Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  While Kavanagh was becoming a familiar figure on Dublin’s city centre streets, remarkable because of his rough, countrified appearance, until July 1940 his few published writings — some poems in the Dublin Magazine or on the Saturday Books Page of The Irish Times, occasional newspaper reports or articles on country life, the odd book review — had created no stir. Suddenly after 20 July he found himself at the centre of a newspaper controversy over one of his Irish Times reviews. The book was The Hill is Mine by Maurice Walsh and the review set out to ask the legitimate question ‘Can a bestselling novelist be an artist?’ The reason it provoked an angry reaction from some of the paper’s readers was because it included a gratuitous insult to the Boy Scout movement. Kavanagh had written:

  The boy scout may be said to represent civilisation at its lowest. The jamboree is the academy of illiteracy.

  This comment might have raised a chuckle among some readers of the nationalist dailies, but The Irish Times was a bastion of Protestant and Unionist Ireland which did not expect that such venerable institutions as the Boy Scouts would be mocked in its columns. Frank Prenton-Jones, who wrote a letter of protest to the paper at the time, still vividly recalls the sense of outrage felt by himself and his friends on this occasion.22

  The controversy took a zany turn when Brian O’Nolan entered the fray. A week after the Walsh review, a short poem by Kavanagh, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, had appeared on the Irish Times Books Page and O’Nolan and two cronies from his student days, Niall Sheridan and Niall Montgomery, who had recently been amusing themselves by cooking up fantastic correspondence in the columns of The Irish Times, proceeded to conflate the poem and the Walsh review in a series of pseudonymous comic letters to the paper. Brian O’Nolan was probably still bristling from being declared a mere runner-up in the Æ Award, and making Kavanagh the butt of his humour was a way of having his own back under the guise of fun and japes. The writers of this rather tediously facetious correspondence posed as urbanites bewildered by the rural complexities of Kavanagh’s poem, particularly its reference to the farm chemicals used in ‘spraying’ potatoes. They implied that such arcane subject matter was quite outside the normal range of information purveyed by the newspaper and suggested that it be followed up by a series of articles in the same strain on ‘inflamed goat-udders, warble-pocked shorthorn, contagious abortion, non-ovoid oviducts and nervous disorders among the gentlemen who pay the rent’.

  The underlying message was that Kavanagh was a country bumpkin, a complete outsider in Dublin and should not aspire to write for city newspapers. Kavanagh, who was excessively thin-skinned and usually ready to meet an insult halfway, took the ragging good-humouredly and was quite chuffed at the unexpected publicity. When Smyllie asked him to write a concluding letter to bring the correspondence to a close on 7 August, however, he went for the jugular. The clowning correspondents were disparaged as clever ‘undergraduate-magazine writers’, unworthy disciples of Joyce and T. S. Eliot, the products of a higher education which had equipped them with a linguistic register far in excess of their literary capacities. They were ‘ploughman without land’, well endowed with verbal skills but utterly lacking in subject matter. In championing literary talent and commitment above formal education in the course of his response, Kavanagh was hitting back, not only at O’Nolan and his graduate circle, but at the high valuation placed upon educational pedigree in a middle-class Dublin, where the school a man had attended or his formal qualifications largely determined his social status and credibility as an intellectual.

  In the event, larking about in the correspondence columns of The Irish Times proved a better way of attracting Smyllie’s attention than paying court in the Palace Bar. On the strength of his epistolary pranks, O’Nolan was offered a thrice-weekly column, the highly successful ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column, which he began producing on 4 October under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. Kavanagh got nothing, but he had enjoyed his fortnight of notoriety.

