Remembering Niall McDevitt (1967-2022)
Personal recollections a year on from the poet's death
One year on since the death of the poet Niall McDevitt, my stepfather for 11 years. I have many notes about him, the book he was writing on Chaucer, the walks he gave, or working with him on his book London Nation. For today, I just want to share some personal memories.
I remember first meeting him as we spoke on a panel together to talk about psychogeography at The Really Free School squat in Bloomsbury. He and my mother had a walking group where they followed the underground rivers in London. This December will be the 10th anniversary of the death of Jamie Cripps, a friend I still think of most weeks who died aged 23. Niall came to visit the hospital then, and wrote a poem about it that he was too shy to share for years. Jamie had written to him previously asking about ways to get poetry published, and Niall gave him advice. He was always supportive of creativity. When he first moved into our home, I think he was a bit overwhelmed, in the wilder days, and I was a bit wary for a while. The penny dropped for me at some point when I realised how happy he made my mother, Julie Goldsmith, and how happy he was made by her. It was beautiful to see them supporting each other always. He was intensely loyal, and even in the heat of political argument would never say anything personally unkind.
I loved his poetry walks, as so many did. They seemed to happen only infrequently, randomly, and so when I was an events organiser I worked with him to do a monthly walk. I loved our collaboration on those and learnt more about the history of poetry and London than at any other time. He leaves behind a constellation of poetic traces, where Marlowe was stabbed, Blake died, or Rimbaud and Verlaine learnt English; where T.S. Eliot put out mock fires as a fire warden (‘in a shamanic dance’, Niall imagined), Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, or the Patisserie Valerie where William Blake was born, or where Emila Bassano was harassed by that pocked faced creep, whoever that was (we have a biography of him somewhere). Niall consulted the producers of a recent play put on at The Globe about Emila Bassano.
I remember the lesser-known poets that Niall honoured, like David Gascoyne and Harry Fainlight, both of whom he organised several tribute events for. Niall had a wealth of obsessions. He organised the shelves in the kitchen bookshelf (from bottom to top): Yeats and Blake; Jewish Interest; Biographies of Poets; London books; Shakespeare and Elizabethan; and ‘the Goddess shelf’, filled with myths and folklore. Many days, Niall was reading a book when I went out in the morning, and when came back in the evening he was still reading. In recent years, Niall’s long-nursed passions began to find form in a deeper, more authoritative, more singular voice. While he was quite ill, the two of us sat for many days editing his collection, London Nation, playing with different layouts on the page. I felt the presence of a new kind of greatness in his work. I will never forget those days.
There was much optimism recently, particularly after Niall signed his first prose book deal with Cheerio Books. Clare Conville took us out to lunch at the Academy in Soho and came up with the idea on the spot, as Niall was telling some story. We called it Chaucerrio. I can’t remember what the story was, but I remember once when I told Niall I had killed a rat, he said that in Medieval times poets were the traditional pest control service, playing the pipes to chance off the rats. Clare and the brilliant Harriet Vyner came to our home for a meeting about the book, which happened to also be Niall’s birthday. Niall said not to tell, but I quietly mentioned it to them anyway. They brought great celebration energies. We filled the house with Chaucer merch - plates, fabrics, and prints, some tacky, some grand. In the last year, my mum and I bought many gifts for Niall. He was brave. For much of his last year, he lay on the sofa reading through many Chaucer books. We downloaded two dozen films set in Medieval times. I have some recordings of him talking about his ideas for the book. He was exploring the moral complexities of the Peasants Revolt, and interested in how the land enclosures of the 15th century were a kind of revenge for it. He was preoccupied with the London sites of Chaucer, and chose seven to structure his book around.
The day before Niall last lost consciousness, he was giving me feedback on a eulogy I was to read that evening for my grandfather, Grey Gowrie, in front of many people. I was worried about time and there was a Tennyson poem at the end, Ulysses. I asked Niall if I should cut the poem and in a gravelly voice he said, ‘The poem gets it in the neck’. Sé Merry Doyle came to look after him so my mum could attend. Niall watched a livestream of the service and I’m told said that I did well. Later that night, he and Julie were laughing and joking together. The next day, he was not conscious. His family gathered to visit and his friends called and spoke sweetly to him on loudspeaker. That day his book, London Nation, arrived from the printers, and he got to hold a copy in his hands. We sang a wobbly Jerusalem and played The Pogues. The energy of everyone together I’m sure on some level Niall felt. It was a beautiful day of gratitude and love, as good a last day as any.
