Thomas McCarthy, diaries of a librarian poet: 'What a scurrilous pup I was'

The newly-published diaries of the Cork-based poet have accounts of his days in UCC, poet rivalries and his friendship with the likes of Molly Keane

Mon, 24 Jan, 2022 - 21:00

Colette Sheridan

Having recently published his journals covering the years 1974-2014, Waterford-born poet Thomas McCarthy admits that some of the diary entries now annoy him.

"For example, what a scurrilous pup I was to think I should have been given a UCC tutorship when I had handed in only one out of four essays in poor Sr Una Nelly's class. That kind of youthful vanity and self-regard annoys me still. From where I am now, I seem to have been a vain self-obsessed youth," says the poet.

McCarthy is being hard on himself. There is wisdom in much of his early journals that he started writing when he was 19 as a student of English at UCC. He was acutely aware of the dangerous times afoot in Ireland in the early 1970s, culminating in the arms trial.

"I must get out while I'm still young," he wrote. But he stayed in Cork, working as a librarian for city council, from which he is now retired.

However, this son of a postman, brought up in poverty, had an opportunity to pursue an academic career in America. On a visit there at the age of 24, he reflects that he could have stayed in the US, embarking on a doctorate at the prestigious Iowa University. "I would have had an academic career but that career, I think, would have been full of yearning and unresolved issues," he reflects.

He adds that it was "actually more interesting to stay in Ireland at that stage, to see Ireland growing up into an incredibly vibrant country." McCarthy says that America would have provided him with more of a poet's life. "I certainly would have had a sense of being a campus poet. But I have no regrets." Had McCarthy stayed in the US, he says he wouldn't have met his soul mate, his wife Catherine Coakley with whom he has two children.

This former member of Fianna Fáil (he was signed up to the party as a child of eight by a Fianna Fáil neighbour) loved working in the library. It chimed well with his literary career. He would write down the first few lines of poems on disused catalogue index cards during tea-breaks at work. He has ten collections of poetry published as well as two novels.

Uninterested in sports, McCarthy says that going around to cumann meetings trying to get people nominated to various committees, was almost a kind of sport. His late father, who succumbed to illness, depression and cynicism, was a staunch Fianna Fáil supporter. McCarthy now describes himself as a lapsed member of the party.

Poetry, Memory and The Party by Thomas McCarthy

As well as poetry and politics, the other great passion in McCarthy's life is gardening. While a student of John Montague and Sean Lucy at UCC, his weekends were spent in the Victorian garden of Glenshelane House in west Waterford that he was replanting for its owner, Brigadier Denis FitzGerald. He actually started working in that garden at the age of eleven. It exposed him to the Anglo-Irish world. He became a good friend of the brigadier, as he refers to FitzGerald.

"I became very close to people like Molly Keane and Patricia Cockburn [writer and wife of journalist Claud Cockburn]. Patricia was an incredible and very meticulous gardener and a very deep soul."

Keane, who wrote the Big House novels and also used the pen name, MJ Farrell, championed McCarthy early on in his career. McCarthy writes that he is sympathetic to the Protestant viewpoint, a position that might make him an unlikely bedfellow with the soldiers of destiny. "I started the diary to try and make sense of knowing these different worlds and different people. The only way I could make sense of this was to write it down."

McCarthy's new book has had the libellous material edited out of it. But that doesn't mean it's a dull read. For instance, is hugely entertaining about Montague's jealousy of Seamus Heaney. Is there a poet that he sees as his competition?

"We grew up with a great generation of Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and to an extent, Brendan Kennelly. These were all titans that strolled across the jungle of Irish poetry. We were like their damaged children; myself, Gerry Murphy, Theo Dorgan, Sean Dunne, Greg Delanty. Of course, we'd tear strips off each other at festivals and readings. But we actually get on much more than the older generation did."