Bridget Hourican on trying to get under the skin of a long-dead Irish poet
at 3am in a lock-in in the Liberties in a brilliant if sadly short-lived bar called McGruders. I knew nothing at all about Mangan except as a name in the morass of Irish poets before Yeats, but I was entranced by the poem Shane showed me, A Vision of Connaught in the 13th Century, and by the sense I was picking up of Mangan as a kind of precursor to Shane: the artist as bohemian and outsider – what the French Romantics called a poète maudit.
He was the subject of two biographies, published a century apart, in 1897 and 1999. Both are well researched, within the severe limitations of there being no archive or direct descendants, but I didn’t think they quite captured him, so I decided to go again. When I’d finished my biography, I realised I hadn’t captured him either. I have never encountered anyone so determinedly elusive.
Over the years of writing and rewriting, Frank and I broke up, got back together, and got married, with Mangan and Joyce as a constant backdrop. Frank died suddenly on December 12th, 2021, four months before the scheduled delivery date for my book, and 10 months before the due date of his book on Joyce’s politics. As “I fell through that pit abysmal” – a line of Mangan’s that suggests both a season in hell and a bottomless fall – I clung to the two books as to ropes flung down by rescuers.
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