).
Both Elizabeth and John were born in New York.
Elizabeth’s parents lived in downtown Manhattan where they practiced as psychoanalysts. Although happy as a child, Elizabeth explained “I lived more richly in books than in the world, partly because I felt my mother was analysing me or putting a kind of template over my life and my experience.”
John was born in 1929 to parents who were newly arrived in New York from Fintona, County Tyrone. Life was tough and money was tight and John explained that his father “once saw a sign for a Sale of Work and said ‘I wouldn’t buy that!’”
But eventually, his parents realised they couldn’t support their children in New York and John was sent back to live with his aunts in Garvaghy, County Tyrone. “It was a strange decision…. But as a child of four I was handed over to two spinster ladies…. At the age of four, I was transplanted to County Tyrone.”
John next saw his mother when he was seven, but there was a battle of wills between his aunts and his mother over who should rear the child. “I think there was a subtle kind of psychological war fare going on between the aunts who wanted to keep me….and my mother who didn’t have enough money to reclaim me”
John recalls this part of his life in a poem called A Flowering Absence, which Elizabeth describes as her favourite of all John’s poems. Because the subject matter is so deeply emotional, this is a poem that John usually does not read in public. But he read a extract for Miriam.
Elizabeth explained that they met in New York in 1992. Miriam asked was it love at first sight? Elizabeth explained I almost hesitate to say it, because it sounds so mawkish and it is an expression that has been bowdlerized in popular song but it does happen…. He was only a man walking into a room, but when I saw him I gasped, I shuddered, I felt I knew him inside myself, in some deep place in myself.
John recalls I remember seeing this strange girl, she had a flowered dress….and she had a flagon in her hand and she said I will be your Ganymede, your cup bearer….and I said My God, this is a very intelligent young lady.” They married in 2005.
Describing how he wrote his first poem, John explained “One day at the back of an extremely boring class, there was something that seem to come alive in my mind, in my psyche. There were these words and I was hooked”.
I think that the psyche is partly feminine, when I was going great guns I used to get a poem almost every month and even suffered from PPT Pre Poem Tension!”
Elizabeth says that she wrote stories even as a child “It was my solace….. I felt more fully myself when I was writing.”
The couple now live between West Cork and their home in Nice in the South of France.