The accident of being who one is.
The accident of being in a place
At one time and not another…
Metro, George Szirtes

In 1999, one of those ineffable moments of pride and joy came when, my friend and mentor Gerald Dawe told me he was dedicating his poem ‘Quartz’ to me. In the poem the historical experience of my grandmother and his great grandmother were entwined and re-imagined. Later Gerry very generously agreed to donate the proceeds of a special copy of the poem, designed by Joe Vanek, to the Irish Refugee Council. In those two acts – the historical and the imaginative – he combined the civic and the moral. At the heart of the poetic re-imagining of his relatives’ arrival in Belfast lay clues to the facets of Gerry’s European sensibility – his ‘cosmopolitan knowingness’ which was subtly linked to his own family history, and specifically, way back, a history of European refugees fleeing different versions of religious and racial intolerance. He rarely spelled out that history specifically but spoke in terms of affinities. Yet this appears memorably etched across poems and essays.

This sensibility, what his wife, Dorothea Melvin, dubbed ‘his European soul’, showed up across all areas of Dawe’s intellectual life.  His early – and lifelong – admiration of European poets; his preoccupation with the dark corners of European history, and his many, visits to European cities and hinterlands, were distilled and made tangible in his works. The diverse accents of Mitteleuropa provided an aural backdrop in the neighbourhood of his youth. It was only much later that he came to discover his own family links to a particular version of European history. These journeys and discoveries, physical, intellectual and cultural, profoundly shaped his creative output and his ethic of social responsibility.  
In the introduction to The Proper Word, Nicholas Allen noted of Dawe:

The roadway is there too, the travels across continents, to Australia, Europe, America.

This essay is concerned with not just the ‘travels’ to Europe but their intellectual, moral, and familial influence on Dawe’s imaginative and worlds. His engagement with European writers began precociously early. He retained admiration for CP Cavafy and Czesław Miłosz , and later, the work of British Hungarian poet George Szirtes, who became his friend. His heartfelt connection with European writers, especially the traduced and the ostracised, whether by Nazi or Soviet regimes, nourished an independence of mind. His admiration encompassed not just the sublime achievements of ‘cosmopolitans’ – in regime parlance this was not a compliment – such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Babel but a deep respect for their constancy, their commitment to write in the most perilous of circumstances. As early as 1990, Dawe was proffering strong opinions on what happens to writers and artists within a culturally orthodox climate of consensus. In the 1990 essay ‘How’s the Poetry Going?’ he ended the essay by pairing Kavanagh and Brecht as contrarian swimmers against the tide. He revisited the episode of Brecht before the House Un-American Activities Committee:

As Brecht knew, the assumptions that gave rise to the Committee are never too far from the surface in any culture that restricts out of fear, doctrine or expediency what he called “free competition of ideas in cultural fields”.

In his essay ‘Against Piety’, on John Hewitt (Proper Word, 1991), he wrote: ‘In Ireland there are fragments of different historical nations – English, Scottish and Irish, with other floating sects and religious residues such as French Huguenots and in more recent years a growing population of Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans and so on.’ At that time, Dawe had not yet begun his excavations into his own Huguenot ancestry. Notes he left about his genealogical detective work, referred, on his father’s side, to the Chartres, who were Huguenots, French Protestants fleeing religious persecution or violence.  He had managed to get some purchase on the trajectory of their lives in Ireland. Of the elusive Quartz family, ‘where did they end up?’  he wondered, ‘re-emigration to the United States?’  On the 1911 census they are down as ‘Presbyterian’. Did some enthusiastic bible-thumper catch them off guard somewhere along their rackety journey? There were various Christian Missions to the Jews – intent on the more benign kind of conversion. French Huguenots had also faced threats. It occurs to me that perhaps his aversion to dogma, be it from the right or the sanctimonious pockets of the left stemmed in part from this family heritage.

