Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Since 1967, the year of Kavanagh’s death, a selection of his poems has been included on the Junior and Leaving Certificate programmes in Ireland. Generations of school pupils have come to love his poetry and he now has admirers and partisans the length and breadth of the country, people who quote his lines unselfconsciously and weave his phrases into their conversation.

  The reactions of an aunt and niece on discovering that I was writing his biography may well typify the attitude of two sorts of reader: those who met and disliked the living man and those who know only the poetry and revere it. ‘I used to see Kavanagh around Baggot Street in the early 1960s when I was a student,’ the aunt said, ‘a big, rough, angry-looking man talking away to himself. I’d move off the pavement when I saw him coming. He looked as if he’d push you into the traffic if you didn’t make way for him.’ ‘Oh don’t start telling me nasty things about him,’ her niece interrupted. ‘He was my favourite poet on the English course when I was at school. I don’t want you spoiling the poetry for me.’

  I hope that this warts-and-all biography does not spoil the poetry for Kavanagh’s many fans. ‘A biography in which the subject isn’t let down wouldn’t be of much interest,’ he once said, and this is no hagiography. Patrick Kavanagh was not Saint Patrick, but a poet living out his imperfect life in an imperfect world.

  If ever you go to Dublin town

  In a hundred years or so

  Sniff for my personality,

  Is it vanity’s vapour now?

  What prompted me to sniff for Kavanagh’s personality and explore the vicissitudes of his life and literary career was my love for his poetry. In ‘the shake-up’, the poetry is what matters. Some of his favourite lines by W. H. Auden summon up what he hoped would be posterity’s verdict on his life and art:

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent,

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique,

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives.

  ANTOINETTE QUINN

  Dublin, 2001

  1

  NO GENEALOGIC ROSARY

  (1850–1910)

  My fathers strung for me

  No genealogic rosary

  Beads of hypnotic power —

  I am, as Napoleon said, my own ancestors . . .

  (‘Dictator’s Genealogy’)1

  The inflated comparison with Napoleon here is typical of Patrick Kavanagh’s self-irony, but this verse from an early poem, unpublished in his lifetime, is his most overt written allusion to the fact that on his father’s side he was a bastard’s son. He was aware of this semi-bastard status from at least his teenage years; in an Irish country parish like Inniskeen in County Monaghan, where he grew up, everyone’s seed and breed was known to all and illegitimacy was a stigma which lingered on for generations. While birth outside wedlock was considered sinful and shameful for both mother and child, increasingly so from the late nineteenth century, such stern sexual morality did not interfere with neighbourly good relations. The taunt of bastard or bastard’s son was an insult kept in reserve, to be resorted to as a weapon during quarrels or as a put-down for those who were becoming too successful. In the case of Patrick Kavanagh’s family it was particularly unlikely that their paternal ancestry would be forgotten. Their growing prosperity ensured that the ‘genealogic rosary’ was often recited by envious neighbours and, in any case, the poet’s father’s origins were more than usually memorable for he had provoked a considerable local scandal while still in the womb.

  Patrick Kavanagh’s paternal grandfather was Patrick Kevany, a farmer’s son from Castletown in County Sligo, who in July 1848 at the age of 22 enrolled at the Royal Albert Agricultural College in Glasnevin, Dublin. He was already an experienced teacher, having been principal of Owenbeg National School in County Sligo for two years, and was attending the Glasnevin college to further his education in literary subjects and in agriculture. According to his college reports he was an academically well-qualified but uncouth youth, awkward in his manner and speaking with a thick accent that augured ill for his ability to communicate as a teacher.2 He probably spoke with a pronounced accent because he was a first-generation speaker of English and his lack of social grace would have been due to the fact that he was a countryman unused to the ways of cultivated city folk. The college staff’s reservations about Patrick Kevany’s lack of gentility would be echoed by middle-class Dubliners two generations later with reference to his poet grandson.

