Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Kavanagh spent about five months in London. He was ejected from his first bedsitter when he created a stink by frying herrings — his father had been partial to herrings and he had been brought up to think of them as good for the brain. By June he was installed in a room at 20 Williamson Street — ‘a mean house in a mean street’— where he would remain until he moved in with John Gawsworth and his wife in October.15 The sudden plunge into fending for himself in London after spending thirty-odd years in the same small village must have been quite bewildering. His only experience of cooking had been boiling a kettle or a pot of potatoes over an open fire and, used to being looked after by his mother or one of his sisters, he had probably never as much as washed a sock. The sheer size of London astounded him and he tried to cope by thinking of it as ‘Crossmaglen on a big scale’. Camden Town was like Dundalk on a Saturday night.16

  This London sojourn was to prove a crucial period for him as a writer. Freed from the continual demands of farming and domestic life under his mother’s surveillance, he had the leisure to work without interruption. Instead of being restricted to composing when he was at his most exhausted after a gruelling day’s manual labour and sacrificing companionship and recreation to do so, he was now at his table from early morning when he was at his freshest and most energetic. He kept up his country habit of rising at six or seven and put in four or five hours’ work before lunch. While it was possible to compose brief lyrics in his head as he worked alone in the fields or in the few afterwork hours he had at his disposal in Mucker, it would have been difficult to launch any lengthy and sustained large-scale prose project under these conditions. He needed leisure to experiment with his new narrative medium.

  In London, too, he lacked the social distractions of Inniskeen and Dublin. He knew very few people and, indeed, often suffered from loneliness. To fill some of the empty hours he took to frequenting the cinema on an almost daily basis.17 Films were still a novelty for him and probably had some educational as well as entertainment value, offering images of other worlds and ways of life. On fine summer afternoons he walked or lay in the sun on Hampstead Heath, puritanically offended by the courting couples who, publicly and in broad daylight, engaged in caresses that were only furtively and nocturnally indulged in Inniskeen. He followed the tourist trail and on Sunday mornings hung about Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

  When he discovered that there was a Sunday excursion train via Matlock, he began making arrangements to visit his sister Celia in mid-June. His first letter to her miscarried. Had the devil prompted him to address it to the Presbyterian instead of the Presentation Convent? he queried. On the July bank holiday he finally boarded an excursion train for Matlock. It was his first time to see Celia in nun’s apparel; he teased her that they could have produced any nun and he wouldn’t have known the difference. He was ill at ease in the prim polished convent parlour, but the nuns had a farm as well as a school and he shed all his shyness and embarrassment when he was given a conducted tour. The smell of the animals made him openly nostalgic for Mucker.18

  Kavanagh once compared the writer to a railway passenger sitting contentedly and comfortably in the same compartment mile after mile but every so often needing to take some action to break this rhythm by moving to a different compartment or train. The writer, he said, must cease relying on achievement or reputation and from time to time change name or direction.19 His own first trip to London was just such a transition.

  Not only was this his first time to reside for an extended period at a geographical and cultural distance from home; it was the first time prose had been substituted for poetry as his principal literary activity. The identity crisis precipitated by the sudden disappearance of every familar personal and contextual landmark was assuaged by the therapeutic exercise of recreating his lost world on the page. He had been so immersed in and so exhausted by his life as a farmer that he could gain no perspective on it, and as a poet he could not conceive of farming as legitimate literary material. Residence in London helped him to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance; he was surrounded by his future audience, urban types who had probably never seen a cow or a churn.

  Constable had assigned him a double task: to combine autobiography with social anthropology. The blurb on the dust-jacket sums up the book’s dual thrust: ‘The life of the community is made as vivid as the life of the person through whose eyes it is presented.’ As an autobiography the first half of the narrative takes him from babyhood, through eight years at the village school, to life as a hired field hand and practising small-farmer; the second half continues the process but concentrates more on his apprenticeship to poetry, his meeting with Dublin writers, his publication by Macmillan, taking him right up to the narrative present, his stay in London and his writing of the book.