He understood that Europe was fount of both civilisation and barbarity, that these were warring factors in the fight over the European soul, coexisting side by side.  The art of the Renaissance and the Inquisition; painting frescoes versus burning heretics at the stake; poets versus dictators. It was brought starkly home to him in the 1990s, on a visit to Poland to do a reading. He and other guests were brought to a cemetery, where six pits remained, the visual evidence of a liquidation of some hundreds of Jews from the ghetto. The pits which the victims were made to dig – their own graves – were still visible against one wall of the cemetery. In ‘Twilight Zones’, an interview with this author, Dawe wrote:

‘Being in that cemetery  and seeing those six pits had an extraordinary effect on me, and I wrote a little poem about it… Later on a train through Slovakia, between sleep and waking,  he had a semi hallucinatory experience, coming awake in the couchette, in the wee small hours, at a timeless  mystery station with its Mitteleuropa sign: it occurred to me that there was something spooky about the journey and I couldn’t quite understand why I was feeling so uncomfortable.’

In his writing, he pulled together the filaments of a submerged history now remaining only in family resemblances through the generations, the dark wavy hair, brown eyes and habits of mind passed down. He could weave a tapestry both precise and capacious, through a single poem.

In ‘Laughing and Forgetting’, the fleetest of references to a different Belfast, a diverse Belfast:

The wine store has gone lilac
And where the Jaffe Memorial
stands in a forlorn green
The Lagan glides by

Otto Jaffe was the only Jewish lord mayor of Belfast, a  philanthropist and generous civic benefactor. He  fell victim to anti-German sentiment in World War I.  ‘Anti-German’ sentiment is what  drove him out of Belfast but it is hard also not to detect latent antisemitism. Even as I write this, I can hear Gerry’s voice, with a slight  sceptical intonation. He was wary of simplistic or reductive pieties, identity obsessions and general cant. He would not lay claim to those identities just to be part of a cultural zeitgeist. He could not make himself be part of the herd: ‘when mouths / mumble the handy sayings’.

Highly attuned as he was to unusual connections and random synchronicities, Gerry compacted complex histories. The ghosts of history slyly haunting city streetscapes, or lurking in front of the neglected shopfronts or swimming beneath lapping lake waters. Like Shimon Attie’s photographic projections in the former Jewish neighbourhood of Berlin, Gerry’s European poems sometimes superimpose the palimpsest of the past on a modern location or event.

In both of the poetry collections The Morning Train (1999) and Lake Geneva ( 2003) and various essays, Gerry mined the trenches of history, both general and personal, part not only of his family’s biological history but also the cultural DNA he cleaved to – the European writers he admired, and the artists such as Chagall and Kandinsky.

Yet the most poignant of his European poems allude to the bleaker histories of the continent, which lie barely below the surface, at a railway station stop, or on the street, with the revelation of a tiny Stolperstein glinting in the pavement outside a building entrance, the former residences of the deported. His reflection of his own European connections, and the palimpsest of civilisational layers that are in reality so fragile show his ‘cosmopolitan knowingness’ at play.

In The Morning Train, the set of European poems including ‘In the Old Jewish Cemetery Lodz’, and ‘Kristallnacht 1938’ are bookended by ‘Hero at Lansdowne’, modern-day fascist violence of the football hooligan. The cemetery scene where the brevity of the poem speaks to the impossibility of conjuring up the fractured history that the broken headstones represent. The bystander-participants, in the poem about Kristallnacht, ‘a woman is smiling as the photo is taken’. With that line, he subliminally draws a line of connection from the bored yet gleeful witnesses to the rounding up of Jews, thence to the infamous lynching photos from the ‘Deep South’ era where bystanders laugh into the camera’s eye, under a suspended black body.

On the creative resilient side, Gerry loved the art of Marc Chagall, and the poem ‘Resting after Chagall’ playfully pays homage to the chronicler of nostalgic shtetl memory, and in particular the 1915 portrait The Poet Reclining. Across poetry and essays, Dawe drew deeply on the well of European literary tradition, taking lessons from the cosmopolitan and trenchantly arguing for breadth of approach to infuse Irish literary criticism with some fresh air. These were views he espoused over decades. (See, for instance, his essays in The Proper Word , especially ‘Anecdotes over a Jar’.)  In Politic Words, Writing Women Writing History published in the last years of his life, an important collection mysteriously ignored by critics, reclaiming these older expansive positions, he reaffirmed his beliefs. His work on the poet Charles Donnelly, begun in the 1970s, eventually coming to fruition in 2007 and 2012, was part of a quest to reveal the European dimensions of the work of (then) not so well-known Irish poets, such as Donnelly, George Reavey and Thomas McGreevy. His essay on Christabel Bielenberg took up the thread again, once more questioning the efficacy of herding writers into ‘literary fashionable categories’. Despite the retrieval of women writers which continues apace, somehow Christabel Bielenberg has fallen somewhat through the cracks. (Claire O’.Reilly interviewed Dawe for her article on Bielenberg in Irish German Studies, 2015) In a marvellous essay, Dawe restores her as literary witness, whilst anchoring her in her European historical context, forced as she was to flee Germany with her anti-Nazi husband, Peter.  Through his friendship with Christabel and Peter Bielenberg, Gerry met and became firm friends with two direct witnesses to that darker European history that so preoccupied him. In the essay ‘Exchanging Messages: Christabel Bielenberg’ he referred to the seismic change in his thinking that the early encounters with the Bielenbergs inspired.

‘It was at that this time [1976] too that I started to find a deeper understanding, through Christabel and Peter’s conversations, the meaning of “European” culture as a living tradition outside of the library and museum and the novels and histories took on a distinctively deeper personal resonance.’ (Dawe, Politic Words). There was surely too a throwback to the neighbourhood of his youth where a few Mitteleuropa accents could be heard, the sophisticated women with God knows what backstory, who visited with his mother. Bielenberg’s multiply reprinted The Past is Myself brought home to an Irish audience the real horrors of the Second World War, horrors from which they had to a certain extent been immunised, sheltered as they were from the reality of fascist occupation.  The abiding friendship between people from different yet not entirely dissimilar histories was marked by Dawe in the poem ‘The Bay Tree’, inspired by the gift of a laurel cutting given to Dawe’s wife, Dorothea, by the Bielenbergs:

So I thought I should let you know
The bay tree from your garden
Rustles here still, in the shade
Just within hearing.

The poem acts as testament and tribute to friendship, memory, endurance and continuity.

Gerry’s sense of Europe and its history wasn’t just confined to horror. There were the happy times, holidays in the 80s, Crete, Italy, Switzerland, and these showed up in poems too. This was family time and fun, with friends Eve and Kevin and others. Friendship. Family. That wicked sense of humour. All enfolded with alchemist’s skill into the beauty and the joy of the everyday. On the sun lounger somewhere, looking forward to the evening’s ice-beaded glass of beer or cold wine. Yet always absorbing the mood, the detail, the heart of the matter. Even on holiday, his antennae were up. The drawing of a map on a napkin, and a poolside conversation with a couple, one of whom had fled the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia, became the catalyst for the poem ‘Refugees’.

Gerry’s approach was subtle. Sometimes huge histories cast but momentary yet indelible shadows in the poems. At the end of his life, he had turned again to the Second World War, specifically the history of Vichy France and the photography of Lee Miller – the collaborators and the woman who bore witness. At this crucial juncture, with Holocaust denial and the far right on the rise, to study the trial of Pétain and the Miller photos of Dachau became Gerry’s new focus, as he worked his way through books on both subjects. It is our loss that his ‘cosmopolitan knowingness’ will not now inform the creation of new poems or lucid commentaries. More’s the pity.

Politic Words: Writing Women/Writing History by Gerald Dawe (Peter Lang, 2023).