He recorded the script on 29 July and his favourite actor, T. P. McKenna, read a selection of the poems. During the first week in August he accompanied Adrian Cronin and the crew — cameraman Godfrey Graham, with Mary Hanratty as assistant and Simon Weafer as general factotum — for three days while they were shooting the Inniskeen footage. A further two days were devoted to filming the poet’s ‘Pembrokeshire’. Cronin, then a young director, took the daring, even foolhardy, step of inviting Kavanagh to come and live in his home with his wife and baby daughter during the filming. By this stage he needed a ‘hair of the dog’ to start the day and began drinking in earnest at about 11 a.m. so he would be unfit for work by mid-afternoon. The film director’s arrangement of keeping him under a form of benign house-arrest worked well. He was always sufficiently sober to work and was on his best behaviour in the Cronin household.9 As ever, the stuff of comedy dogged him. During his first few days with the Cronins, he mistook another house on the same road for theirs and, thinking he was locked out, asked his driving companion, Gay Veale, to climb in through an open window and unlock the front door. Finding no one at home, he went to bed and fell asleep. Next morning a startled family discovered they had an unexpected guest.
The television documentary was screened on Monday, 10 October, from 10.05 to 10.25. Annie Kavanagh’s only criticism, like that of many Inniskeen people, was that it was all too quick; they wished the camera had lingered longer over familiar places. Unwittingly, the film illustrated just how remote from Inniskeen the poet had now become. Though he looked like a countryman in an urban setting, in his home place he did not blend in, appearing altogether too pompous and formal and, surprisingly, too spruce. In Elinor Wiltshire’s photographic record of Kavanagh in Inniskeen, made at his request in October 1963, he also looks like a bad actor playing the part of a countryman. Stooping over the earth in a pretence of lifting potatoes, he apppears incongruous, a dapper city gent.10
Immediately after the screening of the television documentary he was back in the Meath Hospital for three weeks and his RTV Guide column was suspended until the following spring. Brendan Kennelly, a young poet and Trinity College lecturer, was one of his visitors. He brought a present of a bottle of Scotch and noticed that Kavanagh downed two-thirds of it during the hour or less that he was there, with no visible effect.
Kennelly was preparing to write an essay on his poetry, to be published in the RTV Guide on 25 November. The occasion was a programme on Kavanagh in ‘Markings’, a series on writers, selected and introduced by Augustine Martin, broadcast on the evening of Tuesday 29 November from 11.05 to 11.15. After this very appreciative essay, Kavanagh frequently phoned Kennelly at his office in Trinity and invited him to the Wicklow Hotel. There the young poet bought him whiskeys and they talked, but the purpose of these meetings did not emerge until long afterwards when Kennelly was told that Kavanagh had secretly hoped for an honorary degree from Trinity College. He was too proud to drop a hint and it never dawned on the younger poet that he would have coveted such an honour.
Now that he had more or less ceased writing poetry, Kavanagh was becoming a household name in Ireland through TV and radio programmes and his controversial column in the RTV Guide, but the event that was to make him a legend in his own lifetime, as far as Dublin audiences were concerned, was the dramatisation of Tarry Flynn at the Abbey Theatre.
A stage version of Tarry Flynn had been mooted several times in the 1960s, ever since the novel’s republication in paperback. Some of the episodes seemed written to be acted and would require very little modification: the court case rehearsal, for example, and the carrying of sickroom paraphernalia across the fields to dramatise a neighbour’s pseudo-dying. John Ryan attempted to get Kavanagh’s agreement to a Gate production in February 1962, telling him that the theatre was available in March. In April of that year Jim O’Toole enquired if Kavanagh would give him permission to turn the novel into an Abbey play. Kavanagh acceded, provided it was done on a 50–50 basis and he even volunteered to collaborate.11 Nothing came of either Ryan’s or O’Toole’s initiative.
In 1966 the project of turning the novel into an Abbey play was revived. This time the proposed dramatist was P. J. O’Connor, who had already adapted some twenty classics for radio drama, including Moby Dick, and had also written several plays. Proponents of the scheme, such as the Abbey actor Pat Layde, got Joan Ryan on side before approaching Kavanagh. In summer 1966 O’Connor was given permission to adapt Tarry Flynn as a three-act drama. The script was submitted to the Abbey on 6 September and sent to Kavanagh for approval a fortnight later. Once his nihil obstat had been obtained, the Abbey accepted it for production on 21 October under the direction of Tomás Mac Anna and the play opened on Tuesday, 22 November.
