Kavanagh’s all too visible poverty and evident eagerness to succeed elicited sympathy from several Dublin matrons. One influential woman who tried to come to his assistance, however, was rebuffed. This was Delia Murphy, who, in addition to her own celebrity as the singer of such countrywide Irish household favourites as ‘The Spinning Wheel’ and ‘Three Lovely Lassies from Bannion’, was married to Dr Tom Kiernan, director of programmes for Radio Éireann. Patrick probably met her through his friendship with Arthur Darley, for Darley sometimes accompanied her on the guitar. Delia, a handsome, extroverted woman with a larger than life, almost overpowering, personality, tried to take Kavanagh under her wing. Socially, she gravitated towards uninhibitedly bohemian or country-bred folk, totally disregarding class distinctions, and in ‘polite’ Dublin circles she was scathingly referred to as a ‘tinker’. This association with tinkerdom was partly based on her repeated claim that she had learned most of her repertoire from the tinkers, partly on her hoydenish manner. Kavanagh, as a talented country poet newly come to town, attracted Delia Murphy’s favour and she was in a position to find him paying work on the radio. She helped Donagh MacDonagh, then a hard-up poet and barrister, by persuading her husband to offer him a regular weekly radio slot entitled ‘Ireland is Singing’ and could doubtless have brought off something similar for Kavanagh, had he not repelled her advances. He liked women to be middle-class and ‘lady-like’ and Delia was altogether too hearty, blowsy and alcohol-loving for his taste. He also shared in cultivated and middle-class Dublin’s disdain for her come-all-ye songs. Once Delia, the life and soul of every party, began singing, there was no stopping her, and Kavanagh, who loved to talk, deplored the ballad singer’s suppression of conversation.13 The Kiernans lived at 32 Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, not far from the Kavanaghs’ shared apartment at Haddington Road, and he was rude when she called on him informally. She was not the only visitor to be given short shrift. The brothers did not welcome callers to their cramped bedsitter and turned away other friendly writers such as Ernie O’Malley, celebrated author of On Another Man’s Wound. Their inhospitality was understandable, yet unfortunate, because Patrick was in no position to alienate potential allies.
By dint of working away at it morning after morning he completed the required 75,000 words of the novel he named The Land Remains by the end of November 1939 and sent it to his London literary agent, A. M. Heath, for delivery to Michael Joseph. It was a cynical exercise in fulfilling the terms of his contract with Joseph and was never intended for publication, but the discipline involved in compiling it helped him to establish a daily work routine during his first months in Dublin. This unpublished novel, written in longhand, has not been preserved. Its plot may have been one of those to which he returned in later fictions: the Land Commission’s division of the Plunkett-Kenny estate, the tale of a villainous younger son’s rise from pennilessness to the status of big farmer, the failed romance of a poet-farmer.
As soon as A. M. Heath forwarded Michael Joseph’s letter acknowledging that he had discharged his contractual obligation, Kavanagh ceased using him as agent. On 6 December he wrote to Harold Macmillan, enclosing a copy of Joseph’s letter and asking him to consider renewing his previous offer of a weekly advance against royalties on a new novel. He claimed that he had already embarked on this new novel, to be entitled An Irish Winter’s Tale, and, in lieu of a sample chapter, sent the article ‘A Winter’s Tale’, which The Irish Times was due to publish the next day. Smyllie, Seán O’Faoláin and Fred Higgins were cited as referees, established literary figures who could vouch for the merit of the projected novel. He told Macmillan that he also planned a sequel on ‘the sunny time of the year’.
The letter to Macmillan shows that he had already consciously begun to oscillate between two boldly contrasting representations of his former milieu: the one grimly realist, the other sunny and comic, and that he was more imaginatively drawn to the darker story. The projected Winter’s Tale would soon evolve into his long poem The Great Hunger; his summer story, after a very long gestation and many redraftings, would eventually be published as Tarry Flynn.
