That Father Mat is an alter ego is betrayed at various points in the poem. The elderly priest is supposed to hail from Corofin in County Clare and to exercise his ministry in a parish in County Cavan, for instance, but several of the place-names associated with his boyhood and his priesthood — Candlefort, Drumcatton, and Seola — are drawn from Inniskeen and its environs. Moreover, when the lyric known as ‘The Long Garden’ was excerpted from ‘Why Sorrow?’ in December 1941, ‘we’ was substituted for ‘he’ throughout, identifying Father Mat’s childhood experiences with the poet’s own.
‘Why Sorrow?’ is of biographical interest because it gives the reader some hindsight into Kavanagh’s mental processes in his final years in Inniskeen; more importantly, it catches him at a moment of inadvertent transition from the smooth Georgian, pastoral manner of so much of his 1930s’ verse, of ‘Plough-Horses’, for instance, to the dirty realism he began to practise after 1939. In this poem we see his new Inniskeen material forcing itself upon him against his will. Consciously, he sets out to construct a poem in free indirect style, in which the narrator empathises with his hero’s disavowal of the Catholic small-farm milieu as a poetic subject; but the poem’s most moving and memorable passages are those in which both narrator and character betray their affection for and understanding of country scenes and country people.
Father Mat is convinced that, in order to become a practising poet, he must divest himself of his Catholicism and utterly cast off his small-farm acculturation. The narrative sets out to persuade the reader that aestheticism cannot coexist with religious asceticism and the poet-priest’s inability to abandon his familiar world is presented as a failure of nerve. Yet this would-be poet’s imagery is saturated in the Catholicism he discounts and the poem vividly conjures up the workings of a baptised imagination:
He saw the daisies now and the white
Confirmation dresses of the alder trees . . .
or
The dripping branches on the carts going home
Is a holy water blessing this hour . . .
Such is the priest’s inside knowledge of the ‘homes and hearts’ of his people that, even before he visits a parishioner, he can anticipate the sights that will greet him:
Within the house he knew every rag and stick
The mean unmade bed behind the kitchen . . .
. . . an unwashed shirt
Kicked under the bed, and the chamber-pot
That the woman forgot to empty,
A stolen pitch-fork standing in a corner . . .
Nevertheless this potential poet considers that his insight into the lives of his parishioners is irrelevant and he aspires towards a rootless aesthetic. Father Mat’s denial of the claims of an indigenous art involves a rejection of his own nature and nurture:
He was a part of the place, as natural as
The stones in grazing fields that are not seen
By those who walk the ridges . . .
He is unmistakeably the product of the small farm, bad land, the thrift and industry of ambitious Catholic parents; his character, like his priesthood, is woven out of ‘steely grass and green rushes’.
‘Why Sorrow?’ includes some affectionate evocations of life in Inniskeen, but these enter the poem as the familiar persons and scenes that Father Mat must reject if his poetic gift is to thrive. At the same time as this rural material was being disavowed in ‘Why Sorrow?’ or included only through a process of negation, it was becoming central in some of Kavanagh’s lyrics. This lengthy poem reveals how he had to rethink radically and fundamentally his conception of what was legitimate or permissible in poetry. It records a quarrel with himself between the material that affection, understanding and compassion dictated and the safe, decorous subjects and stances that existing Irish literature favoured. Father Mat aims at being a very different kind of poet than his creator was evolving into. It is not surprising that Kavanagh found it impossible to complete ‘Why Sorrow?’ He was floundering in the early 1940s, anxious to do whatever it took to be a successful writer, yet deeply unsure as to what that was. Over ten years would elapse before he would confidently pronounce on the primacy of the local and the parochial in art.22
The elderly celibate, outwardly successful and inwardly tormented, continually procrastinating and postponing the decisive action necessary to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, is known to most readers only in his second incarnation as the disappointed old bachelor farmer, Patrick Maguire, of The Great Hunger. In both ‘Why Sorrow?’ and The Great Hunger, realist fictional material that could have been presented in novel or novella form has been transformed into a lengthy poem. In both poems, too, the brief four-line stanza characteristic of Kavanagh’s contemporaneously published lyrics gives way to long-lined verse paragraphs of unfixed length and irregular rhyme-scheme, a metrical structure flexible enough to accommodate the detailed characterisation and evocation of milieu expected in realist fiction.
