Likewise, O’Connor as poetry editor and editor of ‘The Belfry’, a section for budding writers, counselled would-be contributors to
. . . write about things you know. Describe some old tramp you have just met; the pattern or races or fair you have been to; some landscape that has moved you. Give us reality, whatever else you give us.
Stimulating as it was for Kavanagh to feel that he was in at the start of a new era in Irish writing, his mentors’ theories about the new literature were largely aimed at prose writing, and even O’Connor could not provide any guidance as to what the new Irish poetry should be. One of the first casualties of Kavanagh’s enthusiasm for The Bell’s socio-realist aesthetic vision was his long-standing connection with the Dublin Magazine and with its editor, Seumas O’Sullivan, who had bailed him out financially several times in the previous three years. He now regarded the magazine as a repository of ‘fusty, safe and dim’ writing and ‘Anna Quinn’, ‘Memory of My Father’ and ‘Primrose’ in the October/December 1939 issue were his last contributions.
For much of 1940 Kavanagh was floundering as a poet, unsure about what he was trying to achieve; as he confessed to Peggy Gough in autumn 1939, he could not tell which of his poems were good or bad. Gradually and irregularly from late 1939 onwards, with several lapses and deviations, a new sense of direction emerged in his verse, a move towards local realism.
In fact, the poem he gave Peggy as a Christmas present, ‘Christmas Eve Remembered’, signalled this change of direction. A wryly affectionate portrayal of his country neighbours, ‘going to the chapel/To confess their sins’, it includes images that were familiar to most country or ex-country readers of the Irish Independent where it was first printed:
Bicycles scoot by. Old women
Cling to the grass margin . . .
Immediately recognisable, too, were the snatches of talk from the confession-going folk:
‘Did you hear from Tom this Christmas?’
‘These are the dark days.’
‘Maguire’s shop did a great trade
Turnover double — so Maguire says.’
His uncertainty about this poetic experimentation with realist scenes and dialogue in verse reveals itself in an anxiety to transform ‘plain, hard country folk’ into characters worthy of poetry, to wrap them in a ‘romantic cloak’:
Their feet are heavy; but their minds fly
In dreams of the Mother Virgin . . .
What had begun to happen was that the practice of visualising scenes precisely and using the actual turns of phrase of the farming community, a feature of Kavanagh’s prose since The Green Fool, was impinging on his poetry. Most of his creative energies were being channelled into a realist reconstruction of small-farm and parish life in the ‘specials’ he was writing for The Irish Times in the autumn of 1939, in the potboiler, The Land Remains, and in its successor, Stony Grey Soil, the novel he was working on from early 1940. Because his poems were being written alongside these rural fictions, sometimes as off-cuts, marginal jottings or reworkings, the mental borders that had hitherto separated poetry from prose were eroded, and sharply realised and indecorous country images from his prose began to infiltrate his verse. The interchange between Kavanagh’s fiction and poetry at this time is evident in the common title, ‘Stony Grey Soil’, given to both a poem and a novel and also in the inclusion of quotations from other contemporary poems, such as ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ and ‘Art McCooey’, in this novel. Moreover, some of the surnames in this version of ‘Art McCooey’ are the same as those of characters in Stony Grey Soil:
A hare is grazing in Callan’s meadow
Minnie Dillon is prowling for dead branches . . .4
The novel’s hero, a young farmer-poet in love, is also the hero of some of the short lyrics: ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘Art McCooey’ and ‘Threshing Morning’ (‘On an apple-ripe September morning’).
The trend towards local realism in Kavanagh’s verse was legitimised and affirmed by O’Faoláin’s and O’Connor’s theories, but from the first, many readers, including O’Faoláin himself, were disconcerted by it. ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, which O’Nolan and his cronies made the butt of their intellectual malice in June 1940, begins
The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland of July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white . . .
The flurry of facetious correspondence provoked by this poem was at least partly due to its disturbing originality. Readers did not expect to find mention of varieties of potatoes, Kerr’s Pinks or Arran Banners, or, worse still, reference to a dead wasp or the spraying of crops with pesticides in Irish poetry. They were more comfortable with poems where farming was drawn on vaguely as a metaphor for life, art or nationalism, poems like Kavanagh’s ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ in the previous month’s Irish Times which minimised agricultural specificity and concentrated on symbolic import. The ‘man after the harrow’ was urged to
Forget the men on Brady’s hill.
Forget what Brady’s boy may say . . .
For you are driving your horses through
The mist where Genesis begins.
Local setting, local people, local talk were deliberately ignored in favour of a vague, biblical uplift — he was reverting to his ‘Ploughman’ formula.
This shifting about between various kinds of poem continued throughout 1940. Even his two poems in the first number of The Bell, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ and ‘Kednaminsha’, were not realist. He wrote ‘Stony Grey Soil’ during his extended holiday in Inniskeen in August 1940, thought it was ‘really good’, but was unsure and asked O’Connor’s opinion.5 One of its most remarkable features is its energy and momentum, a rhythmic aggression altogether new in his verse. In a powerful accusatory tirade, the soil of his native Monaghan is made the scapegoat for an array of interrelated frustrations and misdirections, both sexual and artistic:
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble . . .
The poem’s title was to become one of the best-known phrases he ever penned, but the poem itself is a mixture of outdated techniques, such as the personification of the soil of Monaghan and the use of the vocative O — ‘O stony grey soil of Monaghan’ — and sharp, fresh images that pack a powerful punch:
You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth! . . .
Violent mood-swings between resentment and affection characterise the poems about his country past. As he wrote to O’Connor, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ was the product of a mood rather than a fixed attitude, and the swing to a more tender, caressing mood is evident in its last lines as well as in its weak companion piece, ‘Kednaminsha’. A complimentary love poem to a place personified as a woman, ‘Kednaminsha’ opens with the line, ‘You wore a heather jumper then . . .’ He gave a copy of The Bell to Maeve Mulcahy with this poem signed, ‘For Maeve’, and she says that at the time she favoured heather colourings in her clothes and read it as a personal tribute. Maeve’s reading suggests that the figures of real women underpinned the female personifications of the poems. One can only speculate that mother and motherland are being conflated in ‘Stony Grey Soil’.
When this poem first appeared, it was dedicated to Seán O’Faoláin. It was O’Faoláin who had first urged him to ‘down the plough’ and the dedication also expresses Kava
nagh’s general sense of aesthetic indebtedness. Ironically O’Faoláin, who was to publish much of Kavanagh’s new poetry, had little sympathy with or understanding of the break-through the poet was making. A commitment to publishing home-bred literature compelled him to rely on Roibéard Ó Faracháin and Kavanagh as his staple poets rather than turn to Louis MacNeice, as he would have preferred.6
The December number of The Bell carried part two of ‘A Christmas Childhood’, a deft, economical piece, evoking Christmas morning in the poet’s home and townland when he was a 6-year-old boy. Through a series of crisp, lucid images it conjures up the child’s sense of being part of a family and of a closely knit Catholic community, where the Mass-going neighbours’ footsteps are as familiar as their names:
My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cowhouse my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle . . .
Mucker is explicitly connected with Bethlehem in this poem without losing its identity as an Irish townland inhabited by Lennons and Callans. While ‘A Christmas Childhood’, with its brief four-line stanzas, is ostensibly a charming, naif, child-centred Christmas hymn, it is also a poem about the poet’s formation, his awakening to music. The future poet, still at the stage of picking out the letters of the alphabet and making his mark by nicking the door with a penknife, is already responsive to the extraordinary ordinariness of his native place, linking the native with Nativity. His sense of his own special destiny is inherent in the paralleling of the holy family with his own. That Kavanagh should have had such quasi Messianic confidence at the end of 1940 is remarkable in view of the fact that he was publishing very little and was stony broke. His Christmas poems were not just experiments in poetic realism; they paid his train fare home to Inniskeen for the festival.