  Unfortunately, the incident may have had the effect of encouraging him to seek publicity by expressing outrageous views. His career as an enfant terrible, the scourge of respectable public institutions, was inaugurated with the Walsh review. This capacity for iconoclasm made him an instant firm favourite with university students. In November, UCD’s rag magazine, The National Rooster, named PK, Esq. Gent. one of the world’s most prominent personalities. The following February, Trinity College’s Historical Society invited him to preside at a debate on cinema versus theatre. As the students had hoped, he proved a colourful and provocative speaker, lambasting the Abbey, which had never been ‘an actors’ theatre, never a Gaelic theatre and never an orthodox theatre’. His style of oratory at the time was characterised as belonging to ‘the straight-from-the shoulder school’:

  What he has to say he says with vigour and in words that cannot possibly be misunderstood. There is none of your emphasis of understatement technique about this ornament of Irish letters.23

  Kavanagh’s most controversial commentary on a revered Dublin institution at this time was his Irish Times report on the opening of the Royal Hibernian Academy Exhibition on 31 March 1941. This opening was one of the major events on the social calendar and his report was intended to be a colour piece, capturing the glitter and excitement of the occasion. While acknowledging the glitzy social nature of the event, Kavanagh also assumed the role of art critic, loftily disparaging the exhibition, which he pronounced competent but, with the possible exception of Jack Yeats’s work, lacking in genius. His report flailed out indiscriminately, insulting not only all contemporary Irish artists except Jack Yeats but all contemporary Irish poets, including Fred Higgins, and, for good measure, women in general and women artists in particular. His breathtaking misogyny was emphasised by a mischievous sub-editor who inserted a subheading, ‘Women in Art’, over the passage in which Kavanagh attributed the Exhibition’s mere competence to the fact that fifty-seven, or more than a third, of the exhibitors were women: ‘Women add slickness to an art, but in proportion as women succeed in that art the level of criticism sinks . . .’

  His art criticism also had a self-serving class agenda in that he blamed some of art’s shortcomings on its being ‘the property of a lazy, leisurely class of men and women’, ‘easy folk with paternal allowances’; peasants were precluded from becoming painters.

  Predictably, the article raised hackles and a lengthy correspondence in The Irish Times ensued. Mrs Brigid Ganly, a leading academician, who launched the counter-attack in the following day’s paper, started another hare when she claimed that writers should stick to their last and not presume to criticise paintings; her put-down attracted far more hostility than the original article and increased Kavanagh’s share of public support.

  Smyllie was only too happy to encourage his iconoclastic and misogynistic tendencies. In January 1942 his slating of the Capuchin Annual was given pride of place on the Irish Times Saturday Books Page under the provocative headline ‘The Irish Catholic Front’. What Kavanagh deplored, in particular, was the undiscriminating nature of the editor, Father Senan’s, patronage; the sheer size of this 100-page issue of the Annual was a monument to this cleric’s lack of selectivity. Patronage should be exclusively reserved for the gifted few:

  True patronage consists as much in keeping the wrong kind down as in assisting the right kind up.

  The main burden of this transparently self-interested review was the way in which good writers were deprived of a livelihood in Dublin by the absence of artistic standards. Once again Kavanagh’s animus against women artists was given a public airing. The columns of Catholic journals were cluttered up with ‘Little girls who should be at home nursing babies or cooking the dinner . . .’ Such misogyny was also self-serving: female writers were taking the bread from his, more deserving because male, mouth.

  In attacking the journal edited by Father Senan, the best paymaster on the Dublin cultural scene, Kavanagh was displaying the early symptoms of a self-destructive tendency to round
on actual and potential patrons. Father Senan had already published his poetry and had also given him at least one gift of money.24 It was tactless to the point of stupidity to attack a popular Catholic journal and its priestly editor at a time when he was reliant on the goodwill of the Catholic bourgeoisie to provide him with journalistic work or a sinecure of some kind. To have published the uncomplimentary review in the Protestant Irish Times added further insult to injury, not that any other Irish daily would have carried it. During his first years in Dublin, Kavanagh’s notoriety as a journalistic trouble-maker was beginning to overtake his reputation as a lyric poet.

