Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  With this pound. Don’t mention bread and cheese

  Or rashers for the breakfast; for not by these

  Alone is the poet fed. Tell to John

  About the simple unmeasurable fun —

  The pennorths of delight that please

  Better than millionaire-caught ecstasies:

  A drink of beer with a friend is an easy one —

  And there’s tea with that girl who makes sweet

  A heart, argument with the world turns

  Rancid like cream nobody churns.

  And then there’s the cigarette softening the edge

  Of reality’s knife. Sonnet, let your conceit

  Be to the giver a poet’s naive pledge.

  II

  And tell too how this second pound has shone

  Its light upon the late-spring trees

  Made them break buds sooner. Made the breeze

  Summery on my cheek. The children run

  Dancingly and smile. And Helicon

  Runs down her April snows in filigrees

  Of fantasy. I seize

  A pattern of her magic where the sun

  Falls with a sudden difference on the midge

  Called man who on death’s lathe turns

  Verses in which nothing holy burns.

  Now something strange has happened in his street —

  A miracle of love. A growthy ridge

  And the green braid of the eternal wheat.

  In a marginal scribble he writes: ‘Virtuosity on £2’s excitement. I often did less with a £100. Poetically extempore, a little sentimental.’ Such occasional private verse, poetically lightweight though it may be, gives some insight into what it was like for Kavanagh to live like a beggar in Dublin. On 1 June came the letter from Methuen to say they would not give an advance on Stony Grey Soil without a contract. He was working for nothing.

  The Methuen letter was sent to 55a Percy Place, a wretched flat Kavanagh and his brother had just moved to because the landlord at 122 Morehampton Road objected to his entertaining a woman friend on the premises.27 Dublin was as bad as Donaghmoyne: ‘No hope. No. No lust.’

  Throughout 1941 Kavanagh had been besieging Betjeman, as he did all his influential acquaintances, to fix him up with a job. In spring 1942 Betjeman succeeded in having him shortlisted for a well-paid post as a war correspondent based in Lisbon. Kavanagh obtained a passport on 16 March, stamped valid for UK, Canada and the US, and in a handwritten addition stated to be valid also for Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Vatican. Rumour had it that he was learning Portuguese. By mid-June it seemed quite definite that he was leaving for Lisbon, and Mrs Darley, whose Sunday at-homes he still frequented, told Joseph Holloway of it as a certain fact. Holloway surmised that Kavanagh was leaving because he didn’t fit in, had ‘rubbed the Dublin literary element the wrong way’.28 Not only was Kavanagh already embattled with the neo-Gaels — Austin Clarke, Roibéard Ó Faracháin and M. J. MacManus — he and Bertie Smyllie were constantly skirmishing, O’Connor reports, though he adds that Smyllie valued his poetry and would go to any lengths to get a good poem for his Saturday page.29 Kavanagh was too ‘outspoken’ for his own good and ‘most indiscreet’, according to Holloway, who personally liked him because he was ‘sincerely honest’. An instance of his indiscretion was his bad-mouthing of O’Faoláin, an influential ally and friend of seven years standing, to Holloway who was a mere acquaintance and a recent acquaintance at that. O’Faoláin, he said, was ‘clever, but too cocksure of himself to be completely successful; he wrote well in spots but wasn’t very reliable. When an author or an artist becomes egotistical, his art usually stops short. . . .’30 In a city as small as Dublin, which throve on tittle-tattle, such criticism was bound to be relayed back. Kavanagh had no loyalties, only opinions, and these were rarely flattering. Literature mattered so enormously to him that he forgot the trinity of pounds, shilling and pence when literary standards were at stake. In the end the hoped-for job in Lisbon went to someone else and he had to continue hoping and praying for employment in Dublin.

  11

  PILGRIM POET

  (1940–1942)

  It is a remarkable fact that Lough Derg does not lend itself to the literary spirit.

  (Kavanagh in The Standard, 30 August 1946)

  Kavanagh was to become such an experienced newspaper reporter of Irish pilgrimages that in 1950 he proposed a book on the subject to Hollis and Carter. Like most of his attempts to treat pilgrimage as something more than a journalistic assignment, this book was never published. His newspaper reports on, and especially his poems about, pilgrimage are mostly clustered in the early 1940s. The long poem Lough Derg was written in June/July 1942 just before the Cuala Press released The Great Hunger on the Irish market.

