Selected Reviews of Augustus
Young, Light Years (2002)
The reviews copied on this page have been supplied
on behalf of the author by J.
M. Young [ email]. |
What they said About Light
Years ...
‘Augustus Young, poet, has written a volume
of memoirs like none other that I have read before. Augustus Young
is a highly sophisticated writer and a very funny one. If there
is any justice in the world, this book ought to become a classic.’
(David McLaurin, The Tablet)
‘Young is like Orwell’s Henry Miller, getting
on with his own life while momentous events surge on beyond his
control. I shall treasure Young’s book for the reminiscences of
his father and various Welwyn widows, and its subtle
debunking of an era when it was widely believed that once everybody
learned to stand naked holding hands all the problems in the world
would go away’. (Crispin Jackson, The Literary Review.)
‘If you have read Beckett’s Murphy and
Burgess’s Enderby this is somewhere in between. Young is
a restrained memoirist: there is no cloying ego, not much solipsism
considering the subject is pretty m uch himself and his poetry.
but there is nothing rhetorical or shabbily embarrassing.’ (Kevin
Kiely, Books Ireland [infra].)
‘Funny, self-aware and beady-eyed, Augustus Young
is a chronicler of rare originality and wit. his meeting with
Basil Bunting is a comic masterpiece, essential to any future
collection of literary anecdotes.’ (Jeremy Lewis.)
‘Like Montague, Augustus Young manages to interweave
his memories through time, but his stance is a bit funnier, more
quirky and self-deprecating. These two accounts of the formative
years of two in teresting literary Ersemen contain much entertaining
reading.’ (Peter Reading, Times Literary Supplement [infra].)
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Peter
Reading, ‘Travels and travails’, review of John Montague, Company:
A Chosen Life, and Augustus Young, Light Years, in
Times Literary Supplement (12 April 2002).
At first glance, John Montague’s Company,
and Augustus Young’s Light Years, ‘a masterly re-enactment
of the author’s literary development’, seem to be not dissimilar.
Both books are by Irish poets (Montague, though born in Brooklyn,
New York, in 1929, returned when he was four years old to his
family’s farm in County Tyrone; Young hails from Cork); both reflect
the travels, travails and vicissitudes of a couple of lively Hibernian
minds; both take as their nuclei the 1960s; and both finish with
some expression of relief at the notion of an end to exile and
voyaging. But the stylistic approach that each writer takes to
his material is conspicuously different.
Montague ‘weaves in and out of chronology’, as
he phrases it, but he does so in a conventional and convivial
gossipy manner, portraying, inter alios, various eminent
literary personae. Famous names dropped include Mrs Yeats, Brendan
Behan and Samuel Beckett: of Yeats’s wife, the author informs
us that ‘she loved her Willy, and revered his genius’; of Behan,
he notes interestingly that ‘timidity, probably related to his
sexual ambiguity, was also part of his problem’, and that ‘his
stammer betrayed his double nature, not only his sexual conflict,
but the basic gentleness beneath the public bluster’; of Beckett,
who was Montague’s neighbour in Paris for a decade, we are told
what many readers of the Nobel Prizewinner’s works may have already
suspected, that ‘while Beckett could be great company, and gravely
humorous, there was no doubt that his view of the universe was
gloomy’.
Company canters through the years and
the locations – Dublin, Paris, San Antonio Tuxtala, Berkeley –
with engaging felicity, and is peopled with celebrities, less-famed
friends, and a lover or two. The memoir comes with a swatch of
fascinating snaps: there is a diverting photo of a rather loopy-looking
couple, Yeats and his spouse (‘Sheba and Solomon’); a beauty of
Brendan Behan in the boozer; Beckett in the café; there
is a mug-shot of Norman MacCaig (‘A Sombre Scot’), and a frankly
fearsome Hugh MacDiarmid.
Like Montague, Augustus Young manages to interweave
his memories through time, but his stance is a bit funnier, more
quirky and self-deprecating. In 1967, Young departed his home,
with some trepidation, to fly from Cork to Heathrow: ‘At Mass
the previous Sunday the epistle from Ecclesiastes was discouraging.
‘The labour of the foolish wearieth everyone because he knoweth
not how to go to the city.’’ This droll opening sets the tone
for the rest of the book. The reason for the writer’s migration
to London was to set himself up with the dubious credential of
being ‘a published poet’ (although he also had a science degree
– he is an epidemiologist). Three sections follow: the anecdotal
chapters about living in England, ‘Tales from the Sixties’; ‘The
Bohemian Life’ in the big city; and a final return to the Ireland
of family and childhood reminiscences, ‘Requiescat in Pace’.
Young had touched down with twenty quid bulging
comfortably in his new tartan wallet, and he got a lift from the
airport with his only contact in this terra incognita,
the brother of a former classsmate, who had agreed to put up the
callow adventurer until more permanent lodgings could be found.
His host soon introduced him to the dangerous delights of a pub
called The Queen’s Arms:
In a limited way I could think clearly.
For instance, I counted the knots on Knucklenose’s string
tie. Noting his scarce white hair and burning eyes, I remembered
from school Virgil’s description of Charon, Hell’s ferryman.