  Apart from the deficiencies of Palace Bar conversation, this pub’s other chief drawback for Kavanagh was that it was virtually a woman-free zone. Legend has it that Cathal O’Shannon was so horrified to see a woman there that he interrogated her escort, who replied, ‘Don’t be so adjacent.’25

  Despite his public displays of misogyny, Kavanagh craved women’s company, both for the sympathy and comfort it promised and because he was highly sexed. As he had done in Inniskeen he went to dances in the hope of ‘clicking with’ an attractive woman, and he was sometimes successful in the short term. Dubliners were amused to see the poet entertain one of his young women friends on warm summer evenings by swinging her to and fro on the gate outside his flat.26 This innocent country form of courtship was an unaccustomed sight in the town. A less innocent pastime, at least in the eyes of prurient landlords, was his habit of inviting women acquaintances to his room to while away lonely afternoons or evenings. Such a practice was anathema to most Dublin landlords at the period and the brothers were compelled to vacate their apartment several times during the early 1940s because Patrick was receiving women visitors. On one occasion the landlord actually burst into the room, only to discover that the pair on the bed were fully clothed; even this concession to modesty did not appease his fury.27

  The most intimate and candid portrait of Patrick Kavanagh during his first year in Dublin has been recorded by one of his closest women friends at the time, Peggy Gough, later Mrs Rushton.

  Smitten though he was by Maeve Mulcahy, Patrick promptly fell in love in autumn 1939 with Peggy, a cultured, emancipated and attractive 22-year-old from a wealthy family, and an editor with the Dublin publishers, Browne and Nolan. She first saw him at the Gate Theatre where she had slipped in on her own on a Friday evening to attend a performance of Cadenza in Black by her lover, Arthur Duff. At the theatre she was joined by a close friend, Fred Higgins, who had in tow a ‘very long, straggle-legged, six-foot-odd young man’ whom he introduced as Paddy Kavanagh. Peggy immediately recognised the name; she possessed a copy of The Green Fool and of the much rarer Ploughman and Other Poems. Patrick was flattered that she had heard of him. Afterwards, over drinks, Higgins asked Peggy to give his protégé a lift home. When he heard that she was actually walking home to Ballsbridge, Higgins suggested that his friend walk with her because it was in the same general direction as his Haddington Road bedsitter. ‘It’ll be an education for you’, he said to Kavanagh. They went round by the Liffey Quays and Ringsend and he was fascinated to watch the fish being unloaded from the boats on the Quays by the light of acetylene lamps. To Peggy’s urban eyes Paddy Kavanagh was all ‘peasant’, ‘a great, big sloppy peasant’, with ‘a face like a horse’. He appeared much taller than he actually was because he was so thin. On their walk she thought he was awed by her savoir-faire, but she was wrong: sophistication and emancipation in a woman spelt sexual availability to him.

  Next morning he phoned to ask if he could see her again. She was driving to Wicklow and agreed to pick him up at 35 Haddington Road and take him along for the trip. When she arrived, he wanted her to go upstairs with him, which was not on. Indeed, the frank-spoken Peggy sent him back to his room to wash his feet before he sat in her car. They drove around Wicklow and had a meal in a pub. During the tour Patrick made a few passes at her — innocuous, very inexperienced, passes: ‘literally he didn’t know how to approach a woman’. It was a fine weekend and the next day, Sunday, they drove to Glendalough. Peggy had brought her copies of Ploughman and The Green Fool for him to autograph. She was not physically attracted to Paddy Kavanagh: to her he resembled a lanky scarecrow — physically unco-ordinated, with arms and legs flailing about as if they had been stuck on to the wrong body, ill-fitting clothes that looked as if they had belonged to someone else, and, always, a cap. When he sat down, he planted himself in the chair and threw his arms out. What was fascinating about him was his talk; he would get so high on talk that he would seem intoxicated without having drunk anything. She confirms that at that time he drank very little alcohol. In the car he talked to Peggy about his poetry and read to her; he had a large quantity of unpublished verse, didn’t know the good from the bad, and wanted her to help him decide which poems were publishable. Seeing that she was not easily shocked, he also talked to her about his sexual frustration. He was ready to explode with pent-up sexual energy.

  As they stood together on a mountainside admiring the view of Wicklow that Sunday afternoon, he put his arms around her; he was ‘quite hysterical sexually’. ‘Why the hell not?’ she thought, and as a thank-you to him for the gift of his enjoyable company and remarkable conversation, she gave him his heart’s desire, letting him make love to her then and there. The release was so great for him that he screamed and screamed, shrieking ‘like a hyena’. The copulation meant nothing to her because she was in love with and practically married to Arthur Duff, a musician and composer as well as a dramatist, soon to be assistant musical director of Radio Éireann, and a man of immense cultivation and charm. Allowing Patrick to make love to her was merely an act of generosity on her part. Once she had done so, however, there was no getting rid of him. Few Irishwomen at that time would permit extra-marital sexual intercourse, and even fewer would freely satisfy the desire of a man they had no intention of marrying.