  Lough Derg was composed in the fourth floor bedsitter at 9 Lower O’Connell Street to which Kavanagh had moved in the middle of June from the disagreeable flat at 55a Percy Place. This was a small, cheap room, but it was his first unshared accommodation in Dublin. From now until 1945 he and his brother would live separately. At first he complained that the room was too small to write in, but he ended up staying there for well over a year.

  An obsession in some quarters with Kavanagh’s ‘mysticism’ has deflected attention from his quite complicated attitude towards Catholicism: a compound of belief and scepticism, affectionate tolerance and fierce criticism, superstitious fear and anti-clericalism, and, as in The Great Hunger, the imaginative and intellectual power to conceive of an alternative to the popular Irish conception of a prudent and sexually prudish Deity, a God who always said yes. While he deplored the religious absolutism of Patrick Maguire, waiting to be presented with ‘the Absolute envased bouquet’ instead of contenting himself with the ordinary wild flowers that came his way, he himself was sometimes such an idealist that even God himself could hardly be godly enough for him. One or other of this mix of attitudes might be in the ascendant at different times, though throughout the 1940s and 1950s he continued to be a practising Catholic, regularly attending Sunday Mass in St Mary’s Church at Haddington Road or, sometimes, the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook.

  Even in the early 1930s when he was most influenced by Æ’s transcendent aesthetic, Kavanagh was something of a sceptic, self-ironic enough to question his own poetic visions and apparitions:

  A light that might be mystic or a fraud

  Played on far hills beyond all common sight . . .

  (‘After May’)

  Later, Mrs Flynn in Tarry Flynn would be given the role of debunking the apprentice poet’s visionary insights, greeting phrases like ‘The Holy Spirit is in the fields’ with a mischievous twinkle and a request to pare the corn on her little toe.

  The aspect of religion that most preoccupied Kavanagh throughout the 1940s, from the first drafts of Stony Grey Soil until the novel was finally transformed into Tarry Flynn in September 1947, was the representation of the workings of Catholicism in the day-to-day life of an Irish country parish. The most obvious development in his 1940s’ fictions as regards the portrayal of Catholicism is the shift from a hostile, anti-clerical attitude to a benign and affectionately amused acceptance. The closet pagan Father Mat of ‘Why Sorrow?’ had shed all but a few unexplained remnants of his paganism by 1945 and emerged as an exemplary parish priest in ‘Confession Saturday’ and ‘Father Mat’. The anti-clerical plot was dropped from Tarry Flynn in 1947. From 1942 Catholicism would be integral to Kavanagh’s literary radicalism, his cultural self-differentiation from and opposition to the Protestant (or non-Catholic) writers of the Literary Revival.

  However, at the outset of the 1940s, Kavanagh’s response to Irish Catholicism was, at best, ambivalent, and this is nowhere more evident than in his writings on pilgrimage. Generally, the less austere the pilgrimage, the better he liked it. The annual gathering at some ancient shrine or holy well that provided an excuse for a communal summer outing pleased him. Good-humoured crowds dressed in their Sunday best; tea and sandwiches in th
e open air; hawkers and stallholders plying their wares: such easy commerce between the secular and the sacred, piety and gaiety, met with his approval. Nevertheless, his more righteous, earnest, purist side was troubled and at times repelled by the materialist and manipulative basis of his fellow-pilgrims’ devotional exercises. In his role as champion of the poor and oppressed, he could condone and even exalt the ‘banal beggary’ that passed as prayer and envisage a God for whom the petitions of the poor were ‘Homeric utterances’. At other times, especially when the petitioners were middle-class, he was disdainful of this self-interested piety. He found it impossible to reconcile these conflicting attitudes to Irish Catholicism as he knew it: the religion of an undereducated laity, weak on dogma and metaphysics, strong on observance and blackmail, treating their God as a Mister Fix-It whose chief purpose was to ensure that crops flourished and children passed examinations. One wonders if his own longing for a powerful patron who would relieve him of all material anxieties did not derive from his Catholic upbringing with its conception of God as the ultimate and supreme patron.

