Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  The contract with the Pilot Press, which he signed in the Bell office on 14 May, stipulated that the first print run of Tarry Flynn would be 5,000, the book would be on sale within a year, an important incentive, and the initial selling price would be eight shillings and sixpence.9 The deadline for delivery of the typescript, 1 August, was far too tight. Now that he had no day job, Kavanagh had plenty of leisure; even so, he had underestimated the amount of work it would take to turn Mother and Children into Tarry Flynn.

  Despite finding the unaccustomed hot weather quite oppressive, he wrote steadily over the summer. The first major revision he carried out after the signing of the contract was to construct a new final chapter. The original ending had left the hero permanently trapped, married but otherwise just as miserable as Patrick Maguire. He now wanted the autobiographical hero to follow his own trajectory. The story was to end with his liberation from home and farm, an exit rather than a denouement. This new concluding chapter proved quite troublesome and it was 20 June before he had completed it. There were still several middle chapters to do and only six weeks to the deadline.

  Peadar O’Donnell offered moral and emotional support and editorial advice throughout the redrafting process. No wonder Kavanagh had wanted a possible second edition of A Soul for Sale dedicated ‘To Peadar’. In 1947 The Bell’s editor was his chief ally, adviser and promoter and Kavanagh would meet him in the afternoons in Bewley’s of Westmoreland Street to discuss revisions and amendments. O’Donnell’s teetotalism and dislike of drunkenness also helped to steer Kavanagh away from a growing fondness for alcohol, a tendency which his artist friend Patrick O’Connor had recently warned him against. Once he became absorbed in the project of revamping Mother and Children, he cut down on drink, and the fact that O’Donnell was one of the few Irish writers who conducted business in a café rather than a pub meant that their sessions together did not dissolve into a booze-up.

  As the revision of the novel proceeded over the summer, The Bell serialised it, publishing four extracts of approximately 8,000 words each as ‘Four Picturisations’. Chapter 1 appeared in May, Chapter 3 in June and most of Chapter 4 in July. Chapter 2 was omitted because it contained two of the ‘Glimpses’ published in The Bell three years previously. By way of further publicising the forthcoming novel, the July issue included a comic ballad, ‘A Pathetic Ballad of a Big Dinner’, attributed to Tarry’s friend, Eusebius Cassidy.10 There was no new material ready in time for the August number, other than the final chapter, and when the missing chapters were still not ready in time for September, O’Donnell went ahead and printed this.

  The earthy language in the serialised Tarry Flynn upset some Bell readers; phrases such as ‘. . . if I was a man I wouldn’t marry her if her backside was studded with diamonds’. O’Donnell’s biographer, Peter Hegarty, records that a nun in Manchester wrote asking O’Donnell to cancel her subscription. She had always left the magazine out for the senior girls to read ‘and now this’.11

  The looming 1 August deadline interfered with Kavanagh’s enjoyment of a brief summer holiday and he came back to Dublin tired. He had missed the deadline, but by 9 August reported that the narrative was ‘well under control’. Work was a useful antidote to the pangs of jealousy and bitter sense of betrayal he was experiencing that summer as Hilda’s wedding date approached and passed. An unaccustomed heatwave sapped his energy, yet he struggled on. Finally, the typescript was ready for dispatch on 9 September. O’Donnell, who was flying to London next day, personally delivered it to 45 Great Russell Street.

  Like The Green Fool, Tarry Flynn combines a portrait of the artist with a portrait of his region. Set in the fictional parish of Dargan in County Cavan in the summer of 1935, it is a family and parish-centred fiction in which the farmer-poet, Tarry, is involved in an intricate web of relationships with his mother, sisters and the local community. Home truths and neighbourhood scandals deflate the poet’s rhapsodies. The novel presents an insider’s view of the claustrophobic world of family and parish in a country backwater: the routine of farming and household chores, the family squabbles, the townland tensions and rivalries. It depicts an introverted milieu where the only spice that life has to offer is to spy on, gossip about, and intrigue against other family members and neighbours. The novel reminded one critic of O’Casey’s plays, and the comparison with the comic intrusiveness of tenement life in The Plough and the Stars is apt.

