Company - A Chosen Life by John Montague, review by Pat Boran

Company: A Chosen Life. John Montague. Duckworth. HB £14.99 UK.

Pat Boran

'Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life.' When Charles Lamb wrote to William Wordsworth in 1801, he managed both to identify one of the great pleasures of friendship and to offer a glimpse into the relationship between writer and reader. For while the best writers may report back from places and experiences their readers do not know, those reports create a reality for the reader and give the writer a sense or purpose, belonging, even home.

That John Montague has chosen to call the first of a projected three volumes of memoir Company equally makes these two points, and his witty and warm recollections of 1950 and early 60s Dublin, Paris and the Bay Area are both a celebration of those around and with him in a new and surprisingly innocent literary enterprise as well as, on occasion, a recognition of the need for an audience among especially younger writers.

In his late teens when we find him "trying to grope my way through the intellectual murk of literary Dublin without being gored", the Brooklyn-born poet has already developed a taste for words, an admiration of good writing and a determination to test himself against them, even if prose still seems to be the form his journey will take. A stammerer, like his friend Brendan Behan (a "secret complicity" which made them close), he seems to have learned the art of listening, as he also learns the Irish art of drinking.

And it was around drink that the Dublin literary revival of the time happened, a life spent in pubs being an all-too common form of revolt against the censorship and sexual oppression of the day. Though the flamboyant Michael MacLiammoir might parade around town and be loved by almost all (his Gate Theatre a "Sodom" to the Abbey's "Begorrah"), Behan's bisexuality, his desire for "a boy on top of a girl, and myself on top of that" was still "a pyramid not easily choreographed in the pious Ireland of our youth". Patrick's Kavanagh's gruffness, Austin Clarke's aloofness and Behan's strange vulnerability, with the rising presences of poets like Thomas Kinsella and Richard Murphy confused and enlivened a city in which the aged Maud Gonne was now "a hooped, frail figure, scarfed in cigarette smoke" and George Yeats "clearly found being a poet's widow only a cut above being an unpaid museum keeper".

Not surprisingly, Paris beckoned, in particular the almost legendary Left Bank, and there with his young wife Madeleine, Montague found himself a neighbour of Sartre's, de Beauvoir and Claude Esteban, among others, and of course of Samuel Beckett. Hesitant approaches to Beckett reveal a man "shy as an adolescent", and gloomy, despite flashes of good humour. "Things seemed to go better, even swimmingly," Montague writes, "if I was despondent as well"

The arrival of Con Leventhal, one of Beckett's best friends, opens a way to the great man and provides, inevitably, some of the best moments in this fine book. Beckett's new warmth, however, is not enough to convince him to read for a recording for Garech Browne and Montague's newly formed Claddagh Records, and even when he attends and directs the recording session (made by Jack McGowran), he makes sure "that all extraneous material and out-takes were destroyed, until not a murmur of him remained."

Following the twin recognitions of his own increasing drive towards poetry and the French nation's almost complete indifference to it, and despite the welcome intellectual challenge of the Paris scene Montague heads back to Dublin where he plays host, in a wonderful chapter, to the poet Theodore Roethke whose "plangent music brought me back to the traditional lyric, with a post Freudian lilt, Yeats in the speakeasy."

The presence of song in the lyric, much admired by Montague, is also of course one of his own exceptional talents, recalling Cervantes' "Tell me what company thou keepest, and I'll tell thee what thou art."

The onward journey to California, the witnessing of "either the first or the second public reading of Howl" by a quiet, internal Allen Ginsberg who was suddenly "like a redemptorist preacher cutting loose in a hellfire sermon" and the first wanderings off the marriage path (recalling the earlier confession, though then concerning drink - "In my experience, in a childless marriage there is a tendency to revert to former habits") bring the story to the point of return to Dublin, leave the poet literally in the air, on a plane back.

The exact sequence of events here is often difficult to chart because what Company gives us is a series of anecdotes, and not necessarily in chronological order, turning back to details, images and people the way a poet might turn back in the course of a poem.

But for all of that, or perhaps because of it, Company is a welcome, generous and fascinating account of a time that is all the more remarkable for being only a few decades ago.