Once the Michael Joseph contract had been signed, it is probable that Kavanagh paid the long-awaited visit to Gawsworth in December and that at this time he also called on Sean O’Casey. Michael Joseph thought that an introduction by O’Casey would help in the marketing of The Green Fool. O’Casey, who had not registered Kavanagh’s name when they were introduced in June, had since learned on the grapevine that there was a new Irish poet in London. He had ordered a copy of Ploughman from Macmillan on 2 November, mistitling it A Ploughman’s Songs, and was unable to furnish the poet’s name.4 He was pleased to hear from Kavanagh and invited him to call on him at 49 Overstrand Mansions, Battersea.
What the two writers talked of as they ambled through Battersea Park or sat in O’Casey’s big gas-fired study has not been recorded. A socialist strain had been apparent in Kavanagh’s poetry from the mid-1930s. Did he reveal to the older socialist writer his sense of responsibility as the spokesman of a misrepresented and downtrodden agricultural labouring poor, and did O’Casey support him in this stance? O’Casey was to be among those who saluted his major venture in this vein, The Great Hunger, recognising its power when he first read an extract from it in Horizon and later attempting to persuade Kavanagh to have it publicised in North America by Professor David Greene.
At the time of their meeting O’Casey was working intermittently on his play about the 1913 Lock-out, The Star turns Red, in which the propagandist character Red Jim is based on the trade union leader Jim Larkin. Did he impart to Kavanagh something of his hero worship of Jim Larkin? Larkin was to be Kavanagh’s neighbour in Dublin in the mid-1940s and when he died in January 1947, Kavanagh published an elegy in The Bell.
What the veteran Dublin dramatist and the novice country poet had most in common was that both were engaged in writing their very different autobiographies. O’Casey was working on the first volume, I Knock at the Door, for Macmillan, referring to himself in the third person as Sean Casside. They may well have discussed the pitfalls of autobiography. O’Casey refused to write an introduction to The Green Fool because he was sceptical about the usefulness of such introductions, and Kavanagh, who was usually quick to take offence, understood and did not interpret this as a hostile gesture. Actually O’Casey, whose own first volume of autobiography did not appear until early 1939, thought very highly of The Green Fool, and would later rate it far above Eric Cross’s controversial and much-hyped The Tailor and Ansty (1942) as a narrative of country life. Kavanagh, in turn, was highly complimentary about the second volume of O’Casey’s autobiography, Pictures in the Hallway, when he came to review it a few years later.
Kavanagh was on his best behaviour with O’Casey, yet the playwright detected that he was not socialised and could be difficult: blustering, overly sensitive, arrogant, all characteristics he attributed to ‘cowardice, the Irish original sin’. However, O’Casey was very taken with Kavanagh and continued to follow his career with interest throughout the 1940s, willing him to succeed, commenting warmly on his achievement, and seeing him as a talented writer who was much more likely to make a lasting name for himself than Seán O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor or Maura Laverty. He championed Kavanagh repeatedly in his correspondence, refusing to entertain malicious gossip about him and defending him against detractors. He was still giving him good advice on the marketing of his poetry in the US as late as 1948, trying to make him see that it was in his own best interest to be promoted by such a genuine lover of literature as Professor David Greene.
Although he had set his sights on London as his literary Mecca, Kavanagh still made frequent visits to Dublin and on one such trip he came to the notice of Dr Tom Kiernan, the new head of Irish radio, who put some work his way. His first commission was a twenty-minute talk on 9 February 1938, entitled, ‘Dual Personalities: Patrick Kavanagh, Farmer and Poet’. The second was a slot in the series I Liked this Book, broadcast on Friday evenings between February and June. Other speakers included Lord Dunsany and Lady Longford, Professor James Hogan and A. E. Malone, distinguished company. Kavanagh showed the first signs of his non-conformist streak when he entitled his contribution ‘I Hated this Book’. The book in question was Pilgrim’s Progress and the basis of his attack was that it was unchristian of Christian to leave home. It seems that he had made the decision to live at home with his mother and was feeling rather smug about it.
