Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  The Irish number of Horizon, which duly appeared in January 1942, was a diplomatic coup for Betjeman and he largely masterminded it, recruiting most of the writers and reading their contributions before passing them on. A letter to Connolly in December 1941 reveals both genuine admiration for Kavanagh’s poem and a concern to help him financially:

  . . . I’m so glad you are printing Paddy’s poem. It’s very good, I think. The total effect is grand, but probably too long for you to use. Very sad. But he’ll be delighted if you can use some of it. The more he is paid, the better. He is dirt poor. . . .16

  ‘Commentary’, the editorial with which Connolly began each issue of Horizon, was devoted on this occasion to mitigating British ‘prejudice, ignorance and impatience’ in the face of Ireland’s neutrality by showing that it had not escaped the effects of the war and was not an ‘uncharitable earthly paradise’. Accordingly, Connolly emphasises that rationing, scarcity and poverty are facts of life in Ireland and provides a ‘black picture’ of Dublin two years after the outbreak of war:

  The shops are full of good things to eat, the streets of people who cannot afford to buy them. Light and heat are desperately short, for there is very little coal, and turf is scarce through lack of transport. . . . Doctors and government inspectors have less petrol than the English motorist . . . bread is rationed, tea and coffee are very scarce, trains run slowly on inferior fuel, the Archbishop of Dublin has inaugurated free soup kitchens. . . . And emigration — the silent indictment of a civilization which no censor can suppress — continues to threaten its human resources. . . .

  M. J. MacManus of the Irish Press was given the brief of defending Irish neutrality, but his pro de Valera stance was offset by L. T. Murray’s cooler appraisal of Irish government since independence. Kenneth Clarke, director of the National Gallery in London, contributed an enthusiastic account of Jack Yeats’s paintings, and Seán O’Faoláin, a more academic and less eulogistic discussion of W. B. Yeats’s literary career. Frank O’Connor’s essay ‘The Future of Irish Literature’ argued that contemporary Irish literature must necessarily be gloomily realist or satirical, given the oppressively claustrophobic nature of post-independence society. His analysis was borne out by the two examples of contemporary Irish literature in the journal: a lengthy excerpt from The Old Peasant, given pride of place, following immediately after Connolly’s editorial, and Edward Sheehy’s short story on the stifling provincialism of life in middle-class Catholic Cork, ‘Prothalamion’, with which the journal concluded. These pieces are curiously complementary, the one focusing on enforced bachelorhood and sexual frustration in a country parish, and the other on the pressures towards marriage and religious conformity in urban life. Betjeman had given Connolly the full text of Kavanagh’s poem, but at thirty pages it was too long, and pressure on space meant that only the first three parts and the opening of the fourth could be used. Since it was revised as well as being retitled between November and March, the Horizon version differs in places from later versions.

  The Irish reception of the January 1942 number of Horizon was less than enthusiastic. Roibéard Ó Faracháin, reviewing it for The Irish Times, found it unrepresentative, though he considered Connolly’s editorial fair-minded.17 He was particularly incensed by O’Connor’s tantrums and eccentric literary judgments. O’Connor’s promotion of Kavanagh as ‘the most remarkable of modern Irish poets’ may have provoked Ó Faracháin to deal particularly severely with The Old Peasant which he damned with faint praise as ‘impressive in subject and in occasional fine lines’, but having ‘all the appearance of a good rough draft rather than a finished poem’. He faulted it for its failure to observe stanza form and for its lapses into rhythmic dullness. The poem had ‘matter’ but needed ‘much working yet’. Ironically, the same number of The Irish Times which carried the first Irish review of The Great Hunger also printed the Department of Agriculture’s 1942 notice to Irish farmers on compulsory tillage. The government was exhorting the Maguires ‘in every corner of this land’ to increase their productivity, to work themselves into the ground for the common good.

  Critical debate over the merits of the Irish number of Horizon was overtaken by the furore surrounding its distribution in Ireland. It was widely rumoured that the journal had been banned and all copies impounded. One version of the rumour had it that Horizon was proscribed on grounds of obscenity because of explicit allusions to masturbation in The Old Peasant; another that it was suppressed because of the unpatriotic and anti-government views voiced in O’Connor’s essay or his reference to contraception. An editorial in the May 1942 issue of Horizon stated that the Irish number had been banned in Dublin because ‘passages in Patrick Kavanagh’s poem’ were ‘considered to be grossly obscene’ and, with an ironic dig at a draconian Irish censorship, the editor thanked ‘English and American readers for their extreme forbearance in letting this poem pass with favourable comment’. Frank O’Connor, too, maintained that Horizon had been ‘seized by the Vice Squad’ because of Kavanagh’s poem.18 To the contrary, Kavanagh, speaking under oath in a Dublin court in 1954, stated that his poem had never been banned. Whose version are we to believe?

