Like most of the women with whom he became infatuated, Nola was middle-class, highly intelligent, well educated and remarkably beautiful. She came from a prominent Irish political family. Her mother, a former Fine Gael Dáil deputy, Margaret Collins-O’Driscoll, was a sister of Michael Collins. Her father, who also had been involved in the Troubles, was a newspaper editor. The family had settled on the North Circular Road in Dublin and Nola was educated at the Dominican Convent secondary school in Eccles Street before taking her degree at University College and embarking on the career of school attendance officer. She was about 23 when she met Kavanagh, a ‘dark-haired’ beauty with two odd eyes, one blue and one brown. Unlike the later ‘Miriam’ of ‘Dark-haired Miriam Ran Away’, she was fascinated by the poet and when he left Cork city to continue on his travels, she took off with him. Together they visited Macroom and went on to Killarney, though the only companion adverted to in his Irish Press column is his Palace Bar friend Harry Kernoff, the painter. The three cycled to the Gap of Dunloe where Kernoff sketched, and then Kavanagh and Nola proceeded to Dunquin to stay in Kruger Kavanagh’s celebrated guesthouse at the tip of the Dunquin peninsula, from which they visited Peig Sayers. With his usual impetuosity in matters of the heart, Kavanagh proposed marriage to Nola before his return to Dublin and on this occasion his offer was accepted. The betrothed couple went shopping for a ring in Cork city — there is no record as to who paid for its purchase, but it is unlikely to have been the impecunious poet.
Nola wrote to inform her parents that she was engaged to Piers Plowman. Her letter caused consternation in the O’Driscoll household. How could she possibly be engaged to someone after a mere few days’ acquaintance and who was the oddly named Piers Plowman, her mother wondered. Since Kavanagh wrote for the Fianna Fáil newspaper, the Irish Press, his nom de plume was unfamiliar to the O’Driscolls. Her mother was particularly protective of Nola because she had suffered a nervous breakdown during her student days. If the O’Driscolls were taken aback by their daughter’s precipitate engagement, they were aghast when her prospective husband duly presented himself at 147 North Circular Road. That he was a journalist with a Fianna Fáil newspaper did not tell against him; they had determined not to allow the civil war legacy of political divisiveness to interfere with their personal lives and friendships. What worried the O’Driscolls was that Nola’s fiancé was a dishevelled, down at heel, freelance writer with no fixed income, no visible assets, and no certain career prospects. Nola’s parents were fastidious in the matter of dress and deportment and could not understand how their lovely, gently reared daughter could have taken up with someone who resembled the notorious tramp Johnny Forty Coats. His sartorial carelessness had already been observed by the Tailor and Ansty — the Tailor had offered to stitch a button on his jacket during his visit to Gougane Barra.
The O’Driscoll family prized intelligence and talent, but expected these attributes to result in a glittering career or at least a well-paid job, preferably permanent and pensionable. Kavanagh’s social status was as precarious as his income; he was from an altogether lower class and poorer background; he was not their sort. The match was, to say the least, imprudent. Just what were the happy couple going to live on? The ‘marriage bar’ meant that female civil or public servants such as Nola had to resign their employment when they married, so she would be dependent on her husband to support her. Once their first fine careless raptures had subsided, the pair would probably be incompatible and marriage in those days was for life; a woman who separated from her husband was déclassée, more or less a non-person. Nola was very much in love with Patrick and her siblings were sympathetic towards the romance, yet wiser counsels prevailed. She was not so utterly lost to reason as to ignore the economic dimension of marriage. So she was persuaded to put the engagement on hold, deposit the ring in a bank for safekeeping and give her partner time to put his life in order and prove that he could provide for her before making any definite matrimonial plans. Kavanagh, who was inclined to be tight-lipped about personal matters, had no objection to keeping their engagement a secret.
He set about looking for a large apartment where he and Nola could set up home in the style which the O’Driscolls would expect for their cherished daughter. By 20 September, just one month after his first meeting with her, he had found a suitable unfurnished premises at 62 Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge, and leased it for a year.
