We will have other loves — or so they’ll think;
The primroses or the ferns or the briars,
Or even the rusty paling wires,
Or the violets on the sunless sorrel bank.
Only as an aside the bluebells in the plantation
Will mean a thing to our dark contemplation.
In practice, Kavanagh was unable to conceal his ‘desire’s adulation’.
On 15 May 1945 he sent Macmillan a collection entitled simply Poems, which included The Great Hunger. Once again he called on Frank O’Connor’s support, reminding the firm that in his capacity as Cuala Press director O’Connor had written a couple of years previously extolling the merits of The Great Hunger and they had professed an interest in the poem. At that time he may have been hoping for a London republication, but nothing came of it. Now he asked for a quick decision from Macmillan because he thought he could find another London publisher. This was mere bluff. He was clearly anxious that Macmillan take the book because he wrote again a fortnight later to say that he had sent an inferior version of one or two poems, in particular of ‘Confession Saturday’ (later ‘Father Mat’), and that he was willing to change these poems and to omit others. Small wonder he was so placatory; it was now nine years since his previous collection. In the event Macmillan hung fire for three months. Kavanagh wrote accepting their offer of publication of The Great Hunger and Other Poems on 5 September. The list of poems to be included and the order of their appearance was agreed and the contract signed on 6 October.3
The collection was to consist of eighteen short poems and The Great Hunger. It would open with ‘Pegasus’ (formerly ‘A Glut on the Market’), which Kavanagh had come to dislike but was a particular favourite with the Macmillan reader, and conclude with The Great Hunger, probably because these appeared to the publisher to be the two strongest pieces. Otherwise, there seems to be no particular logic to the arrangement of the poems: the order is neither thematic nor chronological. With two exceptions, ‘Sanctity’ (Dublin Magazine, July/September 1936) and ‘Ethical’ (Spectator, 15 July 1938), he ruled out the poetry he had published before his move to Dublin, and the collection effectively spans the period from October 1939 to May 1945, with some surprising omissions and inclusions. The virtual neglect of pre-1939 material meant that ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, the finest poem in the Ploughman collection, was overlooked and that ‘Shancoduff’, later nominated as his favourite poem, was destined to languish forgotten for the present in a 1937 number of the Dublin Magazine.
Kavanagh recognised that his poetry had taken a new direction since 1939 and it was this poetry that he wished to see between hard covers. The new realist rural poems were collected: ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘A Christmas Childhood’, ‘Art McCooey’, ‘The Long Garden’ and also his first Bell offering, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ minus its weak companion-piece, ‘Kednaminsha’. ‘To the Man after the Harrow’, which like ‘Plough Horses’ belongs to a repudiated pastoral mode, was dropped. ‘Advent’ was there and ‘Father Mat’, recently salvaged from the unfinished ‘Why Sorrow?’, and a new sonnet sequence on the enticements of small-farm life, ‘Temptation in Harvest’. He included two of the poems printed in the October/December 1939 issue of the Dublin Magazine: ‘Primrose’, despite George Yeats’s rejection of it for the projected Cuala collection, and ‘Memory of My Father’. Kavanagh tended to be excited by his most recent work, even to the extent of overvaluing it, and it is not surprising to find four 1944 poems in a collection submitted in 1945: ‘A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue’, ‘Memory of Brother Michael’, ‘Bluebells for Love’ and ‘Pegasus’ (a piece he was coming to regard as the whining of ‘a dissolute character’). The two most surprising inclusions are ‘Candida’ and ‘War and Peace’. He told John Betjeman that he had included the birthday tribute to his one-year-old daughter Candida, not as a compliment to an old friend (and, he might have added, potential influential reviewer), but because he thought it had merit.4 Perhaps he did. The birthday girl herself did not think much of it when she got around to reading it in later years. ‘War and Peace’ (The Listener, 30 September 1943) may have been collected for much the same reason as ‘Ethical’, because it had been printed in an English journal. Kavanagh had published very little poetry in England during the war years and such publication had a cachet value for him. His ‘City Commentary’ verse he treated as ephemera and so missed out on ‘May Evening’ and ‘Threshing Morning’ (part-published there as ‘A Reverie of Poor Piers’); it was not printed in full until it was used as the finale of Tarry Flynn in 1948. Occasional verse such as the elegy for Roosevelt was not revived.
