Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Kavanagh’s later fiction would be mother-centred, but in The Green Fool his father plays the more prominent part in the action, possibly because he was safely dead and unable to object. He is portrayed as a key figure, not only in his own family, but in the larger parish community, and his son writes of him respectfully, delighting in his sceptical intelligence, knowledgeability and shrewd business acumen, even grateful for the beatings he had so freely bestowed. In his amnesiac dotage the father is still no mere yokel as he struggles to remember a word like ‘campanile’. Indeed the book is something of a hagiographical memorial tribute. The skeleton in the family cupboard is gestured towards, but there is no rattling of the bones: the manuscript containing his paternal grandfather’s story has conveniently disappeared and he is presented as a colourful nomad from the West of Ireland, an exotic ancestor.

  Conscious that Inniskeen was, as he put it, a ‘law-bred country’,26 Kavanagh took pains to avoid being prosecuted for libel by any of his neighbours. Most of the characters play a merely functional role, entertaining the reader and/or initiating the young narrator into some aspect of local life. We are not told of their private lives and there is no psychological complexity in their characterisation. As a further precaution against identification, real names were seldom used and, indeed, names were still being changed in the final draft. The Kednaminsha schoolteacher Miss Agnew was transformed into Miss Moore, a sly allusion to the fact that the songs she taught her charges were almost always drawn from Moore’s Melodies. Barney Maguire became George; Larry Tuite, Larry Tom; John T., Michael; Johnnie Doran, John Gorman; Kelly’s pub in Essexford, King’s; his neighbour Terry, Owen.27 Calling characters by such locally inauthentic names as George and Fred strikes one of the few false notes in the book. Where local people were named or were recognisable from their real life counterparts, this was because they were not in a position to sue, either because they were dead like Miss Cassidy, or spoken of so favourably that they wouldn’t want to.

  As a portrait of the artist, the book is largely an autodidact’s tale, a story of bookish influences and poetic experiments. Though he is under no external pressure to fictionalise or invent his own poetic career, Kavanagh falsifies the chronology to make it appear that ‘Address to an Old Wooden Gate’ in the Dundalk Democrat pre-dated his Weekly Independent verses and that both were published before a reading of the Irish Statesman showed him the error of his ways. This is the trajectory of his development as it perhaps should have been, not as it was. He dates his introduction to the Irish Statesman as August 1927, rather than August 1925, but still does not cover his tracks, for his Independent verses appeared in 1928/29 and the ‘Address’ in 1929. That intertextuality or habit of literary allusion, complained of by critics of Ploughman, is still a feature of his style. When he thinks of his babyhood, the Immortality Ode arrives on cue; when he works as a farmer, he twice identifies with Colum’s drover; as a poetic misfit in his parish, he conceives of himself as Dostoevsky’s Idiot; and when the Irish Statesman snuffs it, his ‘candle of vision’, in Æ’s phrase, is extinguished. A beggar woman is compared to Colum’s ‘old woman of the roads’; Carrickmacross ass-dealers are seen through Higgins’ eyes as a ‘dark breed’. Yet the narrative is too full of sharp, freshly minted observations to be swamped by literary allusion.

  The role of fool is as close as Kavanagh comes to self-definition in The Green Fool. The subject of his own foolishness touched a raw nerve, not that this is fully exposed in the book. In the family his nickname was the Gam, and he knew that many of his neighbours regarded him as ‘a class of an eejit’ because he wrote poems, talked a lot of high-flown nonsense and seemed deficient in common sense. In one of his few self-defensive passages, he tells how local men taunted him as a fool and congratulates himself on having had the last laugh by writing a book.

  Two journal entries from a notebook of miscellaneous jottings reveal a connection between foolishness and introspection, dating at least as far back as 1927. In the first undated entry he writes:

  When we are most foolish then is the time to study our real selves. That is the time to peer in the recesses of our minds and ask the question ‘Where is my worth?’ I write thus because I have played the seer and been made a fool of by those whom I considered fools.

  The second entry is dated 11 June 1927:

  On this day I was fooled twice the [sic] cattle tricksters, and then the gay boys whose names I shall not forget . . .

  Beware of thy wisdom for it is dangerous, subtle, puffing us up with wind, leading us away from all that makes for real strength and worth . . .28

  On both occasions being made a fool of prompts him to engage in self-analysis and self-admonition; the rhetoric is pseudo-biblical and priestly, as if he is being addressed in the confessional. When Kavanagh read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in the early 1930s, he began to preen himself as a Prince Myshkin figure, a holy fool, initially despised for his unworldliness but gradually attracting respect. Fortunately the thin-skinned young man, unduly sensitive to neighbourhood sneers, was overtaken by the nostalgic exile while he was writing The Green Fool. Besides, he was basking in Helen Waddell’s approval. She was his primary audience as he wrote and he handed her each of his draft chapters as he completed it.29

  As well as working on The Green Fool, Kavanagh was turning out quantities of brief lyrics during his time in London and he passed this verse over to his new poet friend, Gawsworth, to read and assess. Gawsworth, as coordinator of the neo-Georgian lyric poetry movement, was the official keeper of the Georgian flame. Despite the modernist eruption of Eliot, Pound and Yeats into the tranquil English poetic scene, there was still a considerable vogue for this less flamboyantly intellectual and more technically conservative verse which Edward Marsh had begun marketing as ‘Georgian poetry’ in 1912. Georgian poetry was meditative, smooth, short, low-key, often rural in content, realist but avoiding messy particularities, focusing on genteel images which could double as generic symbols and evoke spiritually elevating reactions. Kavanagh’s brief, rhymed, decorous verse on rural subjects was exactly the kind of poetry of which Gawsworth approved. His 1938 anthology, Fifty Years of Modern Verse, would include three of Kavanagh’s lyrics: ‘Plough-Horses’, ‘Old Soldier’ and ‘Ethical’. ‘Plough-Horses’ was quintessentially Georgian, the most polished piece he had written to date, betraying no trace of Irishness, indeed Edward Thomas-like in its pictorial tranquillity:

  Their glossy flanks and manes outshone

  The flying splinters of the sun.

  The tranquil rhythm of that team

  Was as slow-flowing meadow stream.

  And I saw Phidias’ chisel there —

  An ocean stallion, mountain mare,

  Seeing, with eyes the Spirit unsealed

  Plough-horses in a quiet field.

  Not that all Kavanagh’s poems were so accomplished. The years 1937 and 1938 were possibly the most prolific period in his life and he was pouring out verses, many of which were mere effusions, unclear, incoherent and awkwardly phrased. He had little judgment where his own poetry was concerned and trusted implicitly in Gawsworth’s assessment. By and large Gawsworth was a too lenient critic, but he did persuade him to improve the final stanza of ‘The Old Soldier’, first published in the Dublin Magazine, and he recognised the merits of ‘The Irony of It’ (The Irish Times, 14 February 1938), in which Kavanagh reflects on the intimidating situation of being an under-educated poet from a serf class:

  I have not the fine audacity of men

  Who have mastered the pen

  Or the purse.

  The complexes of many slaves are in my verse.

  When I straighten my shoulders to look at the world boldly

  I see talent coldly

  Damning me to stooped attrition . . . 30

  By mid-October 1937, when he was staying with Gawsworth and his wife at 33 Great James Street and finishing The Green Fool, Kavanagh had accumulated so many completed, and for the most part unpublished, poe
ms that he and his host made up a collection of forty entitled The Seed and the Soil and a batch that would form the basis of another collection, all of which he gave Gawsworth to have typed with a view to possible publication.31 A friend of Gawsworth, Maurice Wollman, who compiled anthologies for Macmillan, took ‘Morning’ and ‘Old Soldier’ from the Dublin Magazine for Poems of Twenty Years, An Anthology, 1918–1938.