Because the two other lengthy narratives on which he was working in the run-up to and at the same time as he was writing it remained unpublished, The Great Hunger seems to represent a sudden and abrupt change of thematic and formal direction, whereas it was in fact the culminating expression of a process of literary disenchantment with his small-farm milieu and the most successful of a number of experiments with dramatising a repudiation of Irish country life in fictional form. Each of these narratives celebrates its author’s own self-liberation; each ponders a road not taken, a future as an unhappily married farmer or a frustrated, unfulfilled bachelor farmer, a lifetime as a ‘mute inglorious’ ploughman.
10
THE GREAT HUNGER
(1941–1942)
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
(Thoreau. Quoted by Seán O’Faoláin with
reference to the thirty-acre Irish farmer,
New Statesman, 9 December 1933)
In September 1940 Kavanagh and his brother moved to a bedsitter at 122 Morehampton Road. A slight improvement on their Haddington Road quarters, it was a little larger, had electric rather than gas lighting, and the placing of the gas cooker on the landing made it less smelly as well as freeing up some room. Nevertheless it was a cramped space in which to live, eat, sleep and write, especially when shared by two grown men. Because it was separated from the adjoining room by floor to ceiling folding doors, rather than a party wall, every sound from next door could be heard and there was little privacy or quiet. It was in this Donnybrook bedsitter in October 1941 that Kavanagh wrote the long poem which many readers consider his masterpiece, The Great Hunger.
He was still earning next to nothing from his poetry and journalism and was dependent on his brother for his keep and on friends and acquaintances for pocket money. Fred Higgins had died suddenly from a heart attack in January, and as the months passed he was seeing less of Peggy Gough, now pregnant by Arthur Duff. Among his new friends were Paddy O’Connor-Maguire, a successful businessman, and his wife, Buddy. He later said that he named the hero of The Great Hunger, Patrick or Paddy Maguire, after this friend and not after Canon Bernard Maguire of Inniskeen, as is often assumed.
It is also highly probable that the name Maguire was suggested by a new love affair on which Kavanagh had embarked that autumn. We do not know how he met Treasa Maguire, possibly through the Darleys. A vivacious and exceptionally pretty 17-year-old with long blue-black hair, she had only just finished her studies at the Loreto Convent school on St Stephen’s Green, but by September he was dating her, inviting her to a matinee of Hedda Gabler at the Gate and, subsequently, to afternoon tea at the Savoy. The Maguire family were all talented musicians and their home at 42 Prussia Street was a social centre where people gathered to talk and play music. Treasa herself played the piano and cello and danced with a ballet troupe. Kavanagh, who was also quite fond of Treasa’s younger sister, Monty (Monica), ensconced himself in the family circle and became a regular visitor. Her brothers appear to have been less tolerant of his presence than her mo
ther and Monty. He read his poems aloud to the family from a school copybook and if Mrs Maguire disliked one of them he would tear the page out, scrunch it and toss it in the fire. Whether he read out parts of The Great Hunger has not been recorded; the verse he wrote in Treasa’s autograph book that Christmas was the last stanza of ‘A Christmas Childhood’.
Treasa was just shedding her puppy fat and discovering her sexual power. She liked flirting with the poet and even visited him occasionally at Morehampton Road; however she took the precaution of stationing Monty outside the door of his bedsitter with instructions to rush in immediately if she screamed. The two young women would then run off giggling. Later, her most vivid memory of Kavanagh was of his huge hands, suggesting that she did not enjoy his caresses. One of his letters to her, signed Paddy, ends with four kisses followed by the comment, ‘You don’t like these.’
Kavanagh’s relationship with Treasa lasted until at least the following August and he looked back on the previous six months as a happy period. Though he disliked writing letters he wrote to her four times when she was on holidays in Rosmead near Delvin in County Meath that August, asking to be allowed to visit her, telling her he cared for her and pleading with her to be true to him. ‘I miss you more than you can know’, he wrote, and ‘I hope you are having a good time though not at courting, for I want you.’ They met by arrangement in Athboy. When he visited her in Rosmead, however, she contrived to be absent and her cousins recall that he sat moodily by the fire for hours without speaking, knowing he had been stood up but compelled to wait for the return bus to Dublin. He discovered that she had been dating another chap and in one of his letters discredits him as ‘bad, bad, bad and low, slummy [triply underlined] company’. Was this vehemently denounced rival Treasa’s future husband, the handsome Richard C. Murphy, whom she met in 1942?
