The decision by the organisers of the inaugural Heart of Ireland Festival in Mullingar, from 10 to 12 July next, to recognise in a special way the late Josephine Hart, the town’s most eminent female literary figure, has sparked considerable interest in the late Baroness Saatchi.
In particular, the decision by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation to accept an invitation from the festival organisers to come to the home town of the woman in whose memory the Foundation was established, appears certain to create a newfound local interest in the great literary achievements of Josephine Hart in the past three decades, until her untimely death in 2011, from cancer.
She had a lifelong passionate interest in good poetry and literature, and her work since the 1980s did much to revive and make popular again, in Britain and further afield, the work of great poets.
The former British poet laureate Andrew Motion described Josephine Hart as “a writer of terrific flair and force” and said “the work she undertook for writing itself, especially for poetry, showed an equal passion.”
She attributed the youthful interest she had in poetry and in the English language to the nuns who taught her when she was a student in Presentation Convent, Mullingar, and at 12 years of age, she was already a keen poetry reader. Then, as a second level student at St. Louis’ Convent, Carrickmacross, she further advanced her interest in literature and also in drama.
After leaving school, she worked for several years in the ESB offices at Church Avenue, Mullingar, and took leading parts in two County Hall stage productions, ‘The Righteous Are Bold’ and ‘The Plough and the Stars’, with the local drama society. At age 22, she emigrated to London, attending evening classes at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama while working with ThompsonNewspapers in their telesales department. However, she did not pursue a stage career.
Moving to work with the trade publisher’ Haymarket Publications, she moved up the ranks to become the firm’s only woman director, and it was there she first met Maurice Saatchi, whom she married in 1984. It was Lord Saatchi who finally persuaded her to commence the writing career she had till then avoided. Her first novel ‘Damage’, written “in a few weeks” in 1990, sold a million copies and became a major film, and she followed with seven other books including ‘The Truth About Love’ in 2009. She once described how she had never written about her family’s “loss beyond imagining” except elliptically in this book, which Irish writer John Banville described as “a poetic weaving of a long-ago family tragedy into the tragic history and histories of our time.”
Mullingar people still recall the terrible tragedy which beset the Hart family in July, 1959, when Josephine was just 17 and a Leaving Certificate student, the circumstances of which so strongly shaped aspects of her future life. Her younger brother, Owen Hart (16), a student at Mullingar Vocational School and a keen science student, was greviously injured when experimenting with chemicals in the garden of the family home, and died the next morning at Mullingar Hospital. It was Josephine and her mother Sheila who found him after an explosion, and had to seek help.
“What happened back then made me very serious in my daily life,” Josephine Hart said, many years later. “You must honour life and its deepest experiences, and if you don’t, it robs death of its dignity.”
The way her parents had survived such great suffering and behaved with such dignity and courage “showed a duty to happiness and honour the lives that had been lost” had given her great strength, she said.
LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS
Josephine Hart’s love for literature and good poetry led her to organise public poetry readings in the late eighties, which became highly successful, and still continue. She founded Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour, presenting the work of major poets, read by top actors and noted people, like Roger Moore, Bob Geldof, Jeremy Irons, Bono, Alan Bates and others. She also presented the Thames TV series ‘Books By My Bedside’.
She said poetry gave “voice to experience like no other literary art form” and that for her it had been “a source of joy, and sometimes a lifeline.”
“Without poetry I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable,” she said.
In 2005, she warned “increasingly, our inner ear is failing and an entire sound archive from which great poetry was not only created, but appreciated and understood, is fading away.”
A copy of her book, ‘Catching Life by the Throat’ (2008), short essays on eight noted poets, with eight selected poems from each, read on an accompanying CD, was sent to every school for 12 to 18-year-olds in Britain. Through her husband’s special interest in perpetuating Josephine Hart’s work, via the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, and the latter’s new links to Mullingar, the story of this remarkable Westmeath woman has now come almost full circle. In 2015, she is helping a new generation of Irish schoolgoers to appreciate what she called the “mystical weaving of words that connects us to the auditory imagination”.
The series of poetry workshops being facilitated with local schools in Mullingar is due to translate into a special illustrated book of verse, to go on sale during the Heart to Heart Festival in July.
The Festival organisers are also planning a special Josephine Hart Poetry Hour beside Lough Ennell in July. Last week, Maurice Saatchi, husband of the late Josephine Hart, expressed his support for the Heart to Heart Festival project, and indicated that the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour will participate.