Many of the large houses in Ballsbridge and its environs, now one of Dublin’s most expensive suburbs, were then divided into rental units. No. 62, where Kavanagh was to make his home for most of the next fifteen years, is a typical example of Dublin Georgian architecture: a single-fronted, three-storey over basement brick house with a separate basement entrance and a row of steps up to the main hall door. The unfurnished apartment he rented was one floor up but spread over two levels. A kitchenette, small dining room and bathroom were squeezed into the return, as the rooms off the half-landing were known. On the first floor proper were two large reception rooms with high ceilings, each with a fireplace graced by a marble mantelpiece; these rooms were separated by floor to ceiling folding doors which, when opened back, created a large reception space, where in the good old days a wealthy family would have entertained guests. The folding doors between the front and back drawing rooms now remained permanently closed and the poet’s headquarters were at the front of the house overlooking the street, the lofty front drawing room serving as his combined study and living room and an adjoining room as his bedroom. It was a typical middle-class apartment in a period when many couples rented rather than bought their homes. The high-ceilinged rooms were cool and airy in summer, cold, draughty and almost impossible to heat in winter in those pre-central heating times. During the war years when gas, electricity and coal were rationed, Kavanagh would have been dependent on a turf fire for warmth. At £6.10s. a month, the rent was far in excess of anything he had previously paid for accommodation and cost more than a third of his monthly earnings from the Irish Press. He was setting up home in a style more befitting his future wife’s social status than his own income.
The O’Driscolls had succeeded in keeping their daughter’s romance a secret, but on 9 October news of Piers Plowman’s recent engagement was reported in the Tipperary Star. Kavanagh’s fury about the leak indicates that he was not its source, and the fact that the Star referred to him as Piers Plowman, just as Nola herself did when relaying the news of her engagement to her mother, suggests that it was probably one of her confidantes who had tipped off the Star’s reporter.
When he told his employers at the Irish Press of his marriage plans, hoping that as a breadwinner-to-be he would be offered a permanent post, ‘instead of showing a Christian enthusiasm they shook a bit more the gatepost of [his] permanency with them’. By January the gate was ‘dragging’.11 Once it was obvious that ‘City Commentary’ had not long to run, he wrote to John Betjeman, whose stint as press attaché had ended the previous August and who was now living back in London:
Can you help get me a job?
Can you help get me a job?
The rest of my letter if I were honest would contain a repetition of this query.12
On 7 February he and Nola attended Paul Vincent Carroll’s The Wise Have Not Spoken at the Abbey.13 Piers Plowman’s last column appeared the next day. The Irish Press continued to employ him as a temporary staff journalist for a few months. In order to achieve permanency in this capacity, he would need to ‘merge’ his ‘personality in the all pervading karma of Éamon de Valera’,14 a most unlikely occurrence. Owing to the precariousness of his financial future, the engagement to Nola had been broken off by mid-March, though they still continued to meet. On 16 March he wrote to Betjeman again asking him to do his ‘damndest’ to get him a job in London. Sadly, his old friend could do nothing for him. There was now no prospect of marriage. He returned Penelope Betjeman’s wedding present, a set of cooking pans, to her husband’s successor, Reggie Ross-Williamson, whom he had also roped i
n to aid him in his job-search.15 More than twenty years were to elapse before he would experience the comforts of married life in a Ballsbridge apartment. In the meantime he would become in his own words
A lonely lecher whom the fates
By a financial trick castrate . . .
Nola was broken-hearted. She never married subsequently and always looked back on her relationship with Kavanagh as the great romance of her life.
