Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  On 10 January 1941 Kavanagh submitted a collection to Macmillan; it was rejected within days.8 He also showed it to both O’Faoláin and O’Connor. Privately, O’Faoláin was unenthusiastic, finding that it contained only ‘thirteen pages of printable stuff and that does not make a book’. O’Connor was far more positively disposed and, when he became a director of the Cuala Press in February, following on the death of F. R. Higgins, he asked if Kavanagh would offer the volume to Cuala. He agreed, provided the book was published without delay and that its format was up to Faber or Macmillan standard.9 The projected volume was to run into problems on both scores.

  W. B. Yeats’s widow, George, who was effectively running the editorial side of the Cuala Press, wished to delay publication until 1942. Cuala was having difficulties in making ends meet and a volume of poetry was unlikely to become a bestseller; she wanted to publish a couple of books with better sales potential in the latter part of 1941, one by Elizabeth Bowen and one by O’Connor himself. She also thought that the delay might help by making further poems available for the collection which was currently so small that it could not be bound in the usual Cuala fashion. If Kavanagh were not prepared to wait until he had a larger collection, she suggested publishing it out of series as a very slim volume.10

  The already small collection was further reduced because George Yeats disliked some of the submitted poems and wanted them dropped. A list of publishable poems she prepared for O’Connor consisted of ‘Plough Horses’, ‘The Man After the Harrow’, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘Memory of My Father’, ‘Art McCooey’ (one of her favourites), ‘A Christmas Childhood’, ‘For these I speak’ and ‘Black Shanco’ (later ‘Shancoduff’). ‘Peace’, ‘Mermaid’ and ‘Milking Time’ she would only reluctantly include; likewise ‘Death of Yeats’, which she found ‘entirely artificial’; ‘Kednaminsha’ and ‘Primrose’ she would definitely exclude. She had difficulty in understanding the conclusion of ‘Patriots’, but did not rule it out. Several of the poems of which George Yeats disapproved have disappeared from view: ‘Mermaid’, ‘Milking Time’ and ‘Death of Yeats’; so also have two she would have published: ‘For these I speak’ and ‘Patriots’. She does not appear to have been given ‘Christmas Eve Remembered’, ‘Threshing Morning’ or ‘Stony Grey Soil’. Kavanagh was still copying out his poems in longhand and it seems he sometimes removed a couple of poems from a file to show to a reader or prospective editor rather than recopy them. According to George Yeats’s list, he had now jettisoned all but two of the 130-odd poems he had contemplated publishing through Gawsworth and was more interested in collecting his recent work. Her selection of extant publishable poems shows her to have been the most perceptive reader of Kavanagh’s poetry at the time. Unfortunately they did not meet to discuss it, since O’Connor was conducting negotiations on the poet’s behalf in June 1941. Kavanagh was persuaded that the publication of a new collection was premature. By 1942, when the Cuala Press was prepared to bring out a collection in pamphlet form, he was far more concerned to publish his new long poem, The Great Hunger.

  The main reason why he had assembled such a small collection of new poems by June 1941 was that he had been concentrating on fiction rather than poetry. The overwhelmingly favourable critical response to The Green Fool had boosted his confidence as a prose writer and, ever since, he had set his sights on a novel. He reported having started on one in the summer of 1938 and in May 1939, during his stay in Gerrards Cross, writing a novel, whether the same one or not we do not know, was his principal task. This material was probably cannibalised for the vanished potboiler, The Land Remains, completed in November 1939. By January 1940, as we have seen, he was suggesting two contrasting novels to Macmillan, a winter’s tale and a summer’s tale. When he actually sat down to write fiction, the topic that came to preoccupy him imaginatively was the association of farming with failure and entrapment and his two contrasting plots turned on the frustrations of a young and an elderly bachelor farmer. The story of the young bachelor farmer, so much closer to his own recent personal experience and to his writing experience in The Green Fool, turned out to accommodate itself much better to the demands of a long fiction, and it became the novel Stony Grey Soil.

