From the start there was no love lost between Kavanagh and Sheila Bradshaw. She remembers him as a gruff, coarse, disagreeeable man. The first time he joined the crowd in her flat, she overheard him asking, ‘Who’s that one over there?’ Someone answered, ‘That’s Bob’s wife, your hostess.’ Whereupon he growled, ‘Somebody should give her a kick up the arse.’ Not surprisingly, Sheila was annoyed and his future demeanour did nothing to redeem him in her eyes. He treated her ‘like the wall paper, not worth noticing’. Once as they were all sitting down to Sunday lunch he arrived at the door. She got up from the table to let him in and he sat at her place and proceeded to eat her meal. She had to make do with a cup of tea in the kitchen. This, she felt, was typical of his arrogantly inconsiderate behaviour.
When he set out to be charming to women he was ‘very very nice’, but when he did not ‘he was horrid’. Val Mulkerns, who took over from Anthony Cronin at The Bell in the early 1950s, saw the horrid side. He tramped up to her office every month, peremptorily demanded a copy of the journal and swung out again, treating her as an uninteresting underling. Patricia Collins recounts his rudeness to a young woman who sat at his feet at a party, telling him how much she loved his poetry. To her utter humiliation, he embarked on a tirade of abuse, one of his less offensive comments being, ‘You bore me.’ To deflect his attention, Patricia dropped a £5 note on the floor beside him. The ruse worked. He stopped to pick it up and became distracted.
For all his boorishness, Sheila Bradshaw found Kavanagh snobbish and very choosy about his company. He had absolute contempt for most people. He was also capable of being mean and devious. One evening when she had bought a bottle of whiskey at closing time to bring back to No. 75 for him, he offered to carry the bottle, then claimed that he had left it behind on the bus by mistake. She was tipped off that he had called over to his own flat before going on to hers and secreted the bottle in the garden. After the Bradshaws moved to Sandymount in 1956, he never visited; it was off the beaten track for him.
Chastened and contrite as Kavanagh appears in begging and thank you letters to his brother in the wake of the libel action, all was not doom and gloom. He was sufficiently recovered from his courtroom ordeal to participate in a debate on Irish newspapers at a meeting of the L and H (Literary and Historical Society) in UCD on the evening of Saturday, 6 March. The other speaker was Brian O’Nolan. He claimed to have lost his notes and when Kavanagh began speaking, interrupted to say, ‘Those are my notes he’s speaking from.’ A rumbustious evening was had by all, with Kavanagh quelling backbench rebellion by sternly announcing that he would leave if his next sentence was interrupted.
So long as he could beg, borrow or earn a pittance, he looked to gambling to provide some daily excitement. Finbarr Slattery spotted him in Fogarty’s betting shop in South King Street around noon on Derby day. He was in high spirits, entertaining the other punters with a mock Michael O’Hehir-style advance commentary on the Derby in which he had all the outsiders in the race well in contention throughout, ending up with Lester Piggott winning on Never Say Die. Unfortunately, his audience didn’t back this horse — too much of a long shot at 33/1.5
That summer he was a happy participant in the marathon pub crawl that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Bloomsday. Two horse-drawn cabs complete with jarveys were hired to ferry a party around the locations of different episodes in Ulysses. The other celebrants, in addition to the organisers, John Ryan and ‘the incomparable Myles’, as Kavanagh called him, were Anthony Cronin, Con Leventhal, a drama critic and Trinity College lecturer, and Tom Joyce, a dentist cousin of the author, said never to have read a line of Ulysses. Kavanagh’s contribution to the Joyce number of Envoy had been a satire on the burgeoning Joyce industry in academe. A parody of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’, it concluded by mocking those who followed the Ulysses heritage trail:
I made the pilgrimage
In the Bloomsday swelter
From the Martello Tower
To the cabby’s shelter.
In making the Bloomsday ‘pilgrimage’, he was being hoist with his own petard, but he was not one to let past prejudices stand in the way of a day’s merry-making.
