Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Since Patrick did not wish the journal to be too literary, he led off each week with an editorial on current political, economic or social issues. His stance was forthrightly and virulently anti-Fianna Fáil, presenting this so-called ‘people’s party’ as the party of bankers and capitalists. His main target was a complacent self-congratulatory chauvinism which promoted or unquestioningly accepted a romantic delusion of Irish cultural and spiritual superiority. The first editorial, ‘Victory of Mediocrity’, asserted England’s superior vitality and mental awareness and the superior combination of respect for tradition and modern marketing methods in the Six Counties. The notion of Irish independence was found to be an illusion; the Irish budget was dictated by the Tory government in Westminster. In Kavanagh’s view ‘there was nothing won by’ the revolution of 1916–21 ‘that wasn’t available before it started’. A ten-point programme for immediate economic reform in the third editorial proposed the reduction of the army to 500 soldiers and of the civil service to one-tenth its size, making the presidency an honorary post at a nominal salary, the withdrawal of subsidies to such moribund bodies as the Abbey Theatre, the Institute of Higher Studies, the Irish Folklore Commission, the Arts Council, and the abandonment of compulsory Irish in schools. Most reviewers found such editorials and the articles by John L. Flanagan remarkably hard-hitting. One commented after the first number:

  It hit the town last Saturday like a blast from a sawn-off shotgun . . . it proclaims itself a journal of literature and politics but it might equally be described as a bulletin of abuse and mockery . . . Indeed, its aim appears to be to annoy as many people as possible and in this I should think it has every prospect of succeeding . . .2

  No sooner had the first number gone to the printers than it was time to start on the next; the brothers had set themselves a punishing schedule. As Devin Garrity of Devin-Adair, who was asked to sell it through his New York Book Club, commented, a ‘Kavanagh’s Monthly’ would have been more feasible. Yet, despite the pressure, Kavanagh produced a couple of fine poems and essays: the poems ‘I Had a Future’ and ‘Wet Evening in April’; and the prose articles, ‘Schoolbook Poetry’, a tribute to the schoolbook poetry of his youth, ‘Paris in Aran’, a provocative critique of Synge, and ‘I Went to the Fair’, a recollection of the buying and selling of livestock in his youth which shows off his gift for dialogue and atmosphere. In the course of fulminating about government policy or the state of the arts in Ireland, he also sometimes slipped in some general reflections that would outlive their topical context and pass into Irish cultural discourse. Such, for instance, were his views on parochialism and provincialism, which occurred in the editorial of 24 May:

  Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis — towards which his eyes are turned — has to say on any subject . . .

  The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilisations are based on parochialism — Greek, Israelite, English.

  Week after week Patrick’s ‘angry foghorn’ sounded, but the paper had its lighter moments too. It mocked the fashion and crossword competitions in the Irish Sunday newspapers by holding the competition but omitting the requisite photographs of fashionably dressed models and the crossword square. ‘The Old Foolishness’ (based on ‘This England’ in the New Statesman and named after a 1942 Abbey play by Paul Vincent Carroll) consisted of a series of snippets from newspapers compiled with a view to exposing the fatuities of Irish public discourse. On one occasion de Valera was caught placing the well-being of the Irish people fourth on his list of priorities, the three more important considerations being freedom, the restoration of the Irish language and the unification of the country. Occasionally, Kavanagh simply saw the funny side of some innocuous comment such as the following from a Sunday Press report: ‘. . . his father said, I don’t think it was the Guards who hit him. He has been out of hospital since Sunday.’

  Due to the haste with which the journal was conceived and rushed to press, there had been no time to seek any advertising and the first issue contained only one unsolicited ad for the Devin-Adair press. By the second week Victor Waddington agreed to run a weekly ad for his South Anne Street art gallery. He booked ten slots in advance and the result was certainly not encouraging for other potential advertisers, since the four-line ad was always placed in the most inconspicuous position possible at the bottom corner of one of the final pages. From week 9, the Brown Thomas department store on Grafton Street took a regular slot and this ad too was placed in a bottom corner position. Patrick unsuccessfully sought advertising from Pye Radio, the Dunlop Rubber Company and Aer Lingus among others. By 10 May he recognised that the weekly was too controversial to attract advertisers:

  If the Angel Gabriel brought out a newspaper he would get no advertising on acccount of his attitude to large sections of the human race. Even an angel cannot afford to be estranging too many people.

