Patrick Kavanagh
A Biography
Antoinette Quinn
Gill & Macmillan
For Brian Crowley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: No Genealogic Rosary (1850–1910)
Chapter 2: Childhood (1904–1918)
Chapter 3: Serving his Time (1918–1927)
Chapter 4: Dabbling in Verse (1916–1930)
Chapter 5: Farmer-Poet (1929–1936)
Chapter 6: Towards The Green Fool (1936–1937)
Chapter 7: The Green Fool and its Aftermath (1937–1939)
Chapter 8: I Had a Future (1939–1941)
Chapter 9: Bell-lettres (1940–1942)
Chapter 10: The Great Hunger (1941–1942)
Chapter 11: Pilgrim Poet (1940–1942)
Chapter 12: Marriage and Money? (1942–1944)
Chapter 13: The Enchanted Way (1944–1947)
Chapter 14: Film Critic (1946–1949)
Chapter 15: Tarry Flynn (1947–1949)
Chapter 16: From Ballyrush to Baggot Street (1948–1951)
Chapter 17: King of the Kids (1949–1951)
Chapter 18: Bluster and Beggary (1952–1953)
Chapter 19: Trial and Error (1954)
Chapter 20: The Cut Worm (1954–1955)
Chapter 21: The American Dream (1955–1957)
Chapter 22: Noo Pomes (1957–1958)
Chapter 23: Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1959–1960)
Chapter 24: Roots of Love (1960–1964)
Chapter 25: Sixty-Year-Old Public Man (1964–1965)
Chapter 26: Four Funerals and a Wedding (1965–1967)
Chapter 27: ‘So long’
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
INTRODUCTION
‘There is another me hardly seen in it,’ Patrick Kavanagh said of Tarry Flynn (1948), the novel based on his life in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, during the 1930s. As poet and journalist as well as novelist, Kavanagh was a pervasively autobiographical and confessional author, but he could have made the same observation about any of his self-revelatory writings. Because his doings, his reflections, opinions and memories were the subject of most of his oeuvre and also because the confiding tone he adopted created an impression of honesty and intimacy, many readers assumed that they knew all there was to know about him. One of the purposes of this biography is to discover ‘The Other Man concealed’ behind the artifice of Kavanagh’s self-representations.
The son of a cobbler and subsistence farmer, Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) was removed from school at age 13 to serve his time at the bench and work the land. In spite of his keen interest in reading and writing poetry, he seemed destined to become ‘some mute, inglorious Milton’. However, he disputed Thomas Gray’s view in ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ that a potentially great writer could be silenced by being born into an impoverished underclass living far from the metropolis. ‘If the potentialities are there, it is almost certain that they will find a way out; they will burst a road,’ he said.
The story of Kavanagh’s slow and tortuous journey from homespun balladry through early journal publications to his first volume, Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), an amazing tale of triumph against almost insuperable odds, is this biography’s first important narrative. ‘The apprenticeship takes twenty years,’ he used to warn the aspirant poets who flocked about him in the 1960s, and in his own case it had lasted even longer. Although there are some memorable poems among over two hundred that he wrote in the 1930s, he still regarded himself as a novice until the early 1940s.
One significant aspect of his life about which Kavanagh divulged very little in his autobiographical writings is his bleak publishing history. He maintained a successful public front from the mid-1940s, setting himself up as Ireland’s leading poet, but behind the scenes his career was dogged by misfortune and failure. The acclaimed early autobiography, The Green Fool (1938), was withdrawn after a libel action. His decision to uproot himself from his home and family farm to embark on the career of full-time, freelance writer in Dublin was disastrously mistimed; it coincided almost to the month with the outbreak of the Second World War. Owing to wartime paper rationing writers’ markets shrank. Irish writers were particularly disadvantaged when Eire’s neutrality rendered their products repugnant to some English and United States editors and publishers. Kavanagh’s first publisher, Harold Macmillan, who just before the war had offered a weekly subvention to enable him to write a novel, ignored his pleadings to renew the offer once war was declared.
While war was not the only factor in delaying the acceptance of a second volume of Kavanagh’s poems, the contract for A Soul for Sale and Other Poems was not signed until October 1945 and publication was delayed for almost two years, mainly because of paper rationing. Three novels, two of them heavily revised versions of the same narrative, were turned down by several publishers before he struck lucky at the fourth attempt with Tarry Flynn. As far as publication went, the 1950s proved to be Kavanagh’s worst decade. He was producing some of his finest poems — among them ‘Auditors In’, ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Epic’, ‘Prelude’ and the 1956/57 sonnets — but he failed to interest any commercial publisher in a collection until Longmans brought out Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems in 1960.
In Ireland, Kavanagh had a following from the late 1940s (‘There are people in the streets who steer by my star’). Internationally, because of the thirteen-year interval between the London publication of his two volumes of mature verse, he had no continuous poetic career until the 1960s when Collected Poems (1964) followed soon enough after the award-winning Come Dance with Kitty Stobling to capitalise on its reputation.
