Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  During his schooldays Kavanagh seems to have altogether escaped the hellfire and damnation brand of religion instilled in urban predecessors such as James Joyce, or near-contemporaries like Austin Clarke. Religion, as taught in school, was for the most part catechism-based, a learned-off series of questions and answers seamlessly joined to the lists of rivers, mountains and capital cities in an unthreatening stream of sound. The impact of the sermons he listened to on Sundays was diluted by the after-Mass reactions of fellow parishioners, who rated them as performance-art and whose response to flights of rhetoric was leavened with several grains of peasant salt.

  The liturgical aspect of Catholicism appealed to the young Patrick’s burgeoning aesthetic sense: the altar dressed with flowers and candles, the gorgeous vestments, the gleam of wine being poured into the gold chalice at Mass, the pages of ‘the Golden Book’ reverentially turned. Such things would make their way into his early serious poems as he sought for solemn and beautiful images. Publicly, he adopted a more jocose stance, entertaining other workers at harvest or threshing-time by acting the role of a priest saying Mass.31

  Devotion to the Virgin Mary was encouraged as part of the ‘devotional revolution’ that had been sweeping Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century.32 In school the children sang the hymn ‘Hail, Queen of Heaven’ at the end of the day’s lessons, and it became a favourite with Patrick. The portrayal of Mary in pictures and statuary as a pretty young woman in long blue and white robes also appealed to the boy’s awakening sexuality, conflating in his consciousness with images of nubile village girls to become ‘the Virgin Mary with the schoolgirl air’. In his later writings Marian devotion is described as part and parcel of country Catholicism; there is no evidence that it had any lasting influence on himself.

  When he looked back on his schooldays in The Green Fool, he singled out a few instances that stood out from the drab and painful routine. One was a chastening experience of naive honesty that touched the future crusader against phoniness. Miss Cassidy had asked the pupils in his class individually what they ate for dinner and each had lied and said ‘Potatoes, meat and vegetables’, until it came to the turn of one girl new to the district who replied truthfully ‘Praties and gravy’. It was a moment of simple pathos that visibly affected everyone present, and even the inquisitive teacher was temporarily chastened.

  In much of what he wrote about his classroom experience afterwards, Kavanagh viewed it through literary lenses. Deficient though it may have been in stimulating his creativity directly, it familiarised him with a body of literature, especially poetry. Outwardly he might echo his companions who chafed at all the rote-learning; privately he enjoyed reading and speaking poetry and listening to it spoken or sung.

  What he recounted as the defining epiphany of his schooldays occurred sometime in his final year when, during a brief interlude of quiet in the classroom buzz, he overheard a girl in the next room reading the opening stanza of James Clarence Mangan’s ‘A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’:

  I walked entranced

  Through a land of Morn;

  The sun, with wondrous excess of light,

  Shone down and glanced

  Over fields of corn

  And lustrous gardens aleft and right . . .

  The overheard words, spoken in the first person, and seeming unmediated by any book, cast a spell, miraculously shedding a visionary light on what was for the country boy a familiar spectacle of cornfields bathed in morning sunlight.33 The poem touched a chord, because he already was and would continue to be peculiarly susceptible to the play of light on well-known scenes and objects. His favourite hymn, ‘Hail Queen of Heaven’, depicted the Mother of God as a shining presence in the sky, ‘the ocean star’, and one of his favourites among his father’s songs was ‘A starry night for a ramble’. He had been thrilled by the sight of the white coating of frost on one side of a dark potato pit, ‘the light between the ricks of hay and straw’, the glint of leftover fruit on an apple tree in December, but this was a private delight. Mangan’s poem momentarily awakened the poet as yet dormant in the idle schoolboy. A Mucker child, who could not speak to anyone of his strange liking for lilacs in a dark grate or the Easter sunlight dancing on watery fields, suddenly found his private feelings shared and articulated.

