Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  What did fascinate him was the taboo topic of his own semi-illegitimacy. This he covertly alluded to on several occasions in his writings, as well as referring to it more overtly in the lines from ‘Dictator’s Genealogy’ quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In The Green Fool, the autobiography he published in 1938, he hinted at the family’s shameful secret, claiming that his father had written down the grandfather’s story and placed the manuscript in a jug from which it had subsequently disappeared. It might have been tidied away from motives of prudery rather than cleanliness, he says, implying the sexually scandalous nature of the narrative. Elsewhere in the autobiography, the taunt of ‘bastard’ is hurled at him by neighbours envious of his father’s rise to the rank of farmer.

  The tale of Patrick Kevany’s liaison with Nancy Callan is rewritten in one of the sub-plots of the long unpublished poem Lough Derg (June 1942), in which a rural pedant becomes infatuated with a beautiful young woman but shrinks from her when she confesses to the infanticide of her bastard baby. This romantic sub-plot is quite different from the Kevany-Callan story because there is no tradition that Nancy was ever driven to infanticide, yet there is an allusion to the Kavanagh family history in the near-liaison of village pedant and ‘fallen woman’. His grandfather’s story was certainly on the poet’s mind the summer he wrote Lough Derg, for he asked his brother, who was on a cycling holiday, whether he had made enquiries about their Tullamore relations. He had meant to do so himself a couple of years earlier when he was hitching lifts around Ireland.11

  The Kevany connection is once again alluded to in his novel Tarry Flynn (1948), when a long-vanished reprobate uncle who visits the Flynn family hails from Tullamore. For fictional purposes this character is transformed into a penniless ringmaster, instead of a prosperous workhouse master. The Dillon ménage in the novel, happy, rose-clad home of generations of licentious women, may well be the poet’s retrospective blessing on Nancy Callan’s household, where one and possibly two love children were reared.

  While he tended to be reticent about his siblings, considering their doings to be of no conversational interest, in later life the poet made no secret of the existence of the Kevany connection. He was pleased to discover that Tony Molloy, a journalist who wrote under the pen-name ‘Captain Mac’, was a relative of sorts through Patrick Kevany’s marriage to Mary Molloy in Tullamore, and the two men became friends in the 1940s.

  Bastardy impoverished the poet’s father. Patrick Kevany made some contributions towards his maintenance, but James did not otherwise benefit from his father’s educational advantages or middle-class social status. He grew up in a three-room cabin in a household whose senior male figure, his Uncle Michael, carried on the lowly occupations of stone-breaker and farm labourer. Nancy took the precaution of sending him to the national school in Inniskeen, where her brother-in-law, John Caffrey, was schoolmaster, rather than to his father’s old school at Kednaminsha; apart from this she does not appear to have shown much concern for his education. Though he was highly intelligent, good with figures, enjoyed reading and was musically gifted, there was no suggestion that the bastard son should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a school monitor or trainee schoolmaster. His half-brother, Pat McHugh, would have a more distinguished career. He had gone to live with an uncle in Sunderland in the north-east of England in 1863 for two years and took up permanent residence there in 1875, eventually becoming a Labour Party activist and serving eight successive terms on the Sunderland Board of Guardians.12

  James Kavanagh, the stay-at-home son, was apprenticed to a local cobbler, Larry Callan of Drumcatton, from the age of 14 years to 18 plus. It was a grim adolescence: family folklore has it that Larry Callan’s apprentices often went hungry, one of his stock excuses being ‘There was no bread in Dreenan’s today.’13 At the conclusion of his apprenticeship, James set up shop in the kitchen of the Callan family home in Mucker, where he continued to live with his mother and his Uncle Michael, becoming a byword in the village for his devotion to his mother. Indeed, he confided to his poet son that he would like to have travelled, had not the responsibility of caring for his mother kept him at home. Patrick remembered this when he in turn faced a similar choice some years after his father’s death.

