Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Who bent the coin of my destiny

  That it stuck in the slot?

  These lines lamenting the distortion and paralysis of their lives may be spoken by either Maguire or his sister, Mary Anne. From ‘the purgatory of middle-aged virginity’ she prays to be released to heaven or hell. Mary Anne deteriorates into a harpy who hates the sight of children; the light of her life is extinguished; she frizzles up like the wick of an oil-less lamp. The withering of her sexuality is condemned in biblical terms: she is the unwise virgin with no oil for her lamp. The Great Hunger shows why there was such mass emigration of comely maidens; it wasn’t a career with bright prospects. In the parish of Donaghmoyne even the Queen of Heaven would be ‘too long virgin’ and Christ’s incarnation indefinitely postponed.

  In 1937 the Harvard anthropologist Conrad Arensberg had published The Irish Countryman, a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of late marriage and lifelong bachelorhood in rural Ireland based on his study of a County Clare village, and in 1940 he and Solon Kimball followed it up with a further study, Family and Community in Ireland.9 It is highly probable that these two books were known and discussed in O’Faoláin’s circle and, while Kavanagh would only have known their contents at second-hand, it is quite possible that they provoked him into conducting his own insider’s analysis in The Great Hunger.

  For Arensberg and Kimball, the fundamental cause of rural depopulation and late marriage among the small-farming class in the 1930s was familism. Familism was a system of farm inheritance whereby one son was selected as the heir but had both his inheritance and his permission to marry deferred until his elderly parents were willing to relinquish ownership of home and land. As son and heir to a widow, Patrick Maguire illustrates the problem of belated inheritance and belated matrimony at its most acute. In a vicious cycle of marital postponement, elderly farmers tended to marry young women who long outlived them, delayed signing over control of the farm to a son for as long as possible, and so prevented him marrying and bringing a female rival into the family home. In Maguire’s case, his mother’s longevity ensures that when she dies he is too old to marry. Kavanagh portrays Maguire’s life with his mother as a grotesque oedipal parody of marriage in which fidelity is tantamount to a death wish, being ‘faithful to death’ instead of ‘until death’:

  Maguire was faithful to death:

  He stayed with his mother till she died

  At the age of ninety-one.

  She stayed too long,

  Wife and mother in one.

  When she died

  The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside

  And he was sixty-five.

  Kavanagh had started out from the position that the decision not to marry was an individual one, taken for personal reasons. This was the thinking underlying his 1939 essays and ‘The Drain-Cleaner’. By 1941, two years after he had finally quit Inniskeen, he saw elderly bachelors like Maguire as the dupes of a life-denying ideology masquerading as religion. Arensberg and Kimball had played down the role of Catholicism in small-farm Ireland, seeing it as a tool of familism rather than an equal or dominant partner in the oppression of the young. For Kavanagh the insidiously powerful ideology at work in the country parish is a pernicious compound of materialism and Catholicism, in which the Christian gospel is manipulated to stifle the claims of body and spirit in the short-sighted interests of a small group of ageing landowners. Unlike George Moore, one of his favourite authors, who in The Untilled Field had laid much of the blame for rural Ireland’s psycho-sexual ills on a killjoy Catholic clergy, Kavanagh perceived that the Irish rural version of Catholicism was not so much an imposed morality as a shared value system. Though ecclesiastical power might manifest itself publicly occasionally, as in the case of the two Inniskeen dance halls, he was aware that this was atypical, unrepresentative. For the most part the alliance of Church and small-farm morality was almost invisible, apparently as inevitable as the weather or the passage of the seasons. The priest, as a farmer’s son himself, upholds the values of the farming class who are his paymasters, but The Great Hunger also exposes the Irish mother’s pivotal agency in rural ideology, mediating between materialist and religious control. Her chief source of familial power is her alliance with Church and clergy, who with her complicity extend their power base to the family home and who in turn support her matriarchal rule. It is she who insists that her son attend confession, thereby subjecting whatever of his life and sexuality that may have escaped her scrutiny to the Church’s surveillance. In the case of the widowed mother, who owns and administers her farm, financial power reinforces the customary religious controls.