He postponed his next trip to London until the publication of The Green Fool in May. Josie was still helping to run the farm, which freed him to attend to the final revisions and to read the proofs in March. Bridget showed her gratitude to Josie when she married in April by giving her a dowry of £100, several practical presents including a small red cart, and buying her wedding finery. To entice Patrick into settling down in Mucker after Josie’s departure, she transferred Reynolds’ farm into his name that month. For a while her scheme was quite successful. He was based at home for most of 1938 apart from his usual trips to Dublin and a couple of visits to London.
The Green Fool was published on Monday, 23 May 1938, price ten shillings and sixpence, and the ‘real Green Fool’, as he called himself, descended on Gawsworth shortly afterwards.5 During this visit he and Gawsworth chose forty of his poems to make up a companion volume for The Seed and the Soil, to be entitled To Anna Quinn. The two volumes, presented as the successors of Ploughman, were subtitled Second Poems and Third Poems respectively, and Gawsworth was hoping to publish both, or at least a selection from them, in the Richards Series he was editing, had it not petered out.6
Disappointing as it must have been for Kavanagh at the time, the collapse of this publishing venture was actually fortunate in the longer term, because poet and publisher had been utterly undiscriminating in their choice of poems, seemingly more concerned with the bulk and symmetry of the proposed volumes than with poetic merit. The few poems, like ‘Shancoduff’ and ‘Threshing Morning’, in which he was breaking new ground, might well have been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of bland, vague, self-congratulatory or self-consolatory verse.
The Green Fool was widely reviewed in the English quality papers and the critical reception was exceptionally cordial; even those who demurred slightly, such as the Times Literary Supplement reviewer, had many complimentary things to say. The most eulogistic review was Derek Verschoyle’s in The Spectator. He had found Kavanagh’s verse pleasant and conventional, but The Green Fool revealed a talent of a different order, vital and distinctive and ‘braced on every page by some memorable image or observation’. The review concluded:
The Green Fool is a book of so many qualities that it is difficult to speak of it with restraint. It is, of its kind, almost perfect; and the kind is worthy. It is a book which no one who opens can fail to read with pleasure.
In the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Harold Nicolson was also adulatory, dubbing the author a potential Robert Burns and finding the book a refreshing change from the customary ‘Celtic crooning’, because it spoke of the ‘raffish habits’ and ‘capacity for love and hatred’ of the author’s people while still retaining a lyric atmosphere. In the Sunday Observer, Austin Clarke, too, remarked on the difference between the characters in The Green Fool and the ‘poetic peasants’ of the early days of the Literary Revival. He praised Kavanagh for combining poetry and realism in the right proportions and capturing ‘the sceptical humour of half faith which is an Irish country characteristic’. Such critical perceptions of the difference between Kavanagh’s portrayal of his neighbours and earlier Literary Revival representations of the peasantry are interesting in view of the author’s own much later dismissal of The Green Fool as ‘written under the evil aegis of the so-called Irish Literary Movement’.7 At the time of publication, the book was perceived as marking a definitive break with Revival conventions.
The Green Fool was also favourably received in Ireland. Privately, Seán O’Faoláin was amazed by it. For all his puffing of Kavanagh, he had completely underestimated his talent.8 The Dublin Magazine review by Padraic Fallon in the Octobe
r/December issue did the autobiography proud, hailing it as a ‘delightful book’, ‘humorous, likeable and charmingly lyrical’. Fallon, whom he had met and disliked, was particularly impressed by the fidelity with which Kavanagh recorded ‘the sights and sounds of the Monaghan farmlands’ and by his ‘faculty for fine, generous, lively conversation’. He remarked, too, on the difference between Kavanagh’s verse, which transcends ‘his rural Ireland’, and his prose where ‘he is of the people, realistic and hardheaded, a man with two eyes in his head’. M. J. MacManus’s wholehearted commendation in the Christmas number of the Irish Press must have persuaded several readers to buy the book as a Christmas present: it offered a microcosm of the life of an Irish rural community, ‘loving, sympathetic, yet realistic’ and observed with ‘whimsical humour’. The dialect was picturesque, yet ‘not over-coloured’, and the author showed ‘skill in the use of simple, sinewy English’. And so the plaudits rolled in from all sides, with scarcely a hint of fault-finding anywhere. It was a dream prose début.