That Kavanagh could not have afforded to support a wife and children even on his Irish Press earnings is demonstrated by the figures presented by the secretary of the Cork No.1 Branch of the ITGWU in 1946, when making the case for a weekly minimum wage of just over £6.10.0 for men. He estimated that the cost of maintaining a family of five persons, man, wife and three children aged 7–12 (a small family by 1946 standards) ‘on a standard of a bare subsistence level’ for one week was £6.0.3. This figure was arrived at by calculating £3.13.6 for food, £1 for clothes, 12 shillings for rent, 8 shillings and 9 pence for fuel, gas and light, 2 shillings for medicine, and 4 shillings for insurance and trade union contributions. It allowed nothing for those ‘luxuries’ which Kavanagh would have regarded as necessities — bus fares, holidays, books, papers, recreation, cigarettes, drinks, stamps — and nothing for ‘replacement of bed clothes, cooking utensils or home decorating etc.’ To allow for these additional expenses, a further ten shillings at least should be added to the minimum wage. The trade union official asked how much more should be added to this amount to maintain a family on a decent, rather than a subsistence, standard of living. Even when he was writing a regular twice-weekly column, Kavanagh’s earnings from this source amounted to no more than £4 a week, well below the level necessary to maintain a working-class family.16
With the demise of his ‘City Commentary’ column, Kavanagh had at one blow lost his regular income, his hope of imminent marriage and the hobnobbing lifestyle of the Tatler-type correspondent that he had so enjoyed. Although the Irish Press did not dispense with his services immediately, he was soon back where he had been in his first years in Dublin, touting his wares as a freelance writer, attempting to cadge a livelihood, hoping to be bought a cup of coffee out of pity rather than greeted as a celebrity. His daily misery was once again compounded by financial anxiety; his lifelong fear of insecurity reasserted itself. He had overreached himself financially in renting a family-sized apartment in Ballsbridge. Now that he had no regular source of income, he could not afford the rent, so during the summer of 1944 he sublet it and retreated to Inniskeen.
Returning to Dublin in the autumn, he moved into lodgings in the vicinity, staying in Mrs Kenny’s boarding house at 19 Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, for about six months where, as he put it, he was ‘housed, bedded and cleaned out’ for ten shillings a week. It was a ‘somewhat genteel’ establishment, with a lower middle-class clientele; most of his fellow lodgers were schoolteachers, clerks and sales reps. There was only one lodger of his own ilk, the young Belfast poet Robert Greacen, who had written the critique of The Great Hunger for Horizon a couple of years before. It was not a wholly enthusiastic critique, as Kavanagh well remembered, but he had not held it against the younger man. Indeed, he had praised the journal Lagan in ‘City Commentary’, mentioning that it published the writings of such lively northerners as Roy McFadden, Michael McLaverty and Greacen, whom he described as a Trinity student. Greacen recalls how Kavanagh enjoyed shocking the residents of No. 19:
. . . he would clump into the diningroom as if he were returning from footing turf in a bog, march heavily as far as possible from the others assembled there . . . and, without a word of greeting, open a newspaper noisily . . .
This boorish behaviour was deliberate, a strategy for shunning all social contact. He hated the lack of privacy that went with life in a boarding house, the communal meals, the association with dull, respectable, salaried folk, rather than the more bohemian or moneyed society he was used to. He even avoided Greacen within the boarding house, lest it draw him into the general conversation, though he was quite prepared to behave in a friendly fashion outside. His customary greeting was ‘Hello Rob, what’s new?’ And as their acquaintance progressed he would sometimes salute him affectionately as ‘Protestant bastard’. He soon became anathema to the residents of 19 Raglan Road, just as he had wished. Greacen defended him, but they refused to believe that a significant poet and writer could be so uncouth.17
While it would be reductive and inaccurate to categorise Kavanagh as a social climber, because he enjoyed talking to people from all social classes and, in particular, relished the conversation of craftsmen or technical specialists when they discussed the arcana of their trade, or listening to boxers and footballers talking shop, nevertheless from his coming to Dublin he sought out the company of moneyed, titled or professional persons as well as writers and artists. He had no time for lower middle-class respectability, and his behaviour in 19 Raglan Road reflects this aspect of his character. As his fellow lodgers’ attitude reveals, the antipathy was mutual.
Kavanagh was never one to wallow in self-pity to the extent of shying away from seeking assistance. When Patrick Little, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, was called upon, he had the bright idea of asking the poet to prepare an edition of his deceased brother Philip Francis Little’s voluminous collection of verse for a fee. The meetings Kavanagh arranged to discuss the progress of this edition inevitably involved further cash advances from the minister. A ‘special’ on Philip Francis Little’s poetry for The Irish Times (30 March 1945) had the double benefit of bringing in a few bob and pleasing his benefactor. Not that the article was entirely complimentary. Even less complimentary was his physical treatment of Little’s poetry, pages of which he would seize upon to kindle the fire at 62 Pembroke Road when he moved back there in 1945.
