Professor Alan Warner of Magee College, Derry, had expressed an interest in writing a book on Kavanagh’s poetry and for a few weeks in January he was gratified at the prospect of being the subject of a book, though he played this down, characterising Warner as ‘a cod but well-meaning, and English and very cute to think of this book’.16 He instructed his brother to co-operate with Warner by handing over copies of suitable letters and any other information, so long as it wasn’t ‘too personal’. When Peter proved reluctant to co-operate, he assured him that it was to be a book about his work, not his person. At the end of the month his attitude towards the projected book went into sharp reverse when he suspected that Warner was contemplating a biography. ‘Give Warner Nothing’, he cabled Peter on 31 January 1964. At the thought that his privacy might be violated, he nearly ‘went up a lamp-post’, as he put it. However, he was still willing to allow Warner to undertake a critical study and wrote to tell him so.
He was feeling under the weather at the end of January and in the following days, as he continued knocking back whiskey, the stomach ulcer from which he was now also suffering grew painful and began to bleed. A week later he blamed the episode on Warner rather than on whiskey. Peter reinflamed the ulcer by relaying the news that Warner had approached Annie looking for information and, when she didn’t volunteer any, had asked her for Josie’s and Sissie’s addresses. Kavanagh was furious and wrote to the would-be biographer telling him he was a lunatic and threatening to inform the authorities in his college. O’Keeffe suggested that the publishers withhold permission to quote as a way of quashing the projected book, but this proved unnecessary. Warner decided to abandon the project. For the time being he limited himself to an essay, ‘A Poet of the Countryside’, in the Review of English Literature, which the paranoid poet insisted on vetting, though he allowed it to proceed with a few minor changes, and it duly appeared in July.
Yet Kavanagh’s vanity was so tickled at the thought of being the subject of an academic book that a year later he was still dithering as to whether to allow Warner to proceed. In a close run contest between his vanity and his secrecy about personal matters, his secrecy finally triumphed. He was worried by the news that Warner was interviewing some of his Dublin acquaintances, but his worst fears were roused when he learned that Warner had asked the parish priest of Inniskeen for his baptismal certificate, his age being one of his most closely guarded secrets.17
From the end of February 1964 he was back in Mucker, on the wagon, more or less, for a few weeks, distracting himself and relieving the tedium by backing horses, playing Patience, solving Bridge problems in the newspapers, throwing dice and watching sport on television. Annie reported that he was eating like a ploughman, almost a loaf a day, at least five eggs and a gallon of new milk, and for Sunday lunch a large point steak which he brought back from Dublin. She looked after him devotedly, as always, but he moaned to Katherine that the cooking in Mucker was poor, he was surrounded by sick old people (Annie was six and Mary four years his senior), he lived in an atmosphere of indifference and he was depressed. Only the weather met with his approval. In part he was reassuring Katherine, whom he phoned every Saturday, that he was happier and better cared for with her.
25
SIXTY-YEAR-OLD PUBLIC MAN
(1964–1965)
. . . the sixty-year-old public protected
Man sheltered by the dim Victorian Muses.
(‘Yeats’)
In 1964 Kavanagh was due to turn 60, a fact he of course kept to himself, so that there were no public tributes or any private celebrations organised by groups of friends to mark this chronological milestone, and his Collected Poems published in July was not promoted as a birthday book.
As usual, he spent the year moving about between London, Dublin and Inniskeen. Happy as they were together, Katherine noticed that he pined for Dublin; she was unaware that once in Dublin he became nostalgic for London. He could not settle anywhere. In Dublin he was forever taking off abruptly for Inniskeen and, once there, he became restless and frequently returned to Dublin, even for a day. Within the Mucker house he was equally ill at ease and agitated. ‘He is like the wandering Jew,’ his sister Mary reported, ‘up and down, in and out, God help him. He doesn’t know what he wants.’1
He was in Dublin when Brendan Behan died on Friday, 20 March. Paddy O’Brien and the other barmen in McDaid’s were shocked at his gleeful attitude to Behan’s passing and rebuked him for it. To have pretended that he felt mournful would have appeared hypocritical to Kavanagh.
That spring he was being pursued by the Irish Revenue Commissioners for tax arrears from 1961 to 1963, a total varying from £213 to £227.11.9, including interest. Though legal proceedings were threatened, he ignored all letters. Eventually on 1 April he wrote from Inniskeen to the Revenue solicitor, Mr England, to state ‘the position of the writer, Patrick Kavanagh, the great Irish poet’:
No home, wife, family. No property. No health. For ten years in and out of hospital, first with lung cancer, later with ostio [sic] arthritis, ulcers (stomach and leg), bad circulation. Stayed with friends three winter months last in London being treated under National Health.
The tiny income I have is insufficient to keep me in drugs and bus fares. I live here with and on my two sisters.
I do not like writing this, hence my reluctance to reply to your letters . . . 2
Officialdom was not appeased by his ad hominem appeal. On 14 May a demand for £229.13.9 was accompanied by a further threat of legal proceedings and this time the legal consequences were spelt out — possible arrest and imprisonment. His only response was to bury his head in the sand and leave the Revenue Commissioners to do their worst.
He was not lying about the dire state of his finances. His April statement from the Grafton Street branch of the Bank of Ireland shows him to be £62.7.6 overdrawn. The bank was harrying him, refusing to extend his overdraft beyond £50 and threatening to bounce his cheques. After one interview with the manager, Mr Colthurst, he returned to McDaid’s fulminating. ‘What better can be expected from a close relative of the man who shot Sheehy Skeffington?’ he pronounced. (The pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington had been shot dead by a deranged officer named Bowen-Colthurst in a notorious incident during the 1916 Rising.) ‘But the Bank of Ireland Colthurst is no relation of the Bowen-Colthursts,’ his McDaid’s audience protested. ‘He is now,’ said Kavanagh.
He was producing very little poetry and for the most part was financially dependent on his income from the RTV Guide and his sinecure from UCD. The sonnet ‘An Insult’ in the New Statesman on 21 February dated from at least nine years previously and ‘A Summer Morning Walk’ in the summer issue of Arena was a newly revised excerpt from the poetic sequence ‘Living in the Country’, written two years earlier. James Liddy recalls that the lunchtime haggling over the price of ‘A Summer Morning Walk’ took so long that he was late opening the Joyce tower in Sandycove that afternoon. The payment of £20 was partly determined by the length of the piece, but at the proofreading stage Kavanagh crossed out eight stanzas and offered no refund.3
Unexpectedly, his financial situation took a sudden turn for the better in May. The Sunday Times Colour Magazine commissioned a feature article, ‘The World That Was’, to accompany some ‘Images of Ireland’ by Dan Budnik, a young American photographer. It was an easy assignment that paid astonishingly well: £250 for a few hundred words. Needless to remark, Kavanagh did not use the fee to settle with the Revenue Commissioners.
The most important happening for him in 1964 was the publication of Collected Poems. He had produced the long-promised Author’s Preface for it while staying with Katherine in January, two pages which he said he had written very quickly. This Author’s Preface was probably the single most influential piece of critical or self-interpretive prose he ever composed, the only commentary on his life and art that most readers of his poetry would encounter.
It begins provocatively: ‘I have never been much considered by the
English critics.’ While it was true that in 1964 he was almost unknown as a poet in England, as compared to Ireland where he was a household name, this was not the fault of the English critics, for Come Dance with Kitty Stobling had been widely and well reviewed only four years previously. Even more questionable to those familiar with his poetry and his person is the statement, ‘I am always shy of calling myself a poet’: he had foregrounded his role as poet since the early 1930s in his verse and since at least the early 1940s in his everyday life (even to the tax inspector). The emphasis on the transcendental nature rather than the craft of poetry in the Preface was partly intended to distinguish him from the neo-Revivalist school of Clarke and Ó Faracháin on the one hand, and the English Movement poets such as Philip Larkin on the other. But it ran deeper than this, because a belief in the association between poetry and mysticism had been inculcated by Æ at the outset of his career, as had the concept of the poet as seer and prophet. However much he modernised the idiom and rhythms of his verse, he never shed the Romantic vision of himself as a vatic spiritual leader with a message for his people, a concept which the advent of the Beat poets was bringing back into fashion. The Preface emphasises the poverty and hunger he endured in the service of poetry, memorably encapsulated in the anecdote of his borrowing a ‘shilling for the gas’, when in fact he ‘wanted the coin to buy a chop’. This anecdote would be cited in the future by most commentators on his life or poetry.
Two paragraphs of the very short Preface are devoted to his repudiation of The Great Hunger and again his rationale for this rejection would be frequently annotated and dissected by literary critics in the coming years: ‘The Great Hunger is Tragedy and Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born.’ If the collecting of the poems had been left to Kavanagh, The Great Hunger would probably have been excluded.
As so often in Kavanagh’s writings, an apparently casual structure of rambling reminiscences masks an underlying rhetorical argument, beguiling readers while actually bullying them into accepting a purposefully simplified account of his career. The entire Preface conducts towards a climactic experience of physical passivity and psychic surrender:
But I lost my messianic compulsion. I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose.
The Preface creates the illusion that his life and his verse have remained arrested in this state of calm acquiescence. The sorry tale of his descent into alcoholism, illness and declining creativity remained untold.
Collected Poems was ready for proofing on 2 April, a task undertaken by Martin Green and David Wright and, nominally, by the poet himself. Six years earlier he had exerted himself over the proofing of Recent Poems, but by now he was past dealing with such minutiae. Apart from asking that the word ‘Behaned’ in ‘Living In the Country: Part 2’ (formerly ‘The Poet’s Ready Reckoner’) be reduced to lower case, he suggested no changes, although the text was riddled with misprints. So little attention had he paid to the collection that the placing of ‘No Social Conscience’ (1949), ‘A Ballad’ from Kavanagh’s Weekly (1952) and, even more obviously, ‘On Raglan Road’ (1946), as late poems, entirely escaped him. As he put it at the end of the Preface, he had been ‘too indifferent, too lazy to eliminate, change or collect’.
Sitting in Martin Green’s office with the galley-proofs before him, Kavanagh contemplated the question of dedicating the volume to Katherine:
He thought long and hard, and then said ‘No’ and he scribbled the dedication as it stands.4
To have publicised his relationship with Katherine would have been almost tantamount to a marriage proposal. How could he explain it to all his present and future women friends back in Dublin? Similarly a dedication to one of his men friends or to a married couple like Joan and Eoin Ryan, who had stood by him over many years, would have offended all his other supporters. The dedication to Peter was the safest course. It would not have occurred to him to reward Annie and Mary for years of free board and lodging and professional care.
Back in Dublin in mid-May he reported another ‘bad turn’, probably the DTs and acute gastritis. By now he was also suffering chronically from an embarrassing condition he thought was either due to an enlarged prostate gland or prostate cancer. The symptoms were a frequent need to urinate, difficulty in urinating and severe abdominal pain. He feared consulting a doctor because his father had never recovered fully from his prostate gland operation which had signalled the onset of senile decline and death. Rather than seek a cure, he had decided by late June that his bladder problem was a disagreeable permanent condition which he had ‘to learn to put up with’. Over a year later it would emerge that he had suffered unnecessarily because his condition was treatable.
Ill health may explain the disenchanted, jaundiced view of himself and his poetry he projected in an interview with Máirín O’Farrell for Hibernia that May. As he explained, the interviewee tends to express ‘the surface irritations of the moment’. Asked what he considered his best work, for instance, he replied, ‘I don’t like anything of my own. I don’t like anything.’ And in response to the question, ‘What have been your most fruitful years?’ he answered, ‘All of them have been unfruitful and atrocious.’ Yet, almost in spite of himself, the interview reveals his humility as a poet. He is still learning how to write, though ‘in the last few years’ he has ‘got an idea of how it’s done’. Suffering and misfortune must be transmuted into ‘something gay and happy’: ‘to achieve lightness, that’s the hard work’. He advocates ‘the fun and games’ of Beat verse, intensity rather than plodding.5 He had been publicly singing the praises of the Beats for the previous five years.
