Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Gaelic football was a rough sport in 1930s’ Monaghan. The position of goalkeeper was a particularly vulnerable one. There was often no designated sports field in country parishes and since the game was played in borrowed fields — Toal’s Meadow or Caffrey’s Field in Inniskeen — the goalposts were not firmly secured and supporters of the two sides were in the habit of ‘bive-ing’ them, pulling and pushing them backwards or forwards to foil or assist a likely score. Far more wounding than any newspaper criticism was the verbal onslaught from the Inniskeen supporters when Kavanagh failed to save a goal: ‘Go home and put an apron on you’, they would yell; ‘Me oul’ mother would make a better goalier.’

  The unfortunate players, as well as being subject to verbal attack from their own supporters, were often physically assaulted by players on the opposing team and their supporters. The County Board attempted to impose discipline and to make players responsible for the conduct of their supporters, but for too many the game was an excuse for a fight or a display of dirty tricks. ‘Gut yer man’, ‘bog into him’, supporters would roar at one of their side who was trying to take possession of the ball, and when the ball had been successfully seized there would be loud cries of ‘boot ’er up the middle’ or ‘lash ’er between the sallies’ (goalposts); sometimes not content with such verbal encouragement, they swarmed on to the pitch and a free-for-all ensued. The Troubles and the Civil War had left a legacy of violence and some of the enmity between Treaty and anti-Treaty families was chanelled into football hooliganism. A further factor in rousing passions to breaking point was the fierce inter-parish rivalry that the County Senior League competition engendered. Teams and supporters turned up at Sunday afternoon matches spoiling for a fight and fierce, no holds barred, combat ensued on and off the pitch. A Senior League championship encounter between Castleblayney and Inniskeen in November 1932 was such a ‘dirty game’ that nine Blayney players were injured. The Democrat listed the injured: Bradley (fractured jaw; detained in County Hospital); McElroy (neck injuries); Burns (rib injuries); Fisher (split knee, split lip and cut on face); Roche (kick on hinch); Cunningham (kick on thigh); Loughman (kick on leg); Malone (kick on thigh; still lame); Mason (injuries to side of head). Few of the remainder of the team escaped minor injuries.

  When dissatisfied with the outcome of a match, teams could make an official complaint to the County Board, seeking to have the result invalidated. Kavanagh, who was secretary and treasurer of the Inniskeen team from 1930 to 1932, had to represent his side at some of these reviews and disciplinary hearings. At the end of June 1930 he was one of two Inniskeen representatives at a County Board meeting where the Inniskeen supporters were accused of being unruly in a match against Aughnamullen in Lough Egish. He also represented Inniskeen when the team challenged the validity of a result against Killaney. Inniskeen claimed that one of the Killaney players had not been the required six months in residence, while Killaney countered that one of the Inniskeen players was resident in Dundalk and that its list of players was not written on Irish water-marked paper. Kavanagh’s defence that the list was written on the inside of a large Players cigarette packet made in Ireland did not impress the board.

  In 1932 he was secretary, treasurer and captain of the Inniskeen team. In addition, he was in charge of keeping the ball and the players’ boots in good repair. As the local expert on leather, he was once sent to Carrickmacross to purchase a new football, but when the new ball was inflated it proved to be out of round and had to be surreptitiously swapped for the Lough Egish ball before a match.

  What brought Kavanagh’s footballing career to an end was not a lack of athletic prowess or any deficiency in the purchase of equipment. It was discovered that he had been embezzling the team’s funds. As treasurer he had kept the gate money in a suitcase under his bed and could not resist dipping in to defray some of his expenses, especially the occasional packet of cigarettes. These petty thefts were discovered and denounced by the incoming club chairman in 1932. His mother, the usual victim of his pilfering, was too relieved that his football career had ended to be outraged at this public revelation of his dishonesty. She had feared that he might be irreparably injured in one of the faction fights on the pitch.

