Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Peggy found him ‘very broad-spoken’. Since the issue of Kavanagh’s speech turns up again and again in people’s recollections of him, her comment calls for some clarification. It was not just that he talked in a pronounced south Monaghan accent; he used crude farmyard expressions and swear words that were not current in Dublin’s polite drawing rooms. In middle-class Dublin until at least the 1960s, language was gendered in the sense that certain turns of phrase and words were not used by women and not used by men in the presence of women. Even in pubs, a different language code prevailed in the bar where men drank and the lounge bar, where, from the 1940s, women were permitted.28 A customer found offending against the language code in the lounge would be rebuked or barred by the staff. Kavanagh’s talk, which was larded with ‘fuck’ and ‘fuckin’, and with references to bitches, hoors, cunts, bollocks, arses, was coarse even by middle-class male standards. Several none-too-squeamish men have remarked on the grossness of his speech. Ben Kiely, for instance, cites the phrase, ‘as ignorant as the back of me balls that never saw shite’. Some women were offended that he did not clean up his language in their presence, construing his vulgarisms and swear words as a mark of disrespect. He made some effort to gentrify his turn of phrase, especially in his first years in Dublin and especially in front of women, but it was his native spoken tongue and the phrases sometimes slipped out in unguarded moments. Patrick Henchy, for instance, recalls how during a late-night poker session with Harry Craig, assistant editor of The Bell, himself and a couple of women friends, he said to a woman who had just won some money, ‘You’re a cute hoor.’ The woman blushed scarlet, there was a sudden silence, the men looked uncomfortable. In Mucker the phrase was used in the same sense as it is in Dublin’s more linguistically relaxed society today as a grudging tribute to intelligence and skill. In polite mixed company in 1940s’ Dublin, it implied that the lady was a prostitute.

  As a poet with a sensitivity to language registers and a keen ear for dialogue, Kavanagh quickly caught on to Dublin’s language codes and soon learned to deploy his Mucker English as a social instrument for the amusement of friends or the discomfiture of those he wished to rebuff. Nevertheless, old habits die hard and towards the end of his life a woman friend was disconcerted to be asked by way of flirtatious banter: ‘Would you like a kick in the teeth?’

  He responded enormously to kindness, Peggy remarked. She did not add that his gratitude for kindness was immediate and not sustained. Three months after Fred Higgins had dropped dead of a heart attack in January 1941, Kavanagh gratuitously criticised his work in an Irish Times article and six years afterwards he was to assassinate his character and literary reputation in an unsolicited essay, ‘The Gallivantin’ Irishman’.29 All the friendship and sponsorship Higgins had offered when he was a struggling, penniless beginner was of no account beside Kavanagh’s need to publicise his passionately held aesthetic opinions. And, as we shall see in a later chapter, Peggy Rushton herself did not altogether escape unscathed.

  She found him a poetic snob, intolerant of many of the clientele in the Palace Bar, who wasted their ability: writers who didn’t write and painters who didn’t paint and their many hangers-on. If he thought something was bad, he said so in no uncertain fashion. He could be very cutting. He was intolerant of anybody who produced work that fell below his standards. She would take him to task for being critical of so many of the people he met. In her company he spoke well of those she cared about: Fred Higgins, Brinsley MacNamara, her lover, Arthur Duff, her future husband, Desmond Rushton. One gathers that this was a concession to Peggy and that for the most part he was highly critical of their mutual acquaintances. Sometimes he insulted everybody, including his friends.

  The elegant and charming Arthur Duff would call into Browne and Nolan every day and leave a carnation and some gift-wrapped chocolates for Miss Gough; scruffy Paddy Kavanagh would arrive with a poem or a limerick scribbled on a dirty piece of paper and ask to have it delivered to her in such loud tones that she could hear him from her upstairs office. Some of these extempore limericks with which he plied her show his awareness that his dress and personal hygiene were not up to middle-class urban standards:

  There was a fair damsel called Peggy

  Who was most excitingly leggy

  She wouldn’t go out

  With a poetic lout

  Because his trousers were baggy.