I was going through some of my notes on Niall and found an account of a dream I had shortly after he died:
Had a dream about Niall. Saw his face in a checkered jacket saying ‘I have to leave now’. Walking through London, surreal, didn’t look real, looked vivid. Thomas and Ann, he started to look more and more like young Thomas De Quincey (Julie’s painting of), the separation of Thomas and Ann. Niall helped me with my writing, I feel. He talks for a time. Nice, when Niall edits it with his scrutiny of his stare.
Below is the obituary I wrote for Niall on the New River Press website.
The poet Niall McDevitt — a founding member of New River Press — has died on 29th September, aged 55 at home in North Kensington after six years lived with cancer. He was a restless presence in London poetry. A serious poet and enthusiast of other poets. Iain Sinclair, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, and John Cooper Clarke all admired his work. The literary walks McDevitt gave, ‘psychogeographic investigations’, saw greasy cafes and elite hotels alike as places of poetic pilgrimage. Jeremy Reed, an older contemporary who influenced McDevitt’s early style, described him as ‘a luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries’, adding that ‘London will never be the same without him’.
McDevitt dedicated his life to poetry, to a Blakean vision that celebrated freethinking and resisted the rule of the philistine establishment. His poetry is by turns solemn and sage, with a melancholic romance, or in the words of Heathcote Williams, ‘savagely witty’. A charismatic and sometimes provocative performer with a low, booming voice, McDevitt was more acutely perceptive than first appeared. His loyal, scrutinous attention championed the creativity of all he met. With uncomplaining dignity, he lived to the full while ill. Only four days before his death, McDevitt visited the grave of Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne in Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. Though wheelchair-bound, beaming with delight, he mustered a lecture on Swinburne’s colourful private life and advocacy for Blake.
McDevitt brought many to the path of poetry. A Londonist who led highly original literary walks to uncover traces left by great world writers on the city, in particular the four McDevitt called his ‘personal Kabbala’: Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, and Yeats. His ‘wandering lectures’ revealed a whirlwind of history on unassuming streets. An industrial alley behind The Savoy is shown to have been set ablaze in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1377; to have witnessed the death of William Blake in 1827 and Bob Dylan giving birth to the music video in 1965 in Subterranean Homesick Blues.
The product of six years’ work, London Nation returned from the printers on the day McDevitt died — just in time for the poet to hold a copy. The golden hardback shows Thomas De Quincey with ‘Ann of Oxford Street’, who reputedly once saved the young De Quincey’s life with smelling salts. The paintings are by artist Julie Goldsmith, McDevitt’s partner, collaborator, and now literary executor. Goldsmith and McDevitt made a glamorous pair in pinstripes and leopard print. To Goldsmith’s son, Heathcote Ruthven, McDevitt was a devoted stepfather, responding to, without fail, everything the younger writer wrote. Ruthven and McDevitt worked closely to programme McDevitt’s London Poetry Walks and, with artist Robert Montgomery, design and edit Niall’s work for New River Press. Their Portobello Road address became a loving home and space for McDevitt to develop his work to more critical acclaim. In early 2022, McDevitt was ecstatic to sign a deal with Cheerio books, an imprint of Hachette backed by the Estate of Francis Bacon, for a book about Geoffrey Chaucer.
McDevitt’s poetry wove diverse traditions to unique effect. In a hymn to the murdered playwright Christopher Marlowe, he beats a Celtic Modernism on a Bodhrán drum to the underbelly of Elizabethan England; London Babylon adapts Ancient Sumerian texts to critique contemporary neoliberalism; Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage, the result of a summer in Palestine, fuses two of McDevitt’s lifelong preoccupations — the culture of Judaism and the Jerusalem of Blake — to create a startlingly original world of haunted hopes. Though dense with history and religion, McDevitt’s work is decidedly unacademic. He learnt from Joyce and Chaucer how to remain alive to the visceral contemporary, sing to the music of diverse voices, and travesty piousness with scatological wordplay. McDevitt found in London a lodestar to make vast libraries of erudition concrete and immediate.
Born in Limerick in February 1967, McDevitt moved to South Dublin as a child. Unusually for Seventies Ireland, Niall and his siblings Roddy and Yvonne were raised by a single father, Michael, a famously good-looking man who worked for Irish Rail. After separating from the family, Niall’s mother, Frances, from a distinguished Irish musical family, emigrated to London, where her three children separately followed suit.
