(1948–1951)
inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin . . .
(‘Epic’)
If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me in Baggot Street
And what I was like to know . . .
(‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’)
Kavanagh remained optimistic that his stature as a writer would attract a rich wife in search of a trophy husband, and each publication, even of a single poem, renewed his hope that his female saviour would come charging to his long-term rescue with comfortable home and open chequebook. His belief in his capacity to attract a wealthy young American woman was bolstered by his meeting with Claire McAllister in late spring 1948. Claire was a striking 18-year-old with waist-length auburn hair, heavily made up by Irish standards, her cheeks lavishly powdered to achieve a pallid look.1 A budding poet from a well-off and cultivated Michigan family (her father was a judge in Grand Rapids), she had come to Europe to study and was visiting Dublin from Paris. She was impressed to meet Ireland’s leading poet and he, happy to be admired by a beautiful young American, was at his most gallant and charming. He squired her about, steering her well clear of any rivals to himself, and before she left town presented her with a copy of A Soul for Sale which included a typescript of ‘On Raglan Road’. This lyric she mistakenly believed, or was encouraged to believe, had been written for her.2 (Since it makes several references to the beloved’s ‘dark hair’, her illusion that she was the poem’s heroine is surprising.) The acquaintance was fleeting but Kavanagh was given to love and declarations of love almost at first sight and pressed her to reciprocate. Flattered by the attentions of an established poet and willing to flirt a little, she tried to let him down lightly or keep him dangling. Her diplomatic response was that she loved him platonically: she was in love with his mind and did not desire any physical intimacy.
During his brief overtures to her, Kavanagh had projected himself as a mystical poet, though what he really wanted was a full physical relationship and Claire, as a liberated American woman, would be likely, he thought, to prove less prudish than her Irish middle-class counterparts. In a letter written in late April, after her return to Paris, Claire mentioned that she had visited Paul Vincent Carroll in his hotel bedroom. The knowledge that she had made herself available to a writer, whom he considered an inferior, in a way that she had denied him left Kavanagh dismayed and jealous, yet more than ever convinced that a sexual affair between them was possible. In his answering letter he spelt out the conditions for a continuance of their friendship. She must devote herself exclusively to him and not flirt with other men and she must be prepared to love him in the flesh. He had overplayed the part of mystical poet in his wooing and without altogether jettisoning this role he now showed his carnal side:
. . . Claire dear, you cannot love a person completely unless you love them in the flesh as well, for the flesh is part of the divine image. That is why in the Catholic philosophy body and soul rise together on the Last Day. To say as you do that you would never let me touch you is to reject a very important part of me . . . It is unfriendly to think of a man as an abstraction. You’re a sweet girl but alas! there’s nothing between us for me to remember. Only God my dear can love you for yourself alone. If you write again write to the mere man and not the abstract god.
If she had been sexually intimate with Carroll, she was not to write to him; he did not want the hurt of knowing this. If she did want to see him again on his terms, he was prepared to go halfway, even geographically, and meet her in London.3 Their paths did cross again, for Claire moved to Dublin in 1949. Alas for Kavanagh, she soon became the live-in partner of one of his new friends, the talented young painter Patrick Swift.
A few months after his first encounter with Claire McAllister he met another rich young woman and that October he was very hopeful that she would marry him. When nothing came of this, he was quite depressed.4 Throughout 1948 Kavanagh’s main literary occupation was writing The Good Son for Macmillan.5 The first public sighting of a section of the new novel-in-progress is the short story ‘The Good Child’ in the 1947 Christmas number of The Standard. Its anti-hero, a villainous youngest son, is named Joe Duffy rather than Peter Devine, but the plot to some extent anticipates that of the novel. The title derives from Joe’s mother’s habit of praising him to her neighbours as ‘the good child’, although he is manifestly a very nasty piece of goods. The thinness and implausibility of the character of Joe Duffy and his mother point to some of the difficulties he would encounter in extending a tale of villainy and cynical opportunism to novel or novella length.