  There was an engenious [sic] writer

  Called Kavanagh, these Limerick’s [sic] inditer

  With a countryman’s rashness

  He despised personal freshness

  Said ’twas making the sepulchre whiter.

  In fact, Peggy was not fazed by his sartorial shortcomings and was well capable of ordering him to wash when the occasion warranted; she simply did not want to have an affair with him. Her feelings were more like those of an elder sister or a mother; chronologically she was fourteen years his junior, but in worldly knowledge and experience she was light years ahead of him.

  It upset Patrick that Arthur Duff came first for Peggy. Some of his limericks make light of what was for him a very painful romantic triangle:

  There was an oul’ devil called Duff

  Whom I could not torture enough

  He took from me one

  Who could give me high fun

  And left me to mouthe [sic] my old guff.

  There was an infernal triangle

  Which tied three sad hearts in a tangle

  And caused them to grieve,

  How, you’d hardly believe

  And gave rise to an uprorius [sic] wangle [sic].

  (The last word should probably read ‘wrangle’.)

  He touched lightly on his love for her in one of these limericks:

  There was a maid named Patricia

  As winning as a Japanese geisha

  She was loved to insanity

  By a lyric inanity

  And the lyric inanity is mise.

  Peggy cared enough for him to wish for his happiness and did her best to introduce him to other young women. He fancied a friend of hers, Jo Golden, and she threw a party to bring them together. So far as she knew, nothing seemed to come of it; yet ten years later he was still writing to Jo Golden. The kind of partner he needed, in Peggy’s opinion, was a ‘nurse woman’, not a professional nurse as such, rather a nurturing woman, someone who would be devoted to him and take good care of him. The difficulty was that she also needed to be someone with whom he could communicate — intelligent certainly, literary probably. He had a real need for communication. One of his problems in relating to women was that his sexual and intellectual needs were so intertwined as to be inseparable. Because of his peculiar combination of peasant uncouthness, poverty and lack of grooming on the one hand, and his extraordinary intelligence on the other, he had exceptional difficulty in attracting women who appealed to him physically and intellectually. Peggy was one of those rare women who could satisfy him on both counts. Women from his own rural background could not converse with him and the cultured middle-class urban women who could do so usually found him physically repellent or embarrassingly down-at-heel, certainly not suitor material. In appearance, he was not, Peggy says, ‘God’s gift to women’, but she was sufficiently self-confident not to mind being seen publicly with him. Many women were put off by his ploughman’s gait and trampish appearance.

  Marriage to Peggy seemed the perfect solution to Kavanagh’s problems: she was intelligent company, liked poetry, understood him better than his own mother, was worldly-wise, sexually liberated and well-off. Arthur Duff was already married and separated, so under Irish law he and Peggy could not marry. Kavanagh hoped against hope that she would be his saviour. On her copy of Ploughman he inscribed the following verse:

  Peggy Goff [sic]

  Are you the Golden Door I’ve sought?

  You are, you are, and that’s the end of it.

  Let us not talk too much here.

  She was not his Golden Door, yet occasional
ly Peggy would satisfy his desire by going to bed with him in Haddington Road. To her he was like a man starving. Her metaphor for sexual frustration, ‘starving’, is the same as he would use in The Great Hunger. She felt no sexual attraction towards him and much preferred talking to him than going to bed with him. She was merely offering him an outlet from time to time to stop him exploding. He was very highly sexed and very direct, not given to foreplay. He satisfied his needs like an animal, with what she describes as the ‘thrust of a goat’. According to Peggy, the phrase he later used in ‘Miss Universe’ described his own pent-up sexuality: ‘the explosive body’. Seeing that she was not easily shocked or offended, he talked frankly about sex to her, not dirty talk, for he had a ‘clean mind’. He knew that their affair was one-sided, yet he persisted because Peggy so perfectly answered his needs. He understood that in befriending him she was motivated by genuine affection and not by charity. She respected him, and that was important to him.

  The Great Hunger, completed in October 1941, is a great cri du coeur from a man who has belatedly recognised the importance of gratifying his own sexual desires. His coupling with Peggy, her uninhibited attitude towards sexuality, and his lengthy, candid conversations with her about desire and frustration enabled him to pronounce with such authority on the thwarted and religiously inhibited upbringing of Irish country men. It was to Peggy he confided that he was so frustrated in his youth that he used to try to grope his sisters. In The Great Hunger he preaches the gospel of the importance of human sexual fulfilment with all the zeal of the recently converted. It is peculiarly fitting that Peggy’s firm, Browne and Nolan, of which she was by then publishing manager, were the Irish distributors of this poem.

  Peggy Gough and Patrick drifted apart in 1941, though they remained friends. She became pregnant by Arthur Duff that year and was delivered of a ‘blue baby’ in the autumn. Her brother died in December. Worn out by the double tragedy and unable to marry her lover, she accepted a marriage proposal from Desmond Rushton. Kavanagh was a welcome visitor at their home until she left Dublin in the early 1950s. She gave him small loans from time to time and her maid had instructions that if he called when she was out, he was to be given a meal.

  9

  BELL-LETTRES

  (1940–1942)

  Child remember this high dunce

  Had laughter in his heart and eyes

  A million echoes distant thence

  Ere Corkmen taught him to be wise.

  (‘To a Child’ — cancelled draft)

  Kavanagh’s income from hack work between September 1939 and September 1942 would not even keep him in cigarettes, as he complained. His real work, the writing of poetry and fiction, yielded even less. Three poetry collections and a novel were rejected in this period and a long poem aborted. Only a handful of lyrics and one long poem, The Great Hunger, were published. In Inniskeen farmers were prospering: the war had greatly improved the market for agricultural produce and because the village was so close to the border, smuggling also flourished. Kavanagh clung on in Dublin, largely dependent on the charity of his brother and a few well-wishers, yet working away and still determined to succeed as a writer. Despite his poor publication record between 1940 and 1942, these years were among the most productive of his career and a crucial period in his evolution as a poet. Paradoxically, his chief aim was to succeed as a novelist, taking his cue from his mentors and role models at the time, the two Corkmen who were teaching him ‘to be wise’, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor.

  When Kavanagh first moved to Dublin, O’Connor was still living in Woodenbridge in County Wicklow and working flat out to complete his overdue novel, Dutch Interior, which he sent to Macmillan in December 1939. Although his schedule was interrupted from time to time in 1940 by his newly developing career as a broadcaster with the BBC, he wrote short stories and books on Irish architecture during the periods he spent in Wicklow. O’Connor, who was frequently ill from overwork and stress, admired dedication and commitment in a writer; he had no use for dilettantes.1 There was considerable rivalry between him and Seán O’Faoláin, his chief competitor for the title of Ireland’s leading writer. O’Faoláin had constructed a new study in the garden of his Killiney home in August 1939 and toiled away there as a man of letters, keeping a tally of his daily output of words and his literary earnings.2 Kavanagh’s exemplars were men who viewed the making of literature as a daily discipline, the fruit of industry rather than passing inspiration. To some extent his own working day, though partly dictated by circumstance, was modelled on theirs. Both O’Connor and O’Faoláin were morning writers, who shut themselves away in their study immediately after breakfast most days of the week and wrote until lunchtime.

