Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Come lovely and soothing death,

  Undulate round the world serenely, arriving

  In the day, in the night, to all, to each.

  Soooner or later, delicate death . . .27

  Kavanagh did not share his enthusiasm for Whitman and, typically, said so; he did not discover his dislike of Emerson until later. He was too hungry and too embarrassed to concentrate on the conversation, ashamed of the patched clothes he had so carefully selected, conscious that he had not calculated on having to buy his supper and was short of funds. None of Æ’s protégés ever left his house without an armful of books, and Kavanagh was no exception. Æ picked out a heterogeneous collection: among them Whitman’s poems and Emerson’s essays, of course, but also Les Misérables, Confessions of a Young Man, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, two volumes of his own verse, one of James Stephens’ and Browning’s The Ring and the Book. The gesture was generous and well meant and Patrick would later enjoy some of these books, in particular Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which he read over and over. At the time he was mainly aware of the weight he would have to carry on his return journey.

  Back in the city centre, he procured a night’s lodging for tenpence in an Iveagh Hostel. To the unsophisticated young poet, the hostel, with its indoor lavatories and electric lighting (his Mucker home had neither) was like a hotel, though he was repelled by its cold, barrack-like, even gaol-like interior — the long stony corridors, the array of numbered doors.28 As he tried to locate his own room number, he could hear the bronchial coughing of elderly men from the cubicles he passed. Next day he set out for Inniskeen.

  This stay in an Iveagh Hostel was the first of many. He now took the train to Dublin as often as he could afford it. The fare and expenses, including an overnight stay, amounted to a pound, money that was possibly sometimes purloined from the funds of the Inniskeen football club. His visits to Æ were his first introduction to literary and artistic folk, for 17 Rathgar Avenue was like a railway station, where visitors from Dublin and overseas were continually arriving or departing, many like himself benefiting from their host’s ‘limitless goodwill’. The following year, Æ gave him a volume of Petrarch’s poems in translation as a Christmas present. Over the next few years he continued to correspond with Kavanagh, to send him books and to read his poems. As a self-educated man who had once been poor himself, Æ attached great importance to reading and, encouragingly for Kavanagh, he believed that through reading one could overcome the lack of a formal education. While Æ acknowledged to Yeats that his Monaghan genius needed a lot of educating,29 he never allowed the young man to feel that his academic shortcomings were a barrier to literary achievement. In after-years, Kavanagh, who was rarely wholehearted in his public admiration of any man, praised Æ as ‘a great and holy man’, one who contributed ‘virtue, goodness and nobility’ to the world.30

  Privately, Æ was grooming Kavanagh for an Irish Academy of Letters prize. Without ever mentioning his name, he alluded to him as a coming talent in three letters to Yeats. In April 1932 he is ‘a young shoemaker in Monaghan who has genius but no education’ whom he is supplying with books. In December, when Yeats thought that money for prizes might be forthcoming, Æ replies that he hopes to have ‘a new young genius ready for the first prize — a small farmer in Monaghan, whose verses have a wild and original fire in them’. Later in the month when it seems certain that £1,000 will be raised as prize money, he again refers to ‘a strange genius in Monaghan’, this time acknowledging that ‘it would be years before he is able to make his wild intuitions into art’, and that Frank O’Connor, F. R. Higgins, Francis Stuart and a number of others fulfil the criterion of being under the age of 35.31 Æ is beginning to have cold feet about investing £1,000 in Kavanagh when there are more accomplished young writers about, some of them friends and protégés of Yeats.

  Æ left Dublin permanently in July 1933 and moved to Bournemouth, but not before he had introduced Kavanagh to other Dublin-based Irish writers. The self-educated Corkman Michael O’Donovan, who worked as librarian in the Pembroke Library in Dublin and was just beginning to make a name for himself as the poet and short-story writer Frank O’Connor, was only a year older than Patrick and would be his promoter and loyal friend over the coming twelve years. F. R. Higgins, poet and manager of the Abbey Theatre, was to be another supportive friend and counseller. He read and advised him on his poems and invited him to Dúrlas, his home on the Lower Dodder Road in Rathfarnham. Brinsley MacNamara, registrar of the National Gallery, better known as the author of the notorious novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), a savage exposé of the bitchery of country life, also took Kavanagh under his wing.32

