Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

Is to be eloquent yet sincere;

  Let myself rip and not go phoney

  In an inflated testimony.

  Is verse an entertainment only?

  Or is it a profound and holy

  Faith that cries the inner history

  Of the failure of man’s mission?

  Should it be my job to mention

  Precisely how I chanced to fail . . .

  Part I of this intimate private monologue focuses on ambitions and hopes unrealised because of poverty: ‘A car, a big suburban house’, a wife, children. He is one whom ‘the fates/By a financial trick castrate.’ Yet in a remarkably candid self-revelation the poem also admits that he enjoys all the care and attention his poverty elicits, especially from women. If he were to be socially elevated into a comfortably off suburbanite, he would keep this fact ‘half-secret’ so that he could continue being a focus for female sympathy. He projects himself as a Rasputin, a large, shabby, priestly figure endowed with special mystical powers and gifts and enormously attractive to rich women. His reluctance to bed or even kiss these women is attributed to Catholic sexual morality or to romantic idealism. The poem is not, of course, as disarmingly honest as it appears and on the subject of his sexual behaviour it is at its most disingenuous. Throughout Part I, self-analysis is given a semi-playful air because jingling octosyllabic couplets counterpoint the conversational rhythms.

  The move from self-exhortation to an evocation of the benevolent psychic state most conducive to verse is enacted in a change from couplets to a sonnet sequence. Composition demands composure. In ‘Auditors In’ his vanity and insecurity, which leave him prey to hurt, self-pity and anger, are pinpointed as the enemies within, undermining the psychic peace and poise necessary for poetry:

  From the sour soil of a town where all roots canker

  I turn away to where the Self reposes

  The placeless Heaven that’s under all our noses

  Where we’re shut off from all the barren anger,

  No time for self-pitying melodrama,

  A million Instincts know no other uses

  Than all day long to feed and charm the Muses

  Till they become pure positive . . .

  Even at its most earnest, the poetry is modernised and personalised by the irreverent use of vernacular phrases such as ‘under all our noses’ or the flippant rhyming of ‘reposes’ with ‘noses’ and ‘Muses’ with ‘uses’.

  Now that he was surrounded by a largely urban circle — Ryan, Swift and Jordan were city chaps and Cronin was thoroughly urbanised — Kavanagh pondered the legitimacy of verse on outmoded country themes which had seemed so audaciously innovative almost a decade earlier when he was writing ‘Art McCooey’. ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Ante-Natal Dream’, ‘On First Looking into E. V. Rieu’s Homer’ and ‘Epic’ followed on such musings, poems in which rural recollections are justified as a right of way to poetry. ‘Epic’ is his finest and most subtle defence of old-fashioned rural subject matter:

  I inclined

  To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

  Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind

  He said: I made the Iliad from such

  A local row. Gods make their own importance.

  Socialising with young painters and writers who believed in the importance of the intellectual and artistic life also gave Kavanagh a licence to contemplate his own creativity, particularly the psychic conditions most conducive to poetry. His poems began to thematise a tension between his destructive, satiric side and the positive, benevolent impulses essential for the construction of poetry. This quarrel with himself, evident in ‘Auditors In’, would continue into ‘Intimate Parnassus’, ‘On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers’ and ‘Prelude’. Cronin, in particular, encouraged these new exploratory poems and The Bell published ‘Auditors In’ (October 1951) and most of the early 1950s’ poems not included in ‘Diary’.

  In August 1951 Cronin also published three excerpts from Kavanagh’s novel The Good Son as ‘Three Pieces from a Novel’. The change of the hero’s name from Peter Devine to Peter McCabe at this point broke the connection between this novel and Michael MacOdge. Kavanagh had given Cronin the typescripts of the two novels and the drafts of The Miskish Horror to make a selection of excerpts for The Bell and he left all of these behind in his room at 5 Lower Hatch Street when he departed for London. Claire McAllister and Patrick Swift also shared a flat in the same house and the lease for the entire house was in Claire’s name. During Cronin’s absence in London, Patrick Swift deserted Claire for Oonagh Ryan, John’s sister, in autumn 1952. Claire terminated the lease, packed up the contents of the house, including Cronin’s scattered belongings, put them into storage for safekeeping, and returned to Michigan. The Good Son and Michael MacOdge were destined to languish in a packing case for almost ten years.