  Peggy made no secret of her feelings for Arthur Duff and gave Patrick to understand that her real relationship was with Duff; nevertheless, he became infatuated with her. He understood that she wanted to help him, not hurt him. He was lonely, had time on his hands and there were very few people in whom he could confide or felt he could trust, so he clung to Peggy, wanting to spend as much time with her as she would allow. He phoned her at home frequently, much to her mother’s annoyance. Sometimes he wanted to read a new poem to her and discuss it; sometimes he just needed to talk. She knew he couldn’t afford the call, so she would phone him back and he would think nothing of staying on the line for an hour. He took to visiting her office at Browne and Nolan just before her lunch hour. Knowing that he had no money for food, she would treat him to lunch in the Browne and Nolan canteen or a few times a week in the Metropole Cinema Grill. He was not there to cadge a meal, she felt; he came for the companionship. He haunted her office in Browne and Nolan to such an extent that the firm politely asked her to keep him off the premises.

  Some evenings, when he drifted in after work, they would visit Fred Higgins at the Abbey Theatre. In the Abbey foyer the dead Yeats’s portrait presided over the box office; he had the reputation of being over-fond of money and they used to joke that his portrait was there to keep an eye on the ‘returns’. Arthur Duff often had to stay at the radio station until nine or ten o’clock at night, so if Peggy wanted to go to the theatre she would ask Patrick to escort her. The poem ‘Christmas Eve Remembered’, published in the Irish Independent on 23 December 1939, was his Christmas present to her in the first year of their friendship.

  Fred Higgins enlisted Peggy in the effort to find a job for Kavanagh. She spoke to her boss in Browne and Nolan and Kavanagh was given an interview in spring 1940. Her account of the reasons for his failure to pass muster on this occasion gives us some insight into why numerous other potential employers turned him down. He arrived for the interview ‘looking like nothing on God’s earth and he smelt’. Afterwards the director of Browne and Nolan said, ‘Look, Peggy love, I’d love to he
lp and give him a job, but look, he probably wouldn’t get on with anybody.’ This suggests that from an employer’s viewpoint there were negative factors other than the poet’s personal appearance and hygiene. He was not clubbable, would not fit in as a colleague because his demeanour, manner and outlook were too different from those of his middle-class contemporaries. His social gaucherie did not stand him in good stead at interview.

  In 1935 or 1936 he had also failed to obtain a job with Browne and Nolan, on that occasion a more lowly job in their factory as a labourer, carrying boxes and sacks. To his dismay he discovered that he had inadvertently praised one of their publications in an article on school readers in The Irish Times in April 1940. When a pleased publishing manager wrote to the newspaper to point out that the Sixth Form Reader he favoured was one of theirs, he received a stinging response from the angry poet, attacking their record as patrons of genius. It began:

  Unwittingly, unwillingly, and quite illogically, I have, it does appear, helped to praise Browne and Nolan and their school books . . .

  Socially, Kavanagh was both shy and gregarious, Peggy Rushton recalls. He masked his extreme shyness by a show of noisiness and was always the loudest person in any gathering, with a laugh like a corncrake, harsh and unmusical. He was also much given to lecturing instead of conversing. Patrick O’Connor’s painting of the Palace Bar captures this trait; he is pictured standing up holding forth, as was his wont. He was also very touchy, easily hurt, and hid it by wearing a ‘protective coat like a dinosaur’ and acting the ‘rough, tough nut’. Peggy found him ‘difficult’ in company, not arrogant exactly, but almost incapable of sitting down and being nice to people, though ‘underneath of course he was a sweet nice person and really kind and really good’. He had never learned to socialise and was ill at ease in groups of people. He enjoyed meeting new people and relied on her and later her husband, too, to make the introductions; often he would be contemptuous about these new acquaintances later, yet he liked companionship.