A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism

6. Paul Durcan’s Priests: Refashioning Irish Masculinity

168 6 Paul Durcan’s Priests Refashioning Irish Masculinity If nuns remained largely occluded figures in Irish culture until the notorious revelations of abuse at mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylums brought them unwillingly into the national spotlight, that was distinctly not the case with priests. The preeminent status of the priest in Ireland was such that as late as 1969, the Irish historian John A. Murphy asserted that “anti-clericalism of the negative secular type has of yet put down no roots in Ireland” because it could not “contend with a massive weight of historical tradition.” He proceeded to note that “for the old and middle-aged, no matter what the degree of sophistication or religious commitment, respect for the cloth is inbred and virtually automatic ” and that “even the questioning young have shown no real change in this regard.”1 In Paul Durcan’s poetry, priests continue to occupy a position of centrality; however, it is not one that is granted the sort of unreflective reverence that Murphy describes. Indeed, a quick glance through Durcan’s poetic corpus reveals a number of poems with sensationalistic titles mocking the hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church: “The Archbishop Dreams of the Harlot of Rathkeale,” “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography,” “Bishop of Cork Murders His Wife,” “Archbishop of Dublin to Film Romeo and Juliet,” “Archbishop of Kerry to Have Abortion,” “Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel.” The topicality and offhand humor emblematized by these titles as well as Durcan’s eschewing of prevailing formal expectations account for the critical establishment’s general neglect of his poetry. His reliance upon fantastic and grotesque imagery for shock effect, his colloquial style, Paul Durcan’s Priests | 169 and his prolixity seemingly mark Durcan more as a popular versifier than a poet worthy of serious consideration. Certainly his poetry readings are legendary for their crowds and their entertainment value.2 Yet that popularity has not prevented esteemed poetic contemporaries, such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, or preeminent cultural commentators such as Fintan O’Toole from asserting the significance of Durcan’s poetry. In each case, these commentators accentuate the deeper purposes driving his seemingly slapdash, manic outbursts of poetry. O’Toole puts it best when he notes that the strange disjunctions and absurd vignettes so characteristic of Durcan’s poems are not the work of a surrealist but of “a great realist . . . a brilliant describer of a reality so dislocated, so imbued with political, religious, and psychic myths that it will not yield to prosaic language or to literal minds.”3 These lingering cultural myths, O’Toole suggests, are most fully “embodied for Durcan in the figure of his father.”4 The poet’s struggles with his father, John Durcan, a native of Mayo who eventually moved to Dublin and became a circuit court judge, defined his adolescence and generated his most critically acclaimed book of poetry, Daddy, Daddy (1990). This conflict reached its apex when Durcan’s father had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in his late teens. At the heart of the matter was the fact that the younger Durcan did not conform to the prevailing standard of masculinity in early 1960s Ireland. That normative notion of Irish masculinity was grounded, as we shall see, in the figure of the celibate Catholic cleric, whose self-control and juridical authority established him as a manly exemplar. Throughout his poetry, Durcan travesties this masculine ideal and cultivates an androgynous alternative that is, ironically, epitomized by Jesus as well as the more sensitive form of priest that emerged after the Second Vatican Council. While Durcan’s poetry has often alluded to the trauma of his institutionalization , it is only recently that he has publicly described the circumstances that led to it. In 1964, when he was nineteen and a student at University College, Dublin, Durcan was kidnapped by relatives and consigned to a psychiatric clinic, where he was subjected to extensive electric shock therapy and threatened by the prospect of a lobotomy.5 This extreme response to his late adolescent eccentricities was triggered, 170 | A Chastened Communion according to Durcan, by his anomalous masculinity: “From a fairly early age I was aware that certain kinds of people disapproved of me—particularly certain kinds of male. These men had the idea that boys had to be soldiers, chaste soldiers, and had to fit into a mould and if they...