  Kavanagh continued to be a keen football spectator and remained so until the end of his life. ‘The ban’, as it was known in Gaelic football circles, forbade members of the Gaelic Athletic Association to participate in or support ‘foreign games’, but he was a soccer supporter and regularly cycled into Dundalk to watch matches for free from the ‘Vincent de Paul stand’, the top of a high wall overlooking the football grounds, reached by standing on a bicycle saddle.14 A shared interest in football cemented a growing friendship between him and his brother Peter, despite a gap of twelve years in their ages. They cycled together to matches and Patrick followed his brother’s account of his English literature course with the same zeal as he had once read his sister Lucy’s texts.

  Peter sat his Intermediate Certificate examination in June 1932. At 18 Celia was unfulfilled and restless, the only member of the family with no career prospects. She decided to join a religious order dedicated to teaching. Teaching orders in Ireland were generally unenthusiastic about recruiting dowry-less young women who had not received any secondary education, so Celia looked out for convents on the Continent or in England. She was accepted by a Belgian convent, but this was vetoed by both Bridget and Patrick. Belgium was too far away from home for a cherished youngest daughter to settle permanently; the north of England, where other daughters had already trained as nurses, was more tolerable. The Presentation Convent in Matlock, Derbyshire, which already had many Irish nuns, was willing to receive Celia and she entered as a postulant in August 1933. Two years later she commenced her secondary school education and went on to train as a primary schoolteacher, so she achieved her original ambition by a roundabout route. The way in which Celia’s intention of going to Belgium was discovered sheds some light on the lack of privacy in the Kavanagh household and even more on the cunning of the poet, who, beneath the dreamy, heedless pose he liked to affect, was razor sharp in his assessments and given to snooping and spying. Celia had written to the Belgian convent on a new notepad and Patrick read her letter by holding the blotting paper up to a mirror.

  He did not meet Celia again until 1937, but his letters to her between 1933 and 1939, some written on behalf of his mother and himself, some on his own account, all of which he suspected would be scrutinised by the Reverend Mother or Mistress of Novices, give a sanitised record of the life of the household and of his activities as man and poet at this time.

  Celia’s departure set off further changes. Yet another sister was to be sacrificed for Peter’s welfare. From September 1933 he was studying hard for his Leaving Certificate the following June, so Josie was asked to give up training as a nurse and return home to take over the chores he and Celia used to perform. When in September 1934 Peter went to Dublin to train as a primary schoolteacher at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, Josie remained on in Mucker; she never resumed her nursing career.

  Tarry’s sisters are portrayed in rather unflattering terms in Tarry Flynn, set in the summer of 1935; in real life Patrick hit it off quite well with lively, extroverted Josie. (When Tarry Flynn was in its final draft in 1947, relations between them had soured.) After Peter’s departure to teacher training college, Josie was Patrick’s companion and ally. They often socialised together, attending Irish classes or whist drives. They also worked well as a team. He recalls a typical day in the fields in Shancoduff in October, the two of them gathering potatoes, one each side of a basket. As each basket was filled, he emptied it into their small cart. Sixteen baskets was a full load and then it was time to put the mare between the shafts and drive home up Beeog’s Lane. Once she heard the rattle of the cart, their mother came to the doorway shouting ‘Can I wet the tay now?’ ‘Wet away, Ma’, they answered, and when the potatoes were tipped into the pit and covered with straw and the mare was loosed, they wen
t into the lamplit kitchen for their tea — a feed of flour bread, as soda bread was called, boiled eggs and tea.15

  The major local scandal in 1934 was an incident which Kavanagh was to turn to comic use in Tarry Flynn. In late spring a young woman, Nan McElroy, a follower of O’Duffy’s Blueshirt movement, was set upon by a crowd of young men on her way home from a dance in the nearby village of Kilkerley and so badly injured that she was hospitalised. This unseemly political brawl which resulted in the arrest of eleven men16 is transformed in Tarry Flynn into an unmotivated attack on the pretty, convent-educated daughter of a prosperous farmer, and Tarry, who secretly admires her, is mistakenly denounced from the altar as a ringleader in the assault.

  Outwardly Kavanagh’s day-to-day life was similar to that of the other young farmers of the neighbourhood — working in the fields, playing and talking football, cycling to dances — and inwardly, too, he shared many of their agricultural and amorous anxieties. Would the cow take the bull? Should he sell the heifer so early in the morning on fair day or wait for a better price? How did his crops compare with the neighbours’? Would the girl he fancied from afar be at Mass or at the dance? Like other farmers, self-consciously respectable in their Sunday suits of brown or navy blue serge, he stood by the chapel gates after second Mass, talking of the weather, spring or winter wheat, the value of ammonia and potash for the praties, meanwhile eyeing the girls making their way past, also rigged out in their Sunday best.