  On one of his visits to Dublin in September 1933, Patrick spent an entertaining evening listening to Frank O’Connor’s rendering of some of the old ballads his father used to sing: ‘Down by the Slaney Side’, ‘The Turfman from Ardee’ and ‘The Boys of Mullaghbawn’. When he attempted to join in ‘The Boys of Mullaghbawn’, O’Connor shut him up, telling him he had no ear, a criticism he took in good part. At this private concert he was introduced to Eileen and Seán O’Faoláin, who invited him to stay with them in their cottage near Enniskerry in County Wicklow, an invitation accepted with such alacrity that he accompanied them home immediately afterwards. He was charmed with their cottage in the shadow of the Sugar Loaf and spent happy hours hill-walking with Eileen. Seán, who wrote for the Sunday Chronicle, puffed him as one of Ireland’s most promising new poets, comparing him with the County Meath lyricist who had died in the trenches during the Great War, Francis Ledwidge. It was not a comparison that Kavanagh would have relished a few years later. At the time he was flattered; there was no poet he’d ‘rather be coupled with’. His pleasure was enhanced by the knowledge that the Sunday Chronicle was read in Inniskeen, though he affected to be averse to the publicity.33 Frank O’Connor introduced him to a librarian friend, Roisín Walsh, head of Dublin City Libraries, a former republican activist and a prominent socialist. She too was very taken with the young poet and, along with Frank O’Connor, visited Inniskeen in the summer of 1934. Roisín Walsh continued to be a good friend to Kavanagh for years to come.34

  He was now beginning to live a double life, to-ing and fro-ing between Inniskeen and Dublin. A weekday evening might find him slowly sipping a glass of porter in the Palace Bar and listening to a discussion of assonantal techniques in Gaelic poetry; the following Monday he might be at the Dundalk fowl market with two turkeys, hanging about for hours trying to match the sixpence per pound he had been lucky enough to get for the first of them, and then settling for fivepence.35 One of these visits to Dublin was to attend the funeral of Æ in Mount Jerome Cemetery on 19 July 1935 when his friend Frank O’Connor delivered the oration. He is among the chief mourners, close to the graveside, in the Evening Herald photo. Though he hadn’t seen Æ for two years, it was a sad occasion, the burial of his literary father figure. It was also his first sighting of W. B. Yeats; they were not introduced.

  Back in Inniskeen, Kavanagh was not altogether bereft of literary contacts. By 1931 he had made the acquaintance of the Dundalk dramatist Paul Vincent Carroll. Disillusioned with cultural life in post-Independence Ireland and particularly in his native Dundalk, Carroll had emigrated to Scotland, where he worked as a schoolteacher. He returned to Dundalk during his summer holidays from school and he and Kavanagh would meet in Inniskeen or at the seaside resort of Blackrock, near Dundalk. At this point Carroll’s career as a dramatist was just taking off. He had first come to prominence when his two-act play, The Watched Pot, attracted the attention of Yeats and Lennox Robinson and was presented at the experimental Peacock Theatre in Dublin in November 1930. Since Kavanagh did not attend this performance, he presumably did not know Carroll then. Two years later, on 15 August, he was a guest at the opening night of Carroll’s Things that are Caesar’s in the Abbey Theatre, a prize-winning play which proved so successful that it was given an American tour in 1932 and opened in London in January
1933. Like Kavanagh’s future masterpiece, The Great Hunger, it dramatised the victory of materialism over spirituality in a small-farm setting.36 Better educated, more travelled and far more successful, Carroll, as a dramatist, was not a rival; he was also physically less attractive than Kavanagh, small and very bald, so the poet found him a non-threatening friend. In the 1950s Kavanagh liked to tell an anecdote against Carroll, with whom he had by then quarrelled. Once, as they were parting after a chat in the early 1930s, Carroll exclaimed ‘Well, anyway, Patrick, the truth is we’re both major writers.’37

