However, the chief obstacle to his adoption of a philosophical and objective stance was a dominant egocentric and autobiographical trend in all his writing. He was always his own hero, a farmer-poet, and not even donning the disguise of an old priest could mask this fact. He was ‘self-slaved’, as he would put it later, capable only briefly and sporadically of turning his attention away from his own concerns as poet-farmer or poet-lover. Whatever about representing his farming past philosophically, to do so objectively seemed beyond him.
Then, unexpectedly, in October 1941 he began writing the long poem later named The Great Hunger. Here, with an intense visionary clarity, he saw the life of an Inniskeen farmer in the perspective of his newly developed understanding of sexuality, Irish country Catholicism, rural depopulation and the official pieties about the small-farming class inculcated by Irish literary tradition and the current political wisdom: seeing with eyes The Bell had unsealed. The poem was first entitled The Old Peasant and peasantry is defined, as it would be much later in Self-Portrait, less as a way of life than as a state of semi-consciousness, remote from imaginative awareness. The ‘old peasant’ hero or anti-hero, Patrick Maguire, is a ‘half-vegetable’, little better than the potatoes he harvests.
The Great Hunger was apparently unplanned. He began sketching the portrait of the old bachelor farmer Maguire in scraps of verse on odd pages and the backs of envelopes. The poem gained momentum; it grew and grew. In the end it ran to 759 lines divided into fourteen sections. He had found a subject that engaged him personally and ideologically. Since it was impossible for Kavanagh to undertake a fiction in which self by the same or another name was not a major player, he created a controlling role for himself in the poem as Maguire’s interpreter and spokesman. The break-through that made The Great Hunger possible was the dehyphenation of the farmer-poet into two distinct characters: Patrick Maguire, a farmer with no interest whatever in literature; and a literary and artistically minded commentator who interprets Maguire’s life, often in terms of theatre, books, pages, muses, definitions of tragedy, hysterical texts, powers of communication. The role of rural expert was one he had adopted in poetry before, in the short 1937 poem ‘My People’, for instance, a role which, like most experts, he particularly relished when it involved gainsaying received knowledge or opinion. In matters rural he was beginning to use the terminology of outsider and insider and to pride himself on being an insider. ‘You should have been a preacher’, an exasperated farmer had shouted at him in his youth, and in Dublin he was still a ‘village explainer’, his tendency to preach rather than talk remarked on by friends like Peggy Gough and Frank O’Connor.6 The Great Hunger gave ample scope for these didactic tendencies.
‘Curiously, O’Faoláin’s influence is most marked . . . in the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh’, Frank O’Connor observed, and nowhere is it more marked than in The Great Hunger, his most radically politicised poem.7 Another awakener of his social conscience was Peadar O’Donnell, managing editor of The Bell from 1940 to 1946, who befriended him during the lifetime of the magazine until its suspension in 1948. O’Donnell, who came from a similar small-farm background to his own, was an ex-Republican activist and a dedicated socialist, and the socio-economic issue that most concerned him both inside and outside the pages of The Bell was small-farm poverty. The Great Hunger presents an unorthodox, anti-official view of the Irish subsistence farmer, ‘what a peasant’s left hand wrote on the page’.
In foregrounding the figure of the elderly bachelor farmer, Patrick Maguire, Kavanagh was addressing one of the most crucial sociological issues of the period: the decline and depopulation of the Irish countryside through emigration, migration, late marriage and failure to marry. Among the most appalling realities confronting analysts of Irish society at the end of the 1930s was that, after almost two decades of independence, the demographic trends which had begun in Famine times had not been reversed. The release of the 1936 census figures in 1938 had shown conclusively that migration was still draining the countryside into the towns or overseas. Ireland continued to hold its record of possessing the highest percentage of unmarried men and women in the world. The population over 65 years of age was rising. The population as a whole and the number of births was falling. Not only were marriages becoming fewer and fewer, but the delay of marriage into middle life had grown longer and longer. The statistics on late marriage were much worse for rural than for urban areas. Furthermore, the census figures revealed that the incidence of late marriage, bachelorhood and spinsterhood, and population decline was most pronounced in areas where small farms were the norm.
The aspect of rural decline that most interested Kavanagh was the failure of Irish farmers to marry. In 1939, the year following on the Census Report, he published three newspaper articles on the topic: ‘Jazz in the Irish Countryside’ (Irish Press, 27 January), ‘A Serious Problem, The Flight from the Land’ (The Irish Times, 15 April), and ‘The Sentimental Ploughman’ (The Irish Times, 30 May). In each he poses as a rural expert cum interviewer, questioning an old bachelor as to his reasons for remaining single, though, true to his Green Fool-like habit of entertaining his readers, he does not always treat the topic with the gravity it appears to warrant.
