Holding the handles of a rusty old plough that was drawn by a kicking mare, I made a poem . . . I could not help smiling when I thought of the origin of my ploughman ecstasy. A kicking mare in a rusty old plough tilling the land for turnips.
Poetry here depends on deception, and he is quite self-congratulatory that he has fobbed off editors and readers with a prettified version of reality.
His favourite roles in his 1930s’ poems are those of naif, fool, dreamer, ‘unschooled rustic’, poor man and, above all, poet. A recurrent subject is the poet’s lonely pursuit of his vocation and the stance is self-justifying, self-consoling, self-pitying. A frequent pose is one of straining after some abstraction — wisdom, beauty, truth — sometimes imaged as a star (‘The Chase’, ‘A Star’, ‘Blind Dog’). Images of yearning and unfulfilment proliferate: he hungers for ‘the wisdom that grows/In the other lands; ‘the potion of charm’ is always ‘out of reach’. Poems that centre on his sense of personal or literary inadequacy — anxieties about poverty, lack of conventional education, local reputation as an oddity — often take the form of compensatory fantasies in which the unschooled rustic knows more than scholars (‘Poet’); the despised ballad-maker is Christ in disguise (‘Street Corner Christ’). Poverty is presented defensively as a voluntary or liberating condition (‘Ascetic’, ‘Soft Ease’). Most of his 1930s’ poetry is either smug or whining, and it is always solemn.
Patrick’s attempt to make life imitate art or to read his own life through literary lenses in the 1930s is evident from his accounts of a love affair at that time. He had been very susceptible to the charms of pretty women from puberty and regularly fell in love twice a year, never declaring his feelings, merely worshipping from afar. In autumn 1934 he eventually embarked on a courtship of sorts when he ‘fell very badly’ for May Crawley, a local woman about twelve years younger than himself who had been one of Celia’s friends. Any factual details about his conduct of this romance were recorded in letters to Celia or a draft version of The Green Fool and not in his poetry.45 She was not ‘pretty to objective eyes’ — grey-green slit eyes, straight black hair, a very wide mouth and flat feet — but she was slim, and he liked his women slim. What attracted him was that she was ‘young and gay and innocent’, his opposite, a ‘butterfly’ who hadn’t ‘the slightest interest in poetry’. He persuaded Josie to accompany him three nights a week to Irish classes in Drumlusty, at which May was a fellow pupil. At first this was a willed romance and he deliberately fanned the early sparks, but once it had ignited he lost emotional control. He was very ‘mooney’ when the infatuation was at its most intense in spring 1935 and did not visit Dublin for three months, preferring to hang about Inniskeen on the off chance of exchanging a few words with or even catching a glimpse of his beloved. Val Hanratty also fancied May Crawley, and they discussed her for hours on end, referring to her as ‘the House’ to foil eavesdroppers.
May had no interest whatever in poetry, yet he courted her as a poet, sending her anonymous letters signed ‘Your own lover’ in black capitals and including quotations from love poems: Samuel Ferguson’s ‘O I’d wed you without herds’ and W. S. Landor’s ‘There is a mountain and a wood between us.’ His approach to the romance was self-consciously literary; he continually represented his feelings through quotation and allusion, as if he were discovering or inventing his own emotions by drawing on those of other poets. Yeats’s words about Maud Gonne (misquoted)
Dear God! if she’d but turn her head
You’d know the folly of being comforted
articulated his own feelings for May at this time, he wrote to Celia. One gathers that his affections were not reciprocated, since he appears to have combed the anthologies in search of poems about unrequited love.
In letters to Celia he packaged the love affair in literary wrappers, sending her both his own love poems and others he found relevant to his situation. His own poems consistently present him as a poet in love, rather than as a man in love; he prides himself on experiencing an emotion familiar to many of his literary predecessors. ‘To M’ begins:
I think to cure my love pain
By recalling the many poets who have been
Spliced on the ecstatic blade . . .
Keats to his Fanny Brawne of dream mated
And Dante a nobler Beatrice won
And Mangan calling to his Nameless One
And the pensive poets of the Gael. . . .