Harold Macmillan replied within a few days, offering polite encouragement, but making no mention of a weekly retainer. Kavanagh tried once more, this time elaborating on his desperate financial situation and introducing a hint of aesthetic blackmail:
Regarding the book I propose doing could you possibly advance me some weekly remittance? The articles I am doing hardly keep me in cigarettes and I am just existing on the fringe of starvation. I am afraid that owing to this state of affairs I’ll be forced to offer myself to the first obliging publisher as happened with sad result before . . .
Financial rescue was at hand, but not from Macmillan. In December, the trustees of the Æ Memorial Fund decided to bestow the 1939 award of £100 on Patrick Kavanagh ‘in recognition of his published, unpublished and projected work’.14 This fund, named after his first patron, George William Russell, had been set up with the object of assisting Irish writers under the age of 35, and made an award every five years on the recommendation of its advisory committee. Given that Kavanagh had turned 35 in October, he was lucky to have qualified. There were twenty-four contestants, the most formidable competitor being Brian O’Nolan, whose brilliant novel At Swim-Two-Birds had been published under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien in 1939. The panel of adjudicators, in effect, had the invidious task of deciding whether Kavanagh was actually or potentially a more gifted writer than O’Nolan. There was probably some eloquent special pleading on Kavanagh’s behalf by Seán O’Faoláin, the Irish Academy of Letters representative on the advisory committee. Another articulate supporter on the committee would have been the editor of the Dublin Magazine, Seumas O’Sullivan, who had published Kavanagh’s poetry for eight years. A factor in his favour would have been the rave reviews of The Green Fool and its subsequent withdrawal; he had not been in the city long enough to have forfeited the sympathy and goodwill of the Palace Bar set. It could be argued that Kavanagh was an appropriate recipient of the award on the grounds of talent and need and because of his earlier association with Æ. However, the pecuniary circumstances of the two main contestants may have been his supporters’ strongest argument. As a civil servant with a regular salary, O’Nolan was not in such dire need of financial assistance as the destitute ex-farmer. In a compromise decision, the merits of O’Nolan’s case were recognised by the bestowal of a special award of £30. He was not pleased to be publicly relegated to the position of runner-up.
Though the award was not announced in the press until January, Kavanagh had the good news by 29 December. In addition to its financial benefits, the Æ Award was a morale booster, a public recognition of his literary merit. He immediately set about capitalising on it by writing to inform Harold Macmillan:
I got it mainly on the strength of the little book of poems published by you. I am sure it will be pleasing to you as a publisher — apart from the fact that you have been my friend — to see that your judgment is sound. There were several poets entered for the award — London published — but none of them had the Macmillan imprint save myself.
When it came to buttering up potential patrons at this point, he was ready to stoop to the most obsequious flattery and to play the part of trusting and naif dependant. He seems to have given up all hopes of the coveted retainer because he makes no mention of his projected novel, though the award was for ‘projected’ as well as published work. Instead, he represents himself as a poet. Perhaps he was already preparing the ground for the new collection he was to send the firm a year later, when he again made the point that he had won the Æ Memorial Award for his poetry.
The prize of £100 was the equivalent of seven months’ salary for a young clerk or a primary schoolteacher like Kavanagh’s brother. Had he budgeted the money carefully, he would have been free of financial worries for the first half of 1940. He had been reared in a farming economy where the large cash sums derived at irregular intervals from the sale of
animals or produce had to be prudently reinvested or saved for a rainy day, but he was utterly incapable of budgeting or saving money. This may have been because his mother had never allowed him any financial responsibility in the running of the farm, but she saw it as a character trait: he ‘was afraid that a coin would burn a hole in his pocket’ was how she expressed it.15 Perhaps there was a connection between spending and creativity; in any case, he had no experience in handling large sums of money and by March 1940 he was in desperate financial straits once more.
He was not shy about advertising his plight and poured his tale of woe into any sympathetic ear. Some of those who befriended him and tried to help him at this time, as on many occasions in the future, were influential women. Roisín Walsh, the Dublin City Librarian, gave him many a pound.16 However, his importuning of Mrs MacEntee, wife of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, to use her influence to obtain him a civil service post or some kind of governmental sinecure, backfired badly. He received a peremptory official letter from her husband’s Department informing him that clerical posts in the civil service were filled by competitive examination unless in exceptional circumstances when temporary recruitments were made from the Labour Exchange. He was advised to register as unemployed with the Labour Exchange, a cutting blow to his pride both as writer and ex-farmer.17
Fortunately, some other well-placed men were more compassionate. H. L. Doak of the Talbot Press commissioned an anthology of schoolbook verse. The size of the advance for the proposed anthology has not been recorded but over a few months Kavanagh was able to claim an occasional extra pound or two on the strength of this forthcoming publication which, in fact, never saw the light of day and has apparently vanished without trace. On the basis of his research he also contributed a ‘special’, ‘The Old Sixth Book’, to The Irish Times on 11 April 1940, a rather dutiful account of the poems to be found in the Sixth Book of the Royal Readers series. Frank Geary, editor of the conservative Catholic Irish Independent, was prevailed upon to interview him in late March with a view to putting a few journalistic assignments his way. At this point, as far as journal publication was concerned, Kavanagh was prepared to run with the Unionist/Church of Ireland/liberal hare and hunt with the conservative and populist Catholic hounds. While hoping for a post as columnist or journalist with The Irish Times, because it was considered the most highbrow of the Irish dailies, he was also happy to sell his services to the Irish Independent, the mouthpiece of Catholic middle-class Ireland, referred to by some journalists as ‘the parish priests’ gazette’.
The upshot of his interview with Frank Geary was that he was offered occasional reporting at £3 per article and book-reviewing at ten shillings per review. Very little came of this offer. He published two book reviews in April, contributed one article, ‘Mystery of Our Bogs’ (16 May), reported for the paper on the Punchestown races (1 May), on the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage (29 July) and on a ploughing championship (19 February 1941). The Independent was clearly not going to provide him with a livelihood.
His report on the Lough Derg pilgrimage was not found sufficiently pious or eulogistic to merit publication, so when he was sent to Croagh Patrick, he turned in as fervid a piece of religious journalism as the most ardent Catholic could have wished to read. Today its fervour appears excessive, as, for instance:
Croagh Patrick is the glorious, singing, laughing climb of an Ireland young in spirit and truth and enthusiastic in performance.
In 1940 this kind of religious prose had its devotees.
It so happened that on the very day his article on Croagh Patrick appeared, 29 July 1940, Kavanagh was a plaintiff in the Dublin Circuit Court, taking an action for damages against the British and Irish Steampacket Co., Westmoreland Street. The case was the sequel to an accident at the Tara Street junction of Butt Bridge on 16 October 1939 when he was struck from behind by the shaft of a horse-drawn lorry belonging to the defendants and knocked off his bicycle. He claimed that his bicycle had been wrecked and his clothes damaged; he was precluded from earning his livelihood as a writer for about six weeks afterwards and could not do a scheduled radio broadcast on the day following the accident; for a long time, too, his nerves were badly shaken. The accuracy of this testimony is questionable. He had published two articles in The Irish Times within the six weeks in question and progress on his potboiler for Michael Joseph does not appear to have been halted. Moreover, since he had taken part in a radio discussion with F. R. Higgins and Louis MacNeice on 12 October, he is unlikely to have had another broadcast scheduled so soon afterwards.
Instead of calling for medical or other evidence, Judge Shannon enquired if the plaintiff was the author of the article on Croagh Patrick in that day’s Independent which he had very much enjoyed. On learning that he was indeed the pious author, the judge asked if he had actually made the pilgrimage. The holy pilgrim was then asked what he earned by his writing and, lying through his teeth, replied that it averaged out at about £5 a week. Whereupon the B & I’s claim of contributory negligence was dismissed and the plaintiff was awarded thirty-five pounds and three shillings in damages, the equivalent of six weeks’ fictitious wages plus a little extra for the damage to his bicycle, clothes and nerves.18 In one morning Kavanagh had made almost as much as his brother could earn in three months as a teacher. He was never to have any moral scruples where obtaining money was concerned.
