Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  I wrote a few masterpieces there a while back . . . but I’m no good at stories. D’you see, I’m a journalist, an’ I write nothin’ but shite. Shite I can write with the best of them.

  Naughton found him utterly self-absorbed; he talked to himself rather than conversing and had ‘no interest in anything but one’s reactions to his own words’ and a mild interest at that.

  Next morning the two met by chance on the Charing Cross Road, whereupon Kavanagh pulled a letter out of his pocket that was partly torn and stuffed back into the envelope. He was in a state of high indignation because he had written a begging letter disguised as a love letter to a woman in Dublin and she had that morning sent him a three-page reply but failed to include any money:

  Sure my eyes were open for money, longin’ for a sight of it, an’ when I saw the bloody letter an’ nothin’ else I tore it in ribbons. I couldn’t read it. I hadn’t the patience.

  There was undoubtedly an element of role play involved in this exhibition of his predatoriness; he was self-consciously casting himself as a comic character skidding on his own banana skin, while at the same time making a pitch for a loan from his drinking companion of the day before. When Naughton invited him to Sunday lunch at his George’s Square home, he asked for the bus fare.

  He turned up an hour late for lunch, arriving when the Naughtons were at the sweet course. He was, he said, ‘burstin’ to go out the back’ and introductions had to wait until he had returned from the lavatory. Then he insisted on joining the family for apple strudel and cream, postponing the main course until afterwards. Sweet, he pronounced a bourgeois habit; he preferred to be left with a savoury taste in his mouth, or as he put it,

  When I get up from the table I want to be pickin’ bits of meat from between my teeth, not bits of apple.

  He proceeded to down two helpings of beef and vegetables in double quick time. Afterwards he picked up the Sunday Times and when anyone else other than himself was talking, he started reading. Naughton asked him what he was writing and was told

  Shite. Just the same I’m only happy when I’m writin’ that same shite. That’s the only thing makes me happy.

  Kavanagh was eminently practical about survival. His gruff manner and deliberate avoidance of the civilities expected of a guest possibly covered any embarrassment he might feel at his own importunity. He exaggerated his eccentricities, even, to Naughton’s ear, his accent, playing the part of the untamed savage genius for Londoners or the London Irish, earning his keep by putting on a performance of otherness.

  Nevertheless, he was not making the social impact he had hoped in London and was having no success in breaking into journalism there. Angela Crooms, who lunched at a pub off Gower Street with him and Iain Hamilton in November, got the impression that ‘London was being a flop’ for him and thought that he might fare better in the US. Unaware of his poor record in obtaining travel grants, she advised him to apply to go to the Salzburg seminar as a way of meeting American writers and academics and perhaps procuring an invitation to the US by this means.13

  His chief literary activity during these months in London was composing begging letters. Typical of the unabashedly scrounging epistles he dispatched from Linden Mansions to Dublin was one to a woman friend, Sheila O’Grady, telling her that he had very good prospects but was temporarily ‘broke’, with ‘no money for fags, not to talk of betting’.

  Sheila O’Grady (1917–96) was a fair-haired, intellectual woman in her mid-thirties whom Kavanagh had probably been dating since the previous spring, two-timing her with Deirdre Courtney.14 He was certainly close to Sheila by summer 1952 because she possessed the entire run of Kavanagh’s Weekly, including the almost unobtainable thirteenth issue, which he must have given her since she did not buy it. On 12 September they were photographed together outside the GPO. When he wrote to her from London on 30 October, it was as to a friend who was in his confidence, knew about the proposed libel action and was au fait with his work. Sheila was, in fact, closer to the norm of Kavanagh’s women than Deirdre, being from a well-heeled middle-class family and university educated, though she was considerably older than the student types who usually attracted him. She was the daughter of an ex-gentleman farmer from Newbridge, County Kildare, who had moved to Dublin where he conducted a successful business as a cattle dealer. The family lived at 11 Ailesbury Gardens in the middle-class suburb of Sandymount. Sheila enrolled at University College in 1934 to study architecture. Fellow students considered her talented, but a romantic difficulty with one of their number in her third year threw her off course. Eventually she withdrew in 1939 without a degree, opted for a career as a draughtswoman and ended up working in the Housing Architects’ Department of Dublin Corporation. In her spare time Sheila worked as a freelance scriptwriter, collaborating with her sister Peggy to produce topical, satiric material for Radio Éireann and patter for the comedian Jimmy O’Dea, as well as occasionally contributing to Punch. Through such literary activities or through her regular attendance at the theatre she somehow met Kavanagh.

