Kevin Kiely pays tribute to poet, novelist, musician, and political activist Fred Johnston (1951-2024)
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING
by Kevin Kiely
In the early autumn of 1976 University College Galway hosted a writers workshop. The welcoming event took place in the cloister-like quadrangle with speeches by various writers —Tom Kilroy, Anthony Cronin and others such as Aidan Higgins, plus there was the prospect of Francis Stuart’s arrival. Colm Ó hEocha, President of the College referred to his own discipline (science along with marine biology), making an analogy to poets, novelists and writers plunging into their oceanic depths for literature. He congratulated the workshop members, selected through a national competition by the adjudicators. There we were, apprentices in creativity (ACs), clustered if not swaggering, ready to conquer the slopes of Parnassus and otherwise looking for accommodation. Night was approaching, sleeping quarters had not been secured by everyone.
There we were, apprentices in creativity (ACs), clustered if not swaggering, ready to conquer the slopes of Parnassus and otherwise looking for accommodation
Tom Duddy, one of the AC’s and a local, recommended B&Bs which were turned down as an option; staying in any Galway hotel was beyond bohemian budgets. The funding provided a monthly stipend referred to by Anthony Cronin as the shekels or wherewithal, so Fred Johnston, Rita Kelly, Elizabeth Peavoy (daughter of Mary Lavin), Maurice Scully, Rosita Sweetman and myself joked about our quest for places to stay. Evanna O’Boyle knew the mobile homes and caravan park scene which had prospects. Skilled at line drawings, she veered away from her writing to immersion in visual art. There was a frisson of bravado, an element of recklessness about the ACs, like birds of the air who might overnight at random al fresco. It would be a crazy year for those who stayed beyond the workshop schedule, hunkering on into the spring and early summer.
Rosita became author of On Our Knees and On Our Backs. She was the wisest among the ACs and would pioneer the Irish Women’s Lib Movement. As our ‘Feminist Professor’ she spoke of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics that reframed Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence as flawed romantics. The workshops rustled with notebooks, manuscripts in progress and we showcased our personal preferences in books.
Fred had Lawrence’s Kangaroo and Robert Graves Selected Poems. We didn’t much care for the fashionable poets Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Scully proclaimed himself averse to many poets and all prose in pursuit of abstract poetry. Rita Kelly was unique, writing in two languages. Her partner, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc became our visiting Gaelic bard and scholar. Rosita and Elizabeth were open-genre, open minded. Fred pleaded for poetry and prose as equally demanding: neither forms should claim the high ground.
Fred pleaded for poetry and prose as equally demanding: neither forms should claim the high ground
Cronin had declared there was no such thing as a school for writers, or more colloquially a school for scribblers. He said ironically that if this was heard beyond the quadrangle, the workshop season might be shut down altogether. He asked us to keep subversive and freely gather a few times a week. Aidan Higgins promised nothing but difficulties; writing in any genre meant difficulties he emphasised, reading from Samuel Beckett’s Watt where the character Hackett finds his vocation as dog minder. Francis Stuart spoke of prison experiences, struggles and transcendence through art and literature. Mary Lavin was unable to visit: her commitments were elsewhere, the demands of a working writer.
Arguments, disputes and discussions maintained an edge that was productive. Workshops had no bounds and moved out around the city to pubs, cafés and the streets with equal intensity. Writing appeared as if from nowhere, despite the wild party scene—’wild’ inadequately conservative for some of the high jinks. Of other conduct, shenanigans and antics, silence is best. Galway is untamed, not only as university location, and scenes like mirages remain: someone was unable to find anything suitable to slice a cooked ham at a party, borrowed a handsaw, washed it under a tap and claimed a new utensil to domestic science.
Arguments, disputes and discussions maintained an edge that was productive
It was an era when the collection of empty refundable cider bottles made sense financially. Those who liked a few drinks had to accept hangovers with steely courage, fulfil the workshop hours and otherwise write. Fred was crossing Eyre Square past the famous statue late one afternoon after the weekend’s events: ‘You look as pale as Pádraic Ó’Conaire!’ We were swapping books and rich gossip. He threw out a quote from Alexander Pope ‘[…] where is thy victory, O death where is thy sting?’ And For Whom the Bell Tolls the ‘savage’ closing page and the epigraph: ‘who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises […] I am involved in mankind; and therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
Rosita and Aidan Higgins said cheery farewells to a group of ACs, wondering if anyone would write a book titled Down and Out in Galway and Salthill or a poem Caravan Park Impromptu. Mobile homes and caravan accommodation were our Des Res. Fred had proved his engineering skills, solving a leaking tin roof by ‘affixing’ an abandoned tractor door. The methodology would involve ultra-scientific language. Maurice Scully (who died last year) had ‘nailed himself’ to abstract poems and ghosted workshops towards the close of the season.
Fred had proved his engineering skills, solving a leaking tin roof by ‘affixing’ an abandoned tractor door
‘Tom Duddy is climbing successfully inside UCG,’ Fred remarked as he waved me goodbye after the malingering year in Galway, before my embarkation for Spain. ‘You’re a whinge about weather,’ he said. ‘No appreciation for the Atlantic rollers.’ His quips, banter, and joking about me being ‘hagridden’. ‘There’s no future in calling Evanna, Nirvana? Did you ever return that book to Tom Duddy?’ Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (the selection edited by John Wain).
