Even if he had told Annie and Mary about his matrimonial intentions at the last moment or invited them to the wedding, the situation would have been difficult. They had no inkling of Katherine’s seven-year relationship with their brother, were even unaware of her existence. Over a period of eight years they had grown used to the idea that Mucker was Patrick’s home and that they were his female carers, surrogate wives and mothers, as it were. His very gruffness and unappreciativeness of their pampering, his refusal to tell them when he was coming or where he was going, only enhanced the sense that they were a family. No matter how long he stayed away from them, he always returned. Not confiding his wedding plans was the culmination of years of refusing to treat his sisters as equals. Coming from a close-knit family herself, Katherine could not comprehend his attitude.
Kavanagh took advantage of the secrecy surrounding his forthcoming wedding to carry on as singlemindedly as ever. He continued to flirt with the Veale family individually and collectively, inviting Vivien to the Bailey for dinner in February and generally conducting himself as if he still wished to marry into the family. Fortunately for them, they had no desire for anything other than a friendly relationship so, though the wedding took them by surprise, they were not emotionally affected.
Not so Sheila O’Grady. Kavanagh had maintained a friendship with her since the early 1950s and continued to visit herself and her sister for Sunday lunch. ‘For I love Sheila O’Grady and Sheila O’Grady loves me’ he had written on her copy of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, and on the frontispiece of her Collected Poems he drew a behatted head and inscribed it ‘most moving thoughts’. In November she had received a complimentary ticket to the dress circle for Tarry Flynn.21 She had never ceased to love Kavanagh and his sudden marriage was to leave her feeling that she had been abruptly and inexplicably jilted. The trauma of this event would continue to take its toll for years to come.
The wedding ceremony took place on Wednesday, 19 April, in the Church of the Three Patrons on Rathgar Road, at a side altar because Kavanagh wanted a short service. The appropriateness of the church’s name was not lost on some of the guests. Richard Riordan had been chosen as groomsman; there was no shortage of candidates for the position and some old friends were hurt to be passed over. Katherine’s sister Judy, of whom Kavanagh was very fond, was bridesmaid. Predictably, the ceremony did not run smoothly and there was the odd muttered outburst from the bridegroom. At the ‘Do you take this woman . . . ’ question, he is said to have wheezed, ‘I might as well’ or ‘It has nothing to do with me’ or ‘I suppose I have to.’ When asked to sign the register after the ceremony, he tossed his head and demanded, ‘Bring the effing thing out here.’22 Katherine’s father took umbrage at the groom’s ungallant behaviour, annoyed that the Moloneys might appear to be compelling him to marry against his will. The rest of the family and his friends, who were all familiar with the master’s style, took it in their stride.
The wedding was one of the best kept literary secrets of the period. Nevertheless, the Evening Herald had been tipped off and a reporter and photographer were in wait outside the church as the bridal party emerged. The photographer almost missed Kavanagh, for the threat to his privacy had sent him speeding across the street with unusual alacrity; he had reached the bonnet of the getaway car and in the ensuing black and white photo his dark suit almost merges with the dark colour of the car, leaving him barely distinguishable. Richard Riordan, hurrying after him with the car keys, was in focus, as was Katherine some distance behind, teetering on high heels. Since Kavanagh declined to pose for a photo with his new bride, the Herald carried this unconventional picture of the wedding group on its front page that evening accompanied by a report under the headline ‘Poet Paddy weds niece of Kevin Barry’. The groom was reported to be wearing a brown Anthony Eden hat and a smart navy suit, his bride a matching blue two-piece ensemble.
After their hasty departure from the church, the wedding party proceeded to the Moloney home in Rathgar; Katherine’s mother was bedridden and had been unable to attend the church, so the cake-cutting ceremony took place in her bedroom and guests assembled to drink champagne. Even on his wedding day Kavanagh carried a naggin of whiskey in the pocket of his good suit and immediately upon arrival at the Moloney residence he began drinking from it. An already cross Mr Moloney was further incensed by this slur on his hospitality.
