Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Reynolds’ farm, as it continued to be called even within the family, was poor land — seven hilly fields covered in rushes — but the Kavanaghs were very proud of their acquisition. Patrick and the younger children loved to explore these fields and to sit on top of one of the hills, admiring the view of the distant Mourne Mountains and Slieve Gullion and spying on their neighbours’ doings. The affection Patrick felt for these impoverished acres would find expression in one of the finest of his early poems, ‘Shancoduff’:

  . . . My hills hoard the bright shillings of March

  While the sun searches in every pocket.

  They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn

  With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves

  In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage . . .

  After the purchase of Reynolds’ farm there was still enough money in the kitty to buy a second-hand cart and an old mare. Some means of transport was required to enable Patrick to transfer implements, manure and fodder between the sheds at Mucker, the land at Drumnagrella and what he humorously dubbed their ‘foreign possessions in Shancoduff’. Bridget was given a ceremonial ride into the village on their new rig; it would have been one of the proudest moments of her life. The old mare behaved herself on this occasion; what she strenuously objected to was being yoked with another horse to pull a plough. This was a major defect since the second reason for acquiring the mare was so that Patrick could team up with another one-horse neighbour to plough and harrow each other’s fields. He and Matt Rooney, with whom he pooled resources, found the mare almost impossible to control in a team. She was later to be immortalised as the kicking mare in The Green Fool and in more placid mood she appears between the shafts of a cartload of dung in the poem ‘Art McCooey’, where Matt Rooney also receives a mention.

  The purchase of the new farm just preceded Patrick’s twenty-first birthday. Though it was not transferred into his name until 1938, it was his parents’ implicit acknowledgment of his coming of age. James’s health was visibly declining and they were preparing for a future in which Patrick would take over as the man of the family. With a fair-sized farm to his back he would be in a position to marry a dowried woman who would stock the land or buy further acres and continue the newly founded Kavanagh dynasty. Or so Bridget fondly dreamed.

  James was growing daily more decrepit, failing in body and mind, too arthritic to work at cobbling or to play the melodeon, asking his daughter Annie to recommend some medicine for an incurable cough, fretting at his own forgetfulness, and senilely wandering out on to the road during the night. Patrick was patient with his ageing father, whose dementia took the form of an obsession with retrieving information he had forgotten: he plagued his son with questions and no sooner had one query been answered than he became uneasy about some other lost fact. The figure of his father as a stumbling, faltering old man would later be recalled in the poem ‘Memory of My Father’.

  As James’s health rapidly declined, Patrick, in his early twenties, was entering his prime, bursting with health and vitality. The gift of a bicycle in 1927 liberated him more than ever from domestic restraints. A cast-off belonging to his Uncle Jemmy Quinn, who was too arthritic to use it any more, it propelled him from sheltered adolescence into adulthood, enabling him to attend football matches in neighbouring parishes, join the posses of young men cycling to dances, make free trips into Dundalk or Carrickmacross, using the money saved on train fares to buy cigarettes or magazines. He was freewheeling down the drumlins into a happy future, or was he? For there was a not altogether hidden side to this young man that set him apart from his companions, the sons of neighbouring farmers who were also working the land they expected one day to inherit, and who also loafed around at the Chunk, played pitch and toss at the crossroads and practised with the Inniskeen Rovers. His interest in poetry, which had started out as a hobby, had gradually become an addiction, and only a month after the purchase of Reynolds’ farm, in August 1925, an event occurred that would precipitate him into the career of poet rather than farmer.

  4

  DABBLING IN VERSE

  (1916–1930)

  How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

  (Kavanagh’s Weekly, 10 May 1952)

  With such a busy work schedule and such a full after-hours programme of activities, how did the young Patrick Kavanagh find time to cultivate a taste for reading and writing? The question was one he found difficult to address in middle age, never mind answer. He was ‘so deeply involved’ with poetry for so much of his life that it was almost impossible to visualise the ‘virginal time before’ he ‘had ever thought of writing a verse’. There was ‘nothing deliberate or conscious’ about his poetic beginnings that he could recall. He dabbled in poetry, he says, not realising that it was to be his life.1 The verb ‘dabble’ points up the amateurish, hobby-like, inconsequential nature of his early literary interests.

  How he got hooked, how what started out as a pastime grew into his life’s work, was inexplicable to him, but one thing he was sure of was that it had not been easy. However unwittingly and light-heartedly he embarked on it, his apprenticeship to poetry was to prove very gruelling and long drawn out. Gymnast that he was, he kept raising the height of the bar he was trying to clear. Autodidacticism, as he knew from painful experience, is slow and time-consuming, calling for an obsessive dedication that those who have followed a more conventional educational route often underestimate. Remembering the years of practice, all the hours spent figuring how other poets did it, the search for appropriate subjects and language, the learning of new techniques, and the frequent starting over again as the discovery of a previously unknown poem suggested another and better way — all of this made him impatient in later life with the too common perception that poetry was a natural gift or endowment found at its purest and most original among the untaught. As a poet whose formal schooling stopped at the age of 13, he was particularly vulnerable to the misapprehension that his education had also stopped then and that he was an untutored genius ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’. This image of the country poet as a simple singer piping down the valleys wild is, he pointed out, an absurd sentimentalisation. On the contrary, ‘simplicity is the ultimate in poetic sophistication’ and ‘derivativeness’ is ‘the common failing of self-taught poets’:

  . . . when a country body begins to progress into print he does not write out of his rural innocence — he writes out of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury . . .

  As an instance of such derivativeness, he cited the example of the young County Meath poet, Francis Ledwidge (1891–1917), whose schooling was as restricted as his own: Ledwidge ‘did not write out of his Meathness, he wrote out of John Clare’.2 In the 1960s Kavanagh was contemptuous of pop song lyricists who, in his opinion, thought that lyrics could be tossed off without any apprenticeship to the craft of verse, not recognising that the successful spontaneous lyric is an artifice demanding considerable artistic expertise. This chapter will attempt to unravel the mystery of his poetic beginnings, teasing out some of the strands in his slow progress towards becoming a published poet.

  His youngest sister, Celia, considered that the lengthy convalescence following on his bout of typhoid fever, a period of forced inactivity, gave him the leisure to develop his interest in literature and generally stimulated his mental growth, and her opinion is persuasive.3 As the only grown son in a houseful of girls, the heavier chores fell to his lot and when he was in the full of his health he was afforded little opportunity to read, think or write without interruption. During his prolonged convalescence from early December 1923, reading was the most physically undemanding pastime available. Neighbours and customers indulged the invalid, putting their meagre stock of print matter at his disposal. He was offered Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow, William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, back copies of Old Moore’s Almanac, discarded textbooks, sheafs of the coloured b
allad sheets bought in towns on market days and any number of Westerns, especially his favourites, the Buffalo Bill series.4 Among the few volumes James possessed, generally books of an informative nature such as medical or veterinary manuals, was a copy of the Sunlight Soap Almanac for 1899, which Patrick read and reread and in later years once jocosely nominated as his favourite book.5

  While his prolonged convalescence provided him with unprecedented leisure to indulge his bookish tastes, his habit of reading and of writing poems was already well established, for Lucy, next in line in the family, commented at the time that his serious illness was an interruption of his literary activities.6

  At the age of 16 he was already borrowing from Paddy Brennan, a neighbour, who had inherited a number of books which he liked to gloat over and discuss. Brennan’s volumes included selections from the works of Pope, Byron and Shelley and it may have been he who introduced Patrick to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, one of his principal poetic resources for years to come.7 His close friendship with his cousin Johnny Caffrey, who emigrated to the US in February 1925, was based upon a shared interest in literature. Celia recalls that though she was chased away and told that their evening chats were for adult ears only, she eavesdropped enough to know that for the most part they talked about books and poetry.8

  Kavanagh had been fortunate enough to grow up in a household where the only male role model, his father, was an avid reader and respecter of the printed word, himself something of an autodidact with a reputation for learning and an appetite for information. Though to read during working hours was anathema in the household, reading as a leisure activity was by no means discouraged. Despite his underprivileged upbringing, James was conscious that he was a schoolmaster’s son and even attempted to carry out some of the sidelines generally reserved for rural schoolmasters at the time: drawing up wills, measuring land and writing letters for illiterate neighbours. His status in the parish was something like that of a ‘silenced priest’, considered specially gifted and more approachable than the orthodoxly erudite. His readerly ways were not resented, because it was felt that this was his birthright and because he was a respected craftsman. The same tolerance would not be extended to his son, possibly because with the passage of time the schoolmasterly link had become more tenuous and because James’s very success at building up his business and raising himself to the rank of farmer normalised Patrick’s position. Any deviation from local norms would now be remarked upon.

  When Kavanagh in later years attempted to date the origins of his fascination with poetry, as distinct from a general liking for reading, he traced it back to his schooldays in Kednaminsha, suggesting an organic connection between his own verse and the English literature textbooks of his youth: ‘If roots I had they were in the schoolbooks.’9 However uninspired the teaching in his primary school, the compulsory assimilation of textbook poems and prose excerpts kindled his interest in phrase and rhythm.

  At least some of the poems in his school texts spoke directly to his own situation. The school reader he read in fifth class included Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’, a poem that instantly appealed because of its privileging of boyhood. The refrain

  A boy’s will is the wind’s will

  And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts

  bestowed an importance on being a 12- or 13-year-old that, in those days before the concept of the teenager had been invented, nothing in his school or home life corroborated. No wonder the poem remained a favourite for many years. Other poems from the school readers made such an impression that thirty years later he would quote from them in Tarry Flynn.10 As a schoolboy he was usually attracted by verse that had a pronounced rhythm, a good tune: Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’ and ‘Locksley Hall’, and ballads such as ‘Lucy Grey’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’ and ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ which the Kednaminsha pupils memorised by singing to well-known airs like ‘The Dawning of the Day’. ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’ and ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ were to be two of Kavanagh’s party pieces to the end of his life. Asked to contribute to a poetry reading in Lewis’s department store in London’s Oxford Street as late as 1961, he recited them both, to the chagrin of the organisers, and he sang ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ on his wedding day. Thanks to the emphasis on rote-learning, he left school carrying in his head a small repertoire of some of the most anthologised English poems. These he would recite to himself as he walked the roads or fields and, in the absence of a bicycle or any other means of transport in the Kavanagh household, he did a lot of walking in his teens.

  The termination of his erratic formal attendance at school in June 1918 did not remove him from all contact with school texts. He still had three sisters at Kednaminsha, the eldest of whom, Lucy, was particularly academically inclined. She was so intelligent that, unusually for a girl of her background at the time, she was singled out by the new school principal and coached for the scholarship entrance examination to the St Louis Convent Secondary School in Carrickmacross, which she began attending in 1921. There is no indication that Patrick envied her this opportunity; there was only one branch of education that interested him and he was happy to be allowed to dip into her Intermediate Poetry Book.

  For years Patrick’s principal access to serious poetry, as opposed to the popular ballads in circulation locally, was through school readers. The changing fashions in school readers, coupled with the number of schools in the area, some of which used different textbooks, meant that there was a range of poetry on offer. It was in the sixth book of the Royal Reader series, which he came upon in the nook of a neighbour’s smoky chimney, and not in one of his own school texts, that he first read Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’, Mangan’s ‘Charlemagne and the Bridge of Moonbeams’, Gray’s ‘The Bard’, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and the opening passage of Endymion, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever . . .’, and Dryden’s ‘Veni Creator’ and ‘A Song for St Cecilia’s Day’.11 The sixth school reader used in Kednaminsha school, which he read outside or after school since he himself was not promoted to the sixth class, included Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, excerpts from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ and ‘Essay on Criticism’, selections from Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson, Scott’s ‘Rosabelle’ and several of Moore’s Melodies. It also provided a definition of ‘various kinds of poetry’, paying particular attention to the sonnet, the form that was to become his favourite as a mature poet. In view of Kavanagh’s notorious redefinition of the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ at a late stage in his career, it is interesting to speculate that the first time he ever read a standard definition of these terms may have been in this sixth school reader.

  Through his devoted thumbing of school anthologies and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Kavanagh familiarised himself with a broad selection of canonical English verse. Little by little he acquired as complete a knowledge of English poetry as if he had attended an Irish secondary school, possibly even an Irish university, of the period. The brevity of the anthology pieces made them eminently suitable for a beginner who might have been utterly deterred by a collected works in double columns of small print. Furthermore, their brevity meant that they were a pleasure he could indulge at snatched moments in his full and heavily supervised days.

  The only way he knew how to express his love and appreciation of the poems he read was to apply the method he had been taught in school and learn them off by heart. Working alone in the fields or on his solitary walks to and from, he would repeat phrases and lines over and over, savouring the language and the sentiments, so totally at odds with those he heard around him every day. At the age of 47 he only had to rehearse some lines from ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ to undergo a near-Proustian experience of being a 16-year-old, ‘walking down a lane peeping through the privet hedge into the field of turnips’. Similarly, the opening lines of Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’ would return him to an October evening in ‘a field cal
led Lurgankeel away down towards a shaded corner’.12

  Poetry offered a compensatory secret world in which he could take refuge from his everyday situation as a perpetual minor and inferior, the family ‘gam’ (fool), taunted by his sisters, lectured and pushed around by his parents, lent out as a field hand, exploited by employers, never in control. He learned to switch off from uncongenial circumstances and therefore acquired a reputation for being a dreamer. Whenever he could, he dodged work, just as he had played truant from school. When in 1920 a loft for the storage of grain and implements was constructed on the portion of the family house not raised to two storeys in 1909, Patrick took over this space as his hideaway. Here he would sneak off to sit on a sack of oats and read and write and dream, away from the hurly-burly of the crowded family kitchen. In the main house he had not even a bedroom to himself for, as in most smaller homes of the period, there was a boys’ bedroom and he even shared a bed with Peter.

  From his schooldays Kavanagh had practised writing as well as reading poetry. ‘At the age of twelve I took to the poeming’ was how he put it in 1960, the playful coinage ‘poeming’ suggesting the low literary level of his early compositions.13 He was not the only one in the family to turn a rhyme. Lucy and he teasingly insulted one another in verse in a Family Commonplace Book compiled between 1923 and 1925. Lucy wrote:

  Patrick Kavanagh, you’re a foolish boy

  You seem to be related to Cod Malloy,

  So try no more rhyming if you wish people joy,

  And shut your mouth, my dacent boy.

  She signed it ‘Your good-looking sister’. Patrick, whom she frequently taunted about his long nose and big feet, seized the opportunity to disparage her good looks: