Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  About my feet, earth voices whispering.

  (18 September 1929)

  It took Kavanagh almost four years to learn how to write to the Irish Statesman formula: keep it short, smooth and rhymed; include only enough description to give the lyric a subject or occasion, be unearthly or other-worldly, reaching for stars, clouds and abstractions, and be sure to include some general reference to religion of the Christian or Eastern persuasion and/or to dream.

  His first offerings were returned by Æ’s secretary, Irene Haugh, a young poet herself who let him down lightly, passing on some kind words that her boss had said of them and encouraging him to try again. He would still remember her kindliness fourteen years later when he paid tribute to her in the Irish Press.27 Eventually in September 1929 Æ accepted three poems for future publication: ‘The Intangible’ (29 October 1929), ‘Ploughman’ and ‘Dreamer’ (15 February 1930).

  Kavanagh’s first published poem proper ‘The Intangible’ is deservedly forgotten, but it illustrates his determined, if naif, imitation of the Statesman formula and was deliberately aimed at appealing to the editor’s poetics:

  Rapt to starriness — not quite

  I go through fields and fens of night,

  The nameless, the void

  Where ghostly poplars whisper to

  A silent countryside.

  Not black or blue,

  Grey or red or tan

  The skies I travel under.

  A strange unquiet wonder.

  Indian

  Vision and thunder. . . .

  Out of respect for Æ’s interest in Hindu mysticism, he even drags in the word ‘Indian’, though the only rhyme he can find is ‘tan’ and the oriental is so esoteric to him that the word takes up an entire line. The downside of Æ’s influence in the short term was that it led to an erasure of the local, the sensuous and the realist; in the long term it introduced a fondness for lofty abstractions to which he remained prone for most of his career.

  The poem which really launched that career was ‘Ploughman’, a much more competent piece than ‘The Intangible’, also decorously and aesthetically rural, simple, ‘naively joyous’ and ending on a spiritual uplift:

  I turn the lea-green down

  Gaily now,

  And paint the meadow brown

  With my plough.

  I dream with silvery gull

  And brazen crow.

  A thing that is beautiful

  I may know.

  Tranquillity walks with me

  And no care.

  O, the quiet ecstasy

  Like a prayer.

  I find a star-lovely art

  In a sod.

  O joy that is timeless! O heart

  That knows God!

  The vocative ‘O’ was a leftover from the schoolbooks and the third last line still lacked the adjective ‘dark’, later suggested by Æ, which would much improve it, but ‘Ploughman’ was to be Kavanagh’s passport to Literary Revival Dublin and even to London.

  Kavanagh was to prove a conspicuously unlucky writer; several seemingly successful literary enterprises ran aground, through no fault of his, shortly after he had climbed aboard, and of these the Irish Statesman was the first. The editor and a reviewer had been sued for libel on foot of a book review in October 1928 and when the jury failed to agree, each side had to pay its own costs — £2,500 in the case of the journal. A fund established to pay these costs enabled it to struggle on for a few months, but it folded when the American guarantors withdrew their support in the latter half of 1929, probably because their own finances were strained following on the Wall Street stockmarket crash. The last issue of the journal was 12 April 1930. It must have been distressing for the newly published poet to find that the club he had worked so hard to join had closed its doors, yet he had the consolation that his stuff was publishable and he was in communication with Ireland’s most kindly guru and literary father figure par excellence. His years of isolated autodidacticism were over, immediately as far as letter-writing was concerned, and he would soon be also on actual speaking terms with some living poets.

  5

  FARMER-POET

  (1929–1936)

  I scarcely believe in the theory of the mute, inglorious Milton . . . If the potentialities are there it is almost certain that they will find a way out; they will burst a road.