  Throughout the 1930s Kavanagh tended to market any verse with Irish place-names or content in Irish journals and to send more neutral material to English editors. As in The Green Fool, he was hovering uncertainly between two readerships. Had he settled in London, his poetry might have avoided both local and Irish coloration and remained permanently arrested in a neo-Georgian phase.

  The question of his staying on in London did not arise. In less than five months he had finished the autobiography to Helen Waddell’s satisfaction and his own. Then the bombshell dropped. He had no contract with Constable, only an understanding, and their second reader decided that the book was not suitable for their list. Kavanagh was already so strapped for cash by the beginning of October that he had written a begging letter to Seumas O’Sullivan and was sent £2 which he promised to repay ‘in male or in malt’. As an economy measure, he moved out of 20 Williamson Street after 7 October and stayed with Gawsworth. It was probably Gawsworth who suggested that he raise some money by selling manuscripts to Charles Abbott who was in London collecting for Buffalo University Library. Kavanagh sold Abbott 23 handwritten poems, 18 of which were not duplicates or versions of the poems he gave Gawsworth.32 Since he was already broke and could now expect no further cash advances against royalties from Constable, he had to retreat home to Inniskeen towards the end of October. To soften the blow, Helen Waddell arranged that his first two chapters would appear in the October and December issue of The Nineteenth Century, a Constable publication which paid £10 per chapter.33 On her advice he passed the manuscript to the literary agent A. M. Heath, who dealt with a number of Irish authors. Kavanagh parted with Constable on good terms. The firm had paid him an advance to write his book and did not ask for any refund when it proved unsuitable. He would later present a signed copy to the chairman, Otto Kyllmann.

  Heath sent the manuscript to an ex-literary agent, a former partner with Curtis Brown, Michael Joseph, who had set up a publishing firm in September 1935. It was an inspired choice. Joseph had a reputation for discovering and successfully nurturing new talent. In particular, he was interested in persuading untried writers whose way of life was little documented to tell their story, so Kavanagh’s was exactly the kind of book he liked to publish.34

  Apart from a weak last chapter, the autobiography was, in his view, marketable, but there was an agonising wait for the author while Joseph decided what revisions and improvements he would require. By 18 November he still did not know his fate.35 Finally, Joseph made it a condition of his acceptance that Kavanagh write a new final chapter, an account of his adventures in London and eventual return to Ireland, to bring the story up to date and round off the narrative. Kavanagh happily signed a contract that offered him an advance of £40 against royalties, ‘half on delivery of a new final chapter in accordance with the suggestions made by the publisher, and half on the day of publication’.36

  The ending of an autobiography always presents a problem since the writer has to create an illusion of closure out of his life’s continuum. In its final version the book ended with the return of the native to Inniskeen. Originally, the final chapter had dealt with the poet’s failure as a lover and the book had arrived at a double conclusion: the end of a love affair and the launch of his literary career:

  And curved in mid-air, having leaped for love I end my tale. The grey dawn has broken and it is almost noon.

  On Joseph’s instructions, the romantic narrative was reduced to one and a half pages and pushed back into the previous chapter. This was in line with his general tendency to prune the element of private experience in the book. ‘The New Road’, a chapter which narrated how the Mulla men who socialised on this stretch of road despised the writer, was eliminated and paragraphs telling of non-literary fantasies, such as a newspaper headline, ‘Kavanagh smashes World Record at the Twelfth Olympiad’, were also erased. Such occlusion of private experience suggests that for Michael Joseph the book’s appeal lay less in its autobiographical record than in its portrayal of a generic Irish countryman and country poet.

  Another problem with the concluding section of the original manuscript was a loss of narrative momentum owing to the inclusion of material about country life which properly belonged in the earlier part. Joseph cut a late chapter entitled ‘Harvest Time’ and part of a chapter on Christmas and moved back a piece on salmon gaffing.