There was some disagreement over the title of the collection. Macmillan wanted Pegasus and Other Poems. Kavanagh objected because he thought ‘“Pegasus” only barely worth including’. Since Macmillan was intent on giving ‘Pegasus’ pride of place in the collection, he suggested reverting to its original title, ‘A Glut on the Market’, claiming that Frank O’Connor considered it far superior. When this title was turned down, he proposed Hawking a Soul or alternatively A Soul for Sale, the title all parties finally agreed upon.5
For Kavanagh ‘affectionados’, as he called his fans, the most controversial aspect of this collection is the decision to bowdlerise Part II of The Great Hunger. Most critics, including myself, have explicitly or tacitly attributed this censorship to Macmillan’s squeamishness. In fact, it was Kavanagh who marked the potentially offensive lines, 9–32 in Part II, drew Macmillan’s attention to them and queried whether they should be omitted as ‘perhaps too obscene’.6 This explains why Macmillan deleted these particular lines, while including the allusions to masturbation in Parts V, VIII and XIV, to which they had not been alerted.
All in all, A Soul for Sale at fifty-five pages was a sparse harvest after a period of nine years; yet if one considers the volume in terms of quality rather than quantity, it contains a cluster of very fine poems and, of course, The Great Hunger. Nevertheless, it is true that after settling in Dublin and after 1942, in particular, Kavanagh was primarily a prose writer and journalist.
Though the contract was signed in October 1945, the book did not appear until late February 1947. This delay may be due to the fact that Macmillan found itself juggling a number of publishing responsibilities in the immediate post-war years, balancing an obligation to provide an income for copyright authors or their heirs, a public duty to maintain an adequate supply of school texts such as Hall and Knight’s Algebra and of scholarly classics such as The Golden Bough, with the desirability of providing an outlet for new and contemporary writers. Paper was still rationed and three thousand back titles were out of print. Kavanagh was relatively favoured: he only had to wait a little longer than a year, whereas Winston Churchill had his Memoirs refused outright.7
In the aftermath of the war Dublin was inundated with overseas visitors. War-weary English, Europeans and American servicemen, tired of rationing and food shortages, poured into the capital to dine on steaks at the Dolphin, the Royal Hibernian and the Shelbourne or to sample Jammet’s even more expensive cuisine. The city centre pubs were packed. Whiskey and Guinness flowed. The wealthy and fashionable had a choice of race courses, golf courses and yacht clubs. For those who could afford it, life was one long party.8 Kavanagh’s old antagonist, Oliver St John Gogarty, who returned to Dublin in 1945, was suprised to find it such an unpolluted city. The burning of turf rather than coal had cleared the air. After the pace and bustle of New York, it also seemed curiously leisurely and uncrowded, with forty yards between groups of people on the pavement.9 Dublin’s glamour was superficial, however, and its wealth narrowly distributed. There was chronic unemployment and widespread poverty, with the jobless eking out an existence on State assistance of £1 a week. Kavanagh was to be one of the lucky ones.