Kavanagh, who had been drinking very heavily indeed throughout the previous month, was a patient in the Meath Hospital during most of the rehearsals. He went to the Meath because his friend Richard Riordan was working there at the time. Riordan reported that he was ‘most unwell’: his chest X-ray showed ‘a fairly clear remaining lung’, but his heartbeat was irregular.12 Every evening he was allowed out of the hospital to spend an hour or so, usually between 7 and 8 p.m., in Sheehan’s pub, always accompanied by a nurse. Friends recall how at one of these sessions in Sheehan’s, for some reason — probably shortage of money — a pall of gloom descended on the assembled company. During one of the long silences, the invalid suddenly pronounced: ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of us that a shower of fivers wouldn’t cure.’ The atmosphere had been so tense that everyone burst out laughing. Then, as if on cue, an acquaintance of Kavanagh’s who had just won a lot of money walked into the pub and began buying rounds for everyone. Soon Sheehan’s was en fête. To some of the young poets present, it was as if Kavanagh had conjured up this benefactor and performed a liquid version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Riordan’s faith in the poet’s ‘great powers of recovery’ was justified; he was discharged from hospital a week before the première of Tarry Flynn. When he phoned Katherine on Sunday 20th, she was still unsure whether she would manage to make it to the opening night on Tuesday. In the event, she flew over that morning and met Patrick in Sheehan’s pub at lunchtime, where they were soon joined by Dinny Dwyer, Richard Riordan, Hayden Murphy, Pat Layde and Mrs Ronnie Walsh. The party continued all afternoon and resumed in the Plough before the performance, when John Ryan and another large crowd joined in. The theatre was packed to capacity with friends and supporters. Kavanagh’s sisters Annie and Mary received no tickets for the opening or any other performance; as usual, his Mucker life and his professional and Dublin life were compartmentalised.
The stage version of Tarry Flynn was generally welcomed as far and away the best thing the Abbey company had done since moving into its new home the previous July. The first two acts, in particular, were singled out as the most entertaining seen in the Abbey in a long time. Donal McCann played Tarry Flynn, Máire Ní Dhomhnaill his mother, Patrick Laffan his friend Eusebius Cassidy, and Máire O’Neill, Sheila O’Connell and Deirdre Purcell were cast as Tarry’s sisters, Mary, Aggie and Bridie. In order to accommodate the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the action between indoors and outdoors, the set designers, Tomás Mac Anna and Brian Collins, broke with Abbey tradition in the staging of ‘peasant’ plays by using a double set, with the farm kitchen in one section and a field with low stone walls in another, an innovation not appreciated by several critics. Some found the flying scenery too gimmicky and distracting: two heavy pieces representing a kitchen and a barn door were shunted up and down during the performance and the kitchen stuck on its way down a few times. For others, the permanent backcloth of green meadow and a sky with little curly clouds scuttling across was a too softly romantic setting for the poverty and harshness of Tarry’s background.13 Kavanagh himself loved the play. More and more he wanted art to be ‘a kind of fun’ and he found it very amusing. He had been staying with the Ryans just before the opening night and was drea
ding it and half afraid to go. By the interval he was hugging himself with delight. In particular, he liked Donal McCann’s randy rendering of the young Tarry Flynn and Eileen Crowe as Mrs Callan. ‘She’s a ringer for it’, he said.
While he was delivering his largely unintelligible curtain-speech on the opening night, a single boo was heard, ‘more a wether’s bleat than a full-blooded expression of disapproval’, as Seamus Kelly expressed it. ‘I wouldn’t bring any of my friends to this vulgar play’, Kavanagh told the audience. ‘Look, it’s not worth it.’ A voice from the back of the theatre roared, ‘You’re bloody well right.’14 These dissenters were lone voices drowned out by the general applause.