Like ‘A Christmas Childhood’, most of the short poems he published or wrote in 1940 and 1941 — ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘The Long Garden’, ‘Art McCooey’ — are retrospective. They centre on the figure of a future poet, represented at an early, formative phase, either as a country child or as a young farmer.
Far from being apologetic about the indecorousness of his rural subject matter, he had begun to flaunt it and defy the canons of pastoral orthodoxy. It is not the roses on the orchard wall but the ‘lime and copper smell of the spraying barrels’ and the blossoming potato plants that cast a potent spell in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’. In ‘Threshing Morning’, a young love-struck farmer, rhapsodising on his life, is exhilarated by such trivial and inelegant incidents as shovelling up eels or dodging wasp stings. In ‘The Long Garden’ the mythological ‘Garden of the Golden Apples’ is relocated to ‘a garden between a railway and a road’ pockmarked by sows’ snouts and hens’ beaks, a dumping ground for household rubbish. Even more shocking is ‘Art McCooey’ which focuses on the thoughts and talk of a young farmer during a day spent carting dung and concludes with the messy business of cleaning out the dung cart. As if to set up an association between poetry and dirty realism, the concluding verse connects poetic formation with the process of washing and wiping the horse dung off the cart:
Wash out the cart with a bucket of water and a wangel
Of wheaten straw. Jupiter looks down.
Unlearnedly and unreasonably poetry is shaped
Awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb.
Jupiter may have approved, but not all Kavanagh’s earthly critics did.
His newfound tendency towards dirty realism received little encouragement even from Seán O’Faoláin. The Bell’s official line was to advocate writing which kept its eye on the familiar object, yet O’Faoláin was chary of ugly, realist detail in poetry. His touchstones for good poetry at this point were ‘Dover Beach’ and some lines he had learned from O’Connor: ‘You are the sort that men forget/But I not yet, perhaps not ever.’ Whereas O’Connor consistently championed Kavanagh, O’Faoláin was by no means as convinced of his talent (‘good but mind-clouded’) and was never comfortable with the prosaic realism of his new verse. He liked ‘A Christmas Childhood’ enormously but balked at publishing it as it stood, taking exception to the line, ‘He pulled on his trousers in a hurry’, which he described as ‘one of the finest stuffed owl banal lines of literature’. Since he usually deferred to O’Connor in poetry matters, he agreed to print the poem, at his insistence, but continued to grumble about it. The line, he told O’Connor, reminded him of ‘Wordsworth’s banalities’. ‘The Long Garden’ was submitted to The Bell but not published. Were phrases like ‘In the sow’s rooting where the hen scratches’ or ‘Old buckets rusty holed with half-hung handles’ too ‘unpoetic’ for O’Faoláin to stomach? He also had ‘Threshing Morning’ on file at The Bell in 1941 but didn’t print it. Perhaps his ‘soul squirmed’ at such prosaic lines as
And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.
True, he published ‘Art McCooey’, but he wrote defensively to O’Connor, saying that he was forced to, because Kavanagh, who was dithering about the merit of ‘The Death of Yeats’, decided at the ‘postultimate moment’ not to let it be printed and O’Faoláin had to take another poem from a batch in the Bell office.
