Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Was it Kavanagh himself who got cold feet about publication, knowing that both Archbishops would most likely disapprove and withdraw their patronage? The story of the Franciscan’s paedophilia was based on fact, but could he hope to get away with it in the prevailing censoriously religious climate by presenting it as fiction? He could not afford another scandal so soon after the furore about the Horizon poem. Did his reluctance to publish Lough Derg have anything to do with his superstitious nature? Did he fear divine retribution, even more than episcopal wrath, for presuming to analyse Irish Catholicism? Or did he withhold the poem from more disinterested motives? Was he abashed at his own insensitivity in exploiting the vulnerabilities of his co-religionists for literary copy? He would take such a view with regard to the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in 1945: ‘You are at the raw sensitive heart of the active Faith; too raw and sensitive perhaps for poetic exploitation . . .’5 Did he perhaps sense, as the text implies, a lack of generosity and magnanimity at the heart of his poem?

  . . . and the half untrue

  Of this story is his pride’s rhythm.

  Or, finally, did he consider Lough Derg a failure, simply not good enough to warrant publication? This last is the conclusion one might draw from his review of Denis Devlin’s Lough Derg and Other Poems in 1946 where he commented, ‘It is a remarkable fact that Lough Derg does not lend itself to the literary spirit’, though he did not admit that he was among those who had tried and failed to extract ‘from the stony austerity of Lough Derg the warm blood of abundant poetic life’.6 Lough Derg was only posthumously published in 1978.7

  P.S. Pilgrimaging was to become Kavanagh’s code word for chasing after women.

  12

  MARRIAGE AND MONEY?

  (1942–1944)

  A new rhythm is a new life

  And in it marriage is hung and money.

  (The Great Hunger)

  In September 1942 Kavanagh secured his first regular job as a journalist when Bill Sweetman, editor of the large-circulation daily newspaper, the Irish Press, hired him as a twice-weekly columnist. That the Irish Press was the organ of de Valera’s Fianna Fáil Party, to whose politics O’Faoláin, O’Connor and Kavanagh himself were vehemently opposed, was no deterrent to his acceptance of this job offer. Few Irish journalists could afford the luxury of being swayed by political prejudice at the time. To Bertie Smyllie, working for the Irish Press was ‘slumming it’ because its readership was less posh and less middlebrow than that of The Irish Times. To young journalists it was the liveliest of the national dailies and paid better than The Irish Times.

  Kavanagh’s avowed aim in his Irish Press column, ‘City Commentary’, was ‘to give a countryman’s impression of city life for the benefit of his friends in the country’.1 Such mediation between city and country was part of the Press’s drive to foster its image as a national rather than a Dublin newspaper.2 ‘City Commentary’ was also intended to target the large numbers of rural migrants settling in the city. As a newcomer to Dublin with over thirty years’ experience of living in the country, Kavanagh seemed ideally placed to address both audiences. His adoption of the pen-name Piers Plowman emphasised his country roots for non-literary readers. Those who recognised the allusion to the great medieval poem would have been aware that the choice of pen-name had also poetic, religious and moral overtones, and might have made the connection with another of his sources of journalistic income, writing for The Standard.

  ‘City Commentary’ developed into an informal chat column, a record of Kavanagh’s day-to-day social life in Dublin, written in a relaxed, friendly style. He was already much given to prowling the streets as a form of free entertainment and as a way of understanding and coming to terms with his milieu. He now played the role of roving reporter, indulging his lively curiosity about all aspects of his surroundings: street traders, other pedestrians, children at play, and the contents of stalls, book barrows, shop windows. He appreciated the banter of Moore Street traders, eavesdropped on women in a café, chatted to a street photographer, to a jeweller in his shop and to a gardener in the Botanic Gardens.

  Dublin’s poverty in those wartime years appalled him; he had seen nothing like it in the country, where there was at least free fuel to be had. The poorer reaches of Dublin were like a foreign territory to him. He was fearful of entering ‘the tenements of Cuffe, Stephen, York, Clarendon, and many other streets’ because the buildings looked so ‘shaky’ and because he ‘could not imagine ordinary people living there’. He was amazed to find that slum folk were ‘simple, intelligent folk, not unlike the denizens of a country kitchen’. His sympathies were also provoked by the plight of the low-waged: hairdressers, waitresses and a male clerk too poor to afford a girlfriend. He rarely touched on the grimmer aspects of city life, however. Dublin, he reiterated, needed a Dickens to do it justice; he was not going to take on this role. He seems to have considered it his function to entertain rather than trouble his readers, so he flitted blithely from topic to topic and from one social event to the next, reverting to the contented, easy-going tones of The Green Fool.

