In the course of his attacks on sundry targets, Kavanagh deliberately insulted Marthe and Patrick O’Connor who were at the second lecture. What the nature of the insult was, their son Andrew did not understand, being a schoolboy at the time. But he remembers his parents exchanging looks of grim displeasure during the lecture and their muttered angry comments immediately afterwards. Thereafter, there was a coldness between the old friends and Kavanagh’s dinner invitations to the apartment at the Municipal Gallery ceased. Perhaps O’Connor’s curatorship had rankled after all.
Kavanagh was so pleased with his own performance that he wrote a poetic epilogue to the lecture series entitled, ‘Thank You, Thank You’. It concludes:
I thank you and I say how proud
That I have been by fate allowed
To stand here having the joyful chance
To claim my inheritance
For most have died the day before
The opening of that holy door.
As so often with Kavanagh, there was an asymmetry between poetry and real life. His ‘holy hearing audience’ was largely imaginary.
The deadline for the commissioned Arts Council book, 1 August, was now only three months away. He decided to use his recent lecture material as the basis of the book and from mid-May began turning his attention to writing up his lecture notes as chapters. With only skeletal notes to hand for most of the lectures, he found the task rather daunting and made little progress. There were many social distractions. In addition to the usual daily sessions in McDaid’s, the regular visits for meals and counsel to old friends such as Joan and Eoin Ryan and Elinor O’Brien, and the secretive appointments with women friends such as Sheila O’Grady, he had, through the Swifts, struck up a friendship with a wealthy and cultivated New York visitor, Lavinia Allen Farrelly, known to her friends as Dede.
Dede and her husband John Farrelly were patrons of the arts whose New York home was a rendezvous for visiting poets and writers, including the Beat poets and one of Kavanagh’s Soho drinking companions, George Barker. Patrick and Oonagh Swift had become friendly with the Farrellys when both couples were living in Positano for several months. As a consequence of this friendship, the Farrellys had decided to spend the academic year 1955/56 in Dublin. John, a professor of American literature, secured a one-year lectureship in Trinity College and they rented Glencullen House, a large Georgian house in the picturesque Wicklow village of Glencullen, then within easy commuting distance of the city. In Glencullen, the Farrellys kept up the tradition of hospitality for which they were well known in New York. Patrick and Oonagh Swift’s Dublin circle and some of John Farrelly’s Trinity colleagues, such as Donald Davie, converged on their Wicklow home at weekends. George Barker and his partner Cass also came for an extended visit. Inevitably, Kavanagh was a frequent guest, often driven to the house by John Ryan, Oonagh’s brother.
Dede belonged to the category of woman which always attracted Kavanagh: beautiful, elegantly dressed, gracious, with a liking for poetry, a sympathy for poets and a tolerance for their sometimes outré ways and, of course, a woman who provided excellent meals. Dede, moreover, was very rich, especially by Irish standards. A mother of two, she was warm and caring, and although over twenty years Kavanagh’s junior, she soon found herself semi-adopting him as a wayward surrogate son. She recognised that he was a uniquely gifted man, but he also seemed a babe in the woods, an innocent, totally lacking in worldly wisdom, incapable of looking after himself, utterly dependent. His air of helplessness brought out her maternalism. At the same time she found herself enthralled by his entertaining companionship. When Kavanagh set himself out to please, his fascinating talk, his wide-ranging curiosity about all manner of things and his Groucho Marx-like capacity for exaggerating his own idiosyncrasies, were endlessly endearing. Indeed, his repeated gestures were part of his charm; for instance, a habit of punctuating his remarks by thumping the left side of his chest three times.
She found that he was easily amused and enjoyed such hackneyed riddles as: ‘Which two towns in France most resemble my trousers?’ Answer, ‘Toulon and Toulouse.’ He liked to read and recount tales of minor rascality, such as a story about a cashless train passenger who acquired a ticket by posing as a ticket collector. A book about robber barons that narrated the exploits of canny adventurers entertained him greatly. He was constantly needy and it was difficult to refuse him the pampering which made his face light up. He derived so much pleasure from simple treats — a drive, a meal out — that it was a delight to indulge him. ‘Thank God I could eat that little snack’, he’d say, and, in truth, since his illness his appetite had been poor.
In June he was enlisted to help with Dede’s birthday party for her 3-year-old son, George, and procured her the services of an amateur puppeteer. A photograph of the poet seated among the puppeteer’s audience on this occasion brings out the qualities of eager, childlike enjoyment that Dede found so endearing in him. He is sitting behind the assembled children, just as fascinated as they are by the antics of Punch and Judy, leaning forward, his eyes alight with interest.
The Green Fool was a ‘pack of lies’, he told Dede, but he invited her to visit Mucker and, as the car approached Inniskeen, he grew quite excited. She was amazed to find the homestead so spruce and orderly and the sister Annie who greeted them a respectable, reserved middle-class lady who reminded her of her own aunt. The poet’s ragamuffin appearance, harsh country accent and uncouth mannerisms, and the representation of the family in Tarry Flynn had led Dede to expect that his siblings would be coarse and rough. For the first time she recognised that Kavanagh’s air of wild Irishman from the back hills was his chosen individual way of conducting himself and not an inevitable consequence of his family background.
Mrs Farrelly is adamant that her friendship with Kavanagh was not romantic. He was convinced that it was, and referred to her in one of his letters as ‘the woman in the case’. It would not be the only time he misconstrued a woman’s friendship. So certain was he of Dede’s love for him that he was oblivious to the chemistry between her and a fellow guest at Glencullen House, George Barker. He had by now grown accustomed to being the pet and protégé of a number of wives and he revelled in the temporary domesticity of visiting their homes and being adopted as a surrogate uncle by their children. Even in gossipy Dublin nobody questioned these friendships. It was accepted that he was ‘a charity case’, as one contemporary expressed it. However, he preferred to regard these female Good Samaritans in a more romantic light, referring half-playfully in ‘Prelude’ to
Those women on their mercy missions,
Rescue work with kiss or kitchens . . .
Dede was not to know that since the mid-1940s Kavanagh had cherished the fantasy of marriage to a wealthy American: a naive, mercenary dream in which patronage and passion were conflated. On one occasion he thought he had struck lucky with an American millionairess in the Bailey and was rescued from making a fool of himself by Joan Ryan, who went to the pub at his request to check out the situation. Her verdict was that the shoes and handbag were not those of a wealthy woman and she was subsequently proved right. One young man who introduced him to his American fiancée in Tommy Ryan’s pub found on his return from the lavatory that the great Irish poet had absconded with her. He pursued them to Pembroke Road and through the unlocked front door as far as Kavanagh’s flat, where he found that she had already been steered into the bedroom and was being pawed. In his fury he threw a chair through the glass door of the bedroom, smashed it and then made good his escape.
The Farrellys rented a restored hillside castle in Bormes-les-Mimosas in the south of France in summer 1956 and invited Kavanagh, George Barker and Cass on an extended visit in July. Kavanagh, who was driven there by the Farrellys, brought his lecture notes and papers with him, hoping to do some work on his book for the Arts Council. The party stopped off in Paris for a few days en route and he played at being an emigré or French intellectual, sitting in the same place in the Café Flore or the
Magots every day and answering ‘Oui’ to the waiter’s familiar question, ‘Whiskey soda?’ He comported himself like a Frenchman, poring over Le Figaro and amusing himself by decoding the abbreviations of French racing terms such as cte tête.
In Bormes the party which comprised five adults and two Farrelly children had three maids to look after them. Kavanagh was waited on hand and foot and stayed for three weeks, grumbling all the while about the fact that the household was too distracting for him to concentrate and that no one in the local village of Le Lavandou spoke any English. Barker was excellent company and Kavanagh remembers him discussing Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’, its wonderful melody and the way one does not realise it is unrhymed, as he drove expertly along the narrow winding coast road. There were plenty of books and booze. They dined on the terrace in the evening and the drink flowed. He marvelled that people left half-drunk glasses behind on the table, such was the abundance of liquor.
