Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  . . . Now I turn

  Away from the ricks, the sheds, the cabbage garden,

  The stones of the street, the thrush song in the tree.

  The potato-pits, the flaggers in the swamp;

  From the country heart that hardly learned to harden,

  From the spotlight of an old-fashioned kitchen lamp

  I go . . .

  The tug of love in this poem between Parnassus and Mucker was by no means the whole story. While he may have felt the occasional passing pang as he set off to catch the Dublin train after one of his visits home, he was not seriously interested in living permanently in Inniskeen. The country was a good place to write about but a dreadful place to live in. Had he really wanted to resume the life of farmer-poet, he could have done so during one of the long stretches when he was unemployed. The truth was that he would rather starve in Dublin than live in mentally stultifying comfort in Inniskeen. In November 1945 the farm-management crisis precipitated by his mother’s sudden death presented yet another opportunity to return to the country.

  Still an active and very capable woman in her early seventies, Mrs Kavanagh had been running home and farm until the day before she died, both the outlying Reynolds’ farm, which had been signed over to Patrick, and the Drumnagrella farm nearer the Mucker home which was hers. At her death the only family member willing and able to take over from her was Josie, whose husband, Christopher Markey, was a farmer. Neither of the Kavanagh sons wanted to farm. Peter, who had obtained a Ph.D. at the end of 1944, had his sights set on a university lectureship and a year later would emigrate to the US to fulfil this ambition. Patrick, whom most of the family assumed to be his mother’s heir, had a secure income of £6 a week as a staff journalist with The Standard, which he had no intention of forfeiting. And there was, of course, Hilda. He was still infatuated and wanted to be able to see her every day. He was agreeable that the Markeys should move to the Mucker house and run the two farms for three years.

  At the time no one in the family appears to have challenged Patrick’s assumption that he was the new owner of the Drumnagrella farm. His elder sisters, Annie and Mary, who had in fact inherited the house and land, must have been informed of this either by their mother during her lifetime or by her solicitor after her death. In late 1945 they were both capable of commanding a good salary as nurses; they had no wish to live in Inniskeen and they kept their inheritance a secret. Everyone was terribly upset, Patrick was inconsolable, and they decided that it was no time to drop a legal bombshell. If Patrick had really wanted to take over in Mucker, Annie and Mary might well have ceded it to him. In fact, they chose not to assert their claim until 1955, by which time the house had been lying derelict for five years. Whether Patrick knew the true legal position is uncertain. At first, he may only have known of the existence of the 1940 will; certainly, the existence of the second will took Peter by surprise years later. His mother may not have divulged the change of will, so that he would continue to buy and sell cattle for her, visit, and take an interest in the place. The fact that she did change it indicates how deeply let down she felt by his defection. Peter, who was one of the executors of the 1940 will, would have warned him that according to its terms he had not an unconditional right to the Mucker home and farm; if he did not live there, he would forfeit it. This is presumably why the Markeys were given only a three-year lease on the place.

  When the Land Commission queried his ownership of the property in 1946 and asked if the deceased owners’ wills had been probated,16 it is likely that, hob-lawyer’s son as he was, Kavanagh would have taken an initial step towards having his father’s and mother’s wills probated or at least sought a copy of his mother’s will as proof of inheritance. Whether or not he learned at this time that his claim to the Mucker house and farm had no legal basis, he continued to act as if he were the owner. However, when his sisters finally declared ownership, he evinced no surprise whatever.

  His mother’s death bought Patrick only a temporary reprieve with Hilda. In late 1945 or early 1946 he was already composing ‘On Raglan Road’, a ballad of lost love, tracing their relationship from his first meeting with her on Raglan Road to her present avoidance of him:

