My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs.
I offered him to the Church — the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs . . .
Then the men of State looked at
What I’d brought for sale. . .
I lowered my price. I stood him where
The broken-winded, spavined stand
And crooked shopkeepers said that he
Might do a season on the land —
But not for high-paid work in towns . . .
Despite the Archbishop’s hand-outs, the Church gets a poor press in this poem; it expects to profit by the poet’s humiliation — a spell of hardship will lead him to drop his ‘unusual airs’ and give himself up to religion. He had signed at least one of his letters to McQuaid, ‘Your affectionate and obedient servant in Jesus Christ’; while abasing himself thus, did Kavanagh sometimes think that his Grace was none too displeased to see him cringe? Or was the poem meant to spur him on to greater efforts? The Fianna Fáil government, according to this poem, would be interested in him only if he were a different animal, if he could take on another identity, retaining a mere fraction of his old self. Businessmen find him unemployable, too countrified, not sufficiently urbane. The poem, published in The Irish Times, is an act of public, poetic revenge on his begrudgers. It concludes triumphantly with the transformation of the ‘old horse’ into Pegasus and the poet riding off to imaginative adventures. This image may have been inspired by a picture Jack Yeats drew on the flyleaf of his copy of La La Noo, ‘a horse that having thrown his rider is galloping off into realms of fantasy’.22 The upbeat conclusion arrived at in ‘Pegasus’ is that unemployment leaves the poet with more time to devote to creative writing.
Unfortunately, 1944 was also a very bad year as far as publishing was concerned. In January the Cuala Press turned down the long poem ‘Why Sorrow?’. George Yeats couldn’t see ‘a book in it’: ‘It drifts, repeats itself and spoils itself by having no scenario’, she wrote to Frank O’Connor. What she had put her finger on was Kavanagh’s besetting weakness, a lack of plot and structure. She expected that O’Connor would as usual champion his protégé’s work, but even he could not defend this long, straggling, unresolved poem.23 That month O’Connor left for England, where he spent most of the year. Kavanagh missed his bracing company. He had ‘over-praised’ O’Connor’s A Picture Book in his November review for The Irish Times because he ‘was thinking of the author as a whole — what he has done and will do’.24
While he was ‘resting’, he returned to his 1941 novel, Stony Grey Soil, revised it ‘beyond recognition’ and renamed it Mother and Children.25 Three extracts appeared in The Bell in July under the title, ‘Three Glimpses of Life’, and the novel was sent to Macmillan on 3 October. A fortnight later it was politely declined as unsuitable for their fiction list. At the author’s request, Macmillan sent it on to Methuen in a ‘plain wrapper’, lest they be prejudiced by the fact that it had already been seen by another firm. Methuen too rejected it.26 Three prose sketches sent to John Lehmann in September were not even acknowledged and the two poems he sent the New Statesman (or New Stateswoman as he called it) did not appear. Meanwhile Kavanagh had compiled a new collection which included The Great Hunger. He wrote to Faber about this and in late November T. S. Eliot replied, asking to see the poems. He was chuffed to receive a letter from Eliot and was quite hopeful about the outcome. The poems were sent in January but Faber rejected them.27
‘In Memory of Brother Michael’, which was to prove a favourite with anthologists, appeared in The Irish Times in October 1944. Brother Michael was a seventeenth-century Franciscan monk and historian who, with the aid of three other historians, compiled Annala Rioghachta Éireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), commonly known as The Annals of the Four Masters. The poem which expresses Kavanagh’s dislike of the Irish obsession with history, concludes:
Culture is always something that was,
Something that pedants can measure,
Skull of bard, thigh of chief,
Depth of dried-up river.
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we be thus forever?
He later came to detest this poem and refused to allow it to be anthologised after 1960. In ‘Statue, Symbol and Poet’ (The Irish Times, 4 March, later ‘A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue’) he had also inveighed against Ireland’s cult of the past, this time with specific reference to poetry. Dead poets are honoured because they are amenable to being co-opted for any cause (‘the dead will wear the cap of any racket’) and because they are safe and respectable (their ‘white blood cannot blot the respectable page’). Living poets like himself are disliked because they are unpredictable and uncontrollable; they will not ‘stay poetical’.