  As well as providing a welcome regular pay packet (£2 per column), ‘City Commentary’ offered him all manner of free entertainment, an entrée to most social functions from boxing tournaments to ballets. It would come as a surprise to those who knew him only from his late middle age that he was once a keen concert-goer, attended ballet performances and first nights at the opera, even found himself one April Saturday torn between going to Academy Varnishing Day or the Rugby cup final in Lansdowne Road. His press card enabled him to play the part of a well-to-do, leisured middle-class Dubliner of the period, and he did so with every appearance of enjoyment. He is not usually thought of as humming a Tchaikovsky melody or praising Rhoda Coghill’s rendering of Brahms on the piano or Brian Boydell’s playing of one of his new compositions for the oboe. True, he may have enjoyed the chat in the vestibule of the Mansion House or the foyer of the Gresham Hotel more than the actual music, and he found some of the symphony concerts rather long, but he was a carefree man-about-town, happy to participate in the pleasures of the bourgeoisie. His taste in entertainment was remarkably eclectic: boxing at the Rotunda, camogie, hurling or Gaelic football matches in Croke Park, the races at the Phoenix Park or Baldoyle, a gathering of the magicians of Ireland where he learned the three-card trick, a mannequin parade, a tour of Guinness’s Brewery, Tartuffe at the Gate, Don Jupiter at the Olympia, The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey, ceilidhes at the Mansion House, the Cabbies’ Derby, a Paul Henry exhibition, the Water-Colour Society’s show opened by Betjeman, a presidential garden party at Aras an Uachtaráin or the British Representative’s at-home in the grounds of Trinity College. Many of the evening entertainments he attended were black or white tie affairs, not a style of dress readily associated with the ex-ploughman, yet he had to conform to Dublin’s dress code. In spite of the war, the city kept up its sartorial standards, and glamorous women in long evening dresses were delivered to their destination on the crossbar of a bicycle. In one column he complains of the difficulty of finding collar studs for his boiled shirts.

  As Piers Plowman he mingled with celebrated and influential persons in the Dublin arts world: visiting Seán O’Sullivan’s or Jack Yeats’s studio or the dressing-room of Mr Gerald Shannon, pianist; chatting to Margaret Burke Sheridan, Lady Glenavy, Tom Collins, editor of Dublin Opinion, P. J. Little, the ‘idealistic Minister for Posts and Telegraphs’; at a symphony concert with Dr Arthur Duff, acting music director of Radio Éireann (his former rival for Peggy Gough); lunching with Michael Scott, ‘the well-known modernist architect’; at Baldoyle races with Ronnie Lyon, ‘the easy-going but successful manager of the Talbot Press’. His strategy was to pepper his column with names and events and always to give a favourable mention. He was in a position to bestow favours by publicising forthcoming attractions, for instance, telling readers to look forward to lots of laughs at Faustus Kelly in the Abbey. (Brian O’Nolan had asked him to puff his play
, and he agreed saying ‘I’m not that honest.’)

