Fortnight Publications Ltd.

John Hewitt: The Spirit Lives onAuthor(s): Sheila HamiltonSource: Fortnight, No. 263 (Jun., 1988), p. 28Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25551600 .

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I HAD hoped to dine out on some of my bizarre

adventures in America, but since I went off to

Greece with the weans I must offer these anec

dotes gratis to Fortnight readers. San Francisco

was a thrill, in full sunshine. My hosts took me

straight to the beach to paddle in the cold

Pacific, pointed out the hotel on the cliffs where

Henry James used to stay and the windmills

donated by the Queen of Holland after the war.

Up in Haight Ashbury you could smell euca

lyptus trees through the open car window and

relish the ornate big wooden houses, one of

which Thorn Gunn had bought in the 60s and which now was worth its weight in yuppie gold.

My hosts lived out at Berkeley where the

reading was to be, but I took the train in next

day to ride a cable car up those amazingly steep hills. A tall man in a flowing coat was in charge of the great brake attached to an underground cable. He needed a clear two yards at his back

for his stunning performance, wrestling with

the great lever, forcing it back till his own back

almost touched the floor, chanting and narrat

ing all the time of how it was likely to slip in wet

weather. It wasn't ingratiating: he was serious,

heroic, like a cowboy wrestling a steer.

Anything else I experienced you could get from the guide books, except for the sex shop. I suppose most of us extemporise our dildoes

from children's toys, but there, along the walls, were the largest and coarsest rubber models. It

frightened me to think of people whose appe tites could cope with such size and vulgarity, and, leaning against the wall like a hedge cutter

or a potato sprayer, was a masturbation ma

chine with an adjustable rubber socket at one

end, the rest being an engine?petrol I think?

that you started by pulling a string, as on an out

board motor. There must be such powerful and

insatiable men, and it is part of the wonder of

America that your wildest notion is catered for

and can be bought for money. On the flight from San Francisco to Boston

I was made very much aware of how much of

America is mountain and desert?about half of

it. Flying over, looking down, reduces what

must have been a horrifying drama for those

courageous people travelling west in wagons. None of it seems so high when you are miles

above it. None of it seems so long when you are

travelling over it so quickly. But we spent hours

over a maze of mountains and then hours over

desert, and then the farm land began. It is all

brown and black from above?and not only hundreds of miles of square fields but what

looked like circular fields. Do the great com

bine harvesters now go circling in to a centre?

Most of the tour was the happy experience of presenting the poems and songs to audiences

hungry for the real thing. Good poetry isn 't that

common; being able to sing it still stuns a lot of

people. Not the old commonplaces of tradi

tional songs or the pretentious yelled phrases of

U2, but sung poetry. Then there were the civilised, kindly fami

lies that put me up with clean sheets and a bottle

of Jameson and news of the local estimates of

poetry. There was a sense of teaching still being a vital occupation, of lecturers still caring a lot

about their students, but no person ever came at

me with poems in his/her mouth, with new stuff

that I ought to read. I was asking them, "Have

you read Raymond Carver?" "Do you like Tess

Gallagher?" In New England they said I should read Stanley Kunitz. In Long Island a woman

recommended two prose writers whose work I

duly bought but read without much excitement.

During the trip I read William Kennedy's Iron

weed, very powerful; and Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday, also very good. No surprise.

To enjoy one of these unnatural tours a

small enterprise pays off. In every town I went

I looked in the local art museum for Edward

Hoppers, and this was very rewarding. In

Worcester there was one beautiful Hopper of

FOREMAN'S ESTIMATES

James Simmons two bathers sitting outside a bathing box look

ing off into the late afternoon sun. In the Met

ropolitan Museum in New York there was one

called The Ladies' Tables that I had never seen.

Thus the great continent becomes human.

There were more at Ann Arbor, and some

stunning posters. Why are posters so attrac

tive? Not only do you get a marvellous print, but a sense of an exhibition in a particular place. I love the art of poster-makers.

