For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set . . .
The martyrs call the world . . .
One of the chief pleasures of publication was that it vindicated him against his belittling neighbours; the victim had turned victor. Eusebius Hanratty recalls that after his book was published Kavanagh became very conceited, ‘full of airs and graces’, and for a time took to wearing a stetson hat to Mass.56
The reviews of Ploughman and Other Poems were quite bruising. Most reviewers found something to praise, yet there was a consensus that the poems were bookish and outdated. Donagh MacDonagh in Ireland Today compared Kavanagh unfavourably with Colum, finding that the poems were too often spoiled by ‘prettiness’ and lacked ‘force’ and ‘vitality’. He praised ‘Inniskeen Road’, but thought the last line marred it. His parting advice to the poet was to ‘read the later Yeats and leave his archaic musings’. The Irish Book Lover found the collection disappointing and some of the poems ‘over-schooled’. The most detailed and most generally perceptive review, by M. J. MacManus, was also highly critical, but it did temper harshness with some real praise. MacManus noted the derivativeness of these ‘slight poems’:
What seems to have happened is that the writer has had his ears filled with voices from other writers and poets, that his fresh, personal experiences have been made dim, and that his world has been made bookish . . . Echoes of the factitious Celtic mysticism of nature come trailing like rags of gaudy gauze.
He liked ‘Ploughman’, ‘March’, ‘A Star’, ‘A Wind’; disliked ‘To a Child’, ‘Mary’, ‘The Old White Goat of Slieve Donard’. The review concluded on a very encouraging note:
There are at least half a dozen poems which are evidence of a highly developed art, an instrument that has been wrought almost to perfection, but that yet wants the deeply lunged strength of voice.57
The Dundalk Examiner, which had once appraised Kavanagh’s prowess on the football field, reviewed his poems on 7 November. Indeed its reviewer Frank Gossip was the only critic, apart from MacDonagh, to praise ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, the best poem in Ploughman. Here for the first time Kavanagh is writing out of his ‘Monaghanness’ and revealing a unique personality in his poetry, as he ponders half-playfully, half-ruefully on the plight of being a young Inniskeen poet. He is allusive rather than derivative, humorously adapting a schoolbook poem (William Cowper’s ‘Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’) to his own particular situation. The language barrier between ‘the wink-and-elbow language’ of his neighbours and the ‘solemn talk’ of the poetic canon, far from intimidating him, is now one of his themes. He also displays an easy mastery of sonnet form, boldly disturbing its decorum from the outset by introducing Billy Brennan’s barn and bicyles. The reviewers who complained of Kavanagh’s imitativeness missed his most innovative poem; it was too new.
6
TOWARDS THE GREEN FOOL
(1936–1937)
The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one’s private soul. The only tolerable simple people are those we have manufactured in our evocative memories . . .
(Envoy, July 1951)
Publication by Macmillan had not left Kavanagh cocksure or even self-confident. The letter accompanying the poems he sent to the Dublin Magazine on 2 November 1936 is oddly diffident. He says he is sending them because he may not write any more for a long time and then contradicts himself by offering to write some others if O’Sullivan doesn’t approve of the current offerings.1 The letter reveals his ambivalence about marketing his verse — getting himself into knots of embarrassment over the transaction and fearing rejection. These November poems included ‘My People’ and ‘Love and Laughter’ which were accepted and appeared in the January/March 1937 issue. The magazine had carried ‘Peasant’ in its January/March 1936 issue and ‘Monaghan Hills’ and ‘Sanctity’ in July/September, so there was no reason to anticipate rejection in November. Indeed the succinct ‘Sanctity’ was one of his best poems to date:
To be a poet and not know the trade,
To be a lover and repel all women;
Twin ironies by which great saints are made,
The agonizing pincer-jaws of Heaven.
Despite a capacity for epigrammatic self-irony, Kavanagh still needed a lot of encouragement; isolation in Inniskeen was denting his literary confidence.