  Kavanagh conceived of himself as a diarist rather than a journalist in ‘City Commentary’, writing ‘an intimate personal record of seemingly petty events’ and not commenting on topical wartime happenings. He even professed a dislike of headline news, though he eagerly devoured the war news in the papers as he had done in his teens. He personalised his column by including casual tit-bits of information about himself: he went to a lost property auction at Amiens Street Station to buy an umbrella; he patronises a self-service laundry attached to the Corporation baths at Tara Street; his bedsitter was infested with ants during the summer; he haunts the bookshops looking for new Penguins; he’s a print-junkie who reads every word of a menu if there’s no other reading matter available; he once devoured a book on chess because it was there, though he didn’t know a bishop from a rook; he is fascinated by railway engines and tool shops; Moby Dick is his favourite book, yet he has no interest whatever in the sea. He is given to airing his prejudices and, despite his complimentary references to particular women, every so often his misogynist or deeply conservative views on women are voiced. One is not surprised to find him locked in argument with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington at a street corner when he opines that two women deputies in the Dáil are quite adequate as female representation. On the other hand, his scepticism about the language revival movement and opposition to the conscious Gaelicisation of Irish literature in English are suggested but not elaborated on; while he seems confident that his anti-feminist stance is widely shared, he knows that his opinions on matters Gaelic are likely to raise hackles. He does put forward the view that art should engage with contemporary life, that the artist should not be ‘apart from the ordinary flood of living’. He praises Harry Kernoff for being ‘a vital painter who takes everyday things like Dublin houses and parks for subjects’ and laments the ‘going back to the dead past’, only too ‘common in literary circles’.

  Though it contains hardly any distinguished writing, ‘City Commentary’ played a part in Kavanagh’s literary development analogous to that played by The Green Fool a few years earlier. It compelled him to record his impressions of the city in a direct, accessible style. Since his arrival in Dublin, he had been imaginatively obsessed with the small-farm world from which he had exiled himself. His poetry, his novels, his ‘specials’ for The Irish Times were all concerned with representing country life as he had known it. While he contrived to include a good deal of rural material even in ‘City Commentary’, he also revealed a lively interest in his city milieu. Friendship with O’Faoláin and O’Connor had resulted in an increasing preoccupation with documenting social issues and a tendency to emphasise the gloomier facets of life during the ‘Emergency’. ‘City Commentary’ reveals his lighter side, his humour, good cheer, capacity for enjoyment and zest for all kinds of experience. In its friendly, sociable manner and gravitation towards middle-class entertainment, it possibly reflects the influence of the sunny, good-natured John Betjeman.

  The snippets of verse included in ‘City Commentary’ may also have been influenced by Kavanagh’s friendship with this master of light, contemporary verse. Philip Larkin credited Betjeman as ‘the writer who knocked over the “No road through to real Life” signs which academic commentators had erected around contemporary poetry’.3 His cheery, irreverent verse was a useful antidote to the dullness and dimness of much Irish lyricism at the time, including many of the Inniskeen poet’s own earlier effusions. Kavanagh’s Irish Press columns often contain brief light-hearted jingles, occasional poems that are usually negligible as poetry yet extended his poetic range: Candida Betjeman’s first birthday was celebrated by a light, lilting lyric in September, ‘On a Friend’s Child’ (later ‘Candida’),4 and in response to a dare from Sir John Maffey, he produced a sonnet on a boxing tournament. He was taking his first steps towards accommodating his Dublin experiences in rhyme, and Dublin place-names crop up unobtrusively in these odds and ends of verse — Inchicore, Grafton Street, O’Connell Bridge, Abbey Street, Amiens Street, Mount Street Bridge. There are snatches of doggerel recording his reactions to such diverse events as a film (‘Through Gone with the Wind/I yawned my way’), a beauty contest, a camogie match, lunching in a restaurant, meeting the Belfast train. He waxes nostalgic for pre-war Dublin,

  . . . midnight lighted streets,

  Cigarettes, tea, sugar and gas always on,

  Buses coming at a quarter to one . . .

  Sometimes such lines rounded off a column; once he wrote his entire column in doggerel.

  Although hardly to be dignified with the name of poetry, these ‘City Commentary’ verses show Kavanagh experimenting with a humorous, impromptu, conversational style and a contemporary idiom. Their often playful treatment of everyday happenings results in a continuation and extension of the flexible rhyming that had characterised The Great Hunger and Lough Derg: ‘fighters’ is rhymed with ‘first nighters’, ‘Rotunda’ with ‘Monday’ and ‘understand a’, ‘bridge’ with ‘grudge’, ‘monotonous’ with ‘botanist’, ‘Finn McCool’ with ‘National School’. He no longer equates poetry with profundity, with the tragic destiny or the epiphanic moment. He is experimenting with ‘light verses for the times that are in it’, verse that is ‘an entertainment only’. His poetry is adapting itself, however superficially and ephemerally, to his urban circumstances, not stagnating in the countryside.