In the course of being passed around Catholic middle-class and middlebrow Dublin in 1940, offered a loan here and a writing assignment there, Kavanagh fetched up in Blackrock College in November to give a talk on poetry to the senior pupils. It was a one-off that earned him a few pounds at most but it was to ensure him a source of donations for many years to come. The President of Blackrock College, John Charles McQuaid, from Cootehill in Kavanagh’s neighbouring county of Cavan, a former teacher of English literature, was interested in meeting the poet. The following January McQuaid was to be officially inaugurated Archbishop of Dublin, a position that transformed him into one of the most influential and wealthy men in the city.19
Kavanagh, who was always to be a firm believer in patronage, had embarked on a lifelong habit of cultivating powerful and influential older men, starting with Æ and moving on to Harold Macmillan and Bertie Smyllie. Shortly after he took up office in January 1941, McQuaid found that among the minor duties of his role was to dispense patronage to the Monaghan poet who, when the Fleet Street Palace had failed him, would cycle over to the episcopal palace in Drumcondra. What Kavanagh wanted from the Archbishop was a job as journalist on the Irish Independent or on the weekly Catholic journal, The Standard. What he had to settle for until 1942 was a series of hand-outs. ‘I’m thirty-three today’, he is reputed to have announced on 21 October 1941 (subtracting a few years from his real age as usual). ‘They crucified Christ at thirty-three and I haven’t even got a job yet.’
To save money on accommodation the brothers moved out of their shared bedsitter during the school holidays and, apart from occasional forays to Dublin, spent July and August in Inniskeen. In the summer of 1940 Patrick was also offered a free holiday in June. The painter Patrick O’Connor had been lent a holiday home by Cathal O’Flynn from Carrick-on-Shannon and, after the opening of his exhibition at the Gorry Gallery in Dublin on 8 June, he headed off with Kavanagh to this house on the shore of Killala Bay. Petrol restrictions did not prevent them buzzing about the bay in their host’s boat which had an outboard engine. They fished for mackerel and also carried guns with which they blazed away at anything on the wing. Then they raced back to down some beer before lunch, for the hospitable Mr O’Flynn had ordered a barrel of ale for his guests. Those sunny days on the water at Killala were among Kavanagh’s happiest memories. Both men were high-spirited and laughed a lot and their holiday together cemented an enduring friendship.20 He was understandably reluctant to tear himself away on 17 June to report on the gruelling Lough Derg pilgrimage for the Independent. It says much for his determination to seize at every opportunity of jour
nalistic employment that, though he grumbled about it, he went.
To console himself for the rigours of the pilgrimage, he decided to visit Maeve Mulcahy in Sligo town on the return journey. Maeve was still in love with Frank O’Connor and had in fact returned with him to Woodenbridge after his adjudication at the Sligo feis that Easter. Nevertheless, she was quite content to entertain Kavanagh for a few days. Not so her father. An ex-Republican who had enjoyed Frank O’Connor’s company, he instantly took against the Inniskeen man. Many people found Kavanagh a fascinating talker; Mr Mulcahy was proof against his conversational charm, settling on his guest’s booming voice as his most objectionable trait. He was probably offended that such a trampish, uncouth-looking man presumed to have designs on his beautiful, vivacious daughter, and was doing what he could to discourage him. Nothing daunted, Kavanagh proposed to Maeve during this visit.21
He pursued her to Ennis when she took up a teaching post there in the autumn, arriving unannounced and booking himself into the boarding house where she lodged. Maeve returned from school one afternoon to find him ensconced and enormously pleased with himself. At her insistence the landlady asked him to leave immediately, whereupon he simply moved to other lodgings in the town and resumed his courtship. She was still involved with Frank O’Connor but, even if she hadn’t been, she did not want Kavanagh stalking her around Ennis. At one point he even boarded a hired bus that was taking Maeve and her fellow teachers to a concert in another town and attended the entertainment with them so as to be in her company. Much to her chagrin, he completely won over her fellow teachers by his talk, so that instead of coldshouldering the gatecrasher they made him feel welcome. Though Maeve made it plain that she had no intention of marrying him on Tuesday or any other day of the week, he was slow to take the hint. Eventually he did.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 20