  Nineteen-fifty was a bad year for Kavanagh financially. Since no journalistic work apart from the Envoy ‘Diary’ was coming his way in Dublin, he decided to try his luck in London in July, leaving Peggy Rushton (née Gough) to look after No. 62 in his absence and forward his mail. In London he availed of the hospitality of an old poker-playing pal, Harry Craig, formerly assistant editor of The Bell who was now employed by the BBC’s Third Programme. Craig, an exceptionally handsome man and a great favourite with women, had been Peggy Rushton’s lover for several years and they still corresponded, so it is likely that the two ex-lovers organised Kavanagh’s London expedition between them. Peggy also petitioned Joe McGrath, the Hospitals Trust millionaire who bankrolled The Bell, to pay Kavanagh a weekly stipend of £3 which she argued would do more for the arts in Ireland than endowing The Bell, but on 16 August McGrath, through his secretary, refused.17

  One of Craig’s current mistresses was Margaret Gardiner, the wealthy socialist and patroness of the arts, satirised by Anthony Cronin as the stern taskmistress Amelia in The Life of Riley. Courtesy of Craig, Kavanagh was invited to stay in her luxurious home at 35 Downshire Hill in Hampstead. On the evidence of Cronin’s portrait, it is unlikely that she would have approved of the down-at-heel and rather idle guest foisted on her by her none-too-faithful lover, so his stay would have been of short duration. Kavanagh also had the use of Craig’s flat for a time when Craig was living with Margaret or some other woman friend. Later Craig moved him into an empty room in a flat rented by his friend Tom Hughes, who lived at Broadhurst Gardens near the Finchley Road station. Hughes was an Irish medical student with a late vocation who was paying his way through medical school. His guest had the use of his bathroom and Hughes was exasperated by Kavanagh’s slovenly ways. He would arrive home from a long day in the hospital to find the sink full of dirty water, used razor blades on the side and towels tossed on the floor. Kavanagh also made free with his books. At this time Kavanagh had no money apart from the odd pound or two that Peggy sent him or Craig lent him and he was living hand to mouth like Cronin’s Paddy Riley. Craig took him to the George, the BBC pub, where he met W. R. Rodgers, whose poetry he admired but whose person he detested, and Louis MacNeice, whom he already knew and liked. He was introduced to other BBC editors and programme-makers and, though often hungry, he got by somehow, carried along on a tide of alcoholic bonhomie and availing of the system of elaborately noted but never repaid loans that flourished in the George.18 Between them, the Irish BBC contingent arranged a few programme slots for him for the following year.

  Other ports of call were the Irish Press and the Irish Times offices in Fleet Street where he freely availed of the telephone. Donal Foley recalls the proprietorial air with which he rambled down Fleet Street in his shabby grey brown overcoat, suit and grubby shirt. Foley or Jim McGuinness could be counted on to buy him a drink or offer him a bed for the night. He would sit impatiently waiting while Foley finished his London Letter for the The Irish Times, asking him why he didn’t just copy a piece from the Evening Standard since no one would notice the difference.19 At McGuinness’s behest he composed an extempore verse in Foley’s honour
in return for bed and board:

  1950 was the year

  That Patrick Kavanagh slept here

  He wrote this verse solely

  For a man called Donal Foley.20

  During this London trip he was promised occasional reviewing by The Observer and the Manchester Guardian, but his biggest coup was persuading Hollis and Carter to commission a book on Irish pilgrimages. The contract was signed on 11 October and he was offered a £200 advance, £100 at the signing and the remainder on delivery of the typescript. (The book was never written.) With the first £100 burning a hole in his pocket, he returned to Dublin unexpectedly in mid-October and finding some items missing from his flat — his radio, alarm clock, a tablecloth and a few books — accused Peggy Rushton of stealing them. She was also accused of trying to deprive him of his flat by not forwarding some rental demands.21 He was almost incapable of trusting anyone, even, or especially, a long-standing friend, and invariably put the worst construction on innocent actions or omissions. Peggy knew him too well to be deeply hurt, but she moved to England in the 1950s and they lost touch.

