What little he had to say was distinguished by its invective and that of a not very original kind either. Terms like ‘pulp magazine’, ‘superficial’ writer and ‘lady novelist’ were sprinkled liberally over what should have been film criticism. All the outworn stocks of nomenclature which pass for ideas in certain circles were used, all the shabbiest clichés came into play. . . . the request I make is not unreasonable. And that is that your film critic confine his attention to films. (3 December 1948)
Week after week Kavanagh lambasted the films on offer, yet it never seems to have occurred to him to bow out as critic. For all his moaning about the agonies of reviewing films, he quite liked the job. He was never happier than when pontificating to the plain people of Ireland and he thoroughly enjoyed writing negative criticism. He could indulge his vicious, vitriolic bent without alienating fellow writers and potential patrons. It was a safe outlet for all his destructiveness. The Standard was widely read in Catholic Ireland and he was once again a household name.
His film column is the first time we catch something of what Kavanagh’s talk was like, those lunges from topic to topic and mood to mood that fascinated so many people. He had been on his best behaviour in ‘City Commentary’, abnormally polite. In the film column he is self-confidently his own man: savagely denunciatory or violently partisan, funny, bitchy and wise-cracking by turns, and always opinionated, sometimes indeed infuriatingly dogmatic and righteous, but then re-engaging our sympathy by his irreverent honesty and sheer charm, his certainty that he can say the unsayable and get away with it.
Though he tirelessly reiterated that he was bored, that what he was watching was trash, he continued to haunt Dublin’s cinemas. It was, after all, free entertainment; he was saving on the admission price of three or four shillings, which he found very high. He could always walk out if he wished and often did; if he was in the Carlton he could cross the street to the Savoy and try out the rival cinema’s offerings. Then, too, cinemas were plush, comfortable places in the post-war winters when fuel was still scarce and central heating almost unknown. In the particularly arctic winter of 1947, he marvelled at their warmth. As a film critic he was a minor VIP: he liked jumping the queue, being greeted and fussed over by staff, consulted as to the merits of films by patrons. He was known to all the cinema managers and took care to thank them individually by name in his column. Bill Gaynor, assistant manager at the Adelphi, a big cheerful Dubliner, was a particular friend. Together they would repair to what they called ‘the confessional’ for a chat during or after the evening show. The ‘confessional’ was the sweets and cigarettes store in the Adelphi annexe.1 His first transatlantic phone calls were made from the Adelphi.
The major cinemas had cafés or restaurants attached and he would be offered complimentary cups of tea or meals. He brought his women friends to the cinema and they were often admitted free. They were impressed when he was lionised in the cinema foyer, treated deferentially by the management, recognised by other cinema and café-goers. John Ryan remembers him as the Casanova of the cinemas.2 Cinema restaurants were a favourite haunt of courting couples and he revelled in chatting up other men’s partners while more or less ignoring their escorts. Patricia Collins has described how he tried to pick up her mother over high tea in the Adelphi one evening, pushing the back of his chair up against the back of hers repeatedly to gain her attention. She was not amused.
The downside for his cinema guests was his habit of engaging in a running commentary on the film they were watching and doing so in a very loud voice. One wonders was he the heckler in the audience who greeted some wartime rhetoric on screen with repeated loud exclamations of ‘Haw Haw’. Dr Patrick Henchy recalls how Kavanagh once waylaid him on O’Connell Street and insisted he accompany him to the cinema. Once seated, Kavanagh began to comment on the film at the top of his voice, incurring the wrath of several patrons. Then, bored with the show, he strode out, followed by his shame-faced guest and crossed the street to the other cinema, where he repeated the performance. Henchy found it excruciatingly embarrassing to be in his company.
As film critic he was invited to glitzy social occasions such as the première of The Bells of St Mary’s at the Savoy, when the visiting dignitaries and guests were greeted by the Artane Boys choir singing to the strains of the cinema organ. There were also occasional junkets to film studios in England, travelling by plane, still a novelty in the immediate post-war years. On 29 November 1946, the day his brother emigrated to the US, he flew to Northolt, his first trip to London since the war and his first ever plane journey. He liked visiting the Denham and Ealing studios, seeing the set and discussing the business of film-making with directors. He always enjoyed being a media insider.