The ‘strong bachelor farmer’ interviewed for the Irish Press blames ‘the kind of women that’s goin’ now’ for his failure to marry. Asked who will take care of him in old age, he cracks his fingers: ‘I’ll have me fag and me pint while I’m in it . . . A man that has a bit of money will have plenty to mind him.’ Kavanagh passes no judgment on this attitude. In the first of the two Irish Times articles, where he claims to have interviewed a score of unmarried ‘young’ men of between 50 and 60, he learns that the typical ‘gossoon of fifty’ doesn’t know or can’t articulate why he failed to marry. His bachelorhood results from ‘a succession of inconsequent trifles lost in the deeps of the subconscious mind’ which ‘sometimes come to the surface in the form of revelations’. In the character of Patrick Maguire in The Great Hunger he will probe these subconscious factors as well as registering the farmer’s occasional moments of insight; here the topic is treated more light-heartedly, as in the following reputedly verbatim report of an interview with a middle-aged bachelor:
‘Why don’t you get married?’
‘Because I don’t need a woman.’
‘Do you think that your old mother of 75 is able to manage the house?’
‘Oh, well, with a little help from me; I can bake bread with ever a woman in the country.’
‘Did you ever take a notion?’
‘Never.’
‘And will you ever take a notion?’
‘No, never.’
‘You’re a bad patriot.’
‘No man ever got married for the sake of his country. Why don’t you start yourself?’
The elderly farmer, Barney, is once again a comic figure in the second Irish Times essay, ‘The Sentimental Ploughman’, provoking a smile as he excuses his bachelorhood on the grounds that the ‘nice women that used to be on the go’ are gone: ‘There’s only the riddlings left — only the riddlings.’ The riddlings, Kavanagh explains, are ‘the rough, ill-shaped grain and choppings of straw left on the sieve’. Of the three essays, this most closely anticipates The Great Hunger, in that Kavanagh’s role is that of native informant, offering a corrective to the misleading impressions generated in much Irish literature. To a town-bred poet, Barney might appear to be ‘a sort of primitive pantheist; an observer belonging to another sentimental school . . .’, might ‘grow lyrical in praise of the glorious ploughman, the backbone of spiritual and material Ireland’; only a man ‘who had himself lived inside the shell of that life’, as Kavanagh had done, ‘could really know the truth’.
Yet Kavanagh’s imagination had been stirred by the character of an old country bachelor years before the Census Report of 1938 had brought him into public consciousness. He was the eponymous hero of what was probably his first short story, ‘The Drain Cleaner’. Undated and
never published, this is most likely the story rejected by the Dublin Magazine in 1933. Its solemn tone and poetic cadencing suggest that it predates his Green Fool period. Like Patrick Maguire, the elderly, feeble drain-cleaner, John, lives with his sister. He is described as ‘an old man with a slightly imbecilic expression, like one who might have had dreams and was baffled’. Not content with providing an external portrait, Kavanagh takes the reader inside his character’s consciousness as he muses on the reasons why he didn’t marry. He couldn’t bring in a wife on top of his sister Mary, who was better to him than any wife could be. But he also acknowledges that there was an element of fear of the unknown in his failure to marry: he could trust Mary ‘and God knows what kind the wife would be.’ He tries to banish thoughts that make him ‘discontented with his lot’ and to focus on the job in hand, yet dreams ‘obstruct the sight’. Towards the end of the story, his sister Mary arrives, bringing tea in a small tin can and bread folded in a sheet of old newspaper. She is John’s senior by two years and looks ten years older, a thin, wrinkled creature almost faint from the heat. All afternoon John has been looking forward to his tea, but he has no appetite when it arrives. ‘I’m finished, Mary,’ he says, ‘finished in more ways than one.’ The story concludes with her carefully gathering up the untouched bread, folding the newspaper round it, taking the empty tin vessel and turning homewards. Brother and sister are presented as figures of pathos, stoical, frugal and dignified, Wordsworthian peasants transplanted to Irish fields. But their pathos specifically arises from their condition as an old, unmarried, childless couple, coping with a situation they are powerless to change.
The story demonstrates an empathy with disappointed old men which may well have its roots in Kavanagh’s attachment to his senile, ageing father. While James Kavanagh was a fertile patriarch in his heyday, by the time his poet son was beginning to publish, he was an impotent old man. ‘I’m finished’ may well be a phrase his son heard him use. Kavanagh himself traces his compassion for old men to his love for his father in the elegy, ‘Memory of My Father’, which he wrote in 1939:
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
In his days as an apprentice farmer Kavanagh had also doubtless worked alongside old bachelors who told him their life stories and confided their regrets. Such an old man turns up in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, talking of some Ruth he knew. His empathy with the lonely, puzzled, pathetic Patrick Maguire is a crucial factor in the imaginative success of The Great Hunger. Maguire emerges as a person, a character, rather than a sociological case study.