After the show the party resumed. Kavanagh had promised Joan Ryan that he would be sensible and moderate his drinking but, as was to be expected on such an occasion, his glass was filled over and over. Joan and Eoin Ryan had the unenviable task of prising him out of the bar to ferry him to an apartment he had just acquired at 77 Palmerston Road. During the short journey, Kavanagh passed out and the Ryans detoured and picked up Katherine to help look after him. She had never seen him so completely comatose before and was quite shocked.15 Unknown to her, her marriage to Kavanagh was decided on the night of his Tarry Flynn spree.
Joan Ryan, accustomed to the amenities of a well-run upper middle-class home, was appalled by the lack of home comforts and the cheerlessness of the Palmerston Road apartment and by Kavanagh’s manifest inability to take care of himself. Only a wife could provide the constant care, attention, nourishment and civilised living conditions he needed, she thought. If he did not improve his current lifestyle, he would be dead in a few months. She sat him down in her kitchen and gave him a talking-to, the burden of which was that he must marry and soon. Katherine was the wife he needed: she was devoted to him and good at caring for him. Given Dublin’s moral climate, she could not live with him unless she was married to him. Kavanagh liked being lectured by a woman: ‘You’re just like my mother’, he would say delightedly. On this occasion he required little persuasion for he was immediately enthusiastic about the idea of marrying Katherine. The encouragement of such a long-standing friend as Joan Ryan was crucial. One of the factors that had always militated against his marrying was the fear that in settling for one woman he would lose his other women friends and among these Joan was pre-eminent. Yet he did not rush into marriage immediately. For the present he had somewhere to live, and Tarry Flynn’s success at the box office meant that he was flush with cash. He would enjoy bachelorhood for a little longer.
The flat at 77 Palmerston Road was on the top floor. It had just been vacated by Leo Henry, a young drinking companion from McDaid’s and a son of ex-flatmate Frank Henry. Leo and his wife Liz had moved to a larger flat on the ground floor and recommended their father’s friend to the landlord. Top-floor accommodation was far from ideal because Kavanagh found it difficult to climb the stairs, but he hadn’t much choice in the matter. Most landlords were reluctant to have him as tenant. He frequently postponed the climb upstairs by visiting Liz and Leo Henry’s ground-floor quarters. Liz was occasionally commandeered to see to his laundry, while Leo was assigned the daily task of procuring naggins of whiskey. When Leo suggested he buy bottles of whiskey instead, he was told that buying by the bottle implied that one was an alcoholic; so, although it increased the number of trips to the pub, naggins it had to be. The naggin size had the added advantage that it fitted in a jacket pocket, ensuring that there was always a supply to hand.
By this time Kavanagh was capable of walking only a very short distance. Leo noticed that when they returned from town by bus together he had to stop several times for a rest during the very short walk from the bus stop to No. 77. One evening he volunteered to babysit the Henrys’ daughter, Rio, a toddler. They returned after a few hours to find the flat in chaos, most of the books pulled off the shelves and strewn on the floor, Kavanagh nowhere to be seen (he had gone to sleep in one of the bedrooms) and their daughter perched in front of the telly, saying ‘eff off’ over and over again to the characters on screen — no need to ask where she had acquired this addition to her vocabulary.
Tarry Flynn had a short run because the theatre was putting on a Christmas pantomime. Kavanagh got into the habit of calling at the box office during or after the performance to demand his 10 per cent cut on the evening’s takings. He would stagger well whiskeyed into the Henrys’ flat late in the evening, his pockets stuffed with money which he would try to count there and then, while pound notes and fivers fell out of his unsteady hands on to the floor.
His new-found affluence did not make him any more conscientious about paying the rent and early in March the landlord, Desmond Duffy, wrote demanding arrears of £44, eleven weeks’ rent, as well as payment for damage to the carpet. The stain on the carpet was due to one of those mishaps to which he was prone. Leo Henry had told him that a stale loaf could be resuscitated by pouring milk over it and placing it in a hot oven for a few minutes. Kavanagh’s version was to place the sodden bread directly on to the naked flame of the gas hob. When a conflagration ensued, he put it out by urinating on it. Although by no means an ideal tenant, he was anxious to hold on to the flat and he wrote several times to Leo Henry from London, where he was spending much of the New Year, asking him to placate their landlord.