The name ‘Art McCooey’ meant nothing to O’Faoláin, so he altogether missed the import of the poem. McCooey was an eighteenth-century Irish poet who lived in Cregan, a few miles from Inniskeen, and his best-known poem, ‘Ag Úir Chill an Chreagáin’ (At the Graveyard of Cregan) was an aisling, a political allegory personifying colonised Ireland as a damsel in distress. McCooey worked as a farm labourer, and local tradition had it that he fell into a poetic trance while carting dung for a farmer and kept coming and going with the same load until he was brought back to his senses by a yell from his irate employer. Kavanagh’s poem alludes directly to McCooey’s life as a farm labourer and not to his celebrated poem. In terms of the literary politics of The Bell, it is a fascinating piece for, in his manner of appropriating McCooey, Kavanagh was actually fulfilling O’Faoláin’s editorial injunction to redirect poetry away from national symbolism towards contemporary realism. He was also breaking with the Literary Revival by proclaiming a new literary lineage, diametrically opposed to that adopted by Yeats — not ‘Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke’, but an ancestor from the colonised Catholic rural underclass, his poetic gifts unrecognised by the dominant ascendancy culture because he spoke the wrong language. Although the farmer-poet of Kavanagh’s poem is a disarmingly feckless young man, the poem itself has a serious aesthetic agenda.
O’Faoláin, however, did not approve of Kavanagh’s apparent nostalgie de la boue. He was on an upwardly mobile route socially and intellectually and was rather disdainful of rustic plain living and plain thinking. While as a liberal intellectual he was publicly prepared to defend Eric Cross’s The Tailor and Ansty against censorship in 1942, he privately admitted to O’Connor that a life or a literature populated by bawdy backwoods folk like Ansty had little appeal for him:
I am sick and tired of turfsmoke and Anstys and all that. I’m a city bloke and so are you. I want a literature of the city. Of what we please to call (optimistically) the New Ireland.
As he reminded O’Connor, neither of them had married an Ansty. ‘Beauty and grace and order’ were the qualities O’Faoláin wanted of life and literature. Comparing Kavanagh with Cecil Day Lewis, he complained somewhat shamefacedly and stammeringly, knowing how snobbish he sounded: ‘. . . it’s just . . . just a . . .
Oh the hell with it. One wants civilisation. Kavanagh doesn’t wash his poetry’s ears.’
Such identification of poetry and personal hygiene, the conflation of the ill-groomed man and the ungenteel poet, was shared by many middle-class Dublin readers and patrons of the arts. Kavanagh in their eyes was an uncouth bogman who lacked the personal and mental refinement necessary to produce good poetry. Like O’Faoláin, many of Dublin’s literati and supporters of the arts were none too keen on unexpurgated rural realism. Self-styled sophisticates, boarding-school or university educated, they were of the opinion that he was breaking with accepted poetic conventions and filling his lines with crude, offensive farmyard images because he had been reared beside a dunghill and knew no better. Had he come from a good, middle-class family and been properly educated, he would have been capable of turning out smooth, polished, inoffensive verses. It was a point of view which persisted throughout his career and may still be encountered.
Among those who deplored his new realist trend were the Palace Bar poets, Austin Clarke, Roibéard Ó Faracháin and the literary editor of the Irish Press, M. J. MacManus, a grouping branded as ‘the neo-Gaels’ by O’Connor. They found Kavanagh’s recent poems ‘crude and non-Gaelic’. O’Connor vigorously supported him against such critics and bolstered his morale by firing off lampoons about them. One of his verses on MacManus gives some flavour of the poetry wars of 1941:
What a wonderful man is MacMaynus
Who recites his own verse through his anus,
A most national verse
Which comes straight from the erse
(Or as some people say from the paynis.)7
Seumas O’Sullivan revenged himself on the disloyal poet with a quip soon spread abroad by his cronies in Davy Byrne’s pub. Observing from the window of his house at 2 Morehampton Road a tinker driving a donkey and cart loaded with scrap, he remarked, ‘I see Paddy Kavanagh’s moving. There go his furniture and effects.’ O’Sullivan was snobbishly exaggerating the Inniskeen poet’s low social status, and the quip had added venom because the Kavanagh brothers moved lodgings more often than most. Throughout 1941 they shared a humble bedsitter on the road where O’Sullivan lived in considerable style.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 23