  Miss Cassidy was a very sick woman in Patrick’s final years in school; she died in the August of his last year. She may have had some misgivings about her relegation and neglect of Patrick, for on her last day in school when she was already dying of stomach cancer, she took his hands in hers and said ‘Oh Patrick, if you could get to high school you’d leave them all far behind.’34 So low was his esteem for schoolteachers that he later credited her words to ‘the intuitive wisdom of a woman’ rather than the perspicacity of an experienced headmistress.

  For most of Kavanagh’s final year in Kednaminsha, the ailing Miss Cassidy was replaced by a series of young women teachers. The appointment of the first of these in autumn 1917 threw the parishioners into such a frenzy of disapproval that a boycott of the school was organised and all pupils were withdrawn from 19 November to 4 December.35 To some extent the parents were expressing their dismay that a veteran teacher of Miss Cassidy’s calibre could be replaced by a mere slip of a girl, and the boycott was accompanied by a sexual smear campaign alleging that the young teacher was carrying on with the older boys.36 Such rumours persisted in the case of all three temporary appointments. While the young women teachers were unlikely to have been lusting after their gauche, scruffy charges, there is no doubt that Patrick, among others, developed an adolescent crush on one of these substitute teachers, either Miss Kathleen Mee, who was in Kednaminsha in April and May 1918, or Miss Janie Fennell, who was there in June — probably the latter. She was the first in a long line of pretty, cultivated young women with whom he would become infatuated. He attributes his withdrawal from school to the fact that he got into a prolonged bout of fisticuffs with another boy over this teacher whom both of them fancied, a fight the teacher was powerless to stop. The reason for the quarrel was never articulated, for the rival lovers were too shy or too emotionally repressed to voice their feelings. They were flailing around helplessly, seeking some relief from a sexual frustration they could not comprehend.

  After this episode, Bridget and James decided that it was time to call a halt to their son’s education. He was out of control and had clearly outgrown school. So, on 18 June 1918, four months before his fourteenth birthday, Patrick Kavanagh’s only formal academic education came to an end.

  3

  SERVING HIS TIME

  (1918–1927)

  Left school at thirteen. ‘Squandered the next ten years.’

  (Biographical note in Poems of Twenty Years, an Anthology, 1918–38)

  When in 1938 Kavanagh told one of his first anthologists, Maurice Wollman, that he had squandered the years between the conclusion of his formal education in 1918 and the first publication of his poems in 1929, his dismissal of this decade was conditioned by his attitude to writing at the time. He was then of the opinion that most of his personal and agricultural experience was unamenable to or unworthy of literary and, most especially, of poetic representation. In fact, far from being a misspent decade, these were the years when he was gathering much of the experience of farming and of life as a countryman on which he would draw in his future poetry, fiction and journalism. More importantly, it was in this period that he first acquired a habit of reading and poetic composition that rapidly developed into a passion, even an addiction. The decade from 1918 was crucial for Patrick Kavanagh, because it was during this seemingly unproductive phase that he changed from being an idle, indifferent, work-shy schoolboy and one with ostensibly less than average academic abilities, to become a dedicated, competent and published poet.

  It was expected that, as the elder son, he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a shoe-maker and part-time farmer, so his parents envisaged a dual and seasonal apprentices
hip for him throughout his teens. In the winter months or when the weather was too wet for farming, he would spend his time ‘on the sate’, learning the rudiments of shoe-making. The rest of the time he would be a trainee farmhand, available for hire or to have his labour bartered in exchange for some like work on the family smallholding or for the loan of some necessary farm equipment. It was a sound, commonsensical plan of action, ensuring that the ageing James would have an assistant and eventually someone to take over the business and, since he himself had little agricultural expertise, providing Patrick with a full, rounded experience of mixed farming. It also tackled some of the present shortcomings in the Kavanaghs’ farming enterprise, in particular the necessity of drawing on neighbours’ skills and equipment; they would now be in a better position to make payment in kind for any agricultural favours they solicited. The plan had the added advantage of keeping Patrick fully occupied and burning up his energies. Both parents believed in the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands, and with the deepening political unrest in their neighbourhood in the wake of the 1916 Rising, they were worried that their lazy, aimless son would drift into the clutches of republican activists and fall foul of the law.