  Despite her genteel upbringing, she was drawn to the scruffy, shabby poet who by 1951 had no regular source of income and was already embarking on a self-destructive career of gambling and drinking. Kavanagh made no effort to clean up his act for women such as Sheila, expecting them to discern ‘through the pose/Of drunken talk and dirty clothes’ the ‘poet’s spirit in travail’. It is clear from their correspondence that she supported him financially as well as emotionally, giving him small, unrepaid loans, paying some of his bills and, on occasion, even his rent. When they travelled by bus together or met in cafés, she often picked up the tab. He was faithful to her after his fashion, maintaining a relationship that was less exclusive than he gave her to understand. Some women who knew of the poet’s friendship with her assumed that its basis was intellectual and literary rather than romantic. They were wrong. Those in her confidence then or later knew she ‘adored’ Kavanagh.

  There is a strong possibility that the two had a sexual relationship. As a well-travelled and widely read woman, Sheila was less likely to have been hidebound by conventional sexual morality than many Dublin women of her generation. But the most telling piece of evidence is a phrase in the parody of ‘On Raglan Road’ she wrote years after the poet’s death: ‘for I gave my all away’, the 1950s’ euphemism for a surrender of virginity. Her rewriting of ‘On Raglan Road’, from the perspective of the woman the poet rejected, reveals something of the wit and humour that attracted Kavanagh to her:

  . . . In Dublin town all year round I tripped lightly along the ledge

  Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,

  The King of Time still making rhyme and I not making hay —

  O I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away.

  I gave him gifts of the mind I gave him a secret seat that’s known

  To the artists who have known the true gods of wood and stone

  And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave my all away.

  With his own name there and my own fair hair like clouds over fields of May . . .

  To some contemporaries Sheila O’Grady appeared an asexual intellectual woman, a ‘dry stick’, altogether a most unsuitable partner for Kavanagh. This parody reveals her hidden side.

  By mid-November 1952 Kavanagh admitted that he was ‘not making a go’ of London. Used to being a force to be reckoned with in Dublin, he could not tolerate being a nobody in London where he sensed, accurately, that fellow poets like George Barker looked down on him as a Paddy, a ‘ridiculous Celt’.15

  Padraig O’Halpin, an engineer by profession who published poetry in The Bell and lived with his wife Mary in an apartment on Pembroke Road, was pleased to observe on 19 November that the shutters of No. 62 were once again open.16 He wrote to tell the poet how glad he was to have him back in town. ‘Why is it so good that he is back?’ he pondered in his diary, and concluded, ‘It honours the city: it promises life.’ S
ince these were private sentiments, not uttered to impress Kavanagh or others, they testify to the genuine esteem in which the poet was held by some young writers and intellectuals in Dublin.

  O’Halpin was among those not deterred by Kavanagh’s mood swings and notorious irascibility, particularly with male acquaintances. Happily married himself, he felt that the older man’s rages arose from an absence of the sustained loving companionship and affectionate sympathy that marriage would provide:

  It seemed to me that if he did marry . . . how great a thing it would be for him; if he gets love which he needs so much, it will deepen his sympathy and soften his too-many angers, and will put love into him. He is very responsive to love. . . .

  O’Halpin had no reason to suspect that Kavanagh would eventually marry his own sister-in-law; the couple had not yet met.