  According to the Censorship of Publications Act 1929, a single issue of Horizon, such as the Irish number, could not have been banned on grounds of obscenity, nor could the journal have been banned on the basis of Kavanagh’s poem alone. The banning of periodicals on grounds of obscenity required that three recently published issues of the periodical be examined by the Censorship Board and prohibition would ensue only if it was found that these issues had ‘usually or frequently been indecent or obscene’. The prohibition would then last for three months and would become permanent if the periodical reoffended. Neither was it the practice of the Censorship Board to seize copies of a journal from a retailer, as is alleged to have happened with Eason’s copies of the January Horizon.19 If a journal had not been seized by customs, the usual practice was for members of the public who found it objectionable to purchase copies and send them to the censors for inspection. So Cyril Connolly misinformed his readers when he stated that the January issue of Horizon had been banned in Ireland on account of some obscene passages in Kavanagh’s poem. When the issue of the banning of The Great Hunger was investigated in the course of a libel action in 1954, it was found never to have been banned under the Censorship of Publications Act.

  Yet, the alleged banning was a case of no smoke without fire. Kavanagh stated on numerous occasions, and once under oath in the same libel trial, that he had been visited by two gardaí in connection with the publication of part of The Great Hunger in Horizon. They came to the door of 122 Morehampton Road but did not enter the premises, the implication being that they hadn’t a search warrant. They interviewed him about the poem on the pathway without raising the question of obscenity or referring to the law; he talked to them about Chaucer and they departed after fifteen minutes or so ‘in a haze of goodwill’. However, the Censorship Board did not employ policemen in the performance of its duties. It published its findings in the Iris Oifigiúil and in the Register of Prohibited Books and the onus was on distributors and booksellers not to stock or sell the banned material under threat of a £50 fine.

  The probable explanation of the garda presence at Morehampton Road is that Horizon was being investigated under the Emergency Powers Act, voted in on 2 September 1939, which contained provision for prohibiting the publication or spreading of subversive statements and propaganda and authorised and provided for the control and censorship of newspapers and periodicals. The seizure of Eason’s copies of the journal could also have occurred under the Emergency Powers Act. The Old Peasant may have incurred official displeasure because of its distinctly unfavourable representation of Irish life, but O’Connor’s essay was more forthrightly critical of the status quo in Ireland, criticising de Valera’s government for strengthening ‘the grip of the gombeen man, of the religious secret societies like the Knights of Columbanus; of the illiterate censorships�
�� and suppressing all discussion of birth control and the sale of contraceptives. Whereas Kavanagh was only mildly harassed once over his contribution to Horizon, Frank O’Connor was persistently hounded for years. At the time he told a friend, Seán Hendrick, that he had been banned from the Dublin radio station on the strength of his contribution,20 but he then found that he was also blacklisted as a writer and could not publish in newspapers. By contrast, Kavanagh’s career as a journalist took off for the first time in September 1942 and, moreover, he was employed by the pro-government newspaper, the Irish Press. By dint of much behind the scenes investigation, O’Faoláin ascertained that the reason for O’Connor’s disgrace was a combination of his marriage to a divorcée, Evelyn Speaight Bowen, and his article in Horizon.21

  O’Connor first read The Great Hunger during a walk along the Liffey with Kavanagh, and immediately determined to use his influence as a member of the editorial board to have the Cuala Press publish what he considered the finest poem of its time.22 George Yeats was in full agreement with him and The Great Hunger was in proof by March 1942. The limited edition of 250 copies, priced at twelve shillings and sixpence, was ready in the third week of April.

  Since the poem had already achieved such notoriety, George Yeats undertook publication in the full knowledge that the book might be prosecuted for indecency. She thought it would be a wise precaution to send a hundred copies to England before distributing it in Ireland. Betjeman was asked to convey the copies in his diplomatic bag, but he considered it undiplomatic to do so, and they were sent via Belfast. Irish distribution was delayed until 1 July when the English copies had arrived safely in London. Kavanagh, who was fretting at the delay, telephoned George Yeats but received short shrift since she was dealing with another client at the time.23

  After all her precautions, The Great Hunger did not fall foul of the censors in spite of a number of sexually explicit passages, which may seem surprising given that only a year previously Kate O’Brien’s novel The Land of Spices had been banned because of a decorous one-sentence allusion to homosexuality. It probably escaped because it was a poem and also because of its very limited circulation, for in spite of the whiff of scandal surrounding it, The Great Hunger was a worst-seller. Few readers, other than reviewers, obtained a copy. As Frank O’Connor remarked to his friend Seán Hendrick, when sending him a proof copy, 12/6 was a hefty price for a book of thirty-odd pages.24

  Not only was it prohibitively expensive; it was not readily available except directly from the publishers. Fifty copies were dispatched to Browne and Nolan, the main Irish distributors of Irish and British-published books. As soon as they had been received, several gardaí turned up at the premises. They did not seize any copies, and merely asked some questions, but this was sufficient for the management to get cold feet and decide not to distribute the book. Peggy Gough, then publications manager, came to the rescue by buying all forty-eight copies still in stock and later distributing them as gifts. Bumpus Books in London returned fifty of the hundred copies it had been sent by George Yeats prior to Irish publication. Most Cuala Press publications sold badly, as she ruefully observed, but ‘Paddy’s poem’ did not sell at all. In 1952 the Cuala Press still had 105 out of the print run of 250 copies in stock and she was making arrangements to remainder them in England. When review and author’s presentation copies are accounted for, less than 30 copies of the poem, other than those purchased by Peggy Gough, were sold in Ireland in 1942. Six years after publication the Cuala edition was so little known that John Kilfeather, a Belfast fan, bought an autographed presentation copy in a bookshop along the Liffey Quays for ten shillings.25