In 1944, at Smyllie’s request, the poet and barrister Donagh MacDonagh compiled Poems from Ireland, an anthology based on the poems published on the Saturday books page of The Irish Times since the start of the war. Five of Kavanagh’s poems were selected, the maximum number MacDonagh allowed himself: ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘Renewal’ (‘Advent’), ‘Statue, Symbol and Poet’, ‘A Glut on the Market’ (‘Pegasus’) and ‘Memory of Brother Michael’. In the introduction, MacDonagh comments that Kavanagh’s poetry is ‘as recognisably Irish as turf-smoke though he is not consciously writing in the “Irish mode”’, and deliberately juxtaposes it with the work of Austin Clarke and Roibéard Ó Faracháin, who are. Since The Great Hunger, MacDonagh, who had been dismissive of Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936, had become a fan of Kavanagh’s verse, and would write a poem in his honour the following year. Instead of the customary anodyne ‘Biographical Note’ at the end of the volume, he not only states his admiration for The Great Hunger, but implicitly connects the vigour and originality of Kavanagh’s verse with his ungenteel ways:
The publication of his important poem, The Great Hunger, by the Cuala Press, placed him in the first rank of Irish poets . . . he speaks with the ruggedness of the country and the strength of the poet who can afford to break the rules.
While his poetry and his person are being linked as in the 1930s, Kavanagh is no longer viewed as a generic peasant-poet or a figure out of a Padraic Colum poem; his rebarbative distinctiveness as a human being is reflected in his defiance of poetic convention. By contrast, Geoffrey Taylor, who compiled an anthology of Bell poems in 1944, selected his worst poem in that journal, ‘Kednaminsha’.
As 1944 turned into 1945, Kavanagh was still pursuing Betjeman to find him a job. He suggested that Betjeman enquire if one of the English Sunday newspapers, the Dispatch, Express, People or Sunday Times, would be interested in hiring an Irish gossip columnist and offered to send a sample column. As he acknowledged, all his letters to Betjeman were self-centred and asking for favours.28 One concluded, ‘When I get rich I’ll write altruistic letters.’29
By now he was willing to turn his hand to almost any employment that would earn him a few pounds, though he was, understandably, insulted when the exasperated McQuaid offered to have him hired as a factory labourer. One of his temporary jobs at this time was as a salesman for a new invention, a gadget which when attached to a furnace supposedly conserved the heat. Heating was a major preoccupation in the last winter of the war. Since the device wasn’t portable, Kavanagh tramped the streets with a brochure, giving a spiel about it to any shopkeeper or janitor who would listen. Finally after a fortnight in which there were no takers, the manager of a Grafton Street store showed enough interest to query the price of £25, offering £5 to be given it on a trial basis. As Kavanagh put it: ‘Morality triumphed over commerce’, and he blurted out ‘It’s not worth five shillings never mind five pounds. It’s a complete fraud.’30 It was the death of a salesman.
Artistic morality did not always triumph over commerce. He was not above prostituting his poetic talent to earn a few pounds. As soon as he learned of Roosevelt’s death on 13 April 1945, he promised Smyllie an elegy, rushed back to Pe
mbroke Road and returned with a sonnet for the following day’s paper. This poem is more a tribute to the writer’s opportunism than to his talent. Apart from the title, it is not specifically about the American President; indeed if it weren’t for the title, ‘Roosevelt’, the subject of the poem would be quite unguessable. Under the guise of a complimentary sonnet on a powerful man, Kavanagh is incoherently articulating his appreciation of men of power who remain humane and compassionate. Doubtless there was a message there for some of his Irish readers.
One of the more pleasant temporary jobs that came his way, when he was down on his luck in 1945, was the role of film extra. In 1938 when he was trying to make ends meet while writing The Green Fool, he had auditioned in the Denham studios to be on call for a walk-on part and had failed the preliminary interview when it was discovered that he did not swim or play golf, tennis or polo.31 As a special favour he had been invited in June 1943 to join in some of the crowd scenes in Henry V on the Powerscourt estate in Wicklow; the filming of the Battle of Agincourt in Enniskerry had proved such a draw that Betjeman was inundated with phone calls from would-be extras.32 In the first week of July 1945 when Kavanagh, as he put it, played opposite Deborah Kerr in I See a Dark Stranger, he was in it for the money: twenty-seven shillings and sixpence a day all found. The film’s comic plot involved a scam in which, under the guise of a funeral, watches and alarm clocks were smuggled across the border in a coffin. The funeral footage was shot in County Wicklow and Kavanagh’s part was to be a mourner sitting in one of the cabs that followed the funeral helter-skelter down a mountain road. Much of the time it was too wet to film and he played poker in the hotel with the directors, Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Launder, opting for their poker school because the pot was likely to be a big one. He claims to have made £25 on one day’s play. He also collected a few pounds by writing up his experience for the Irish Press.33
For all the financial misery, end of marriage prospects, loss of self-esteem and sense of social stigma that followed on the termination of his gossip column for the Irish Press, 1944 was not an altogether unhappy year. As he worded it for the Archbishop’s benefit, the latter part of the year had brought ‘a special grace’.34 This was not the religious conversion the prelate might have inferred. Kavanagh had once again fallen in love.
13
THE ENCHANTED WAY
(1944–1947)
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way . . .
(‘On Raglan Road’)
Sometime in the autumn of 1944, while he was living in Mrs Kenny’s boarding house at 19 Raglan Road and largely surviving on hand-outs from Archbishop McQuaid and others, Kavanagh met and became infatuated by Hilda Moriarty. She was a 22-year-old medical student at University College, Dublin, one of the belles of the college, admired and courted by Trinity undergraduates as well as by her fellow students. With her black wavy shoulder-length hair, creamy complexion, high cheekbones and dark blue eyes, Hilda was also considered one of the most beautiful women in the city. The degree of veneration she inspired is typified by one contemporary’s comment that she was his Madonna. Afterwards Kavanagh was to celebrate his moment of love at first sight in the song, ‘On Raglan Road’:
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
The second stanza concludes, ‘O I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away.’ He did indeed ‘love too much’. From that first meeting he became fixated on Hilda. He took to standing near the top of Grafton Street at a time when he knew she would come walking through the gateway of St Stephen’s Green, so that he could observe her approach, or he would sit at a table in Mitchell’s café when she was there with her friends, gazing at her. He came to know all her haunts and stalked her.
Hilda was an exceptionally intelligent young woman who had matriculated at the age of 16 and would have become a writer or journalist had not her father, a doctor in Dingle, County Kerry, insisted that she follow in his footsteps. She had a real love of literature and, for a time, was captivated by Kavanagh’s poetry and his conversation. Accustomed as she was to male admiration, it was a novelty to have one of Ireland’s leading poets among her retinue of admirers. His poverty and neediness stirred her compassion and she treated him with sympathy and kindness. Kavanagh, for his part, was grateful for her interest and overly encouraged by it. In November 1944 he drew on the reserves of episcopal influence he badly needed for himself to try to obtain a place in the Holy Child Hostel for Hilda, describing her to the Archbishop as a ‘charming, virtuous’ girl whose uncle is a parish priest in Ballyferriter, who does not go to dances and who has been good to him.1
For the first time ever he did not spend Christmas with his mother in 1944 because, jobless and penniless though he was, he followed Hilda to her home in Dingle. He was not invited to stay with her family, of course. A down at heel, middle-aged, out of work journalist from a small farm in Monaghan was not the kind of match Dr Paddy Moriarty envisaged for the beautiful, clever daughter he adored and spoiled with smart clothes and expensive jewellery. Kavanagh once again put up at Kruger Kavanagh’s guest house, recovering part of the expenses for the trip by writing it up for the Irish Press as ‘My Christmas in Kerry’. The article infuriated Kruger because it highlighted the unlicensed hotelier’s vast volume of takeaway liquor sales on Christmas Day. Kavanagh escaped vengeance only by borrowing his host’s bicycle and heading for the train. Years later when the hotelier was applying for a liquor licence, the judge recalled the newspaper article and Kruger tried to discredit it by declaring the reporter to have been a bicycle thief.
