For the rest of his life he turned to the Ryans for companionship, counsel and support, knowing that they had his best interests at heart and he could trust them. He did not always follow their advice, but he knew that they were generally right. Joan’s special relationship with Kavanagh was acknowledged by most people who knew him. She was perceived as a good influence on him, one who knew how to handle him and bring out the best in him. Though she was well over twenty years his junior, he looked to her as a mother figure and would confide in her and talk things over with her. Whereas his affair with Hilda had been a romance, his love for Joan grew into a solid, enduring, lifelong friendship.
One of the consequences of redrafting his novel for the Pilot Press was that it led Kavanagh to formalise and formulate his changing views on literature: Tarry Flynn is packed with aesthetic pronouncements. In particular, its narrator dwells on the importance of affection for one’s material or a comic detachment from it, as opposed to socio-critical engagement in art. Ironically, Tarry Flynn ushered in a period when the theme and thrust of most of Kavanagh’s writing would be cultural and literary criticism. Using The Bell as his main base of operations, he now set himself up as an authoritative cultural critic. An aggressive, unmannerly period ensued as he wrenched himself free from both his rural and his ethnic matrix.
Throughout 1947 he had been a frequent contributor to The Bell and towards the end of the year Peadar O’Donnell’s adoption of him as a favourite son resulted in his promotion to the position of assistant editor, a move his promoter soon regretted. O’Donnell found Kavanagh exasperatingly difficult to work with and sometimes felt like breaking his neck down the stairs. If he suspected that the editor was merely filling out the magazine, he would drum his fingers on the desk and hiss at him, ‘You’re wasting my time.’18 At first he was grateful to be appointed to the Bell staff and repaid O’Donnell’s favour by collaborating creatively with him. The verse playlet ‘The Wake of the Books’, in November 1947, was his enactment of a drama on censorship suggested by O’Donnell in the July editorial, ‘Suggestion for a Fighting Wake’. From the first, his execution of O’Donnell’s scenario was hampered by his lack of interest in the topic of censorship; his position stated at the outset was
For howsoever I try I can’t but feel
The censorship of books is not a real
Problem for the writers of this land:
There’s much that’s insincere in what is banned —
And time if left the corpse would bury it deeper
In ten years than our bitterest conscience-keeper . . .
The ‘last judgement’ that William Blake demanded
Would leave nine-tenths of these rhymsters stranded.
‘The Wake of the Books’ was closely followed by two savagely critical essays on writers who had been close friends, supporters and benefactors. In ‘Coloured Balloons’ in the next month’s Bell he abruptly turned on his ally, mentor and champion Frank O’Connor. The gist of his charge against O’Connor was that the artist in him had sold out to the entertainer; he was a showman who had reneged on his former commitment to realism and authenticity in the interest of being popular. This attack was quite unexpected. O’Connor had spent the first half of 1947 in England, so the two had seldom met of late, but only a few months previously he had enthusiastically reviewed A Soul for Sale and Kavanagh’s review of O’Connor’s Irish Miles in September, while not altogether uncritical, was genial and appreciative. ‘Coloured Balloons’ is indicative of a gratuitously vicious and ultimately self-destructive streak which Kavanagh recognised as a ‘kink’ in his own character and sometimes fondly excused as a ‘kink of rectitude’.19 Like the ‘kicking mare’, he was given to sudden, arbitrary nasty moods when he lashed out at writers with whom he had been closely yoked. He felt guilty about his public betrayal of such a good and long-time friend, and when he sighted O’Connor at a party Macmillan’s gave for its Irish writers in April 1948, he hung back sheepishly, dreading the encounter, nervous that his former friend would cut him. Instead, he was greeted warmly and the abusive essay was brushed aside as of no consequence. Though O’Connor was affable, the friendship was over.20
Meantime, Kavanagh had provoked a more self-damaging literary rumpus by an essay on F. R. Higgins, ‘The Gallivanting Poet’, in the December 1947 number of the relatively new journal, Irish Writing. Taking sincerity as his criterion for good human behaviour and aesthetic validity alike, he denounced Higgins as a phoney, a Protestant in stage-Irish costume acting the part of a droll, peasant balladeer and alluding to Catholic ritual in his verse to make his work appear more Irish. The editors, David Marcus and Terence Smith, objected to the sectarian tone of the essay and asked him if he would disclaim the theory that a Protestant cannot be an Irish writer. Kavanagh incorporated their objections in an end-note, but instead of denying that he was making Irishness synonymous with Irish Catholicism, he sidestepped and asked, ‘Who wants to be an Irish writer? A man is what he is, and if there is some mystical quality in the nation or the race it will ooze through his skin.’
