I was introduced to James Clarence Mangan by Shane MacGowan at 3am in a closed bar in the Liberties, in a brilliant if sadly short-lived bar called McGruders. I didn’t know Mangan at all, except as a name in the morass of pre-Yeats Irish poets, but I was fascinated by the poem Shane showed me, A Vision of Connaught in the 13th Century, and by the sense I picked up that Mangan was a kind of precursor to Shane: the artist as bohemian and outsider – what the French Romantics called a poète maudit.
When I started reading up on him, I discovered that he was just that in life – his peers were morbidly fixated on his “mad orgies… which he held in the dingiest and darkest taverns, and in the company of the offal of the human species”, to quote (exaggeratedly) John Mitchell – but after his death in 1849, aged just 46, he was canonised as a “national poet”, revered for his poems about the Famine, and featured on the school curriculum for much of the 20th century, with his most famous poem, My Dark Rosaleen, sung by Count John McCormack. He was even printed on a postage stamp.
Of course, rioters can become national treasures—MacGowan is a case in point—but what amazed me was that Mangan found his way back to the margins: when he was removed from the curriculum in the early 1970s, he did not disappear into the footnotes of academia like other canonical writers, but reemerged as a cult figure: a ghostly muse for rock stars and poets, and an exciting proto-postmodernist for avant-garde critics, experimenting with masks and forms long before that was a thing..
( The Death of the Poets – Tony Delaney on James Clarence Mangan, John Keegan and the cholera epidemic of 1849Opens in new window. )
He was the subject of two biographies published a century apart, in 1897 and 1999. Both are well researched, albeit with the severe limitations of no archive or direct descendants. But I felt they hadn’t captured him properly, so I decided to investigate again. When I finished my biography, I realised I hadn’t captured him either. I’ve never met anyone (in person or on paper) so determinedly elusive.
I felt that using conventional biographical tools on this escape artist would be like trying to pick up mercury with a fork. So I went back and rewrote my book, inserting myself into the text, along with the experts and fanatical fans—the Manganistas, as I called them—that I had met on my journey. Since the Manganistas are fascinating in themselves, and they all disagree about what kind of writer Mangan was, this approach allowed me to replace the impersonal objectivity of conventional biography with instability and subjectivity. Given the meanderings of my subject, this seemed a better fit.
( In Cruachan’s Land: James Joyce and James Clarence ManganOpens in new window. )
Among the interlocutors I now inserted into the text was Frank Callanan. I wouldn’t call Frank a Manganista, as he never read poetry, either by Mangan or anyone else, but he had a Joyce-derived keen sense of Mangan as a lurker in Irish history. I noticed that whenever Frank would break into my text – to make a gnostic comment about self-invention or to illuminate Joyce’s sense of Mangan – he always lightened things up. This amused me, because that was his effect in person.
Over the years of writing and rewriting, Frank and I separated, reunited, and married, with Mangan and Joyce always remaining in the background. Frank died suddenly on December 12, 2021, four months before the scheduled delivery date for my book and 10 months before the publication date of his book on Joyce’s politics. As “I fell through that bottomless pit” – a line from Mangan that suggests both a time in hell and a bottomless fall – I clung to the two books like ropes thrown down by rescue workers.
The books are now finished, or nearly finished: Frank’s book will be published by Princeton in the autumn of next year; mine has just been published by Gill. I use the present continuous in my title, “Finding Mangan, The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet”, because I am not sure whether I have really found Manganese or whether he can ever be found, and to point out that the book is less about describing life as it happened – who can say now how it happened? – than about tracing the journey.
( James Clarence Mangan, the rebellious poetOpens in new window. )
The subtitle is intended as a provocation: I cannot imagine Mangan, the self-proclaimed “Nameless One,” as a “national poet.” But since that title was bestowed on him like a laurel wreath, I wanted to find out how he acquired it, kept it for over a century, and lost it again, only to resurface decades later in a Liberties dispute with our own poète maudit.
Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet is published by Gill Books.