  The Great Hunger opens with a succinct parodic perversion of the opening of St John’s Gospel:

  Clay is the word and clay is the flesh . . .

  The Christ who dignified the human body and spirit by choosing to become incarnate has been replaced in the Irish country version of Catholicism by a false clay god, an agricultural divinity who is simultaneously a graveyard deity. This god is the ultimate materialist, for whom human flesh and spirit are mere matter in the service of matter. He is the god of ‘respectability’ and economic success, his ‘truth’ measured ‘in pounds and pence and farthings’. He is appeased or coaxed into bestowing material benefits by ritual observances:

  ‘Now go to Mass and pray and confess your sins

  And you’ll have all the luck’ . . .

  He is a puritanical god fashioned in the image of those who value property and propriety above love and self-fulfilment; one of his chief functions is to act as the custodian of extra-marital chastity. ‘Sex’ has become synonymous with another three-letter word, ‘Sin’, and both are imprinted ‘in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of’ on the consciousness of the young. Maguire’s sexual inhibition and recoil from relationships with local women are attributed to a mixture of motives arising from his ideological conditioning:

  Religion, the fields and the fear of the Lord

  And Ignorance . . .

  The Great Hunger is a Christian critique of a supposedly Christian country, and perhaps the most startlingly subversive aspect of Kavanagh’s alternative religious vision is the inseparability of spirituality and sexuality, two concepts generally presented as opposing drives in current Irish religious discourse. While it adverts momentarily to the possibility of visionary experience — local farmers sometimes see the Trinity in a tree, as Moses saw God in a burning bush — the poem’s focus throughout is on the incarnate Christ, an embodied divinity who honours the claims of the flesh. In a land of empty wombs, only the tabernacle is ‘pregnant’. Kavanagh’s god is a fertility god who delights in love and lust:

  God’s truth is life — even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.

  For this god, sexual repression, not sexual indulgence, is the unforgiveable sin:

  For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.

  Sexual enjoyment, or marriage, its only valid expression in the small-farm ethos, is presented as the supreme good, the only human fulfilment in this poem. Belatedly the ‘cataracts’ fall from Maguire’s eyes and he sees that, rather than behaving like a dutiful son and a good farmer, he has been duped. He is finally glimpsed as a ragged, despairing old man deprived of all consolation: ‘No hope. No. No lust.’ The narrator concludes the poem with oracular authority, warning against the terrible ‘Apocalypse of clay’ in store for a country that has blasphemed against the god of love and fertility. The end of their world is coming, the ‘hungry fiend’, an antithesis to the fecund Christian God, suggests a return to the disaster of famine.

  The title of The Great Hunger and its recurrent motif of potato-harvesting suggest a disturbing analogy between the psycho-sexual deprivation that is depopulating and devitalising contemporary Ireland and the Famine that ravaged the country in the mid-nineteenth century. (The Great Hunger is almost a Famine centenary poem.) Now the potato crop flourishes but human lives are blighted; rural Ireland is a land of full bel
lies and unwanted wombs, its people ‘hungry for life’. Angry when Cecil Woodham-Smith entitled her best-selling history of the Great Famine The Great Hunger, Kavanagh maintained that the phrase had never been a synonym for the Famine and that she had stolen his title.

  He may well have been right; the phrase was certainly not in common usage either in English or in translations from the Irish.10 Post Woodham-Smith, Kavanagh’s title inevitably conjures up the Famine, but the question arises as to whether we are now backreading a metaphor into the poem that was not originally there. Has the recurrent image of potato-harvesting in the poem no historical overtones? Other commentators on rural depopulation in the early 1940s invoked the Famine analogy and shortly after the first publication of The Great Hunger Kavanagh remarked that the Famine should more properly be referred to as ‘the great Starvation’, almost but not quite making a connection with his poem.11 Whatever the author’s intentions, Cecil Woodham-Smith has ensured that the Famine metaphor is now ineradicably associated with the poem.