The long-suffering O’Curry’s patience with Kavanagh’s cavalier attitude to the role of film critic finally snapped in July 1949. On 22 July he was abruptly replaced by a reviewer with the Gaelic pen-name Scannan. The sacked critic nicknamed his ex-employer Petty Curry,3 an insulting reference to his small stature as well as to his mean-mindedness. In reality O’Curry had shown remarkable tolerance, letting Kavanagh hold down for over three years a job he publicly cocked a snook at almost every week.
After his sacking, Kavanagh continued to patronise the cinema restaurants and even attend the occasional film. He was a creature of habit and routine who formed an attachment to the places he frequented and found it hard to change his ways. His substitute for the warm, dark womb of the cinema and the close proximity of company, caffeine and food would soon be the public house.
15
TARRY FLYNN
(1947–1949)
. . . real elementalism is a . . . tawdry thing, resentful, mean and ungenerous.
(Studies, Spring 1959)
Hilda’s marriage apart, 1947 was a good year for Kavanagh: he published his first collection of poems in nine years, successfully redrafted and revised a novel which he had been writing intermittently for about seven years, and negotiated a contract that enabled him to work as a full-time writer.
A Soul for Sale was announced in Macmillan’s spring list in January 1947 and published in London at the end of February, a very slim volume of 55 pages, bound in green cloth with a green dust-jacket. Publication of a second volume of verse by the Inniskeen poet was a momentous event in Irish literary circles. For the previous five years or so he had been behaving as if he were Ireland’s premier poet, strutting around Dublin disparaging other poets’ stuff with loud Olympian disdain. While he had been publishing piecemeal in journals, it had been difficult to assess whether his achievement measured up to his arrogant sense of his own importance. Reaction to his long-promised volume among some of Dublin’s literati was one of gratified amazement that the collection was so small: evidence that his reputation and his self-projection as a genius were inflated. On the whole the response, even from those fellow poets and critics he had alienated, was remarkably cordial, though Smyllie was cross that there was no Acknowledgments page listing the journals where the poems had first appeared, so that The Irish Times got no credit.1 It was the first time that The Great Hunger had become widely available and there was an almost unanimous recognition that it was a major poem.
In England, A Soul for Sale was effectively Kavanagh’s debut volume. Like many other poets of his generation, he was a late starter, his career delayed by the war. The slight beginner’s volume nine years previously had been little noticed and long forgotten, and the Cuala Press Great Hunger had scarcely impinged. Now that he was at last reaching a wider audience, the reception was heartening. The Great Hunger was saluted as a masterpiece and reviewers also remarked on the poet’s humour and liveliness, his mastery of the lyric and his modernising of Irish verse.
North American reviews, too, were favourable. Padraic Colum praised the book and included a section of ‘Father Mat’ in his Anthology of Irish Verse the following year. Poetry (Chicago) thought that Kavanagh was escaping the shadow of Yeats and that the not altogether successful Great Hunge
r was one of the best long poems of the decade. The New York Times considered that the collection as a whole was lacking in direction but liked the poetry, which it found ‘wiry and aware’.
Kavanagh immediately turned his attention to bringing out an enlarged American edition to include such recent poems as ‘Dark-Haired Miriam Ran Away’ (‘On Raglan Road’) and ‘In Memory of My Mother’ and to pick up a 1930s’ love poem, ‘Anna Quinn’. He also wanted to substitute the Cuala Press Great Hunger for the bowdlerised Macmillan version. His brother, roped in as unofficial North American agent soon after his arrival in New York in late 1946, was asked to approach Macmillan of New York or another American publisher with the enlarged collection. He was unsuccessful. There was to be no London reprint of A Soul for Sale either, though Kavanagh variously claimed that it was a bestseller in Ireland and had sold 1,000 copies there.2
However, he acquired an influential admirer in the person of John Arlott, who was responsible for poetry broadcasts on the BBC’s Third Programme. Four of Kavanagh’s poems were included in his anthology First Time in America (New York, 1948), a selection of poems never before published in the US. Three of these — ‘To the Man after the Harrow’, ‘Shancoduff’ and ‘In Memory of My Mother’ had been omitted from A Soul for Sale; the fourth, ‘October Dublin’, a 30-line poem in four stanzas, had been published as part of ‘The Wake of the Books’ the previous year. It consists of four consecutive stanzas from this verse play, beginning:
Sometimes I can see in these poor streets
A little village, and hear in the women’s gossip
The talk of country women at a well
Echoing in the valleys.