  (Envoy, July 1951)

  In 1931 the Irish cultural nationalist writer and critic Daniel Corkery predicted that the Literary Revival generation of writers — W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory — who belonged to the Protestant ruling class, would be succeeded by an altogether different kind of Irish writer, one drawn from the majority Catholic population, an under-educated man of the people, a Mass-goer, one of the thousands who flocked to Gaelic football and hurling matches.1 Unknown to Corkery, such a writer was already in formation in the parish of Inniskeen. A decade later Patrick Kavanagh would challenge the Revivalists’ representation of Ireland, disparaging it as the literature of ‘lookers-on’ who are not ‘part of the national conscience’.2 In 1931 he was a novice poet, respectful of his literary predecessors, still immersed in living the day-today life of home, farm and village, and convinced that what happened ‘in his own fields’ was ‘not stuff for the Muses’.3

  After ailing for a couple of years James Kavanagh died on 28 August 1929. The whole family assembled for his funeral, the last time they would all be together. Since Bridget had effectively been the farm and household manager, with Patrick acting as her right-hand man or unpaid farm labourer for the previous four years, James’s death made little difference to the practicalities of living in the Kavanagh household. Yet it was a watershed in the life of the family, a time when the future prospects of those children who had not already left home were discussed and decisions taken.

  Patrick, of course, would now be the man of the house, the widow’s mainstay and support. At some time in the distant future it was expected that he would marry, but Bridget at 57 was still a capable, energetic woman and had no intention of surrendering the reins to a daughter-in-law for a long time to come; besides it was barely four years since they had bought the new farm and she wanted to savour her purchase. After drifting about from job to job, Annie had finally made her way into nursing in the north of England, and Mary, at age 24, had followed her example. Both were now qualified nurses. Sissie and Josie had also embarked on a nursing career in the north of England, and Lucy at 22 had recently qualified as a primary schoolteacher.4 Only Tessie, Celia and Peter remained to be provided for.

  It was decided in family conclave that Peter would follow in Lucy’s footsteps by attending secondary school in Carrickmacross with a view to training as a primary schoolteacher afterwards. His employed sisters clubbed together to pay his school fees and kit him out with a bicycle, uniform and school books. A couple of weeks after his father’s death he began commuting by bicycle to the Patrician Brothers’ High School in Carrickmacross. Celia, now aged 15, had been a bright pupil, too, and also wished to follow Lucy’s lead, but there was not enough money to educate two children and, like so many girls of her generation, she was passed over in favour of her younger brother. Instead, Bridget decided to keep her about the house as her assistant and companion. The real problem was deciding what to do about Tessie, who was almost 21. She had taken lessons in shorthand and typing and had tried out a nursing career in England, but hadn’t settled to any profession. It was decided that she should emigrate to New York where her maternal uncle, Mick Quinn, would receive her and help her to settle down and find a job. On 29 March 1930, seven months after her father’s death, she sailed on the Transylvania. The timing could not have been worse. The Depression had struck New York and reverse emigration had started. Tessie would like to have come home, but she stuck it out and four years later married another Inniskeen emigrant, Eddie Kerr.

  On 8 June Uncle Mick, who was supposed to be looking after Tessie in New York, arrived in Cobh, an economic refugee from
the Depression, and turned up the next day in Mucker to stay with his sister Bridget. He was one of a number of returning emigrants in the district. Mick lodged in Mucker until September while repairing and refurbishing the old family home in Tullyrane, and Patrick, delighted to have the company of a travelled adult male in the house, pressed his uncle to tell him stories of life in New York. Uncle Petey in Tarry Flynn, the penniless but travelled and entertaining maternal uncle, who descends on the Flynn household, would be partly based on Mick Quinn. Kavanagh’s favourite story about his Uncle Mick told how when a neighbouring farmer visited the Kavanaghs to boast about his forthcoming marriage to a rich woman, Mick slyly undermined his confidence in the great bargain he had made by continually interrupting his boasting to ask how certain he was about the woman’s wealth. Eventually the unfortunate man was so overcome by doubt that he took to pacing the floor and muttering ‘Be ghost, she’ll have to show the dockets.’ Kavanagh loved to act out this scene for friends in later years and the phrase ‘show the dockets’ was one he frequently used. His Uncle Mick, he said, was a ‘great character’, endlessly amusing.5 It may have been his uncle’s traveller’s tales that first kindled Kavanagh’s longing to visit New York, though it would be many years before he actually made the trip. The time certainly was not propitious. He noted in his Cobbler’s Account Book at the end of 1930 that while the outgoing year had been kind to his own immediate family, it had been a black year for many in the US.