  Some of the extraordinary emotional power of The Great Hunger arises from its concealed autobiographical basis. Maguire’s first name, Patrick, may have been chosen because of its representative status as the name of Ireland’s national apostle or because it or, more customarily, its derivative, Paddy, was the generic Irish first name, signifying all the virtues and vices associated with the stereotypical Irish character. Yet the fact that poet and hero share a common first name may also signify Kavanagh’s awareness that there was a lot of himself in his character; not the poet who wrote books and went to live in Dublin, but his prior incarnation, the stay-at-home small farmer with the possessive mother, the wifeless only son trapped as the man of the house, the mainstay of an all-female household. In the long days in the fields as he brooded over the idea of breaking away, he must have fore-known and fore-suffered much of what ‘poor Paddy Maguire’ is made to endure.

  Kavanagh’s own cowardice about changing his way of life is transposed into a bachelor’s postponement of and cowardice about marriage. The poem focuses relentlessly on the theme of procrastination, the continual deferral of what is deeply desired. In Kavanagh’s own case his entire family had fled the coop; until 1937 he was the least adventurous, the most homebound. There was never a good time to leave. Maguire is invested with his own cautious disposition, always postponing and settling for short-term satisfactions — a good crop, a cigarette, a pound to spend, a wank on the headland. He is utterly passive, wanting to escape without lifting a finger to bring it about. In The Great Hunger the freed man is reliving his own nightmare of perpetual bondage. Had life in Inniskeen been utterly unendurable, Kavanagh might have got out sooner. But it had its good moments, its compensations and satisfactions, and these too Maguire experiences — the joy of flourishing crops, male companionship at pub, crossroads and card-games, the possibility of love and marriage.

  Kavanagh’s anger at his own belated escape from matriarchy and celibacy, from the prolonged adolescence that was the lot of the farmer’s son and heir, is turned against the ideology that had trapped him. In The Great Hunger the ill-focused anger and bitter sense of having been conned, which energised the poem ‘Stony Grey Soil’ the previous year, were channelled into an impassioned exposition of the spiritual and sexual starvation of the Irish farmer. For once, personal regrets and self-recriminations acquired social resonances, and narcissism was briefly attuned to the cultural moment.

  In The Great Hunger Kavanagh writes as a politically engaged, class-conscious poet, the champion of an oppressed and misrepresented rural Catholic underclass. He presents the subsistence farming class as helpless, inarticulate victims, living out a wretched, doomed existence, applauded from a comfortable distance as noble peasants by policiticans with fantasies about self-sustaining rural communities, romantic poets, and day trippers indoctrinated by neo-romantic rhetoric about the spiritual and psychic superiority of a life lived close to nature. He has set out on a deliberate crusade to enlighten and shock a complacent urban readership, used to acquiescing in the myth of rural blessedness which a number of overlapping ideologies promoted and perpetuated. Rage against political and cultural cults of primitivism energised him as a writer. Indignation made him eloquent, impassioned his rhetoric.

  One of his main targets was the idealisation of small-farm life by Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach since 1932, who envisaged an Irish rural Utopia inhabited by frugal, pious, Irish-speaking, self-sustaining communities, utterly content with their lot. De Valera’s person and his politics were anathema to Seán O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Peadar O’Donnell and most of the young writers associated with The Bell, but Kavanagh, conscious from bitter personal experience of the gulf between this politician’s rustic fantasy and the grim struggle to wrest a livelihood from a few stony or boggy acres, was particularly incensed by his rural programme. One year after the publication of The Great Hunger, de Valera would make his notorious St Patrick’s Day broadcast in which he fantasised about a rural Ireland ‘joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.’ Twenty-five thousand people a year were emigrating from his ‘dreary Eden’. In 1942 Peadar O’Donnell observed that the question young country people were asking was not who would inherit the small farm, but who would be stuck with it.12

