Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  In the fifty years before Patrick Kavanagh’s birth, Inniskeen was gradually shifting from an oral Irish to a literate English culture. Statistics quoted in the Board of Education Reports for 1903, the year before he was born, show that illiteracy in County Monaghan had decreased from 51 per cent in 1841 to less than 14 per cent in 1901 — literacy indicating the ability to write and read English. Patrick’s own grandfather had contributed to this shift from an oral Irish to an English print culture. Proximity to and a rail connection with Carrickmacross and with the busy port town of Dundalk would also have hastened the establishment of English as the local vernacular. Many of the sons and daughters of Inniskeen farmers found employment in Dundalk factories or in the railway works. So many of them worked for the Great Northern Railway Company that it was said one had to be from ‘the village’ to be employed there.15 The First World War provided a fresh impetus towards literacy; parents became more insistent on their children’s regular attendance at school because they wanted them to be able to read aloud from the newspapers. Patrick Kavanagh grew up in a parish where monolingual Irish speakers were very few in number, usually quite old and something of a curiosity. The last Inniskeen person to have learned Irish from the cradle, Dan Tuite, was born in 1874.16 In later life Patrick Kavanagh would maintain that the vernacular of Ireland was English and he was highly critical of government policies directed at reviving the Irish language as a vernacular.17

  Whatever the official figures on literacy might indicate, Patrick, himself a print-junkie from his teenage years, passed his childhood (outside the schoolroom) and much of his early manhood in a largely oral culture where entertaining talk was what counted, interspersed by the occasional song or his father’s melodeon-playing. Gossip about neighbours’ doings, especially their misfortunes, anecdotes about the local gentry, the Plunkett-Kennys, ghost stories, tales of maladies, strange healing powers and cures — such were the topics neighbours rehearsed on rainy afternoons and long winter evenings in the Kavanagh kitchen. James uneasily straddled the two cultures: a newspaper reader with an appetite for facts and information, he had a respect for book knowledge in medical and veterinary matters; yet he had grown up in a bilingual home and in later life spent his evenings surrounded by credulous neighbours who told tales of fairies, marvels and magic cures. In The Green Fool, Patrick presents his father as a sceptic, undermining local superstitions about the healing properties of certain spells and verbal formulas by appearing to go along with the belief and then torpedoing it. He himself was credited with having a cure for jaundice. This was a prescription he had come upon in a medical book, but it didn’t do to let clients know that. They wanted mysterious gifts, not mere book knowledge. It would also have been bad for business to diverge too far from cultural norms. James was not an out and out rationalist, of course. A practising Catholic who believed in life after death, he maintained that his mother had spoken to him after her death and he made a private pact with Patrick that if he were immortal, he would return from the dead to let him know. Patrick took the precaution of cancelling the pact when his father was dying, just in case. The Kavanagh children were more influenced by their father’s attitudes in medical and veterinary matters than by the prescientific mentality still prevalent in the locality. Despite growing up in a parish where folk medicine flourished, the three eldest daughters, Annie, Mary and Sissie, became qualified nurses and a further two, Tessie and Josie, started on a nursing career.

  The Kavanagh kitchen, overpopulated when family and visitors were assembled, was a cosy place, softly lit and warmed by the large open hearth, where a coal fire always burned. In winter the children wrote their school exercises by the light of an oil-lamp placed in the centre of the table. The young Kavanaghs were a lively, intelligent bunch and, cooped up in the small space of the family kitchen, they teased and taunted one another and bickered. While the two eldest girls, Annie and Mary, were miniature adults, surrogate parents or home helps from an early age, their younger siblings, Sissie, Patrick, Lucy, Tessie and Josie, conducted short-lived feuds, ganging up in temporary and shifting alliances, name-calling and trading insults. All the children had nicknames: Annie was Pig, Mary (Wheeler), Sissie (Orderer), Patrick (Gam or Long Nose), Lucy (Snipe), Tessie (Bull), Josie (Martha), Celia (Cricket or Witch) and Peter (Good Boy). There was particular sibling rivalry between Patrick and Lucy, the sister next in line. The two were still teasingly insulting one another in verse in a Family Commonplace Book compiled between 1923 and 1925, when Lucy was in her late teens and Patrick was moving into his twenties. Josie at 13 also came in for some teasing in verse from Patrick, being described as ‘a stout little girl with a very fat face’, ‘sour as gall’, ‘proud as a peacock’ who ‘cries at the least thing’, though the insults are tempered by occasional compliments and the tone is affectionate. Something of the fun of family life and the good-natured sniping between the children is captured in their Commonplace Book, where their Mucker home is comically designated by Lucy as ‘Bog View House’.

