The Haddington Road premises was tiny: beds, table and chairs, cupboards and cooker were squeezed into a space not much more than twelve feet square.4 It was only possible for Patrick to write because he had vacant possession from early morning on weekdays while his brother was teaching. He became a morning writer who settled down to work after breakfast when the house was quiet. Peter could not afford to keep their premises heated all day long and from October onwards it was too cold to write at home in the afternoons. Later, when gas rationing was introduced, the supply was cut off between 8.30 and 11.30 a.m. and from 1.30 until 5.30 in the afternoon. Once he set out for town around noon, Patrick seldom returned until evening.
At half past twelve Peter had a lunch break from his school and the brothers sometimes met up in a cheap café in Westland Row where regular customers could enjoy a substantial lunch for one shilling and threepence a day and pay by the week. The cuisine in this café was similar but superior to his mother’s hearty country fare — cabbage, plenty of floury potatoes and a little meat or bacon — and Patrick still remembered it with relish many years later. On a couple of occasions his brother smuggled him into the school to take over his class for an hour or so. One of his pupils, George Coughlan, remembers that he held them all ‘spellbound’ as he read passages from Moby Dick and Hopkins’ poetry: ‘He would have made a superb actor.’5 Some of the other teachers, however, considered him an ill-adjusted countryman, with lots of chips on his shoulders.
During his first years in Dublin he went home to Inniskeen from time to time to buy or sell animals at the fair for his mother and he stayed with her for weeks at a stretch during the summer. She treasured these visits. Since she had no telephone, he could not leave a message to say which train he would catch from Dublin, yet when he arrived he always found the door ajar, the table set and the kettle on the boil. This he put down to maternal telepathy. How many times did she prepare for a visit that didn’t happen? She still hoped against hope that he would tire of scrimping and scraping in Dublin and move back home. As a further inducement, she resorted to the traditional form of blackmail in small-farm Ireland. In the will she drew up in April 1940, the house and Drumnagrella farm were left to Patrick provided he resided there; otherwise the place was to go to his eldest sister, Annie.
Meanwhile he struggled on trying to establish a career in Dublin. In the first months, indeed in the first years, his energies were more or less equally divided between writing, looking for a job, networking and seeking companionship. Part of the afternoon was spent composing replies to the Situations Vacant ads from the newspapers, canvassing support for these job applications from relevant influential persons, and seeking interviews with potential employers. He was determined to procure a salaried job and, as he had told Harold Macmillan, he was prepared to work at anything. The theme of security is one that was to haunt him for the rest of his life — the dream of a monthly or weekly pay check. The salaried life was not the kind of security to which his small-farm upbringing had accustomed him, but he felt that if he were to survive away from the economic and emotional certainties of home, he must have a regular, reliable income. For a time, his hopes of employment were buoyed up by his short-listing for the plum job of Talks Officer.
Alas, this short-listing proved a one-off. White and blue-collar employment was extremely hard to come by in wartime Dublin. A system of patronage flourished and a job applicant’s chances frequently depended as much on the power of his or her political or religious connections or even on county of origin as on qualifications or merit. Kavanagh, who had no formal educational qualifications, and at 35 no employment record, was more disadvantaged than most in the middle-class employment market. Worse still, in a city where Civil War loyalties still held sway, where Republicans and pro-Treatyites still looked out for their own, he had no political affiliations. After two years of intensive job-hunting he would cynically conclude:
How I blame my father for not doing one day’s fighting for Ireland instead of fifty years’ hard work. If he had, he would have a ‘good national record’ and so would I by his proxy. I might misquote Bunyan. The milk and honey of easy, well-paid jobs are beyond the wilderness of the ruined GPO and the burned-out Custom House.6
It would not have been strategic to admit that he was of an age to have played a part in the Civil War and had in fact done so. He always pretended to be younger than his years and his minor republican past would have left him politically aligned with Fianna Fáil. He preferred to remain unaligned.