  The two Cork writers, both of whom were frequently embroiled in literary controversy, maintained a united front in public. Privately, relations between O’Connor and O’Faoláin were often strained. O’Connor was highly critical of O’Faoláin, distrusting his business-like, man of letters attitude to writing, and he made no secret of his views to Kavanagh, who was only too happy to join in such criticisms.3 What united O’Connor and O’Faoláin ideologically was a shared disillusionment with the Republican movement they had embraced in their youth and a vehement opposition to the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s vision of post-Independence Ireland. As writers, both regarded themselves as the leaders of a post-romantic and post-Literary Revival generation whose task was to construct a new agenda for Irish writing. For them the death of Yeats in January 1939 marked the end of an era in Irish letters.

  Kavanagh was still somewhat in awe of the Harvard-educated O’Faoláin, looking up to him as a confident intellectual and literary theorist, and profoundly influenced by his aesthetic opinions. The mercurial, warm-hearted O’Connor was a close friend as well as an adviser. He was stimulating company, firing off ideas and arguments, parading his enthusiasms and antagonisms, irascible, ebullient or sympathetic by turns, alive to every contemporary cultural issue, and generous in his encouragement of his impoverished and insecure friend. Until Frank O’Connor moved to 57 Strand Road, Sandymount, in late summer 1941, he and Kavanagh usually met by chance when O’Connor was in town. He frequented Hanna’s bookshop and Ann’s Teashop in Nassau Street, Greene’s bookshop in Clare Street and the Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien café near by, so Kavanagh kept an eye out for him in these places. O’Connor, whose father had been an alcoholic, avoided pubs; Kavanagh referred to him as ‘a bun man’ because he socialised in cafés. Though O’Connor was well aware of Kavanagh’s attempts to poach his girlfriend Maeve, he was merely amused at his antics. Convinced that Kavanagh had genius, he tolerated, even enjoyed, his human follies and foibles. He tirelessly championed and promoted Kavanagh and, though his repeated attempts to have his poetry and fiction published were rarely successful, he was steadfast in his efforts. Kavanagh, who trusted O’Connor’s literary judgment, showed him everything he wrote. The more experienced O’Connor’s unswerving belief in his talent was heartening during a most discouraging period.

  O’Connor did more than offer support and constructive criticism. His and O’Faoláin’s programmatic approach to the making of Irish literature gave Kavanagh’s writing a much-needed sense of purpose and direction after his move to Dublin. O’Faoláin’s key argument was that the Literary Revival was the product of a nation in the process of becoming, and that the new Free State demanded a radically new and different literature. This new literature must represent Free State Ireland in all its facets: it must be primarily documentary or socio-analytical in focus, pluralist in political and religious matters, realist in technique. From late 1939 and throughout 1940 Kavanagh listened avidly as the two Cork writers hammered out the basic tenets of their programme for the future of Irish literature, which they would expound in print in the first issue of the influential new journal, The Bell, in October 1940. O’Faoláin had been offered the editorship of The Bell and invited O’Connor to be poetry editor, envisaging that the journal would give them a cont
rolling voice in determining the course of post-Independence writing.

  The first issue of The Bell, which sold out in a day, gives some flavour of the generationist thinking that Kavanagh had been eagerly lapping up during the previous year. O’Faoláin’s first editorial is forthrightly post-revolutionary and post-Revivalist, demanding that Irish literature discard its romantic nationalist trappings. The symbolism and dramatis personae of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary literature are declared passé: ‘dead as Brian Boru, Granuaile, the Shan Van Vocht, Banba, Roisin Dubh, Fodhla, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the swords of light and the risings of the moon’. Such nationalist symbols belonged ‘to the time when we growled in defeat and dreamed of the future. That future has arrived and, with its arrival, killed them.’ The distinguishing characteristic of contemporary Irish writing, for O’Faoláin in 1940, was a shift from totalising national symbolism to local realism. His advice to intending contributors was to avoid abstraction and describe what they knew:

  Write about your gateway, your well-field, your street-corner, your girl, your boat-slip, pubs, books, pictures, dogs, horses, river, tractor, anything at all that has a hold on you.

  He even went so far as to to prefer truthful representation to ‘perfection in the craftwork’.