When Leslie Daiken (1912–64), the socialist journalist and poet, asked for a contribution to Goodbye, Twilight, Songs of the Struggle in Ireland (1936), he had to make do with ‘To a Blackbird’, ‘Tinker’s Wife’ and ‘April’, though the anthology aimed at illustrating ‘a movement towards the Left’ in Irish verse. Kavanagh was recruited by Daiken because he personally belonged to a serf class, even if his poetry was apolitical. Such overtures from those who regarded peasantry in the context of a class struggle provoked the first stirrings of a social conscience in Kavanagh. A significant new direction in some of the later 1936 and the 1937 poems is a conscious adoption of the role of peasant spokesman which points the way forward towards his anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment masterpiece, The Great Hunger. In ‘Peasant’ the poet is ‘the representative of those/Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles’. ‘My People’ is a dialogue between a country poet and an urban stranger, in which metropolitan myths about peasant Ireland are harshly dismissed. The outsider conceives of country people romantically as elemental heroes:
Great in despair,
Simple in prayer,
And their hard hands tear
The soil on the rock
Where the plough cannot go.
The poet as native informant disillusions him:
They till their fields and scrape among the stones
Because they cannot be schoolmasters —
They work because judge Want condemns the drones.
Dear stranger, duty is a joke
Among my peasant folk.
Two poems, ‘The Hired Boy’ and ‘Listen’, were sent to the new left-wing journal Ireland Today.2 The first of these briefly anticipates The Great Hunger in its embittered exposé of the constricted, brutalised life of the farm labourer:
He knew what he wanted to know —
How the best potatoes are grown
And how to put flesh on a York pig’s back
And clay on a hilly bone.
And how to be satisfied with the little
The destiny masters give
To the beasts of the tillage country —
To be damned and yet to live.
As yet the role of peasant champion and challenger of Revivalist or metropolitan myths of the peasantry was only one stance among many in Kavanagh’s poetry.
One contributory factor in his occasional debunking of the romantic view of peasantry still prevalent in Irish literary circles may have been an intermittent discontent with his own lot. Fellow writers who visited him in Inniskeen, such as Paul Vincent Carroll, were appalled that the author of Ploughman and Other Poems was still putting in a back-breaking day’s stint in the fields by 1936, instead of having the leisure to cultivate his art. At times he himself felt hard done by, oppressed and unappreciated; at other times the idea of finally abandoning home and farm frightened him, and the familiar routine appeared a refuge instead of a prison. In a 1937 diary he observes rather sententiously:
When a man breaks up the mould in which the first twenty-five years of his life have been shaped he is doing a dangerous thing unless the disintegration is accomplished by marriage.3
Yet he recognised that so long as he remained in Inniskeen he would be primarily a farmer and only a part-time, after-hours writer, a perpetual amateur. Commitment to his art appeared to demand a move to Dublin or London where ‘art, music, letters are the real things’. However, his emotional roots were in Inniskeen. He had the small-farmer’s powerful attachment to the land he had tilled and cared for over the y
ears and, in addition, an aesthete’s attraction to the seasonal beauties of familiar scenes: ‘the excitement of primrose time, the music-filled silence of little fields in March and April’; the distant view of the ‘sun-flecked plains’ of Louth and Meath in May.4
While he sometimes chafed at his mother’s bossy ways, the bond between them had been strengthening since his father’s death. When Peter, the son on whom she doted, left for St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra in 1934, her affections were undividedly centred on Patrick. He might sometimes feel cabined and confined, but he was also cosy and comfortable in the sheltering womb of home. Bridget had said that he could bring in a wife when he turned 35 and the notion of settling down with a woman he loved was not without its appeal. He vacillated, sometimes wishing to repeat his father’s dutiful, responsible, apparently contented life; sometimes longing to break out of the cycle of daily drudgery and make the grand literary gesture of going into exile to become a full-time writer like Joyce or O’Casey.