This biography traces Kavanagh’s publishing history and also reveals what he was writing in the long intervals between books. It is to be hoped that its account of his daily professional life as a writer, his revisions and redraftings, his negotiations with publishers and editors, will help to dispel the view that he was an untutored, gormless genius visited by an occasional flash of inspiration.
From his arrival in Dublin, Kavanagh was a morning writer who spent most of his day about the town. For nearly thirty years he was Dublin’s best-known flâneur and, partly because of his countryman image, he soon acquired the status of a local ‘character’. His dishevelled appearance, lack of a conventional education and apparent eccentricity undermined his reputation as a serious writer in some quarters and also excluded him from the highly paid, executive positions towards which he aspired. A gradual slide into alcoholism from the mid-1950s exacerbated the situation. This biography chronicles his twenty-year search for a well-paid job and examines his financial affairs at different stages, the money worries that preyed on him, his occasional windfalls, his gambling, his dealings with bank managers and the Revenue Commissioners, the shifts and stratagems to which he resorted to ‘beat the rap’.
Among the aspects of his life about which Kavanagh was most secretive in his published writings were romantic friendships and sex. Reticence in matters sexual was necessitated by the social and ethical codes of the 1940s and 1950s and reinforced by Church teaching and state censorship. Even to bandy the names of women friends in print would have been unseemly. When his best-known love poem, ‘On Raglan Road’, first appeared, it was entitled ‘Dark-Haired Miriam Ran Away’, though its heroine was based on Hilda Moriarty. When he named a poem after a later woman friend, ‘Deirdre’, he published it under the pseudonym N. Caffrey. I
n his confessional poetry and autobiographical fiction, Kavanagh tended to play the role of the failed or unrequited lover, or of the man who loves and is loved by many women but is too puritanical to be a seducer and too poor to marry. These literary stances resulted in a common perception, still current, that he was a sexually frustrated eunuch who ‘died wondering’. Even the story of his seven-year relationship with Katherine Moloney, the woman he finally married, has hitherto been suppressed. Despite the veil of propriety which still covers much of his sexual life, enough evidence has come to light to show that he was not only capable of romance but was a practising heterosexual.
A remarkably resilient man with a keen sense of humour and self-irony, Kavanagh was, nevertheless, prone to feelings of victimisation and envied the successful careers of some other contemporary Irish writers whom he considered less talented than himself. Continually disappointed in his hopes of attracting a wealthy patron or rich wife who would free him from literary hack work, he sometimes misrepresented Dublin’s bourgeoisie en masse as heartless philistines. He has been portrayed as a friendless man or one whose so-called friends proved false and had no real interest in his welfare. In fact, as this biography illustrates, there were always relays of generous middle-class well-wishers who recognised his genius and valued his company, who dispensed regular meals, donations and good advice, and exerted themselves to procure him literary commissions or work as a newspaper columnist. From the outset of his literary career, other writers and artists also rallied round, bolstering his morale and promoting his work, creating a congenial milieu and offering hospitality.
While Kavanagh’s life was not an easy one, some of his misfortunes were self-inflicted. He was a divided man, at odds with himself, one half of him intent on frustrating what the other half desired. An abiding faith in his own genius and a profound and enduring commitment to poetry were countered or undermined by a character and temperament that too frequently landed him in situations or states of mind unconducive to creativity. A man intensely jealous of his privacy, he spent most of his waking hours in public. His craving for economic and emotional security was offset by an often self-destructive recklessness; he chose to live at the extremes while protesting otherwise. Spendthrift when he had money, he rapidly impoverished himself and then fretted about his lack of ‘the readies’. He longed for a wife and family but either courted unsuitable women or postponed settling down with a loving and supportive partner, hoping for some fresh romantic excitement. Once his health had become precarious after his lung cancer operation, he jeopardised it further by turning to alcohol. Arrogant, aggressive and abusive, he not only lambasted in print and in person writers whose work he disliked, but alienated potential supporters. While he enjoyed camaraderie and conversation, he was suspicious even of friends (especially male friends), distrustful, always wary of being exploited. Not until the final summer of his life did he achieve ease and serenity, a ‘golden summer’ when he had at last acquired a wife and home and reigned supreme as ‘the Irish poet’, surrounded by admiring and protective courtiers, among them many of the upcoming generation of Irish poets.
No biography was undertaken during Patrick Kavanagh’s lifetime because he was so secretive about his personal affairs that he refused to co-operate. When he learned that Alan Warner was contemplating a biography in 1964 and was contacting family and friends looking for information, he, in his own words, ‘nearly went up a lamp-post’. Subjected to a barrage of insults and threats, Warner withdrew and it was not until 1973 that he brought out the first book-length study of Kavanagh’s oeuvre, Clay is the Word.
At one time Kavanagh thought that his younger friend, the poet, short story writer and academic John Jordan, would be his Boswell but Jordan confined himself to writing perceptive literary criticism of his friend’s work. In 1951 Kavanagh had envisaged that his biographer would be another younger friend, Anthony Cronin, and he playfully fantasised that the book would be entitled He Was God. Cronin did include a memoir of Kavanagh, as he had known him during the 1950s, in Dead as Doornails (1976). For many of Kavanagh’s contemporaries, this memoir is the most true to life of all the portraits of the poet. John Ryan, founding editor of Envoy and one of Kavanagh’s circle from 1949, recorded their friendship and preserved many of the well-honed anecdotes that circulated about the poet’s doings and sayings in Remembering How We Stood (1975), an account of ‘Bohemian Dublin at the mid-century’.