Patrick Maguire, first glimpsed as a distant figure among other farm-workers gathering potatoes in a hilly field in October, is soon brought into focus as an old farmer, outwardly assured and masterful, inwardly troubled by uncertainties and regrets, belatedly aware that in allowing himself to be conned into making ‘a field his bride’ he has been cheated of the best life has to offer. Why did this once ‘young and heated fellow’ end up as a solitary, childless old bachelor with ‘no hope’ left and ‘no lust’? His story is told for the most part in a lengthy flashback that extends from the second through the thirteenth of the poem’s fourteen sections. When we first meet him, he is an old scarecrow, his clothes flapping on his skeletal frame. What the narrrative evokes is the texture of his adult life from the age of 35 to the present over thirty years later. The reader is made privy not only to his doings and sayings, but to his consciousness and his unconscious, his moments of joy and satisfaction, his kindly impulses towards neighbours and children, his most intimate sexual fears, fantasies and frustrations, even his night-time tears. A shockingly honest and comprehensive portrayal of a subsistence farmer’s life at different seasons of the year and times of the day is compressed into 759 lines. The narrative follows Maguire from his early morning household and farmyard chores through his long hours in the fields to evenings spent in the pub or at the crossroads and to summer Sundays sitting idly on the railway bank watching children pick flowers or young girls lying temptingly stretch-legged. The technique is cinematic: cutting from the fizzling of the breakfast bacon in the kitchen to a headland at dawn where a ploughman shivers in the black March wind; from the candle-lit altar and flowers at Sunday Mass to Maguire’s quickly repressed lustful impulse in the Yellow Meadow; from neighbours playing whist by the fire to Maguire alone by the potato pit in a field bleached by morning frost. Sharply focused images reveal his context with startling vividness:
A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart . . .
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves . . .
Primroses and the unearthly start of ferns
Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,
A dead sparrow and an old waistcoat . . .
There is now no ditch on Kavanagh’s vision; nothing human is foreign to him; nothing too indecorous to be included. Maguire spits, grunts, coughs, cleans his arse with grass, masturbates.
The Great Hunger is also explicitly and pervasively libidinised in a way that is altogether new in Kavanagh’s writing. Where previously he had dealt in romance, he now foregrounds lust and sexual torment. Between them, the narrator and Patrick Maguire invest most of the daily sights and happenings on the farm with sexual significance: a dog sitting between the handles of a plough is phallic; ploughing is rape or violent penetration; picking potatoes is groping in pubic hair; cows with ample flanks substitute for wives. Maguire takes advantage of his few private leisure moments to masturbate on the headland of a field, on a farm gate or indoors over the hearth. From all sides he is taunted by the spectacle of a burgeoning, breeding, fecund world where crops and weeds sprout, birds and animals mate, young girls bare their legs and unbutton their skirts invitingly. Maguire has allowed himself to be sexually starved in a land of plenty. He has lived
. . . that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ’s Name . . .
Old age has already set the seal on his sterile, lonely fate when the poem opens; it is too late for change.
Because Maguire’s biography takes the form of an extended flashback, its tragic conclusion is inevitable. The reader, positioned from the outset as a spectator, is compelled to watch his pathetic, half-hearted attempts to avoid his fate, twisting and turning this way and that, writhing on Kavanagh’s death-baited hook. He is caught in the noose of the circular narrative and further circumscribed by the circular metaphors applied to his routine existence: a goat mooching about the tree stump to which it is tethered, ‘a sick horse nosing around the meadow’, an athlete running round and round a grass track where there is no finishing line. He dreams of a new circle, curved to his own will, but his will is immobilised. Another series of metaphors reveals him as a trapped figure; he is ‘tethered’, ‘tied’, caught in ‘the grip’ of his fields, ‘stuck in a slot’, ‘locked in a stable with pigs and cows forever’. There is ‘no escape, no escape’. The recurrence of the seasonal and agricultural cycle is co-opted as an image of repetitiveness, monotony and sameness, and also of the ineluctable passage of the years:
A year passed and another hurried after it. . .
Another field whitened in the April air . . .
Maguire is a country cousin of Joyce’s paralysed Dubliners.8
While The Great Hunger foregrounds male sexual frustration, it does not altogether neglect its female counterpart. In one remarkable image the reader is given a glimpse of the mad woman in Maguire’s attic, a hysterical virgin trapped in his inhibited consciousness, a nun cloistered and compelled to be chaste against her will, symbolic of all the women whose sexual fulfilment he has prevented. His sexual torments are paralleled by the private agonies his sister Mary Anne endures as she watches her child-bearing years slip away. Her secret desires are acted out by other young women of the parish, who
from sheer desperation try to tempt bachelors like Maguire. They sit by the roadside with their legs outstretched, lift up their clothes sensationally high when walking through wet grass, leave some buttons of their skirt ‘undone’; their behaviour, like their dress, is ‘deliberately loose’. They are so frustrated that they are prepared to settle for sexual pleasure at the price of bearing a love child and being forsaken; but ‘No one would take them.’ They inhabit a
. . . metaphysical land
Where flesh was a thought more spiritual than music
Among the stars — out of the reach of the peasant’s hand.
Barney Meegan’s daughter makes the same three wishes as Patrick Maguire, ‘health and wealth and love’, but no fairy godmother intervenes; they do not get together, are confined in separate verses of the poem. Maguire and his male neighbours talk about women, Kitty or Molly or Eileen Farrelly (‘A man might do a damned sight worse’), but talk is not translated into deeds.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 26