Higgins was an illustration of his new bête noire: professional ‘Irishness’, whether of the synthetic Hollywood Oirish variety, sneered at in his film criticism, or as exemplified by ballad-singing Radio Éireann and pub entertainers, or by poets and critics concerned with ethnicity as a literary criterion. He would soon coin the term ‘the national bucklep’ to describe Ireland’s obsession with Irishness; ‘gallivanting’ was an early synonym for ‘buckleppin’, his phrase for the antics of those exhibitionists who used Irishness to advance their careers.
The essay on Higgins represents an important break-through in Kavanagh’s thinking, the first articulation of his swerve away from an ethnic or regional aesthetic. It calls for a literature that is the expression of a unique individual whose Irishness is a part of his selfhood, but it was unfortunate that he should have selected Higgins as his negative exemplar. This public attack on a much-loved writer only six years after his untimely death provoked an outcry, and the aesthetic argument went unheeded because of the shudder of distaste that the essay elicited.
While he did not state the reason for his refusal to be included in a projected Faber anthology, Irish Contemporary Poetry, being compiled by Valentin Iremonger and Robert Greacen at this time, it was probably the phrase ‘Irish poetry’ that got his back up. He may have expected that his non-cooperation would stymie the book, but T. S. Eliot gave it his imprimatur and it went ahead.21 So vitriolic was his review of Roibéard Ó Faracháin’s book, The Course of Irish Verse (1948), which promoted ethnicity as an aesthetic criterion, that The Irish Times refused to publish it.22
Even more offensive than the Higgins article in many quarters, and certainly more guaranteed to raise the hackles of Irish officialdom, was Kavanagh’s frontal attack on the revival of Irish as a spoken or written language. The Bell dared not risk alienating a large number of its readers by publishing an article attacking the language movement, so Kavanagh’s views were presented in the form of a letter to the editor, published under the title ‘The Bones of the Dead’ in January 1948, a title deriving from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.’) Blake was one of his favourite poets.
Tarry Flynn was scheduled to be published in April 1948 and the blurb and biographical note Kavanagh had provided appeared in the Pilot Press spring catalogue. However, because of delays in London, the book was only at the copy-editing stage by April. At this point the Pilot requested revisions to the first chapter; some of the coarser language needed to be modified. Kavanagh was quick to oblige. Soon afterwards he was sent a copy of the dust-jacket. The book itself did not appear until November.
In the expectation that Tarry Flynn would come out in April, O’Donnell had arranged to have the author puffed in that month’s number of The Bell. It would also be his last opportunity to promote Kavanagh for some time, since the magazine was about to suspend publication. Its financial proble
ms were exacerbated by a post-war embargo on distribution in Britain which restricted readership and a projected fund-raising tour of the US by O’Donnell had been cancelled when he could not obtain a visa because of his socialist leanings.
Larry Morrow, the witty Belfast journalist who, under the pseudonym the Bellman, contributed a series of pen portraits to the journal, was assigned the task of interviewing Kavanagh. The resultant feature, ‘Meet Mr Patrick Kavanagh’, establishes him as a Dublin ‘character’, a ‘Stage-Irishman-about-Town’. Morrow dwells on the theatrical rusticity of his dress — tartan-pattern shirt, unmatching Paisley tie, highly colourful check sports jacket, and check-pattern cloth cap. His ostentatiously countrified air prompts him to satirise Kavanagh through rural images: ‘great root-like’ hands, ‘enormous, mountainous shoulders’, ‘tufts of oily, black hair like scraps of fleece caught on barbed wire’. One of his favourite tropes is the comparison of the poet to a horse: spectacles like blinkers, ‘scobed nostrils’, equine teeth, an imaginary jingle of harness when he tosses his head. Kavanagh’s big bodily frame is magnified and made part of his larger-than-life persona; he is constructed on a ‘heroic’ scale. His movements are seismic: tea-shop table, chairs and even walls seem to shake when he gestures; his very whispers boom. For Morrow, Kavanagh’s self-publicising persona completely dwarfs his ‘output’, which is really ‘extremely small’. He is a fabrication of his own publicity machine, his own greatest work.
On the day that Tarry Flynn was published, 1 November 1948, Kavanagh was told that it had been reported to the Censorship Board. A week later the Pilot Press issued a press release stating that they had received notification from the Éire Censorship Board that Tarry Flynn was prohibited from 4 November on the grounds that it was ‘indecent and obscene’.
Far from being downcast by the banning, Kavanagh was delighted with the publicity: ‘Good advert’ was his reaction.23 The Pilot Press immediately appealed and by Christmas the Appeal Board had lifted the ban. This speedy banning and unbanning had done the book a considerable service, making it a news item twice in as many months, giving the author the kudos of being a victim of literary oppression and his book the kind of scandalous reputation that would boost sales figures in Ireland. Tarry Flynn was back on the shelves for the Christmas market.
Rumour reached Kavanagh that his old antagonist, Roibéard Ó Faracháin had been instrumental in the removal of the ban. Normally no individual, other than the author or his/her publisher’s representative, was permitted to make a case to the Appeal Board to have a ban revoked. What had happened in this instance was that a member of the four-man Appeal Board, Dr Richard Hayes, the film censor and a co-director with Ó Faracháin at the Abbey Theatre, asked him to give the Board a writer’s opinion on Tarry Flynn. O’Faracháin’s opinion was that it should not have been banned ‘because though there was coarseness in it, it was, in general, an affirmation of life’.24 It was a magnanimous gesture, given the history of the two men’s relations. Now that Kavanagh found himself indebted to his old foe, he was rather relieved that The Irish Times had suppressed his nasty review of The Course of Irish Verse.
He was greatly embarrassed to be under an obligation to Ó Faracháin, nevertheless, and was not quite sure how to handle the situation. In the event he played out the scene of gratitude in two different ways, as Ó Faracháin’s account narrates:
. . . I was sitting in the Pearl bar . . . with my wife and some friends when my fellow-poet (mot juste?) walked up to me, hands under oxters, and said ‘I hear you got the ban taken off my book?’ ‘I don’t know, Paddy,’ I said, ‘but I said it shouldn’t have been banned.’ A long struggle followed — within the Poet himself. ‘Well — thanks, thanks anyway.’ ‘Not at all. It’s literature I’m concerned with.’
Next week: même jeu as the French say in their stage directions. That is, not quite même jeu, Patrick Kavanagh walks up again to me, one hand under oxter, one hand holding a bottle of stout; leans over me and, very deliberately, pours the stout, not into but onto my hat. ‘Bloody well,’ says my fellow-poet, ‘you can afford to buy a new hat’, referring to the Radio Éireann job I got in 1939 and which he didn’t.25
Thus Kavanagh solved the dilemma of being beholden to Ó Faracháin and ensured that former hostilities could be resumed. He disliked shedding enemies.
Tarry Flynn sold very well26 but it was not as enthusiastically received by reviewers as The Green Fool. Some readers found it offensively vulgar and its earthiness shocked many priests who were Standard fans.27 The realist descriptions of country ways, such as ‘the vessel’ that substituted for an indoor lavatory, and many of the turns of speech (‘it ’id make a body throw off their guts to see him’) in the opening pages alone placed it beyond the pale of polite perusal, despite Pilot’s attempt to clean up the first chapter.
In Inniskeen, where it was read as a roman à clef, neighbours derived much malicious amusement from playing the game of who’s who in Tarry Flynn. Not that their curiosity did much to boost sales figures. Only a few copies were bought and these were passed around. When the Monaghan County Library opened a branch in the village Central Stores, there was always a waiting list queued up to borrow the novel. It had the reputation of being ‘a dirty book’ and the library copy was truly filthy from frequent handling. While there was considerable debate, particularly over the originals of the nastier characters, nobody denied that Kavanagh had captured Inniskeen. So, there was no public burning as with The Valley of the Squinting Windows or, later, The Country Girls, just a robust and often secret enjoyment.
The author of Tarry Flynn was sufficiently notorious to be used as advertising copy by a leading Dublin firm of mattress-makers in the marketing of its Odearest range. An ad on the front page of The Irish Times on 19 February 1949 presents him as a barefoot, casually clad figure, chiefly recognisable by his battered hat and horn-rimmed spectacles, seated on an Odearest mattress in a field near a farmyard. (By 1947/48 thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles had become part of his public image.) The score of the old hit song ‘Let him go, let him tarry’ lies discarded at the bottom of the mattress and he is singing ‘Nature Boy’, the latest hit song, the words of which read
Just now with the advent of Spring
We agree that all poets must sing,
For the poems I have made
Put all verse in the shade,
For the ‘spring’ in ODEAREST’s the thing.
Since all the Odearest ads were accompanied by a rhyming jingle, it is unlikely that this verse was one of his compositions. He had been given a proof of the ad in advance and passed it. In fact he was really chuffed by it, happy to collude in its portrayal of him as an idle, scruffy, devil-may-care fellow.
The Pilot Press had undertaken to find an American publisher for Tarry Flynn, but none of those approached were interested, except Devin-Adair of New York, who had an Irish list. Kavanagh was none too pleased by this niche-marketing but had to make the best of it. In December 1947 he had high hopes of placing it with Harper Row, to whom he had sent the Bell extracts since the Pilot had his only typescripts. He had even fantasised about how he would spend Harper’s $1,000 advance — refurbishing his apartment and taking a spring holiday in the US. The Devin-Adair advance was a mere $150. Tarry Flynn was published in New York on 3 October 1949, price $2.75.
Devin Garrity, the publisher, advertised the novel in the Saturday Review of Literature as the ‘Irish Book of the Month’ for October/ November. This sounded impressive; what it really meant was that he had made it the bi-monthly selection of his Irish Book Club which at the time boasted only one hundred subscribers, most of them conservative Catholics with Irish roots. In the advance publicity to club members, the book was touted as one that would appeal to ‘those who like the land and favor rural ways’ and Garritty fondly hoped that they would ‘welcome Tarry Flynn, poet and peasant-farmer, as a kindred soul’. In fact, the novel was not calculated to have much attraction for such a readership, as he implicitly a
cknowledged, when he went on to say that he presented it ‘with pride and possibly a bit of trepidation’. Kavanagh was marketed to club members both as a second Robbie Burns and as ‘Ireland’s maddest writer’; his status as a ‘character’ was corroborated by the inclusion of the Bellman pen portrait in Garrity’s publicity.
A reassuringly tranquil Irish rural scene, complete with whitewashed cottage, graced the blue front cover of the Devin-Adair dust-jacket but, predictably, Tarry Flynn did not appeal to its target audience, the Irish diaspora. When the book was sent out with a postage-paid card asking readers whether or not it had lived up to their expectations, many availed of the opportunity to vent their sense of outrage. On 9 January 1950 Devin Garrity reported to Kavanagh that twenty-five members of his book club had resigned because of it. ‘Irish-Americans carry around with them a completely sentimental and utterly untrue version of Ireland’, he wrote. Such readers found the book ‘realistic to a revolting degree’.28 The fact that it had been banned in Ireland would also have told against it with this rather conservative Catholic audience. The Catholic World slammed it as minor, imitative and dull and dubbed it ‘the Tobacco Road of County Cavan’. Though Tarry Flynn disgusted some lace-curtain Irish, it received quite favourable coverage in the broader American press.
Kavanagh’s own reactions to the book vacillated. When it first appeared he was enthusiastic, convinced that it was ‘a delightful job, a good novel’ and a considerable ‘improvement on the poor foolish original’.29 Then it plummeted in his estimation for a time. In later life he had every confidence in its merits and promoted it as an exemplary Irish realist novel: ‘not only the best but the only authentic account of life’ as it was lived in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.30
16
FROM BALLYRUSH TO BAGGOT STREET
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 39