  Financially, Kavanagh was in really dire straits at this time; apart from the minuscule rent from the Inniskeen farm, he appears to have had almost no income. He published very little in the three years following on Kavanagh’s Weekly, only a handful of poems and articles. Although he had railed against Radio Éireann in his Weekly, the new director, Maurice Gorham, put some work his way and he was offered a number of broadcasting slots in 1953. Several of these scripts were then recycled for publication in The Bell.17

  In December, Kavanagh visited the O’Halpins to enquire about the possibility of getting money from An Tostal. He was convinced that those in charge of this government-sponsored festival, designed to bring tourists to Ireland in April (or as he put it, ‘during the monsoon season’), were making thousands of pounds and ‘going around with ten-inch cigars’. He wanted to get in on the racket somehow. He didn’t.

  O’Halpin’s 1953 diary reveals how Kavanagh at this time begged and scrounged from sympathetic acquaintances, covering up his humiliation with a show of gruffness or a pretence of wealth or of indifference to money. He records a conversation with the poet on 27 February:

  ‘I bought a suit today . . . about £28.’ . . .

  ‘Here, give me three-halfpence to buy a ball o’ malt.’

  I gave him sixpence, feeling a fool.

  ‘Here, give me one of the others.’ They were half-crowns; feeling even more of a fool, I said, ‘I gave you four times what you asked.’

  ‘Bedad, you did,’ he said, really speaking to me for the first time. ‘I’ll have £15 tomorrow morning. I’ll lend you what you like. Do you know what I’d do with a fiver. I’d wipe me arse with it,’ he said. ‘It’s no use, money, at all, no use. You can throw it all away. No use. I’m after dropping £2 on the horses this very day.’. . .

  He was buying a Mail and was just going to pay for it when he said to me, ‘Go on buy me that Mail’, but I wouldn’t.

  If he buys a suit at about £10 [sic] and pays a £5 phone bill and has three or four glasses of whiskey in him and drops £2 on horses and is getting £15 tomorrow he can buy a Mail. But he does it to be doing something. He is really gauche or shy, unsure, not used to the banal, too much truth in him to make light conversation.

  O’Halpin did not realise that Kavanagh was virtually penniless and that his talk of big spending was mere bluster; he compensated for the indignity of being forced to beg by making his donor feel a fool both for giving and for withholding.

  John Broderick reported a somewhat similar experience to O’Halpin’s. Kavanagh asked him for a fiver one evening in McDaid’s and, when Broderick obliged, said, ‘Now buy me a whiskey.’ He then repeated the performance and, once again, Broderick furnished the fiver and the whiskey. When he repeated the request for a third time, Broderick protested, whereupon Kavanagh turned on him and shouted, ‘You’re a mean bollocks, Broderick.’ He had succeeded in borrowing a tenner, yet managed to cancel any sense of friendship or indebtedness.

  After fourteen years of trying and failing to find employment in a clerical or public relations capacity, Kavanagh still hadn’t given up. On 6 December he phoned O’Halpin, who was then working for the Electricity Supply Board, about a recently advertised job of assistant public relations officer with the company. He wanted him to find out what the job entailed and, when he did, asked him to inform the head of section, Mr Lawler, that Patrick Kavanagh would be applying. Lawler was surprised and sorry to hear that Kavanagh had been brought so low. Kavanagh did not see it as a come-down; he was excited at the thought of being in regular employment. He phoned O’Halpin several times to discuss his prospects and spoke of the salary — £15 a week — in awestruck tones. O’Halpin wished he had it in his power to help the impoverished poet, who complained of feeling ill. He did not get the job.

  The Irish Times of 21 March 1953 carried the ballad, ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’, in which Kavanagh immortalises himself as a Dublin ‘character’. It may have been provoked by the hurtful ‘Profile’ six months previously, a signed counter-profile as it were. In a lenient, affectionate sketch of his most prominent characteristics as man and poet, he observes his follies and vanities with playful honesty and humour, pondering how he will be remembered by Dubliners in a hundred years or so:

  Go into a pub and listen well

  If my voice still echoes there,

  Ask the men what their grandsires thought

  And tell them to answer fair.

  O he was eccentric

  Fol dol the di do,

  He was eccentric

  I tell you.