The women selling oranges have a grip
On life that prude censorship
Would call obscene —
Life pressed in the gutter yields the gutter’s dream
Of flowers.
I have no fears, new Aprils will be ours . . .
This reading of Dublin street life through Inniskeen lenses suggests that the poem could have been written any time from 1943 onwards, but it was probably written in 1947. He still had not made the transition to being an urban writer.
Success as a poet did not make Kavanagh any more employable. When Radio Éireann advertised vacancies for scriptwriters in spring 1947, he applied and was chagrined not to be called for interview. He attempted to make light of the incident, pretending that he had applied ‘in an insulting way’ and would not have taken the job if it had been offered. It is unlikely that he would have turned down a salary of £750 per annum, almost double what he was earning on The Standard. Moreover, having moved heaven and earth, or heaven on earth in the guise of two archbishops, to become a staff reporter on The Standard, he was by now bored with that weekly and anxious to quit. At the end of 1946 he asked Betjeman if he could find him a job with the BBC because, although The Standard paid quite well, he could no longer ‘stand the inertia, the vegetable quality of Irish life’.3
The favourable reception of A Soul for Sale in February had brought a surge of adrenalin and self-confidence, and he had immediately begun trawling through some of his old manuscripts with a view to capitalising on his success by publishing another book. In April he wrote to Michael Joseph saying that he assumed the copyright of The Green Fool had reverted to the author since the book had been out of print for so long. This elicited a peremptory response from Joseph to the effect that Kavanagh still owed him £400 and he was surprised to see him bringing out a volume of poetry on which his firm had not been given a prior option. Lawyer friends reassured Kavanagh that Joseph’s claim was statute barred because he had not demanded payment of the debt over an eight-year period. On 2 May he informed Joseph of this fact and formally asked him to reprint The Green Fool. He received no reply. The terms of the contract with Michael Joseph stated that if the publisher did not reprint within six months of the author’s formal request to do so, the copyright reverted to the author. Kavanagh did not wait that long. Even before his 2 May letter to Joseph, he had asked his brother to show the book to Macmillan of New York. On the advice of Mr Pembrey of Greene’s bookshop, he offered it to Harry Tempest’s Dundealgan Press in Dundalk on 30 April, claiming that he owned the copyright. The offer was politely refused three days later. He also approached Harper and Brothers of New York, who had co-published The Green Fool or taken sheets back in 1938, asking if they would consider really publishing it. They declined, tempering their refusal by evincing an interest in publishing some of his other work. In August his brother reported that he could not place the book with any American publisher. A month later his long-lost friend John Gawsworth wrote on behalf of the Melifont Press to ask if The Green Fool was available. Kavanagh jumped at the opportunity because he needed the money. However nothing further came of this.4 Though he owned the copyright of The Green Fool from 2 November 1947, he appears to have decided against republishing it, perhaps because he had come to regard it as juvenilia or had already arrived at the view that it was contaminated by Literary Revival romanticism. Besides, by then he had already completed one Inniskeen-based novel and started on another.
Six months after his mother’s death Kavanagh had returned to the novel rejected by Macmillan and Methuen in 1944, Mother and Children. A heavily revised version of the previously rejected Stony Grey Soil (1941/42), it now had a poignancy for him because it drew on his relationship with his mother when he was living at home in the 1930s. In June 1946 he published an extract in the Irish Press as the short story ‘One Summer Evening in the Month of June’.