  Yet in an increasingly important part of his life he was different from most of his acquaintances. What had started out as a desultory dabbling in the reading and writing of verse, had by 1929 developed into an ingrained habit, a daily drug he could not do without. While getting on with life as a young man about the village, he was also a closet poet. His writing was closeted only in so far as it was an occupation he carried on in private; it would have been impossible to keep it a closely guarded secret in a village like Inniskeen, where minding everybody else’s business was an all-consuming passion. Being a ‘bard’ did nothing to enhance his status in the community; on the contrary, fellow parishioners looked on his versifying as an affliction akin to madness: he was ‘touched’, not quite ‘right in the head’, ‘a bit odd of himself’, ‘not like another’. ‘God protect everybody’s rearing’, older people murmured, feeling sorry for Bridget. Young chaps at the Chunk or at the crossroads led him on and taunted him and, in the absence of other meatier conversational topics, gave him the ‘wink-and-elbow’ treatment. If so, they got as good as they gave. Kavanagh could be vicious in repartee, scathing about others’ shortcomings, merciless in protecting his own thin skin. No matter what literary success he achieved, he was never to lose this sensitivity to the sneers of Inniskeen neighbours.

  The summer after his father’s death brought an unexpected boost to his poetic morale — a request from Thomas Moult in London to include ‘Ploughman’ in the anthology, Best Poems of 1930. The Best Poems series, published by Jonathan Cape, had been running since 1922 and represented what in the compiler’s estimate were the best poems published in British, Irish and American periodicals, as distinct from books, during a stated twelve months. In this instance, the year extended from July 1929 to June 1930. Moult did not pay contributors — their only recompense was a copy of the anthology — but for Patrick, at this early stage in his career, the honour of inclusion was sufficient. He had been amazed when Æ offered him a guinea for his Statesman poems; to the novice poet, payment on top of publication seemed a bonus.17 It must have been very gratifying for him to find that, as a ‘best poet’, he joined the distinguished company of his own mentor, Æ, and the veteran Irish poet Katherine Tynan. The anthology appeared shortly before Christmas with ‘Ploughman’ on page 84 in its Irish Statesman version, i.e. with the lamer phrase ‘I find a star-lovely art/In a sod’, rather than the later and better ‘In a dark sod’. The improved version, proposed by Æ, was approved of by the poet’s mother, which suggests that his published verse was discussed in the Kavanagh household and that his mother, whatever her misgivings about literature as a livelihood, took a keen interest in his achievement.

  After the demise of the Irish Statesman, he appears to have been without a publishing outlet, though he may have been sending out poems that were not accepted. Æ, who continued to correspond with him, suggested that he try the Dublin Magazine, a quarterly review of literature, science and art, established in 1923 by James Starkey, better known to readers by his pen-name Seumas O’Sullivan.

  An undated letter to Seumas O’Sullivan may have accompanied the first ever collection of verse that Kavanagh sent to the Dublin Magazine. The tone of this missive is humble and diffident: he feels that by sending his poor poems to this journal he is ‘throwing crab-apples into an orchard of Orange Pippin’.18 Since we do not know which poems accompanied this letter or whether it was sent in 1930 or 1931, we do not know when Kavanagh made his first tentative approach to O’Sullivan. His work did not begin appearing in the Dublin Magazine until the Oct./Dec. 1931 issue which carried three poems: ‘Beech Tree’, ‘The Goat of Slieve Donard’ and ‘To a Child’. After 1932 he was a frequent contributor, with a cluster of poems published at least once a year for the next eight years. Publication in the Dublin Magazine carried prestige, and the name Patrick Kavanagh soon became known in Dublin literary circles.

  Yet, before he succeeded in having any poems accepted by O’Sullivan, he had broken into the English market. A new literary friend, Paul Vincent Carroll, may have pointed him in this direction or Thomas Moult’s encouragement may have nerved him to approach other English editors. Inclusion in Best Poems of 1930 would certainly have eased Kavanagh’s passage into English journals and he would have made sure to mention it in his introductory letter to unknown editors. The popular John O’London’s, which had been read in the Kavanagh household for years, carried ‘Ascetic’ in May 1931, but his most remarkable coup in 1931 was the acceptance by The Spectator of two poems, ‘To a Blackbird’ (9 May) and ‘Gold Watch’ (20 June).

  Despite publication in both English and Irish journals, Kavanagh had postal contact only with other established writers until late 1931. The least travelled of the adults in his immediate family, with the exception of his mother, he had never even been as far as Dublin. It was not until after his father’s death that he began exploring Ireland, walking and hitching his way as far as Galway on one occasion, and getting a lift back from Ballinasloe on the back of a potato truck.19 Eventually, almost two years after he had sent his first poems to the Irish Statesman, he made his way to Dublin to meet Æ. As his first living literary mentor and the first publisher of his poems, Æ was to Kavanagh a guru figure: sage, wise counseller, encourager, eminently trustworthy because of his otherworldliness. It seems strange that he had postponed meeting him for so long, but he was a shy young man, unaccustomed to travel, and with a farm to look after. Besides, Æ had been away from Dublin a good deal since the closure of his journal: on a lecture tour in America between September 1930 and mid-May 1931 and then holidaying in Donegal for several months.20

  Kavanagh set off to visit him a week before Christmas, when his brother Peter was on holidays from school and could help out with the farming chores. He was apparently acting on impulse, since he did not inform Æ of his intended arrival. Lest the sage doubt his rural authenticity or need for patronage, he decided to wear his shabby old work clothes for the visit instead of dressing up in his Sunday suit. Since his appearance was unmistakably countrified, his adoption of the guise of a Syngean tramp was, as he later realised, quite unnecessary. To exaggerate his peasant persona still further, Kavanagh decided to walk the sixty-odd miles to Dublin, rather than travel by train or bicycle, though it was the depths of winter and the journey took the best part of three days. (He set out on the 18th and arrived on the 20th.)21 He was deliberately acting the part of a ‘country gobshite’, ‘pretending’ instead of behaving ‘honestly, sincerely’.22

  It was late afternoon on 20 December by the tim
e he climbed the steps to Æ’s door at 17 Rathgar Avenue. Frank O’Connor has left a vivid sketch of Æ as he would have been when Kavanagh first called on him: ‘a big burly North of Ireland Presbyterian with wild hair and beard and a pipe hanging from his discoloured teeth’. Kavanagh’s unexpected arrival would have been heralded by the barking of the smelly old dog and his host’s struggle with the beast in the hallway.23 Once the Inniskeen poet had identified himself, he received the kindliest of welcomes. Used to dealing with impoverished farmers in his work for the Co-operative Movement, Æ would not have been put off by his guest’s tramp-like demeanour. To O’Connor, Æ in his emotional abundance resembled an oversized old fur coat, warm and enveloping and perhaps a trifle suffocating. But Kavanagh had not chosen his moment well. The ex-editor’s wife was dying in hospital and he was ‘haggard from strain’.24 Whereas O’Connor found Æ a benign, unintimidating, paternal figure, who sat ‘well back in his chair, beaming benevolently through his spectacles, his legs crossed, and his socks hanging down over his ankles’, Kavanagh was at first quite terrified by him, especially by the intensity of his gaze:

  I was afraid of that man. He looked like a man who had awakened from a dark trance. His eyes stared at me like two nightmare eyes from which there was no escape.25

  However, he never forgot the warmth and kindness of the welcome he received, though his heart sank when Æ murmured that it was his housekeeper’s day off. He offered his guest a cup of tea, unaware that he had been hoping for a full meal and was famished with hunger after all his walking. Æ entertained Kavanagh in characteristic fashion. His talk, prolific in pronouncements and quotations about art, literature and life, was punctuated by his jumping up to find and read from some poem or article or book, interspersing his readings with remarks like ‘Isn’t that good? Isn’t that clever? Don’t you like that?’26 He read excerpts from Whitman and Emerson and, since he was preoccupied with his wife’s imminent death, he sonorously chanted Whitman’s lines: