Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Seven hundred and fifty copies of The Green Fool were issued by Harper and Brothers, New York, at the beginning of 1939 in advance of the libel trial, but the firm took the precaution of stubbing the disputed page 300. Despite a number of welcoming reviews in the North American press between February and April, the book’s print run was not extended. The verdict of the London court would not have disposed the publishers to take any further risk with an unknown author.

  At the time of the libel trial the book was being serialised in the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, a Belfast-based newspaper which circulated across the border and was read in Inniskeen. Serialisation had begun in December 1938 and, although it continued after the court case until the last chapter was arrived at on 13 May 1939, the editor’s or Kavanagh’s paranoia about further libel action resulted in a number of revisions. In addition to the deletion of the entire Gogarty passage, the names of Helen Waddell and John Gawsworth and some of the comments on Seán O’Faoláin were also omitted; Oul’ Quinn was renamed Oul’ Casey; McNello’s pub in Inniskeen became Daly’s; and the Big House, Rocksavage, was referred to as Rocklawn. Since the Irish Weekly was being read in Inniskeen during and after a London libel action that caused a local sensation, the fact that no lawsuits were pressed by Kavanagh’s neighbours probably testifies to the fact that The Green Fool was libel-proof.18 He had not pried into the private lives of any family or lifted the lid on any scandals; at worst, or best, he had titillated his neighbours with the hope that he might have done so.

  For the rest of 1939 there was a feeling in Dublin’s artistic circles that Kavanagh was owed. Directly after the libel action, The Irish Times did its bit by commissioning a series of four ‘specials’, the paper’s jargon for feature articles — ‘The Flight from the Land’ (15 April), ‘Twenty-three Tons of Accumulated Folklore’ (18 April), ‘Old Moore’s Poets’ (9 May) and ‘Sentimental Ploughman’ (30 May). Kavanagh was encouraged to apply for the newly created position of Talks Officer with Radio Éireann and was called for interview on 18 May. The salary — £600 for a man, £500 for a woman — was approximately four times what Peter was earning as a primary schoolteacher, so there was stiff competition for the post. It is a mark of the high esteem in which Kavanagh was held after the rave reviews of The Green Fool, or perhaps testifies to the wave of sympathy and support following on the libel case, that he should have reached the interview stage, given his inadequate educational qualifications and limited broadcasting experience. That he was personally known to T. J. Kiernan may have helped, of course. Since the interviews were conducted by the Civil Service Commission, which would have insisted on fluency in Irish as a minimum requirement, Kavanagh was never a serious candidate. Attendance at a number of evening classes in Irish and a couple of weeks’ holiday in a Connemara Gaeltacht had left him with a ‘cúpla focal’ at best.

  In the event, the post went to Roibéard Ó Faracháin, a much better qualified applicant. Four to five years younger than Kavanagh, a Dubliner, with fluent Irish, ten years’ experience as a primary schoolteacher and an M.A. in scholastic philosophy, he had published two books of poetry in English, a collection of short stories in Irish, and had acted as assistant editor to the Capuchin Annual for two years. He was interested in theatre, especially poetic theatre, and with Austin Clarke would go on to found the Dublin Verse Speaking Society and the Lyric Theatre; a year after he became Talks Officer, he was made a director of the Abbey Theatre. He also had vastly more radio experience than Kavanagh, having been, since 1935, one of three critics who broadcast book reviews in Irish for the station.

  Kavanagh’s lifelong enmity toward Ó Faracháin dates from his unsuccessful application for the job of Talks Officer, yet in fairness it must be said that the hostility was likely to have arisen at some point and been sustained in any case because, as we shall see, the two men were to become implacably opposed ideologically. Still, it was unwise to have taken against Ó Faracháin because the Talks Officer’s remit covered an enormous field stretching from farming talks to news in Irish, and he was to be very influential in determining the station’s choice of programmes; General Features Officer, the title substituted for Talks Officer in 1945, more accurately described his role.19

  Kavanagh’s application for the Talks Officer job demonstrates that by May 1939 he had no intention of staying on the farm if he could help it. His mother’s blackmail had not succeeded. Josie had her first baby in February and she would be unable to help out in Mucker or visit with any frequency for some time to come. He could scarcely have chosen a more inopportune moment to leave home, but Christian decided to be unchristian all the same.

  A surprise offer from two English women fans, the Misses Blois, who ran a teashop at 3 Oak End Way, Gerrards Cross, opened up an avenue of escape. They were so impressed by The Green Fool that they were prepared to provide its author with free board and lodging to enable him to write another book. When he was turned down for the post of Talks Officer, he took up the Blois invitation and by late May was installed as writer in residence. It was an opportunity to live within an hour’s train journey from London, which at this juncture he regarded as an employment centre as well as a literary metropolis. The Oak End Way residence was at the town end of the street, conveniently close to the railway station.

  The Blois ménage provided him with ideal conditions for writing — leisure, a room of his own, meals prepared, home comforts. While the three last were to be had, admittedly in a more downmarket version, in Mucker, the Blois sisters, unlike his mother, considered him as primarily a writer and he was not made to feel guilty because he was neglecting other chores. It was his first prolonged stay in a suburban household and he was quite amenable to being house-trained and acquiring some middle-class civilities. At first he was delighted with the novelty of his situation, working away happily on a new novel in the mornings, commuting frequently to the city in the afternoons and renewing his friendship with John Gawsworth. He was particularly pleased by his patrons’ gift of a typewriter and began teaching himself to type. The address and date on most of his Gerrards Cross correspondence are typed; he did not become proficient enough to type his letters in full.20 There was not much to do besides write or read. The town was small and offered little by way of distraction other than a walk in the Buckinghamshire countryside.

  From the first, Kavanagh’s chief problems were financial. He was economically dependent on his hostesses and there was no hope of earning a livelihood from novel-writing in the near future. Michael Joseph had a contractual lien on the novel he was writing and any royalties it earned would go to discharging the costs of the libel action for which Joseph held him accountable. So he divided his time in Gerrards Cross between writing and job-hunting: visiting the offices of newspapers such as The Observer looking for books to review and writing to publishers seeking some more permanent form of employment.

  Among the publishers Kavanagh approached at this time was Harold Macmillan, who had brought out Ploughman and Other Poems three years previously. His brief note to Macmillan in mid-July was a combination of begging letter and job application: he was a deserving writer threatened with starvation; could Macmillan offer him employment? Just as he had exaggerated the persona of ‘peasant poet’ to provoke the interest of Æ on his first visit to Dublin, he now played the romantic role of the starving artist to attract Macmillan’s sympathy, whereas in truth he had never been better fed. The letter mentioned that he was the author of two books but did not specify the title of either, though he did mention that Macmillan had published a volume of his verse. He evidently thought it politic to pass over The Green Fool, either because it lacked the Macmillan imprint or because he thought the libel suit might deter other publishers.

  Fortunately, Harold Macmillan immediately recognised Kavanagh’s name and was interested in his tale of woe. It had been only three years since Ploughman and he would have heard news of him in the meantime through Sean and Eileen O’Casey. He was well aware of his authorship of Th
e Green Fool — in fact he scribbled the title of this book on Kavanagh’s letter. He probably knew O’Casey’s high opinion of The Green Fool and, far from being put off by its unhappy fate, he replied immediately asking for a copy. His letter did not hold out any prospect of employment, but Kavanagh was so encouraged that he sent the book by return of post and in the accompanying letter elaborated on the kind of job offer he had in mind:

  I had hopes that you might be able to use me to sift Mss. as I am a good judge of a book — or to write blurbs. I might add I am not bad at figures. In the final eventuality I will gladly accept any job that offers comparative security.

  It was an ill-judged job application: Kavanagh showed himself willing to be fobbed off with any kind of work; he was seeking security at almost any price. He would have known that his friend Frank O’Connor was paid a monthly retainer of £15 by Macmillan, yet he did not suggest that Harold Macmillan enter into a similar arrangement with him. Perhaps he thought that the debt to Michael Joseph precluded it; perhaps too the fate of The Green Fool left him far from sanguine about the possibility of surviving on novel-writing. Instead, he touted his literary skills as a qualification that entitled him to a role in the publishing world or even a clerical post, however lowly. He wanted the kind of non-royalty income on which Michael Joseph would have no claim. Harold Macmillan replied immediately to say that there was no opening in the firm.

  By early August Kavanagh’s economic situation had worsened considerably and he was at real risk of becoming the starving writer he had pretended to be. Lonely and sexually frustrated, he had made passes at a waitress in the Blois café. Whether she complained or he was caught in flagrante is not recorded, but the Misses Blois were furious. They were not going to subsidise a lecher who could not be trusted to keep his hands on the keyboard. There was a major row, after which he found himself summarily ejected, minus his typewriter, and compelled to seek refuge once again with his friend, John Gawsworth, in 33 Great James Street. Unless he found paid employment, his days in London were numbered.

  He called on Harold Macmillan, who was about to depart on his annual Scottish holiday. Macmillan promised to read The Green Fool during his holiday and gave Kavanagh £3 to tide him over until his return. This could have proved a very lucky break for Kavanagh. Apart altogether from the very considerable literary merits of The Green Fool, the location in which Macmillan had chosen to read it could hardly have been more propitious. For, despite his Etonian background and his marriage into the aristocracy, Harold Macmillan was inordinately proud of the fact that his grandfather, a founder of the publishing house, was born a crofter’s son on the Isle of Arran. Every year since the age of 8 he had made a pilgrimage to the island and a picture of the ancestral crofter’s cabin was to be prominently displayed in 10 Downing Street during his prime ministership. Family tradition recounted how this great-grandfather, Duncan, even after he had moved to the mainland town of Irvine, continued to keep a cow and farm a few acres.21 Reading Kavanagh’s ‘peasant’ autobiography on the Isle of Arran, Harold Macmillan, descendant of crofters, found himself sympathetically disposed towards its author. He returned to London resolved to help.

  What he proposed to Kavanagh on 15 August was to pay him a retainer of £3 a week for six months, on condition that he arranged a release from the contractual obligation to offer his next book to Michael Joseph. Kavanagh immediately approached Michael Joseph but, not surprisingly, since he had lost £100 plus costs, £400 all told, on the Oliver St John Gogarty libel action and hoped to recoup some of his losses on the next book, Joseph was quite unwilling to relinquish his option on it. Ever the optimist, Kavanagh returned to Macmillan on the 17th hoping to be offered some alternative assistance. What he got was the price of a one-way ticket to Dublin.

  8

  I HAD A FUTURE

  (1939–1941)

  Gods of the imagination bring back to life

  The personality of those streets,

  Not any streets

  But the streets of nineteen forty . . .

  Show me the stretcher-bed I slept on

  In a room on Drumcondra Road . . .

  (‘I Had a Future’)

  On his return to Ireland, Kavanagh’s principal aim was to complete his novel with all possible speed. He had decided to churn out a potboiler that would fulfil his contractual obligation, confident that, once he was free of Joseph, Macmillan would renew his offer of a weekly retainer. Meantime, he needed a roof over his head. If he returned to Mucker he would be expected to resume his farming duties and thus be prevented from making rapid headway on his novel. Instead, he invited himself to stay with his sister Sissie, once his school mate, now a qualified nurse and married to Joseph McLoughlin of Cavan House, Killygordan, County Donegal.1 Sissie was content to receive him for a short holiday, not as a long-term boarder and freeloader. She was a busy farmer’s wife with a new baby to look after and he soon wore out his welcome for he was contributing nothing whatever to the family budget and she had been brought up to regard his writing as a form of dossing.

  Of all the Kavanagh family, only his young brother Peter shared his own faith in his genius and was prepared to support him financially. Peter, a teacher at the Christian Brothers’ school in Westland Row, Dublin, duplicated the offer made by the ladies in Gerrards Cross — free board and lodging for a few weeks or months to enable him to complete his novel. It was a remarkably generous offer from a young bachelor on a relatively low salary who could have used the money for his own amusement. After the school holidays in August 1939 the brothers set up house together in a flat at 51 Upper Drumcondra Road where Patrick slept on ‘a stretcher bed that had been purchased for seven and sixpence’.2 The temporary expedient of the stretcher-bed indicates that his stay was not intended to be of long duration.

  Immediately after his arrival in Dublin, Patrick fell in love. Her name was Maeve Mulcahy, one of a celebrated family of beauties from Sligo, a cultivated and intelligent young woman who had moved to Dublin to be close to Frank O’Connor. O’Connor had met Maeve the previous Easter when he was in Sligo judging at one of the two rival local feiseanna. Her father, an ex-republican like O’Connor, was involved in the administration of a feis and he had visited the Mulcahy home, where he was a most welcome guest. He became attached to Maeve, the most lively and vivacious of the Mulcahy sisters.3 Whatever scruples Kavanagh might have had about attempting to annex a friend’s girlfriend were allayed by the fact that O’Connor was married to Evelyn Speaight, née Bowen, at the time. Within a few days of meeting Maeve, Kavanagh began proposing to her. Half-teasing, half in earnest, he would ask her, ‘Will you marry me on Tuesday?’ She was flattered by his attention but not bowled over. A photo survives of Kavanagh walking down the street flanked by Maeve and her sister: he is clutching a newspaper and a cake box, on his way to afternoon tea with the sisters. The camera has caught the radiant affection with which he gazes at Maeve and something of the gaiety of the two smartly dressed sisters. The sisters would have bought the cake, Maeve says. Patrick was penniless.

  While Maeve thought him an entertaining and humorous companion, she found his attempts at fondling and embracing her rather rough and clumsy. He had acquired no refinement in caressing a woman and appeared to think that the way to behave was to push her up against a wall and paw her. Since she was very fond of Frank O’Connor, it is uncertain whether she would have undertaken to tutor Kavanagh in the amorous arts, but in any case the outbreak of the war cut short the budding romance.

  On Sunday morning, 3 September 1939, he was strolling down the Drumcondra Road, a ‘fresh and foolish’ fellow ‘from the happy country’, when he came upon a boy holding a Stop Press before him like an apron. It consisted of only one word. For Kavanagh the outbreak of the war meant that Dublin, which he had been looking on as a temporary address, became his permanent home. Hundreds of Irish people were travelling back from England, escaping the war or the draft. He had arrived just a few weeks ahead of the posse. Because of th
e war, Maeve Mulcahy felt obliged to return to Sligo and live with her widowed father. She took up a post as a domestic science teacher at a local convent school and her lover temporarily abandoned his pursuit.

  As soon as war was declared, the government announced that Ireland was neutral and Dublin gradually went into wartime mode. Trenches were dug in parks; petrol rationing was introduced at the end of October; white bread began to be streaked a grey-brown, turning darker as the war proceeded. The city was dimmed out rather than blacked out, with restrictions on display lighting, and turf would soon be stacked on what became known as the New Bog Road in the Phoenix Park. Cigarettes, to which Patrick was addicted, were in short supply.

  It is doubtful if wartime austerity made much difference to the Kavanaghs at first, since neither brother was used to a lavish lifestyle nor had much opportunity to acquire extravagant tastes. Their staple diet of bread, eggs, milk, bacon and sausages remained plentiful throughout the war years and no one with country relations was ever short of butter. Patrick was usually able to charm shop girls into keeping a packet of cigarettes under the counter for him. The brothers would not have really felt the pinch until rationing of tea, sugar, clothes and shoes began in 1942, a year when gas rationing, the most punitive restriction of all, was introduced.

  Even with two adults living on one teacher’s salary, they were well off compared to many of their fellow citizens. Unemployment was high in Dublin in the war years and community kitchens and free food vouchers were necessary to ward off starvation for many. Near Grafton Street’s smart shops and cafés, children went barefoot even in winter.

  Nevertheless Peter, who was used to having the spending of his entire salary, did feel constrained. In October 1939, when it had become apparent that Patrick would be at least a semi-permanent, non-contributory guest, he decided to economise by moving from Drumcondra Road to cheaper accommodation nearer the city centre at 35 Haddington Road. It was the first of many flittings. Peter was earning £13 a month as a schoolteacher and the furnished bedsitter, which cost only 12 shillings a week, left sufficient money to cover the modest living expenses of the two frugally reared bachelors. Patrick succeeded in convincing his more budget-conscious brother that cigarettes were a necessity; he could not write unless he smoked.