  Nancy Callan died at home in Mucker in July 1896, aged 64, just two months after Patrick Kevany’s death in Tullamore, aged 70. Not until April 1873, eighteen years after his parting from Nancy, did Kevany marry and start another family. He and his wife, Mary Molloy, opened a drapery shop on Harbour Street in Tullamore, rearing their family above the shop while he still continued to administer the workhouse.

  Since local folklore dwells on Nancy’s beauty rather than her brains, the Callan line is not generally regarded as having contributed anything to the future poet’s intellectual inheritance. Nancy’s gender, her lack of academic education and her illiteracy in English would have masked her intelligence, yet it is remarkable that she was the mother of a distinguished citizen of Sunderland as well as the grandmother of an Irish poet.

  After the death of his adored mother, James Kavanagh set about acquiring a wife. He had a business to attend to and his bachelor uncle Michael was an elderly man of 71 who needed looking after. On 28 August 1896 Michael signed over his rights in the family home to James under the customary condition that his nephew feed, clothe and house him for the remainder of his days.14 The formal signing over of the house and acre of land was a first step towards marriage. As a tradesman with a steady income and a house of his own, James was in a position to seek a wife and it took him less than six months to find one. On 12 January 1897 he married Bridget Quinn from Tullyrane in the neighbouring parish of Killaney.

  James had met Bridget through her brother Jimmy, one of his apprentices. It is likely that this was a marriage of convenience rather than a love match. At the time of his wedding James cut a rather unprepossessing figure: he was a slight, undersized, balding man of 41 with a large moustache and bushy, overgrown side-whiskers, disparaged by Bridget’s father, himself a tall, well-built man, as ‘wee Kavanagh’. His bastard origins would have deterred many local families from allowing him to marry one of their daughters, yet Bridget’s brother would have observed that he was a good marriage prospect. He was an industrious and well-established tradesman whose kindly treatment of his mother augured well for his attitude to his future wife. A quiet, unmeddling fellow, not addicted to alcohol or gambling, he had a reputation for being well informed and possessed of sound good sense. His principal recreations were reading the local newspapers, or magazines such as Tit Bits and Answers and playing the melodeon, and his musical skills ensured that he was much in demand at dances and weddings.

  Bridget Quinn was a friendly, energetic woman of 25, a labourer’s daughter who worked as a barmaid in Byrne’s pub in Corcreaghy, near her home. She was neat-featured, at least as tall as her husband, and wore her long dark hair in a knot or comb on top of her head, later in a bun. Though she was a lively, attractive woman, her profession would probably have told against her on the marriage market, since barmaids were not considered quite respectable, and her lack of dowry also ruled out the possibility of a match with a farmer. She was content to settle down with James Kavanagh in a house where there was no mother-in-law in residence. True, she had to take care of James’s elderly uncle, Michael Callan, who, according to the terms of the legal settlement, lived with the family until his death in 1905, but the main cause of unhappiness in the early years of most rural marriages was the friction between the young wife and the mother-in-law she was ousting.

  Bridget was fortunate in her choice of husband, a remarkably hardworking man. After marriage James maintained the routine he had established as the son of the Callan household. He was first up every morning, rising at six, and it was he who lit the fire, fed the hens and prepared the breakfast, anticipating the actions of another devoted son, Patrick Maguire, the anti-hero of Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem The Great Hunger. By eight o’clock James was at
his cobbler’s bench where he worked a twelve to thirteen-hour day. At four o’clock on winter evenings he lit the oil-lamp that hung suspended from the ceiling and went on working. By the time he had finished for the day, there was only an hour’s leisure before it was time for the rosary at ten. Neighbours and customers who had stayed on to talk left promptly at ten: the rosary was a useful social deterrent. Once it was over it was time for bed.

  The Callan home into which Bridget had married was a sparsely furnished three-room cabin consisting of a kitchen with two rooms opening off it. The kitchen was only thirteen feet square and almost half of this space was taken up by the cobbler’s workshop with its bench and two seats at right angles to one another, the second seat generally being occupied by a visiting or journeyman cobbler. Part of the cobbler’s equipment were dozens of maple lasts to fit the various shoe sizes for males, females and children, and in front of his bench he kept a shallow iron pot for soaking the leather. For the rest, the kitchen contained a table and stools, a dresser to hold the dishes and crockery and a settle bed where a journeyman cobbler could spend the night. Cooking was done in pots suspended on crooks over a large open coal fire in the hearth.15 The family enjoyed little privacy by day, being frequently under the surveillance of James’s assistants or customers. Their house was a social centre where neighbours who called by to have shoes made or repaired stayed to chat and others dropped in to seek the cobbler’s advice on medical and legal matters, in both of which he was thought to have considerable expertise.