  Preserving a balance between telling his own story and serving as a native informant was daunting, yet also peculiarly liberating. The imperative to provide an insider’s insight into the ways of an obscure rural community compelled him to shed an inhibiting sense of poetic decorum and write in a realist mode. Where he had previously inclined towards prettification and generic symbol, he now aimed at a precise, documentary particularity in which ugly and sordid details contribute to the effect of ‘honest reality’: as well as noticing woodbine and wild roses when walking down a lane, he observes ‘Baked and half-baked cakes of cow-dung’. Whereas realist poems such as ‘My Room’ or ‘Tinker’s Wife’ had provided a close-up of a scene divorced from its context, he now had to register and document his milieu. Fields and lanes, seasonal crops and wild flowers, workaday life on the farm and in the home and cobbler’s shop, local beliefs, rituals and pastimes, all had to be introduced to a British public. Confronted with the challenge of peopling his parish, he had to construct dramatic scenes and dialogue. The very expansiveness of the narrative project — three hundred and fifty pages of prose — emancipated him from the verbal and syntactical constraints of the brief lyric.

  In his portrayal of a parish community at work, at play and at prayer, Kavanagh intersperses the narrative with a number of playlets. Narrator and characters between them enact or talk about the various aspects of farming: ploughing, sowing and threshing corn, thinning turnips, cutting turf, driving cattle, slaughtering pigs, churning. The commercial side of farming is not ignored: cattle fairs, a pork market, the purchase of a horse and cart at an auction, the leasing of land on the conacre system, and attendance at a hiring fair. There are lively accounts of wedding festivities, the rituals surrounding death, the annual pilgrimage to a holy well, gambling at the crossroads, gaffing salmon, blackberrying, and Christmas mumming. Several chapters are devoted to chronicling local superstitions about cures, ghosts and fairies.

  One problem facing the farmer-autobiographer, in particular, is how to avoid the repetitiveness inherent in the cyclical nature of farming. In The Green Fool, cumulative experiences such as ploughing or gathering potatoes are condensed into singular episodes. In many instances the narrator’s role is to present common rural activities with a first-person immediacy and vividness. The narrative oscillates between chronological progression and documentary stasis as the focus shifts from the hero’s development to dwell on some aspect of farming life. Yet all this rural detail is profferred with a remarkably light touch. No subject is dwelt on at length; sometimes he switches from one topic to another within a brief paragraph. Each chapter consists of a sequence of slight, impressionistic jottings. The thematic variety, the to-ing and fro-ing of so many characters, the frequent interruption of commentary by conversation, ensures that there is hardly a dull moment. To some extent Kavanagh is catering for a literary tourist trade, what he would later characterise as the kind of reader who seeks ‘quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious’.

  One of the book’s chief delights is hearing the authentic ‘voice of the people’ on every page. This larding of both commentary and conversation with local saws and sayings was not simply a natural consequence of growing up
in or writing about Inniskeen. It was a legacy of the Literary Revival in general and of Synge’s drama in particular. That Synge, scion of the Protestant ascendancy, should have eavesdropped on the speech of Wicklow servant girls and jotted down or memorised their turns of speech to help him construct an authentic peasant dialect, is not surprising; but one does not expect that Kavanagh, a man of the people, would have eavesdropped and recorded local idioms in his notebook. A notebook of preparatory jottings for The Green Fool lists numerous Inniskeen sayings, some of which were included in the final text:

  ‘You’re the key of the work.’

  Of churning — ‘Take a brash.’

  and some for which he didn’t find a place:

  ‘Don’t give that letter. I didn’t kettle it yet.’

  ‘All over like a bad breakfast.’

  Two big slits in coat: ‘Two pockets to put dogs in.’20

  The use of a notebook may have been mere imitation of predecessors such as Synge, or it may have been part of the process of learning to listen as a writer instead of merely hearing. Comically, he suffers the traditional fate of eavesdroppers: ‘Is that Paddy Kavanagh?’ his quarry exclaims. ‘Would he be gettin’ a bit odd of himself?’

  His sharp ear and thorough grasp of the local vernacular, of no use to the kind of poetry he was writing, now came into their own. Sitting in a room in London he could replay snatches of dialogue from the cobbler’s workshop, the crossroads or the chapel gate after Mass. In reconstructing local life, his primary model was the fiction of William Carleton, the nineteenth-century Ulster short-story writer and novelist, whose work he had begun to revere. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed him how to populate his narrative with a multitude of characters and make them live through speech. All the characters in The Green Fool are talkers, always ready with an opinion, a proverb, a local cliché or commonplace. He catches every turn and nuance of local talk and even attempts to mimic the Inniskeen accent in his spelling. Here he is recording the reaction of two ‘oldish girls’ to the news of another girl’s forthcoming wedding:

  ‘Well, she’s not much and the fella that’s marryin’ her must be a fool.’

  ‘Sure some girls would take anyone.’

  ‘I wonder is she gettin’ married decent.’

  ‘Just.’

  This word ‘just’ was much more eloquent than it appears on paper. It was steeped in the venom of a thousand desires.

  Sometimes Kavanagh stressed the poetic qualities of local speech; mostly he balked at presenting his shrewd, commonsensical neighbours as ‘a poetry-loving people’. Throughout The Green Fool there is an unresolved tension between a Revivalist romanticisation of country folk and a comic realist representation. As he later recognised, he was serving two metropolitan masters: a London publisher who expected an entertaining text and a Dublin literary readership, hypersensitive about stage-Irishry, which demanded a more lyrical and reverential representation of the Irish countryside. Accordingly, he has recourse to double-speak when he writes about his neighbours, referring to them as farmers or peasants according to whether the situation is realist/comic or Revivalist. By no means a Literary Revival term, the word ‘peasant’ belonged to literature rather than to life in Ireland, and outside literature had a decidedly condescending, colonial resonance. The normal term for a landowner who possessed even as few as five acres was ‘farmer’. Kavanagh employs the ordinary word ‘farmer’ when he is reporting the speech of the people or writing about their day-to-day activities. So when his neighbours talk about the 1914–18 War, they say ‘It’s a great war for the farmer’, and when his cobbler father buys a nine-acre field, he is told by way of congratulation: ‘Yer a farmer’s son now.’ When he views his neighbours through Literary Revival lenses, regarding them as purveyors of Irish folk culture, they become ‘peasants’ e.g. ‘. . . the secret archives of peasant minds of which no official document has ever been made’. One part of him wanted Inniskeen to outshine the much-hyped West of Ireland and on the basis of his travels in Irish-speaking Connemara he does conclude: ‘The English-speaking peasants of my own country were nearer to the old tradition.’ Yet he could not altogether conceal his awareness of the disparity between his commonsensical neighbours and the various models of literary peasantry available for his imitation, deftly summarised by John Wilson Foster:

  Pearse’s peasantry is innocent, childlike, submissive, Catholic; Synge’s romantic, primitive, artistic; Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s mystical, otherworldly, traditionalist; Colum’s and Stephens’ bright, adaptive, quick-witted . . .21

  A large part of the implicit comedy of The Green Fool derives from the gap between literary orthodoxy and Mucker fact. Inniskeen refuses to be Innisfree.