  Normally the Kavanagh household comprised two adults and two children for some years after James’s death, and Patrick might have been cast in the role of virtual husband and father, were not his mother so managerial that she controlled the finances, gave the orders and behaved as the only responsible adult. He was still cocooned in what he would on a good day describe as ‘the protecting fog of family life’,6 or in sourer mood typify as the plight of young men in rural Ireland, ‘where every man’s a gossoon till the day of his marriage at fifty-five or sixty . . .’7 His father’s death left him with considerably more freedom and responsibility than some of his acquaintances who were trapped in a prolonged adolescence.

  From 1929 his day-to-day life took on the pattern it would follow for almost eight years. Rise at 6 to 7 a.m. on weekdays, feed the hens, milk the cows, tend the fire, prepare the breakfast, work all day on the farm except in very wet or wintry weather, home at noon for dinner (cabbage or turnips, potatoes or colcannon and sometimes bacon), finish work at sunset in time for tea (soda bread, a couple of boiled eggs and mugs of tea). Shortly before his father’s death he had been sent a watch by American relatives, the timepiece described in the poem ‘Gold Watch’, so he was no longer reliant on the Angelus bell, recess and closing time in Kednaminsha school or passing trains to calculate the time as he worked in the fields. On wet days and in winter he carried on the cobbling trade, now reduced to a repairs only business, with an occasional sideline in bathing feet or paring corns.8 After tea he cycled to the village to buy the Evening Herald, practise football, visit a friend, gossip with neighbourhood lads at the Chunk or play pitch and toss. Invariably every evening, either before or after these leisure time activities, he would devote a couple of hours to literary pursuits, reading and scribbling by candlelight in an upstairs bedroom. At night time, when his mother and the younger children had gone to bed, he enjoyed a quiet hour or so alone reading by the fire, sipping a mug of milk or cocoa. Apart from the conspicuous absence of any interest in literature, Patrick Maguire’s day in The Great Hunger (1942) was to be closely based on his author’s routine at this time.

  The main variation in this daily routine was attendance at a fair or market in either Dundalk or Carrickmacross, with all the anxieties and elation attendant on buying and selling heifers, or selling pork or fowl. On Sunday afternoons in summer Patrick was generally to be found at a football match either as a player or spectator; in winter the time would be given over to reading and writing. He was also a keen dance-goer.

  Actual dance halls were few and far between in the vicinity of Inniskeen in the early 1930s and most dances were held in what were known as ‘dance places’, such as ‘Billy Brennan’s barn’. Two of Patrick’s favourite venues were Kelly’s loft in Essexford and the hall at Rossdreenagh, really a galvanised hut. Fourpence was the admission charge to Kelly’s loft; twopence more would admit him to Rossdreenagh, where the music was much better, though the twopence was sometimes hard to find.9

  Despite being a great frequenter of dance places, Patrick was a poor dancer, lumbering, unco-ordinated and graceless. He generally joined a group of male wallflowers, middle-aged spectators who passed the time commenting on the merits and demerits of the dancing couples. One of their staple topics of discussion was the likely number of virgins among the women present. For him, as for most of his acquaintances, the draw of the dance place was the proximity of so many pretty young women; he would select the prettiest and then follow her progress, rarely approaching her but agonising over the possible success of those who did. At least he did not stoop to the antics of some of his non-dancing companions, who showed their appreciation by sticking out a foot and attempting to trip up the girl they fancied as she danced past.10 The dance hall was, as William Trevor ironically dubbed it, a ‘ballroom of romance’ and one of the young men’s chief aims was to secure a female partner for the journey home; Patrick hardly ever succeeded. Once, just as he was starting out on his own from Culloville hall, his bicycle chain snapped and a local man, Mick Shevlin, towed him as far as Drumboat and lent him his own bicycle to complete the journey. Kindliness and camaraderie such as this are very little in evidence in Kavanagh’s writings about country life.

  In fine weather young people danced to melodeon music on a deck, an outdoor dance floor of boards made cheaply by a local carpenter. Kavanagh recalled how one such deck dance at Annavackey Cross about 1930 was interrupted by the Inniskeen curate, Father Gilmartin, who arrived on a bicycle and ordered the dancers to disperse, which they meekly did.11 The Irish Church’s opposition to dancing had come to a head five years previously in a ‘Statement of the Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland issued at their meeting held in Maynooth on October 6, 1925’, which denounced imported dances as fomenters of evil and immorality. It was decreed that this statement on the evils of dancing be read from the pulpit of every Catholic church four times a year and Patrick probably half-listened to it numerous times during second Mass in Inniskeen.

  Over twenty years later Kavanagh would voice his opposition to the Irish Church’s killjoy attitude towards dancing and the ‘company-keeping’ which they feared might arise from it, seeing this as a continuation of the life-denying stance deplored by George Moore in The Untilled Field.12 However during the 1930s, the Church’s condemnation coloured his own views to the extent that the dance hall became a symbol of sensuality in his poetry, to be avoided or regarded as a temptation, not because it was sinful, but because it was at odds with the cultivation of the mind and the imagination. He conceived of the poet as a loner, avoiding all participation in communal sports and pastimes, a monk or ascetic repressing his sexuality for a higher spiritual good. ‘I am fenced/The light, the laugh, the dance against’, he wrote in ‘Poet’, and in one of his finest 1930s’ sonnets, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, where he depicts himself as an Alexander Selkirk figure, a voluntary castaway for poetry’s sake, he contrasts the lonely solitude of the poet with the carefree companionship of dance-goers. In real life he would have been among the ‘twos and threes’ cycling to the dance in Billy Brennan’s barn if he could have afforded the fourpence admission price.

  Patrick cut a better figure on the football field than on the dance floor. He was taller than most of his companions and his height and long limbs, physical fitness and love of running worked to his advantage. He had inherited his athletic abilities from his mother’s family; his Quinn cousins were to be well known for their football prowess. In 1929, the year he first published in the Irish Statesman, he graduated from Inniskeen
’s junior to its senior team, the Rovers. He was the Inniskeen goalkeeper, a rather erratic and unreliable one.13 Easily bored with standing about when there was nothing happening in his vicinity, he had a bad habit of deserting his post to run up the field and take close-in frees, hot-footing it back before the action returned to his end of the field. In a game against Killaney in March 1930 his defence was so poor that the Dundalk Democrat’s reporter described him as Inniskeen’s ‘weak point’ and thought he should be replaced. This match ‘came to an abrupt conclusion with but a few minutes to go’ when Killaney were leading four goals and one point to Inniskeen’s one goal and six points. The Rovers walked off the pitch because the umpire, a Carrickmacross man, refused to recognise a point they had scored from a free. A couple of months later the Democrat commended Kavanagh’s performance in the home and away games against Aughnamullen. However, he was not dependable. On 20 September 1931 the same reporter once again criticised his play in the Owen Ward cup match against Castleblayney at Carrickmacross: ‘Kavanagh in goals was not safe and needs a lot of practice and shows little judgment.’ The following year he acquitted himself well in two matches against Donaghmoyne and was pronounced ‘incisive in goal’, a phrase that baffled his local critics.

  Kavanagh’s most inglorious moment as the Rovers’ goalkeeper occurred during a Monaghan County final against Latton in Carrickmacross on 9 August 1931. In the course of this game the Inniskeen supporters invaded the pitch and it took fifteen minutes to restore order. Considering that the better part of valour was discretion, Kavanagh made himself scarce. Unfortunately, he miscalculated the time it would take before play was resumed; when he returned it already had and a Latton player had taken advantage of his absence to fist a ball through the goalposts. Inniskeen lost the match and the Democrat reporter blamed Kavanagh. Telling the story of this goal in later years, Kavanagh gave different reasons why he was not at his post; on one occasion he said he had gone to buy ice cream. Surprisingly, he was retained as goalkeeper for this and the following year.