Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  John Jordan was a friend of Swift. They had attended the same school, the Christian Brothers at Synge Street, after which Jordan went on to read literature at UCD and Oxford and involve himself in theatre before becoming an academic in 1956. His diary records his first meeting with Kavanagh in 1948, an appointment to meet him for coffee on 18 June.9 Jordan was a rather pompously intellectual and earnest youth and the relationship with Kavanagh was slow to develop. Gradually the older man came to value and to rely upon his scholarly knowledge of English literature. He was the un-universitied man’s chief connection with academe for many years. Kavanagh, who was sharp-witted but too impatient and too undisciplined to undertake a course of reading or a thorough study of any branch of learning, looked on Jordan as a living reference library, ready to direct him to the relevant sources or provide an instant and incisive summary of any literary matter on which he needed to be informed. From the Late 1950s the two were close friends and, when both were in Dublin, met almost daily.

  Despite the age gap between him and this group of twenty-somethings Kavanagh was adopted by them, less as an artistic father figure than as a wayward uncle, one who had escaped adult respectability, responsibility and dullness and, as they soon recognised, had missed out too on the emotional maturity and balance that might be expected in a man of 45 and rising. From now on he spent less and less time with his contemporaries and was generally to be found in the company of much younger writers and artists. Brendan Behan dubbed him ‘the king of the kids’.10 Such a tendency to cultivate the young or allow himself to be cultivated by them was partly due to his bachelor condition, for most men of his own generation had wives and families to return to in the evenings and were not inclined to fritter either their time or their money in pubs on a daily basis. Many of the older artistic set who did frequent pubs met in the Pearl, from which ‘The Paddiad’ had more or less permanently exiled him.

  The young writers and painters he was meeting through Envoy tended to be European in their artistic and intellectual interests. The Irish writer they most respected was James Joyce because of his Europeanism. Surrounded by conversation larded with Joycean allusions, Kavanagh took to reading Ulysses. He claimed to have read it many times before, but at least some of his hearers disbelieved him.11 ‘Yeats I can do without’, he asserted, a remark so iconoclastic that it passed into literary folklore. In the company of young intellectuals like Cronin, serious debate about literature and ideas was not only permitted but encouraged, though the talk might just as well veer to racing or the daily tittle-tattle of the town. Kavanagh’s response to any book he hadn’t read was to rubbish it until he had a chance to peruse it on the quiet. In 1950 he would have found himself dipping into many a new book or essay. Yet he was genuinely impatient with some of the avant-garde ideas he heard bandied about by his young acquaintances, especially their discussions of the then fashionable angst for, as both Tarry Flynn and his film criticism show, he was already well on his way towards preferring comedy to tragedy as a literary mode. His riposte to the cult of gloomy philosophies was the ballad ‘Spring Day’:

  Philosophy’s a graveyard — only dead men analyse

  The reason for existence. Come all you solemn boys

  From out your dictionary world and literary gloom —

  Kafka’s mad, Picasso’s sad in Despair’s confining room.

  O Come all darling poets and try to look more happy,

  Forget about sexology as you gossip in the cafe;

  Forget about the books you’ve read and the inbred verses there

  Forget about the Kinsey Report and take a mouthful of air.

  Once Kavanagh had befriended a young or aspiring writer he relaxed; his prickly, defensive side disappeared and he was entertaining and witty. He loved to talk and be surrounded by talk, and he revelled in gossip, anecdotes and the in-jokes of a coterie, as well as participating in more intellectual discussions when they arose. Once his genius was tacitly acknowledged or appreciated, he was at ease. While he affected to despise literary schools or coteries, he liked familiar contexts and congenial routines; he was always prone to insecurity and group support reassured him and bolstered his ego. In order to win acceptance into his circle most young men had to undergo a ritual initiatory bloodletting. His first impulse on being introduced to a young writer was to utter a barrage of abuse or a curt and abusive put-down. He was still engaging in this sort of offensive in the 1960s. When Michael Hartnett was first introduced to him in the Bailey, he turned away, remarking gruffly that he did not know him.12 John Montague was one of the few who got off lightly. When they first met Montague was so nervous that he rushed and half-stuttered his words. ‘You’re a very nervous young man, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some merit’, he said.13

  Understandably, there were young writers who were not prepared to subject themselves to the ritual tongue-lashing. Such a one was John McGahern, a secret admirer of Kavanagh’s poetry, whose deliberate public avoidance of him in the late 1950s, piqued the older poet. McGahern’s short story ‘Bank Holiday’, which turns on a power struggle between a middle-aged poet and a younger civil servant, is based on an actual confrontation between the novelist and Kavanagh. In the story the two meet in a pub and the older man asks the younger to buy cigarettes in a pub across the way, giving him the money to do so, a seemingly innocuous request, but the younger man understands that it is really an attempt to bring him to heel by turning him into an errand boy. He outmanoeuvres the poet, while avoiding a direct refusal, by taking the proffered money and sending a lounge boy on the errand. In the real-life incident McGahern was accompanied by a male friend who, to his annoyance, fetched the requested cigarettes. Kavanagh was not to know that he was locking horns with a novelist whose fictions would focus on the nuances of power struggles between fathers and sons.

  The younger writer with whom Kavanagh was to maintain a very public feud unto the death was Brendan Behan (1923–64). At first there was no friction between them. Kavanagh looked on Behan primarily as a house painter who dabbled in literature, not as a rival. Behan was touting for painting jobs early in 1950 and Kavanagh put in a good word for him with Raymond McGrath, an architect friend on the Board of Works. When McGrath duly put some work Behan’s way, he offered to paint the poet’s flat as a thank you gesture. Kavanagh accepted; Behan distempered his living room on the weekend of 11–12 February and was given an inscribed copy of Tarry Flynn, a gesture that was to have unfortunate consequences over four years later. He also went out to Behan’s mother’s house in Kildare Street in Crumlin at least once to partake of one of the gargantuan feasts of Irish stew of which her son boasted. By the end of 1950 the enmity between the two writers was so bitter that it was difficult to credit they had ever been on friendly terms, and the anecdote circulated that Behan had painted Kavanagh’s apartment black.

  Behan was working class, a rabid republican, a jailbird, and a bisexual: all attributes from which Kavanagh recoiled in horror. With his boisterous behaviour, colourful stories and readiness to burst into impromptu song or recital, Behan also represented the type of buckleppin’ Irishman whom Kavanagh loathed. Behan, who was inordinately proud of being a true Dubliner, despised Kavanagh as a ‘culchie’, the contemptuous Dublin term for country folk. Another cause of friction was Kavanagh’s anglophilia, since Behan was a republican activist who had recently served a term in Strangeways Gaol. Whereas Kavanagh thought that the attempt to revive Irish as a written or spoken language was a lost cause, Behan was a fluent speaker of Irish who also wrote plays in the language.

  Since both men drank in McDaid’s from 1950 onwards, relations rapidly turned sharply antagonistic. Between 1950 and 1953 Behan developed into an alcoholic. His face fattened, his body coarsened and if he went beyond a certain stage in drink, he became savage and engaged in violent verbal outbursts or physical assaults against fellow drinkers.14 Behan, who was over twenty years Kavanagh’s junior, initiated hostilities by telling him to his face in McDaid’s that he wa
s a failure. There was a great deal of sympathy for the poet because the taunt had a ring of truth to it; he had no regular employment other than his ‘Diary’ and was publishing very little poetry. Kavanagh, who was by now used to being treated in literary circles with deference or a wary distancing, was cut to the quick by Behan’s insults and never forgave this destructive attack.

