Madam, – Michael Smith’s affectionate word portrait of the poet Michael Hartnett (Arts, February 16th) raises a number of issues which I can address as someone who knew Hartnett when he first came to live in Dublin in 1962.
It was John Jordan, then editor of Poetry Ireland magazine and a lecturer in the English Department at UCD, who paid Michael Hartnett’s first-year college fees. James Liddy also helped to subsidise him while he attended college, and for a time accommodated him in a flat in Haddington Road. Hartnett definitely studied English and Latin (as I, too, did) in that first year.
He probably also studied Irish and Spanish, as I recall that he was reading Spanish textbooks and the verse of Lorca, and planning to go to Spain later.
Finally, it has to be said that Michael Smith is being very prudent and perhaps unduly circumspect about the medical condition that proved fatal to Michael Hartnett: alcoholism, a condition publicly acknowledged by his son Niall, and alluded to by the poet himself in his verse Sibelius in Silence: “Alcohol’s a cunning beast./ It fools the doctor and the priest,/ it fools the clever and the sane/ but not the liver or the brain.” — Yours, etc,
Madam, – It was with great interest that I read Michael Smith’s article “Remembering Michael Hartnett”.
I met Michael Hartnett in the late 1950s in London when he came to our house with my husband’s nephew, Jimmy Musgrave. The two young Newcastlewest men were working in Lyons tea rooms during their school holidays.
Even then Michael was writing poetry and my husband, Donal, wrote an article about his work for the Sunday Review. It was a big spread entitled “Teaboy of the Western World” and over the years Michael often laughingly referred to it, saying it was his first media exposure. In fact he dedicated one of his collections of poetry to Donal.
Just a couple of days before he died he phoned me and we reminisced about London and mutual friends,
His early death is still a source of great sadness. – Yours, etc,