  On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now

  Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow

  That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay —

  When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

  Ben Kiely recalls him trying it out to the air of ‘The Dawning of the Day’ in the editorial office of The Standard, and the two of them singing it together, a Monaghan and Tyrone cacophony. Hilda is not mentioned by name in this poem either and, in fact, when he first published it in October 1946, he borrowed the name of Peter’s woman friend by way of concealment; so it was originally entitled ‘Dark-haired Miriam Ran Away’.17 The Irish Press took the unusual step of printing the lovestruck poet’s photo along with the poem, a picture of him looking sensitive and wistful. On its first appearance the catchy line 7, ‘The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay’, was replaced by the altogether vaguer and grimmer line, ‘Synthetic sighs and fish-dim eyes and all death’s loud display’. An American publisher rejected the poem, because he found the last two stanzas had several weak lines, as indeed they do.18 Nevertheless, it had caught on as a party piece in Dublin by the late 1940s and was also being sung in Irish-American circles. Its popularity was due to a combination of factors: the perennially relevant theme of unrequited love, the use of Dublin place-names, the satisfying double click of the internal rhymes and, above all, its setting to the air of ‘The Dawning of the Day’, one of the best-known Irish melodies. Right from the start Kavanagh sensed that this song had the potential to be a hit. He had ‘reoriented in a city setting one of the oldest traditional ballads’. At the end of 1946 he was suggesting to his brother in New York that it be used as part of the sound track for the Dublin sequence of a film on Ireland.19 Many years later he would entrust the song to Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, who listened to him sing it in his own emphysemic fashion in the Bailey public house in the 1960s.20 Luke Kelly popularised it with an international audience and it has been interpreted by artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and the American country singer Peter Rowan.

  Not all the writing inspired by Hilda’s rejection was elegiac. The denouement of the fable ‘The Lay of the Crooked Knight’ makes the point that the lady’s gentrifying influence has been detrimental to the poet; his crude vitality was an inextricable part of his literary gift. Her departure restores him to his former authentic self: a large, clumsy, loud, foul-mouthed but unquestionably red-blooded male. This story which equates creativity with virility and both with carelessness in dress and a lack of social graces is his outburst, not just against Hilda, but against bourgeois Dublin, a club he had tried and failed to join.

  Another contemporary story, ‘Stars in Muddy Puddles’ (Irish Press, 4 April 1946), reads like a revenge fantasy. Its heroine, Mary, wants to be a film star. (Hilda had taken a screen test.) She has jilted the lover who was ‘insistent’ on marrying her because he was a poor, unsuccessful writer and in his place wed a slick, cheerful pseudo-writer of plays, stories and radio scripts, who hopes to sell the film rights to one of his fictions. After the marriage her husband’s career declines; her ex-lover’s prospers and, finally, a famous American film star comes specially to Dublin to meet him with a view to filming his stories. The story concludes with Mary and her husband looking on enviously as the Hollywood star and her ex-lover enter his house together.

  During a visit to Limerick in 1946 Hilda Moriarty was introduced to the handsome, flamboyant and well-off engineer Donogh O’Malley, who was to become a Fianna Fáil deputy in 1954 and was later to be, as Minister for Education, one of the most dynamic and charismatic figures in the Fianna Fáil governments of the 1960s. A girlfriend of O’Malley’s had recently died and the meeti
ng was organised by family friends anxious to cheer him up. His courtship of Hilda was lavish and spectacular. He travelled from Limerick to take her for romantic dinners in Dublin and showered her with expensive gifts.

  The unfortunate poet was still unable to detach himself and even accompanied Hilda on some of her dates with O’Malley throughout 1946. The 25-year-old Limerick man tolerated the presence of this rival admirer as an amusing inconvenience; it was only to be expected that a woman like Hilda would attract devotees and the middle-aged, lovelorn poet was no threat to his own courtship. Kavanagh was bitter and resentful, feeling that he had been passed over for a younger, richer but less worthy suitor. He accused Hilda of wanting ‘a man with a future’, dismissing this as ‘the sure sign of a shallow mind’ and he disparaged O’Malley to his brother Peter as ‘a quack architect’. As if nature was in sympathy with his mood, the summer of 1946 was one of the wettest on record; it sometimes rained seven days a week.

  On 29 November 1946, remembering the follies he had perpetrated during his affair with Hilda and the emotional upheavals he was still enduring, he wrote in The Standard:

  . . . none of the characters [in Hollywood films] react in anything approximating to the reactions of real life. A man kisses and makes ‘love’ as they call it, but never does one find him making a cod of himself. No remorse, no self-blame, none of the real emotions that are to be found in men and women with nerves — not to speak of souls . . .