  He was not beyond stooping to religious blackmail of sorts himself. In June 1942 the Lisbon job looked unlikely and the Irish Travel Association had not shortlisted him for a job as touring reporter, so he was pinning his hopes on being appointed staff reporter on The Standard. He had just inadvertently attracted a new ecclesiastical champion by a flattering reference to Archbishop Joseph Walsh of Tuam in an article on the Knock pilgrimage in May and Walsh was now leaning on The Standard to employ him. It was time for a public parade of piety. At the beginning of June he not only ostensibly made the Lough Derg pilgrimage (he was actually a reporter rather than a pilgrim) but went on a two-day religious retreat with the Jesuits at Milltown Park, making an each-way bet on the Deity and his earthly representatives, the Archbishops of Dublin and Tuam, by reporting on both pious activities in The Standard. He was a practical as well as a practising Catholic, not one to hide his halo under a bushel.

  Did he partly subscribe to the association between religious observance and worldly success, as voiced by the mother in The Great Hunger?

  ‘Now go to mass and pray and confess your sins

  And you’ll have all the luck.’

  Like many country Catholics at the time, he was deeply superstitious, unsaying any sneer about an acquaintance’s physical defect or illness with the phrase, ‘God bless the mark’, lest a similar misfortune be visited on himself by a vengeful Deity. Anarchic though his politics often were, from the early 1940s onwards he tended publicly to support or at least not to criticise the Irish Catholic Church, even at its most conservative and reactionary. Was this due to fear of divine retribution? Or merely a prudent course of action for a writer who lived in a theocracy and often depended on ecclesiastical patronage?

  Until he moved to Dublin and began work as an occasional reporter for various newspapers, Kavanagh appears never to have gone on pilgrimage. His colourful account in The Green Fool of the ecclesiastically disapproved gathering at Lady Well near Dundalk was based on neighbours’ reports of this unruly, carnivalesque occasion and not on first-hand experience.

  ‘Doing Lough Derg’, as it was generally known, a far cry from the rumbustious excesses of Lady Well, was also a recognised summer outing for some hardy Inniskeen folk. Lough Derg was actually the name of the County Donegal lake on which the island known as St Patrick’s Purgatory, an ancient place of pilgrimage, was situated. A special excursion train from Carrickmacross stopped to pick up intending pilgrims at the Inniskeen station, all of them fasting since the previous midnight. For three days they survived on black tea, dry bread and the peppered and salted water known as Lough Derg soup. During their stay on the island they spent much of their time praying while walking barefoot around rings of stones known as stations and on one of their two nights there they had to observe an all-night vigil. On their return journey they fasted until midnight. Every pilgrim on the excursion train travelled in expectation or hope of some heavenly reward: the granting of a favour, the expiation of a grievous sin, a rise in their spiritual ratings. However, working farmers like Kavanagh rarely made the pilgrimage because it entailed three days’ absence at a busy time of the year.

  His first actual experience of pilgrimage was probably the inopportune visit to Lough Derg on behalf of the Irish Independent, which interrupted his idyllic holiday with Patrick O’Connor in Killala in June 1940. An embarrassing incident that occurred at the outset of this pilgrimage biased him against it then and coloured his view of it thereafter. On his arrival at the shore of Lough Derg, he had attempted to distinguish himself from the group of pilgrims waiting for the ferry, signalling his special status as a mystical poet by standing apart in meditative pose, gazing intently at the island. This ‘bogus trance’ (he acknowledged it was an act) aroused the suspicions of two ferrymen, who took him for a nutter and accosted him insultingly, while his fellow pilgrims looked on appreciatively. It was the kind of discomfiture which he might later turn into a comic fictional episode, but at the time he was not amused. The boatmen’s sneering familiarity touched a raw nerve. On a remote Donegal shore, far away from his literary friends, he was vulnerable to being cut down to size by rude fellows. He still looked like a tillage farmer, and his attempts to give himself airs and trail his mystical cloak left him open to being taken down a peg. Over the next two days he brooded on the incident, his temper not improved by a failure to pack any sandwiches for the sojourn in what was virtually a food-free zone. He had seriously underestimated the rigours of the pilgrimage, was totally unprepared, and had to rely on nips of whiskey to sustain him, a beverage for which he had not yet developed a taste.

