Writers in Residence

SWIMMING IN MONACO
Justin Quinn : 7 October 2005

My job was clear. I had a month in Monaco to write a large chunk of a book on Irish poetry. My wife and I had a baby earlier in the year, and there wasn’t much opportunity to get work done at home. I hit the ground running on 11 September 2005 and pounded out 2500 words.

The next day the same. And so on. There was hardly time to notice my surroundings, though I did make sure to go swimming each day so that my body didn’t wither completely. I sent postcards to friends and family saying how much I was enjoying the sun, the sea, the wine, the olives, the Provençal market outside my window, but in truth I had only half an eye on these things and on Monaco. After a few hours spent ranging through the sad terrain of nineteenth-century Ireland, and its poetry, I was daily shocked to walk out the library’s door into the Mediterranean sunlight, saunter between the larches and pines, the bougainvillaeas, wearing sandals and shorts, with towel and togs under my arm.

When I floated out from Plage des Pêcheurs at the bottom of the Rock of Monaco, rocked by the waves beneath the stunning azure sky, I thought I could never be further away from Ireland than at those moments.

I received an e-mail from my father in reply to my postcard. He joked: ‘It’s all about location, isn’t it?’ I immediately thought, no, it’s not, but then I began to disagree with myself in the next few days. I started looking more closely at my surroundings. First, I was in the Princess Grace Irish Library, as a guest of The Ireland Fund of Monaco.

Grace Kelly: an American actress, whose grandfather was Irish, and who married the Prince of Monaco in 1956. A fragile thread of Ireland woven back and forth across the Atlantic, eventually gathering to form the study, the shelves, the books that surrounded me.

Second, I was in a principality that was a protectorate of France—the carabinieri that guard the Palais Princier itself are French-trained and there is no army; its entire territory measures just under two square kilometres. And yet Monaco is a nation-state that has its own language, Monégasque, just as Ireland is a nation-state and has the Irish language.

The research for my book had been gradually leading me away from the idea that a country’s literature must somehow be an expression of its national spirit—to put it crudely, that Irish literature must be a mixture of Celtic mythology and misty landscapes. Contrary to popular belief, nation-states, along with their national spirits, are much frailer things than poems. Irish poetry, at its best, exceeds the borders of the country in bizarre ways. For instance, the senior generation of Irish poets—Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian—all were born as subjects of the British Crown, not citizens of the Irish Republic. (Several remain the Queen’s subjects to this day.) The work of the younger Irish poets now ranges widely beyond Ireland’s borders for its themes.

I continued to swim at the Plage des Pêcheurs, suspended between sea and sky, and resolved that when I finished the book, I would use the following lines by Michael Hartnett as its epigraph:

That there is still an Ireland where
Trees suddenly fly away
And leave their pigeons standing |
Baffled in the air.

Those trees, I discovered, occasionally fly to America, to Monaco, and perhaps even to Prague, where I was headed at the end of my month.
© JUSTIN QUINN