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John Montague Dies In A French Hospital on HWN ENTERTAINMENT
The Irish poet John Montague passed away in the Clinique Parc Impérial in Nice early on Saturday morning. He was 87.
Montague had undergone major surgery to removing knotting in his colon. His widow, the American novelist Elizabeth Wassell, said he was “recovering nicely” until December 9th, when he came down with fever and began to decline. Montague’s daughters, Oonagh and Sibyl Montague, flew to Nice from Cork and Dublin respectively.
Nurses at the clinic extended visiting hours for Wassell. “On Thursday night we were sitting so closely. We were both lonely when we were apart,” Wassell said. “I suggested to John that it was a second courtship for us. He smiled warmly.
Doctors put Montague on a respirator and life support system on Friday. He was semi-conscious. Wassell and Sibyl were called to the clinic at 1am on Saturday. The French don’t understand the concept of a wake, but they let us stay with him longer than usual, Wassell said.
The funeral and burial will take place at Garvaghy, County Tyrone. The poet Theo Dorgan is organising a memorial service to be held in Dublin.
Montague was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and was sent to live with spinster aunts in Tyrone at the age of four. In the poem A Flowering Absence he wrote “how a mother gave her away her son".
Montague spent the rest of his life between Ireland, the US and France. Since 1998, Montague and Wassel had divided their time between their farmhouse in West Cork and a garret apartment near the train station in Nice. They married at the town hall in Nice in 2005.
Montague’s first wife, Madeleine Mottuel, still lives in the apartment they occupied together in the rue Daguerre in Paris. “He was just a country boy. Madeleine put manners on him,” Oonagh Montague said.
Montague’s marriage to his second wife, Evelyn Robson Montague, lasted 25 years. She is the mother of Oonagh and Sibyl. Like Madeleine, Evelyn is French, but has continued to live in Cork.
For 25 years in Cork, they had a very open home that many poets and artists visited,” said Oonagh Montague. I grew up hearing amazing dinner conversation, poetry readings and music. Mum would put together incredible meals. It was the place where Dad produced some of his most memorable work.
Montague had two grandchildren, Eve (10) and Theo (7), the children of Oonagh.
Each wife brought something to him,” Oonagh Montague said. Elizabeth was there for him no matter what, and dedicated herself to him totally. Without Madeleine, Evelyn and Elizabeth, Dad would not have become what he did.
Montague had told me that Nice was a good place to work. He produced his late period poems there, and recently completed his last volume of poetry, titled Second Childhood. It will be published by Gallery Press next February.
Montague’s Collected Poems were published in 1995. In 1998, Montague became the first Ireland Professor of Poetry. The University of Buffalo awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Montague and Wassell met when she served wine at one of his poetry readings in lower Manhattan in 1992.I will be your Ganymede,” she told him. They became inseparable and were a striking couple as they walked around their immigrant quarter in Nice: John tall, white-haired and twinkly-eyed; Elizabeth with her high forehead and flaming red hair.
In the preface to The Pear is Ripe the second volume of his memoirs, published in 2007, Montague wrote that he was not always sure where my phrases end and hers begin. When one interviewed Montague, Wassell reminded him of dates and events and quoted his verses.
In a poem titled Landing Montague called Wassell my late but final anchoring.
We loved each other so ferociously. He was the love of my life. I am very lucky to have known him, Wassell said through tears on Saturday.
Montague freelanced for The Irish Times in Paris during the Algerian War, when he covered press conferences by Gen Charles de Gaulle. He mailed his articles to Dublin by post. It was typical of Montague’s humour and power of analogy that he referred to de Gaulle in later years as “the great giraffe.
During that same period of the early 1960s, Montague befriended Samuel Beckett. He wrote a poem about Beckett watching children sailing boats on the pond in the Luxembourg gardens, and sent it to Beckett, who wrote back. They became drinking buddies.
Wassell described Montague’s 1972 volume, The Rough Field about Northern Ireland, as a book “about anguish and rage and a sundered province” that “made the establishment uncomfortable".
Montague often spoke of parallels between the British in Northern Ireland and the French in Algeria.
Montague and Wassell were heading to the Promenade des Anglais to watch the fireworks last July 14th when they turned back, deterred by what Wassell called a “méchant wind”. An hour or two later, a Tunisian lorry driver plowed down spectators, killing 86 people.
When I had dinner with Montague and Wassell four days later, they were devastated by what had happened to their beloved Nice. Montague said he feared long term civil strife between Muslims and secular French. He walked a little more slowly, and his voice had softened to a whisper, but he was still sharp-minded and fit.
In an interview in Nice in March 2014, I had asked Montague the same question he put to Beckett at their last meeting: “Was there much of the journey you found worthwhile?”.
There was a great deal of it I enjoyed… Obviously, love has meant a great deal to me… I seem to have got rid of jealousy,” Montague said. He referred to “sibling rivalry perhaps” with Seamus Heaney. But he spoke fondly of Heaney, quoted his poetry and was in contact with Heaney’s widow Marie.
Montague said he “would have liked it to be a bit easier,” but concluded, “I’ve had a full life.
Source: IrishTimes, HWN Africa.
: 2016-12-10 08:44:43 | : 1423
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