  When he came to write his piece for the Independent he was still smarting from the ferrymen’s interrogation and the collusion of fellow pilgrims in his humiliation, and he seized on the report as an opportunity to revenge himself, describing his fellow pilgrims with a contempt that betrays how deeply his self-esteem had suffered:

  The crowds which gather in such a place as Lough Derg act like one enormous creature, almost; and it is doubtful if one can develop a defence against it. The heart of this creature is one boiling mass of suspicious insultability . . . Lough Derg is typical of what may be called the Irish mind. No contemplation, no adventure, the narrow primitive piety of the small huxter with the large family.1

  It was Kavanagh, of course, who was ‘one boiling mass of suspicious insultability’, thin-skinned, touchy, defensive, recoiling from the intrusiveness and familiarity of his fellow countrymen, incapable of summoning sufficient professional detachment to write a few column inches of devotional prose. A sneering dismissal of Ireland’s most celebrated pilgrimage was not what the editor of the Independent had in mind when he dispatched the poet to Lough Derg. After all the bodily and psychic torture he had endured, the article was rejected.

  Kavanagh’s first encounter with Lough Derg then was unpleasant and unprofitable. Moreover, he found it imaginatively recalcitrant: ‘The moment you think of Lough Derg your mind goes blank, your mind atrophies’, he complained. Yet he would return to this most austere and gruelling of pilgrimages both in person and in verse. While his next report for the Independent, on the Croagh Patrick climb, was, as we have seen, so effusive as to prejudice a Circuit Court judge in his favour, his private, unpublished reaction was more ambivalent.

  Sometime in the late summer or autumn of 1940 Kavanagh sent Frank O’Connor ‘Pilgrims’, a symmetrical and highly patterned poem, his carefully crafted response to the three pilgrimages which he had already treated in prose. Its first three stanzas succinctly and cynically analyse the mind-set of the pilgrims at Lady Well, Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg, their religious aspirations bounded by the little hedges of the small farm; the fourth reverses and destabilises this analysis. O’Connor apparently advised against publication. Because the poem has languished unprinted among his papers,2 I quote it in full:

  I saw them kneeling by the holy well —


  It was for life, life, life they prayed:

  Life that for a farmer is land enough to keep two horses,

  Life that is a healthy husband to a maid.

  I saw them climbing the holy mountain —

  It was the knowledge, knowledge, knowledge of life they pursued:

  Knowledge that is in knowing what fair to sell* the cattle in

  Knowledge that is in being able to cart an acre from a field.

  I saw them lying on the burning stones —

  It was vision, vision, vision they desired:

  Vision that is forecasting a mare’s hour of foaling,

  Vision that is catching the idler, newly hired.

  I saw them kneeling, climbing and prostrate —

  It was love, love, love they found:

  Love that is Christ green walking from the summer headlands

  To His scare-crow cross in the turnip ground.

  (*‘see’ in the MS. is obviously a mistake.)

  This poem illustrates an ambivalent attitude towards pilgrimage which was to persist in Kavanagh’s verse. Positive abstractions such as life, knowledge and vision are diminished by the pilgrims to fit their own petty, materialistic ambitions. Then, unexpectedly, in the final stanza the poem lurches in a contrary direction and they are granted an unexpected religious reward when the incarnate Christ enters the headlands and turnip fields which form their mental landscape. Confronted with his fellow Catholics at prayer, Kavanagh did not know whether to kick out or to kneel.

  O’Connor possibly disliked ‘Pilgrims’ because of the glibness of the first three stanzas and the thumping insistence of the second line in each stanza, or he perhaps considered that it was inadvisable to publish the first three stanzas in the prevailing climate of unofficial ecclesiastical censorship. Nevertheless, the poem’s underlying theme that pilgrims’ longings and aspirations offer an insight into ‘the Irish mind’, first formulated as a result of his unhappy visit to Lough Derg, was one Kavanagh would soon elaborate.