His chief benefactor in 1944/5, the man who bankrolled him and possibly paid for his keep at 19 Raglan Road, was Archbishop McQuaid. Notoriously close-mouthed about his almsgiving, the prelate was a discreet source of finance in a gossipy city. Kavanagh wanted a regular, salaried job rather than hand-outs. As 1944 passed, he was ashamed that his financial dependence on the Archbishop was so long drawn out. He had looked on it as ‘a temporary thing, prelude to a job’. Had he known he would be out of work for so long, he would have gone to England.18 Because of his vast network of contacts in the middle-class Catholic community, McQuaid was ideally placed to procure employment for him, as Kavanagh well knew. The Archbishop worked ‘in mysterious ways his wonders to perform’, always acting indirectly through second parties since he would never risk losing face by suffering a direct rebuff.19 Even this influential ecclesiastic drew a blank when it came to obtaining the kind of middle-class position to which Kavanagh aspired. Frank Geary, editor of the Irish Press’s rival, the Irish Independent, was again approached, but declined to take him on because, some said, he was queasy about The Great Hunger.20 Ben Kiely is of the opinion that Kavanagh would not have fitted in with the staff of this conservative Catholic paper. The Tourist Board, to whom he had applied for a post in publicity, did not even consider the application. The fact that he confided these failures on the employment market to McQuaid suggests that the Archbishop had been asked to lend his support to his job applications.
From his first years in Dublin, Kavanagh exploited the occasional journalism that came his way, including book reviews, to publicise the fact of his own unemployment. He resumed this practice in 1944 and 1945. In a review of Lord Dunsany’s Donnellan Lectures (The Irish Times, 3 February 1945), he criticises Dunsany’s representation of Francis Ledwidge as a poet who would go on singing of the fields and hedgerows of Meath forever. Dunsany was one of those who regarded the poet as ‘a sort of angelic moron with none of the normal capabilities or appetites — a curse for which we have Keats, Shelley and Byron to thank’. He represented a widely shared view of the poetic nature, one that was very damaging to the poet’s employment prospects and must be quashed. Kavanagh reminds readers that Robert Bridge
s was a successful doctor and Gerard Manley Hopkins a successful priest and concludes that ‘the modern poet is a hot competitor in the world of pounds, shillings and pence.’
As 1944 passed, Kavanagh grew increasingly embittered against Dublin’s middle class. Some who had appeared amiable and welcoming while he was in their social circle had discontinued their friendly overtures and failed to extend a helping hand in his hour of dire need. It was as much a blow to his pride and self-esteem as to his pocket. He became quite paranoid about his former acquaintances, exaggerating the fact that he had been dropped socially into a general feeling of hatred against him and seeing himself as a victim and outcast. He told the Archbishop:
. . . I am beginning to realise how hated [I am] (hated is a strong word, but Our Lord used it) by — by whom? I ask myself and the answer seems to be the World.
One finds this in small things: a man thinking you do not require his help, offers you help, then as your need for it reaches towards him, he recedes — and leaves you grasping air.21
Our Lord had used the word ‘hated’: Kavanagh was beginning to identify with Christ in his Golgotha phase, an inflated comparison to which he would have recourse again in later years when he felt himself oppressed by his fellow citizens.
The bitter, self-pitying poem ‘Pegasus’, published in July 1944 as ‘A Glut on the Market’, vents some of the anger and frustration of the previous six months’ unsuccessful job hunting. This poem makes it clear that for him there was more at stake than just a series of job refusals. What he was trading was his ‘soul’; every rejection was a psychic wounding, a profound personal hurt. In the poem he parades his soul in the metaphoric guise of an old horse (Kavanagh’s equine head and equine way of tossing it were noted by several contemporaries), targeting different kinds of buyer and lowering the price until he ends up touting his good points, stooping to beg and being ignored even by tinkers:
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 32