  This time Kavanagh wished to counter the romanticising influence of the Literary Revival. He was intent on presenting ‘real elementalism’ as he himself had experienced it, a ‘tawdry thing, resentful, mean and ungenerous’.12 Gone are the ceilidhes and story-telling sessions beloved of the folklorist. This is the impoverished, tight-fisted Ireland of the 1930s in which people struggle for survival or a minimal social betterment. Small meannesses abound in a neighbourhood where every cigarette butt is counted. Hospitality is at best a pretence and the kettle is taken off the hob when a caller is sighted. Yet this version of ‘the barbaric life of the Irish poor’ is also very funny. Kavanagh had emerged from the gloomy earnestness of his socio-realist phase and now valued comedy as the supreme art form. While some grim touches from the old novel remained on in the new, such as the claybound condition of the church-goers in the first chapter, he managed to sustain an attitude of comic detachment throughout Tarry Flynn. ‘It is only in normality that you can have originality’ was to be one of Kavanagh’s axioms.13 Tarry Flynn captures the comedy of normal local life and local talk, the unending entertainment that neighbours provide for one another as they go about their daily round of point-scoring, begrudgery and malicious innuendo.

  The original novel’s anti-clericalism is dissipated in a series of amusing episodes in which the congregation enjoys the parish priest’s fulminations from the pulpit; the sermons preached by two Redemptorist missioners, ‘specialists in sex sins’, raise the collective libido; and Tarry, who considers himself the clergy’s intellectual equal or superior, is repeatedly tripped up or wrongfooted in their presence.

  Tarry Flynn, completed two years after his mother’s death, is Kavanagh’s tribute to his mother’s vitality, her energy and enterprise, her salty tongue and sense of humour, her overwhelming love for her poet son. The mother had been represented as an exploitative, self-serving figure in The Great Hunger, and in ‘Stony Grey Soil’ it was obliquely suggested that she was a retarding force, deceiving and destructive. The warm, nurturing dimension of family life was absent in those poems; they emphasised bondage rather than bonding. Mrs Flynn, on the contrary, is one of the great matriarchs of Irish literature, capable, bustling, bossy, managerial, utterly devoted to the furtherance of her family’s affairs and the doing-down of her neighbours, yet also richly delighting in the day-to-day drama of family and parish life. Some women who knew Kavanagh’s mother consider that the book slanders her by depicting her as mean, tight-fisted and inhospitable, when she is remembered as kindly and welcoming. Mrs Flynn is not Mrs Kavanagh, however; she is a fictional character whose role is to encapsulate the small-farm mentality, its pragmatic outlook and values, and to offer a bold contrast with the vague idealising, the nature love and the literary aspirations of her dreamy, impractical son. The conflict between rhapsody and common sense is an unfailing source of humour in the novel.

  Tarry captures a part of Kavanagh’s own younger self: the satisfaction he often derived from working in the fields, his tendency to fall in love, his close, sometimes constricting, relationship with his mother, his occasional naive trust in male friends, his sudden stabs of wonder at the beauty of commonplace sights such as weeds and stones and, above all, his stubborn devotion to his writing. The book also dramatises his sense of being regarded as a freak by his neighbours, an oddity resented for his interest in books and poetry and therefore made the butt of village jokes and japes. It is consciously autobiographical in its attribution to Tarry of three of the author’s published poems: ‘My Room’, ‘Anna Quinn’ and the untitled concluding poem, t
hree stanzas of which had been published in his ‘City Commentary’ column.

  However, Tarry is not a faithful self-portrait. As he wrote to his brother, ‘There is another me hardly seen it it.’14 Tarry was a fictional version of certain aspects of his younger self; Kavanagh was under no illusion that he was ever actually such an ‘angelic moron’. The ‘other me’, which he claims is almost invisible, may in fact be partially glimpsed in his portrayal of the tensions between Tarry and Mrs Flynn. Mother and son embody two contrary impulses in Kavanagh himself, a see-saw between celebration and denigration, between an almost simultaneous urge to enthuse and to undermine, between unworldliness and low cunning, vision and scepticism. Mrs Flynn’s protective love of Tarry, despite his manifest failings, dramatises Kavanagh’s own self-cherishing and belief in his innate lovableness.