  Behan had some qualms about his doing-down of Kavanagh, but they were short-lived. A showman, determined to hog the literary limelight, he perceived Kavanagh as the reigning exhibitionist who had to be over thrown. Cronin recalls that when Behan appeared in McDaid’s, Kavanagh’s ‘huge frame would become visibly agitated. The great shoulders would shake, the enormous hands fidget nervously, the long head swivel from side to side in search of allies or openings; and, unless well protected by company he trusted’ he would ‘flee into the night’.15 Their battleground extended from McDaid’s into other pubs such as Tommy Ryan’s on Haddington Road and out into the streets of Dublin, and their supporters took sides. Kavanagh claimed that Behan shouted after him and leered at him. His insults hit home: ‘Paddy the wanker’, a deliberate conflation of him with Patrick Maguire in The Great Hunger and, more cruelly accurate, ‘the Monaghan toucher’, for Kavanagh’s cadging was notorious. Anecdotes abounded about Behan’s physical terrorising of the poet. It was said that he had chased him through the streets and that Kavanagh had given him the slip by diving into a church and hiding in the confession box. Another story told of his suspending the poet by the heels from a windowsill above the Pearl Bar. The stories always portray Kavanagh as the undignified loser, but he was past his mid-forties by the time Behan’s persecution was getting into full stride and he was no physical match for him.

  Kavanagh’s hatred of Behan was further fuelled by envy as the younger man’s literary star rose and he amassed money in addition to an international reputation as a dramatist. However, he could not shake Behan off. Behan even began inhabiting his part of town, his ‘Pembrokeshire’. When Behan married Beatrice Salkeld in February 1955, he rented an apartment at 18 Waterloo Road, uncomfortably close to Pembroke Road, and when he moved, it was to Herbert Road, off Baggot Street. Parsons on Baggot Street Bridge, Kavanagh’s best-loved bookshop, and the stretch of the Grand Canal near that bridge, a favourite spot on summer days, both became Behan’s haunts as well.

  John Montague says that Behan tried to make peace and asked him to hand-deliver letters of reconciliation to Kavanagh in Parsons. But Kavanagh was not prepared to enter any negotiations. He had decided that Behan was ‘evil’, a word he did not use lightly, and he recoiled from any association.

  In conversation with Anthony Cronin, Kavanagh sometimes referred to his Envoy phase as a time of poetic rebirth, a metaphor he would later apply more publicly and more frequently to a period of convalescence beside the Grand Canal in 1955. However, the Envoy years have at least equal claim to be considered a time of rebirth, for in the less than two years of its existence his poetics underwent the crucial reorientation that made all his later poetry possible. This change of direction was partly due to the fact that he had exhausted his vein of rural realism and partly to the discovery of a congenial circle of intellectual and artistic friends. The supportive presence of these young, cultivated and combative friends, bored with the Literary Revival and all its pomps, nerved him to renew the verse hostilities begun in ‘The Paddiad’ against the proponents of Celtic verse and to attack his circle’s other common enemy, Dublin’s philistine bourgeoisie. Much of the satiric verse of this period was included in his ‘Diary’, including ‘Tale of Two Cities’, the sonnet sequence ‘The Defeated’ and ‘Adventure in the Bohemian Jungle’.

  In ‘Adventure in the Bohemian Jungle’, a verse playlet substituted for the usual prose ‘Diary’ in April 1950, a simple, morally upright countryman and lover of letters observes the corrupt mores of rich city folk, particularly of young and not-so-young bourgeois women, for whom an interest in the performing arts is an excuse for flirtation, sexual sleaze and drunkenness. ‘Adventure’ has many cultural targets: verse-plays, drama festivals, the cult of film stars, beauty competitions, tourism and, especially, the tie-up between big business, show business and the Church. This last is represented by the wealthy Count O’Mulligan, a papal count and confidant of the bishop, father of a meretricious film star and presenter of Ardagh Chalice-like cups at drama festivals, a smug captain of industry in charge of relief schemes for beggars, while paying starvation wages to a poet in his employ. The naif observer is literally nauseated by his vision of an Irish cultural ethos in which piety, profiteering and partying mingle; a society where nouveaux-riches playboys on the make are closely affiliated through family connections and hefty donations with the Church triumphal. Kavanagh reverts to two metaphors he had recently applied to Irish literary cliques — the jungle16 and hell — now applying them to the entire milieu of the performing arts in Ireland, its players, patrons and hangers-on. It is quite likely that his chief benefactors at the time, the Ryan family, may have served to some extent as his models for the O’Mulligans and for the De Vanays of Michael MacOdge.