  It would be years before Carroll’s grim rural realism had much effect on his friend’s poetry, but it may have been as a consequence of their talks together that Kavanagh first began to conceive of himself as a writer with a social conscience and as the literate representative of his inarticulate countrymen. In November 1933 he sent Seumas O’Sullivan the first short story he had ever written, probably ‘The Drain Cleaner’.38 Unpublished then or later, it was his first attempt to write about an old peasant and mildly anticipates The Great Hunger in that it centres on an elderly bachelor farmer and his spinster sister. The old man is slow and feeble, unfit for the strenuous task of cleaning the drain, regretful that he has preferred a safe life with his sister to the risks of marriage, yet as he watches her bringing him bread and bottled tea to the field, he feels that he could not have abandoned her. In November 1933 Josie had just moved back home; did Patrick dread that his life might now have assumed its permanent shape, that this new partnership might carry on into doddery old age?

  Meetings with Carroll were confined to the summer holidays. For literary companionship throughout the year Patrick turned to another aspiring local poet, Valentine Hanratty, who lived only a few miles away in Channonrock.39 He cycled over several times a week to visit Val at home and discuss poetry and women. On fine afternoons they sometimes sat and talked in the Black Meadow by the Fane river near Carolan’s mill. Val, like Patrick, was a keen dance-goer and they cycled together to the hall in Rosdreenagh and to Kelly’s loft in Essexford; he also joined his friend at pitch and toss. Tarry’s friendship with Eusebius Cassidy in Tarry Flynn is modelled on Patrick’s friendship with Val Hanratty in so far as both are based on a shared interest in literature, dancing and women; otherwise, the hard-up Cassidy, who earns a precarious livelihood cutting calves, has little in common with the middle-class, secondary-school-educated Hanratty. It is quite likely that Kavanagh borrowed the highly unusual Christian name of Val’s younger brother, Eusebius, for Tarry’s friend, though he later said it derived from a Eusebius Murphy of Lowtown.40 (Father Eusebius was the Father Superior of the Marist Fathers who ran a boys’ secondary school in Dundalk and three local boys were named after him, one being Eusebius Hanratty.)

  For years after he had emigrated to train as a nurse in England and attend university in London, Val Hanratty published ballads in the Dundalk Examiner, voicing emigrant nostalgia and local piety; many years afterwards he sent Patrick a poem reminiscing over their shared past. While it sets out to sentimentalise the past, this poem reveals that Kavanagh’s relationship with other men in the parish was fraught and edgy. He was ‘ridiculed, hated and loved’, hated, it seems, because of his habit of uttering unpalatable home truths and because he cruelly ‘burst the bag’ of neighbours’ ‘dreams and ambitions’: ‘Stripped of the camouflage of makebelieve/You revealed them as they really were.’ Hanratty’s poem shows that his male neighbours’ taunting of Kavanagh, to which he alludes briefly in The Green Fool, was provoked by his own blunt speaking and sneers, not just by his intellectual pretensions and the publication of his verse.41

  By 1932 Patrick’s poetic aspirations were of an altogether different order than Val Hanratty’s. His reading had broadened to include Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Archibald MacLeish and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from whom he picked up the verbal tic of coining compound adjectives, e.g. apple-ripe. He pored over back copies of Poetry (Chicago). He was also catching up with the poetry of his Irish contemporaries — Seumas O’Sullivan, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, F. R. Higgins, Frank O’Connor. He had developed a habit of walking about with cuttings of poems from journals or handwritten copies stuffed in his pockets, and he hid some of these in the hedges of the farm so that he could consult them at odd moments during the day. When an idea or a phrase for a poem struck him out in the fields, he scribbled it on the inside of his cigarette packet. So his literary interests spilled over into his farming activities and the days were less dichotomised between manual work and writing.

  Yet the evenings were his customary writing time. He took over the dressing table in Celia’s former bedroom as a desk and wrote verse there by candlelight, the candle grease dripping on the varnish. He was tired and his back ached after a day in the fields, but he persevered. And when he rebelled and wished to fritter away a few hours, Peter and his mother scolded him. They wanted to chain him to his desk, he complained.42 Elsewhere, he has created the impression that his mother was an interrupter rather than an encourager of his work. In The Green Fool she is heard calling out to him from the kitchen, disturbing him just at the moment a new poem is hovering or a line that had eluded him:

  ‘Patrick, Patrick, are ye comin’ down. There’s a man here wants a heel on his boot.’

