Bits & pieces served with Coffey

For most people, the name Brian Coffey doesn’t mean much. I imagine for most Irish people the name might not mean much either. Even if one knows something about literature, Brian Coffey may still not be a very familiar name.

My first introduction to Coffey was in the late 60s. I discovered a translation he did of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard or Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance. At the time, I was going through a French Symbolist-Surrealist phase which has remained with me ever since, but the book remained one of my favorites. The translation was impeccable in both form and substance and that discovery led me to other works: I recall reading a 1975 article by James Mays in the Irish University Review in which Mays wrote, “Anyone who admires Brian Coffey’s poetry is a member of a minority and must be aware of that fact. The knowledge is disquieting because it makes one ask, frequently at first, if one’s standards have dissolved in some strange enthusiasm. Has one’s mind be taken over by a cult or is one being stubborn into sticking to one’s convictions? Such questions trouble me but, on reflection, I cannot find that I have been misled.” That became apparent to me as well. What I didn’t know at the time, but should have, was Coffey’s relationship to Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin and Beckett (a kind of Irish Gang of Four) and what I had no inkling of at the time, was that Coffey would, eventually, be the person responsible for connecting me to Beckett.

Fast forward to 1977. I had completed my master’s degree in Comparative Literature at Indiana and began working on a novel. In between the decision to advance to a doctoral program or decline into the abyss of a writer’s life, I moved to the Monterey Bay area where I continued working on the book while sending out applications to doctoral programs in the U.S. As a flyer, I applied for an International Institute of Education Scholarship to Oxford. As I recall, it was one of those summer semester programs, but I had always wanted to see what the Oxford experience was like, so it was worth the postage. Apparently, the postage worked and I was awarded a scholarship. At the same time, I was accepted into the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, but since that didn’t begin until the fall, my summer was my own. And so I left for Oxford.

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