The Good Son was undertaken as Kavanagh’s fictional revenge on Dublin’s bourgeoisie who condescended to him as a mere peasant and failed to reward his genius with either employment or patronage. Its sequel would expose them as the nouveaux riches sons and daughters of Peter Devine, a reprobate who had clawed a path from poverty to affluence through unscrupulous dealing, chicanery, exploitation of human labour and even murder. In the persons of Peter and Mary Devine, Dublin’s powerful families were provided with the most repulsive parents he could envisage.
Peter is physically ugly, ‘small and slightly built with a thin face like a weasel’, ‘small streaky blue eyes’ and a nose that perpetually drips. His character is even nastier than his looks. Compelled to leave the fictional townland of Garleygobban in the parish of Ballyrush to avoid marrying a woman he had made pregnant, he fails to save any money as a labourer in Leeds, returns and soon persuades his widowed mother, who dotes on him, to transfer the family farm into his name. His three brothers, who had been tending the fourteen-acre farm in his absence, are treated like slaves and housed in a barn. He then mortgages the farm, pretends that the money is from his Leeds savings, and marries the heiress to a forty-acre farm whose father is short of cash. Having stripped his own mortgaged farm of all its useful equipment, he returns the land to his mother and brothers and they fade out of the story.
Peter’s wife is almost as physically unprepossessing as himself. She has a jelly-like body liable to run to fat, walks with short steps, speaks in a cow-like drawl and wears a pout of importance. She is also ‘actressy’, which Kavanagh, who at this point despised actors, translates as being prone to tantrums and bouts of hysteria. She is consumed with pride in her father’s forty acres and her chief delight is to lord it over her poorer neighbours, boast of her possessions, refuse to lend farm equipment, and inconvenience others as much as lies in her power.
There is no character in the entire novel with whom the reader can empathise. The Devines’ neighbours and servants are dislikeable or servile. John the Bard, who speaks in rhyme, is merely a comic character introduced for purposes of light relief. He is modelled on the Bard of Callanberg, several of whose verses he recites. Kavanagh is clearly drawn to his rascally anti-hero because he is the only man in the parish with vision and energy. Devine puts his faith in education as the route to commercial, social and artistic success for the next generation. As to how he himself succeeds in accumulating wealth, his author is rather vague. He whirls about, energetically, driving his workmen to clear the fields of stones and to repair lanes; he progresses from keeping a boar to having a bull and then a stallion at stud, but we are given no sense of the gradual expansion of his farm and his bank balance. By the end of the novel the pinnacle of his achievement is to be the proud owner of a village corn mill. Prosperity in local terms, yes, but the leap that would take him to urban commercial success, to the ownership of mills and factories in other towns and directorships in Dublin-based companies does not occur within the novel. It was possibly beyond Kavanagh’s powers of invention to describe the trajectory from peasant to business magnate.
For his model of a local businessman and farmer who cut a figure on the national stage, he turned to Bernard O’Rourke, who owned a corn mill in Inniskeen and Dundalk and was, in addition, a major shareholder in several large fac
tories and business enterprises nationwide, and a senator. The location of Peter’s corn mill on the banks of the river and near the railway station identifies it with O’Rourke’s Inniskeen mill. Apart from the fact that Senator O’Rourke enjoyed the kind of wealth and status to which Peter aspires, his family origins, character, general demeanour, business methods and children’s careers had nothing in common with those Kavanagh devised for his anti-hero. Nevertheless, the attribution of such a wicked life history to a captain of industry partly identifiable as Senator O’Rourke might well have landed Macmillan with a libel suit, had the novel been published.