In 1945 he was once again installed in 62 Pembroke Road sharing the apartment with his brother, who would live there until he left for New York in November 1946. With two Archbishops pulli
ng strings on his behalf, he was confident that in a few months he would be appointed a staff journalist on the Catholic weekly, The Standard: McQuaid, anxious to pass him on to another paymaster, was lobbying behind the scenes and Joseph Walsh, Archbishop of Tuam, was conducting a more forthright campaign. The editor, Peadar O’Curry, who had been under considerable pressure to create a post for him from the time he lost his Irish Press column, was eager to accommodate him. The Inniskeen writer was after all one of his discoveries; O’Curry was the only journalist who beat a path to the house in Mucker when Ploughman and Other Poems was published. Thanks to their combined efforts, Kavanagh joined the Standard team on 3 August 1945. After a year and a half in the wilderness he was immensely grateful to have a regular weekly wage. Paying tribute to O’Curry in later years, he said:
He was the only man who ever gave me a regular job. He was also the only editor who would and did give me complete freedom to say what I liked without fearing that the remarks of a ‘genius’ would cause scandal, widespread sinfulness and — worse than all — loss of advertising revenue.10
As a mark of his gratitude to O’Curry, he dedicated the new collection of poems to him; the negotiations over the contract had been conducted from The Standard office and on Standard notepaper. Uncharacteristically, given his aversion to Irish, he masked the dedicatee’s identity to some extent by using the Irish language version of his name, Peadar O Comhraidhe. Gratitude was not Kavanagh’s forte and with the time-lag between submission and publication of the poems, he had cooled towards O’Curry. No sooner had he dispatched the page proofs than he was having second thoughts about the dedication and wrote asking if it were too late to change the name he had scribbled on the typescript. It was. He had to content himself with a request that the surname be dropped from the dedication in the event of a reprint.11 This would achieve the dual purpose of distancing himself from O’Curry and being construable as a compliment to Peadar O’Donnell, who had just taken over as editor of The Bell and was being kind and helpful.
His job at The Standard earned Kavanagh £6 a week and he held it down for almost two years, until April 1947. The office where he worked was on the first floor of a building at the junction of Tara Street and Pearse Street, near the city centre and within easy cycling or even walking distance from his apartment. Here he was close to the other newspaper offices, the Press on Burgh Quay, the Independent on Middle Abbey Street and The Irish Times on D’Olier Street; The Bell too had moved its office to nearby Lower O’Connell Street after the war. Most of the cafés and pubs frequented by journalists and other writers were within easy reach. He liked the environment of the small newspaper office — a place to go every day, the clack of typewriters, warmth, shabby comfort, chat. One of his colleagues for the first six months was Ben Kiely, who was also the paper’s film critic. Kiely recalls him as a pleasant presence about the place — friendly, companionable, good-humoured. The Irish title for the weekly, printed under the masthead, was ‘An tIolair’; Kavanagh’s nickname for the journal was ‘The Tiller’.
The journalistic pace at The Standard was generally leisurely. One of the problems exercising fellow writers and himself was finding synonyms for that frequently mentioned personage, the Pope. His list ran to eight — Holy Father, His Holiness, Supreme Pontiff, Vicar of Christ, Visible Head of the Church, Angelic Shepherd, Successor of Saint Peter and Bishop of Rome.12 Kiely remembers that as Kavanagh contemplated the angle he’d take on a report, he would sit at his desk holding a pencil like a fishing rod, as if he were reeling in the story.
The moment from their six-month association at The Standard that Kiely best likes to recount occurred on the night they worked late writing up the story of Cardinal McRory’s obsequies. The death and funeral of the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland (13 October 1945) was a huge story for the Catholic weekly, a front-page splash with further coverage on inside pages and lots of photographs. When they had finished, Kiely, a voracious whiskey drinker, produced a bottle of Powers Gold Label and they sat there until three in the morning holding a private wake for the Cardinal. Out of the blue, Kavanagh remarked, ‘Now he knows what I always knew.’ ‘What’s that?’ Kiely asked. ‘There’s no God,’ answered Kavanagh. This atheistic shaft from a staff journalist at The Standard was richly enjoyed by the other Dublin newsmen to whom Kiely relayed it, and it passed into urban folklore.
One year after his coup de foudre on Raglan Road, it was obvious even to the love-blind poet that Hilda was visibly withdrawing from him. She pleaded the need to study for her examinations. She tried rebuffing him; he interpreted her brush-offs as signs of interest. As he persisted with his unwanted attentions, shadowing her even on dates with other men, he made himself ridiculous. Hilda remained polite, but his inevitable presence in her vicinity became something of a joke between herself and her women friends. His success in obtaining regular employment with The Standard did not make him an attractive marriage prospect to one of Dublin’s most sought-after women. In fact, it may have made it easier for her to dump him; she was no longer kicking a dog who was down.