A detailed evocation of his life as a farmer-poet was locked up in this unsuccessful novel and he needed to find a way of releasing it. Still hopeful that some publisher would take it as it was, he had packed it in Peter’s luggage when he was emigrating to the US in November 1946 and asked him to try it on some American presses. In April 1947 he instructed his brother not to send the novel to any US publishers because he was embarking on a major revision.
Rereading Mother and Children that spring, he could suddenly see clearly where he had gone wrong. His recreation of his small-farm milieu as the basis of a fictional thesis on the dispiriting nature of Irish rural life had been misguided. The novel belonged to the days of his discipleship to O’Faoláin, O’Connor and their new school of Irish socio-realist fiction when he was enthusiastic about analysing Ireland’s social and moral blight. ‘To lay bare the myth of living, to tear up the faith and show nothing but futility’ now seemed to him sinful.5 The plot about the parish priest’s opposition to the licensing of a dance hall as an instance of the tyrannical rule of the Catholic Church, though it was based on fact, was ‘a big lie’. It was false in the sense that it was atypical. The novel was at cross-purposes; inside its doom-laden framework a comic fiction was struggling to emerge. One of the main contributory factors to the gloominess of the narrative was the fate of its young farmer-poet hero, Tarry, condemned in the last chapter to settle down with the wrong woman for the sake of her dowry and spend a life of drudgery on the land. If the dance hall plot were filleted out and the unhappy-ever-after ending jettisoned, it could be transformed into an altogether sunnier, mellower fiction. He was now prepared to undertake the necessary radical surgery. The new novel would recycle much of the material already present in Mother and Children, reorienting it and substituting a new concluding chapter for the existing pessimistic finale. It would be ‘a different novel with the same characters’, ‘entirely new’ because of the change of emphasis and ending and some differences in detail.6 Peadar O’Donnell, now editor of The Bell, with whom Kavanagh discussed his ideas, was encouraging. O’Donnell thought that for the writer ‘the way into oneness with the world is through wholeness with your parish’, so he entirely approved of the proposal to engage in a new fictional evocation of life in Inniskeen.7
By May the first chapters of the novel now renamed Tarry Flynn were ready, and right on cue a positive incentive to undertake the revision of the entire novel presented i
tself. Charles Madge from the Pilot Press had come to Dublin to conduct negotiations with Maurice Fridburg, publisher of Frank O’Connor’s The Midnight Court.8 The Pilot Press was a small London publishing house with an address at 45 Great Russell Street, founded just before the end of the war by a wealthy Hungarian, Kalman Lantos. It had become the Bell’s British distributor, so Madge called on Peadar O’Donnell. He had signed up Mervyn Wall for a second novel and was on the look-out for new Irish authors. When O’Donnell told him of Kavanagh’s novel, he offered a £100 advance, £50 on or before the signing of the agreement and the remainder on receipt of the completed typescript.
Kavanagh found the prospect of a large cheque irresistible and rose to the bait without trying any other publishers. The Pilot Press advance was particularly welcome at this juncture because his job as staff journalist at The Standard had just ended. He had been treating it as a sinecure of late, eager to cut work so that he could concentrate on his novel, and spending too much time at the Bell office a couple of streets away or sitting over coffee with Peadar O’Donnell. He was bored with writing for The Standard and wanted to ‘scram’. O’Curry was equally anxious to be rid of him and employ someone more reliable. Kavanagh left before he was sacked. He was making a few pounds by writing for the Irish Press under the name Pat Murphy and the severance package agreed with O’Curry, whereby he would continue on as film reviewer at a salary of two guineas a week and contribute other freelance articles at two guineas a time, left him with enough to live on. O’Curry’s compromise deal ensured that the editor of The Standard would not incur ecclesiastical displeasure for having fired the protégé of two archbishops. For Kavanagh it meant retaining that part of his connection with The Standard which, for all his grumbling about the dreadfulness of commercial cinema, he most enjoyed.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 37
