[attach id=476180 size="medium"][/attach]

Paul P. Borg:
Maqful fil-ħabs ta’ ġbini: il-poeta tat-tbatija, Carmel Attard
Horizons, 2015. 768pp.

Paul P. Borg, a prolific author whose heart is always in what he writes, has produced this weighty tome that combines a complex analytical biography of the author Carmel Attard (1943-1994) with a large collection of Attard’s verse and prose, largely still unpublished.

For many years, Borg was one of a small number of Attard’s closest friends, comforting and counselling him during the many periods of suffering from mental illness Attard experienced between adolescence and his death in Mount Carmel Hospital in 1994.

Borg has often been drawn to the not-quite-normal. In Attard, he found a talented author plagued by problems of sexual identity and a whole variety of mental illnesses. Suicidally-inclined, he was an unhappy man who poured out his soul into the verse and prose he seemed to be writing all the time.

Though Attard scored a critical success with his early collections of verse, Lampara (1970) and Taħt Qillet ix-Xemx (1972), he is no longer widely-known. Borg’s volume is meant to make Attard, so often belittled or even scorned by society, known and respected by today’s readers – both as author and as human being.

The volume reproduces a good many of Attard’s drawings, accompanied or not by manuscript, prose or verse. Some of them are very striking and, sometimes, they strangely convey the author’s feelings when he drew them. He tried to explore his ability in more than one field of artistic expression. Hearing Beethoven and Mozart was a great joy to him, but he also tested himself as a singer. He was greatly drawn to the voice of the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli who was a model for his own singing.

Borg’s book opens with the picture of a magical evening in which Borg, his wife and young son and also Attard, one of Borg’s closest friends, walked out with a great moon looking down on them. When Borg’s son asked suddenly if the moon was going to accompany them on their walk, Attard suddenly launched into a rendition of one of the well-known Ave Marias.

The combination of the great moon, the little boy’s sweetly naive question, and Attard’s being inspired to sing gives the reader a clue as to why Borg was urged to write this book.

Should be on the shelves of all those scholars and serious readers specialising in 20th-century Maltese literature

As a boy, and later as an adolescent, Attard was closely connected with the religious society Mużew, where he also taught doctrine for some years and whose influence he continued to feel through his whole life.

This remained true even after he started to feel that this society, a loyal instrument of the Church in Malta, had caused him harm by failing to make him understand his sexuality and by making him feel guilty about his sinfulness.

There was a time when Attard saw God as a slave-driver, but he worshipped the Crucified Christ even in his last years. He was also a devotee of the Virgin and, when in one of his stays at Mount Carmel, another patient made disrespectful use of his picture of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, Attard was greatly enraged. It was one of his worst moments in hospital. Imprisonment, physical or psychological, is one of the great themes of Borg’s book.

The title itself of the book, which roughly translates to ‘Locked up within the prison of my brow’, says much about this.

But, except for his first stay at Mount Carmel in 1970 which he felt had been very beneficial, Attard felt highly disappointed and sometimes enraged by the hospital treatment.

This was particularly true about the severe treatment inflicted on bad cases in the notorious Ward 10. His protests were not limited to the verses and short stories he wrote all the time, but also included formal communications, such as a memorandum to the Health Minister of the day in which he detailed his critical comments of the mental hospital and made suggestions. It appears that he may have influenced the setting up of an Occupational Therapy Unit at Mount Carmel.

His memo to the minister asks whether people were immured in the hospital because of their homosexuality.

In this book, Borg never goes deeply into the nature of Attard’s sexuality. He got to know of Attard’s reputation for being homosexual from his own wife, who clearly worried that her husband’s friendship with Attard might be leading other people to doubt her husband’s sexuality, though she herself certainly had no such doubts.

We learn nothing of any possible homosexual relationships with other people, but Borg makes it clear that Attard had many other friends and acquaintances about whom he knew little or nothing.

There is only one poem that might possibly refer to a homosexual experience as compared to a number of poems addressed to, or inspired by, women that Attard dated in early manhood. These poems poignantly reflect his great uncertainty regarding hetero-relationships. However, the reader might be as surprised as I was to read verses Attard wrote in hospital a few months before his death, bearing the title F’dan l-isptar misħut minn Alla, in which he says, ejja tfajla/ta’ mħabba, /bewsa tiegħek/tiswa tnejn/biex immut/ ħieni f’’dirgħajk.

The poems he wrote in 1994, the year of his death, often show his anguish and despair. But, even as early as 1988, he was writing the bleakest of possible verses, like Farrkuni, frankuni/frankuni farrkuni/bellħuni, kissruni.

For much of his life, Attard’s writings show him longing to find release through suicide, but it appears that his relatively early death at the age of 51 was not self-inflicted, but caused by heart failure.

Just a brief mention of a 1978 dialogue Attard wrote, Il-kritiku u Jien. In this astonishing piece, Attard speaks to a critic who, Borg assures us, is meant to be distinguished poet and academic Oliver Friggieri. In this work, Attard speaks abusively to Friggieri, one of his accusations being that the latter put all the authors he wrote about inside his critical straitjacket. Readers should remember that Friggieri and Fr Peter Serracino Inglott had helped make the public aware of the high value of Attard’s Taħt qillet ix-Xemx only six years previously.

It is unfortunate that the length and frequent chronological vagueness of Borg’s book may put off a number of readers.

This work not only provides a detailed portrait by a man who knew the subject well for many years, but provides the literary historian and the reader with much of Attard’s work and so should be on the shelves of all those scholars and serious readers specialising in 20th century Maltese literature.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.