By the autumn of 1949 all his money seems to have been frittered away and he was once again ‘as broke as bedamned’. He hoped for a column on the new Irish Sunday Press in late 1949 but was to be disappointed and he was not recruited for the government’s newly founded News Agency as he had confidently expected. Patrick Henchy, the librarian with responsibility for manuscript acquisitions in the National Library, motivated partly by compassion for his financial plight and partly by belief in his talent, offered to buy his manuscripts for £50. At first Kavanagh was unco-operative, telling Henchy in his gruff old way that ‘the mice had eaten them all down in Mucker’. However, after some rooting around in Mucker cupboards he produced a manuscript of The Green Fool and of a collection of approximately forty early poems, as well as his own and his father’s Cobbler’s Account Books. There was no manuscript of The Great Hunger, he explained, because he ‘wrote it on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper, including lavatory paper’. Henchy was disappointed not to have been given The Great Hunger and feared that his director would think he had made a bad bargain. To oblige him, Kavanagh agreed to sit down in the library and write out a fair copy of the poem. Afterwards he brought the librarian to a pub and treated him to a glass of stout, like a farmer who had just sold an animal at the fair. When Henchy thanked him, Kavanagh responded that he had behaved decently; then after a few moments’ reflection he remarked that in the long run it would probably turn out that Henchy had been ‘a cute hoor’.26
In The Spirit of Ireland (1935) Lynn Doyle listed the chief preoccupations of the Irish people as, in order of priority, ‘the struggle for existence, religion, politics, betting and gambling, drink, sport, the cinema, the theatre, literature, the other arts’. After Tarry Flynn such preoccupations were frequently alluded to in Kavanagh’s verse.
From mid-1949 he took to gambling on horse racing. This new addiction can be precisely dated to Derby day, 4 June. While he had attended occasional race meetings in the early 1940s, he had given bookies’ shops a wide berth, thinking that they were frequented by ‘degenerate derelicts’. When he went to place a win bet on Nimbus, the second favourite in the Epsom Derby, in Messervey’s of Merrion Row, he didn’t even know how to fill in a betting slip. He had been given a tip for Nimbus, who was 7/1, and intended having a five shilling bet but, riled by the sneers of some bystanders in the shop, he doubled his stake. It proved an exciting race in which Nimbus was always in the leading group and it concluded in the first ever photo finish at the Derby. When he was collecting his winnings, the clerk warned Kavanagh that he might come to regret doing so well on his first off-course bet. She was right; from that day on he was hooked.27 Unlike his youthful addiction to pitch and toss, which he got over long before he left Inniskeen (although he would still occasionally play on the back lane outside a Dublin pub during ‘the holy hour’), betting on racing was to prove an expensive and lifelong addiction. Most days he had several bets. He devoured the racing columns in every newspaper, particularly English newspapers and especially The Sporting Chronicle. Deciding on his bets for the day, weighing up the pros and cons of the various horses tipped and discussing their previous history with like-minded companions whiled away many hours and every day brought its quota of excitements, anxieties, elations and depressions as the selected nags obliged or, more often, failed. Kavanagh was not a lucky punter. Gambling brought out his superstitious, ritualistic side. In his youth he had suffered from a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder28 and he now invented a series of rules which, if broken, would bring ill luck. One of these was that he must leave the betting shop before the race was run and learn the result later. In solemn, puritanical moments he denounced gambling as ‘a form of disease or of sin’; for him its immorality did not consist ‘in the getting of easy money (he got very little), but in the way that gambling is lived by the sensations’.29 At first he restricted himself to off-course betting, but very soon he was a familiar figure at race meetings and point-to-points, chauffeured there by middle-class friends. Gambling served as a convenient excuse for his customary chronic shortage of money or, more rarely, for his being flush with cash. Most of the proceeds of Reynolds’ farm probably disappeared into the bank accounts of his bookies. Gambling acted as a mood-altering drug. The smoke stacks near London’s Alley-Pally (Alexander Park) racecourse seemed beautiful when he had won on four races in a row; the arboreal scene near Leopardstown appeared dismal on a fine Saturday evening when he had just lost his last shilling and wondered what he was going to live on for the weekend.30
He was introduced to dog racing by Leo Holohan, one of his staunchest friends from their first meeting in 1946. Holohan was a senior civil servant in the Department of Social Welfare, a Falstaffian man who loved Kavanagh’s poetry and considered Tarry Flynn a masterpiece. ‘Houlihan is a rotten name’, Kavanagh said when they were introduced, and they immediately hit it off. Holohan was a passionate follower of Gaelic football, hurling and tennis and wrote sports journalism. His brother was a greyhound breeder and Leo took the poet dog racing to Harold’s Cross and Shelbourne Park. He liked to recite the Yeatsian parody that resulted from this new pastime:
Irish poets open your eyes
Even Cabra can surprise
Try the dog-tracks now and then —
Shelbourne Park and crooked men . . .
Once at Shelbourne Park Kavanagh was sitting beside a child who told him, ‘They’re up to back Roselind.’ So he put £1 on the dog at six to one. ‘Wouldn’t a child hang you’, he said to Holohan.31
Holohan had a keen interest in literature, wrote short stories in Irish and was an authority on George Moore. (Kavanagh’s interest in Moore, kindled by Frank O’Connor, was probably sustained by Holohan.) Holohan’s companionship was also treasured by Dublin journalists such as Donal Foley because of his breadth of learning and literary allusion, his incisive turn of phrase and his gift for mimicry. Imitations of de Valera, for whom he invented bawdy speeches, were particularly in demand. If he had a fault, it was a tendency to be self-effacing and content to serve as the dependable person propping up more flamboyant but more insecure men. He was happy to play this role with Kavanagh and was utterly loyal and devoted to him. ‘Poor Leo’, onlookers commented, as they witnessed Kavanagh take advantage of his good nature and constancy, but Holohan, who in other contexts could be just as individualistic and eccentric as Kavanagh himself, had chosen the role of trusted henchman and confidant and considered that his own life was immensely enriched by his unswerving friendship. ‘Holohan is an authentic man’, Kavanagh often said, the highest accolade he could bestow.32
He had need of staunch friends in 1949 as he set about burning yet more bridges. In January The Irish Times carried the poem ‘The Hero’, in which his ideal hero is described as ‘an egoist with an unsocial conscience . . . Wanting to be no one’s but his own saviour.’ This proclaimed a parting of the ways with Peadar O’Donnell. In August, Smyllie and his Pearl Bar cronies became his targets. Smyllie’s circle had migrated en masse from the Palace to the Pearl Bar around 1943. The move is said to have occurred because the new owner of the Palace refused to cash a cheque for one of the editor’s friends. Immediately, following Smyllie’s cue, all the drinkers in the Palace, carrying their glasses, crossed the street in solemn procession to the Pearl. ‘The Paddiad’, Kavanagh’s satire on the Pearl Bar set, begins:
In the corner of a Dublin pub
The party opens blub-a-blub
Paddy whiskey, Rum and Gin
Paddy Three Sheets in the Wind;
Paddy of the Celtic Mist,
Paddy Connemara West,
Chestertonian Paddy Frog
Croaking nightly in the bog.
All the Paddies having fun
Since Yeats handed in his gun.
Every man completely blind
To the truth about his mind . . .
Based on Pope’s The Dunciad, ‘The Paddiad’ cleverly undermines the Pearl Bar literati by turning them into the Irish
contemporary equivalent of Pope’s dunces, a collection of untalented hacks and scribblers. Dullness, the dunces’ goddess and muse, is replaced by the devil Mediocrity, a senior male figure who presides over literary discussion in the pub. A smooth, bland, Catholic writer, whose novels have never been banned for obscenity, his diabolic mission is to praise dead writers and to promote ethnicity, local colour and piety, a Catholic and a Gaelic note in verse. The Paddies have one distinct advantage over Pope’s dunces: in Ireland it pays to be dull. The Dublin literary establishment is projected as a business cooperative, oblivious to standards of excellence, preoccupied with marketing and advertising strategies and mutual promotion.
To ensure that the Pearl Bar set recognised themselves in ‘The Paddiad’, Kavanagh included a draft couplet from it in a ‘Letter from Ireland’ in Poetry (Chicago) that August where, as an instance of Dublin’s abundance of ‘low literary life’, he cited the Pearl Bar with
Paddy Drunk and Paddy Sober
Slobbering over their pints of porter.
The Paddies, privately named by him as ‘Maurice Walsh or M. J. MacManus, Austin Clarke, Robert Farren and others’, are composite characters, not quite identifiable individually.33 The presiding Devil is and is not Smyllie, M. J. MacManus and Maurice Walsh. ‘Chestertonian Paddy Frog’ is and is not Austin Clarke, who voiced his ‘Froggish’ views weekly on Radio Éireann but could by no stretch of the imagination be described as Chestertonian in girth. ‘Paddy of the Celtic Mist’ is and is not Clarke’s friend Roibéard Ó Faracháin. (Gratitude for the unbanning of Tarry Flynn was indeed short-lived.) The collective neo-Gaelic, neo-Revivalist, rural, pro-Catholic mentality which Kavanagh attributes to the Pearl Bar set is a fantasy, a simplified caricature of a very diverse collection of writers, artists and talkers with no common literary agenda. Smyllie, for instance, was Church of Ireland, and one has only to conjure up the figure of Austin Clarke — neo-Gaelic in his verse techniques, but also a modernist and a stern critic of puritanical Irish Catholicism — to recognise something of the complex viewpoint of a Pearl Bar habitué.
The Pearl Bar crowd, as caricatured in ‘The Paddiad’, could be characterised as Kavanagh’s ‘other’, an assemblage of all the aspects of contemporary Irish writing he most detested. He defines himself by opposition; he is the unwanted outsider, Paddy Conscience, a composite of Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce and himself, a starving and martyred poet ‘ready to die of hunger’ in the cause of art, though not, it seems, of thirst. Whereas the followers of Mediocrity are smooth-spoken, well-dressed bourgeois types, Paddy Conscience is a dirty, down-at-heel drunk, ‘condemnatory and uncivil’, bothering Ireland ‘with muck and anger’. In his satires on literary Dublin, Kavanagh is always his own hero. In reality he was a novice drinker at this time, compared to the stalwarts of the Pearl Bar, but he wished to dramatise his own emancipation from what he perceived as a tame, scholarly, clerkly approach to literature and life. ‘The Paddiad’ was published in Horizon, his first poem there since The Great Hunger. The substitution of Paddy Conscience for Paddy Maguire points up the shift in Kavanagh’s attitude from social critic and spokesman of the oppressed to self-promoting literary and cultural critic.
From late 1947 Kavanagh had anticipated that his fiction would have to make a transition from rural to urban themes and settings. The Inniskeen-based novel with the Dublin-based sequel he had proposed to Macmillan in October 1947 signalled such a transition, but the Dublin sequel was postponed for several years and was not started until late 1949 or 1950. A completed, typed draft of this untitled novel, which I refer to as Michael MacOdge, was finally ready by mid-1951.34
Its eponymous hero (son of Hodge) is the urban continuator of Tarry Flynn, a farmer turned poet and novelist and an innocent abroad in bourgeois Dublin. The bourgeoisie he encounters are the educated second generation of the Devine family, who have moved to town, now style themselves De Vanay and have developed cultural pretensions. Michael MacOdge has to sit through piano and gramophone recitals in their homes and admire their art collections in order to curry favour with them. Closely connected by marriage and business alliances with the rest of upper middle-class Dublin, their tentacles reach into every sphere of city life. MacOdge needs their support if he is to get a job as publicity director of a plastics company and be in a position to marry his girlfriend Margaret O’Carroll. While ostensibly exposing the base origins, cultural crassness and inter-relatedness of elite Dublin society, the novel also demonstrates the writer’s unemployability and lack of the most elementary social skills. Its portrait of MacOdge bears a remarkable resemblance to Peggy Gough’s portrait of Kavanagh in his first years in Dublin: a shabby, earnest, thin-skinned bumpkin convinced of his own genius, blundering about in a closely knit society, tactlessly venting his low opinion of everyone behind their backs and sometimes to their faces, performing disastrously at job interviews, and biting the hands that try to feed him. MacOdge, we are told, had an unfortunate tendency to ‘fire on the ships that were coming to rescue him’. The main difference between MacOdge and his creator is that the fictional character despises middle-class culture, whereas Kavanagh initially bought into it and was happy to attend art exhibitions and symphony concerts.
A wonderfully comic account of an archbishop’s condescending charity towards MacOdge is so closely modelled on Kavanagh’s grovelling relationship with Dr McQuaid that he would have been felled by a crozier if he had published the novel as it stood. The archbishop even physically resembles McQuaid. As we shall see, the question of publication did not arise at this time.
The heroine of Michael MacOdge, Margaret O’Carroll, was largely based on a young woman Kavanagh met in the spring of 1949 and courted for over five years. She was Deirdre Courtney, a farmer’s daughter from a village near Tuam in County Galway who had recently moved to Dublin to work in the civil service. On one of their early dates they went to the cinema. The film concerned a woman’s obsessive pursuit of and eventual marriage to a young doctor, Cary Grant. He wanted to be loved and pursued like this, Kavanagh told Deirdre, then lapsed into romantic melancholy, foretelling that his destiny was to be solitary. He was no Cary Grant. At 44 he was, in Deirdre’s words, ‘past his best’; quite bald with a few hairs plastered across his pate, but he was a very talented and entertaining man and she fell in love. The novel describes her as ‘a simple young woman with brown hair, a slim waist and a look of dreamy practicality in her eyes’; well-dressed but not interested in compliments about her appearance; beautiful but ‘modest’.
A daily Mass-goer and much given to prayer, Margaret urges MacOdge to accompany her to church and to pray more. Deirdre, who was fervently religious, once wrote to the poet that she was ‘storming heaven’ for him, and another time that she was praying to St Teresa for him. ‘I’ll make a saint of you yet’, she announced in one letter.35 She liked him to make religious pronouncements and discuss theological ideas. That he was a film critic on a Catholic weekly when they first met told in his favour. She had an unwavering belief in his literary genius and hoped that he would devote it to Christian witness and become an Irish Belloc or Chesterton. He told her that Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was his bible. Her sheer goodness and Christian fervour attracted the idealist in him:
Remember how your heart was moved
And youth’s eternity was proved
When you saw a young girl going to Mass
On a weekday morning as
You yourself used to go
Down to church from Ednamo . . .
He liked to project himself as a mystical poet and a holier-than-thou countryman at odds with a corrupt urban society; she encouraged such self-images. She hated to see him squander his talent on satiric verse; later she would disapprove of him taking an action for libel. The self-admonitory voice in ‘Auditors In’, urging him to reform, to take himself in hand and ‘dig and ditch’ his ‘authentic land’, is the voice of his conscience or superego, but also an echo of Deirdre’s continual urgings.
&
nbsp; Though she was less than half his age, he soon manoeuvred her into a maternal role, confiding his worries, hopes and fears and looking to her to advise, scold and console. He phoned her every day, postponing the call until afternoon if he felt a scolding was due. He told her he would marry her if she had £10,000, but she suspected that steady employment on his part would suffice. He was chronically impoverished for most of the time she knew him. She fretted over his lack of grooming: the crooked tie, the unshined shoes, the uncombed hair. How could he hope to get a job, if he looked so untidy. Meantime, she subsidised him as best she could out of her small salary.
She attempted to set his flat to rights; it was far too large for a bachelor to look after. Newly painted in 1949 when he had hoped for a wealthy bride, it had soon slipped back into its original squalor. Empty bean and sardine tins and soured milk bottles cluttered up the kitchenette and filled the bath, the living room floor was ankle-deep in yellowing typescripts and newspapers, the hearth covered in ash and cigarette butts. Work-in-progress was scattered around his typewriter on a large table. His only approximation to a filing system was to slide most letters under the hearthrug. In one of his few efforts at domesticity, he habitually dried his socks on the outside ledge of a back window; inevitably, they were blown into the garden two storeys below. To retrieve them, he swung himself down on a rope secured to a gas meter. Once, thinking that the meter was suffering from the strain, he attached the rope to a large brass fender instead. It followed him through the window, crashing with him through the roof of a shed.36 He was accident prone but a survivor. Stories of his misadventures, such as the tale of the flying fender, made him an amusing companion. When he was comic and ironic at his own expense, as in some episodes of Michael MacOdge, he was remarkably entertaining company.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 42