  As autobiographer and native informant alike, the narrator’s main contribution to the book’s success is his personality: he exudes geniality, good-natured amiability, an untroubled gaiety. He is affectionately amused at the vagaries and rascalities of his rogues and villains and at his own shortcomings, never judgmental. The self-defensive, self-justifying first-person narrator of the poems is very seldom on display. Whatever tribulations may afflict the characters and whatever their lapses into ugly tricks or criminal activities, these barely ruffle the narrator’s cheerful mood or dispel his confidence that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. To a large extent Kavanagh’s prolonged absence from Inniskeen was performing its clichéd function of lending a patina of nostalgic fondness to a way of life he had frequently griped against and grudged while it was actually occurring. The narrator’s sunny tolerance reflected an aspect of his own personality. Yet there must also have been a conscious decision to charm his readers by opting for a comic realist approach to Inniskeen, unlike Brinsley MacNamara in The Valley of the Squinting Windows, whose view of Garradrimna was as distorted by prejudice and hostility as that of the most squint-eyed and poison-penned of his characters. Kavanagh later disparaged the book’s humour as stage-Irish, dictated by the need to manufacture an exportable literary commodity, tailored to the requirements of the English market.22 Within the text itself his excuse is that he remembers only ‘the quaint and the bizarre’. Yet comedy in The Green Fool is not reliant on buffoonery or malapropisms; it is largely a matter of the narrator’s tone and perspective. The numerous small incidents and encounters that add up to a varied picture of life in Inniskeen are presented with such affectionate indulgence that the community endears itself to the reader. What the narrative elicits on almost every page is a smile, never a guffaw.

  The biographer trawling The Green Fool for reliable data on Kavanagh’s first thirty-three years comes away with a rich sense of context but little accurate information. His role of native informant ensures that, though he is omnipresent in the book, he does not divulge much about his personal life, and his coyness about revealing his age prevents him from either giving his date of birth or dating certain episodes as they fit into the chronology of his life. The minor misinformation that at his father’s death he was just 22, when he was actually almost 25, is a case in point. He later admitted that he had invented such episodes as his pilgrimage to Lady Well, and his family vehemently denied that he had ever been hired out as a labourer at a hiring fair.23 Given that his parents were not short of money and there was plenty of work for the only grown son at home, their version appears more credible.

  Among his preparatory jottings for The Green Fool, Kavanagh included a cautionary note to himself:

  A man who writes a book libelling his own people is burning his bed. The fragments cannot be put together again.24

  ‘Burning his bed’, a domestic variant on ‘burning his boats’, indicates his awareness that if he alienated ‘his own people’, either his family or his neighbours, he risked becoming so unwelcome at home and in the local community that he could no longer continue to live in Inniskeen. The villagers of Delvin’s notorious reaction to Brinsley MacNamara’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows was a dire warning to all Irish writer
s. His book had been publicly burned, his schoolmaster father’s school boycotted and his livelihood thereby threatened.25 Kavanagh was embarking on an autobiography which afforded far less protective cover than a novel like MacNamara’s. Moreover, he was an unusually young autobiographer, so that most of his cast of characters were still living and ready to take offence. No sooner had he been presented with the opportunity of writing about the subject he knew best, his life in Inniskeen, than he found himself obliged to suppress a good deal of relevant information and generally engage in an imaginative rearrangement of facts. The aim was to achieve a comic realist narrative rather than a truthful documentary.

  As the phrase ‘burning his bed’ suggests, the first group to be placated was his immediate family. Whether he entered into an explicit pact with them not to exploit their private lives for copy, his portrayal of his siblings is markedly reticent. None of his seven sisters plays a part in the narrative and his relationship with them is scarcely touched upon. None is described and only one, Mary, is named, and that en passant. His brother Peter does receive some mention because he was sympathetic to the project and would have consented readily to his inclusion. The book was dedicated to him. We learn hardly anything about day-to-day family life in the Kavanagh household. Their kitchen doubles as a cobbler’s workshop and the writer focuses on its social instead of its domestic aspect. It is effectively a stage set, like a room in an O’Casey tenement, a public forum where customers come and go and neighbours gather to talk, tell stories and perform. While he pays tribute to his mother’s thrifty managerial ways, she is seldom portrayed in a maternal role and generally functions as one of the rustic chorus in the cobbler’s workshop or in the later part as one of the ‘enemies of promise’. Discretion about family matters may have been a factor in contriving that the narrator, on one pretext or another, spends much of his time away from home and out of doors. When he is at home in adult years, he is frequently alone, reading or writing.