The Bloomsday party set out in good spirits from the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where a stirrup cup had been provided by the architect Michael Scott. They went to Sandymount Strand for the ‘Proteus’ episode, to Glasnevin for ‘Hades’ and back into the city for ‘Aeolus’, making several unscheduled stops along the route at public houses not known for their Joycean associations. In the afternoon the party drew up on Duke Street between the Bailey and Davy Byrnes, the pub where they were to commemorate ‘Lestrygonians’. At this point they settled down to serious drinking in the back of the Bailey, the jarveys got tired of hanging about, and the expedition was abandoned.6
While not averse to enjoying life as much as possible, Kavanagh was frantically trying to find a way of making some money. In June he tried to arrange a lecture tour in the US for the autumn, but on the 17th he was told by the McFadden Lecture Management Inc., Chicago, that it was already too late to set up any lectures for the coming fall. He was now so hard up that he accepted the offer of a friend, racing crony and fellow drinker Dinny (Denis) Dwyer, to take on the job of travelling canvasser for his spray-painting company which painted hay barns.
Kavanagh had first met Dinny Dwyer a couple of years previously in Kilmartin’s betting shop on Baggot Street. Dwyer had a win bet of several hundred pounds on a horse and his winnings were so colossal that the local branch of the Kilmartin chain could not pay out and told him he would have to go to the head office. Dwyer insisted that if the Baggot Street shop was willing to take his bet it should pay his winnings and not put him to the inconvenience of going to a different part of town to collect. A taxi should be dispatched to fetch the money from head office. As his argument with Kilmartin’s staff dragged on, interested bystanders drifted away and he found himself left with one strong supporter who stood beside him, vehemently insisted that he was right and reiterated his point of view like a chorus. Eventually, a compromise was reached whereby Kilmartin’s agreed to pay Dwyer’s taxi fare to their head office. As he leaped into the taxi, his supporter followed. It was Kavanagh, foreseeing that a windfall such as this would inevitably result in quite a few celebratory drinks and perhaps even a couple of £20 notes. This was the beginning of a very long friendship.
Dwyer gradually became an almost daily drinking, racing and betting companion and a constant source of hand-outs. They also played rings7 together in Tommy Ryan’s pub on Haddington Road. Christine Dwyer Hickey recalls that in her childhood Kavanagh and her father looked like terrible twins, both dressed in Aran sweaters and black berets. He sometimes came to their house in Greystones during the summer and the children relished these visits because all the adults were so preoccupied with looking after their restless, troublesome guest that the youngsters escaped surveillance for a time. Going boating with him as a passenger was a terrifying ordeal for a child: he shifted about on his seat so heavily that it seemed the boat would capsize.8
Dwyer was not popular with some of Kavanagh’s other friends. He was perceived to be monopolising him and to be operating a divide and rule policy, attributing various slanders on the poet’s person to other friends. However, nobody doubted his genuine affection for Kavanagh or his generosity towards him.
In letters to his brother, Kavanagh presented Dwyer’s offer of a job with his spray-painting company as a business proposition and the business itself as a ‘racket’ in which he would not risk becoming involved unless he got ‘a fair good cut’ of the profits. This was typical of the tough stance he liked to adopt in these letters, assuming his brother would approve a ‘hard man’ approach. As he could not have failed to recognise, the job was Dwyer’s kindly way of putting money in his pocket. Dwyer was well able to tout for business on his own account, and the poet didn’t drive a car, a prerequisite for a travelling salesman. The job was more in the nature of a touring
holiday with an entertaining companion than work. It was an opportunity to spend fine summer days in the countryside, with free drinks and sandwiches in country pubs thrown in, his hotel bills paid if they stayed over and about £12 a week in wages. Despite his frequently aggressive manner and language, Kavanagh had quite a passive disposition and loved to be chauffeured about. Through the car windows he looked approvingly at Corporation workers repairing streets and labourers in the fields, sometimes blessing them with mock-episcopal hauteur.