McDevitt was educated at the Jesuit-run Belvedere College and University College Dublin. Like fellow alumni to both schools, James Joyce, McDevitt excelled in a Classical Latin education the richness of which is enshrined in his writing. ‘Bloomsday’ walks, following the path of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, was founded in 1954 by a friend’s father, the artist John Ryan. Discovering the tradition was ‘extra-curricular manna’, said McDevitt. ‘It showed how a literary walk could become a national holiday.’ Unknown to him then, Bloomsday became a model for the mode of research McDevitt would develop for the rest of his life.
In 1996, McDevitt’s poem ‘Off-Duty’, describing a drunk clinging to a lamppost, was selected by Roger McGough to be shown on the 38 and 73 bus routes for a year, part of the ‘Poems on the Buses’ project by Transport For London. The selected poets were invited to read at St. James, Piccadilly. This proved fateful for the 29-year-old McDevitt. At the Grinling Gibbons font where Blake had been baptised in the 1750s, McDevitt sang ‘London’ and felt the human Blake come alive. This ignited a hunger to seek out other Blake sites, found at first through Paddy Kitchen’s Poets’ London (1980). Soon, McDevitt was discovering new sites. By 2006, his weekly William Blake Walk was a well-known fixture, featured in journalist Nigel Richardson’s Great British Walks; on Radio 4’s The Poet of Albion, Robert Elms Show, and The Verb; and a BBC London documentary.
McDevitt came to London as an ‘aesthetic migrant’ in search of bohemia. He found his feet joining his brother, Roddy, in the troupe of countercultural impresario Ken Campbell, performing in Neil Oram’s 24-hour play The Warp. One role McDevitt played was based on poet Harry Fainlight, one of many under-acknowledged poets McDevitt organised nights for. McDevitt campaigned to secure poetic landmarks from redevelopment, once chaining himself with fellow poet Aiden Andrew Dun to the railings of Rimbaud and Verlaine’s home at 8 Royal College Street in Camden. McDevitt worked closely with Campbell on Pidgin Macbeth, a transposition of Shakespeare into the language of the Pacific island of Vanuatu, Bislama. Soon fluent, McDevitt became resident ‘Pidgin poet/translator’ on John Peel’s programme Home Truths, translating Yeats and Rimbaud into Bislama, and . McDevitt put the language to anti-imperial use: a 2003 Guardian report on right-wing historian Niall Ferguson reads: ‘Security men removed a self-styled "shamanistic poet", Niall McDevitt, from the lecture, when he accused Prof Ferguson of trying to "alleviate guilt", while reciting a poem in pidgin on the imperial legacy in the New Hebrides islands in the Pacific.’
During national lockdowns, director Sé Merry Doyle made films of McDevitt’s ‘poetopographical’ walks. An infamous daemon-summoning duel between Yeats and Alistair Crowley is recounted in The Battle of Blythe Road, an incident McDevitt described in a poem in 2010’s b/w. Reluctant Groom explores the church where James and Nora Joyce married in Notting Hill. McDevitt met Doyle through Rosalind Scanlon, Cultural Director at the Irish Culture Centre, where McDevitt became poet-in-residence in the late Nineties.
In August 2021, McDevitt devised five new Blake walks, pairing Blake with Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Swedenborg, with the River Tyburn and Bedlam Hospital, and finally with the modern painter, Francis Bacon. Each walk is recorded in Doyle and Scanlon’s series Blakeland — films that will forever be essential viewing for serious students of Blake or London. In an emotional evening only two weeks before his death, McDevitt attended the full-house premier at the Portobello Road Film Festival for the first film, on McDevitt’s fellow republican, Thomas Paine. Given the recent death of Elizabeth II, the timing was apt. A frail McDevitt, still with his wits about him, declared in an introduction — ‘I’m glad to be living in a democracy again’.
Niall McDevitt is survived by Julie Goldsmith and her son Heathcote Ruthven, his mother Frances McDevitt, siblings Roddy and Yvonne McDevitt, and niece Dixie McDevitt.
McDevitt is the author of four poetry collections, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Portaloo (International Times, 2013), Firing Slits (New River Press, 2016), and London Nation (New River Press, 2022).
For those who wish to, you can order a copy of London Nation here from New River Press.