There were considerations other than political ones militating against him in the kind of employment he coveted. Scruffy, ungainly, and badly washed, with shabby clothes and dirty fingernails, he did not look the part of a business executive. At a time when hats were normal outdoor wear in business and professional circles, he went hatless or wore a cap like a workman. He talked in a loud booming voice and he walked like a ploughman, slightly stooped and swinging his large arms, taking up too much of the city pavement. When he sat down, he planked himself broadly and comfortably, taking his ease, with legs outspread. All in all, he was not the type one expected to encounter in an office environment and he was virtually unemployable in a blue or white-collar capacity.
As a strictly mornings-only writer, Kavanagh had a lot of time on his hands, and the afternoons, in particular, hung heavy. He soon became a familiar sight on Nassau Street and Grafton Street and along the Liffey Quays, browsing in new and second-hand bookshops, looking into shop windows, chatting to children and street traders, killing time, but also familiarising himself with his new village. Acquaintances were greeted from afar with his hailing cry, ‘Anything new? Anything new?’ Joseph Holloway has left a brief pen-portrait of him in Hanna’s bookshop on Nassau Street, hatless as usual, skimming through a book with his left elbow resting on the shelf. He told Holloway he was looking for some of Carleton’s novels, now very hard to come by — Valentine M’Clutchy and The Black Baronet. Carleton, he said, was the greatest writer of Irish novels and he would like to bring out an edition of his works, omitting the anti-Catholic propaganda.7 He was to champion Carleton’s fiction for the rest of his life.
Lonely, idle and hard-up, Kavanagh strolled along the pavements of Grafton Street on wet afternoons glancing into Mitchell’s café or walking through the shop into the ground floor café in Robert Roberts’ or Bewley’s in the hope of seeing someone he knew who would stand him a cup of coffee or invite him to sit down and talk. It was a way of staying warm and dry as well as passing the time. Since the Grafton Street cafés were patronised by Dublin’s well-to-do and he was an entertaining companion, he often struck lucky, especially as his acquaintance in the city grew. Most of the afternoon café-goers, particularly in Mitchell’s, were well-heeled wives taking a break from the rigours of shopping, and those to whom he had been introduced at art exhibitions or literary parties were often well disposed towards the shy but friendly poet. During the ‘holy hour’ between 2.30 and 3.30 p.m. the closure of the pubs compelled a motley collection of semi-tipsy males to emerge into the daylight and seek refuge in a café. Bewley’s in Westmoreland Street was a popular daytime rendezvous for Irish Times journalists. If push came to shove, he could afford to buy himself a fourpenny coffee and make it last for an hour, glancing over the top of his newspaper to spot a likely companion. Some wet afternoons were passed sheltering in the National Library on Kildare Street where he could read for free until 6 p.m. when it was time to stroll over to the Palace Bar.
Surprisingly, Kavanagh seems to have spent very little of his leisure time reading, though it is difficult to be certain about this. While he was prepared to be quite informative about the books he read in his teens and twenties, he was generally reticent about what he was reading after his move to Dublin, anxious to conceal his educational deficiencies by not divulging that he was still catching up on authors like Hardy. He liked Penguins and kept an eye out for new titles. When he did enjoy a book he tended to read it over and over for about six mont
hs. Moby Dick, Gil Blas, and Knut Hamsun’s Wanderers and Hunger were favourites during his first years in Dublin. In poetry, he was still largely an anthology man, browsing and dipping in search of something that excited him and then looking out for books by the writer in question. He naively expected the National Library to buy whatever books he happened to be interested in, generally poetry. Hopkins was one of his favourite poets in 1939/40, but he was interested in technically adventurous contemporaries like Auden, whom he considered similar to Hopkins at first. One of his main purposes in reading was to ‘kickstart’ his own writing.
Most of Kavanagh’s networking in his first year in Dublin was conducted in the Palace Bar, the pub which during the war was an essential port of call for any aspiring writer who wished to become known and accepted or to look for some form of literary employment, whether as columnist or book reviewer. The main reason for the popularity of the Palace Bar in the late 1930s and early 1940s was that it was a branch office of The Irish Times. There between 6 and 9.30 p.m. Bertie Smyllie, the genial, expansive editor of that newspaper held court, seated at a central table towards the rear, surrounded by his particular cronies, the painters William Conor and Seán O’Sullivan, Lynn Doyle, author of the Ballygullion stories, Brinsley MacNamara, and Cathal O’Shannon, then secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. Under Smyllie’s editorship, The Irish Times had gained a reputation as a literary journal because of its Saturday Books Page which, in addition to the usual book reviews, often included a new poem by a young Irish writer. There was considerable competition for a place on this page.
