Bits & pieces served with Coffey

 

“Dear Mark,

Thank you for your letter. Don’t try to separate human activities into real and non-real ones. Whatever men or women do is real in so far as being what they do. So earning one’s living in a university as lecturer is a real activity which may also be a means to a further end. One is just earning one’s keep by lecturing, which one can do badly, or well or if one attends to the opportunity very well. It is when a person attempts to pull rank or to see themselves not as other men/mss and to expect to be taken as speaking with authority that an element of unreality (=lies) appears.”

 

And following: “Don’t forget that Dante was both poet and scholar, and that scholarship, scientific study, poetry and statesmanship proceed from the personal centre of a human being, the intelligence preceding the specifications. The only problems that arise are those one makes for oneself and those one sets up barriers and obstacles to the doing and to the making. The imperative of choice disarms, no doubt, but it is choose or die on any plane and slipping into working and then choosing to go on is a good path. The Muses also are a reality.” Hadn’t ever thought of myself in the company of Dante whether in this hell or any other hell, but the point was well taken.

Years lapsed. I returned to the United States, finished my doctorate and took a position at Chapman College in 1990. I wrote to Coffey extending an invitation to come to Chapman which he politely declined. The letter, written on 26:ix:90, only a few months after Beckett’s death, included a poem he wrote titled, “One Way” from the collection Third Person.

 

“Giving what he has not given

he sees what he has not seen

Taken what he has not taken

he hears what he has not heard

No worst fear

no best fight

constraint constrained

to work himself out”

 

 At the bottom of the page he wrote, “poem, written in 1937, with S.B. in mind, is a kind of pre-view of the man to come. He was a faithful friend. From our first meeting, in 1935, to the end. R.I.P.”

Alas, I never met Coffey. It was one of those encounters that never happened and that one regrets not happening and when he died I felt that I had missed yet another moment in time that could never be regained. All I had to remember were the phone conversations and the voice from his letters, which I return to frequently as a measure of his insight, his intellect and the gentle measure of his hand.

 

Brian Coffey was born in Dublin in 1905 and died in 1995. He entered University College Dublin in 1924, earning advanced degrees in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He spent a number of years in Paris, where he became friends with such writers as Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett.

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