  He also embodies facets of his contemporary self in the character of the reprobate Uncle Petey in the final chapter. While Petey’s arrival is loosely based on Uncle Mick Quinn’s return from New York in June 1930 and the bond between Tarry and himself recalls the author’s fondness for this uncle, the older man’s disparaging attitude to Drumnay reflects Kavanagh’s contemporary view of Mucker and Inniskeen. In the persona of Petey, who walks his native roads and fields with a blasé air, marvelling that he had once put up with living there, and who persuades Tarry that the townland of Drumnay is best written about from a distance, the author is counselling and reassuring his younger self. Of course, the blackguard uncle’s blandishments also serve as a rather unconvincing plot device to account for and to justify Tarry’s departure from home. Any attempt to present or analyse the tortuous process by which the writer had actually disengaged himself from Mucker would have weighed the novel down unbearably.

  No sooner had the typescript been delivered than Kavanagh discovered to his chagrin that he had passed up on the opportunity of publication by Macmillan. Harold Macmillan’s son, Maurice, newly responsible for the firm’s Irish list, visited Dublin in September 1947 to make contact with Irish writers. On his return he reported that Kavanagh was at work on a new novel.15

  At first there was some confusion in Macmillan’s as to whether this was indeed a new work or the novel Maurice misremembered as ‘Terence O’Flynn’, parts of which he had seen in The Bell and thought very highly of. His father, Harold, back with the firm while the Tories were in opposition after the war, was keen to acquire the novel serialised in The Bell. By the time Maurice got in touch with Kavanagh on 26 September it was far too late. Tarry Flynn had already been sold and delivered. Kavanagh immediately wrote a conciliatory letter, explaining that he was at work on a ‘much superior’ novel, enclosing a brief outline of the plot and saying that he was planning to go to America for six months or a year to complete the book there because he thought it would give him ‘greater objectivity’. Predictably, he took advantage of Macmillan’s overture to ask for a cash advance to enable him to spend six months in America.

  After his brother Peter had moved to the US in December 1946, he was eager to follow him, at least for a holiday, and toyed with the idea of moving there permanently. New York, rather than London, was now his Mecca. When Kavanagh was growing up, America was looked upon by his country neighbours as the land of opportunity and he still retained a residual belief in the American dream. His own version of the dream was marriage to a beautiful heiress who would maintain him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed. For a time, especially after Hilda’s defection, he looked on marriage cynically as a financial contract: since he couldn’t marry for love, he might as well marry for money. Publicly, and in ‘hard man’ letters to his brother, he persistently maintained that a poet needed a rich wife.

  He had booked a passage from Southampton to New York on 4 December 1947 to join his brother for the Christmas vacation and also intended taking all his papers with him in case he decided to settle in the US. Peadar O’Donnell had offered to capitalise on the good reviews of A Soul for Sale by setting up an American lecture tour for him in the spring. A practical man of the world, for all his strong socialist principles, O’Donnell advised him to travel first class on the boat so that he would make contacts with affluent and influential Americans and Kavanagh hoped to acquire a wealthy wife either on the voyage or shortly after his arrival.16

  The novel that he proposed to Macmillan was to be entitled The Good Son and he outlined its plot as follows:

  It is the story of a mean little peasant who climbed out of the peasant gutter during the forty seven years of this century to see his family become tremendous powers in the cultural, religious and business life of the country. It will be humorous as well as satirical and will be the story of the New Rich and the New Ireland. One of the sons becomes a big businessman, owner of racehorses who also buys pictures and gives gramophone recitals — a humbug, another son becomes a bishop while a daughter is ballyhooed as a great pianist with a real message.

  The second generation of twentieth-century Irish peasants would include ‘a writer (myself) . . . whose background is the same gutter and whose career runs parallel to the lives of these others.’ The writer’s parents ‘were crushed by the old villain and the circle comes full round till the son is crushed though neither knows of the previous spiritual encounter.’