  Except for the concluding chapters, the revisions Michael Joseph introduced involved very little rewriting. Observations which might prove offensive to squeamish readers were rephrased or dropped. One of these concerned the children’s torture of bees on page 42. Kavanagh had written: ‘We held the bees by the wings and stuck pins through the eyes of the poor creatures until they died.’ This was modified to the less specific ‘We killed them. . . .’ On page 65 a reference to a method of increasing the weight of a can of blackberries — ‘once I saw a fellow using his can of berries as a urinal’ — was deleted. On page 32 the phrase ‘a pack of flaming faggots’ was substituted for ‘a pack of whore’s bastards’. In Chapter 11, ‘The Well-Learned Scholar’, crossroads gossip that the young female teacher who had replaced the martinet, Miss Cassidy, was carrying on with the older schoolboys was omitted and four lines of a poem substituted to fill the gap.37

  Michael Joseph was also unhappy with Kavanagh’s choice of title, The Grey Dawn, which derived from the popular song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and it survived only as a chapter title. In later life Kavanagh must have been thankful to have been steered away from such shamrockery. He toyed with the title The Iron Fool, meaning one who purposefully pretends to be a fool, a Monaghan phrase with no connotations for British readers. It was probably Michael Joseph who amended this to The Green Fool. He had just scored a publishing success with How Green was My Valley, changed on his advice from the manuscript title, The Land of My Fathers.38 The Green Fool as title had the merit of being succinct, fresh and apt. ‘Green’, with its connotations of Irishness, innocence, naivety and lush pastoral, was a useful marketing adjective, and the character of ‘fool’, Dostoievskian idiot or comic entertainer, was the double persona adopted by the book’s narrator throughout.

  7

  THE GREEN FOOL AND ITS AFTERMATH

  (1937–1939)

  Christian was unchristian because he left home.

  (Kavanagh on Pilgrim’s Progress in 1938)

  Once back in Mucker in late October 1937, Patrick was under real pressure to resume the role of farmer. His brother Peter, who had been teaching in Dundalk until the summer, had taken advantage of a good inspector’s report to move to a permanent post with a better salary in a Dublin primary school.1 He would now be available to help out on the farm only during the school holidays. Josie, who had been trying to run the place single-handedly under her mother’s direction since August, was engaged to be married to a local farmer, Christopher Markey, with the wedding date set for 21 April the following year. There would soon be no one left except Patrick to undertake all the chores and act as his mother’s companion.

  At the outset he refused to knuckle under and continued to regard himself primarily as a writer. In addition to the collection entitled The Seed and the Soil and the other forty or so poems which he had left at 33 Great James Street, he had a further fifty half-finished poems on hand which he was working up into a new collection to be given to Gawsworth the following August under the draft title Verses. He corresponded with his London friend, keeping him au fait with his literary activities, including an article on potato harvesting in the Irish Press, but divulging nothing about his life in Inniskeen other than to say that it was not conducive to w
riting poetry. He was eager to return to London, and Gawsworth was told to expect him shortly, but until he received an advance on royalties from Michael Joseph, he could not afford the trip.2

  With The Green Fool in abeyance for the time being, he turned his attention to the possibility of publishing another collection of poems with Macmillan. On 22 November he wrote to remind the firm that in April 1936 they had professed an interest in publishing his verse in a regular edition. He proposed a volume consisting of ten or twelve poems from Ploughman and a selection from his recent verse. Macmillan asked to see this collection and he immediately enlisted Gawsworth’s help, asking him to indicate by page number the best poems in Ploughman and to send what he considered the best of the other poems in his possession. Gawsworth promptly obliged and his advice on what to send Macmillan was accepted. On 11 December, Kavanagh dispatched this material, saying he was leaving it to the publisher’s reader to refine the selection, because he was unsure which poems would suit an English public. Macmillan’s reader, Squire, decided that there were not enough good new poems to justify another book, and the hoped-for sequel to Ploughman never materialised.3 It was a blow, but a new collection would have been premature at this point and was likely to have provoked a much more hostile reception than Ploughman.