Besides Smyllie’s inner circle, almost everyone who counted in journalism and the arts in Dublin was to be seen in the Palace Bar at some time on some evening of the week: F. R. Higgins, poet and Abbey Theatre director, M. J. MacManus, novelist and literary editor of the Irish Press, the painter Harry Kernoff, the sculptor Jerome Conor, Donagh MacDonagh, lawyer and poet, Roibéard Ó Faracháin and his friend, the poet Austin Clarke, Alec Newman, assistant editor of The Irish Times and, quite rarely before 1940, Brian O’Nolan, who had not yet metamorphosed into the comic Irish Times columnist, Myles na gCopaleen. The Palace was also a mecca for all visiting writers, artists and journalists.8
Kavanagh had been in the habit of dropping into the Palace during his short trips to Dublin and now that he was a resident, he became a regular. If there was no comparatively well-off companion to treat him, he could rise to buying himself a couple of glasses of porter, or ‘plain’ as it was known, at fourpence a glass. If one avoided whiskey, the tipple of the well-to-do, booze was no more expensive than a cup of coffee in a Grafton Street café. At this time he was not keen on alcohol and he went to the Palace for the companionship and the contacts, rather than the liquor. It was a good investment of his time and his brother’s money.
Smyllie had already offered Kavanagh work earlier in the year and now that he was struggling to earn a livelihood, he was invited to contribute a further series of five feature articles or ‘specials’ to the paper between September and December 1939. The Irish Times paid very badly, sometimes as little as three shillings and sixpence per 200 words. At most, these articles would have earned Kavanagh £2 each. For his first four months in Dublin he was financially almost entirely dependent on his brother.
Reminiscences of life in Inniskeen were becoming his journalistic stock-in-trade. One of these Irish Times articles was a report on a GAA football final. The other four concerned small-farm life: ‘To the Corn Goddess’ (8 November); ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (7 December); ‘Christmas in the Country’ (30 December); even ‘Europe is at War’ (25 October) is based on recollections of the countryside in peacetime. These short essays are similar to The Green Fool in style and tenor — a mix of description and vernacular dialogue, with a younger version of himself serving as narrator-hero. He habitually distances himself from his Monaghan past, writing as one who abandoned small-farm life for a literary career back in 1934. Such revision of his personal history was probably due to his anxiety to be taken seriously as an already established writer rather than a peasant curiosity.
For a time Kavanagh was charmed by the stylised conversation of the Palace Bar denizens, with their bons mots, well-honed anecdotes and elaborate puns. He enjoyed mingling with writers and painters and being in on the malicious gossip about fellow artists. The Malice Bar was his name for the pub. He had supporters and well-wishers among the Palace regulars — Brinsley MacNamara was always kind; Seán O’Sullivan drew a flattering head and shoulders sketch of him as a lean, pensive romantic poet; Fred Higgins was by now an established friend. The painters Harry Kernoff and Patrick O’Connor were to be future holiday companions. Patrick O’Connor would turn into a lifelong friend. O’Connor and his Belgian wife, Marthe, were a strikingly handsome couple, both over six feet tall. Ever restless, they commuted between Dublin and New York, settling for a time in one city and then uprooting themselves and moving again with all their possessions. O’Connor was a champion wrestler; Kavanagh called him ‘the only playboy of the wrestling world’. The playboy allusion may have been intended as a reference to his ebullient personality and love of argument or to his philandering, for he was fond of the ladies. O’Connor was well read and knowledgeable about literature as well as art, and at first Kavanagh was in awe of his cosmopolitan sophistication.