Peter Kavanagh, who had been collecting his brother’s published writings since the 1940s and preserving his letters, used this material as the basis of the first book-length biography, Sacred Keeper (1979). Writing ‘as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist’, Peter Kavanagh also combined biography with autobiography by quoting extensively from his brother’s first-person and fictionalised versions of events. Recently, as the present biography was going to press, Peter Kavanagh issued a second biography, Patrick Kavanagh, A Life Chronicle, which includes further material on the early history of the Kavanagh family and emphasises the key role he himself played in Patrick’s life.
A major difference between the foregoing memoirs and biographies and this biography is that I did not know Patrick Kavanagh. In fact, I met him only once, very briefly, as a child when I approached him for his autograph. However, I do not believe that this lack of personal acquaintance disqualifies me from chronicling his life history. Few biographers are on daily intimate terms with their subject from birth to death. Had I known Kavanagh at only one time of his life, I might have been tempted to confuse the genres of memoir and biography, relying on personal knowledge rather than consulting archival sources and seeking the testimony of other contemporaries. There are many versions of the self, and Kavanagh projected a different image to different people even during the same period.
Almost half a century after he typed the lines
If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me in Baggot Street
And what I was like to know . . .
I set such enquiries in train, extending their scope to include a diverse range of people who encountered him or knew him at one or more phases of his life. Many of my respondents considered themselves privileged to have spent some time in his company or to have been his intimates for a number of months or years. They remember him as a wonderful talker, a humorous companion, a man who had a great curiosity about the world, a zest for life and an enormous capacity for enjoyment, a ‘pure straight’ individual who could not abide pretension and phoniness; above all, as a magnetic personality radiating energy and intelligence. Others had more mixed reactions, usually some rueful recollection of how ‘unpoetic’ he seemed: cunning or curmudgeonly and, especially in later years, drunken and savagely rude. John McGahern has summarised the complex nature of Kavanagh’s wayward genius as it appeared to him and to the painter Patrick Swift in the late 1950s: ‘a mixture of child and monster, fool and knave’. Kavanagh was not universally loved, as he acknowledges in the ballad ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’. While some contemporaries ‘disliked his air’, one group who admired his ‘airs’ in both senses were the young Dublin-based poets who began publishing in the 1960s: Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett, Brendan Kennelly, James Liddy, Brian Lynch, Macdara Woods.
One of my difficulties in reconstructing Kavanagh’s life story is a problem familiar to biographers of twentieth-century figures: the subject’s preference for telephoning rather than writing letters. Though Kavanagh loved receiving letters and hated bank holidays because there was no post, he generally wrote only on business matters or to beg a favour. Most of the extant letters are addressed to editors, publishers or promoters, such as Seumas O’Sullivan, John Gawsworth, Frank O’Connor, Harold and Maurice Macmillan, John Betjeman. A few are written to patrons, to Archbishop McQuaid for instance, or to a sympathetic woman friend, as in the case of Sheila O’Grady. There is also a batch of letters to his sister Celia, a nun in England, written from Inniskeen
on his own and his mother’s behalf in the 1930s.
The bulk of Kavanagh’s surviving correspondence was sent to his brother Peter between late 1946 and 1965. His brother, who lived in the United States for most of this period, sometimes served as North American literary agent and once as publisher; transatlantic telephone calls to Peter (though he made a few) would have been prohibitively expensive. Yet, as a record of his life from 1946, these letters to his brother are an unreliable source. While they are quite informative about his writing and his job-hunting, they tell us little about Kavanagh’s day-to-day life and, when they do, sometimes reveal only what he called ‘the surface irritations of the moment’. These letters reflect little credit on Kavanagh, too often revealing him as exploitative, vindictive and self-absorbed. He has little good to say of anyone and is given to badmouthing friends and acquaintances whom he had turned against temporarily or permanently. The names of many of those who cared for him, supported him emotionally and financially, and promoted his work over three decades in Dublin and London, hardly feature in this correspondence, unless he had quarrelled with them. For five years he wrote to Peter from the various addresses at which he was living with Katherine Moloney, without revealing her name or her role in his life, and he did not divulge his marriage plans.
Kavanagh had the knack of making the man or woman he was confiding in at any one time appear to be his only friend, rescuer or patron, the only one who mattered to him. On one occasion he referred to his brother Peter as the ‘sacred keeper’ of his ‘sacred conscience’, hence the title of the first biography. It has been upsetting for some of the people I interviewed to learn that he was more promiscuous with his confidences and his affections than he pretended. I suspect that this apparent duplicity was due to emotional dependency, that ‘gaping need’ to be loved and provided for which led him to lean on powerful and influential men and to transform women friends, twenty or more years younger than himself, into surrogates for his own wise and managerial mother.
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