Fred (over the years) accepted having his name misprinted on a few occasions as (Samuel) Johnson and (Ben) Jonson, instead of Johnston. There was a sentence in Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage 1697-1743 that we recited: ‘He lodged as much by accident as he dined, and passed the night sometimes in mean houses, which are set open to any casual wanderers, sometimes in cellars when he had not money to support these receptacles, walked about the streets till he was weary, and lay down in the summer upon a bulk, or in winter, with his associates in poverty, among the ashes of a glass-house.’
Thus, Fred (Frederick Patrick) Johnston, native of Belfast had left the Sectarian war-torn city in the early 1970s for bohemian Dublin and instantly adopted Galway, and eventually happy domestic life with Mary Ellen Hodgins in Carn Ard. Education in Belfast was at the historical St Malachys Diocesan College, his mother May (Mary) linked to Ballybough Dublin, died when Fred was a child. An only child named after his father, the owner of a hardware and paint shop. Fred’s Galway became a love affair as the connection to the city by osmosis flowered not only in poetry, prose, literary journalism but also making music.
Back in Dublin he was founder member of The Irish Writer’s Co-Op with Peter Sheridan (brother of Film Maker Jim), Neil Jordan, Desmond Hogan. As publishing house, it began over a meal of burgers and fries in Grafton Street. This pioneering scope led him to Corrib-Claddagh-side where in notoriously creative Galway he initiated Cúirt International Festival of Literature and The Western Writers Centre and initiated the Gort Literary Festival.
Fred’s Galway became a love affair as the connection to the city by osmosis flowered not only in poetry, prose, literary journalism but also making music
Galway in the 1970s saw the rise of Michael D. Higgins and frequent musician visitors Christy Moore, Frankie Gavin among many, and The Druid Theatre, brainchild of Gary Hynes. Fred had played in pub sessions not only in Dublin, and randomly performed as busker or with others. He could cover the Brady-Irvine classic Arthur McBride and the Sergeant or join in with a trad-group till the small hours of the morning. Instrumentation was part of the discourse about fiddles, uilleann pipes, button accordions, bouzoukis, mandolins. Primordially any source music merged with his poems that reflect the improvisational sporadic jig, reel and lament. Once he had established the inherently lyrical-stylistic he stuck by it and it stuck to him. Fast paced, instantly accessible verse with the logic of a pocket watch. As writer, he favoured multi-genre authors. Poets who could not produce prose, fiction and professional journalism left him suspicious, quizzical, just as he was not ruffled comparing music to poetry. Sessions in the pub on guitar could inform the poetry review which was in effect the essay in miniature. Step dancing, writing, the bodhrán, Sean-Nós, rap were all the same to him intrinsically.
Ó hEocha had joked on that opening night in UCG before the workshops were to commence about writers seeking clú agus cáil and onóir agus ór. Fame, fortune, honour, money—these are associated with literature but not necessarily by all of those who create it. The decades sped forward and the once-upon-a-time ACs became parents and much else with the exigencies of being poets, writers, artists, survivors. There were various reunions by chance or arrangement out on the arts scene, known in bohemian slang as the circus, with its clowns, acrobats, lions, tigers, magicians, high trapeze artists and all individual.
Fred was intensely an activist, highly politicised, hailing from that quagmire of politics, Belfast, but only obliquely political in poems
His books and collections swung through from various publishers. Glenda Cimino’s Beaver Row Press, Salmon and Jessie Lendennie, Lapwing and Dennis Grieg, Lagan Press and Patrick Ramsey. He did not neglect fiction and had returned to a collection of short stories, latterly. He loved Paris just as much as Algeria. London had seemingly for such a Celtic Irishman not the lure it had for others. Fred was intensely an activist, highly politicised, hailing from that quagmire of politics, Belfast, but only obliquely political in poems.
His sojourn in 2004 to the Grace Kelly Library (Monaco) was often recollected in conversation. The obsessional highlight of the trip was Yeats’s telephone, displayed in the library from the Hotel Idéal Séjour where the poet had died. ‘I would pick up that phone […],’ he told me. You mean the occult phone? ‘I think so,’ he said. This anecdote in a nearby caff on D’Olier Street. We’d met after a poetry hoedown in Dublin’s infamous Books Upstairs, organised by the maestros, Maurice Earls and Ruth Kenny. It wasn’t a lengthy meeting. Galway beckoned as always. Friendship is often dependent on reminiscence. ‘Remember Cronin blared at you for only having the Jeffares edition of Selected Yeats. He was decent, wasn’t he, back in the days […] He cadged a Collected Yeats off one of those UCG profs, and gave it to you!’
Fred praised a recent poem in Cyphers “We Could be Seen in the X-Position.” Never insecure in his own work, having a healthy ego, he glowered at my comment. Love poems are expensive. His hands opened up to the ceiling. He quoted Yeats: ‘some woman’s yellow hair has maddened every mother’s son.’ ‘Expensive! You’re hagridden,’ he laughed, ‘but you love it.’ Out in the street, he referenced the impending journey west with a phrase from N17 by The Saw Doctors, ‘stone walls and the grass is green.’
Of the perplexities of life, literature, the music of what happens, the poetry of what happens, Johnston’s collection Being Anywhere reveals the internal exile: “You could be anywhere,/But here you are, with the Japanese/Tourists, the red buses and the old despair.” Whether in Dublin, Limerick, Paris, or among the poets, writers, folk musicians and characters of Galway he hadn’t forgotten Belfast, yet states “my true north is always shifting.” While ‘Poet On An Island’ is about his discipline: the creative calling “I follow an old routine/from pillow to pen/from dreaming to imagining and back again.”
Kevin Kiely’s books include I shot the President’s Verse: Selected Literary Journalism and The Principles of Poetry DI + ID = Ψ Psi (Spa Cottage Publishing).