For several months from the beginning of June onwards he accompanied Dwyer on many of his ‘sprainting’ trips, being driven around in an old van with a compressor in tow, both speckled red from the iron oxide paint used. This paint was highly toxic, but one farmer who enquired if it might poison his cattle was told that licking it would be as beneficial as taking an iron tonic. Kavanagh’s task was to act the part of spray-paint canvasser at the various farms along the route which boasted a corrugated iron hay barn. The only equipment required was a steel tape measure and a notebook. If a farmer evinced any interest in a paint job, he would go through the motions of writing down the barn’s measurements and making jottings in his notebook, pretending to be involved in intricate calculations. In fact, the barns were made in standard sizes, so the job could be quickly priced by counting the number of spans, £5 a span and £1 apiece for the pillars. For all Kavanagh’s frequent protestations about his invincible honesty, playing at being a conman appealed to him. Not all farmers succumbed to his salesmanship. At one rather grand Big House he overheard the conversation between the wife who had answered the door to him and her husband, who was swearing loudly about the rascality of the enterprise. The wife returned and said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid it’s a lemon’, a phrase that so took his fancy he loved to repeat it.9
As well as providing Kavanagh with a job so that he could give him money without offending his dignity, Dwyer looked after him in other ways. When the telephone company again threatened to cut him off in September for non-payment, Dwyer, knowing how much the phone meant to him, paid the bill. Yet the job of spray-paint canvasser was essentially fairweather work and, as October set in, he was once again faced with destitution. The unpaid rent on No. 62 continued to mount. Stories about his meanness and continual scrounging probably date from lean periods like autumn 1954 when he was penniless. It was easier to cadge drinks than a meal and some of his drunkenness would have been due to drinking on an empty stomach or relying on alcohol to supply his calorie intake. Fellow drinkers recall that when they bought him a drink, he scooped up their change from the pub counter and put it in his pocket.
Kavanagh’s cantankerousness at this time may be partly explained by a combination of poverty, depression and illness. He felt tired and unwell and in September complained of a nagging pain in his left shoulder. The doctor on out-patient duty at Baggot Street Hospital told him the pain was muscular and nothing to worry about. He was, in fact, suffering from undiagnosed cancer.
He was also to suffer psychological agonies before the wretched year of 1954 drew to a close. In October his long-standing woman friend Deirdre Courtney finally gave up on him. Their relationship had lasted over five years with no sign of closure, but the end came quite suddenly.
In late June Deirdre had asked him to ‘do Lough Derg’ with her and he agreed but failed to turn up. The invitation and his response were a measure of her misunderstanding of Kavanagh and of his partly unintentional misleading of her. He did not want to lose her. She represented an ideal of goodness and unconditional love that he clung to; she kept him in touch with a younger and better self. Anxious not to forfeit her emotional support and approval, he had shown her only those facets of his personality and lifestyle which she could admire, condone or sympathise with. Above all, he indulged her fervid Catholicism; when their conversation was not about his problems or his prospects, he was willing to engage in discussion of spiritual profundities, keeping his cynical, unbelieving side well hidden. He was a complex man; it was not so much that he deliberately deceived her as that he simplified himself for her, playing the role of fallible but well-meaning, intelligent and devout Christian poet, the same role that he played with Archbishop McQuaid. While he could conduct himself as a pious poet in her presence, he was not prepared to put himself through the rigours of Lough Derg for her sake.
When she returned, she was in a huff and, in order to teach him a lesson, she refused to meet him. Somehow the weeks drifted by and she still hadn’t met him by the time she was going on her annual holiday in August. She went to Kerry with a woman friend and they stayed in Kruger Kavanagh’s guest house. Kruger was in match-making mood and set about teaming her up with a fellow guest, Willie Manifold from Limerick. When Deirdre and her friend moved on to Killarney, Willie turned up there too.