  The rates were also too expensive. Arnold Marsh, headmaster of Drogheda Grammar School, who took two ads at £1 each, complained that the cost of an equivalent ad in the Manchester Guardian was only four shillings.

  Some well-wishers, including Peadar O’Donnell, were concerned that under Peter’s influence the journal was becoming altogether too bitter and abusive. They warned Patrick to cease collaborating with his brother or to exert more editorial control. He slapped ‘Edited by Patrick Kavanagh’ on the front page in week 10, but the journal continued to alienate as many sectors of Irish society as before. Readers were notified in week 11 that unless the weekly received financial backing, it would have to close down. Its only backer was Peter, who had already lost £600. As Dublin wits put it, ‘It was robbing Peter to pay Patrick.’

  The thirteenth issue on 13 July, consisting of four pages written entirely by Patrick, was the last. Five hundred copies were printed, but it could be bought only as one of a complete set of thirteen issues selling at £1. There were only thirteen takers. From mid-July the brothers embarked on an orgy of burning in the fireplace at 62 Pembroke Road: first, all but one hundred of the last issue went up in flames; then, as the thousands of returns came in, the fire was stoked for weeks.

  After the collapse of their Weekly the brothers thought it prudent to leave town. Peter returned to the US and Patrick once again tried his fortunes in London. This time, responsibility for looking after No. 62 and forwarding his mail was assigned to Elinor O’Brien. Her partner, the journalist Tony Molloy, a relation of Kavanagh through his grandfather’s Tullamore marriage, had died prematurely of Bright’s disease the previous year. The two men had been friends and Elinor, who lived close to Kavanagh’s flat, continued on as a friend after Tony’s death. He referred to her as ‘my Protestant friend’. While there was no romantic attachment whatever on her side, she recognised Kavanagh’s talent and was pleased to be befriended by him. He confided in her and, according to Anthony Cronin, she advised him well.3 By profession Elinor was a photographer and Kavanagh co-opted her as his ‘official photographer’. For the remainder of his life, Elinor, who married her photographer partner Reggie Wiltshire in 1957, was a loyal friend to Kavanagh and he came to rely on her kindness and disinterested concern for his welfare.

  In London he moved about, staying for a couple of weeks with different friends. Dr Nuala Gilmore, whom he had dated when she was a medical student, helped him financially4 and also offered him temporary accommodation in the large Highgate apartment which she and her doctor husband leased at 25 Linden Mansions, Hornsey Lane. He settled down happily there for much of October and November, running up his hosts’ telephone bill and browsing through their medical books which, with his fascination for technical terms and the arcana of trades and professions, appealed to him. In his first flush of enthusiasm for London, he once again toyed with the idea of moving there permanently.

  His assault on literary Lon
don recalls his early attempts to infiltrate literary Dublin. Now he lunched and drank in Soho on the off chance of meeting fellow writers. One of his haunts became the Duke of Wellington at the corner of Old Compton Street and Wardour Street, at that time a Soho equivalent of the Bailey or McDaid’s, frequented by writers and painters. Its snug was a spot favoured by George Barker on his visits to London and it was there he introduced Kavanagh to one of the most supportive of his future friends, the deaf South African poet David Wright. Wright recalls that he first sighted Kavanagh making his entrance through the dense mob in the small bar one wintry evening, ‘like an erratic boulder breaking the smooth of a moorland’.5 He was soon moving in a circle which included Wright, Barker, John Heath-Stubbs, David Archer and Elizabeth Smart. The welcome he received in the Duke of Wellington was heartening for the outcast poet, whose Weekly had diminished his already limited stock of goodwill in Dublin. He needed to make a fresh start and it was to be under the aegis of his Soho friends, David Wright especially, that the final, successful phase of his career was launched. One immediate consequence of his introduction to this new literary circle was that the following year two of his poems, ‘Pegasus’ and ‘Sanctity’, were included in the Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Verse edited by Heath-Stubbs and Wright.