  The first breach in the family circle occurred when Patrick was aged 10. At this point the 16-year-old Annie left home to go into domestic service for two years in faraway Roscommon.18 Celia was only a year old and the youngest, Peter, had not yet been born. Celia may not have been quite accurate in her recollection that the only time the entire family was assembled was on the occasion of their father’s funeral,19 but this perception reflects the fragmentation of large families at a time when children began migrating or emigrating in search of work around the age of 14.

  Attendance at primary school had been compulsory in Ireland since 1891 and all the Kavanagh children were pupils at their disgraced grandfather’s old school in Kednaminsha. Patrick’s education began at the age of 4 in June 1909 when he and his 6-year-old sister, Sissie, set off together. It was almost the end of the school year, but their parents wanted them out of the way: Bridget already had a toddler, Lucy, and a baby, Tessie, to look after and the extension to the house was being built.

  At school Patrick was in trouble from the beginning. On his very first day another pupil spilt ink on his hands and when he was ordered outdoors to wash them, he wandered off in search of water and was not missed for some time. His teacher was the young Miss Agnew, who had to report his disappearance to the principal, Miss Cassidy, and the ensuing brouhaha did not endear him to either teacher. Miss Cassidy concluded that he had made his way home and dispatched his elder sister Mary to fetch him back, thus alerting his parents to his disappearance. Some of the older pupils were sent to scour the surrounding countryside, just in case, and they came upon him lying under a railway bridge, unaware that he was lost and unconcerned about being found. Meanwhile, his mother had arrived at the school and was berating Miss Cassidy in most ungenteel language. Both women were so relieved when the errant pupil turned up that they immediately patched up their differences, but it was an inauspicious start for the future poet whose schooldays were not to be among his happiest.

  At school as at home, the dominant figures in Patrick’s youthful life, with the exception of his father, were all female; he was also surrounded by female siblings, some like Annie and Mary taking on the role of surrogate parents. In later life, as we shall see, his attitude towards women would veer between a sense of his superiority as a male, an expectation that women would nurture, support and admire him, and a concept of maternalism that included domination and disciplining. At home his bossy mother made his father responsible for the infliction of corporal punishment, but at school he was regularly beaten by women and deeply resented it. When he was writing The Green Fool, Miss Bridget Agnew, the junior mistress who taught in Kednaminsha from 1902 to 1913, was still living in the area, as were many of her relatives, so he glossed over his early school experience and concentrated his ire on the deceased principal of Kednaminsha school, the formidable Julia Cassidy. She had been principal since 1877 and had taught the parents of many of his fellow pupils. Since neither James nor Bridget had been schooled by
her, they were not as in awe of her as many of their neighbours.

  Kavanagh remembered her as a cruel disciplinarian and an ugly woman — ‘a big woman with a heavy coarse face’ — this unflattering description a belated male revenge for her cruelty. As a toddler he had first sighted her walking to school with a bundle of yellow canes under her arm and ever afterwards associated her with punishment rather than learning. As late as 1962 when the school burnt down, he referred to her as ‘the one and only cane-swinger’.20 Julia Cassidy was within seven years of retirement when Patrick went to school, but age had not mellowed her. He never forgave her the physical abuse which made his school life a nightmare and turned him against all interest in furthering his education. Seven or eight hard slaps of the cane on each hand at least once a day was commonplace, often accompanied by a box on the ear or a kick on the behind. Miss Cassidy’s regime may have been harsher than that of some other teachers, but corporal punishment was an essential ingredient of education in most Irish schools. It was an age which believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child: the world was a tough place and it was considered a mistake to indulge children and turn them into softies, ill-equipped for the stern struggle that awaited them as adults. By the standards of the time, Julia Cassidy, though she had not attended a teacher training college, was considered remarkably proficient; indeed, so highly was she rated by the inspectors that she was awarded the much coveted Carlyle and Blake award for pedagogical excellence in the month that Patrick was born.