  At this time too he showed how acutely self-perceptive he could be when, while still tortured by the loss of Hilda, he coolly analysed the concept of falling in love:

  . . . romantic love is not quite the fortuitous happening it is made out to be. There is a considerable element of will about falling in love. There is more of a suicide than an accidental death about it.21

  This view of the deliberate, willed nature of the initial attraction in a love affair is similar to that expressed in the cancelled draft of The Green Fool ten years previously. Wretched, jobless and temporarily outcast from the social whirl, he had needed a purpose in life when he first met Hilda.

  Kavanagh was not so utterly downcast as to withdraw from social life because Hilda had rejected him. At the end of August 1946, Nichevo of The Irish Times (a Smyllie pseudonym) announced a forthcoming charity cricket match in aid of the Adelaide Hospital to take place on 4 September in Trinity College Park. A team of medicos would meet a team of ‘nondescripts’ including the world-famous West Indian cricketer, Sir Learie Constantine, the British Representative Sir John Maffey, and ‘the one and only Paddy Kavanagh’, substituting for Smyllie who had strained a ligament and couldn’t play. Kavanagh’s ambition was ‘to break the windows of the Kildare Street Club’. Patrick Waldron, one of the ‘nondescripts’, thinks that due to rain the game never actually took place, though the teams did assemble in the changing room in the Trinity Pavilion where the ‘nondescripts’ eyed Kavanagh askance as a sort of ‘cuckoo in the nest’. They lacked Smyllie’s confidence in the former Inniskeen goalie’s prowess at the wicket.22

  Hilda Moriarty and Donogh O’Malley became engaged and were married in August 1947. Kavanagh’s letters indicate that he did not know of her engagement until early May. He still ‘had it bad’ about her, to use his own phrase, though he dismissed his infatuation of the previous years as a chronic disease of which he was ‘about cured’. He was not. Several references in letters to his brother of May through June reveal his bitterness at being jilted. Hurt at observing Hilda still swanning around Dublin but definitively not interested in him, he portrayed her as a predator using the long abundant ‘dark hair’ he had loved as a snare to trap a rich man. Meeting her with her hair up, he connected this with her engagement as signifying that the ‘hunt’ was over for her. In the middle of June he ran into her ‘all smiles looking for congratulations’ and ‘said everything proper’. Although he claimed that he no longer cared, he was still deeply wounded and it was a source of bitter rejoicing to him when she failed a Hollywood screen test. When she did marry in late August, he maliciously observed on 10 September that ‘she was sick since’, implying that all had not gone well on the honeymoon, a remark worthy of one of the venomous gossips in The Green Fool.

  His ugly mood was all bravado. He was heart-broken at the loss of Hilda. She had turned not only Raglan Road into an ‘enchanted way’ but other Dublin haunts, like Grafton Street and Holles Street and a corner of St Stephen’s Green and the Country Shop where they sometimes met for lunch. She was associated in his mind with Kerry, with Dingle and Cooleen, where they had walked together at Christmas 1944. He returned to the Dunsany plantation to seek her ghost in winter when the flowers and greenery had died. He poured out his despair in verse, intimate private doodlings, unpublished and unpublishable.

  Hilda Moriarty was to assume a mythical status as ‘the love of Kavanagh’s life’, largely because of the popularity of ‘On Raglan Road’, but to some extent because he encouraged this legend of himself as a great unrequited lover. He would sometimes refer to his lost heroine in order to tease later women friends or put them on their mettle. He had acquired a painting of Hilda and kept it in his room at Pembroke Road for years, propped against a wall, an image of his enduring fidelity. One of his women friends used to turn it to face the wall when she visited. In reality he was incapable of remaining heart-broken for very long and by summer 1947 he was parading Grafton Street in search of Hilda’s successor.

  Hilda’s marriage was not an altogether happy one for, while he sought her advice in political matters and trusted her to write or fine-tune his speeches, Donogh was a ladies’ man who persistently and publicly sought the company of other women. Hilda, for her part, never quite lost her interest in Kavanagh, though they apparently did not see one another again until the last months of his life, when she was hostessing for her husband at an official function.