  He passed the days scouting for employment and seeking out literary contacts, calling on old friends such as John Betjeman, then literary editor of Time and Tide, who gave him some books to review. However, his principal project for making money from journalism in the autumn of 1952 was to claim damages for libel against a long-running Irish political and cultural weekly, The Leader. On 24 May this journal had launched a fortnightly series of articles on prominent personalities in Irish life, entitled ‘Profile’. First to be profiled was Dr Alfred O’Rahilly, President of University College Cork and Smyllie followed on 7 June. Since the series was launched during the short-lived run of the provocative Kavanagh’s Weekly, it was predictable that a ‘Profile’ of Kavanagh would be mooted and it duly appeared, unsigned, on 11 October.

  This ‘Profile’ starts off with a caricature of the poet ‘hunkering on a bar-stool’ in McDaid’s (wittily renamed McQuaid’s), defining alcohol as ‘the worst enemy of the imagination’ (as he had done in Envoy), his great booming voice ‘reminiscent of a load of gravel sliding down the side of a quarry’. He is surrounded by a bevy of acolytes of both sexes, all twenty years his junior, whom he insults, ‘Yous have no merit, no merit at all.’ This image was to prove a self-fulfilling prophecy but, while it is a fairly accurate portrayal of the poet in the 1960s, it was wildly inaccurate in the early 1950s when Kavanagh’s only regular young companions in McDaid’s were John Ryan and Anthony Cronin. The opening sketch goes on to draw a humorous contrast between the romantic image of the poet constructed by Shelley — ‘a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift’ — and Kavanagh, gulping down a whiskey and thereby bringing on a paroxysm of coughing, moving from McDaid’s to the Bailey and back, and meantime placing a bet on the second favourite. There follows a still humorous, but astute analysis of Kavanagh’s provincial fantasy of urban literary life, projected on to a London for which he longs rather than the Dublin where he lives, and of his contempt for the rural barbarity of Inniskeen from which he has escaped. He is depicted as a man much given to the repetition of abstractions and self-serving slogans. His most recent literary and journalistic venture, the short-lived and splenetic Kavanagh’s Weekly, is dismissed as an amateur production at the level of a school or undergraduate magazine.

  Then, with a rhetorical volte-face, the ‘Profile’ forgives all the poet’s foibles, eccentricities and rages because of the magnificent fact that The Great Hunger is the best poem produced in Ireland since Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. It laments that the mistreatment and lack of recognition Kavanagh has received from editors and from the Irish establishment have reduced him to a near continual state of anger or bitterness which threatens to submerge his genius. The article concludes that Kavanagh lacks Yeats’s self-protective guile, but that he is nevertheless a poet, and in a ‘handful of poems’ his pard-like spirit flashes through the entanglements of everyday, contemporary life.

  Most of Kavanagh’s Dublin friends interpreted the ‘Profile’ as an unmitigatedly hostile attack. His younger friends were particularly incensed by the portrayal of the poet as a sponger. In John Jordan’s opinion this opening image undermined the praise of the poetry that followed.6 Kavanagh’s own immediate reaction was one of outrage; for him, the article had no redeeming features whatever. Its praise for some of his poetry he interpreted as a ruse, creating an air of impartiality so as to increase the impact of the personal insults. He was deeply wounded and offended, yet not so distraught that he did not immediately perceive the potential silver lining attaching to this particular cloud. If the ‘Profile’ proved libellous, it could become a nice little earner.

  He promptly contacted his Dublin solicitor, Rory O’Connor, of James O’Connor and Sons, 34 Upper Ormond Quay, to enquire whether he should sue for libel. O’Connor referred the matter to a leading barrister, Thomas Doyle, and on 16 October advised Kavanagh that in Doyle’s opinion there would be a good claim for damages. Doyle drafted a letter for Rory O’Connor to send to the publishers and Kavanagh was assured that, failing a satisfactory reply, proceedings would be issued on his behalf. Less than a week after the ‘Profile’ had appeared, the process of seeking damages from The Leader and its printer, The Argus, had been set in train. It was originally intended that Eason’s, the distributors, be joined to the action, but this was dropped. A letter of 2 November reveals that Kavanagh was hoping to be paid upwards of £500 in damages.