  Rather than return to County Sligo when his course was completed in February 1850, Patrick Kevany applied for the post of teacher in one of the new national schools which the Marquis of Bath’s agent, Tristram Kennedy, was setting up on the Bath estate in the parish of Inniskeen, about six miles from Carrickmacross in County Monaghan. The new schools on the Bath estate were part of a flurry of school-building that followed on the establishment in 1831 of a Board of Commissioners to administer British government grants for education in Ireland. All existing and new schools could apply through their manager to the board for financial assistance towards the cost of buildings, repairs, teachers’ salaries, books and other equipment.3 The spread of a network of national schools, answerable to the Board of Commissioners in Marlborough Street, Dublin, was a vehicle of colonisation as well as modernisation. The schools were sometimes referred to as ‘literary schools’ and, since literacy entailed an ability to read and write English, those who spoke only the Irish language would be relegated as illiterates.

  When, in the wake of the Great Famine of 1847, Tristram Kennedy could turn his attention from material to educational concerns, he set about establishing three schools in the vicinity of Inniskeen — at Drumlusty, Tattyboys and Kednaminsha — each intended to house a hundred pupils. There was already a school in Inniskeen village. This seems a lot of schools, but the pre-Famine population of the area was 3,698 and, since pupils had to walk, a number of small, accessible schools rather than one large establishment was desirable. Kednaminsha was a one-room school intended to serve not only as a literary school but to provide instruction in agriculture to the future farmers and farm labourers of the area, rather than leave them to follow traditional methods which had failed so conspicuously in the recent past. Improved productivity on the Bath estate was high on Tristram Kennedy’s list of priorities — he sponsored three students at the Royal Albert College in 1850–51 — so Patrick Kevany, a qualified agricultural instructor as well as an experienced national schoolteacher, had no difficulty in securing the first appointment to the new school at Kednaminsha in April 1850. By December he was joined by a workmistress who took over the junior classes.

  The new schools contributed to a process of modernisation in the district that had begun the previous year with the opening of the Dundalk to Castleblaney railway line. The siting of a railway station at Inniskeen meant that the village was connected to a transport system that brought passengers, not only to the market and port town of Dundalk, nine miles distant by road, but on to Dublin, fifty miles further south. In 1850 Patrick Kevany could have made the journey from Dublin by train to a station at one side of Drogheda, crossed that town on a horse-drawn vehicle to the station of Newfoundwell at the other side, and continued his journey by rail to Inniskeen. Three years later he could have made the entire journey by train, for a temporary railway bridge over the River Boyne at Drogheda was completed that June; the permanent bridge, the Boyne viaduct, was ready in time for his final departure from Inniskeen in April 1855.4

  Inniskeen was the name of both a parish and a village. It had started out as a monastic foundation on the banks of the Fane river in the sixth century and in the 1850s boasted a dilapidated round tower, a Catholic church, built in 1820, and a new Protestant church, completed in 1854. However, it was the coming of the railway that brought the village into prominence as a commercial centre for the surrounding countryside: shops, public houses, a police barracks and a corn mill would all be sit
uated near the railway station.5 The inland town of Carrickmacross, which was three miles closer to Inniskeen than Dundalk, was not connected to the village by rail until 1886, but farmers travelling on foot or by horse-drawn vehicle went to fairs and markets in both towns. Despite the absence of a rail connection, Patrick Kevany probably gravitated more towards Carrickmacross than Dundalk. His boss, the Marquis of Bath’s agent, lived there and he had at least one friend among the Poor Law guardians in the town’s workhouse.

  Patrick Kevany proved a successful schoolmaster and was rapidly promoted from grade 3 to grade 2 status. In addition, he was officially recognised by the Board of Commissioners as an instructor in agriculture, for which he received a separate salary. He taught agricultural theory for half an hour during the lunch break, and from three to four o’clock in the afternoons his sixteen trainee farmers practised on a few acres attached to the school which he had stocked with a cow and eight pigs. He excelled as a teacher of agriculture and was commended by the commission inspectors. The abrupt termination of his employment in April 1855 was due not to any professional incompetence but to what was construed by the authorities as professional misconduct.