In ‘Mary’, which also dates from this time, he again perceives failure in love as a literary phenomenon:
Her name was poet’s grief before
Mary, the saddest name
In all the litanies of love
And all the books of fame.
I think of poor John Clare’s beloved
And know the blessed pain . . .
The effect in both poems is self-inflationary and even self-congratulatory.
His mother was of the opinion that he was deliberately romanticising the situation: his perception of May’s unattainability was entirely imaginary and she would have accepted with alacrity had he proposed to her. He was carrying on like a courtly love troubadour, fantasising that his beloved was unattainable, when in reality it was he who had no intention of marrying her. The recognised courtship code in the Monaghan countryside, according to Patrick, was that if a man approached a woman as a farmer, he was looking for a wife; if he approached her as ‘a country boy’, he was looking for fun and excitement; any woman who was not a fool could tell the difference. Patrick’s courtship of May was in the ‘country boy’ category. He was 30 years old but capitalising on the tradition that men remained boys until they took over the farm from their parents.
From first to last the affair seems to have been as much a construct as one of his own poems and as little grounded in actuality — he was indulging in a poetic experience of love. At the beginning of 1936 when the romance was fully behind him, he was still experimenting with refracting the experience through poetry, this time a translation from the Irish:
O woman shapely as the swan
On your account I shall not die . . .
He identified with the speaker in this poem, who was ‘in a cunning house hard-reared’. All in all he was pleased with himself that he had at last experienced a love affair, feeling the episode would stand him in good stead as a writer.
There were several short-lived romances in the 1930s, some of which inspired him to verse. He wrote a poem ‘To Rita O’Dwyer’, and ‘I Heard You Laugh’ is dedicated to E. S. (‘Your laugh was a fantastic poem in many books’.)46 His principal muse in 1936/37 was Anna Quinn, who inspired at least three poems, ‘Anna Quinn’ and the two polished sonnets, ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’ and ‘In the Same Mood’; she also had an unpublished collection named after her, To Anna Quinn.47 An untitled manuscript poem jocularly recalls one of their tiffs:
Anna contra mundi
Won upon a Wednesday
Lost upon a Sunday —
Patrick contra mundi . . .
Another manuscript poem at this period, ‘A Woman’s Word’, voices his utter dejection when Anna or one of her successors turned him down:
‘Never’ you said
And I went back the road and wept
And wished to be dead
Because I’d kept an empty tryst . . .48
Later he would confide to a friend that he was so sexually frustrated in his twenties and thirties, he was driven to grope his own sisters, not, it seems, actual molestation, just some contact with female clothes and female flesh.49 His first full sexual relationship was with a 15-year-old convent schoolgirl, ‘her plump young body tantalizing in a gym dress’. His later sexual history would indicate that this must have occurred while he was still living in Inniskeen. The girl confessed to him that she had already been sexually violated by a priest; as a consequence her self-esteem was very low and she thought herself unworthy of any man’s love. Patrick’s first reactions were indignation and anger on his own behalf, rather t
han the girl’s. He had been indoctrinated to prize female virginity and he did so to the extent that he wanted a woman whose ‘maidenbloom’ had been preserved for him; he was furious to find that his chosen girl had already been deflowered by a supposed celibate:
Why could he not contain himself within
The coffinbox of listened into sin . . .
This sense of outrage did not prevent him taking over where the priest had left off, albeit with some sense that he was being short-changed:
I took what he had left without a stitch
Of lining and cried sexual-salted tears . . .
The affair eventually ended badly, with the girl sneering at him, presumably at his lack of sexual expertise.
He did not refer to the episode in his autobiographical writings until quite late, when he included it in an unpublished and untitled poem.50 At 15, the girl in the case was jail bait, and since she attended a nearby secondary school, she was quite traceable. Patrick Maguire in The Great Hunger toys with the temptation of groping innocent schoolgirls, but decides it is too risky. However, the story of the priest who sexually assaulted a schoolgirl and got away with it is smuggled into the slightly later poem, Lough Derg (1942). One of the Lough Derg pilgrims in the poem, a Franciscan priest, has had sex with an innocent schoolgirl three times, only three because
Three times finds all
The notes of body’s madrigal.