  Kavanagh was soon to be embattled with Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory over their representation of ‘peasantry’, his key argument being that, as writers from a Protestant ascendancy background, they were ‘outside the mainstream of the people’s consciousness’. In The Great Hunger he is assuming the tactical position that would enable him to mount such a critique, setting himself up as the spokesman of the oppressed farming and farm-labouring class who constituted the vast majority of the Irish population in the early 1940s. His original title, The Old Peasant, was probably ironic, for Maguire subverts most of the literary and cultural pieties attaching to peasantry since Wordsworth’s Literary Ballads, as well as those with which Irish peasantry in particular had become encrusted. The Irish ‘peasant’ was a literary fiction, the subsistence farmer a more uncomfortable fact. Drab, passive, conformist and, above all, nearly taciturn, Maguire is implicitly contrasted with the more colourful, robust, rumbustious, talkative ‘gallivanters’ and playboy heroes or the purveyors of folklore and folk song customarily encountered in twentieth-century Irish literature.

  Dehyphenating his customary role of poet-farmer and distributing it beween two characters left the poet-narrator of The Great Hunger with no function other than that of commentator and interpreter. The advantage of this is that it invests the disembodied narrator’s voice with authoritativeness. The clarity and comprehensiveness of the narrator’s overview compensates for the fictional characters’ myopia. His vision of an alternative world, where a people’s psycho-sexual needs are honoured and given priority over material or religious considerations, establishes a criterion by which the clay-bound world of the small farmer can be judged and found wanting. The downside of the narrator’s rhetorical role is that it gives the poet a licence to pontificate. The Great Hunger is from the first an audience-conscious poem whose designs on the reader are sometimes too palpable. Even in the opening scenes, when the theatre metaphor is most prominent, the narrator at times upstages his central protagonist.

  It was its crusading zeal, its sociological mission that later caused Kavanagh to repudiate the poem. By 1949 he was already disowning the sociological function of literature, but his most notorious public recantation was in the preface to his Collected Poems in 1964:

  The Great Hunger is concerned with the woes of the poor. A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not.

  The dogmatism and social concern that Kavanagah later came to loathe are integral to The Great Hunger, its raison d’être. At the time of writing, its subversion
of existing cultural pieties was part of its conscious radicalism and modernity.

  The angry young man was also consciously modern in his formal techniques. The Waste Land provided a model for a long poem divided into parts of irregular length which also dispensed with regularity in stanzaic form, line lengths and rhymes. He claimed that he had asked for this poem in the National Library on his first visit to Dublin. Auden was his mentor in modernising his idiom and images. John Ryan has repeatedly dated Kavanagh’s fascination with Auden to the early 1950s, but he was a fan as early as 1941.13 What he admired about Auden’s verse at that time was its ‘fresh young attitude and vocabulary’ and its up-to-dateness; he found that it pumped with ‘the blood of life-as-it-is-lived’.14 The fact that Kavanagh’s adventurous technique was applied to such an old-fashioned subject as ‘the peasant’ was to prove quite disconcerting for some Irish critics. The Great Hunger was the culmination of his experiment with the dirty realist verse he had begun writing only the previous year. He had now gone as far in that particular direction as he could go.

  When his long poem was finished and professionally typed, Kavanagh showed it to John Betjeman and Frank O’Connor. Both immediately recognised it as a major work and set about having it published. Betjeman was to be responsible for the first journal publication of an excerpt from the poem in January 1942 and O’Connor for its first publication in full as a book three months later.

  Already radically politicised within an Irish context, The Old Peasant, as it was then named, was to contribute to a British political agenda as well, being co-opted by Betjeman to play a part in his mission to foster good cultural relations between wartime Britain and neutral Éire. In November 1941 he had arranged that his friend Cyril Connolly, founding editor of Horizon, should give a lecture to the Friends of the Irish Ascendancy, inviting him to Dublin with the ulterior motive of organising an Irish number of his journal. Although less than two years old, Horizon was already widely regarded as the most distinguished and chic English literary journal of its time and had a circulation of about 8,000.15 It would provide an ideal forum for Irish writers to address an influential and articulate sector of the British public, airing their views on politics and culture and showcasing Irish art and literature, thus helping to counter the pervasive anti-Irish prejudice and hostility consequent on Éire’s neutrality.