'It’s Almost a Courtesy to Be Clear'

Only after my friend Michael Carroll died at age seventy-nine in 2016 did I learn that he and the poet Dennis O’Driscoll were born in Thurles, in County Tipperary, Ireland. Michael was a mechanical engineer elected to the American Academy of Engineering. His gifts and interests were never narrow. Two of his plays were produced, he published crossword puzzles and was a soft-voiced, riotously funny Irish raconteur. When I would stop by his office, we got business out of the way to talk about the Irish writers we loved, especially Flann O’Brien. 

O’Driscoll died in 2012 at age fifty-eight. He too spanned disciplines, and defied most of our stereotypes about poets and how they behave and how they earn a living. O’Driscoll joined the Office of the Revenue Commissioners in Dublin at age sixteen, specializing in “death duties, stamp duties, and customs,” and remained there for almost forty years. In his memoir-essay “Sing for the Taxman,” O’Driscoll says, “I have always regarded myself as a civil servant rather than a ‘poet’ or ‘artist’ – words I would find embarrassing and presumptuous to ascribe to myself.” If only more writers shared his common sense and humility. Like C.H. Sisson, he was a civil servant.

 

I thought of O’Driscoll again after stumbling on an interview with him published after his death in The Poetry Ireland Review. This passage reminded me of Michael – the humility and broad-mindedness:

 

“Paul Celan interests me as a benchmark for how much obscurity or clarity is permissible in poetry. He’s one of the few poets whose obscurity I really would forgive on the basis that what he was trying to say was so extraordinarily inexpressible and so profound that it couldn't be said in simple daily language. But there are very few poets of whom we can say that and I tend to agree with Primo Levi, that it’s almost a courtesy to be clear, that one shouldn’t make one’s readers feel stupid. In one of his essays, Levi links Ezra Pound’s obscurity with his fascism, and he is referring to Pound's use of Chinese ideograms and Greek words, etc. Levi had been in a prison camp where the Italians were roared at in German by people who knew they couldn't understand German. This kind of arrogance was Levi's enduring memory of the camps.”

 

O’Driscoll brings together writers whose work I love – Celan, Levi – and one I detest – Pound. If any of you know the source of Levi’s “courtesy to be clear” comment, please let me know. O’Driscoll, like Michael Carroll, was a deeply thoughtful man. He says later in the interview:

“One of my criticisms of contemporary poetry is that it tends to be trivial. It doesn’t in the end take the measure of both the awe of existence and the value of one individual life.”

[A reader in Belgium tells me the Primo Levi passage can be found in his essay “On Obscure Writing” (Other People’s Trades (trans. Raymond Rosenthal, 1989): “He who does not know how to communicate, or communicates badly, in a code that belongs only to him and a few others, is unhappy, and spreads unhappiness around him. If he communicates badly deliberately, he is wicked or at least a discourteous person.”]