  When Kavanagh died she sent a wreath of red roses arranged in the form of an ‘H’. This posthumous love token acknowledges that the affair had not been altogether one-sided. He was the frog-prince of a young woman’s fairy tale who, alas, had never metamorphosed into a marriageable partner.

  14

  FILM CRITIC

  (1946–1949)

  Through Gone With the Wind I yawned my way

  So I might know what magic lay

  In this slow story that to its author

  Three million sterling must have brought her.

  ‘And here’s the secret I found in it:—

  Barnum was wrong — there’s two a minute.’

  (Film Notes, ‘City Commentary’, October 1942)

  Most of Kavanagh’s work at The Standard was routine sub-editing or anonymous reporting. His signed articles were mainly accounts of pilgrimages and rural reminiscences. Since most of his contributions were so anodyne and anonymous, he was delighted to succeed to the post of film critic when Ben Kiely resigned early in 1946 and went to work full-time for the Irish Independent. As well as earning him a welcome two guineas a week, the film column, written under his own name from 22 February, provided him with a public forum once more. O’Curry gave him his head and allowed him to be outrageously outspoken. It was to his film column he alluded rather than his routine reportage when he later paid tribute to this editor’s courageous refusal to muzzle him.

  Kavanagh had no qualifications or aptitude for the job of film critic, not even a liking for film as a form of entertainment. Unlike urban contemporaries, he had not frequented the cinema as a child or young man and his only prolonged stint of cinema-going was eight years previously when he was in London writing The Green Fool. His most recent connection with film had been working as an extra on a couple of sets in Wicklow. What he lacked in knowledge, he made up for in opinion; he always held strong views and liked airing them.

  In his opening statement as film critic he announced that his column would be flagrantly opinionated:

  A critic should have an attitude, a bias . . .

  He followed this up
by declaring the kind of films he liked and disliked. What he most enjoyed was ‘comic stuff’ — Popeye, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers. He had gone off gangster movies, could not abide musicals and was allergic to films set in hospitals. The only three films he could bear to see again were Pygmalion, The Petrified Forest and The Cheat, two of them because they were originally plays and had a lively script and because he was an admirer of the deceased Leslie Howard. He wanted to be intellectually stimulated rather than merely entertained and the films he had seen in his first week as critic were ‘empty of any kind of intelligence’. This introductory parade of his prejudices set the future tone of the column. Kavanagh was first and foremost a columnist; cinema-goers seeking guidance about the current offerings in Dublin would have to turn elsewhere.

  That he viewed his role as primarily a columnist and rather resented the obligation to comment on films became evident quite early on:

  The trouble with films from the point of view of the critic is that as a peg upon which to base an argument, an outlook, they are too rudimentarily trashy. Putting a gold ring in a guinea-pig’s nose is reasonable compared with using the films as vehicles for philosophic speculation. (18 October 1946)

  From the outset he took a rather lofty view of the avocation of film critic, his purpose being to guide film-makers rather than film-goers (28 June 1946). Since there was no Irish film industry he had to forgo this advisory role, but he never fully adapted to the newspaper film critic’s more usual role of reviewing and rating the current releases for the public’s benefit. He was indeed singularly ill-suited to this task for he was a culture snob who despised film as popular entertainment on a par with pulp fiction. He considered the job of film critic to be beneath him intellectually and he made no secret of this: ‘. . . the level of the cinema is that of the lowest form of pulp-literature for uneducated young girls — and young boys. . . .’ (21 January 1949); the application of ‘serious criticism to the average Hollywood product is analogous to a well-known literary critic devoting his ability to the pulp novels and magazines . . .’ (13 December 1946). He did not count popular cinema as an art form and disparaged ‘nearly all films’ as ‘low, loud and illiterate . . .’ (31 May 1946). The critic’s task in rating films is compared to ‘the poetry contest which was held in Persia long ago. There were only two entrants: the adjudicator listened to one of the poems and gave the prize to the other.’ (13 September 1946)