James Clarence Mangan and the Beauty of Hate

BOOKS AND AUTHORS JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN AND THE BEAUTY OF HATE JACQUES CHUTO matthew arnold’s well-known description of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineVectual angel” is hopelessly misleading. The adjective “ineVectual” will not bother those who think with Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen ,” but the noun “angel” cannot be accepted, suggesting as it does a Shelley of indeterminate sex, or indeed, as he appears in some contemporary portraits, downright eVeminate, languid, gentle, and soft. This tame picture is instantly shattered when one reads such indignant, vigorous poems as “England in 1819” or “The Mask of Anarchy.” Mangan has been submitted to the same emasculating treatment as Shelley. His contemporaries repeatedly emphasized his gentleness, and his biographers have generally followed suit, like D. J. O’Donoghue who speaks of Mangan’s “inherent mildness of disposition.”1 Mangan was not such a good, loving, insipid man as some would like to portray him. When in his unWnished Autobiography Mangan says about his father: “May GOD assoil his great and mistaken soul and grant him eternal peace and forgiveness!—but I have an inward feeling that to him I owe all my misfortunes,”2 one strongly suspects that he is asking God to forgive his father faults which he, the son, has not forgiven. Moreover, some of these faults are, if not invented, at least distorted, as when Mangan asserts: “While my mother lived he made her miserable”3—a palpable inaccuracy, for Mangan senior died three years before his wife. In the same text, Mangan presents his father as a “human boa-constrictor”4 and claims that he has tried JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN AND THE BEAUTY OF HATE 173 1 D. J. O’Donoghue, The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes & Colleagues, 1897), p. 229. 2 The Autobiography of James Clarence Mangan, ed. James Kilroy (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968), p. 14. 3 Ibid., p. 14. 4 Ibid., p. 14. to depict his Werceness of temper in “my Italian story of Gasparo Bandollo ,”5 a poem that describes a father who kills his son. A father’s aggressiveness as described by his son is, as often as not, a construct made up by the son himself to mask his own aggressiveness against his father. That Mangan suVers from such aggressiveness can be seen in the way in which he treats the poets he pretends to be translating. His “translations” so recreate their originals that the “father,” the original author, would be unable to recognize and acknowledge his “children.” Moreover, by attributing, say, a fable by the German poet Gellert to the French poet Jean de La Fontaine, Mangan implies that fathers are interchangeable and, therefore, dispensable. Mangan’s aggressiveness was powerfully aided by his love of words and gift for invective, which are conspicuous, for instance, in the following diatribe against a German poet: “Ludwig Tieck, man-milliner to the Muses, poet, metaphysician, dramatist, novelist, moralist, wanderer, weeper and wooer, a gentleman of extensive and varied endowments is notwithstanding , in one respect, a sad quack.” Nowhere else, Mangan goes on, did he Wnd “such rubbish, such trumpery, such a farrago of self-condemned senilities, so many mouthy nothings, altogether so much snoring stupidity , so much drowsiness, dreariness, drizzle, froth and fog.”6 His love of words and gift for invective place Mangan in the tradition of Gaelic satire, so that it comes as no surprise that he should have written his own version of “The Tribes of Ireland,” a satire written by Aenghus O’Daly in the reign of Elizabeth to ridicule the chiefs of the principal ancient Irish families. Translating or adapting this, Mangan was not attacking any personal enemy, yet he took obvious pleasure in adding new insults to those concocted by O’Daly. Here is a stanza in John O’Donovan ’s literal translation: Ard-Ulagh, destitute, starving, A district without delight—without mass— Where the son of Savage, the English hangman, Slaughters barnacles with a mallet!7 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN AND THE BEAUTY OF HATE 174 5 Ibid., p. 13. 6 “Anthologia Germanica—No. X. Tieck and the other Song-singers of Germany,” Dublin University Magazine, IX, 51 (March, 1837), 271–72...