To some extent, Kavanagh’s fascination with the vile Peter Devine was an attraction of opposites. The spendthrift writer who frittered whatever money came his way and who, whether he was earning a weekly wage or not, was almost permanently broke, had constructed an alter ego so canny in financial matters that he is destined to end up as one of the richest men in Ireland. Yet Devine and his creator were not altogether dissimilar: both, for example, looked on marriage as the quickest route to riches and, while Kavanagh would not stoop to Devine’s stratagems for amassing wealth, he was none too scrupulously ethical where acquiring money was concerned. He had, for instance, helped himself to most of the teaching salary he had been asked to bank for his brother after Peter had left for the US, and this at a time when he was earning a regular salary himself as a Standard reporter. His cover story was that the cashier in the bank had been on the fiddle.6
The Good Son shows none of the affection for its material that had made the doings of small farmers so entertaining in Tarry Flynn. The creation of a rural anti-hero, who progresses from rags to riches by dint of cheating, trickery and evil deeds, necessitated attention to plot and incident rather than to the evocation of the comedy of normal family and neighbourhood relations and ‘the ordinary business of country living’. It also left no room for lyricism. Nine years after leaving home, Kavanagh had not only lost touch with day-to-day life in Inniskeen, he had come to loathe the place. The contempt manifest in his 1948 letters pervades The Good Son: ‘Inniskeen is a frightfully sordid, squalid, slummy place, gutter and low living’; and again, ‘Cities are the only place for anyone but a peasant. It really is living in the mentality of a slum . . . The country is awful except to write about.’7
In April he was still quite pleased with the way his new novel was going; by the summer he was less enthusiastic and he ignored Macmillan’s request for a progress report in July and again in August 1948. When there was still no news by September, Maurice Macmillan was asked to send one of his ‘Dear Paddy’ letters. Kavanagh responded with a display of ‘broth of a boy’ Irish charm:
About the novel. It has been giving me some trouble. Wrote it several times. However I’ll be able to send it in a month or six weeks and I don’t think you’ll be too disappointed. It is a good and important theme. I am like a very awkward cow calving, a large cow that many people might think was not in calf at all. (The imagery is not quite complimentary.) Please don’t let me think that you are doubtful of my delivering the goods. I may be slow for a while but eventually I’ll churn the butter. [This last sentence is crossed out in pen and marked ‘metaphor mixed’] . . .
Maurice hastened to reassure him by return of post. On 13 December 1948, at the prompting of the accounts department, Maurice again brought a little pressure to bear in a letter that combined a business query with good wishes for Christmas and a ‘prolific’ New Year. According to the terms of the contract the first novel was now due. With the renewal of the advance in jeopardy, Kavanagh wrote on 26 December to explain that he had run into some problems with the novel but was now forging ahead:
Regarding novel: I wrote it. No good. Not me. I’m at it again, same material and a good critic to whom I read bits said ‘this is it’ . . . If ‘this is it’ I’d run through it in three weeks. Let’s hope it is at any rate. I’ll go on writing till I die and I intend to live as long as Shaw . . .
Clearly he was too embarrassed to send Maurice his work-in-progress, knowing that the new novel fell well below the standard of Tarry Flynn.
In spite of Kavanagh’s unproductiveness, Harold Macmillan would probably have continued to subsidise him for a few more months, had not the firm received a letter from the Pilot Press in January claiming a prior option on Kavanagh’s next two novels. When Maurice asked Paddy for an explanation, he responded indignantly, denouncing the Pilot Press in racist terms as ‘Shylocks’ who had added a clause to the contract he had signed with them. There was no clause ‘giving a claim on his “next three novels”’ in the agreement he had signed. Was the reference to three novels rather than two a deliberate mistake? Macmillan formally notified him that they were ceasing payment of the monthly advance forthwith, but would be prepared to reconsider this decision should the unfortunate affair be cleared up to their entire satisfaction. If, on the other hand, the Pilot Press were to substantiate its allegation, Macmillan would lay claim to all royalties up to the full amount already advanced. Maurice did not abandon his role as the human face of the firm and his ‘Dear Paddy’ correspondence continued.
