In Deirdre’s case, a farming background gave them much in common and he sometimes played at being a country lad walking out with his sweetheart. ‘Give us a link’, he would say as they met on Baggot Street Bridge to walk along the canal. The only solution she could see to his joblessness, chronic poverty and the impossibility of their ever marrying, was that they move to Inniskeen where they could live simply and rent-free, he writing, she running a poultry farm. He frequently promised to take her to Mucker some weekend so that she could judge if they could make a go of living there, but his heart was not in it and the trip was never made. Bucolic bliss was only a fantasy; he was a confirmed city-dweller.
Deirdre was intelligent and interested in ideas, but she was no bohemian. A shy country lass, she felt ill at ease in the company of the poet’s literary set, and on the few occasions she accompanied him to a pub she was miserable. She was an active member of a lay religious organisation, the Legion of Mary, and spent much of her spare time on the legion’s mission to prostitutes. Her relationship with Kavanagh, though not clandestine, was very private. Few suspected its existence. In turn, much of what she knew of Kavanagh’s life and friendships was the edited version he chose to relay: tales of job-hunting, hardship, poverty, rebuffs. He hid his gambling and most of his drinking from her and she heard very little about the various friends who lent him money and invited him to meals. He was a secretive man who had the knack of making each woman friend think that she was the only woman in his world. On Deirdre’s side, there was both sexual attraction and a feeling of affinity, of homecoming, as if he were a sibling.
She visited him in London in 1950 and, as he laconically commented, gave him a cold and nothing else.37 He respected the fact that she was a strict adherent of the Catholic Church’s sexual code and did not make any improper advances. Analysing the nature of Michael’s feelings towards Margaret in Michael MacOdge, he describes a love which includes the sexual and yet also transcends it. Michael divides women into those who arouse physical desire alone and those who call out the whole man, body and mind. In the 1952 poem ‘Deirdre’, Kavanagh writes of her ‘tenderness’, ‘pure heart’, her warmth and ‘candid caressing’, her way of assuaging and healing his wounds and her unstinting love, ‘A golden ample stream’.38
Deirdre is among the women celebrated in the poem ‘God in Woman’; so too are Maeve, Peggy, Jo, Nola, Hilda, Nuala, Joan and at least half a dozen others. Like them, she exemplified what he saw as the quintessential feminine virtues of nurture, generosity and sympathy:
Surely my God is feminine, for Heaven
Is the generous impulse, is contented
With feeding praise to the good. And all
Of these that I have known have come from women . . .
For all his railing against Dublin’s bourgeoisie, Kavanagh’s caring, forgiving, unconditionally loving God is envisaged as not only maternal, but middle-class, a God who hides
Behind a well-bred convent girl’s eyes,
Or wrapped in middle-class felicities
Among the women in a coffee shop . . .
Unlike George Herbert, Kavanagh found ‘heaven in ordinary woman well-dressed’.
17
KING OF THE KIDS
(1949–1951)
JOHN MAC DAID’S
3 Harry Street
(where the elite meet)
The pub where the drink is efficacious and the conversation effervescent.
(Advertisement in Envoy, probably penned by the editor)
Alcohol is the worst enemy of the Imagination.
(Kavanagh in Envoy)
By summer 1949 John Ryan, a cultivated and comfortably off young man about town, was well advanced in his plans to bring out a successor to The Bell, a monthly journal of literature and art to be called Envoy — the bearer of a message. A regular feature by Kavanagh would help give the new journal continuity while also ensuring that it was lively and controversial, but his rough way with those who made unwanted approaches was notorious. In order to avoid an embarrassing rebuff or irreversible refusal, Ryan, a painter himself, asked the portrait painter Seán O’Sullivan to introduce him to the poet. When he broached the subject of his projected journal, Kavanagh let out a roar and took off. O’Sullivan pursued him and berated him for his incivility, whereupon he meekly agreed to adjourn to a nearby pub and hear Ryan out.1
His exaggerated rudeness was a way of playing hard-to-get and buying time to decide on his conditions of employment; he would have been quite flattered by Ryan’s attention, delighted to be in at the start of a new journal and to be offered a regular public platform. A monthly stipend was the least of the financial benefits. The Ryan family were super-rich, one of the wealthiest families in Dublin at the time, and some of that affluence was bound to rub off on close acquaintances such as Kavanagh intended to become. He claimed that he could tell exactly how much was in a man’s wallet and that he could distinguish between the crinkle of singles, fivers, tenners or twenties if a man in another cubicle in the Gents was secretly counting his cash. The Ryans’ wealth largely derived from the Monument Creameries, an extensive chain of cafés noted for their tasty, wholesome fare, and a vista of delicious free meals opened up before him. Once he had ascertained over a pint with Ryan that he would be free of editorial interference and could be as outrageous as he wished, he quickly mellowed and agreed to supply a signed monthly opinion column. Privately, he was positively gleeful at this opportunity to vent his spleen.
Further arrangements were negotiated at meetings over coffee and cakes (in 1949 Kavanagh was still largely ‘a bun man’). He wanted to entitle his column ‘Diary’ so as to emphasise its independent and personal status, and he demanded that it be placed at the back of the journal, so that it could not be mistaken for an editorial or lead article. He was anxious not to be perceived as a team player or a member of any literary coterie.
The new journal’s backer was John Ryan’s mother, Agnes, known in family circles as ‘the AV’ (an abbreviation of her first name, Agnes Veronica). She was a formidable businesswoman but indulged her son John’s artistic leanings, was content to donate some of her vast fortune to the support of the arts and encouraged him to bring his interesting friends to Burton Hall, the family home. She wholeheartedly approved of the Envoy project and was prepared to reward Kavanagh for becoming involved in it.
Mother and son proved generous patrons. By December Kavanagh’s rent arrears were cleared and a few months paid in advance; a good supply of coal had been delivered; he had a new Remington typewriter, a new radio and his first telephone, 69333. The following year the AV paid for him to go to Rome as the guest of the Irish legation. He spent Christmas Day alone but contentedly, playing with his new toys. Of these toys, the telephone was his favourite. He loved to talk and from now on he would happily spend up to an hour chatting with friends, often during their working hours when it was least convenient for them. Attempts to raise some cash by flogging off his old typewriter met with little success. As he told Ben Kiely, it was ‘like trying to sell an arsehole; everyone already has one.’ Such coarse turns of phrase were accepted as a delightful eccentricity by John Ryan, who liked to quote them.
Kavanagh became a welcome visitor at Burton Hall and by the end of February was permitted to escort John’s sister Cora to the theatre. He was pleased to be mixing with ‘the cream of Irish society’ as Dublin wits dubbed the Ryans, though, typically, he played down the privilege, once referring to Cora as ‘the baker’s daughter’ with a figure ‘like a turnover’. The Ryan women were exceptionally good-looking; Kathleen, the film star, being generally considered the most beautiful. He was soon fantasising about marrying into the family. Once when he was indulging this fantasy aloud in the pub, pondering which of the daughters it would be most lucrative to marry, one of his listeners suggested that he marry the widowed mother and collect all the loot. The AV controlled the family purse-strings and even the recently married John Ryan, who was among the best-off young men around
, was living on an allowance.
Envoy, launched in December 1949 under John Ryan’s editorship, rather than being sociologically oriented like The Bell, had a cultural mission to present all that was outstanding and genuinely creative in Irish art and to bring the best in international writing and art to the attention of Irish readers. It was advertised as ‘Ireland’s only literary monthly’, but while the emphasis was on literature — fiction, poetry and literary criticism — it lived up to its subtitle, ‘An Irish Review of Literature and Art’, by consistently commenting on painting, sculpture, music and dance, especially on painting. Ryan recruited some of the liveliest and most progressive Irish or Ireland-based writers, intellectuals and artists: Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin, Denis Devlin, J. P. Donleavy, Aidan Higgins, Pearse Hutchinson, John Jordan, Mary Lavin, Ewart Milne, John Montague, Brian O’Nolan, Francis Stuart, Patrick Swift. The poetry editor was Valentin Iremonger, poet and diplomat, a critic with a marked interest in modernist and contemporary poetic trends.
Envoy was shaped by its editor and its mainly twenty-something contributors to be consciously avant-garde and iconoclastic, the product of an educated, confident generation, impatient with Irish navel-gazing, with censorship and chauvinism, eager to embrace citizenship of the world. Despite Kavanagh’s rural background and countrified appearance, his cultural radicalism, as manifested in his irreverence towards the Literary Revival and contempt for the pervasive Irish nationalist clichés, ensured him a cult status among Dublin’s young intellectuals.
Every month his ‘Diary’ appeared, commenting provocatively on matters literary and cultural in confident, lucid, humorous prose. He it was who chiefly articulated Envoy’s determined anti-chauvinist and anti-Celtic Twilight bias, evident for the most part in the journal’s choice of contents. The ‘Diary’ did not aim at mounting a coherent argument or organised assault on the prevailing pieties of Irish life; rather it conducted a guerrilla or sniper campaign, hitting selected but not necessarily related targets in successive sentences or paragraphs. What unified the column was a strong sense of the personality and style of the writer, continuously subversive yet engagingly direct and amusing. To quote a few instances:
A group of newspapers accusing one another . . . are like a group of fag-puffing ladies-in-waiting on O’Connell Street at 1 a.m. moralising.
. . . Ireland is a Potential country. There are more good intentions in this country than would make a luxurious autobahn to hell.
. . . As far as I am concerned, Auden and Dylan Thomas, Moravia, Sartre, Pound are all Irish poets. They have all said the thing that delighted me, a man born in Ireland. . . .
No good poet was ever a patriot — as a poet. Only minor poets, such as Kipling, Thomas Campbell or Rupert Brooke, cared about their country. Neither do they possess that most hypocritical of appendages, ‘a social conscience’. The poet may be human and humane, but he is not humanitarian, which is another way of saying that he isn’t a fraud . . .
The last quotation here points up the difference between Envoy and its predecessor, The Bell.
The ‘Diary’ was guaranteed to raise a variety of hackles as it denounced actors, the Abbey Theatre, the Church’s involvement in the arts, Rome (a place of pilgrimage during the Holy Year of 1950), Radio Éireann, the National Film Institute, Dublin as a literary metropolis, the Irish Club in London and the habitués of the Pearl Bar. Hubert Butler, who objected among other things to the absence of organised, focused argument in the ‘Diary’, compared Kavanagh’s mind — outside his poetry and fiction — to ‘a monkey house at feeding time’,2 but for the editor and some of the other young contributors, the ‘Diary’ was the journal’s high point. Cronin, for instance, considered that it was this Diary which marked out Envoy as the first radical point of departure in post-war letters in Ireland.3
Kavanagh liked the ambience of the small-circulation newspaper or journal office, so from the first he took a proprietorial interest in Envoy’s affairs and its office upstairs at No. 39 Grafton Street was now included in his daily beat. Tony McInerney, secretary to the journal, recalls his daily arrival around noon. Sometimes he would repair into another room with John Ryan for a private chat. This, McInerney surmised, was when he was negotiating an advance or looking for a loan or donation. Generally, he would read the galley proofs pinned up on the walls and riffle through the daily mail, commenting on the letters and contributions received, reading snippets from submitted manuscripts and after a few moments, flinging the pages back on the table with the invariable dismissal:
Rubbish. Utter drivel and the most appalling nonsense I have ever had the disinterest to read.4
There was nearly always company in the office: writers and aspiring writers such as Edna O’Brien, who called by and recited her poetry, and occasional American visitors.
J. P. Donleavy, the author of The Ginger Man, then an unknown young American writer living on a small farm in Wicklow, was present as his manuscript was being rubbished. Kavanagh had the grace to apologise. In an attempt to make conversation, Donleavy consulted him about growing potatoes. This query was greeted with a look of ‘sceptical disgust’. It would have been immensely irritating to Kavanagh that a well-educated American with a monthly allowance from home should be playing at being an Irish subsistence farmer. His pronouncement on the enterprise was, ‘Phoney, phoney, phoney. Utterly phoney. The whole thing is phoney. Nothing but phoniness.’ When Donleavy reacted good-humouredly to his scorn, laughing out loud, he was forgiven; he wasn’t a phoney after all because he had a sense of humour.5
Around one o’clock the Envoy office would empty itself into John McDaid’s, a small, narrow, high-ceilinged pub at 3 Harry Street, where much of the journal’s business was conducted. The clientele was a mixture of working class and bohemian, but it was advertised in Envoy as the pub ‘where the elite meet’, soon modified by Tom Nisbet, a Dublin Opinion humourist, to ‘where the effete meet’. Kavanagh had not patronised McDaid’s in the past, but from now on he adopted it as his city-centre local, later commuting between it and the Bailey on Duke Street, less than five minutes’ walking distance away. The downside of his association with Envoy was that it was during this period he began to spend much of his day in pubs, though he was still a pint drinker and alcoholism did not really take hold until whiskey became his staple drink. When he arrived at McDaid’s unaccompanied, he would peer round the door for a couple of moments, sizing up the scene and deciding which party to join, then stride in and make for his chosen group, attracting their attention with some general observation made in booming tones or by launching into an anecdote. A loud declamatory mode of utterance, a platform tone, was common among Dublin writers of Kavanagh’s generation. As the clientele of McDaid’s became more literary with the passing years, the conversational noise could be heard from the end of the street.
The Envoy group would down pints of stout at John Ryan’s expense until the ‘holy hour’ at half past two, when the pub closed and it was time for lunch. Then Ryan might treat Kavanagh to a meal in the Monument Creamery on Grafton Street, after which he would lope off about his private business, sometimes reappearing late in the evening to drink until closing time. The revellers might then pile into whatever cars were available and be driven to a bona fide pub.6 Matt Smith’s at Stepaside was a favourite. Sometimes they bought take-away bottles of Guinness packed in a brown paper bag and converged on a rendezvous such as Deirdre MacDonagh’s flat in Baggot Street or John Ryan’s house in Orwell Road or the Catacombs. Kavanagh was rarely sighted in the Catacombs, a warren of basement rooms and passages at 13 Fitzwilliam Place where Dublin’s temporarily homeless bohemians caroused late at night and slept it off (the owner lived by selling their empty bottles). He had retained his country habit of rising early, so he was exhausted by midnight and when he did join any brown bag parties he would lie on the floor with his hat over his eyes listening to the talk, replying cheerfully to any solicitous enquiries: ‘Don’t mind me. I’m only resting. I’m enjoyin
g myself.’7
His association with Envoy brought him into contact with a circle of young artists and intellectuals. Chief among these, apart from John Ryan himself, were Anthony Cronin (1928–), Patrick Swift (1927–1983) and, to a lesser extent at first, John Jordan (1930–88). Cronin and Swift would remain his friends, allies and promoters until the early 1960s, Ryan and Jordan for the remainder of his life. He made his first overture to Anthony Cronin, an almost daily companion in the early 1950s, when he was so impressed by ‘For the Father’ in the May 1950 issue of Envoy that he actually complimented him on a ‘smashing poem’, a remarkable occurrence because he was better known for invective than for praise. Cronin, a socialist intellectual with a degree in law who became associate editor of The Bell when it resumed publication in November 1950, had cultural as well as more narrowly literary interests and was an engaging conversationalist with a keen appreciation of life’s little ironies. He also shared the older man’s growing interest in betting on horses.
Patrick Swift came to prominence as a painter at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950, when one influential critic rated him the most promising of the newcomers. Kavanagh had at first dismissed the 23-year-old artist as a phoney because he was something of a dandy who affected a goatee beard, dark suits and a gold-knobbed cane. He may have been further irritated by Swift’s annexing of Claire McAllister as his live-in partner, the wealthy young American on whom the poet had designs the previous year. Swift and ‘Marmalade’, as she was known because of her red hair, were a couple by April 1949. According to Swift, Kavanagh at their first meeting denounced him as ‘nothing but a gurrier and a fucking intellectual fraud’. After this, Swift kept his distance. Some months later he was lunching with Patrick MacDonogh, poet and Guinness rep, and they retired to the restaurant bar afterwards for a brandy. Kavanagh was at the back of the bar ‘coughing and muttering and shifting around all the time’ and as soon as MacDonogh left he joined Swift at the counter and asked what he was doing ‘with that fraud MacDonogh’. ‘You shouldn’t be wastin’ your time with fucking phoneys like that. I’ve been thinking about you and I think you may well be the real thing!’ It was a gambit to have a drink bought for him, but the two got talking and the friendship took off.8 Swift’s love of Auden’s verse — he knew quantities of it off by heart and loved reciting it — rekindled Kavanagh’s enthusiasm for its contemporary images and idioms which he had praised as long ago as 1942. His rediscovery of Auden, celebrated in the June 1951 issue of Envoy, owes much to Swift’s frequent recitations of favourite verses. While by no means blind to Kavanagh’s faults, Swift believed in his genius and indulged him and, since he was not an artistic rival, the older man did not feel himself threatened and came to lean on Swift as a beloved nephew.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 43