Yet as they lounged on deck chairs on the beach in Le Lavandou, he was bored with looking at the perpetually blue Mediterranean. He fretted and could not relax. Eventually his hostess, seeing him become increasingly restless, had Barker drive him via a few Cannes bars to the airport in Nice where after some further drinks he boarded a plane for London.9 Dublin in August did not live up to his expectations: ‘It was a good place to be either about to leave or just returned to.’ He was soon pining for his luxurious, leisurely millionaire existence in France, so he went back for a further fortnight in August, all expenses paid.
The holidays, the sea air and all the cossetting did him good; he had recovered his health and appetite and settled back in Dublin in September in excellent form. He had been painfully thin the previous summer after his illness, but his weight had now gone up to 14 stone. Despite all the Farrellys’ pampering, he claimed that Nice was perhaps the place he most detested on earth and he would entertain fellow drinkers in McDaid’s by fantasising about himself in the role of a district justice threatening the accused with ‘not less than three weeks in Nice’.
Dede had been appalled by the filthy, rubbish-strewn condition of Kavanagh’s flat on her few brief glimpses of it, and before she left for New York in mid-September she arranged to have it cleared out and thorougly refurbished at a cost of over $400. It was rewired and fitted with electric fires in each room and a new cooker; the old carpet and lino were disposed of and replaced, and all the rooms repainted. Though Kavanagh generally lived in squalor, he appreciated clean, tidy surroundings and was thrilled with his new-look flat. He was living like a millionaire, he said; Mrs Farrelly was a real patroness. When the Farrellys wound up their Irish bank account towards the end of September, their solicitor, on John’s instructions, forwarded to Kavanagh the remaining balance of about £24.
At last, three months after the due date, the typescript for the Arts Council book was ready and on 28 October a copy was dispatched to the Arts Council, who sent it to Dr Tierney of UCD for his expert opinion. The book, a prose collection, was entitled The Forgiven Plough and had as epigraph a quotation from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The cut worm forgives the plough.’ Kavanagh professed himself pleased with it, describing it as ‘exceedingly interesting and readable’. Dr Tierney did not take such a rosy view. He summoned John Jordan, then a new lecturer in the university’s English department, and asked him to do an editorial job on the sheaf of typed pages. It was unpaid work so, as Jordan recalls it, he made a brief report on what needed to be done and returned the typescript. That was the last he heard of it. In fact the typescript was copy edited by Jordan, except for the numerous quotations which he hadn’t time to check. P. J. Little, director of the Arts Council, wrote to Kavanagh that he had enjoyed the book, with certain reservations, and returned the unrevised copy; he was keeping the revised version, awaiting the final approval of the council. That was 29 November 1956. The matter was in abeyance for the next three years. Though the typescript was sent to Browne and Nolan for publication, the book never appeared. Finally, on 20 November 1959, Mervyn Wall, then Arts Council secretary, wrote on the council’s behalf to say that it had decided to waive rights to The Forgiven Plough. He enclosed the typescript which he had retrieved from the publishers and said that Kavanagh was free to use it as he saw fit.10
The director of the Arts Council in 1956 was the same P. J. Little who had asked Kavanagh to make a selection of his brother Philip Francis Little’s poems back in spring 1945. Renewed contact set him thinking once more about publishing this poetry and, unaware that Kavanagh had stoked the fire in No. 62 with most of it, he asked him to rework the article, ‘A Strange Irish Poet’, which he had published ten years earlier.
Kavanagh’s contempt for other would-be Irish poets was legendary. T. P. McKenna witnessed his refusal to as much as look at a poem by George Hodnett. ‘It can’t be any good’, he said. The actor Cyril Cusack once had the temerity to ask his opinion of a poem he had just published. ‘The punctuation was marvellous,’ Kavanagh responded, ‘as good as James Metcalfe.’ Metcalfe’s poems in the Irish Independent were notorious for overusing the ellipsis; every other phrase was separated from the next by three dots. Jim Craven from Bridge-a-Chrin near Dundalk gave him a large package of his potry to read. ‘Well, I can say one thing about it right away; it has bulk’, Kavanagh remarked. A few weeks later the package was returned with best wishes and no other comment. Craven interpreted this as ‘the charity of his silence’.11 On another occasion when an apprentice barman in McDaid’s spilt drink over a young hopeful’s manuscript that Kavanagh was glancing over, he congratulated him. ‘You may be a useless barman,’ he said, ‘but you’re a fine judge of poetry.’ Serious, committed young poets like John Montague found the literary climate in Dublin discouraging, largely because of Kavanagh’s attitude:
. . . what prevailed in the poetic world of Dublin was acrimony and insult; a poem was to be kicked not examined; the begrudgers ruled.12
On his return from the US in 1956, however, Montague found the atmosphere more cordial. Kavanagh was in a good mood because, thanks to the publication of a selection of his poems in the winter issue of Nimbus, his poetry was at last receiving the recognition it had been denied for almost ten years.
Nimbus published nineteen poems, advertising their presence prominently on the journal cover. With the exception of ‘Shancoduff’ and ‘In Memory of My Mother’, these poems dated from 1950 to the present and, apart from ‘House Party’ and ‘The Hospital’, now being published for the first time, all had appeared in small-circulation Irish journals: Envoy, Kavanagh’s Weekly, The Irish Times or The Bell. The selection opened strongly with ‘Intimate Parnassus’, ‘Auditors In’ and ‘Prelude’, followed by ‘The Fabled Daughters’ (later ‘Joyce’s Ulysses’), ‘The Hero’ (‘Dublin’ in The Bell), ‘On Looking into E. V. Rieu’s Homer’, ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Shancoduff’, ‘Epic’, ‘I Had a Future’, ‘God in Woman’, ‘Irish Stew’, ‘Who Killed James Joyce?’, ‘Portrait of the Artist’, ‘House Party to Celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland’, ‘Narcissus and the Women’, ‘In Memory of My Mother’, ‘Ante-Natal Dream’ and ‘The Hospital’.
A jubilant Kavanagh claimed that 500 copies of the winter 1956 Nimbus were sold in Dublin. John McGahern recalls the excitement with which he picked up Nimbus in the Eblana bookshop on Grafton Street and encountered ‘Prelude’, ‘Auditors In’, ‘Kerr’s Ass’ and ‘The Hospital’. Beckett and Kavanagh were the two living writers who mattered most to the younger generation. Kavanagh, with his ‘violent energy’ was ‘an extraordinary physical presence’ in the city. Young writers, like McGahern, were ‘all partisans’, exhilarated ‘at the possibility that literature could belong again to the streets rather than to the Church and university and the worn establishment’.13
Even more important for Kavanagh’s career in the long term was Nimbus’s reception in England. Publication there was to prove a turning point, for it was this seventeen-page spread, twenty-one pages c
ounting the accompanying essay by Anthony Cronin, that re-introduced his work to the British poetry-reading public. The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964) would be seen through the press by Martin Green, the second London recipient of a package from the Swift brothers.
Kavanagh was also exceedingly lucky in the choice of commentator on the poems. Cronin’s essay, ‘Innocence and Experience: the Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh’, was remarkably perceptive and is still a landmark in Kavanagh criticism. While it frequently refers the reader to the A Soul for Sale collection, the essay argues that the post-1947 verse is better because it is ironic, psychologically perceptive and astonishingly direct. The real subject of these later poems, including the satires, is the man who wrote them, ‘alive in a city which happens to be Dublin (very much Dublin)’ and ‘his own loss of and struggle to regain simplicity in the face of outer confusion’. The satires ‘are about the poet’s relationship with an urban world of confusion, lies and mis-direction’ and the writing of them has brought gains in humour, directness and control of complexity. As regards language, the poetry is praised for its handling of the normal, the conversational and the cliché.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 52