  Patrick Kevany had fallen in love with the beautiful Nancy Callan, a servant in the McEntaggart household where he had lodged on his first arrival in Inniskeen. Nancy’s family, formerly tenant farmers, had lost their land for non-payment of rent after their father’s death in 1846. The family had split up and scattered, but Nancy, her mother, her sister Mary and her brother Michael stayed together and managed to retain a small cottage and one acre of land in the Inniskeen townland of Mucker.6 Sometime in 1852/3 Patrick Kevany moved in with Nancy, living openly with her as her lover. He must have been aware that he was jeopardising his career by this move, for his first workmistress, Catherine McMahon, a spinster, had been instantly dismissed from her post for absenting herself from school to spend a few days with a male lover in February 1851. If Tristram Kennedy was so well briefed on his teachers’ private lives as to be aware of the reason for the schoolmistress’s short absence from her duties, it is unlikely that he would be kept long in ignorance of Kevany’s flagrant sexual immorality. Owing to the continual agrarian unrest, landlords’ agents maintained a network of local informers. Yet Kevany was such an asset that Tristram Kennedy may have turned a blind eye to his liaison and, in any case, the agent was leaving his post in July 1854. Before the year was out Nancy was pregnant and by the following April, when this became common knowledge, the matter was brought to the attention of the new agent, William Steuart Trench.

  He reacted by suspending Kevany from his teaching post and on 4 April 1855 wrote to inform the Commissioners for Education that the teacher was living with ‘a widow’ who was with child by him and not married to him. In acknowledgment of Kevany’s satisfactoriness in other respects, Trench allowed him to plead his own cause and the agent’s damning report was accompanied by a letter from the errant schoolmaster begging forgiveness and promising amendment. Pending a response from Dublin, Trench closed the school temporarily from 16 April. Twelve days later the commissioners issued their harsh verdict. They pointed out that Trench had the power to remove Kevany from the school and advised him to do so immediately. For their part, they were dismissing him from their service from 1 May and he would not henceforth be recognised by them as a national schoolteacher. By 29 April Kevany’s fate was sealed and he departed from Inniskeen in disgrace, his career in ruins.

  Why he did not marry Nancy Callan instead of risking his career is incomprehensible. Her sister Mary married a schoolteacher, John Caffrey (McCaffrey), who taught in the Inniskeen village school, so there was a family precedent for such a match. In addition to the threat of summary sacking by the commissioners, Kevany would also have been under pressure from the local Catholic clergy to regularise his union. There was often considerable tension between the landlord’s agent and the parish priest over control of the estate schools, because the spiritual and ideological formation of so many Catholic children was at stake. Having a Catholic teacher in charge of the school enabled the parish priest to maintain a form of indirect educational control, but he needed an exemplary Catholic in the post, not a public sinner. Local tradition has it that the reason the couple did not marry was that Nancy opposed the match and, since Kevany must have known that it was in his best interest to make an honest woman of her, this explanation is plausible.

  There was certainly no question of Nancy accompanying Patrick Kevany at the time of his sudden departure from Inniskeen. Apart from the fact that she was twenty-two weeks pregnant and had never left home before, she already had a 3-year-old son by a previous partner to care for. Pat McHugh was Nancy’s child by a man named the Tramp McHugh who had married her or had a brief union with her in 1851 and died before the birth of their child in February 1852.7 Though Trench’s letter to the commissioners refers to Nancy as a widow, it is not certain that she ever officially married McHugh, and she continued to be called Callan while her child was called McHugh.

  Whatever Nancy’s views on marriage to Patrick Kevany, once he had left the village, her hold over him would undoubtedly have weakened. Would a man as intent on retrieving his teaching career as Patrick Kevany have encumbered himself with a pregnant partner and another man’s child? He was still pleading his cause with the commissioners on 6 July when he requested that they would recognise him as a teacher should he at any future time be offered employment in a national school and enclosed testimonials from the sympathetic Inniskeen curate, Rev. P. O’Carroll, and from Mr Donaghy, a Poor Law guardian in Carrickmacross. On 20 September he requested that the commissioners send him his Certificate of Classification which rated him as a class 2 teacher, a classification that would ordinarily have assured him of another job. On 13 October the commissioners restated their position: he would never again be recognised by them as a national teacher. Kevaney returned to his native Sligo and, probably through the good offices of Thomas Howlin, the land agent who had sponsored him in Glasnevin, he was appointed a teacher in the workhouse school in Tullamore, County Offaly, the following January.8 After eight months in the wilderness he had rejoined the teaching profession; at this point he would have been anxious to conceal his scandalous past and would not have risked producing a mistress and two children.