He was back in London in late July, visiting Gawsworth almost daily from 28 July until 9 August and then house-sitting for him until 13th while he was in Dublin.9 Perhaps because his mother disapproved of the trip, he was short of funds and had to write a begging letter to Seumas O’Sullivan at the Dublin Magazine. During this visit he and Gawsworth packaged a further collection of fifty-seven poems under the working title Verses, and these Gawsworth transcribed. As a thank-you gesture for his hospitality, literary advice and assistance, Kavanagh presented his host with yet another small holograph collection (seventeen pages) of poems, mostly in several drafts, entitled ‘The Lady of the Poets and other Draft Verses’.10 In August 1938 the unpublished Kavanagh poems in Gawsworth’s possession amounted to over 140, mostly of very poor quality; there were a further eighteen poems in the Charles Abbott collection, and another untitled collection from about this time, now in the National Library of Ireland, includes a further seven unpublished and forgettable poems. A note Kavanagh appended to this last collection in 1949 reads, ‘All unpub. all rightly so.’11 The survival of such a vast quantity of low-grade early verse means that to bring out a Complete Poems that was really complete would do Kavanagh’s reputation no service.
At this point his ambition was to be a London-based author. Gawsworth, as well as acting as reader and intellectual companion and providing free accommodation, was his chief point of contact with other London writers. Yet already he felt himself superior to this friend who allowed himself to be used. The poem he dedicated to him that August is entitled ‘To a Lover’. Though Gawsworth was then a handsome young man, the phrase probably had no homosexual connotations; for the rest of his life Kavanagh tended to speak of love in contexts where other, more restrained, men might have spoken of true friendship. His lovers were those, generally female, who had his welfare at heart and unreservedly cared for, supported and promoted him. It was a maternal rather than a sexual model of relationship. It was also passive and profoundly self-centred. Though capable of infatuation or passionate attachment, he continually looked for patrons, personal assistants, managers or carers who would take charge of his affairs. Often quite acute in his self-analysis, he would later summarise this characteristic attitude towards others as:
That Promised Land you thought to find
Where the worldly-wise and rich take over
The mundane problems of the lover . . .
However outwardly lacking in self-confidence he might appear, his self-esteem was unshakeable and he exacted and expected service from those he admitted to friendship or intimacy. It was typical of his rather predatory approach to human relations that he sought out friends who were socially, materially or educationally more advantaged than himself: likely providers or people from whom he could learn. Gawsworth, urbane, literary-minded, London-based scion of the Irish gentry, was among the first in a long line of ‘lovers’.
That autumn, BBC Northern Ireland offered Kavanagh two slots in its ‘Undiscovered Ulster’ series: a talk on County Armagh and on County Down. He put considerable effort into making a success of this project, cycling the two counties to gain a first-hand impression and reading up on them. For his talk on County Armagh, broadcast on 20 October 1938, he cycled to the top of Slieve Gullion to see the famous lake supposedly made by Finn McCool. Only the preparatory notes for these two talks survive and they show that he had boned up on the origins of the Newry Canal, read Harris’s History of County Down and supplemented his research by drawing on his own literary interests: references to Keats’s walking tour from Donaghadee to Belfast and quotations from Ferguson’s ‘The Hosting of Congall’.12
Nineteen thirty-nine began badly. He learned that Oliver St John Gogarty, author and medical doctor, intended taking an action for libel against The Green Fool’s publisher and the printer William Brendon and Son Ltd. Kavanagh was convinced that he had taken every possible precaution against libel. He had expected any litigation to emanate from Inniskeen; nevertheless, in mentioning his Dublin literary acquaintances, he had been careful to write of them in a complimentary, even sycophantic, vein, but there was one exception, one unguarded flash of malice that was to cost him dear.
What Gogarty took exception to was a throwaway comment that on his first visit to Dublin, Kavanagh had gone to the author-doctor’s house at Ely Place and ‘mistook’ the ‘white-robed maid’ who answered the door ‘for his wife — or mistress’, expecting ‘every poet to have a spare wife’. This observation is more revealing of its author’s naivety than of Gogarty’s marital or extra-marital arrangements. It seems so innocent as to be utterly innocuous. The alleged defamation of character was the implication that Gogarty kept a paramour on the premises where he practised as a doctor. Since he had already moved his practice to London, had no intention of setting up again in Ely Place and in fact sold his Dublin house about six months after the libel action, the suggestion that The Green Fool might damage his professional practice strains credibility. He later joked that what annoyed him was the suggestion that he had only one mistress.
It may well be that what actually offended Gogarty was an insulting remark a few lines earlier in The Green Fool. When he enquired in the National Library for the address of any Dublin poet and was offered Gogarty’s, Kavanagh’s response was ‘Is that the best you can do?’ This gratuitous put-down may have prompted Gogarty to teach the provincial pup a lesson; his motive in going to court, according to his Dublin cronies, was to ‘take a bumptious upstart down a peg’.13 If this was indeed his aim, he succeeded, because Kavanagh found the episode so stressful that his hair turned prematurely grey and he began to go bald. (The baldness may have been coincidental; his father was very bald at 41, but in Patrick’s case it was interpreted as a stress symptom.)
Gogarty had been in a litigious frame of mind for over a year, on the look-out for libel since Henry Sinclair had successfully sued him in a Dublin court for character defamation on foot of two passages in As I was Going Down Sackville Street.14 As his biographer Ulick O’Connor has pointed out, Gogarty lost more than the £2,000 he had to pay in costs and damages, because the sale of his book was adversely affected. He was so embittered by the treatment meted out to him by fellow Dubliners that he left the city and recommenced practice as an ear, nose and throat specialist in Upper Wimpole Street, London. It was from this address that he visited losses similar to those he had recently endured on the hapless Patrick Kavanagh.
Gogarty had already tried to persuade Austin Clarke to take an action for libel against Samuel Beckett on the ground that he had been caricatured as Austin Ticklepenny in Murphy, but Clarke had too much sense to get involved in litigation. The proposed action against Beckett was a continuation of the Sinclair vendetta because Beckett had testified on Sinclair’s behalf. Connections between The Green Fool and the Sinclair case are more tenuous: Gogarty may have been attempting to recoup some of his losses while also continuing to vent his anti-Semitism; Michael Joseph, like Sinclair, was a Jew.
/> The action was heard in London in the King’s Bench Division before Mr Justice MacNaughten and a jury on 20 and 21 March 1939. Kavanagh was not present; he was not required as a witness and there was no point in paying good money to travel to London for such an unpleasant event. In his summing up the judge pronounced that the offending passage in The Green Fool ‘imputed that Dr Gogarty was a loose man who had a paramour. . . . The publication was a gross libel, and Dr Gogarty was entitled to bring the action out of respect for himself and his wife, and as a duty to the medical profession.’ After one and a half hour’s deliberation, the jury found in Gogarty’s favour and he was awarded £100 damages plus costs.15
This verdict hit Joseph hard; he had split with his partner, Victor Gollancz, in 1937 and the fledgling company’s finances were very tight for some time thereafter.16 For Kavanagh, the outcome was disastrous, both financially and in terms of his literary reputation. The Green Fool, which had been in circulation for less than a year, was immediately withdrawn or, as he put it, ‘crushed’. The critically acclaimed autobiography which had seemed set to establish its author as a brilliant young writer and to secure him further commissions, as well as earning him some much-needed money in the short term, disappeared from public view in Britain and Ireland.17 It was a bitter blow to an impoverished writer at the outset of his career and even in Dublin literary circles, where back-stabbing was an occupational hazard, Gogarty’s destructive action was widely regarded as despicable. One of the most irritating aspects of the episode as far as the luckless author was concerned was that it was entirely fictional; he had never called at 15 Ely Place.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 17