  What particularly chagrined him was that in his own estimation he was a bright pupil, yet somehow he could never manage to have his intelligence recognised or appreciated by his teachers. In a system largely based on rote-learning, there was not much play for lively intelligence, and his brightness was of the unorthodox variety that did not appeal to those who privileged conformity above creativity. Yet he had a retentive memory and learning off by heart came easily to him, whether it was a long poem or the Latin responses for serving Mass, which he could patter off at age 6. He had such an aptitude for arithmetic that he searched out arithmetical problems to occupy his mind while he walked the roads as a child. Nevertheless, this talent went unremarked by his teacher. In the subject where one might have expected him to excel, essay-writing, he appears to have been too cowed or too unawakened to stray outside the parameters of convention. When he did experiment with the use of subjunctives, such speculative tendencies were checked by red ink underlinings, and one of his rare ventures into ‘poetic English’, the description of the sun as ‘a blazen orb’, was corrected to ‘blazing’. The only anticipation of the mature Kavanagh’s point of view occurs in an essay on ‘Gardens’ where he writes that ‘the lover of nature . . . can see beauty in everything. He can see the finger of God even in a nettle.’21

  A few fellow pupils and his own younger sister Lucy went on to secondary school from Kednaminsha. The question did not even arise in Patrick’s case. On only one occasion during his schooldays did he cover himself in glory. This was during a school inspection in the First World War years when, thanks to the conversations in the cobbler’s workshop and his reading of the newspapers, his knowledge of the generals’ names on both sides was such that the inspector said he should be appointed a colonel. So undervalued was he for the rest of the time that he was not even promoted to the top class, the sixth,22 and, like his sister Sissie, loitered for two years in fifth class whiling away the time until he was old enough to leave school. On the strength of her primary school education, Sissie, also labelled a dunce by Miss Cassidy, would train and qualify as a nurse in England.

  By the time he was reaching his teens, Patrick was becoming increasingly bored by school. From his first years he had sat in one or other of the two classrooms with the door opened between them listening to his own or other classes chanting addition and multiplication tables, poems, the names of countries, rivers and famous battles, and he knew most of the curriculum off by heart. Accustomed to joining in during adult conversation in the workshop at home, the emphasis on repetition and rote-learning, the absence of debate and discussion wearied him. And, of course, there was also the peer pressure to look on academic excellence as sissy: manliness demanded physical prowess, skill at wrestling or football; neatness, conformity and goody-goodiness were all right for girls. His younger sister Lucy, herself a model pupil, records in the Family Commonplace Book that ‘at Kednaminsha school he gave much trouble by disobedience’. It was ‘not done’ for boys to like school, so it was only in later years that he confessed to the occasional pleasure he felt when seated comfortably near a warm fire, sniffing the fresh canvas smell of a new school satchel23 or how in May he loved to see the school fireplace filled with lilac, for flowers indoors were a novelty in that hard-pressed society.24 That he actually enjoyed poetry was a guilty secret. Like his peers, Patrick fidgeted, looked for diversions, blotted copybooks, inscribed the desk with his penknife — and he mitched.