  By and large, Patrick did passively follow the course his parents had plotted for him, though, as the Irish saying went about a son whose ambitious parents had pushed him into the priesthood, ‘it was his mother and father had the vocation’. While he was quite content to sit in the warm, dry shop in bad weather, chatting with his father or swapping yarns with customers, he never advanced to shoe-making proper, and after years of apprenticeship could still be entrusted only with repairs. One of the reasons his father found him unteachable was that he was a know-all; once his quick brain had grasped the theory or principle, he became impatient with the demonstration. He would seize the boot back in the middle of a lesson and then proceed to make a botch of it.1 The normally irascible James tried to remain patient and to persevere with his instruction, but to no avail. Physically as well as temperamentally, Patrick was unsuited to shoemaking. He took after his mother’s side of the family; the Quinn men were tall, strong and athletic. By contrast with his neat, spare, wiry father, he was five feet ten and a half inches in height, with a large frame, broad shoulders, enormous hands and size eleven feet; squashed into the tiny space behind the cobbler’s bench, he was literally a misfit. In his teens he was particularly awkward and ungainly, with poor co-ordination, as if unable to cope with his newly extended limbs and extra inches.

  Unfortunately, this coltish clumsiness also extended to his wielding of farmyard implements. His exasperated father once exclaimed: ‘You broke every tool about the place except the crowbar, and you bent that.’2 Yet he was a sturdy youngster, well fed, healthy, athletically fit and very strong. In his prime he could carry a 112 lb sack on his back with ease. Local farmers were willing to take him on for seasonal stints, convinced that they could get a good day’s labour out of him. Few did. He was more given to talk than action. As his poem ‘Threshing Morning’ suggests, the companionship and banter of other young men was one of the chief compensations of bartered labour:

  The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,

  In Cassidy’s haggard last night,

  And we owed them a day at the threshing

  Since last year. O it was delight

  To be paying bills of laughter

  And chaffy gossip in kind

  With work thrown in to ballast

  The fantasy-soaring mind . . .

  Patrick, like his father, had views on everything and liked to air them. ‘I’d be in pocket if I paid you to stay at home. You ought to have been a preacher,’ one irate employer shouted. Another farmer, Owen Hanratty, recalling Patrick’s easy-going ways from the mellow distance of old age, remarked: ‘You carried bags for me at the mill and I found you all right. Of course you never killed yourself and sure weren’t you right.’3 Patrick was just as work-shy when it came to looking after the family farm. A playful description of how his biography should begin opens with a typical scene of paternal exasperation at his dreamy, irresponsible habits:

  Once upon a time there was a boy of eighteen who lived in a little house in the country. His father was a hot-tempered man and his mother a wise woman. The boy was as lazy a boy as ever slept on a headland in the sunlight of a June afternoon. The boy was awakened from his headland sleep by his father: ‘The cows are broke into the oats and you lazy robber, you are lying here like a churn a-drying. What do you intend to make of yourself?’4

  His autobiographical novel, Tarry Flynn, includes similar episodes of maternal exasperation:

  How many times did I tell him to fix that paling and not have the buck wire trailing half way across the field. To look at this place a person would think we hadn’t a man about it . . .