By 1936 Kavanagh had achieved a literary reputation in Dublin far in excess of his slender output or his slight, undeveloped talent. This reputation, which preceded and anticipated his later achievement, was based on the vogue for peasantry in the wake of the Literary Revival. In the 1930s he was perceived as an incarnation of a Literary Revival ideal, a peasant poet, a singer of the bogs and, as such, a remarkable phenomenon. Ironically, in view of Daniel Corkery’s classification of the ascendancy greats, Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, as ‘exotic’ rather than indigenous writers, Kavanagh, on Corkery’s definition, the quintessentially indigenous writer — small farmer, Mass-goer, football player — was to urban eyes an exotic. Though various peasant stereotypes were common in literary circles, these were confined to the page or the stage, and an actual, living poetic peasant was a curiosity.
It seemed to the bemused Kavanagh that everyone was trying to climb on the peasant bandwagon.51 ‘Peasant quality’ had become such a commonplace criterion in assessing proposed Abbey Theatre plays that it was abbreviated to ‘pq’. Yeats was turning to country personae and ballad forms to give his verse a robust directness. A Folklore Commission had been set up in 1935 and field workers were busily compiling an archive of folk songs, folk tales and country customs. F. R. Higgins in Arable Holdings (1933) had begun writing rougher, more energetic country verses, modelled on Yeats’s later ballads, and he collaborated with Yeats in issuing a series of broadside ballads from the Cuala Press in 1935. Frank O’Connor was translating Irish songs and poems.
The yardstick against which poetic ‘pq’ was measured in 1930s’ Dublin was Padraic Colum’s 1907 collection, Wild Earth. Poems like ‘An Old Woman of the Roads’, ‘A Drover’, ‘A Poor Scholar of the Forties’ and, especially, ‘The Plougher’, had passed into the national repertoire. ‘The Plougher’, in which the poet observes a ploughman at sunset ‘standing lone and bowed earthward’ and attributes to him thoughts of Pan or Wotan or Dana, was the peasant poem par excellence, as well known as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Kavanagh the farmer-poet was conflated with Colum’s creation, an elemental peasant with lofty thoughts, and ‘Ploughman’, inevitably compared or associated with ‘The Plougher’ by commentators, became his flagship poem. To sustain his role as peasant-poet, Kavanagh only needed to make the occasional reference to trees, birds, weather, seeds or soil in his verse; no display of more specific agricultural imagery was expected.
When The Irish Times published a series of four of his poems in 1935, ‘To a Child’ (23 February), ‘Fear’ (24 April), ‘After May’ (15 June) and ‘No Charlatan am I’ (24 August), the accompanying photograph he supplied pictures him as a clear-eyed, clean-shaven, neat young man, with a candid, trusting look. It was not how his fellow writers saw him.
An article by Seán O’Faoláin on ‘Irish Poetry since the War’ in the London Mercury that April, for instance, portrays him primarily as a farmer-poet. As he ‘lumbers’ through Dublin’s streets, he looks like a farmer who has come to the city ‘to buy seeds or implements for his fields’; yet O’Faoláin knows that his mind is ‘aflame with images, like Colum’s Plougher, of Pan or Wotan or Dana’. In all his poems ‘it is his own world of the fields that he transmutes into magic’. In support of this statement, O’Faoláin quotes ‘The Sower’. If anything is clear from this dreadful poem, it is that Kavanagh’s years of work in the fields have contributed nothing to it; he is interested only in the symbolic aspect of sowing and harrowing.
Though he had not yet published a collection, Kavanagh was invited to read on Radio Athlone, the Irish national station, as part of a series in which Irish poets read from their own work and at 9.20 p.m. on 20 February 1936 he made his début as a radio performer. Predictably the Irish Press presented him on this occasion as a poet in the Padraic Colum mode, purveying ‘traditional poems of the soil’, ‘a poetry full of the Irish countryside’. Listeners to this first broadcast would not have had the benefit of observing Kavanagh’s peasant appearance and would have been largely reliant on his harsh south Monaghan accent to supply the rural dimension.