  He was almost a year in Tullamore before the commissioners discovered that the highly commended new teacher in the town’s workhouse school was none other than the disgraced teacher from Inniskeen. On this occasion, following on strong representations from the Workhouse Board, they relented and allowed him to continue in his post. It was now utterly out of the question that he would resume his affair with Nancy. He had embarked on a new phase of his life, his career was flourishing and his talents were so appreciated that he was made Master of the Workhouse in 1861.

  Kevany was aware that Nancy Callan had given birth to their son James (a twin was stillborn) in the August following his departure from Inniskeen. He continued to acknowledge paternity, making some contribution towards James’s support during his childhood, maintaining contact with him by letter and occasionally meeting with him in Dublin in later years.9

  As far as nomenclature is concerned, the link between father and son was effectively concealed at James’s baptism for he was recorded in the parish register as the son of Patrick Cavanagh rather than Patrick Kevany. Yet, because of the instability in the official recording of names at a time when Gaelic surnames and proper names were still being anglicised, one must be wary of leaping to the conclusion that the Inniskeen priests deliberately misrecorded Kevany’s surname to protect the reputation of a Catholic teacher. In the Board of Education records for the 1850s, for instance, the school is referred to as Kidnaminsha and Kednaminsha, the parish as Donomine and Donaghmoyne and Kevany is spelt Kaveney (twice), Kevaney and Kevany. Nancy herself is recorded as Callen in the parish register.

  In any case, whether through deliberate clerical error or the instability of proper names at t
he time, Nancy Callan’s second son’s official name became James Cavanagh. As an adult, James would often opt to spell his name with an initial K rather than a C, naming himself Kavanagh on the document which transferred his uncle’s rights in the Callan cottage to him, on his marriage certificate, and on census forms. Such a spelling was possibly a gesture of filial continuity, like christening his first son Patrick. On one significant occasion he styled himself James Kevany: this was when he was witnessing his mother’s death certificate in 1896. Both parents were now dead and he was paying a final tribute to their union and reclaiming his own birthright. Officially he was James Cavanagh and when he bought land in 1910 he used this version of his surname, perhaps fearful that the transaction would not be legal otherwise. Similarly, at his first son’s baptism, Cavanagh was the version used, perhaps by James’s own choice because he was anxious to establish legal paternity, possibly at the whim of the officiating priest. So the future poet was christened Patrick Joseph Cavanagh, a spelling of his surname he never in fact used.

  Whatever anxieties or resentments James Kavanagh may have harboured over the name change which further severed his already tenuous link with his paternity — and the fact that he used the three variants of his surname at different times does indicate that he was exercised by the problem of nomenclature — he did not visit them on the next generation. He reared his children as Kavanaghs; they accepted it and got on with their lives. When Patrick Kavanagh briefly adopted a pen-name in his teenage years, he opted for Laurence Callan, using his paternal grandmother’s surname rather than his grandfather’s.10

  Later, he would be surrounded by writers who had changed their names: Seán O’Faoláin, formerly John Whelan; Roibéard Ó Faracháin, formerly Robert Farren; John Weldon, who had dropped this name in favour of his pen-name, Brinsley MacNamara; and Michael O’Donovan, who made such extensive use of the pen-name Frank O’Connor that he was widely known by this name; Brian O’Nolan, who was variously Brian Ó Nualláin, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Myles na Gopaleen. Had Patrick Kavanagh so wished, he could have changed his surname to Kevany or adopted this as a pen-name without causing any comment.