  Nevertheless, by dint of spending years working in the fields under the supervision of experienced farmers, Patrick acquired a thorough knowledge of every aspect of the agricultural cycle, from tilling and sowing to harvesting, learning all the tricks of the trade as it was then practised. Farming was still highly labour-intensive. On small farms like the Kavanaghs’, oats and barley were scythed and stooked by hand rather than mown and gathered by reaping machine and there are photographs of Patrick at work in the fields, scythe in hand. He accompanied seasoned sellers of livestock to the fairs in Dundalk and Carrickmacross and drove cows to the bull and mares to the stallion; all this was done on foot in the absence of transport trucks or trailers, although the round trip to Carrickmacross was about twelve miles and to Dundalk about eighteen. By his twenties there was no branch of farming he had not tried his hand at, from delivering calves and foals to clearing the matted scraw from drains or standing guard over the barley crops as a living scarecrow armed with a shotgun. In particular, he responded to the one-to-one tuition offered by the owners of small, subsistence farms who worked alongside him and enlivened instruction and back-breaking toil by passing on local lore, stories and gossip. As he passed from his teens to his twenties, he underwent a saturation course in farming, folklore, and masculinity, Inniskeen-style. It was one of his farming mentors, John Taaffe, rather than his father, who instructed him in matters sexual, teaching him to respect the distinction between the animal coupling, with which he was familiar, and the joys of heterosexual intercourse.5

  Unlike his workaholic parents, who seldom left home except for business reasons, to buy leather and rivets or to sell produce at the Dundalk or Carrickmacross markets, Patrick was always on the look-out for whatever entertainment the village had to offer. In the evenings he would stroll down to the Chunk, a nearby railway gatehouse where young men hung about passing the time, smoking and gossiping. He fished for eels in the local streams and tried his hand at salmon poaching on the Fane river. He was athletically inclined, liked cross-country running, wrestling and playing football. On summer evenings he practised high jumps in the fields, enjoying the exercise and the distant admiration of young women milking cows in the fields. As in other Irish parishes, Gaelic football was the principal sport; he practised with the Inniskeen Rovers’ junior team, though he would be 25 before he had the honour of being selected to play for the senior team. He also loved to read about sport. The first book he ever bought was not a poetry book but a boxing manual, which he came upon in a Carrickmacross shop at the age of 12.6

  For a time he became addicted to pitch and toss. There were ‘toss schools’ at almost every crossroads and the gamblers foregathered every evening, winter and summer alike; some were so keen that they even played during the day on the headlands of the fields. Those with more money went to a substantial school such as the one at Essexford Cross, where they gambled in shillings; normally the bets were in sixpences or even in single pence. Every penny and halfpenny Patrick could wheedle out of his parents was wagered, but the combination of their tightfistedness, his own poor luck and the fact that it was strictly a cash game made it a spectator sport for him much of the time.7

&nbs
p; One of the drawbacks of the bartered labour system for Patrick was that he did not earn money. Like most farmers’ sons in the district, working for the family business while waiting to come into their inheritance, he was totally dependent on hand-outs from his parents. Every coin had to be begged and the amount of each hand-out haggled over. His mother liked him to have a shilling in his pocket; the best way to ensure this, she thought, was never to spend it. A packet of cigarettes and a pound in his pocket is sufficient bliss to distract Patrick Maguire from his miseries in The Great Hunger, and his creator spent much of his time during his teenage years thinking about how to arrive at just such a happy state. It was to prove a good preparation for his life as a mature writer.

  While other farmers’ sons came to James for melodeon lessons, Patrick, who had picked up a few tunes, joined the village pipers’ band established by Dick Keelan.8 James had dismissed him as tone deaf and having no ear for music, a charge which Frank O’Connor would later corroborate, though Anthony Cronin maintains that he had a good singing voice. About sixty fellows joined the band which met three nights a week in a hall over the Inniskeen school; surrounded as he was by sisters, Patrick welcomed every opportunity of male camaraderie. He and his fellow musicians were given chanters to practise on and later acquired a sample set of pipes. Eventually, as he tells it, they learned three tunes — ‘The Barren Rock of Aden’, ‘The Dawning of the Day’ and ‘The Little House under the Hill’. Being an undisciplined bunch and unable to decide on the order of recital, they played all three tunes simultaneously when they gave a performance outside the chapel on Christmas Day. Their next public performance on St Patrick’s Day broke up in disarray when a row erupted.9 It was 1921 and the row was probably a political one because, despite the unpatriotic nature of their tunes, this was a Sinn Féin pipers’ band.