Over the coming weeks he drove frequently from Limerick to Dublin to continue his courtship and press Deirdre to marry him. She was overwhelmed by all this ardour; the affair with Kavanagh was going nowhere; she wanted children; she thought that God had sent Willie as the answer to a maiden’s prayer. When he proposed for the umpteenth time, she said yes. It was difficult to break the news to Kavanagh. He was hurt and she hated having to hurt him. Willie and Deirdre married in November 1954, only three months after they had met. ‘Deirdre is getting married and I am not objecting’, he wrote to his brother, but the loss of Deirdre, who had stood by him for nearly six years, was a dreadful blow. Almost inevitably, given the general misery of his life, he began to slip into alcoholism. Though he had been spending an increasing amount of time in pubs since the start of Envoy, he had been a pint drinker for the most part. In Dinny Dwyer’s company he developed a fondness for the whiskey with which Dwyer kept him plied and it became his tipple of choice. During the winter of 1954, jobless, impoverished, suffering shoulder pain and plagued by catarrh, he came to rely on whiskey to provide a comforting glow and make life bearable. When the pint was his staple drink, he could pass hours in the pub and remain relatively sober. Now he was frequently drunk.
On 21 October he was 50, had spent fifteen years in Dublin, and was still desperately seeking employment. That month he applied to Ferguson Ltd of 136 Lower Baggot Street, a large firm of tractor retailers, for the post of publicity manager; on 2 November he was informed that he was not on the short-list. The post of curator of the Municipal Gallery was also advertised in October. He moaned about the salary — at £12 or so a week, it paid no better than spray-painting — but a free apartment went with the job, an important incentive for a man who was always many months in arrears with the rent. Rather surprisingly, given his absence of qualifications or administrative expertise, Kavanagh’s application was taken seriously and he was short-listed. Patrick O’Connor, now back in Dublin, would have liked the job for himself, but rather than oppose his friend’s candidacy, he coached him on modern art in preparation for the interview. Kavanagh was also relying on ‘pull’, hoping that the new Taoiseach, John A. Costello, would speak on his behalf. In the event the selection committee did not appoint any of the interviewees and the post was readvertised. The second time round, Patrick O’Connor put himself forward as a candidate and was duly appointed.
Towards the end of 1954 Peadar O’Donnell asked Cronin as Associate Editor of The Bell to assemble a small party of Irish writers to visit the Soviet Union. Cronin invited Brian O’Nolan and Kavanagh and both immediately accepted. Then both got cold feet. Kavanagh excused himself on the ground that he did not want to prejudice his coming court action by being labelled a communist fellow traveller. His other and unstated reason for declining the offer was that he could not afford to alienate Archbishop McQuaid or the Taoiseach at this critical juncture when he was dependent on short-term ecclesiastical alms and also hopeful of obtaining some kind of sinecure or funding from Costello. As it turned out, he was right to avoid this particular junket since the delegates who took up the invitation were vigorously denounced in the press, with The Standard the most vociferous in its cond
emnation. The trip to Russia turned into a cause célèbre.10
His long-awaited appeal against the judgment of the High Court in the libel action opened in Dublin’s Supreme Court on 16 November. The judges were Mr Justice Cecil Lavery, Mr Justice Martin Maguire, the Chief Justice Mr Conor Maguire, Mr Justice Kingsmill Moore and Mr Justice Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. The case once again attracted a large audience, though not as large as on the previous occasion. When the hearing ended on 26 November, judgment was reserved, so Kavanagh was left in suspense, still hopeful of a windfall from the courts in the not too distant future.
On Christmas Day 1954 he was, justifiably, feeling a little sorry for himself. His friend Anthony Cronin cooked Christmas lunch for him, a ‘wee snack’ of steak and potatoes washed down with a bottle of whiskey, and accompanied by a recording of ‘Bantry Bay’ on the gramophone which Kavanagh wanted played again and again.11 They were two bachelors together, but Cronin was a young man with a bright future and would marry his beautiful Thérèse in two months’ time; Kavanagh was a middle-aged pauper with no prospects, recently deserted by a woman whose devotion he had counted on.
In the sonnet ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’, set on New Year’s Eve, he looks back on the annus horribilis just past, which had left him ‘groping in madness under a low sky’, vainly trying to ‘organize a perspective from’ a ‘hellish scatter’. It is a de profundis poem, ending on the word ‘weep’, one of the two most desolate he ever wrote.
It had not altogether been an annus horribilis: there had been enjoyable interludes and the appeal against the verdict in the libel trial could still be decided in his favour. Fortunately, he did not know that he had not yet reached the nadir.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 49
