I was attracted to The Green Bell by the part that the poet Michael Dransfield has in it. He was a symbolic figure of the 1960s, representing the Dionysian and Bacchanal as against the ordered classical world of my studies and faith, with his raw and needle-strewn life and poetry and his photograph in a Franciscan cowl.
The attraction and unease he had evoked in me marked unfinished business with such questions as what makes a human life worthwhile, what it is to waste it.
Paula Keogh's memoir offered even more than I had hoped for. It echoes Dante's Purgatorio in describing her journey through the pain of madness and purification, shared with significant people who accompanied her. It is a deeply moving account, unsparing in its self-reflection and fastidious in finding precise words in which to describe what she experienced. What could have been a record of despair ends in hope and in the celebration of presence through memory.
The central figures in Keogh's journey were her school friend Julianne Gilroy and Michael Dransfield. Both are represented in haunting photographs, Gilroy looking towards the camera with eager eyes and strong mouth, ready for whatever life brings. She lived in music, and music in her. Dransfield and Keogh are shown embracing — Keogh in ecstasy and Dransfield in tenderness.
Keogh's first onset of madness and loss of identity came with Gilroy's death in a psychiatric institution after intensive, probably reckless, treatment by shock therapy and drugs. Both young women were then in the early years of their university course. The encompassing Catholic framework of meaning taken for granted during childhood fell away under their analytical questioning, and their belief in rationality was tested by the violent social changes of 1968. They tried to read a discordant world's music by defining each of its notes. The options for living and commitment were endless and the pressure to follow them was correspondingly high.
After Gilroy's death, deprived of the friendship that was her one fixed point, Keogh also spent time in treatment, returning in 1972 when her delusion that she was Gilroy mastered her, and she was dissociated from her world.
There she met Dransfield who was being treated for drug addiction. He had a gift for giving himself totally to any experience. His affectionate and generous companionship and invitation to enter his life in poetry led to a deepening friendship and soon to their engagement. For Keogh