  Horizon readers were the poem’s most likely English audience, but the review in this journal did little to promote sales. Connolly had entrusted it to the young Northern Irish poet Robert Greacen. It was his first review and, anxious to make an impression, he took a staunchly anti-Free State stance, presenting the book as, materially and mentally, a product of neutral Ireland. While he praised the poetry as ‘simple and direct’, what really interested him was the book’s value as clinical evidence. Cuala’s uneconomical use of paper at a time of paper rationing was typical of neutral Ireland’s wastefulness. Maguire’s apathy was symptomatic of the neuter and negative attitudes on which neutrality was based; he typified a country where the young had emigrated to work in wartime Britain, leaving a huge population of elderly bachelors and spinsters. The only way out of ‘the sterile impasse’ in which both populace and poets found themselves was for paratroopers to land and ‘trample down all the Paddy Maguires and their creators’. In the meantime Irish poetry must look to Northern Ireland ‘for new direction and vigour’, to MacNeice, Rodgers, Hewitt and the younger poets, of whom he himself was one. (Greacen would write a much more appreciative review when the poem was reissued in 1947.) The Great Hunger otherwise went almost unnoticed in England but for a brief complimentary mention as ‘no glib narrative’ in a round-up review of a number of books of poetry in The Spectator on 17 July. O’Connor sent the poem to his agent, A. D. Peters, who admired it but did not succeed in finding an English publisher for it.

  In Ireland, Geoffrey Taylor, O’Connor’s successor as poetry editor at The Bell, immediately hailed it as a break-through poem in Irish literature, ‘a far more hopeful portent than was, for instance, the Wanderings of Oisin’. It was the poem the age demanded, a product of contemporary Ireland and a culmination of the socio-realist experiments in which Irish writers had recently been engaged:

  He has produced exactly the kind of poem one had been hoping for, for which the opportunity was ready and which it demanded — an educated civilized poem by a poet who knows his stuff both as to the technique of writing and (what is just as important) as to the subject matter with which he deals. . . . The movement of the poem from start to finish is as natural, inevitable, and as negligent as the seasons; and the subdued, almost subconscious, personal drama is truly integrated with that seasonal rhythm.

  While Taylor saluted the range and flexibility of Kavanagh’s verse, the shocking newness of its technique would rouse considerable debate in Irish literary circles when the poem became more widely available five years later.

  It is remarkable that Kavanagh should have produced such a poetically authoritative indictment of Irish Catholic materialism in The Great Hunger, privileging spirituality and sexuality above money and economic security at a time when he himself was penniless and with no prospects of employment or income. The Bell paid him two guineas per poem, twice the normal rate, because of his poverty, but it had carried only four of his poems in its first two years, and sales of The Great Hunger were so low that he had made more from its journal publication. He gave an autographed presentation copy to Lord Dunsany with a poem, ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, inscribed on the flyleaf, hopeful that Francis Ledwidge’s patron would sponsor another ‘peasant poet’. Dunsany proved friendly but did not become the patron Kavanagh longed for. For the most part, he had to get by on small ‘loans’. He tried to beg artfully, for instance asking Frank O’Connor if Evelyn’s coat were really mink, before touching him for a pound. O’Connor saw through the transparent ruse, but gave him money anyhow because he really believed in his genius. Another regular donor at this time would have been the Bell’s managing editor, Peadar O’Donnell, known throughout Dublin as ‘a soft touch’.

  The daily degradation of being a pauper is voiced in the extempore poem ‘Money’ which Kavanagh gave Betjeman on 16 May 1942.26 In a private reversal of the sentiments expressed in the masterpiece officially published the previous month, he acknowledges that money is a psychic necessity. Though hunger enters the poem obliquely through the metaphor of a gaseous empty soul, this is the work of a man who knew what it was to go hungry:

  Money is the stomach of the soul

  And sin is when it’s empty — all the shame

  Of being damned. I know, I know it all,

  The degradation and the self-blame;

  The sneaking cowardice
of devils,

  Beggary’s knife in the back of a friend,

  The truth of life swinging on swivels

  To the light of every chance wind.

  O money, it is no use saying

  That your dirt makes no difference —

  My empty soul is gaseous with praying

  The Trinity that’s not Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

  We glimpse how difficult it must have been to concentrate on the spiritual vision of The Great Hunger when that other monetary trinity was the deity that ruled his everyday life. Kavanagh also blames his mood swings and a habit of backstabbing friends on his financially precarious existence. In a handwritten note on this typed poem he says, ‘Some things in this extempore effusion frighten me.’

  He was so poor that a mere £2 was enough to induce poetic rhapsodies and he wrote a sequence of two sonnets entitled ‘£2’ to thank John Betjeman for a gift of this amount on 15 April:

  I

  Sonnet, tell all the things that can be done