He would ferry me out of this…
A new landlord, and ham philosopher, one McFee,
heralds ‘The Bohemian Life’ where Young’s poetry thrives (in quantity
if not quality). The aspirant bard meets Alma, who works for a
publisher and has a ‘Tale of Woe’; and he visits Putney, on which
he delivers a witty, Waugh-like tirade:
Putney’s shady terraces, I decided, harboured
embezzlers, wife-beaters, child molesters, bigamists, poisoners,
respectable madames specialising in whippings and nannying
nasty clergymen in rubber knickers and frilly bonnets, and
ordinary people taking murderous fantasies out on hedge clipping.
While Company ends with Montague’s return
to Paris, after a sojourn of academic and amatory diversion in
California, to rejoin his ‘Madeleine’s eager face’ (‘It seemed
to me the plane leaped forward every time I farted’), Light
Years rambles in a quasi-experimental manner (at times Young
recalls a diluted Flann O’Brien) towards its retrospective conclusion
– early friendships, family lore, first loves, recollections of
a dead father (‘Halcyon days waiting in the estuary inlet for
the appearance of a kingfisher’). These two accounts of the formative
years of two interesting literary Ersemen contain much entertaining
reading.
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Kevin Kiely, ‘Slippery
Slopes of Parnassus’, review of Augustus Young, Light Years,
in Books Ireland (September 2002)
If you have read Beckett’s Murphy and Burgess’s Enderby
this is somewhere in between but strictly a memoir and easier
to place with the latter title, since the hero is a poet-drudge
who finds some solace in the science laboratory. James Hogan,
twenty-something son of a history professor from UCC, reflects
on his past while flying out from Cork on a Viscount. He is London
bound for a spell in a purgatorial bohemia and scoops of childhood
pour from his memory as he sips his drink high in the clouds.
His passive resistance renders him a shadowman armed with fifteen
English pounds, at first sponging off the Kennys as he invites
himself into their household. This anxious unwelcome guest is
well sent up with bursting luggage on arrival and finds everything
in London as baffling as the tube map. Independence is asserted
when he slots into the digs system with the Beveridges for five
pounds all in, including the gut-wrenching suet pudding, Mr and
Mrs B, and the daughter sulking inside the serving hatch. Life
is portrayed as quirky and eccentric. The array and manner of
his fellow lodgers are denigrated for the fun of it. The attic
room in Romford is all very fine for jotting down his neat little
verses and reading Pascal, Camus and Sartre but he is situated
in the homeland of his idols and soon yearns to meet them.
The drudgery for him of being a poet is balanced by work in Romford
hospital, in the lab, where his unrequited passion for Elizabeth
makes him her confidant and money-lender – she eventually leaves
her boyfriend, a married man, and returns to New Zealand. He changes
lodgings in the pursuit of the muse. All an aspiring poet can
do is tramp out to poetry readings in search of like-minded spirits.
A visit to Ayot St Lawrence and Shaw’s habitat inspires a leap
into the unknown and total devotion to his art as eventually he
becomes runner-up in the Cork Gin Poetry Prize. Ah, the slopes
of Parnassus in sight at last!
Hogan took his name, Augustus Young, from Dryden’s MacFlecknoe,
King of Fools. He sends himself up as a self-conscious poet deliberately
basing his own efforts on the greats – if you must steal, steal
from the best such as Holub and Popa – ‘Flattery sustains vanity
in a literary youth’.
At a party in Putney wearing his French beret,
he meets Alma who works for Hutchinsons. She provides a curious
history and half likes his work. Tickets for Hair the musical
seal their bizarre unromantic romance. There is neither kiss nor
tell about any of it. Slowly he meets the members of the living
pantheon, starting with the egomaniacal George Barker. ‘Who are
you to reduce my work to two poems?’ inquires the elder on being
praised by the aspirant. John Heath-Stubbs is less bruising on
the ego than Barker’s bark and bite. Only with the arrival of
his landlord and confidant, McFee, does he find a fitting confrere.
There are no more London patrons, only the rather odd but kind
landlord.
Young mocks himself for trying to feel like Dante in exile having
written a review in a small Irish poetry magazine, ‘Seamus Heaney’s
spawn have hatched into tadpoles’. Jeff Squires is portrayed in
a decent light – the text is peppered with poets but he pours
plenty of salt on their tales usually, except for David Marcus,
and Basil Bunting who explains Yeats’s obsessional friendship
with Pound, ‘He needed an injection of Ezra’s energy’ in order
to knock out the Last Poems. Even Kierkegaard cannot keep
London pure for him so he abandons it for Dundee. Celtic longings,
perhaps.
The last section almost sinks but if you have got that far you
may well see it through. Ancestry and family loom large and top
billing must go to Aunt Hanna. Her antidote to the nightly rosary
was a few pages read out loud from Les Miserables. The
suggested light years of youth of the title can be seen in terms
of the light years of cosmology if not eternity and mortality
as the elegiac strain enters the tableaux when he recalls people
who drowned during his youth, a school friend who died, and lastly
‘I was twenty-one and my father was dying’ – the year 1963 and
what a father, revered in an unsentimental and model account.
There is a terrific swipe at Dev attending the father’s funeral:
‘Started a civil war because of a symbolic oath.’
Young is a restrained memoirist: there is no cloying ego, not
much solipsism considering the subject is pretty much himself
and his poetry; there are even lengthy quotes but there is nothing
rhetorical or shabbily embarrassing. ‘Is the past falsified or
fossilised?’ ‘My memories of my father’s memories, my father’s
memories of my grandfather’s memories.’ No false flourishes at
all hardly.
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