  On 16 October he forwarded 20,000 words and a provisional synopsis of the new novel, The Good Son, claiming that he had a further 40,000 words in draft form. Between proposal and synopsis stage the scope of the projected novel had been curtailed. He now proposed that The Good Son should be restricted to chronicling the rags to riches story of a peasant family and that the narrative dealing with the second and urbanised generation of this family should form a separate novel, a sequel to the first. He had very little experience of describing contemporary Dublin life and knew that such a novel might prove slow going.

  Kavanagh was probably being extravagant with the truth when he said that he had a 60,000 word novel drafted. At the beginning of October he had only started on the novel he hoped to sell to Macmillan before sailing to the US and he was still working flat out on the first three chapters on 11 October. The 20,000 word section of The Good Son he submitted later that month gave the impression of having been very hastily run off. Maurice Macmillan described it as a ‘messy fragment’: ‘patchy, jerky, written carelessly and idly’. However, he was sufficiently respectful of Kavanagh’s talent to trust that he could turn the material into a good novel if he worked at it.

  Harold Macmillan decided that it was worth taking a chance on Kavanagh; given ‘the leisure and the peace of mind which result from a regular, even if modest, income’, he might produce a masterpiece. In return for an option on his next two books, he offered an advance of £300 a year in monthly instalments over a two-year period, beginning in January 1948, the continuation of the advance into the second year being conditional on his having submitted a manuscript by the end of the first.

  As agreed in informal discussion and internal memoranda between father and son, the Macmillans adopted a stick and carrot approach. A stern, paternalistic letter from Harold, warning Kavanagh against fobbing him off with an ‘idly produced’ pot-boiler, was followed by a friendly ‘Dear Paddy’ letter from Maurice, advising the author to accept Macmillan senior’s proffered advance, stay in Ireland and devote his energies to creative writing. A legal agreement was duly signed; Kavanagh postponed any thoughts of following his brother to the US and remained on in Dublin. Maurice invited him to stay in his Sussex home; he was very taken with Maurice’s wife, Katy, and the visit went well. The strategy father and son had devised for dealing with the recalcitrant Irish author seemed to be working.

  For all his ‘hard man’ talk about marrying for money, Kavanagh was an incurable romantic and in the summer of 1947 he had fallen in love again. Ironically, he was introduced to Joan Dowd by her future husband Eoin Ryan; they were merely acquaintances at the time, not yet courting. The three met on Grafton Street at the end of Joan’s lunch hour and he an
d Eoin Ryan walked her back to her Baggot Street office. To her astonishment, when she was leaving work that evening, Kavanagh was on the doorstep waiting to make a date with her. Ever susceptible to attractive, intelligent women, he pursued her so ardently that some contemporaries were quite certain that she and not Hilda was the heroine of ‘On Raglan Road’. Shabbily dressed and badly groomed as he was himself, he had a keen eye for expensively dressed and fashionably turned out women such as Joan. In every aspect of life he always wanted quality; only the best would do. Joan had no romantic interest in him, but she found him very amusing and ‘marvellous company’, so she often met him for coffee in Mitchell’s or in the Teatime Express, sometimes by arrangement, sometimes casually. He was always gallant and charming with her, never showing his harsh, abrasive side, never indulging in any boorish behaviour. One of his male acquaintances says that he was positively obsequious in the company of good-looking women.

  He was well aware that in Joan’s case the sexual attraction was not mutual, but he couldn’t help himself. His affectionate name for her was ‘Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’ (from Betjeman’s poem) and he told friends that what particularly attracted him was her gait and deportment. ‘I love to watch her walking’, he said.17 However, they talked a good deal too and a real friendship developed. Since he couldn’t marry her himself, he was pleased that she was marrying his friend Eoin Ryan and was a guest at their wedding in 1949.

  After her marriage he still had a ‘harmless crush’ on Joan, but he was the couple’s friend and joined them for lunch or supper at their Fitzwilliam Square apartment two or three times a week or met them for drinks in the Pembroke Bar. They both respected him as a special, gifted individual and both enjoyed his company and appreciated his sense of humour.