Meanwhile, Kavanagh had acquired a patron-cum-friend in John Betjeman, who whirled him into a round of parties and glitzy occasions and was to be instrumental in the first publication of The Great Hunger. John Betjeman had been posted to Dublin in January as press attaché to the newly appointed UK Representative to Éire, Sir John Maffey.1 It was a delicate diplomatic mission, doubly so because of Britain’s non-acceptance of the twenty-six counties’ non-dominion status and because of Éire’s neutral status in the war. The term UK Representative itself had been concocted to avoid the use of the title ambassador, which would have implied that Ireland was not a dominion.
Betjeman’s first impressions of Dublin in wartime were mixed:
. . . Neutrality, harps, art exhibitions, reviews, libels, backchat, high-tea, cold, no petrol, no light, no coal, no trains, Irish language, partition, propaganda, propaganda, propaganda, rumour, counter-rumour, flat Georgian façades — Guinness, double Irish, single Scotch, sherry, Censors, morals, rain . . .
Neutrality and propaganda were most germane to his Irish mission, but he had also ascertained that life need not be austere or abstemious for those who had a healthy expense account.
Apart from reporting to his Majesty’s government on the state of affairs in Ireland, Betjeman’s brief was to improve relations between the two countries. He had been selected because of his journalistic nous and consummate social skills and he set about exercising these at once. Deciding that a friendly relationship between Britain and Ireland could best be fostered by establishing good personal relations with people of influence in his host country, he capitalised on his own profession as poet and journalist and cultivated Irish writers, journalists and intellectuals.
He took up with M. J. MacManus, the literary editor of the populist nationalist Irish Press and, since as a diplomat he was permitted to drive a car despite wartime restrictions, he rented MacManus’ vehicle. At the same time, he was on very friendly terms with two of MacManus’ fiercest political opponents, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, and also enjoyed the companionship of another of the Bell set, Geoffrey Taylor, who became poetry editor in 1941. The two later collaborated on an anthology of landscape poetry. Predictably, he established a rapport with Frank Gallagher, the newly appointed head of the Government Information Bureau. The Irish Times, which was already strongly pro-British, did not require any special attention. Through his friendship with Monsignor Browne, professor of Irish at Maynooth, Betjeman pulled off a double stroke: an entrée into Irish-speaking circles and the ranks of the ecclesiastical elite. He took to using the Gaelic version of his name on occasion, signing letters Seán O’Betjeman, a semi-comic flourish but tactically useful, like so many of his public gestures. Perhaps the journal that he was most anxious to infiltrate was the Irish Catholic weekly, The Standard, and he cultivated its editor, Peadar O’Curry. It is clear from his dispatches that Betjeman considered The Standard to be of vital importance in the anti-German propaganda war. Many of its readers were pro-German and the paper’s sympathies lay with the Axis.2
Betjeman’s penetration of both establishment and anti-establishment literary and journalistic circles in Dublin is not surprising in view of his mission to collect Irish intelligence and dispense British goodwill. Truly remarkable, even astonishing, however, is his close friendship with Patrick Kavanagh. There has been a suggestion that the reason for this otherwise politically inexplicable relationship was that it gave Betjeman some access to The Standard.3 But in 1941 when Betjeman first met and befriended him, the Inniskeen writer was a ‘dirt-poor’, unsuccessful author with no newspaper or journal base, and absolutely no cultural clout or political influence. Kavanagh, who was still quite naif about Dublin society, could not serve as social guide or watchdog for his friend either, though he tried to. His presence on the expense account might have been justified on the ground that he represented the Irish Catholic rural heartland, yet Betjeman could not but have been aware just how unrepresentative Kavanagh really was.