  He returned to Dublin on 19 October in a state of excitable paranoia. The ‘Profile’s’ anonymity had driven him into a frenzy of suspicion and distrust and he was obsessed with discovering the writer’s identity. In fact, to this day authorship of the ‘Profile’ has remained shrouded in secrecy. There is now a consensus that Valentin Iremonger was involved either as sole, main, or assistant author. A reliable source claims that the principal writer was T. Desmond Williams, the UCD historian, and Kavanagh himself came to hold this view. He at first suspected Brian Inglis; then someone suggested that it might be Tommy Woods, a civil servant in the Department of External Affairs who wrote in The Irish Times under the pen-names Michael Hogan and Thersites.7 Soon he had fingered one of the real culprits, Valentin Iremonger, but he still wasn’t sure that he had the right man. He also speculated that the article was probably not the work of one man; the writer had assistance from one or several others. He wanted Behan in the frame, so he placed him there. Who else had assisted Iremonger? Again he scanned the ranks of Dublin’s literati: were some of his so-called friends actually traitors? Then there was the risk that the profiler’s helpers were friends of his friends; the plot thickened, the possibilities of dirty dealing ramified.

  In these circumstances where the loyalty of friends was under daily suspicion, it was difficult to attempt to persuade Kavanagh not to take a High Court action for libel without appearing to collude with the enemy. Long-standing friends, such as Eoin Ryan, himself a barrister, did their best. Younger friends such as John Jordan, for whom ‘the damning inference of the Profile far outweighed the fulsome but patronising praise’, felt that he was over-reacting in seeking legal redress but probably knew better than to say so.8 John Montague thought that ‘his upset’ was ‘in excess of the facts’.9 John Ryan would later describe the caricature as a reasonably fair (if uncharitable) description of the Kavanagh he knew, but he would not have openly said so in 1952.10 His part was to serve as a character witness if such were needed. Kavanagh himself did not anticipate that the case would ever come to trial and hoped for a substantial out-of-court settlement.

  Several contemporary verbal sketches of Kavanagh, including the ‘Profile’, portray him as an angry and volatile man, given to sudden rages and accusatory outbursts. John Arden’s first glimpse of him in a Baggot Street bar
one rainy evening was of a face dark with anger under a shapeless hat suddenly uplifted from a group of sodden men crowded round a table, loud furious words, a large arm all but sweeping the pint glasses on to the floor, a placatory chorus of ‘Ah, now, Paddy, ah now — no, no, no, hold on there’, and then ‘a slow pacified subsidence’.11 This sighting dates from the later 1950s, but for some contemporaries it is the quintessential 1950s’ image of Kavanagh in his cups, quick to take offence, lashing out blindly and having to be soothed and humoured into quiescence. There were many such scenes from October 1952 onwards when the anonymous, wounding ‘Profile’ aroused his profound insecurity and he no longer knew whom to trust.

  To the considerable relief of his sorely tried Dublin coterie, he went back to London in late October. There, despite living in comfortable quarters and hobnobbing with fellow writers and artists, he was as usual strapped for cash. Bill Naughton, the Mayo-born lorry driver turned author, has left a vivid account of Kavanagh’s approach to the business of survival during this London trip.12 He ran into him on the last Friday in October, lunching at the Café Torino in Soho, a cheap café where one could get an excellent bowl of minestrone for a shilling and the rolls and coffee were good. Even among the very varied crowd in Soho, Kavanagh stood out, with his long, ‘unwashed’ face and ‘clownish expression’ though, as Naughton was quick to recognise, this clownish air was merely a front: he was ‘a sharp man in a seemingly unsharp way’. Later that afternoon over drinks, he told Naughton that he was interested ‘in any job that would get [him] a few shillings’. When Naughton, who already had a considerable reputation as a short-story writer, offered to place some short stories if he had any, he responded: