Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  After he had joined the staff of the Farmers’ Journal, Kavanagh often accompanied Larry Sheedy and his new wife Annette to their home for Saturday lunch. Sheedy, who worked a half-day, would join Annette in the Bailey where Kavanagh was to be found in company that generally included John Ryan and his film star sister, Kathleen. They would all enjoy themselves hugely and afterwards Sheedy would drive Annette and Kavanagh out to their suburban home in Palmerstown. Immediately on arrival Kavanagh’s demeanour and mood would change, passing from easy banter to dour and clumsy incivility. Annette prided herself on setting an attractive table, laying out the white tablecloths, china and silverware the couple had been given as wedding gifts. This display of bourgeois elegance brought out the boorish side of Kavanagh and at the first opportunity he would spill his glass of red wine over the cloth. Annette found it a trial to have him in the house. Whereas her husband was unconscious of Kavanagh’s appearance, she noticed his unkemptness and dirty fingernails. He refused to modify his ungentlemanly language or to avoid indelicate conversational topics in her presence, though she was clearly uncomfortable with both. At one lunch he said to her apropos of another smartly dressed older woman, ‘You’re nice, but that other one, I’d piss on her.’ The man whose company Sheedy enjoyed in the office or pub was an uncouth and uncomfortable bull in a china shop in suburbia. When the situation was becoming unbearable, Sheedy would drive him to visit his father, a farmer who lived four miles away. His father was a widower and it was an all-male household where five or six men from the neighbourhood might be gathered. Immediately Kavanagh’s good humour would be restored. They would all repair to the local pub for a few pints and later in the evening Sheedy would drive him back into town.

  We catch a glimpse of Kavanagh through his sister Celia’s eyes during the summer of 1958, in cheerful, convivial mood after that rare occurrence, a successful day at the races.11 She was visiting home from her English convent and he turned up to meet her at the airport looking like a down-and-out in his summer apparel: a ‘large limp figure’ dressed in baggy trousers, an old faded linen jacket, sandals and no socks and on his head the inevitable battered hat. She already had a ticket for the airport coach into town, but he insisted on summoning a taxi with a huge sweep of his arm while he talked non-stop about the day’s racing. He stayed with her until the bus for Inniskeen was leaving. To the bus conductor the poet appeared a drunken down-at-heel lout who had latched on to the good sister, and he wondered if he should order the vagrant to leave. In fact he apologised to the nun for not doing so when he came to collect her fare and was mortified to be informed that the tramp was her brother. That same July the drunken bum addressed his people in The Irish Times: a technically clever verse epistle in sonnet form where he begins ‘Dear Folks’ (the title) and signs off after the phrase ‘So good luck and cheers.’

  In October 1958 Kavanagh finally left 62 Pembroke Road, his home for over fifteen years. Once again he was substantially in arrears on both rent and utilities bills. The telephone company asked him to fill in a card stating what time it would suit him to have the line removed. The time he stipulated was 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on any date except Christmas night, but he thought it wiser not to return the card. He also owed £100 in rent and Mrs Beauchamp, his landlord, agreed to forfeit it to get him out. She was glad to be rid of such a troublesome, irregularly paying tenant and he had been anxious to leave for some time and had been looking around for alternative accommodation. The flat at No. 62 was far too large for him to manage and Dede Farrelly’s repairs and refurbishments had long since succumbed to his messy ways. Also it was on the first floor and by now he was suffering breathing problems and was finding it difficult to climb the stairs. Yet when it came time to leave, his parting with the place which had been home for so long was fraught with emotion. He ‘walked into each room in turn and prostrated [himself] on the floor’, concentrating, knowing that it would be his last look at those familiar walls and floors and at the view from the windows. He even wept.12 From then on he was to be a nomad. Just as he had done when he first left 62 Pembroke Road because he could not afford the rent back in 1944, he moved into the boarding house at 19 Raglan Road.

  After he had left Pembroke Road, his visits to Mucker were more frequent. Privately he approved of the job Annie and Mary had made of the house, though in his Irish Farmers’ Journal column he lamented their modernisation. October was a time of transition. Two of his longstanding friends, Patrick and Marthe O’Connor, were packing up to leave Dublin for New York. True, there had been a falling out and a coldness over the previous two years, but the old friendship had recently been re-established. On 29 October Kavanagh dined with the O’Connors for the last time and he was at Kingsbridge Station on 1 November when they and their son Andrew set off for Cobh to catch the boat to New York.

  That Christmas The Times Literary Supplement printed ‘Song at Fifty’. He had sent it to them shortly after his fifty-fourth birthday on 21 October, and it was probably written about this date. As usual he was subtracting a few years off his age, but the poem was psychologically, if not chronologically, truthful. In his new ebullient mood he had shed years. Instead of poor-mouthing, as had become his wont in the 1940s, he writes as a secure and confident man, with a wealth of talent, love and friendship at his disposal:

  Him, him the ne’er-

  Do-well a millionaire.

  He spent Christmas with his sisters in Inniskeen.

  23

  COME DANCE WITH KITTY STOBLING

  (1959–1960)

  London is my city.

  (Letter to Elinor and Reggie Wiltshire,

  3 November 1959)

  At the start of 1959 Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems, which had been doing the rounds of London publishers during 1958, was rejected by André Deutsch. Then a new publishing possibility presented itself. Thomas Blackburn had recently been appointed adviser on modern poetry by Longmans, and Anthony Cronin alerted him to the existence of Kavanagh’s new collection. Blackburn, who had read the mini-collection in Nimbus and included ‘In Memory of My Mother’ and ‘Shancoduff’ in the 1957 P.E.N. anthology he co-edited, was immediately interested. In his reader’s report of 20 March 1959 he strongly advised Longmans to publish this collection. As far as he was concerned, the Irish poet was a ‘must’, though some less strong pieces might need pruning away. He wrote to the commissioning editor, Cyprian Blagdan:

  I enormously hope that you will share my enthusiasm. It’s so rare and exciting to feel the human being present in the work and breathing. . . .1

  He had met Kavanagh in Soho in his ‘club’, the Caves de France, and claimed that he had been given carte blanche to edit and select as Longmans wished. Either Blackburn misunderstood Kavanagh’s terms or the Irish poet was proving highly amenable in order to secure a contract. The context in which the discussions took place was conducive to an atmosphere of hazy goodwill.

  By 15 May Longmans had decided to go ahead with publication. Once they made their offer, Kavanagh became more demanding and negotiations took a further six months. The first hurdle was that Longmans wanted to publish a slim volume of not more than forty-five poems. Another sticking-point was the title; Blackburn was adamant that he was not using Come Dance with Kitty Stobling.

  While Kavanagh was anxious to publish in London, rather than Dublin, he was contemptuous of the English angle on what constitutes Irish poetry and he distrusted Blackburn’s judgment. The English preference, as represented by Blackburn, was for poems with Gaelic place-names and country settings. Blackburn’s favourite poem was ‘Shancoduff’ and he wanted to entitle the collection Shancoduff and Other Poems. ‘Shancoduff’ was one of Kavanagh’s favourites as well, but it was a 1930s’ poem and he was miffed that his new poems should be slighted and his early work given such prominence. He was not at all happy to have a minor English poet deciding which poems were worthy of inclusion in the long-awaited volume and how it should be entitled. To emphasise the cult of comic casualness un
derpinning his newer poems, he proposed the jokey title 45 Pomes. This was also vetoed.

  Had Blackburn read ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, a manifesto essay published in Studies that spring, he would have had a better insight into Kavanagh’s opposition to the cult of place and ethnicity in literature. Post-Revival literature, the essay argues, was largely predicated on the significance of place, particularly rural places, ‘roots in the soil’, and this promotion of the regional and local was an offshoot of literary nationalism, the preoccupation with a spiritual entity called Ireland. The principal revelation that had occurred to Kavanagh during his period of psychic and aesthetic renewal on the bank of the Grand Canal in July 1955 was that

  Real roots lie in our capacity for love and its abandon. The material itself has no special value; it is what our imagination and our love does to it.

  He was now keen to promote the verse written under the influence of his post-canal aesthetic, rather than his earlier place-conscious pieces: verse that was energetic, humorous, celebratory, ‘gay and young’ and that made ‘judicious use of slang and of outrageous rhyming’.

  In March Kavanagh went to London for talks with Blackburn and spent three weeks with Thérèse and Anthony Cronin at Hearne Farm Cottage near Haslemere in Surrey. He generally approved of his friends’ wives and added them to the circle of his providers and nurturers. Thérèse, who was pretty and sang tunefully, was a favourite; he called her Teasie. He also entertained the Cronins’ young daughter, Iseult, and she was charmed by him.

  It was the first time he had lived in the country since leaving Inniskeen. The cottage, a half-mile from the road up a grass track, had neither electricity nor running water and, though much more picturesque than his Mucker home, its primitiveness brought back youthful memories. The oil-lamps and the open fire appealed and he liked to pee outdoors at night under the stars. The downside of the visit was that he was accident-prone and proved a destructive guest and that he was expensive to entertain, expecting Cronin to treat him to drinks in the local pubs both at lunchtime and in the evening. By now he was a dedicated whiskey drinker and though, parodying Tennyson, he complained that the English served ‘the smallest measure ever moulded for the lips of man’, he refused to stoop to drinking the then cheaper bitter, so he was quite a drain on the Cronins’ modest resources. At closing time a bottle or half-bottle of whiskey had to be procured so that he would have alcohol to hand if he woke up in a panic in the small hours. Almost invariably he did and, terrified of the dark, he blundered about the living room where he was sleeping, muttering, knocking things over and breaking the globe of the Tilley lamp or other oil-lamps in a vain endeavour to light them.

  During this visit he also managed to destroy the Cronins’ radio, bashing it on the table when he could not switch it off. A few days previously he had smashed the glass in the back door. He was sitting outside the door on a barrel at the time, listening to a commentary on the Grand National and rolling from side to side in paroxysms of glee, when during one of his wilder swings he struck the glass panel. On another occasion he leaped into the Cronins’ old Ford van with such vigour that his feet went through the floor.

  From his point of view the visit was a success. He loved the wooded countryside with its ‘wonderful oaks’. He enjoyed chatting to the locals in the pubs, even though he could understand little of what they said. With his ear for colloquialisms, he latched on to a phrase used by a local child who said the family had left the Church of England because they were not invited to the Sunday school social: ‘Mother said we’d wrap it.’ Thereafter he would repeat this phrase with relish.2

  That enjoyable interlude in the Surrey countryside prompted him to spend the summer in Inniskeen. He moved out of the Raglan Road boarding house in June and migrated with his books and papers to the downstairs room in Mucker which his sister Annie had shelved and furnished as a study cum bedroom. It was the first time he had spent longer than a few days in his native village for over fifteen years. The summer was remarkably warm and dry, but the return of the native was not as idyllic as he had hoped. He had expected that his literary reputation, coupled with his long absence, would have earned him the respect of his neighbours and that he could dictate the terms on which they approached him. Not so. To many local people he was still Paddy Kavanagh, a jumped-up cobbler and small farmer, a poet maybe, but also an ‘eejit’. They resented his attempts to lord it over them and behave like a superior being, as if he were some squireen or city gent. He did indeed conceive of himself as an aristocrat among serfs and thought that ‘the only way a man of sensitivity could endure this society would be to do what the old gentry did, build high walls around themselves and never get down from their perches’.3 Since such seclusion was not available to him, he tried to indicate by a withdrawn and aloof mien or by surly remarks that he did not wish for companionship. His former neighbours refused to recognise the social barriers he constructed and insisted on intruding either to make conversation that subtly cut him down to size or to jeer openly. ‘Living in the Country’, a poem based on his experience of life in Inniskeen in the summer of 1959, sets up an ironic contrast between memories of an idyllic childhood summer and the discomforts of adulthood when the returned native runs the gauntlet of neighbourhood resentment.4 A public house scene in the poem comically reveals the beleaguered poet surrounded by plebeians who subject his talk to their own form of censorship:

  It’s not nearly as bad as you’d imagine

  Living among small farmers in the north of Ireland

  They are for the most part the ordinary frightened

  Blind brightened, referred to sometimes socially

  As the underprivileged.