In the cartoon of the Palace Bar crowd which the New Zealander Alan Reeve drew in 1940, under the satiric caption, ‘Dublin Culture’, Kavanagh is the only one leaving the party early. He is portrayed as an earnest, pompous, even priggish young man standing with one hand outstretched theatrically, seemingly making a great show of refusing further refreshment. He does not affect the large black clerical hat favoured by quite a few of the writers present and which even Myles na gCopaleen donned once he had established his credentials as a novelist. He is hatless, but surprisingly dapper in appearance by comparison with other contemporary descriptions, and his receding hairline contributes to his rather clerkish and formal air. Reeve singles Kavanagh out as different from his companions, a misfit because of his sobriety rather than his countrified ways.
Kavanagh was present in the Palace Bar in the winter of 1939 when one of its most talked-about fights, a row over Louis MacNeice, erupted. A ‘wild hooey . . . over Louis’ was how he described it. His ballad about the occasion, ‘The Battle of the Palace Bar’, survives in fragmentary form. According to Kavanagh’s version of events, Austin Clarke had insulted Louis MacNeice in the only words of the ballad that have passed into popular anecdotage:
Let him go back and labour for Faber and Faber . . .
Fred Higgins returned the insult on MacNeice’s behalf with some allusion to Clarke’s nervous breakdown; Padraic Fallon leaped to Clarke’s defence and a free-for-all ensued. Kavanagh’s ballad concludes:
They fought like barbarians, these highbrow grammarians,
As I have recorded for the future to hear.
And in no other land could a battle so grand
Have been fought over poetry, but in Ireland my dear!9
The ballad, which categorised Fallon, Clarke and his own friend and sponsor, Higgins, as mere ‘highbrow grammarians’ rather than poets, anticipates his later sustained assault on Dublin’s artistic establishment as represented by the Palace Bar habitués. For him, this coterie came to symbolise Dublin’s smug, self-congratulatory, post-Revival culture, parasitic on the real achievements of the dead Yeats, talking about art rather than achieving it. He soon wearied of what he later termed the ‘tiresome drivel between journalists and civil servants’.10 Even in his first months and years in Dublin, when his own literary advancement to some extent depended on it, he could not conceal his contempt for some of the Palace Bar aesthetes and intellectuals.
Through his Palace Bar connections, Kavanagh was invited to art exhibitions, literary at-homes, parties and concerts. Fred Higgins gave him tickets for Abbey shows and for a couple of years he was a regular first-nighter. He was among th
ose present at T. S. Eliot’s Memorial Lecture on W. B. Yeats in the Abbey Theatre on Sunday, 30 June, when Eliot in a slow, hesitating yet clear voice spoke about Yeats’s poetry for over an hour without ever becoming totally enthusiastic.11 This cool, critical appraisal may have planted his own first doubts about Yeats’s greatness. He was invited to the party that followed the lecture and, like a score of other Dublin writers, was introduced to the distinguished guest. Normally on Sunday evenings he either bused out to Seán O’Faoláin’s literary gatherings in Killiney, until wartime restrictions made the journey too difficult or, more frequently, went to Mrs Arthur Darley’s at-homes in Morehampton Road, Donnybrook.
Like the Palace Bar, Mrs Darley’s home was a place where one met stimulating company and potentially useful contacts,12 though Kavanagh complained that he was too often seated next to Joseph Holloway, the inveterate theatre-goer and expert on the early days of the Abbey, whose reminiscences bored him. He must have dissembled well because Holloway took to him. Arthur Darley had been a noted musician and his son Arthur, a doctor, was a keen guitarist and violinist. It was through the Darleys, especially Arthur, that Kavanagh was first introduced to classical music and began attending symphony concerts. One of the men he met in Darley’s in 1940, Eoin Ryan, later barrister, senator and an influential member of the Fianna Fáil Party, was to be a lifelong friend. The two sometimes repaired back to Ryan’s Fitzwilliam Square apartment for a bachelor supper. Further invitations to parties or literary and artistic events followed on from those Sunday at-homes at Mrs Darley’s, drawing Kavanagh into Dublin’s social and cultural whirl. He was poor and shabby and maladroit, but he was a published poet and writer, and when he chose he could be engaging company and converse interestingly on almost any topic. In particular he was gracious to hostesses and they felt maternal towards him.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 19