In fact his departure from home was very gradual: from time to time he took off for a few days or a couple of weeks, hitching around Ireland, leaving the farming chores to Josie, or to his young brother during school or college holidays. Whenever he felt hungry for literary talk, he would scrape together the necessary couple of pounds, take the train to Dublin and trawl the bookshops, cafés and pubs until he met up with some writers. Tenpence paid for a night in an Iveagh Hostel, with breakfast for a further three halfpence. He was at the Abbey for the first night of Carroll’s Shadow and Substance on 25 January 1937 and caught his second glimpse of Yeats, this time sitting half-asleep in the foyer during the interval; again they were not introduced.5 Gradually it was being borne in on him that more than five years of visiting Dublin had done very little to advance his literary career. The publication of Ploughman, so eagerly awaited, had proved a dead end. He had applied unsuccessfully for a few Dublin-based jobs: menial work such as labourer in the Browne and Nolan printing works.6 His secret hope was that some wealthy Dublin patron would pluck him from the fields and offer him a sinecure. Not for the last time in his career he was embittered by what he saw as Dublin’s neglect of his genius. He dismissed it as
. . . a city overrun by patrons of poetry and art who praise the poets and secure the jobs for their own relations. A Government — since — to whom poet, prophet, and imbecile, are persons with votes.7
His sights were now set on London.
Eventually by May 1937 he screwed up the courage to try his luck there. At the beginning of the month the spring sowing was finished and on the first weekend he set out, envisaging only a few weeks’ stay. Peter, who was now teaching in Dundalk, and Josie could keep the farm ticking over in his absence. What motivated him to make the trip just then was George VI’s coronation, scheduled for Wednesday, 12 May. The nationalist and republican fervour of his teenage years had long since evaporated and the coronation promised the carnival atmosphere he relished; it would be, he thought, like a fair day writ large. In fact, the event did not live up to his expectations — he dismissed it in Father Maguire’s phrase as ‘a rendezvous of amadauns’ — and was appalled by the amount of litter on the streets the following day.8
He had travelled to London uninvited and on impulse, armed with no letters of introduction and with only £2.4.0 in his pocket. On arrival he put up at a Rowton House in Camden Town, a depressing experience because the hostel was full of Irish emigrants down on their luck or newly arrived and looking for work, and his pride and sense of his own distinctiveness were offended at being one of many job-seeking Paddies. Several writers whose support he had expected to canvass were out of town for the coronation and not all those in residence were welcoming. His trip to London had been so unpremeditated and so badly planned that he had left a batch of poems with Fred Higgins in Dublin without making any copies. Now he wrote to chivvy Higgins into sending the poems on, hoping to raise a few pounds by selling some to London journals.9
A week after his arrival he was down to his last eighteen pence. So his first literary assignment was to compose six begging letters, among them one to Seumas O’Sullivan, who responded to his Mayday signal by sending £1 on the 20th. He bartered two poems against this advance: ‘Shanco Dubh’ (‘Shancoduff’), which O’Sullivan had previously seen and asked him to send, and ‘The Old Soldier’, an ersatz piece obviously written to cash in on the trendy topic of the Spanish Civil War without taking sides. It was much admired at the time, but ‘Shancoduff’, even in this early version,10 was among the best poems he would ever write and it is to O’Sullivan’s credit that he spotted it.
Shy and thin-skinned though he was, and fearful of rebuff, Kavanagh was a determined ‘networker’. No sooner was he installed at 117 Camden Street than he immediately set about calling on his few contacts in the hope of being given some paying literary work or, at the least, a small loan or a meal. The first writer he targeted was Thomas Moult, who had selected ‘Ploughman’ as one of his Best Poems of 1930. He made the mistake of arriving unannounced at Moult’s Golders Green home before noon; the anthologist, irked by this unexpected interruption of his morning’s work, refused to entertain him. Kavanagh, who was used to having his informal manners indulged by Dublin’s literati, was shocked and upset at Moult’s attitude.
He had also intended calling on John Gawsworth with whom he had corresponded after Ploughman, but met him by chance in Foyle’s, the Charing Cross bookshop. Gawsworth had probably been asked by his friend Seumas O’Sullivan to look out for Kavanagh and recognised him from his accent and from the Dublin editor’s description. They repaired to a café where he promptly endeared himself by lending the Irish poet five shillings.