At the radio station, Seamus Hughes, the programme-maker, was another of those more struck by his peasant appearance than by his verse. He was particularly fascinated by the poet’s hands — huge, ingrained with clay-dirt and covered in scratches. ‘Cutting a hedge I was’, the nervous broadcaster explained.52 The occasion was symbolic of the intersection of the two parts of Kavanagh’s life, in transition between farming and poetry, sitting in a radio studio carrying the scars of the brambles he had been cutting earlier in the week.
For several years he had been attempting to publish a volume of poems. Frank O’Connor had been entrusted with a collection and showed it to Æ, who was disappointed. ‘They’re fake’, he told O’Connor.53 Nevertheless, Æ’s friend Helen Waddell, a poet herself as well as a reader for Constable, was roped in to advise on placing the poems in 1934. She was unable to find a publisher. In 1935 Séan O’Faoláin mentioned in his London Mercury article that Kavanagh had a ‘tidy’ collection ready, in the hope that some publisher would come forward. None did. The following year, buoyed up by his radio broadcast and the Irish Press’s billing of him as ‘one of the most brilliant of the younger poets’, he sent a collection to O’Connor’s London publisher, Macmillan, on 2 March. This time he struck lucky.54
The firm was actively seeking young poets for its list and to this end had launched a series in 1934 entitled ‘Contemporary Poets’, priced at one shilling. Poets included in the series were Christopher Hassall, Elizabeth Belloc, Elizabeth Daryrush, E. H. W. Meyerstein and R. C. Trevelyan. With the exception of ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ and ‘Tinker’s Wife’, Kavanagh’s collection was rather old-fashioned for the mid-1930s, but Macmillan’s young poets were only chronologically ‘contemporary’ because the firm’s principal reader was Jack Squire, whose own poetry was at least a generation out of date and who favoured neo-Georgian verse.55 So Kavanagh’s poetry was considered suitable for inclusion in the series and an offer of publication was made on 9 April. The terms were £5 advance on a royalty of 10 per cent and the offer was accompanied by a vague promise that at some time in the future it might be possible to publish an enlarged collection of the poems ‘in the usual cloth-bound volume at a higher price’. Kavanagh accepted on 14 April. Predictably the book was to be entitled Ploughman and Other Poems.
This slim volume of thirty-one brief poems appeared in September 1936. The collection might euphemistically be described as eclectic; individually the poems were quite polished, but the book as a whole lacked any sense o
f a characteristic preoccupation, style, form or approach. For the most part the poems were the five-finger exercises of a poet whose models kept changing. Kavanagh’s ambition had outrun his achievement. He knew that a book would give his reputation a solidity that no amount of magazine publication ever could and there is no doubt that the fact of having a book to his name, rarer then among aspirant Irish poets than it is now, was a good career move. Praised and encouraged on all sides, he simply did not realise how weak much of his work actually was.
He made the front page of the Irish Press on 12 September, the day after publication, under the headline ‘Ireland has a New Poet’. Peadar O’Curry, who cycled out from Dundalk to interview him for the Press, has left a sympathetic portrait of him as he appeared on this momentous day: a handsome young man, ‘dark-haired and tanned by the sun and wind’, the most flattering description of him to date. Already he was knocking a few years off his age, giving O’Curry to understand that he was still in his twenties, whereas he was actually almost 32. The most remarkable fact about himself he had to relate was that he had tramped all Ireland — Kerry and Wicklow, Donegal and Connemara. The image of himself as a carefree tramp was one he liked to propagate at this time. It appears again in the sparse ‘Biographical Notes’ he supplied for Maurice Wollman’s Poems of Twenty Years a year later. He struck O’Curry as a mixture of practicality and poeticality, his feet on the soil, his poetry soaring up from the fields — again the ‘Plougher’ stereotype surfaces. Even on publication day he was more concerned with local reaction than with the Dublin or London reception of his verse. He told O’Curry that he had hitherto kept his writing a secret from his neighbours, who thought him a lazybones, applying some lines from Yeats’s poem ‘Adam’s Curse’ to his own circumstances:
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 13