  O’Faoláin’s politicisation of Kavanagh’s writing is evident in this novel, for it was the Corkman’s interpretation of an Inniskeen happening that provided him with a sociologically significant basis for his fiction. While collecting material for his book-length survey of contemporary Ireland, An Irish Journey (1940), O’Faoláin came upon the case of the two Inniskeen dance halls which he considered so ‘typically illuminating’ of clerical dominance in Ireland that he recounted it:

  Some local boys got the idea of erecting a dance-hall. So, unfortunately, did the Parish Priest. The two halls were started. Just then the P.P. had to leave his parish on a spiritual retreat. While he was away the local boys built as no man ever built before, so that when the P.P. returned he found the rival building almost completed. The next Sunday there was a sermon fit to scald the hair off a cannon-ball. The local boys’ dance-hall became known thereafter as the Anti-Christ Hall. Undaunted, the local boys went ahead and finished their hall.

  Then came the fateful question, ‘Which would get a licence?’ The local boys applied to the courts for their licence and were, of course, opposed by the P.P. The justice supported the P.P. and refused a licence. In due course the P.P. finished his hall and applied for a licence. It is not too much to say that he got it con brio, fortissimo, and suaviter in modo. Now the local boys may survey their hall and wonder what they are going to do with it, and how they can ever hope to pay for it, while the strains of revelry by night come to their ears from the triumphant jazz-palace beside the church.

  For O’Faoláin, this story illustrated ‘better than a Blue Book the power of the Church in Ireland’.11

  When the proprietors of the two rival Inniskeen dance halls, the Parochial Hall and the Mullagh Hall, first applied to the courts for a licence in 1939, Kavanagh was lodging in Gerrards Cross. He was greatly amused by the episode and his first written response was ‘Great fun over Halls, surely.’12 Later, under O’Faoláin’s tuition, he was brought to a recognition of the symbolic import of the event as an instance of the repressive nature of Irish Catholicism. The ‘dance hall case’ now provided him with the basis for a novel on clerical oppression in an Irish village. In later life, he said that Stony Grey Soil belonged to his ‘anti-clerical period’, to a time when ‘anti-clericalism was part of the jag’.13 He was well aware that, in fact, the builders of the Mullagh Hall had been granted a licence on appeal and that their hall, which had opened on New Year’s Eve 1939, about a month after its rival, had proved a very successful venture. Such a happy outcome did not suit his polemical purposes: real life was not repressive enough for the new realist fiction.

  Condition of Ireland realism, as practised by Frank O’Connor in Dutch Interior (1940) and Seán O’Faoláin in Bird Alone (1936), resulted in grim, depressing portrayals of life in small-town, provincial Ireland. O’Connor’s biographer contends that the characters in Dutch Interior are ‘not much more than symptoms of a diseased provincial town’ and thinks that ‘one is . . . meant to be less interested in the characters than in what has trapped them’.14 O’Faolain’s hero, Frankie Hannafey, is a man who has been starved of high culture and sexual enjoyment because of his devotion to Irish nationalism. He finds that Ireland is ‘on top of him like a load of hay’.

  Stony Grey Soil is a product of this fictional climate, narrating the frustrations of a young farmer-poet in conflict with the Church, cheated of the woman he loves and condemned to eke out a miserable existence in a backward village as an unhappily married man and thwarted intellectual. The main characters were Tarry Flynn and his friend, Eusebius Cassidy, two young bachelor farmers in love with the same woman and having a shared interest in literature. Although it drew on the 1939 feud over the two halls, it was set in 1935, suggesting that it may have derived from
or been a version of one of the novels he had been toying with before his move to Dublin. Despite O’Faoláin’s politicisation of his outlook, when Kavanagh came to write about life in Inniskeen he slipped back into autobiographical concerns. His new-found anti-clericalism became entangled with a version of the failed romance which Michael Joseph had insisted he downplay in The Green Fool. As he later confessed, he always had difficulty in constructing a plot15 and on this occasion the intertwined stories of the conflict over the rival village halls and the loss of the hero’s beloved to an unscrupulous rival failed to cohere. His customary difficulties with plot construction were exacerbated in the case of a romantic plot; he was too much at the mercy of his own frustrated desires to present a controlled and persuasive courtship narrative. Another major problem with Stony Grey Soil was that the closing down of a village dance hall as a metaphor for the repression of rural intellectual aspirations was not convincing. Even Kavanagh himself was not persuaded by it. As we have seen, dancing was antagonistic to the imaginative and intellectual life for him and represented the opposing temptation of sensuality. He was superimposing O’Faoláin’s sociological concerns on what, left to his own devices, he would have regarded as comic material. It was only when the dance hall plot was filleted out and the novel’s submerged comic potential allowed to dominate six years later, that it could be successfully transformed into Tarry Flynn.

  Had not O’Connor co-opted Stony Grey Soil as an illustration of the new Irish school of gloomy realist fiction, the coincidence of interests between himself, O’Faoláin and Kavanagh in the use of fiction for purposes of social criticism might have gone unnoticed. In his essay, ‘The Future of Irish Literature’ (January 1942), O’Connor charted the rise of a disenchanted, realist fiction that looked back to George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903), Gerald O’Donovan’s Father Ralph (1913) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), rather than to ‘the subjective, idealistic, romantic literature of Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge’. As examples of this new fiction he cited O’Faoláin’s novel Bird Alone, his own recent novel Dutch Interior, and a first, unpublished novel by Patrick Kavanagh which he did not name. All these recent novels followed a similar pattern, he claimed: they portrayed young Irish men and women who demanded a fuller, richer life for themselves coming into conflict with the ‘furious piety and puritanism of Catholic Ireland’ and they ended in despair or suicide. The novels themselves were ‘almost choked by the feeling of anguish and claustrophobia’; they were the kind of fiction which ‘every Irish writer who isn’t a rogue or an imbecile is doomed to write when the emptiness and horror of Irish life begins to dawn on him’. O’Connor provided readers of his essay ‘The Future of Irish Fiction’ with a plot-summary designed to reveal how closely Kavanagh’s unpublished novel corresponded to the thematic concerns and narrative shape of the new Free State fiction.16 Stony Grey Soil survives only as a collection of drafts and fragments, but these remnants suggest that it was a rambling and confused romantic tale, more comic in tone and much less focused in its social criticism than O’Connor led readers to believe.

  Stony Grey Soil, which Kavanagh expected to complete around April, was finished and on O’Connor’s desk by autumn 1941. It was first submitted to Macmillan and then passed on to Methuen, who rejected it in April 1942. Their reader reported that it was ‘good in many ways’ but also ‘loosely held together’, sprawling disconcertingly and needing ‘the devil of a lot of work to make it ship-shape’. He regarded Kavanagh as a talented but undisciplined writer and advised that ‘if the author will discipline himself, he will make a name’. In his experience, most authors were unable to revise an unpublishable novel to publishable standard and he expected Kavanagh to fare no better, so he asked to see his next effort. As well as promoting Stony Grey Soil in the London-published essay ‘The Future of Irish Literature’, as an example of the new Irish fiction, O’Connor wrote to Methuen to puff the book. Mr Forrester replied on Methuen’s behalf, including some quotations from the reader’s report to demonstrate that, despite the negative outcome, the novel had been given a sympathetic reception. He was doing this, he told O’Connor, to counteract the opinion held by him, by Kavanagh and probably by O’Faoláin, that English publishers were not sympathetic to the aspirations of the younger Irish writers.17

  A disappointed Kavanagh followed up Methuen’s suggestion that he should seek further advice from their reader, and then complained that the advice he was given was unhelpful. Characteristically, he also attempted to take advantage of the firm’s professedly sympathetic stance towards new Irish writers by asking for a subvention to enable him to revise his novel — to no avail.18

  That continuity between Kavanagh’s realist fiction and the novels of George Moore, Gerald O’Donovan and James Joyce, which O’Connor discerned in Stony Grey Soil, is actually more evident in the unfinished and unpublished novella-poem ‘Why Sorrow?’ whose poet-priest hero, Father Mat, has to choose between his ministry and his muse.19 Father Mat is a successful farmer-priest, loved and revered by his parishioners. They regard him as a combination of father figure and saint, but, unknown to them, he is also a closet poet and pagan who finds Christianity alien and repugnant. Outwardly successful, inwardly a misfit, Father Mat lives a double and divided life, torn between his pastoral responsibilities and his literary calling. Out of a sense of loyalty to his devoted parishioners, he sacrifices poetry to priesthood, yet continues to vacillate and, as this long, sprawling poem peters out, he is still a troubled man, his dilemma still unresolved.

  Protagonist and plot may well have derived to some extent from two of the novels singled out by O’Connor — Moore’s The Lake and O’Donovan’s Father Ralph — both of which focus on a priest’s vocational crisis. The choice between dedication to the priesthood of art and to the religious priesthood was also confronted by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Moore and Joyce were to become two of Kavanagh’s favourite novelists; whether he read Father Ralph or merely listened to O’Connor’s plot-summary, we do not know. Although ‘Why Sorrow?’ was written at the same time as O’Connor was promoting The Lake, Father Ralph and A Portrait as the three precursors of current Irish realist fiction, it does not repeat or rework an existing plot. Unlike his three predecessors, Kavanagh’s hero never resolves his vocational crisis.

  ‘Why Sorrow?’ was taken up and abandoned again and again. The lyric ‘The Long Garden’ was quarried from it in 1941;20 an extract was published in 1945 and another in 1946 and the two were combined to make a new poem, ‘Father Mat’, included in the collection A Soul for Sale (1947).21 ‘Why Sorrow?’ in its entirety was submitted to the Cuala Press for publication in 1944 and rejected. Why was Kavanagh so concerned with the secret history of an elderly celibate, a poet cum priest cum farmer? Heart-mysteries there, surely, for even his fictional writings were largely autobiographical. He is unlikely to have been moved to repeated poetic endeavour by the plight of Inniskeen’s ageing parish priest, Canon Bernard Maguire, the haughty ex-Salamanca academic who found himself posted to a backward parish. He did contribute a real-life model of the parish priest as farmer and intellectual, though it is more probable that Father Mat’s qualities of benevolence, wisdom, saintliness and approachability were drawn from Maguire’s predecessor, the kindly Father McElroy, who heard the author’s first confession.

  What George Moore’s depiction of Father Gogarty’s agonising indecision over whether to abandon his priesthood and his parish suggested to Kavanagh was a means of fictionalising his own recent agonising indecision over leaving home. Father Mat’s white hairs and clerical garb serve as a convenient double disguise for the thirty-something farmer-poet. The poet-priest, outwardly at ease in his community, inwardly at odds with the small-farm ethos and with the contemptus mundi mind-set of Catholicism, dramatises the writer’s own predicament in the 1930s. He too had been a closet poet and pagan, ostensibly ‘one of the boys’, talking about his crops, attending church, fair and market,
playing football, cycling to dances; then in the privacy of the family home sneaking up to a loft or bedroom to write a lyric such as ‘To a Blackbird’: ‘O pagan poet/ You and I are one/ At setting sun.’ Father Mat’s awareness of his parishioners’ loving dependence on and trust in him conveys something of Kavanagh’s own umbilical sense of emotional connection with and filial obligation to his widowed mother, who relied on him to farm her land and in general serve as the mainstay and support of her declining years. The guilt that Father Mat experiences as he acts out his priestly role and hides his loss of faith had dogged Kavanagh too as he listened to his mother’s hopes and plans for their shared future, while all the time dreaming of a different future as an urban writer. Having made the break himself, he is uncompromising about his character’s need to do so: if Father Mat remains in his parish, his imaginative vision will be stifled. He must choose between poetry and pastoral responsibility. Though the priest is still undecided in the closing lines of the unfinished poem, it is clear by then that he will never summon up the courage to depart.

  The fact that Father Mat, unlike his creator, fails to make a commitment to poetry by leaving his parish, does not undermine this poem’s autobiographical dimension. Kavanagh could never understand how he had finally managed to tear himself away from home and in fact he had done so very slowly and gradually, through a series of longer and longer absences, rather than by any grand gesture of farewell. By transposing this state of anguished uncertainty about his literary vocation on to the figure of Father Mat, he could write with greater detachment about the painful state of irresolution and guilt in which he had passed his last years in Inniskeen.