  The language of the household was English; James was bilingual but Bridget had no Irish.16 Out of deference to her husband’s superior literary and clerical ability, Bridget sometimes claimed to be illiterate, though she could read and write and was perfectly well able to sign cheques. On Sundays she listened as James read aloud the local weekly journal, the Dundalk Democrat, from the first to the last page. It was a Saturday paper but it was Sunday before there was leisure for its perusal. During the First World War James also read out newspaper reports of speeches in the British House of Commons, including the bracketed phrases, ‘Order, order’ and ‘cheers’.17

  As a barmaid, Bridget had been used to getting on with her work in an atmosphere of chat and banter, so she was not fazed by the lack of privacy in her new home and may even have welcomed it, especially at first. The only daughter of a widower, she had experience of running a house and could manage the plain cooking required of her: porridge, tea, baked soda bread, boiled potatoes or champ, boiled eggs, boiled bacon, and the occasional Sunday pot roast were the staple diet of local families. According to the usual practice among neighbouring small farmers’ wives, she supplemented the family income by keeping a few dozen hens, a couple of pigs and, later, a cow. Joined to the house on the outside were a hen-house and a pigsty, and opposite it, across the yard, or street as it was called, were two cowsheds separated by a dunghill. The Kavanaghs acquired a cow before they had the land to feed her, and Bridget resorted to grazing her on ‘the long acre’, the roadside grass. She was caught doing so by the police sergeant and was summonsed and fined for it. This embarrassing incident did not deter the thrifty Mrs Kavanagh from availing of free roadside grazing whenever possible. In the 1920s her children were still being urged to drive the cattle home very slowly and to encourage them to eat as much as possible along the way.18

  Bridget’s affable manner concealed a shrewd, calculating intelligence and she was to prove a capable business partner for the industrious cobbler. While James stuck to his last and earned good money by working all day every day, she plotted and planned for the future, counting the shillings and seeing to it that they were not frittered away on personal or household adornment. James used to claim that he had never saved any money before he met her and it is demonstrably true that the Kavanagh home prospered as the Callan ménage had not. Bridget’s ambition was to save enough money to buy a farm. With such a different pedigree from James’s, she did not see education as a mode of advancement. Ironically, while she was to achieve her ambition of becoming a farmer’s wife, her children’s upward social mobility was to be based on their educational and professional achievements. Two were to be primary schoolteachers, one a university lecturer, three would qualify as nurses, and her elder son, though she did her best to fashion him into a successful farmer, would turn his back on his parents’ hard-earned acres to become a poet and freelance journalist. Despite Patrick Kevany’s desertion of their grandmother and their father’s consequent disadvantaged start in life, one generation on, the Kavanaghs would emulate their paternal grandfather, rising in the world by a combination of intelligence and determination.

  For the first twenty-odd years of the marriage James Kavanagh was doing a brisk trade in the manufacture and repair of boots. A pair of new boots cost from ten shillings and sixpence to twelve shillings for a man and from eight shillings and sixpence for a woman. He charged about three shillings to sole and heel a man’s boots and two shillings for a woman’s; to repair the heels cost from threepence to sevenpence. Some customers ran up accounts and paid after the harvest, usually around November. These lump sums were generally saved and the household lived day to day on the proceeds from the cash-paying customers and on the sale of eggs and occasionally of livestock, what was known as ‘the dropping shilling’. This ready cash also covered the purchase of leather and rivets for shoe-making. James’s Cobbler’s Account Book testifies to his clerical skills and methodical nature.19 By August 1898, a year and a half into their marriage, the Kavanaghs were doing so well that he could afford to invest £9 in a new Singer sewing-machine for his business, which he ordered direct from the Singer Manufacturing Company. In years to come his poet son would use this sewing-machine as a writing desk.