  Piers Plowman became a household name countrywide in Ireland, a national as well as a Dublin celebrity, yet the kind of chat column he produced is unlikely to have furthered the Press’s editorial aim of bridging the divide between town and country. His reporting of his social life acquired a Tatler quality and all too frequently became a record of his hobnobbing with prominent figures from the Dublin arts and business world. Although his style and manner were reader-friendly, all the name-dropping can have had little relevance or appeal either to the Paddy Maguires of Donaghmoyne or their migrant siblings. Given Kavanagh’s record as a writer on rural subjects, the Press probably expected a more ‘naif’ approach to the big city. Kavanagh, on the contrary, was rapidly assimilating into the middle classes, a process doubtless speeded up by Betjeman’s company and further accelerated by the possession of a press card. In the circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that his column came to an abrupt end in February 1944; what is remarkable is that it survived for almost a year and a half.

  For three months in spring 1943 Kavanagh also had a weekly book review column in The Standard, entitled ‘The Literary Scene’, and here he revealed his less frivolous side.5 The social and literary mind-set that informed and impassioned The Great Hunger are made explicit in a number of these reviews, the author’s conception of his role as the voice of the inarticulate and misrepresented Catholic small-farming and labouring classes. Reading O’Faoláin’s The Great O’Neill, he was on the lookout for ‘the secret history of the poor and humble and virtuous’, regretting that the Irish have no social historian of the poor other than Carleton who wrote in a convention that ‘barred some salutary truths’.6 Yet reviewing Carleton’s Valentine M’Clutchey seven weeks later, he confessed that, despite the book’s too obvious propaganda, he was moved by its account of the Famine, or ‘the Great Starvation’ as he calls it, implicitly associating it with his own long poem.7

  In the course of these reviews he mounted his first full frontal attack on the Literary Revival writers, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, on grounds of creed and class, displaying a blatant sectarianism he was generally careful to conceal in public. ‘The Anglo-Irish’ are presented as ‘lookers-on’, not ‘part of the national consciousness’, bypassing Rome and so missing the ‘soul of Ireland’. Yeats, who was ‘the fruit of many generations resident in Ireland’, consciously adopted Ireland as subject, and Synge wandered around Europe looking for a subject before finding the Aran Islands. Even Kavanagh’s Protestant friend F. R. Higgins looked for subjects, whereas a true poet ‘is pushed up by the under-drive of a na
tion’. The nativist aesthetic in this essay, the premise that art should articulate a national consciousness and that the Irish consciousness is Catholic, devalues Revival texts by insisting on their minority basis. He is deliberately decentralising Revival literature to make space for another kind of writing, a Catholic narrative deriving from the experience of the majority. ‘A people raises up a poet out of its silent necessity’, as he has been raised.8 He is here manoeuvring himself into the position of poet laureate or national bard. The author of A Vision of Piers Plowman appears in The Standard columns as a ‘historian of the poor’, a far cry from the role Piers is allocated in his Irish Press column. The gap between the views expressed in the two journals reveals the coexistence of two Kavanaghs, the one looking back in anger and compassion on the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ he has left behind, the other, upwardly mobile socially, availing eagerly of the cultivated pleasures to which intellect and sensibility entitle him.

  In August 1943 he went on holiday to Cork and Kerry with Paddy Ó Nualláin, who had an office on the ground floor of 9 Lower O’Connell Street, the building where Kavanagh had a small upstairs apartment. The two men often met in the hallway and stopped for a chat. In order to pay for his holiday and maintain his twice-weekly column with the Irish Press, Kavanagh arranged to write about his trip, and his ‘City Commentary’ was accordingly retitled ‘Tourist Commentary’. His holiday reports recount his favourable impressions of meeting with Seamus Murphy, the sculptor, in Cork city and with the notorious Tailor and Ansty9 in Gougane Barra, and his surprise that the Blasket Island storyteller Peig Sayers was like the hostess of a literary salon. The encounter that most mattered to him at the time was not publicly mentioned. Immediately after his arrival in Cork, Ó Nualláin introduced him to a young Dublin woman who was holidaying with her relatives in that city, Nola (Finola) O’Driscoll.10 For Kavanagh it was once again love at first sight.