I got to Ann Arbor because I took a few days off to visit my nephew, Michael Stephens, who

is doing a PhD in Bowling Green, Ohio. He is off the drink, playing good bottle-neck guitar and exploring 19th century American prose. To hear him sing again some of his marvellous

songs was an Irish experience in America ...

Even Cowgirls Have the Blues.

In New York at a reading at the Irish Ameri

can Institute, Peter Kavanagh turned up and not

many others; but there was a death mask of

Wolfe Tone and a dedicatory wall-piece to

John Mitchel. Peter Kavanagh doesn't turn up to many readings, so I took this as an honour. I

was right. "I came along to hear you," he said,

"because I have heard a lot about you. I hear

you are one of the best. What have you heard

about me?" "I've heard you are very carnap

scious," I said. I could do no less. "Ah, that is

only a mask to keep off fools," he said. Not that

Peter Kavanagh is the brightest man in the

world, but he liked my setting of his brother's

poems that I sang for him. I enjoyed him saying "Well, you are still in there, you might make it

yet." It's the way I feel about myself. Let me finish on a lighter note. My host at St

Patrick's College, West Virginia, was James

Connolly?yet one more American Catholic

teaching Anglo-Irish literature. He warmed to

me particularly because my poetry had sud

denly become quite vital to his immediate

concerns. To tell you the truth I found this a bit

insulting because my poems are spiritual exer

cises and not part of a lobby for licentiousness

or multiple marriages; but it is always nice to be

welcomed and celebrated by a handsome man

with a beautiful wife. They had just moved into

the house of their dreams. "A farmhouse," he

said. I queried him on his usage when we drove

up a suburban avenue with large houses with

large gardens. 'Farmhouse' is apparently an

estate agent's description?a farm-type house.

Fair enough, but part of their joy was that they had done most of the work on the house them

selves, and fine and spacious it was, with a

good hi-fi, some decent jazz and framed poems

by Yeats and Seamus Heaney on the walls.

God, they have great energy, I thought, and

drank my few Jameson and went to bed,

bowled over by kindness and hospitality. But

when I got into my bedroom, threw down my case, set my whiskey on the mantelpiece and

set myself to relish those luxurious hours of

privacy that are so poignant on tours, it was

hard to close the bedroom door. The lush carpet

prevented it from closing. What odds! I un

dressed and brought my toothbrush into the

little bathroom next door. Holy God, the taps didn't work?a gush of the cold, while the hot

didn't materialise. I washed my hands and

reached for the towel, attached to a nice brass

rail. Towel and rail came away in my hands and

couldn't be put back again. Damn it, be luxuri

ous, have a shower, get the sweat off you and

have a nice half-hour reading William Ken

nedy. No go. The lever that shifted the water, a

lovely archaic lever and taps, wouldn't work.

Maybe they should have hired a professional.

Nothing stopped my pleasure in the linen

sheets, with the cigarette and the whiskey and

William Kennedy?if only the bedside lamp had worked.

The marriage seemed to be working all

right.

John Hewitt: the spirit lives on

2_i ^^' !__________________________ n

THE FIRST John Hewitt International Summer School

will be held in St MacNissi's

College, Garron Tower, on the

Antrim coast, from July 30th to August 5th.

The tribute to Hewitt, the elder statesman of poetry in

the north until his death last

year, takes the theme 'An

Ulster Poet and his Quest*.

Among the speakers will be

Terence Brown, on 'John

Hewitt and the Lost Genera

tion'; Tom Paulin, on

Hewitt's 'Ancestral Social

ism'; and John Wilson Foster, on his relation to the Protest

ant mentality. There will be talks on

Hewitt and Ulster painting, his relationships with

women, and his study of the

18th century rhyming weavers, as well as poetry

readings, music, films, tours

of the glens of Antrim and a

reading of his play, The

Bloody Brae.

Further details from The

Director, John Hewitt Inter

national Summer School,

Cushendall, Co Antrim.

28 June Fortnight

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