He had joined Katherine in St Stephen’s Crescent for Christmas, reportedly pouring himself off the plane ‘in a state of semi-collapse’ and remaining ‘semi-moribund’ for most of the holiday period.16 John McGahern, out for a late walk on Christmas afternoon, spotted him and Katherine. It was a grey overcast London day with sudden sharp showers and the streets were empty. They were looking to see if a large corner pub was open, trying several doors and peering in the windows. At the time it struck McGahern as a strange, sad scene, and for a moment he considered inviting them to his flat. But he had years ago made up his mind not to give the poet an opportunity to practise his savagery on him, so he resisted the impulse.17
By January, Kavanagh was ‘hale and hearty’, having given up whiskey and restricted himself to Guinness. During this fairly sober period he made a contract with Barbara Rowlands, a friend of Katherine, signing over the film rights to Tarry Flynn for £50. They were in the Plough at the time and his publisher Tim O’Keeffe, one of the drinking party, was asked to countersign the document, which he did, not realising what it was. Afterwards he was cross with Kavanagh for pulling such a fast one. Kavanagh for his part behaved as an injured innocent.18
In mid-February he returned to Dublin and resumed his column for the RTV Guide, suspended since the previous October. ‘I’m Back’ was the headline. Wedding plans were now being firmed up. According to Joan Ryan, who guided him through the subsequent arrangements, he proposed to Katherine over the phone. The couple were to be married from the Moloneys’ parish church in Rathgar and he and Mrs Moloney between them contacted the priest and booked the church. Before and after each move he consulted Katherine, making most of the calls from Ryans. She was pleased that he was playing such an active role in organising the wedding.
Katherine’s parents were none too happy at her choice of marriage partner, though they did not actively oppose the match. Indeed, her father wished to treat the couple to a wedding reception in the Shelbourne, but Kavanagh vetoed the idea because he dreaded the lack of privacy. Instead, he accepted the Ryans’ offer to host the reception at their home.
In March Kavanagh accompanied Annie on a two-day visit to Sissie in Donegal. Sissie, who was suffering from cancer, was pleased and touched by the fact that he had travelled so far to see her, when his own health was none too robust. One of the kindly sides to Kavanagh was his willingness to visit sick friends and relatives. This tendency was not simply due to a fellow-feeling arising from his own frequent hospitalisations, for it predated them. A couple of weeks before his death, when he must have been feeling quite poorly, he tried to visit Joan Ryan in hospital, but missed her because the date of her operation had been changed
.
By mid-March he was back in London with Katherine. Despite his repudiation of The Great Hunger, he had allowed David Wright, who was editing Longer Contemporary Poems for Penguin the previous year, to include it, and that spring he had given the go-ahead to MacGibbon and Kee to reissue the poem as a booklet. However, his main publication in spring 1967 was Collected Pruse. It was ready in February and he went over for publication day on 13 March. Pruse was supposed to be an affected pronunciation of prose, the intention being to undermine the pretentiousness of the enterprise. Though he took little interest in the retrieval of his work, he did remark that this was not a good collection. The book was less complete, more sloppily edited and altogether less scholarly than Collected Poems. It took liberties with the texts, omitting sections and, in one case, combining pieces from different sources to make up a new essay, without any indication that it was doing so. It also reprinted excerpts from the readily available Tarry Flynn and, although it was supposed to be a prose collection, it included newspaper coverage of the libel case. All in all, Collected Pruse was a quite bizarre book and the reviewers slated it.
Throughout March wedding plans were proceeding. Kavanagh was staying with Richard Riordan, from whose address at 41 Fitzwilliam Place he was to be married, and had done a fiver’s worth of damage in a week, even breaking some window panes.19 When Katherine arrived for a weekend shortly before the wedding, he did not show. It was a crisis. She was unsure whether the wedding was on or off and he thought she might back down. In the following days he pursued her with telegrams and phone calls pleading forgiveness.20 If he had indeed momentarily panicked or suffered second thoughts, he had reached a decision.
The marriage still remained a closely guarded secret, ostensibly to avoid the presence of the press or of intrusive sightseers, but largely because Kavanagh was paranoid about his personal privacy. Despite Katherine’s pleading, he was adamant that his own family be neither invited nor informed, a ban extending to Annie and Mary with whom he had been living for a considerable part of each year since 1959. They were to know nothing of the wedding until they read about it in the newspapers; his brother Peter was also kept in the dark.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 65