  He had the knack of making men feel

  As small as they really were

  Which meant as great as God had made them

  But as males they disliked his air . . .

  The verbal slightness and nonsense refrains of this ballad make light of the egotistical enterprise of self-portrayal. That he does not balk at including uncomplimentary opinions is typical of his peculiar candour in self-appraisal. However, an irritating tendency towards self-inflation or self-elevation was a feature of his poetry throughout the 1950s: in ‘Dublin’ (later ‘The Hero’) he is a giant trapped in a pygmy city; in ‘Dear Folks’ he is Gulliver in Lilliput; in ‘Freedom’ he is mounted on ‘a tall column’; in ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’ he cavorts about on stilts.

  By 1954 Anthony Cronin, who had resumed the associate editorship of The Bell, persuaded Kavanagh to publish poetry and essays there. ‘The Rowley Mile’ and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, two formally and thematically paired comic poems which deal with the middle-aged poet’s amorous misadventures, appeared in January. As he grew older he continued to fall for women in their early twenties or younger, often leaving himself open to ridicule and misunderstanding. ‘Narcissus and the Women’ attributes his failures in love to his narcissism. Some of his less sympathetic acquaintances would testify that self-obsession was indeed his besetting social sin.

  While he wrote several poems about his flirtations and unrequited passions, only once, en passant in ‘Auditors In’, did he touch on the subject of his childlessness. (‘You’ve not even bred illegitimates.’). For a man who loved children, this void in his life was deeply painful. Patricia Ryan recalls that when she had her second child in 1952, Kavanagh came to the house unexpectedly and asked to see the baby. He sat alone by the cradle for about half an hour just staring at the infant and rocking himself and then went away silently. He repeated the performance when her third child was born. Whereas many adults merely tolerated their friends’ young offspring, Kavanagh positively delighted in their company. Such vicarious parenting was the nearest he would come to fatherhood.

  Cronin felt that by providing a ready publishing outlet in The Bell he was encouraging Kavanagh to produce poetry and that the £5 on the nail he had persuaded O’Donnell to pay per poem was a practical form of inspiration. ‘Intimate Parnassus’ and ‘On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers’ in March 1954 were among the finest of the new wave of poems in which he analyses his creative processes. He was in the habit of reading as a stimulus to his own writing, turning the pages of a poetry anthology or a favourite novel such as Moby Dick unt
il the point where he felt himself imaginatively stimulated and could begin writing. ‘On Reading’ demonstrates how the perusal of Hutchinson’s Book on Common Wild Flowers (1948) distracts him from present pressures and clears a new time-space where poetry may flower.

  The previous month Cronin had been rather disconcerted to be given the short story ‘Pages from a Literary Novel’ for The Bell, because it was based on gossip he himself had relayed to Kavanagh and the fact that he was the source would be all too obvious. The story turns on an assignation in a London friend’s apartment between Seamus (Seán O’Faoláin) and Sheela (Honor Tracy). Seamus regards it as an act of extra-marital daring that will add a frisson of sin to his fiction, but it actually illustrates his naivety in sexual relations. Kavanagh, who by now both despised and envied O’Faolain as a successful man of letters, could not resist the oppportunity to embarrass and discomfit him publicly, while also revenging himself on Honor Tracy, who had included a cruelly accurate caricature of him in her book about Ireland, Mind You, I’ve Said Nothing (1953). Kavanagh is readily identifiable in this book as the poet in the pub ‘with a thirsty look on his face’ who depends on Tracy and her companion to supply him with drinks for the evening because his confidence in certain racehorses had been misplaced. He entertains them with ‘a diatribe against Ireland and all her works, her passion for mediocrity, her crucifixion of genius’, laments ‘the passing of his best years among marshmen and Firbolgs’ and threatens ‘to seek his living henceforward in strange places among foreign men’.

  A year later, Kavanagh again clashed with O’Faoláin and Tracy. His verse satire ‘House Party to Celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland’ is based on the 1955 libel action the parish priest of Doneraile, County Cork, took on foot of Tracy’s book and lost. The poem concludes