Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  The Miskish Horror in all its fragmentary versions alludes to, rather than faithfully chronicles, the dispute over the division of Rocksavage. This may have been to avoid accusations of libel in the event of publication, for the Plunkett-Kenny sisters and most of the parties to the dispute were still living when he was writing the novel. The Miskish Horror is recognisably set in contemporary Inniskeen and its environs, with the Garda Barracks, Magee’s pub and the railway station situated close together and the road winding on past the Glebe and the Protestant church with a round tower in the graveyard, then past McNello’s (here, Thomas Moyle’s large pub, general merchants and undertakers), the forge in Paris Row, the Catholic church and O’Rourke’s corn mill (here called Connolly’s). In some drafts Inniskeen is Killmuck, in others Killoran, Kill, Gortial or Gorteen. The townland in which the disputed estate is located is named Miskish or Miskishbawn and sometimes Snara. (There were actual townlands named Miskish Beg and Miskish Mor in the parish.)

  All versions of the novel concern a house and large farm which its elderly spinster proprietor, a Catholic aristocrat, has bequeathed to an order of nuns, against the wishes of local farmers, who dub the nuns ‘grabbers’. Kavanagh kept changing the names of the characters, out of forgetfulness or to give himself a fresh stimulus, and the lady landowner is sometimes Jane Deery, sometimes Feegan, and sometimes one of two elderly Mullins sisters. In some drafts the bequest is intended to fund a home for Catholic imbeciles, in others a foreign mission novitiate. In all versions a number of local people form an organisation calling itself a Land Division committee with a view to acquiring the land for neighbouring farmers. The organisation is chaired by a former blacksmith and former county councillor called Fayley Madden or Felix Meegan. The committee sends a deputation to meet with the reverend mother of the Dundalk convent which has inherited the farm and, when this fails to produce the intended result, Fayley/Felix is unsure how to proceed. Local farmers then seize the initiative. When the farm is offered for sale or to let, ill-scrawled notices appear on the piers of the church on Sunday morning, warning people not to purchase or lease land from the ‘grabbers’. The priest denounces the nuns’ opponents from the altar, but his words fall on deaf ears: ‘Like all peasants they took their religion lightly.’ Nobody turns up to bid for the farm at the auction and it does not sell by private treaty either. The nuns also fail to let the land. Meanwhile, aggrieved Miskish farmers strip the house, outhouses and farm of every item of value, even removing gates and the doors of stables. They scythe every blade of grass to feed their own animals and lop the branches off the trees for firewood. These scorched earth tactics are based on another local episode in the agrarian troubles of the 1930s, what the Dundalk Democrat termed ‘The sack of Longfield’.

  As well as drawing on his memories of local newspaper reports and gossip in the 1930s for his novel, Kavanagh borrows an episode from the agrarian troubles of the late nineteenth century involving the Plunkett-Kennys, part of the folklore he would have heard discussed as a child in his father’s workshop. The Land League’s first major boycott in County Monaghan was conducted against this family. As a protest against high rents, local people withdrew their labour and refused to help Kenny plant his crops in 1881, so he had to content himself with 25 acres of hay. When he could get no help to reap this, he appealed to Colonel Lloyd and the Orange Emergency committee in Monaghan town, who sent twelve men. Inspector McDermott and forty policemen met the workers at Inniskeen and escorted them to the Kenny farm.14 In Kavanagh’s rewriting of this episode, it is the nuns who require police protection when they arrive in the village to claim their inheritance.

  Kavanagh’s unsympathetic stance towards the perpetrators of the agrarian troubles in his own neighbourhood is revealed when he makes their fictional ringleader the villain of his novel. Fayley/Felix, the titular head of the local Land Division committee, is a harmless fellow, more given to fiddle-playing and speech-making than to illegal behaviour. The ringleader of the agrarian activists who block the public auction of the nuns’ inherited estate and strip it of every stealable commodity is a farmer less concerned with the redistribution of the land among his neighbours than with acquiring it for himself. Sometimes called Peter Connolly, he is also at times conflated with the scheming, upwardly mobile crook, Peter Devine of The Good Son. Connolly is, like the anti-hero Peter, the owner of the village corn mill.

  Kavanagh also casts himself in a villainous role in this novel. A journalist, recognisably based on the author, swaggers into the village to report on the agrarian troubles in Miskish. This reporter, a drama critic from the National Catholic Weekly or the Catholic Age, is a cobbler’s son and in one draft is named Tarry Flynn. He allows the members of the Land Division committee to ply him with drink, appears to take their side in the dispute with the nuns and tells them about his own sceptical attitude towards Catholicism:

  You couldn’t work for a so-called Catholic newspaper without being an atheist. The whole thing’s a cod from start to finish . . . There may be a God for all I know. I’m only saying that no one knows more about that than another . . .

  He then repays the committee’s hospitality by deflowering a young local virgin. His final treachery is to publish a newspaper article denouncing the nuns’ impious opponents: ‘Anti-Christian activists in Monaghan village’, ‘Nuns Attacked’ are some of the by-lines. The story appears in the National Catholic Weekly under the headline ‘The Miskish Horror’.

  There was really only sufficient material for a short story in the Rocksavage material as Kavanagh presented it, a tale of local greed and chicanery. He shows very little interest in characterisation or dialogue and all the chopping and changing between drafts and the instability of nomenclature indicate a lack of sustained attention to his fictional enterprise. Twenty years later he recalled that he was not writing with any view to publication, but simply to give himself a purpose and save him from jumping into the Liffey off O’Connell Street Bridge. Every morning he was up at seven clacking away on his typewriter as if his life depended on it, which apparently it did. Yet he was ambitious to produce another novel and sensed that in the agrarian unrest of the 1930s and the conflict between Church and landed interests in the matter of farm inheritance, he had the material for a lively and controversial fiction. It was to be some years before he arrived at the view that writers should not concern themselves with ‘subjects of public importance’.

  The real problem was that he was incapable of writing another country novel. By now he was bored by the machinations of small farmers, weary of their antics and their talk. He had burgled the bank of youth so often that there was nothing left in the strongroom. He could only write autobiographically and he could no longer portray himself as a farmer. In The Miskish Horror he tried to overcome the problem by introducing a visiting journalist character, but the novel remained farmer-centred and never progressed beyond a mess of fragmentary drafts.

  While The Good Son and The Miskish Horror both exude an air of lofty detachment from the stunted lives of small farmers, in fact during 1948 and the first half of 1949 Kavanagh was gradually being drawn back into his Mucker milieu, and the land hunger, petty financial greed, inter-family feuding and agrarian disputes in his country novels to some extent mirror the tensions and hostilities over land ownership, tenancy, rents and squatters’ rights he was experiencing in his private life.

  For a time the arrangement of leasing Mucker to the Markeys had worked well. He spent Christmas Day 1946 with Josie and her husband and visited again in spring 1947 during ‘the big snow’ when his sister Tessie was home on holiday from New York. Coal was then in short supply and he chopped up a tree to help with the fuel crisis in the household. By May of that year the first rumblings of disagreement between brother and sister begin to be heard. Josie complained that she and her husband were down £250 by leaving their own place in Rossdreenagh. In September, after the completion of Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh went to Mucker for a holiday and had to cut his stay short b
ecause Markey’s sister was due to visit. When he returned for another visit in December, there was no bedroom available and he had to sleep in the same room as the married couple and child.15 His exasperation was mounting; he felt that he was being cuckooed out of his rightful nest.

  In January 1948 he notified the Markeys that he intended taking over the place in the autumn, when their three-year lease was up. He planned to repair and modernise the house, installing a telephone line from the railway station and a generator for electricity. The following January the Markeys were still there and he had made up his mind to evict them and sell Reynolds’ farm. It was sold by auction on 27 January 1949 for £450.

  Throughout the spring he harassed the Markeys. Eventually he went to Mucker in April, barricaded himself into the house while they were outside, and claimed that they had been evicted. The gardaí were summoned. There was a dreadful family scene, with Kavanagh refusing to open the door, Josie and her husband shouting at him from the yard and the young Markey child howling in distress, while the sergeant endeavoured to placate the rowing parties. Kavanagh would not let Josie and her family re-enter the house until they had promised the sergeant they would vacate it the following Monday. They went as promised.16

  Once he had obtained possession of the Mucker homestead, he did nothing about repairing or modernising it. Going there was now ‘a bore’; even the thought of ‘wasting a moment in it was intolerable’.17 He changed the lock on the front door, let the Drumnagrella farm for £30 and decided to use the house as a holiday home, his ‘shooting lodge’. In fact, he hardly ever visited it over the next six years and whatever maintenance or repairs were carried out were undertaken by his brother on his occasional visits to Ireland from the US.

  When he locked the door of the Mucker house behind him in April 1949, Kavanagh was finally acknowledging the fact that Dublin was now his home. The streets around 62 Pembroke Road had replaced Inniskeen Road as his ‘mile of kingdom’. He looked on this area as his village or fiefdom, referring to it affectionately as his ‘Pembrokeshire’. He made it his business to know all the pretty young women in the neighbourhood and to chat to them about their families, jobs and romances. Many of these were civil servants living in bedsitters or flats in the vicinity. They treated him as a flirtatious uncle, some even semi-adopting him and giving him small ‘loans’ or packets of cigarettes in the coming years when he was hard up. He befriended all the local children, chatting to the pupils of Miss Meredith’s school as they played behind the railings and carrying sweets in his pockets to distribute among them. Though he appeared quite fearsome at first glance, children soon came to like and trust him. One mother credited him with ‘bringing on’ her mildly retarded daughter. The little girl worshipped him.

  By the late 1940s he was well established as a Dublin ‘character’. His writing day was short; his living day was long and he spent most of this in public. Around 11 a.m. or 12 noon he left No. 62 and proceeded into town, often on foot. He was a familiar sight loping along the pavement of Baggot Street on his way to and from the city centre: a tall, thin shabby figure in a too long, belted gaberdine overcoat, hat with downturned brim and thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles. As he walked he muttered or talked aloud angrily to himself and he had a way of kicking out from time to time as if lashing out at invisible targets. When he stopped to talk to a passer-by, he had a habit of crossing his arms over his chest with a huge hand on each shoulder or dangling above his pocket on either side, a cigarette perpetually protruding from the right hand. Though repose was a state he advocated for the poet and would later claim to have attained, he was a markedly restless, physically agitated man, continually squirming and shifting around when seated, exclaiming aloud, breathing harshly, clearing his throat, spluttering and coughing, turning pages noisily, contriving to create as much commotion as if he were ‘a warring crowd’ rather than an individual.18

  Generally, he carried a briefcase containing some of the day’s unread papers to be perused in a café or pub along his route. His habit was to discard the pages as he finished with them, leaving a pile of loose paper scattered on the ground. If the day was fine, he would sit beside the canal to read or lean on the bridge and the pages would waft down the street. This and his habit of spitting to left and right as he strolled along did not endear him to house-proud local women who scrubbed the steps of their houses and tried to keep their basement areas tidy.19

  He was a gregarious man, but socialising was carried out on his terms; he decided whom he would favour with his attention. He was choosy about his company and resented parents thinking they knew him just because he talked to their children. Some fellow pedestrians thought that because he was such a well-known public figure, he was as it were a public property, like a speaking statue or mobile monument, to be stared at curiously, greeted, called out after. Because he was shabbily dressed, some condescended to him like a colourful local tramp, accosting him as ‘Paddy the poet’. But woe betide those who presumed an unwanted familiarity. His scowl was a ‘keep off’ sign. He used coarse, abrasive language and rude behaviour as a bramble hedge to protect his privacy. One of his milder retorts to a casual ‘How are you’ was a growled ‘Axe me arse.’ Another standard reply to any overture was:

  ‘Have you got a pound to give me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well fuck off then.’20

  ‘Don’t dare’ were often the opening words of his response to some intrusive would-be conversationalist. A priest who shouted at him across Baggot Street, ‘How are the poems, Paddy?’ received the terse rejoinder: ‘How are the Masses, Father?’ It was gentle compared to some of his put-downs.

  Already, Dublin’s young literature lovers revered him. Thérèse Cronin recalls how she and some of her fellow undergraduates would kneel a few rows behind him at Mass in Haddington Road, just to be near him and gaze worshipfully at the back of his head.

  When Parsons shop on the corner of Baggot Street and Mespil Road was bought by Miss May O’Flaherty in 1949 and gradually transformed from a huckster’s and hardware store into a bookshop, he began to include it on his beat into town. He regarded the shop almost proprietorially, taking an interest in new stock, what books were selling well and, of course, in the all-female staff. On his advice the shop stocked the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which proved a good seller and, when his brother’s book on the Abbey Theatre appeared in November 1950, Miss O’Flaherty ordered three copies at his request. Soon Parsons became a regular halting place and a stool was set aside there for his sole use, his ‘cow-stool’ he called it, although it was square-shaped and four-legged. On wet days he sometimes read the newspapers there. May O’Flaherty he treated with old-world courtesy and, knowing that she was a very devout Catholic, was careful not to offend her religious sensibilities. She says that she rarely conversed with him; she was his audience and he often made her laugh because his talk was so amusing. Like so many of Kavanagh’s relationships, his friendship with May O’Flaherty was partly exploitative. As the years passed Parsons became for him a cross between a poste-restante and a secretariat. Letters, cheques and parcels were hand-delivered and posted to him there to be collected or forwarded; his telephone messages were taken. May O’Flaherty was devoted to him and only too happy to be of service. She did not lose by the association either because, as other writers, including Brendan Behan, also began patronising it, Parsons became the most talked-about bookshop in town. It was said there were more geniuses on the floor than on the shelves.21

  To most passersby, Kavanagh appeared a ‘wild man’, an eccentric genius or half-crazed derelict, but he yearned for a normal middle-class life: wife, children, a comfortable suburban home, a car. He even considered that domesticity was the best humus for creativity. Meantime, he discounted several women who appealed to him because they could not afford to keep him.

  His fantasies as to how he would spend the proceeds of Reynolds’ farm centred on marriage. He would transform his apartment into a potential marital home and u
se the rest of the money to attract a wife; buy a house outright and furnish it as a marital home; or, better still, put down a deposit on the purchase of a house, take out a building society mortgage and devote most of his capital to the acquisition of a rich widow who would take care of his financial needs for the future. With the publication of Tarry Flynn he was now ‘the most talked of man in Dublin’. This gave a man ‘a great lift with the women’.22 In fact, he did not invest the proceeds in buying a house. Instead, he paid off his rental arrears and had part of his flat repainted with a view to entertaining a wealthy potential bride. The transformation amazed him; the clean white bathroom and kitchenette made it look ‘like a place where someone lived’.23

  What became of the rest of the £450 is not clear; it seems to have been absorbed by his everyday expenditure. The auction had coincided almost to the day with the withdrawal of the Macmillan monthly subsidy of £25 in January and his career as Ireland’s most outrageous film critic was abruptly terminated after 8 July, so he had no regular income for most of 1949. Accustomed to spending his salary as or before he earned it, he was utterly incapable of investing or using capital wisely. He told Renée Dougherty, a young Belfast fan, that his method of putting something aside for a rainy day was to scatter his loose change about the room when he was flush with cash. He enjoyed the element of surprise in finding these coins when he was hard up. The two of them had to scrabble about the floor looking for the price of a packet of cigarettes when she visited him by invitation early in 1949.24

  Bríd Mahon, a freelance journalist and Irish Folklore Commission employee, claims that Kavanagh asked her to dinner in Jammet’s about this time and propositioned her to become his wife or lover: wife if she proved rich enough; if not, mistress. Dinner in the most expensive restaurant in Dublin was a bait that failed to ensnare her. If he attempted this ploy with a number of women, it would not have taken him long to run through the price of a farm.25