From the Moloney home the party moved on to the wedding reception proper in the Ryans’ house at 4 Winton Road, off Leeson Park. It was meant to be a semi-private affair for a chosen few guests, but the numbers snowballed. Joan Ryan had laid out a magnificent nuptial buffet; however, the new husband could only manage an omelette, which had to be specially made. Guests sat around in the drawing room, some on the floor at the poet’s feet, and there were lots of speeches. Press photographers were allowed in at short notice to take a picture of the bride and groom for the next day’s papers. The highlight of the wedding reception was the poet’s emphysemic rendition of some of his favourite ballads, including ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ and ‘Raglan Road’. He told friends that he had loved his wedding day and even said it was the happiest day of his life. The Kavanaghs did not go away on honeymoon and the next day Patrick staggered into the Bailey acting the part of a man who was exhausted by his connubial efforts. ‘She has me worn out’, he moaned.
Kavanagh confided in his friend Elinor Wiltshire that he was sorry he had not invited some of his family to the wedding or asked Lucy’s son, Father John Quinn, to officiate at the ceremony.23 Ten days later he took Katherine to Mucker to meet Annie and Mary. It was a rather tense occasion for both parties, but Katherine was friendly and invited the sisters to return the visit. In response they made the best of the new situation. Naturally, they were a little jealous of this rival woman who had been so suddenly sprung on them. They found her ‘shrewd’ and thought she had their brother wrapped round her little finger. Yet they summoned up enough goodwill to profess themselves glad that their brother now had ‘roots’ and someone to ‘look after him’. His other sisters, too, saw Katherine as Patrick’s carer and thought that marriage would be good for him.24
Katherine was a devoted wife, making sure that her husband had regular meals, keeping him spruce, having a doctor visit to give him injections, but she did not attempt to turn him into a domestic animal. They spent a lot of time in the pubs; she was extroverted and convivial and happy to drink with his crowd, many of whom were already known to her. When she attempted to slip away and leave him with friends or fans, he would bellow hoarsely ‘Come back here, Katherine.’25 While she did not stop his drinking, Katherine did try to curb it. She was cross when he was given a case of whiskey as a wedding present, and she would call out to him if she saw him about to accept another glass when he had agreed to stop and go home. Her strategy was to provide dinner between 7 and 8 p.m., at which point they would leave the pub together and not return. Sometimes, a few friends were invited back, but the Kavanaghs did not keep open house. Kavanagh and she were so used to living together that they seemed to friends like an old married couple. Katherine’s sister Helen had given them a large sugán armchair as a wedding present and Kavanagh took it over; it became his favourite seat. Friends noticed that there was an extraordinary communication between the new husband and wife. He would start a sentence and, if he faltered or was stuck for a word, she would complete it, and he was grateful. Married life was no idyll, however. Kavanagh was a very sick man and often short-tempered and irritable. Katherine had many difficult moments.
They lived in a garden flat on Winton Road in Rathgar at first, but it was too far from Kavanagh’s ‘Pembrokeshire’ haunts. The move to a garden flat at 67 Waterloo Road brought him back to his old stamping-ground. Unfortunately, No. 67 was at the wrong end of the road for him; often he could not manage the short trip to the newspaper kiosk or the pubs of Baggot Street. Since he now felt too frail to travel much by bus, he spent a fortune on taxis.
Money was not a problem i
n the early days of the marriage. Quite a few friends had given a cheque in lieu of a wedding present; Katherine had received a golden handshake on leaving her job and her brother Paddy was very generous to the couple; also Tarry Flynn was having a second run at the Abbey from 29 May. So for a while they had enough to live on. Kavanagh kept up his RTV Guide column until 30 June and wrote a Preface to The Autobiography of William Carleton, to be published by MacGibbon and Kee the following year. For a few months Katherine did not work, her first prolonged holiday since the age of 18. She typed Patrick’s letters and handled his correspondence as she had often done in the past. Soon the money ran out and Patrick said to her jokingly: ‘One of us will have to get a job . . . and it’ll have to be you!’ She was used to subsidising him when he was living with her in London, so she was not surprised that he expected her to be the breadwinner. He searched through the Situations Vacant ads in The Irish Times and found her a job as a bookkeeper with a firm of architects in Merrion Square.26 Later she joined Quadrant Engineering in Sandymount, a firm owned by her brother-in-law, Padraig O’Halpin.