Throughout the following year Kavanagh did his best to transform himself into the kind of gentlemanly suitor who would be worthy of Hilda’s regard. An exaggerated account of the process is presented in ‘The Lay of the Crooked Knight’ (The Irish Times, January 1946). In this transparently autobiographical fable, a graceless, slovenly, badly shaven and ill-dressed knight is taken in hand by a beautiful, wealthy and sought-after lady. She sets about gentrifying him: teaching him to talk with a less countrified accent, to straighten his back and stop slouching, to abandon his ploughman’s gait and walk like a gentleman, to give up drinking porter and whiskey, which make him too excitable, and sip sherry instead, to use a cigarette holder. She chooses new clothes for him. After a few months’ tuition from his lady friend, the crooked knight is transformed:
As he sauntered along the fashionable avenues of the town he was almost indistinguishable in his suavity, poise and speech from one of those rich young men who are generally, in the popular mind, believed to be writers or artists or something of that sort, but in fact whose only art is as exponents of the profession of arty, slightly decadent, slightly feminine living . . .
The portrait of the reformed knight would not have been recognisable to Kavanagh’s contemporaries as a self-portrait. The fable provides an exaggerated account of Hilda’s efforts to smarten him up a little. Another medical student with literary interests to whom he had taken a fancy a couple of years previously, Nuala Sheehan, had been sufficiently fascinated by his talk about poetry and literature to agree to a date. She was horrified that when he presented himself for this date, he had felt no need to clean himself up even a little; he wore the same old clothes as always and he even smelt. Though he continued to dog Nuala, meeting her as if by chance as she walked to college, posting poems through her letterbox and waiting by her front door while she cowered inside pretending to be out, she was adamant about having no further relationship with him.2 Hilda evidently decided to tackle the problem of his appearance and personal hygiene.
The presentation of the knight’s courtship is probably a psychologically accurate account of Kavanagh’s way of relating to a woman. Though he is the older, more experienced partner
(he was almost twenty years older than Hilda), his lady is assigned the role of a surrogate mother, responsible for his formation. She literally teaches him how to walk and talk. He also thinks to please her by coming ‘to her with a sensational story such as he always tried to bring home to his mother’. Desire is represented as inseparable from dependency, even infantilisation. It is a model of love and relationship that had been formed during his thirty-five year sojourn in the maternal home: woman as carer, guardian, protector; love as scolding, punitive but ultimately nurturing and unconditional. (This private emotional dependency was at odds with the misogyny he affected in his writings.) He wanted a home, a nest where he would be sheltered and fostered, however outrageously he behaved. His longing for a home was closely connected with his longing for material security in the form of steady employment or a regular pay packet.
In the fable the knight’s lady also tries to promote his career by introducing him to rich men with an interest in art and literature, and he gradually becomes rich, or at least fairly well off. In real life, Hilda’s efforts to make Kavanagh more employable were quite unsuccessful and he had no regular work for most of the first year of their acquaintance.
The real basis of his attractiveness for her was his poetry and she inspired both his finest love-poem, the tender and subtle ‘Bluebells for Love’, and the poem by which he is best known, ‘On Raglan Road’, a lament for lost love. She had teased him that his poetry was unromantic, concerned only with agricultural matters, with fields and weeds, and in response he wrote a lyric celebrating their walk together among the bluebells in the plantation at Lord Dunsany’s County Meath home in May 1945. Hilda is unnamed in this piece, published as ‘Bluebells’ in the June 1945 issue of The Bell, and it has never been publicly associated with her. The poem advocates obliquity and indirectness in matters of the heart; passion must remain unstated in its spring time as mutuality of affection is being established. A covert responsiveness to the beauty of bluebells becomes a metaphor for undeclared passion:
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 33