  They cannot perceive Irony or even Satire

  They start up with insane faces if

  You break the newspaper moral code.

  ‘Language’ they screech ‘you effing so and so’

  And you withdraw into a precarious silence

  Organizing in your mind quickly, for the situation is tense,

  The theological tenets of the press.

  He did establish some self-protective routines that would enable him to spend long stints in Inniskeen over the next eight years. By frequenting pubs in Carrickmacross or Dundalk, he escaped to some extent the company of neighbours. When he did drink locally in McNello’s, he insisted that fellow drinkers keep at a physical distance from him. If he did not want to talk, he froze out would-be conversationalists with silence, hostile grunts and snorts, and forthrightly rude remarks. Within the Mucker household he kept to his own room, even taking his meals there, and treating Annie and Mary like servants, cooks and laundresses and occasional nurses, certainly not as equals or confidantes. When he left the house he never indicated to them where he was going or when he would return: he might be heading for McNello’s pub or catching the bus to a local town, or he might be off to Dublin or London; he might return that evening or in two weeks’ time. As far as he was concerned, his life was none of their business.

  For all his moaning in verse, prose and conversations with cronies about the dreadfulness of Inniskeen, he stayed there for most of the summer, returning to Dublin only in mid-September. He was, as he acknowledged, ‘a creature of habit’ and for him ‘One of the pleasures of a long stay, the thing that makes it a valuable experience, is that your life falls into a pattern.’5 Life in Inniskeen also had the unstated advantage that it provided free bed and board. While he valued the privacy of a room of his own, he resented wasting good drinking money on accommodation and overheads.

  Financially, he was better off in the second half of 1959 than at any previous time in his life, and for the first time acquired a chequebook. His first extant cheques date from September and his producing a chequebook a couple of months later was still such a novelty that Liam O’Flaherty remarked on it rather unkindly, noting that he would take it out of his pocket, think better of writing a cheque and immediately put it away again.6 Unfortunately, he did not always
think better of it and his correspondence soon included letters from his irate bank manager and from publicans and others complaining of bounced cheques. As his income increased, he grew ever more extravagant and for the rest of his life he would always be chasing after money, caught up in a spiral of debt, his future work mortgaged in advance to pay off past borrowings.

  In June he was approached by Tom Sheehy to write a regular series of articles for the National Observer, a monthly journal of views and comment, edited by Declan Costello and Alexis FitzGerald. He agreed to a series of 1,000 word articles at five guineas apiece, beginning with the July issue, and produced seven articles over the next seven months.7 There was no conflict of interest with the column in the Irish Farmers’ Journal since the Observer was a more highbrow publication.

  Shortly after he had installed himself in Inniskeen, Tommy Marks, on behalf of Guinness, invited him to become the Irish judge of the Guinness Poetry Awards for the twelve months commencing 1 July 1959. The Guinness brewing company had established an annual poetry award in 1956, with cash prizes of £300, £200 and £100 for the best three poems or groups of poems published in Britain and Ireland between 1 July and 30 June. There was also an annual poetry anthology, the Guinness Book of Poetry, in which the best sixty or so of the year’s poems were collected at five guineas per poem. Poets did not submit their work for this competition; instead, appointees of the company collected the poems. That he had not won a Guinness prize had been a sore point. ‘In Memory of My Mother’ from Nimbus was judged one of the best sixty poems published in 1956/57 but in 1957/58, when ‘October’ was one of the sixty, he became the only poet ever to refuse inclusion in a Guinness anthology because he was cross that none of his Encounter poems had won one of the three prizes. He thought he had been discriminated against by the Irish judge, Lennox Robinson. According to the rules governing the award, one of the three judges had to be resident in Ireland and the office had been held in turn by Patrick MacDonogh, Lennox Robinson and Donagh MacDonagh.