  While satiric verse was a way of bringing his poetry into contact with contemporary life, comparisons of Dublin to hell and condemnations of second-rate artists or vulgar plutocrats as devils were ludicrously inflated and melodramatic. Above all, the role assigned to the Kavanagh persona in these satires, that of priggish, judgmental, holier-than-thou naif, forever pained by the gap between his own idealism and his Irish context, was one dimensional and humourless. The poet might have been ejected from the Catholic Standard, but the Catholic Standard had not been ejected from the poet. With the encouragement of witty young Envoy friends like Cronin, he lightened up and ceased to pose as the boringly earnest personification of unworldly virtue in his verse.

  From 1950 he began to write humorous, vernacular, confessional poems in which the self is represented as a combination of fallible human person and poet: ‘Bank Holiday’, ‘To be Dead’, ‘Auditors In’, ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’, ‘Prelude’. The ‘I’ who speaks in these poems is a complex individual, a flawed man convinced of his own poetic genius floundering about in an imperfect world. Not an angelic moron but a down-at-heel lazy bachelor who drinks too much, gambles on horses and greyhounds, fancies women and is fancied by them, yet is too impoverished to marry, tends to rub men up the wrong way and feels hard done by in Irish society which refuses him the means of earning a livelihood. This self is always primarily a poet concerned to protect and nourish his precious and vulnerable gift in the face of daily threats from the destructive aspects of his own personality and from the slings and arrows of a largely uncaring society. Because it involved so much self-exposure both of his unsaintly character and his reverence for the poet in himself, this was a very daring poetry to publish in a small gossipy society like Dublin. It could probably only be done with the support of a coterie of friends, who relished his doings and sayings and encouraged him to reveal the range of his character and personality and not to limit himself to the roles of victim or morally outraged prig.

  The move to a contemporary urban poetry and an updating of his self-image to some extent preceded but was certainly supported by his move into the Envoy circle. The contrast between the countryman of ‘Adventure’ and the poet-narrator of ‘Bank Holiday’ (originally ‘Testament’) and ‘Auditors In’ demonstrates his discovery of the self as subject rather than mere moral exemplar. In these poems Kavanagh embarks on a dialogue of self with self or of super-ego with recalcitrant id. The poet in the role of misguided satirist or frivolous flâneur is roundly abused or admonished by his better half, a stern counsellor intent on identifying and eliminating those personal traits and habits that prevent his producing lyric poetry. The reader, who was hectored in The Great Hunger, is here reduced to an eavesdropper, an ‘auditor’ who overhears a private pep talk. In ‘Bank Holiday’ he is harshly self-critical:

  There he comes your alter ego

  Pa
st the Waterloo and Searson’s

  With a silly gaping mouth

  Sucking smiles from every slut,

  Sure that this is Heaven’s high manna —

  God is good to Patrick Kavanagh,

  Building like a rejected lover

  Dust into an ivory tower.

  Had anyone else written about him so scathingly he would have issued a writ for libel.

  ‘Auditors In’, which is kindlier and more condoning of the self’s vagaries, is centrally concerned with the self as poet. Its combination of candour and playfulness, its refreshingly direct approach to personal difficulties and confusions, draws the reader into sharing the perplexed poet’s difficulties and empathising with the final casting out of his demons. From the first the reader is disarmed by the casual provisionality of verse which is getting under way even while ostensibly wondering how or where to begin:

  The problem that confronts me here