  In October 1898 the couple had their first child, Annie. Nine others were to follow, spaced out over eighteen years: Mary (1900), Sissie (christened Bridget, 1903), Patrick Joseph (1904), Lucy (1907), Tessie (Teresa Agatha, 1908), Josie (Magret Josephine, 1910), James Colmcille, who died in babyhood (1911), Celia (Cecilia Clare, 1913) and Peter (1916).

  Housing this growing family was a pressing concern for the cobbler. Long after they could afford to extend the house, the Kavanaghs hesitated about doing so. This was partly because they were saving their money to buy a farm, but a more compelling reason was that there was considerable ambiguity over their title to the property. The Callan family appears to have had only squatters’ rights.

  Not until 1909 did James feel sufficiently confident about his right to the Callan house to risk enlarging it.20 Construction took place during the summer and the family camped out in the garden and outhouses while building was in progress, with James conducting business as usual in the open air and Bridget cooking over an improvised outdoor fire. The poet remembered it as an exciting time: his father plying the masons with porter to keep them in humour, and neighbourhood children scrambling about on the scaffolding, using an unfinished wall as a concert platform or playing see-saw on unused planks. The house was extended in the most economical manner for a family who had only one precious acre of land — by adding another storey. This was built on top of the kitchen and one of the bedrooms. The new two-storey house had a slate roof, a symbol of prosperity in an area where most cottages were still thatched. The Kavanaghs were literally going up in the world. Their enlarged house had increased bedroom accommodation but the kitchen was still only thirteen feet square and the shoe-making business continued to be carried on there.

  By the time the future poet was 6 years old the family had graduated to the small-farming class. In the local social hierarchy, farmers, even those who owned only five acres, were considered superior to craftsmen. On 8 December 1910 James purchased at auction nine acres, one rood and twenty perches statute measure, in the nearby townland of Drumnagrella, at a cost of £180 plus professional fees. It was land which William Woods, a strong farmer and one of the cobbler’s customers, had mortgaged to a Carrickmacross auctioneer: six acres of arable land and thre
e of bog. Inniskeen folk speculated that James had inherited a fortune from his deceased uncle, Michael Callan; James did not contradict them but privately said that Michael had left only thirty-five shillings. A three-way legal document was drawn up which inter alia ensured James Kavanagh right of way ten feet wide through the lands of William Woods to the county road, broad enough to allow for vehicular as well as pedestrian traffic. The only vehicle the Kavanaghs possessed then or for many years to come was a wooden wheelbarrow, but James was not taking any chances.21

  In Tarry Flynn Patrick Kavanagh would construct a comic sub-plot around the neighbourly envy and spite aroused by a family’s acquisition of land. While Willie Woods does not appear to have begrudged James Kavanagh his purchase, for he continued on as a customer and in coming years offered casual seasonal employment to the cobbler’s children, others were not so tolerant of the Kavanaghs’ sudden social rise, and the taunt of ‘bastard’ hovered in the Mucker air.

  2

  CHILDHOOD

  (1904–1918)

  Once, when we were staying at John Farrelly’s, PK pointed out a particular grass. ‘I love that grass. I’ve known it since I was a child. I’ve often wondered if I’d be different if I had been brought up to love better things.’

  (John McGahern in PS . . . of course)

  Patrick Kavanagh has left us two strongly contrasting versions and many brief glimpses of his childhood. His account in the early fictionalised autobiography, The Green Fool (1938), though not quite idyllic, is certainly idealised; his late gruff, summary dismissal in Self-Portrait (1964) — ‘My childhood experience was the usual barbaric life of the Irish country poor’ — renders it bleaker than it really was. He tended to wax lyrical about childhood in his early published writings; later, as he became accustomed to mixing in middle-class and prosperous circles, he was more conscious that his was a disadvantaged upbringing. The visit to the Wicklow home of the wealthy American family, the Farrellys, referred to in the epigraph, occurred in 1956 when he was 41.