Kavanagh, protesting his innocence and good faith, sent a photostat of the agreement which Macmillan had already been sent by the Pilot Press. It is a standard form amended in type to suit the specifics of the particular contract, so it is impossible to tell from it whether certain additions were made before or after the agreement was signed. What Kavanagh needed to produce, in order to prove that the Pilot Press had cheated him, was a signed copy of the agreement in which there was no mention of his next two novels. However, this document had apparently disappeared without trace. Kavanagh told Maurice Macmillan that he had never received a duplicate of his contract from Pilot; he thought Peadar O’Donnell might have it, but he hadn’t, and the Bell office, where the contract was signed, had been thoroughly searched to no avail.
Did he yield to the temptation to prevent history repeating itself in the matter of the Macmillan subsidy? In 1939 he had lost the modest advance proposed by Harold Macmillan because of Michael Joseph’s lien on his next book; was he to forfeit a far more considerable advance nine years later because of the Pilot Press’s claim? Harold Macmillan was certainly of the opinion that Kavanagh had tried to pull a fast one on the firm, but he spoke of the incident with resigned amusement as an instance of the wayward behaviour of authors.8
In an attempt to compel him to acknowledge their prior option on his next novel, the Pilot Press resorted to blackmail, withholding the advance on Tarry Flynn’s American royalties which they had been sent in their capacity as author’s agent. Kavanagh took legal advice, discovered that their action was a felony, and threatened court proceedings. Pilot capitulated and disgorged the £90 or so it had received from Devin-Adair.9
The dispute between the rival claimants to the next two novels resolved itself. Kalman Lantos, who had been bankrolling the Pilot Press, died, and it immediately went bankrupt. All its assets were seized and its typescripts and papers deposited in the vaults of Lloyd’s Bank. ‘Dear Paddy’, who went on promising a book to Maurice Macmillan until August 1949, never turned it in.
Although, as far as the Macmillans were concerned, Kavanagh had failed ‘to churn the butter’, he did persevere with the attempt to draft a novel centring on rural villainy. Dissatisfied with The Good Son, he tried his hand at a different novel, incorporating some of the same characters and the same setting, but with an entirely different plot and different place-names. This often-started and never-finished alternative novel, The Miskish Horror, sometimes entitled Fayley Madden and sometimes untitled, survives as an accumulation of fragmentary drafts.10 It had what he describes as ‘an agrarian-clerical plot’ and was loosely based on the agrarian disputes of the early 1930s in the Carrickmacross area, including those arising from the Land Commission’s division of the Plunkett-Kenny estate in Inniskeen.
By the 1930s most of the large estates had already been disposed of by the commission and, as the
land available for subdivision became scarcer, needy or greedy farmers grew more ruthless in their pursuit of the remaining acres. In the Carrickmacross district between 1930 and 1936 subsistence farmers, intent on intimidating former landlords or the owners of large farms into selling or speeding up the sale of their land to the commission, boycotted the letting of land at the Longfield estate at Lisanisk, at Dunanney and at Joseph Withrington’s farm. In Inniskeen, Olive and Lily Plunkett-Kenny, spinster daughters of a family of Catholic landlords who still owned what by local standards was a comparatively large farm of approximately 150 acres at Rocksavage, fell victim to the predatoriness of local farmers when in 1932 they set about selling a large portion of their farm to the Land Commission.11
Kavanagh was among those who applied for a parcel of land when the actual division of Rocksavage occurred in 1935; by January 1936 he had been informed that his application was unsuccessful. As a farmer with less than 30 arable acres, whose existing land was within half a mile radius of Rocksavage, he was eligible for selection but he did not match up to the other criteria. The commission favoured married farmers with large families, the larger the better, and a service record in the pre-Truce IRA was almost a prerequisite.12
He affected not to care when he reported his failure with the commission to his sister Celia13 and, since he was already more interested in succeeding as a writer than as a farmer, his indifference may have been genuine, though he was probably peasant enough, or sufficiently his mother’s son, to have looked forward to acquiring a few further acres at a bargain price. Whatever his attitude, he took no part in the organised boycotting of the annual land-letting auction on the Rocksavage estate and was indeed horrified by it. His disdain for the participants in the agrarian outrages of the early 1930s is evident in the drafts and fragments of his unfinished novel.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 40