  He was back in London in mid-January 1951 to prepare a 25-minute BBC talk about himself for which he received a very welcome forty guineas. Broadcast on 20 February under the title ‘Thinking of Other Things’, it went down well and he was complimented on being a very pleasant speaker. Such praise raised his hopes that the BBC would offer him a contract and he hung on in London as long as he could in the expectation that Harry Craig would swing something for him. Even after his return to Dublin in March, he was still reasonably confident of a London job, but the BBC did not avail of his services again until the end of July. By then he had long since grasped that there was no chance of a contract. The July broadcast, repeated on Sunday, 4 August, was a talk on Carleton and resulted in the offer of another broadcast to take the form of a reading from his personal anthology of Irish poetry. Not even the inducement of a further BBC slot could tempt Kavanagh to find anything of merit in Irish verse, apart from a few poems by Yeats and Thomas Moore.22 A cannier or less fastidious critic would have turned the anthology programme into a mini-series and perhaps found a niche for himself as Irish poetry commentator. Instead, the idiosyncrasy of his proposed anthology demonstrated that he was not one to do business with, and offers from the BBC dried up for the time being. During one of these London trips he was introduced to Dylan Thomas, who immediately launched into a broad, offensive imitation of his accent. Kavanagh retreated, hurt.23

  On his return from London in March, he and John Ryan discussed the possibility of publishing a collection of his Envoy Diaries. Ryan wanted Envoy to be the publisher, but Kavanagh thought he might interest Burns and Oates in the project. He decided to bulk out the book by including the sketches and stories published in the Irish Press in 1946, which Devin-Adair had declined, and also the August 1949 ‘Letter from Ireland’. What he envisaged was a collection along the lines of Cyril Connolly’s Condemned Playground.24 Burns and Oates turned down his proposal and Envoy folded after the July 1951 issue, so there was no prose collection at this time.

  Another project mooted by John Ryan in March 1951 to cheer up the chronically impecunious poet was a sponsored visit to the US. Ryan had been appointed to the Cultural Relations Committee which had a budget of £10,000 to spend on schemes for the promotion and development of cultural relations between Ireland and other countries. The committee had already paid for Roger McHugh to go to Iceland and Ria Mooney to Salzburg. If Kavanagh could produce an invitation on headed notepaper from an American university to lecture on some aspect of Irish culture, the Cultural Relations Committee would pay his fare and expenses. The poet asked his brother to arrange such an invitation. By late March his plans were coming unstuck. Word was leaked to him that Seán MacBride, Minister for External Affairs, had vetoed the sending to the US of his and O’Connor’s photographs, never mind their persons.

  When the government changed and Fianna Fáil came into power on 1 May, his hopes of a travel grant were renewed. By the end of June he was confident that he would be in the US that autumn. The committee had now agreed to pay the return fare and a little extra towards his expenses. On 5 August he learned that Frank Aiken, the new Minister for External Affairs, had vetoed the Cultural Committee’s offer. This veto may have been prompted or copperfastened by an interview with John Pudney, published in the Illustrated London News the day before, in which Kavanagh opposed Ireland’s proposed entry into the United Nations. (Pudney described him as a caricature Irishman, clad in orange tweed coat and green hat, though in the accompanying photograph he is wearing a belted raincoat and dark hat.) Aiken’s attention may also have been drawn to Kavanagh’s celebration with Cronin, Ryan and Swift of the burning down of the Abbey Theatre on 17 July. He was hardly the ideal Irish cultural ambassador. Indignant and disappointed at Aiken’s intervention, Kavanagh denounced Fianna Fáil as the ‘dirtiest, lowest crowd we ever had’, his only consolation being that he hadn’t voted for ‘the bastards’.25 When later that same month the Cultural Relations Committee proposed sending Kavanagh and Cronin to attend an international congress of writers in Belgium on 6 September, Aiken again intervened and directed it to send Clarke and Ó Faracháin instead.

