We Stayed Up Late: Remembering Vincent Buckley

It is always an affront to be named. In Ireland it is even worse to be quoted. Irish people hate biographers, autobiographers, and diarists: such practitioners of the belle lettres are looked upon with deep suspicion. This Irish sense of paranoia comes from the smallness of our land, its vulnerable intimacy, and the well-established fact that within a week of criticizing someone in print you'll run into him or his mother on Nassau Street, Patrick Street, or the Ormeau Road. In a social milieu as narrow as Irish writing, the memoirist has no friends. The biographer soon finds himself adroitly isolated in an ever-widening bogland of unanswered phone calls. That's the way it is in Ireland: everyone has a passionate opinion but nobody wants to go "on record."

When Vincent Buckley published Memory Ireland, things were even more desperate, more paranoid. Here was a great Irish Australian, or Australian Irishman, poet, and philosopher, an über-Catholic intellectual of the Cold War era, one of that great academic apostolate of Melbourne; here he was among us young poets who lived for love and for the present moment. Vincent wished to discuss the matters of the past, the long Hunger Strike campaign and the suffering of Ulster Catholics. But we were Austin Clarke's "poor Twenty-Sixers." We "lived on lack."

It was in the afternoon of October 8, 1983, that Buckley came to stay with us for a week in Cork. At the time, my wife Catherine and I—newly married, childless, and carefree—were living in an old apartment that had been the governess's flat of a terraced house, an abandoned British regimental residence in Sidney Place, off Patrick Hill. Vincent loved the view of the city, the lights of Cork, the glimpse of shipping in the inner harbor and the voices of schoolchildren running to Scoil Mhuire, a school that had been founded by the sisters of the dead hunger striker, the patriot lord mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney On the day Vincent arrived, I came home from work at the library to be greeted by the poet Theo Dorgan and Vincent, who were full of stories about a fellow poet's wife's anger at my being Vincent's host. She said that I had insulted herself and her husband by not giving them the option of having Vincent Buckley to stay with them. She had created havoc on the phone and Vincent, the mildest of guests and a sufferer from heart trouble, was most upset by the whole thing. I reassured him that this was normal affectionate behavior among the Cork literati, and a sure sign of his high status still in the world of Irish poetry. He was reassured by my words and remarked that, while some people live in the mistaken belief that literature is some sort of higher politics, it in fact operates by the ordinary rules of politics.

We hit it off immediately. Buckley—the author of the masterful study of Irish-Australian and High Catholic politics, Cutting Green Hay (1983), a friend and admirer of the poets Thomas Kinsella and John Montague, and the last living emblem of the Irish-Australian soul—felt at home. Here he was in Cork, rebel Cork, port of departures and transportations, city of a powerful Catholic merchant class, mid-autumn and the days getting darker, the tension of political feeling stalking the land; but not in a sinister way. No, it stalked rather benignly at that moment in Cork, as if the ghost of Yeats was abroad in the night, humming verses beneath our windows. That day in Cork it was wine and poetry, gossip and impoverished youth, that Vincent fell upon in our house. The insanely charismatic Waterford poet Seán Dunne lived in the apartment beneath ours. Vincent said that he felt he'd stumbled upon a commune, an Irish kibbutz, a boarding house in Brooklyn, and he loved it.

We loved him back, both for his poems and his uncompromising political beliefs, although we did not share them. His friendship with Captain Kelly of the 1970...