His author’s copies of Collected Poems arrived on 12 July and he flew to London on the 14th in good time for the launch on the 22nd and publication day, the 27th. The Irish Embassy in London had declined to host the launch and instead it was arranged through Tommy Marks that Guinness would sponsor the event. Since he was managing director of their Harp Lager division, the launch was held at the Harp headquarters in Mayfair in a magnificent room overlooking Manchester Square. Martin Green and Kavanagh were the first two arrivals and, looking out the window at the rain cascading down outside, he was apprehensive that no one would come. Then David Wright was sighted sprinting across the square, the first of the numerous guests. It was a memorable occasion. All Kavanagh’s London circle were there drinking black velvet. Guinness had done him proud and he was delighted. When the reception, which had begun at 5 p.m., eventually came to an end at about 9.30 or 10 p.m., he and a group of friends repaired to a Henekeys pub to prolong the celebrations. John Montague observed how, when Kavanagh was roughly treated by bar staff who thought he had overimbibed, the loyal Katherine came decisively to his rescue. Montague recognised how much she loved him and wished to protect him.6
Collected Poems was marketed in a limited leather-bound edition at five guineas and in a regular hardback edition at forty-two shillings. It was an attractively presented book with generous margins and plenty of space between poems. More importantly, it succeeded in collecting most of the pre-1963 published poems deserving of collection and, since Kavanagh did not publish much after that date, very little was missed. Its main weakness was that it was peculiarly organised. It followed the ordering of the poems in the two volumes Ploughman and Other Poems and A Soul for Sale, with a bridging section in between for The Great Hunger and the pre-1945 poems not included in either volume; then it moved to a thematic ordering of the poems up to and including those collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (‘satire, then confession, followed by acceptance’); the final section was supposedly devoted to post-1958 poems. The attempt to be thematic without sacrificing chronology generated numerous problems in the placing of poems, problems further compounded by the editors’ lack of bibliographical information. On the positive side, the arrangement had the merit of distinguishing pre-1945 poetry from later poetry, giving some sense of
the trajectory of Kavanagh’s career. Collected Poems was to be the medium by which Kavanagh’s poetry was disseminated in Ireland, Britain and the US throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A paperback edition (which corrected some of the misprints) was published in 1972 and reprinted in 1973, 1975 and 1977; this last went into its fourth impression in 1984. Because it remained in print for over twenty years, Collected Poems performed an invaluable service in making the bulk of Kavanagh’s best poetry easily available to generations of readers.
What interested most reviewers was that this was the first time the range of Kavanagh’s poetry from 1936 to 1962 was on view. There had been such a long timespan between each of the three volumes that most, if not all, were reading Ploughman for the first time and some were even unacquainted with A Soul for Sale. The previously uncollected Dublin satires of the 1950s were also unfamiliar to British critics, as were the post-1958 poems scattered in small-circulation Irish journals. Only the lyrics from Come Dance with Kitty Stobling were well known. It was an occasion for the critics to review Kavanagh’s career and to assess his poetic stature. The general verdict was that he was inconsistent, ‘a hit and miss poet’; most disliked the Ploughman poems and the satires, but found that he had written a number of memorable poems in addition to The Great Hunger and that, when showing an ‘ironic edge’, ‘blending the conversational with the lyrical’ or fusing ‘lyricism and deliberately awkward vernacular rhythms’, he succeeded in creating an original style.7 A nine-minute interview by Peter Duval Smith on BBC Radio, transmitted on 18 August, in which Kavanagh was questioned about his poetry and his life in Ireland, further helped to publicise Collected Poems.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 61