  ‘Patrick, come down we’re going to say the Rosary . . .’

  ‘Patrick, Patrick, the cows are after breakin’ into the turnips . . .’

  If it wasn’t the turnips, the pigs were after breaking loose, or a hen they wanted me catch for the fowl dealer.

  An unpublished collection of his 1930–c.1940 poems in the National Library is prefaced by a note to the reader that once again casts his mother as his person from Porlock:

  They [the ms poems] are my roots in Monaghan sitting at the end of the day upstairs in a cold corner by the light of a candle. A mother’s voice calling every now and then: ‘Come down and throw a lock of turnips to the unfortunate cows.’43

  These comic vignettes do not do his mother full justice. She liked Patrick to read his poems to her and when he came downstairs, excited at having finished a new poem, she wanted to hear it and be consulted as to its merits. She took a pride in seeing his words and name in print and was also impressed that poems earned guineas. Nevertheless, Bridget had a double agenda and the farm was her first priority — poetry, like shoe repairs, was a sideline.

  It is a measure of Patrick’s increasing preoccupation with literature and his eagerness for an audience in the early 1930s that in letters to Celia at her convent he interspersed home news with discussions of his views on poetry and enclosed copies of some of his poems, though he knew well that she was under-educated and the only verses she enjoyed were the lyrics of popular songs. Conscious that his letters to her might well be read by her Mother Superior, he laboured the religious angle:

  Well, you couldn’t do better than read real poetry, ’tis more religious than prayer . . .

  Poetry is a piece of earth in which the Holy Ghost is manifest.

  This association of poetry and religion was also a strand in his verse and one encouraged by Æ, as we have seen, yet at the time he was mouthing these pious sentiments to Celia, he had, supposedly, lost his religious faith. ‘O pagan poet/You and I are one . . .’ was how he expressed it in ‘To a Blackbird’ (May 1931). Both the paganism and the piety were affectations; he was an intellectual poseur. By 1935 he was a practising Catholic once more and, like Patrick Maguire in The Great Hunger, was rewarded by a ‘holy rise’, being promoted to a collector of money at the church door.44

  Religious imagery was but one strand in his verse. He was also experimenting with a realist, secular mode; he had turned to ‘objective reality’, as he put it in a May 1934 letter. In fact, he had been a realist intermittently since ‘Gold Watch’ in 1931:

  Engraved on the case

  House and mountain

  And a far mist

  Rising from faery fountain.

  On inner case />
  No. 2244

  Elgin Nath . . .

  Sold by a guy in a New York store.

  Dates of repairs

  1914 M.Y., 1918 H.J. . . .

  His most remarkable break-through into realism was ‘My Room’ (Dublin Magazine, April/June 1933) because, within the clichéd framework of situating the artist in an attic, this poem divulged something of his actual surroundings: a cramped upstairs bedroom with a sloped ceiling, the bed doubling as a desk, the walls covered in holy pictures. He omitted some of the grim details, of course: the old black chest he sat on and the discarded sewing-machine covered in candle grease or the varnished dressing-table that really served as his desk. He customarily avoided any precise revelation of his own particular circumstances in his poetry. In ‘Tinker’s Wife’, the most polished of these early-eye-on-the-object poems and the only one to admit ugly everyday images, his stance is that of an aloof middle-class male onlooker, observing an agile tinker woman scrabbling about on the ‘dunghill debris’:

  Tripping gingerly

  Over tin cannisters

  And sharp broken

  Dinner plates.

  Generally he wrote as a romantic, more concerned to record his feelings and reactions than his visual observations. Yet, while almost every 1930s’ poem is a lyric, presented from a first-person, present-tense perspective, almost none achieves individuality. He purposely copies stances and styles that seem legitimately literary; he cultivates derivativeness. Personal references are either very generalised or stripped of any disturbing detail or muffled by metaphor. In The Green Fool he would explain how a smooth, decorous lyric like ‘Ploughman’ was arrived at by censoring out most of the actual context: