They kidnapped the fledgling poet when he was 19, forcibly imprisoned him in mental institutions and condemned him to suffer the worst psychiatry had to offer for years.
Thank the literary gods that those savage interventions didn’t work.
“I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it.”
When Durcan recently died on May 17 at the fine old age of 80, he did so as one of Ireland’s most beloved and honored poets, leaving behind a literary legacy that will last forever.
In all, Durcan penned over 20 volumes of beautiful poetry, won the prestigious Whitbread Book Award and received the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award for his first collection, “O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor.” He also enjoyed a distinguished teaching career and was later honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards.
Durcan was known, too, as a popular showman, famed for performing highly entertaining readings of his poetry to sold-out crowds.
He was so well regarded that Irish President Michael D. Higgins, himself a poet, attended Durcan’s funeral. “I remember him being in an agony of tension before a radio reading, but when the first line was delivered the trance was underway,” President Higgins said.
As a teenager, Durcan was stricken with osteomyelitis and spent two months in the hospital, which kept him from excelling at sports.
Alan Gilsenan, who directed a documentary on Durcan, said, “I think that childhood illness affected him greatly and made him feel like even more of an outsider. There was always something of a mystery around Paul even though he was also a kindly, gentle soul.”
The debilitation also made him the target of his father’s scorn, who would say, “Paul is a sissy. Come on, be a man.”
“From a fairly early age, I was aware that certain kinds of people disapproved of me—particularly certain kinds of male,” Durcan recalled. “These men had the idea that boys had to be soldiers, chaste soldiers, and had to fit into a mold, and if they didn’t there was something not quite right.”
Of his father, he said, “I was aware of his deep disapproval.”
Durcan spoke of “gratuitous beatings” and said his father “was incredibly severe about things like examinations. If I hadn’t got second or third place it was bad news, and sometimes he would take the strap off his trousers and beat me.
“A man has to be so very complicated if he takes a school report for a 10-year-old that seriously.”
But by far, the worst was yet to come.
“They could inject electricity and gas into you so as to make you conform.”
In 1964, when Durcan was just 19, while he sat in a pub, two of his family members entered. Sensing trouble, Durcan ran out the back door, but another relative tackled him, threw him into a car and took him home.
Soon after, a psychiatrist arrived and gave him an injection, and Durcan was taken to St. John of God Hospital in Dublin, and then to various psychiatric hospitals.
Over the next three years, he suffered through 27 brain-frying sessions of electroshock because he was deemed schizophrenic.
Durcan’s greatest fear was that he would be subjected to a lobotomy. In those days, horrifying lobotomies, known as “icepick” procedures, were often used to separate the prefrontal lobes from the rest of the brain, leaving individuals like President John Kennedy’s sister, Rose, mentally crippled for life.
“The thing that I was most seriously terrified of was that it might happen to me,” Durcan said. “With other people who had it you could see these little dimples. Even the terrible psychiatrist who performed it admitted that there was no way you could undo what had been done.”
Mercifully, Durcan was spared a lobotomy, but said, “I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name.”
“Here were these authoritarian, cocky middle-aged men telling me they knew everything about me,” he said. “They could inject electricity and gas into you so as to make you conform.”
Durcan spent three years in and out of various psychiatric hospitals until he eventually escaped that life.
“There was nothing the matter with me,” he said. “I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it.”
Durcan found his way into Irish literary circles and pursued the career of his dreams as a creator, a poet and a reciter of his works.
Poems of warmth and love, poems of insight and hilarity and poems of pathos and tragedy marked his work as a writer who embodied the very spirit of being Irish. He bravely tackled controversial topics, writing about the Catholic Church in Ireland, the Northern Ireland conflict and Ireland’s divorce referendum, homelessness, poverty and domestic violence.
Sissy? Durcan had enough steel in his character to withstand and overcome the worst that psychiatrists could throw at him.
“I was seen as going the way of a poet and that had to be stopped,” he said.
But Durcan, above all, was a survivor—a survivor whose insistence on achieving his artistic dreams were stronger than the charlatans who tried to prevent them from being realized.
Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard famously said: “A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.”
Though the psychiatric industry tried to turn Durcan’s artistic dreams into nightmares, his extraordinary achievements stand as living proof they failed.