His liking for Kavanagh seems to have been a matter of genuine personal attraction, a private friendship that had nothing to do with diplomatic duty. Though the two men were almost of an age — Betjeman was two years Kavanagh’s junior — their backgrounds could hardly have been more different since Betjeman, from a prosperous middle-class London family, was Marlborough and Oxford educated. Somehow he saw through the ex-farmer’s unprepossessing exterior to the extraordinary human being beneath, and made the time in a busy social schedule to look after him. As a fellow poet, he was quick to recognise Kavanagh’s literary gifts. In the first year of their acquaintance, the Irish poet trusted him and valued his judgment sufficiently to allow him to read his unpublished work, both Stony Grey Soil and The Great Hunger, which Betjeman saw as soon as it was finished. Kavanagh once said that the British press attaché was Ireland’s best literary agent4 and for a time he became one of his own most influential promoters.
That Kavanagh should have reciprocated Betjeman’s attentions is understandable. He was an Anglophile who, given the choice, would have settled in London rather than Dublin, and he was firmly on the British side throughout the war. Moreover, he was always seeking out powerful men as patrons, and Betjeman had excellent literary and journalistic connections in England and a generous expense account to spend on entertaining the Irish. Betjeman would have been alert to the cupboard love aspect of the relationship — Kavanagh, at his most guileful, was always quite transparent — but his almost childlike enjoyment of the good life the diplomat could provide was heart-warming.
‘I Had a Future’, a poem recalling some highlights of Kavanagh’s life in wartime Dublin, includes the line
Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.
To be chauffeured about in the diplomat’s car was the ultimate luxury in those war years when, because of petrol rationing, private cars were a rarity. From his squalid, cheap little bedsitter, the scruffy poet was whisked away to every fashionable shindig in town — receptions, concerts, exhibitions, parties — and sometimes to lunches in Jammet’s, Dublin’s smartest restaurant, where he could not read a word of the menu. He was mixing on a near-daily basis with the fa
shionable set and Kavanagh, who would always hanker after style and glamour, loved every moment of it. It was a see-saw existence between grinding poverty, an insecurity as to where the next half-crown would come from, and a flow of whiskey and pink gins or the chain-smoking of cigarettes proffered from monogrammed silver cases.
He would never have a sunnier, more fun-loving friend. With his bouncy personality and ever-bubbling good humour, Betjeman brought a feel-good factor to every situation, the light touch with which he approached his serious diplomatic mission being signalled by the painting of his office a ‘boudoir pink’. Betjeman was good for Kavanagh as well as good to him, drawing out his light-hearted, amusing side which poverty and repeated rebuffs in the employment market had tended to suppress. Kavanagh’s own personal charm and gift for camaraderie have been too often overlooked because the most widely circulated accounts of his behaviour were recorded by those who witnessed his public displays of splenetic ill-humour and abusive language in his later years. Men like Senator Eoin Ryan, who were friendly with him in the early 1940s, recall that as a young man he was a very engaging and entertaining companion and, throughout his life, intimates with whom he could relax found him a humorous and endearing person.
It may seem strange that, in the midst of such a whirl of gaiety and frivolity, Kavanagh should have composed a long poem on the woes of the rural poor. However, he was committed to his writing and his new socio-literary programme was utterly remote from his frothy social life. A morning writer who got up early and put in several hours’ work before lunch, he was free to disport himself in the afternoons or evenings.
In December 1939 Kavanagh had told Harold Macmillan that in his next book he intended ‘going back and looking philosophically and objectively at the country’ he knew.5 This ambition reveals that by late 1939 his conception of his role as writer was already heavily influenced by his Cork mentors, and by O’Faoláin in particular. Yet there was a big step between conceiving of the writer as primarily a cultural and social commentator and actually transforming himself into the kind of artist who could document, analyse and interpret his society. It was not until autumn 1941 that he succeeded in refashioning himself as a writer in the disenchanted, socio-analytic Bell mode. One of his problems was that cheerfulness kept breaking in. Since The Green Fool, he had tended to lapse into a benign, tolerant, amused stance in his sketches of country life, instead of the sterner, more disapproving, more disillusioned attitude the new socio-realism demanded. He was also impeded by an undertow of nostalgia, especially in his verse, where he was less in control of the creative process. His recent lyrics were realist, but even when not outrightly nostalgic, they evoked the charm of country living, and his experiment in writing a poem that repudiated a small-farm Catholic ethos in ‘Why Sorrow?’ had backfired badly, resulting in verse that was saturated in the love of what it affected to despise.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 25