  Workaholic James, who had been a family breadwinner since his late teens, was irritated by Patrick’s feckless, irresponsible ways, and thought that he was rearing a ne’er do well, a lazy, idle, awkward fellow with a bent for devilment. When a customer or neighbour did not succeed in deflecting him, he walloped his son for his misdeeds with a disused black umbrella or a strap, in an endeavour to make him better behaved or more industrious. Bridget sometimes intervened to save her son, sometimes ordered the beatings. Despite the cobbler’s advanced age and small stature, he continued to lash out at his son until he was well into his teens and towering over him. In later years Patrick still resented those floggings; nevertheless he in turn beat his much younger brother.25

  With hindsight, the poet attributed the begrudging, ungenerous atmosphere of his upbringing to the economic insecurity generated by the Famine. Harsh words of criticism from parents and teachers, rather than praise or encouragement, were the norm. There was little cherishing of the older Kavanagh children, in particular; the younger ones would fare better. Told that he was ugly-looking, big-nosed, humpy, Patrick grew up lacking in self-confidence. He was later convinced that such undermining of the young sprang from bad land and poverty and that ‘courage, gaiety, wisdom and so forth derive from the right kind of soil’.26 Yet in his heart he knew that, despite the lack of outward displays of affection, the beatings and the daily tirades of complaint, he was caught in a net of love, and that his good Catholic mother would cheerfully cut the Pope’s throat in his defence.27

  Sometimes Patrick’s absences from school were legitimate, for farmwork took priority over lessons. His parents may have insisted that he notify his teacher about these authorised absences on family business so that they could keep track of his truancy. The note he sent to Miss Cassidy on 26 September 1917 has survived:

  Dear Teacher,

  The cause of my absence from school yesterday was because we were drawing home the corn and I was sorry I could not attend my lessons.

  I remain

  your fond pupil

  P. Kavanagh28

  He also resorted to religion as an excuse to escape the brutality of school, piously making the devotion known as ‘the nine Fridays’ over and over. This devotion, which entailed having one’s confession heard on the first Thursday of each month and attending Mass and communion the following morning, gave him an excuse to leave school early on the Thursday and to arrive late on Friday. There was the added bonus that the pious communicants were treated with special deference by Miss Cassidy and were unlikely to be slapped for a few hours. In his thirties he was grateful that he had ‘made the nine Fridays’ as a schoolboy, since the Church taught that those who had once done so would repent their sins before they died: the idea that he had taken out an insurance policy against his future salvation appealed to his need for security.

  He had made his first confession at about the age of 6. There was no set age then to make one’s first confession, as there would be later, and he entered the wooden wardrobe-like structure in the church out o
f curiosity. His confessor, Father McElroy, the parish priest, was very taken with the precocious youngster and invited him to become an altar boy. He was a kindly, easy-going priest who may have served as a model for Father Mat in the long unpublished poem ‘Why Sorrow?’, and in the shorter lyric, ‘Father Mat’, later quarried from it. It was an honour to be asked to serve Mass and James taught his son the Latin responses. While Patrick easily mastered the Latin words, he was a clumsy child and none too graceful in his movements about the altar. The verdict of some Mass-goers on his performance was that he behaved as if he were breaking stones, an insulting allusion to his great-uncle Michael’s profession. He was kept on as an altar boy, however, possibly because the new curate, Father Pat McConnon, who arrived in the parish in 1911, was so dreaded by all the children that it was difficult to find anyone to serve his Masses.

  In June 191329 Patrick received the sacrament of confirmation, a religious rite of passage that permitted him to serve as godfather to his new baby brother in 1916, despite the fact that he was only 12 years old. In 1915 an ex-rector of Salamanca, Father Bernard Maguire, took over as parish priest. ‘Salamanca Barney’, as his parishioners nicknamed him, was a noted preacher, and Patrick, frequently present on the altar during his sermons, ingested the style of pulpit oratory he was to reproduce in Tarry Flynn. Father Maguire cut a stylish figure, driving around the parish in his pony and trap, the most sophisticated man on Patrick’s horizon, well educated, well travelled, supremely self-confident.30 He was the model for Father Markey in Tarry Flynn, the priest with a reputation for erudition, who refuses to respect the aspirations of the gauche, young autodidact, Tarry, and cuts him down to size.