Her final severing of their relationship was delayed by his mother’s death. On 10 November 1945 Kavanagh received a telegram to say that his mother had died that morning. At the age of 73 she was still active and in good health and her death was totally unexpected. She had been to the market in Dundalk on 9 November, felt ill afterwards, and went to bed. At 3 a.m. her brother Mick Quinn had a premonition that all was not well and cycled to Mucker to be with her. He stayed with her until she died later that morning.13
Kavanagh had been so involved in his relationship with his surrogate mother/lover Hilda that he had been neglecting his real mother. The previous Christmas he had preferred Hilda’s company to hers; she had not waited to be snubbed a second time. At her sudden death, guilt and remorse were joined to his dreadful sense of loss. He was utterly devastated and the trauma he experienced may be grasped from his sympathetic attitude later towards other men who had suffered a similar bereavement. On the night that Brian O’Nolan’s mother died in 1956, he comforted him. ‘You have only one mother’, he said.14
A stilted obituary in the Dundalk Democrat on 12 December bears none of the hallmarks of Patrick’s style, though he is said to have had a hand in its composition. The previous week The Standard carried his double commemoration in prose and verse: the article ‘A Conversation with Memory’, an evocation of Christmas time during his farming days which includes nostalgic glimpses of his companionable relationship with his mother, and the moving elegy ‘In Memory of My Mother’.
The article shows how his mother’s death set him reminiscing about their life together. Within a year of her death he would rework the novel that revolves around their relationship, Tarry Flynn. In ‘A Conversation with Memory’ he recalls her blessing the cart with holy water as he departed with a load of turkeys for the market in Dundalk and joining him later by train; after the market, as they walk the streets together, he feels ‘free and elated’. His mother blends into the crowd of country women, all of them dressed in dark clothes, wearing a blue felt hat and carrying an egg basket. Neither son nor mother are downcast by the depressed state of the turkey market because neither is primarily interested in making money. They are ‘taking part in a way of life, a life rich and complete’. The reason that the predominant image of the mother in this article is of her attendance at market is probably because this is how she spent her last day.
In the elegy, ‘In Memory of My Mother’, featured on the front page of the same number of The Standard, the Christmas context is dropped and all the memories of the shared life of mother and son have a summer or autumn setting. In this sequence of images she is always pictured on the move, walking to the station or to second Mass or along the headland of a field and, as in the essay, strolling the streets of the town on a fair day. It is an unexpectedly outdoors poem; the mother is never associated with the domestic, with household tasks and cooking, but with farm management, wi
th crops, livestock and the fair. In keeping with its elegiac mode, this is a soft-focus portrait immortalising the alert, energetic, domineering Mrs Kavanagh as a woman both ‘rich with life’ and ‘full of repose’. The only words she speaks are businesslike and bossy, yet they are given a transcendental resonance: ‘Among your earthiest words the angels stray.’ As in some formal dance, mother and son meet briefly within the stanzas, take a turn together, and later meet again. Ultimately, she is fixed for ever in an approving and encouraging role, smiling on and blessing her son’s labours:
O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us — eternally.
The ideal woman envisaged in this elegy is one who eternally looks up to her son and is ceaselessly admiring and supportive. Two years later the poem’s idealised portrait of Mrs Kavanagh would be complemented by the dramatisation of Tarry Flynn’s lively, shrewd, managerial mother, whose affection for her farmer-poet son is for the most part well hidden.
Even before his mother’s death, he had been imaginatively revisiting home in the sonnet sequence ‘Temptation in Harvest’.15 The poet here represents himself as a returned native, surrendering to the erotic charms of a countryside he had deserted five years previously. The harvest fields are almost irresistibly seductive but ‘surrender’ to their attraction is given both sexual and military connotations: it is at once pleasurable and dishonorable, dishonorable because he is a dedicated artist and art is presented as an urban phenomenon. However, the pursuit of culture is no less problematic than the love of nature in this poem; each is personified as a temptress. The poem concludes with a poignant farewell to home, a last look around at the familiar sights:
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 34