  John Ryan’s resignation from the committee in protest at Aiken’s interference made front page news in The Irish Times on 20 September and Cronin gave the matter a further airing in The Bell in November. Ryan offered to pay for Kavanagh and Cronin to go to Belgium in an unofficial capacity, but the AV refused to put up the money. Kavanagh’s brother volunteered to pay his fare to the US and for a time he entertained himself with the idea of going there to spite the government. Patrick O’Connor counselled against making the trip. Its only purpose would be to annoy officialdom; there was nothing to be gained by it otherwise. Kavanagh agreed with him. All he had really wanted was the money.26

  He contented himself with a belated verse revenge. The antics of the Arts Committee or the Cultural Relations Committee as funding bodies are mocked by being compared in ‘Prelude’ to those of the fly-by-night three-card-trick merchants, notorious for cheating gullible folk out of their money:

  Card-sharpers of the art committees

  Working all the provincial cities,

  They cry ‘Eccentric’ if they hear

  A voice that sounds at all sincere.

  Fold up their table and their gear

  And with the money disappear . . .

  Frank Aiken’s embargo on employing him as an overseas cultural representative is satirised in the comic couplets of ‘Irish Stew’ (The Bell, July 1954), a dramatic monologue in which a government official, motivated by hate and nepotism masquerading as concern for the poet’s welfare, proposes sending his own cousin as ‘art emissary’ to Europe, instead of the indigent author. The burden of the satire, as its culinary title suggests, is the government’s willingness to see him starve in the name of art:

  You’re far too great a genius to

  Talk of steak and onions or a stew,

  Luxury would ruin your sublime

  Imagination in no time . . .

  In hindsight one can sympathise with the Fianna Fáil government’s attitude that the badly-groomed, foul-mouthed poet would not showcase Irish culture to best advantage abroad and certainly could not be relied upon to speak well of his fellow writers or to foster the notion that the Literary Revival was still in full swing in 1950s’ Dublin. From Kavanagh’s point of view, Cultural Relations Committee funding was the only form of State patronage available and it was cruelly tantalising to have it almost within his grasp and then abruptly withdrawn. His double rejection by Aiken fuelled the paranoia to which he was prone. His friends had played down his sense of victimisation, telling him he was being melodramatic, but events were proving them wrong.

  18

  BLUSTER AND BEGGARY

  (1952–1953)

  Poverty has nothing to do with eating your fill today; it is anxiety about what is going to happen next w
eek.

  (Kavanagh in Self-Portrait)

  When Envoy folded in July 1951 Kavanagh was deprived of a monthly platform and, since no other editor offered him a column, he felt muzzled. The solution he came up with was to start his own journal in the combined hopes of having his say and making some money. His brother Peter, who was visiting Ireland at the end of March 1952, was willing to invest his £800 savings in a weekly journal on the understanding that when the money ran out it would stop. Kavanagh’s Weekly, subtitled ‘A Journal of Literature and Politics’, was on the stands by Saturday, 12 April, little more than a week after it had first been mooted.1

  It consisted of eight demi-quarto pages, about nine thousand words, and cost sixpence. The initial print run was 3,000: Patrick was relying on his personal notoriety and on the iconoclastic nature of the paper’s content to ensure a wide readership. Each number, except the thirteenth and last, contained an editorial, feature articles, a gossip column, a theatre and radio column, a books page and a satiric anthology of press cuttings, ‘The Old Foolishness’. Patrick wrote a large part of the weekly, being responsible for the unsigned front page editorial, for most of the other articles and poems signed or written under a pseudonym and the stories for children by Tom Breen. Peter contributed articles under the pen-name John L. Flanagan, unsigned articles on North America, wrote the Letters column, and organised the layout, printing and distribution. Apart from a very few articles by Myles na gCopaleen and others, the weekly was a fraternal venture. A newspaper format was adopted in that there was no cover. John Ryan designed the masthead and promised to contribute the gossip column entitled ‘Graftonia’, but he distanced himself from the venture after the first number, in which Peter’s article on Irish embassies, ‘Diplomatic Whiskey’, caused a furore and was pronounced by a number of journalists, including Smyllie, to be ‘hitting below the belt’. Even Patrick is said to have shivered when he read it. After this he added ‘Graftonia’ to his list of weekly chores, a reversion to his ‘City Commentary’ days, and John Ryan’s wife, Patricia, occasionally supplied him with tit-bits of society gossip.