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In memoriam Robert Greacen
Irish Literary Supplement, Fall, 2008 by Jack W. Weaver
If YOU ARE A READER OF THE Irish Times, Books Ireland, or a number of other papers and journals, you will know that Robert Greacen, like W.H. Auden's Yeats, is now his poetry and prose. Born 24 October 1920 in Derry, Robert Henry Greacen died 13 April 2008 in Dublin's St. Vincent's Hospital. The official cause was cancer, but his health had been bad for several years and he was 87. After receiving his education at Methodist College, Belfast, and a diploma in Social Studies from Trinity College Dublin, he supported himself and family as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (i.e., English As A Second Language) for the United Nations Committee in London for some forty years. Upon retirement, he moved to Dublin and spent his final years in a flat in Sandymount near Stella Maris church.
His was a busy literary career, too. As poet, editor, essayist, and biographer, he lacked only prose fiction to lay claim to the status of Man of Letters. At the launch of his volume of poems called "Lunch At the Ivy" (2002), Seamus Heaney identified three Robert Greacens: the writer about Northern Ireland, about England, and about the Irish Republic. On an earlier occasion, Terrence Brown characterized Greacen's literary stance as one of observation, rather than participation in life. I prefer to see a biographical impulse in his writings, whether poetry or prose. After early works influenced by Dylan Thomas, he progressed to a style and tone one associates with Auden or Phillip Larkin. Like them, he did care about man's inhumanity to man, but chose to use an air of detachment to keep his works literature, instead of propaganda. Only with public figures, whose activities he found destructive, did he openly criticize. Among Americans, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover were panned; England's Margaret Thatcher was found wanting; and Scotland's John Logic Baird, credited with invention of the television, was cursed for spoiling evenings of good conversation. His wit is in evidence often in his twelve volumes of poems: One Recent Evening (1944), The Undying Day (1948), A Garland for Captain Fox (1975), Young Mr. Gibbon (1979), A Bright Mask: New and Selected Poems (1985), Carnival at the River (1980), Collected Poems, 1944-1994 (1995), Protestant Without a Horse (1997), Ecstasy: New Poems (1999), Captain Fox." a Life (2000), Lunch at the Ivy (2002), Shelley Plain (2003), and New and Collected Poems (2006). For Collected Poems (1995), he received the Irish Times Literary Prize for Poetry.
While most of us will remember him as a poet, Greacen was deservedly proud of his prose. While a good bit is still to be collected and reissued, the number and range of volumes is quite impressive. Autobiographical writings include Even Without Irene. The Sash My Father Wore. and Brief Encounters: Literary Dublin and Belfast in the 1940's. Critical writings include The Art of Noel Coward, the Worm of C.P. Snow, Rooted in Ulster. Nine Northern Writers (2001), "A Garden by the Sea--Forrest Reid (1876-1947)," The Honest Ulsterman, No 107, Spring 1999, 87ff; "Reading John Hewitt," A Talk Delivered at the Hewitt Summer School, 29 July 1998, and frequent critical reviews in (London) Times, Acumen, Books Ireland, Irish Poetry Review, and elsewhere. As co-editor, Greacen worked a bit with Peadar O'Donnell on The Bell, after O'Faolain relinquished it, with Alex Comfort ("The Joy of Sex" man) on Lyra (a poetry journal), and with Valentin Iremonger on The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Verse (for editor T.S. Eliot). As sole editor, he issued Poems from Ulster. Northern Harvest: An Anthology of Ulster Writing, and Irish Harvest: An Anthology of Ulster Poetry and Prose.
How and why did Greacen write so much prose? Look back at the list of volumes of poems and you will note that he published none between 1948 and 1975. Those were years of personal depression, years in which he received chemical treatment (LSD) for his condition, as well as extended counseling. As he admitted to me years later, he was naturally given to depression, but his failed marriage with Patricia Hutchins, their divorce, and his isolation from both her and Arethusa, their child, prevented the muse of poetry from coming. Samuel T. Coleridge had the same sort of dry spell with similar results. Because of the biographies he wrote and the inclusion of biographical details in all of his critical writings, RG managed to work his way out of the depression by writing real and quasi-biographical poems. He created the character of Captain Fox in a series of letter poems to friends. The friends begged him to publish the poems, A Garland for Captain Fox 1975) appeared, and RG was able to publish both poems and prose for the rest of his life. For a number of years, though, he wrote nothing about his father (alcoholic and abusive) or about his relationship with Patricia, though he wrote two poems about and for Arethusa. In the volume Ecstasy: New Poems (1999), he forgave his father and remembered Patricia with affection.
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