John Gawsworth was the pen-name and alias of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, a poet whose father’s family, the Armstrongs, were originally from Cork and still drew rent from some cottages there. He was only 25 but had already attained a literary stature far in excess of his years and slight poetic talent. Partly because of his old-fashioned verse, written in regularly rhymed stanzas and using a conventional poetic diction, and partly because of his charm and good looks, he was the darling of an English literary establishment distrustful of clever modernists like T. S. Eliot and the new breed of politically motivated poets such as W. H. Auden.11 Gawsworth was eight years Kavanagh’s junior, but he was a Londoner born and bred and also knew his way round urban literary circles, so he was a useful mentor for the socially inexperienced and wet-behind-the-ears Irish poet. It was probably in Gawsworth’s company that Kavanagh met George Bernard Shaw on 13 June and the following day was introduced to Sean O’Casey.12 Like most initial encounters between obscure and established writers, the meeting made no impression on the latter. Gawsworth and Kavanagh, however, struck up a friendship. An entertaining conversationalist, he had a fund of anecdotes about literary figures of the twenties, and Kavanagh always loved to hear stories about the previous generation. He would later describe Gawsworth as his ‘only literary mate’ in 1938; this was presumably for the sake of the rhyme, since it was in 1937 that they spent most time together.13
Kavanagh’s risky strategy of turning up on a correspondent’s doorstep without notice proved successful in the case of the Northern Irish writer Helen Waddell, who had been consulted about the publication of Ploughman. A respected medieval scholar and translator, she had become a best-selling novelist with the publication of Peter Abelard in 1933. She was also reader and adviser for Constable and had considerable clout in this publishing firm because, in addition to her academic and literary prestige, she was live-in partner to the chairman, Otto Kyllmann. She seems not to have been introduced to Kavanagh at her friend Æ’s funeral, but when his protégé unexpectedly knocked on the door of 32 Primrose Hill Road on 20 May, her welcome was warm and genuine.14
Kavanagh brought out women’s maternal side; even younger women would frequently end up taking care of him, and Helen Waddell was five years his senior. He leaned on worldly-wise women as he leaned on his mother, r
elying on them to look after the practicalities. On this first visit to London he was so much an innocent abroad, so impoverished and helpless and trusting, that Helen Waddell took him under her wing, lending him sufficient money to get by in London while she took his career in hand. For his part, he was so impressed by her generosity that in an all too rare gesture of gratitude he later repaid the debt in full. It was immediately apparent to Helen Waddell that he could not survive in London without a paying literary project and she used her considerable influence to secure him one. He had brought a sheaf of new poems to show her and she admired ‘Old Soldier’, but what really caught her interest was an Irish Times article reminiscing on the journeymen cobblers who had visited his home as a boy. She saw that he was a lively prose writer with a good ear for dialogue and, drawing him out on his own story, quickly ascertained that there was a fund of rural reminiscence which he had not yet tapped in his writing. As a trusted Constable reader and an Ulsterwoman with a knowledge of Irish writing, she was able to prevail upon the firm to commission an autobiography, later entitled The Green Fool. Otto Kyllmann was persuaded to take a chance on the comparatively unknown author to the extent of paying him a sufficient advance to enable him to live in London and write full-time.
Commissioning an autobiography from Kavanagh was a sound publishing proposition for Constable. Two Irish ‘peasant’ autobiographies published a few years previously had achieved instant critical and commercial success: Twenty Years A-Growing, the English translation of Maurice O’Sullivan’s account of life on the Blasket Islands (1933) and another Blasket autobiography, Tomás Ó Criomhtháin’s The Islandman (1934), translated by Robin Flower. Kavanagh was an articulate ‘peasant’ who had passed the thirty-odd years of his life in an Ulster parish and could furnish a colourful, first-hand account of rural characters and customs to rival the Blasketmen’s. Moreover, he had the additional market appeal of a romantic Robbie Burns figure who had metamorphosed from ploughman into London-published poet. His autobiography would combine a portrait of the artist with a portrait of his primitive milieu; the biographical element would provide a progressive linear structure, and the anthropological dimension would ensure the book’s appeal to a broader, non-literary audience. Helen Waddell had made the transition from poet to fiction writer herself and saw no reason to typecast the Inniskeen writer solely as a poet.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 14