In June 1967 the Intermediate Certificate English curriculum in Irish secondary schools was changed and Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry was part of the new syllabus. The poet who had first learned his craft from school texts had himself become a schoolbook poet.
On Bloomsday he was asked to perform the ceremony of declaring open Leopold Bloom’s door, No. 7 Eccles Street, which John Ryan had acquired for exhibition in the Bailey. Kavanagh, who chose instead to declare it ‘shut forever’, told his audience that he had first bought Ulysses in London in the late 1940s for twenty-five shillings. It had been his book at breakfast for several years, propped on the table against his typewriter like an altar missal on a lectern, and he had read and reread the same comic chapters like a priest reading his breviary.
That summer he was the only Irish poet in a star-studded international cast of poets invited to participate in Poetry International, a ‘festival of poetry’ organised by the Poetry Book Society in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room at London’s South Bank on the evenings of 12 to 15 July. Fellow readers were Ginsberg, Empson, Olson, Auden, Spender, Lee, Sexton, Hecht, MacDiarmid, Graves, Amichai, Neruda, Bonnefoy, Bachmann, Paz and Ungaretti. Ginsberg was so attentive to and respectful of the Irish poet that The Daily Telegraph reported it.
Macdara Woods was in the audience and, when it came to Kavanagh’s turn to read, he thought the poet looked very old and feeble as he shambled to the front of the stage; yet he was a large figure with great presence. He began reading ‘Literary Adventures’, had difficulty in breathing, and stopped after the first verse. Just then a group of young hippies, gathered near the stage, began pelting him with flowers. It was a theatrical moment: the frail elderly poet standing in a shower of petals. The adulation of these young people restored his confidence and he found the courage to continue; his reading improved and he managed a second poem. He had composed an extempore verse to mark the occasion:
But since the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones
Anything goes
And I am glad
That freedom is mad
Dancing with pot
Hurray hurray
I say
For this beautiful day.27
Not one of his better poems, but it shows that he was in tune with the sixties.
The last summer of Kavanagh’s life is remembered by some of his young poet disciples as a ‘golden summer’ — the phrase was Tim O’Keeffe’s. As a married man with a home of his own, he appeared to have reached a plateau of contentment and serenity, to have no bitterness in him. Some, like Paul Durcan, who saw him every day that summer, thought that he might even enjoy another poetic rebirth, as he had done a decade previously when he had recovered from his lung cancer operation. But it was not to be. His health was clearly failing and he would sometimes sit, as if in pain, muttering over and over, ‘Oh god, oh god, oh gody god’. He was still capable of his great rages and flytings of lesser mortals. Brian Lynch witnessed him throw his sandwich plus plate on to the floor of the pub, smashing the plate. He had always disposed of food that displeased him in this manner and he hadn’t changed. Some of his tantrums were ritualistic. When a Danish student and admirer of his work approached him in the Bailey, tentatively and deferentially, asking to speak to him about his poetry, he rasped hoarsely at him, ‘Get out of my sight. You killed our king.’ Not understanding the allusion to Brian Boru, the unfortunate Dane was flabbergasted. However, Kavanagh was just playing out the role expected of him — that of fearsome dictator. Shortly afterwards, he was observed sitting apart with the Dane, patiently answering all his questions.
He continued to take a lively interest in the doings and writings of his young disciples. When Paul Durcan and Brian Lynch published a joint collection of poems entitled Endsville, Kavanagh greeted Durcan by quoting ‘First Confession’, a couplet-poem of his that had taken his fancy:
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
I have not read Jean Gênet.
On the basis of this collection, he pronounced solemnly ‘I’ve found my successor. I pass my mantle to Durcan’. Not wishing to hurt Brian Lynch, who was with Durcan in Sheehan’s at the time, he added, ‘That’s not saying anything against you, Brian’. Kavanagh even composed a couplet about Durcan and, because Katherine liked it, he often repeated it:
On Paul Durcan my hopes are pinned,
But wait till he gets his second wind.
He would speak the first line very slowly and the second line rapidly; he had not lost the sense of comic timing which listeners to his stories had always relished. Kavanagh also took practical steps to promote Durcan’s career, arranging for him to meet his own publisher, Tim O’Keeffe, when he was in Dublin. Durcan’s poem ‘Waterloo Road’, which begins and ends with an affectionate parody of ‘On Raglan Road’, recalls the afternoon of 1 August 1967 when he accompanied Kavanagh by taxi to Richard Riordan’s brother’s wedding reception in the Shangri La Hotel in Dalkey, where he met his future wife, Nessa O’Neill:
On Waterloo Road on an August day
I met Patrick Kavanagh in his garden flat . . .
On Waterloo Road on the first of August I met her first and knew
That her red hair would weave a snare that I would never rue;
I embraced the danger, I sailed along in the enchanted cab
And I rowed my oar by the star of Patrick Kavanagh.28
When a number of Kavanagh’s young friends staged a dramatisation of Ulysses in the Players’ Theatre in Trinity College on 10 September, he went along to cheer them on, even though it was only an amateur production. The novel had been dramatised by Richard Riordan, and Leland Bardwell, Paul Durcan and Macdara Woods were in the cast.
One of Kavanagh’s last verses was a comic stanza for a young poet fan, Hayden Murphy, who launched a new journal named Broadsheet in November. Shortly before publication he gave Murphy the five lines rhyming on his name which later appeared in Broadsheet 3, 1968, an issue dedicated to Kavanagh’s memory:
Dear Hayden Murphy
The seas you embark on are wildly surfy
I have no message to bring more comfy
But although I may leave you I’ll always love you
Hayden Murphy.
In September 1967 Tim O’Keeffe appealed to the Irish Arts Council to come to Kavanagh’s financial assistance. The secretary, Mervyn Wall, acknowledged that something should be done but that it would be a further year before the Irish version of the British Civil List was established. He would recommend that Kavanagh be the first beneficiary. The following month the British Arts Council awarded him a poetry bursary of £1,200. John Betjeman was among those who sponsored him. Knowing his own propensity to blow money as quickly as he earned it, he kept only a third of the award and handed over the remainder to Katherine, who was managing their finances. Marriage to a bookkeeper was perhaps the most commonsensical action of his life. He was still being pursue
d for income tax and among his last writings was an unposted letter to his tax inspector pleading inability to pay.
That October he was present at the unveiling of a Henry Moore centenary monument to Yeats in St Stephen’s Green. To Eavan Boland’s eyes, he was plainly an ill man. It was a lovely autumn morning, but he was breathing very noisily and appeared stooped. When he sat down on one of the stone ledges, someone solicitously spread a coat to keep out the damp. But Kavanagh’s ‘perversity was gloriously unchecked’:
‘Why don’t you,’ he said in a wheezy, roaring, perfectly audible voice — Mrs Yeats was only a few steps away — ‘read “The Fiddler of Dooney”? It was his best poem, y’know.’
Boland also observed the animosity between Clarke and Kavanagh: only six feet away from one another, they could not bring themselves to speak.29
At one of his last public outings, a reception for the executive committee of the International P.E.N. at Iveagh House on 1 November, he met Hilda O’Malley for the first time in many years. When he introduced Katherine, Hilda remarked, ‘Aren’t you lucky? What a lovely wife you’ve got.’ Katherine was grateful for those kind words; it wasn’t easy for her to meet the most mythologised woman in Kavanagh’s life.
It was becoming obvious that Kavanagh was failing fast and he himself had premonitions that his death was near. The Kerry dramatist John B. Keane noticed at the P.E.N. reception that he looked very ill. Kavanagh complained several times that he was feeling terrible. Keane tried to cheer him up by saying that he was imagining it, but he shook his great grey head and insisted that he was at death’s door. He needed physical and moral support to help him get through the occasion and he asked Keane to stay with him for the evening, as writers from all over the world came to shake his hand and pay their respects. As they said goodbye, Keane remarked that he hoped to meet him again before Christmas. Kavanagh shook his head and responded ominously: ‘Don’t count on it.’30
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 66