Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  O commemorate me where there is water . . .

  would provoke many a chuckle from his fellow drinkers, but the poet, who was often ironic at his own expense, is here deadly serious. One of the sonnet’s most remarkable features is its relocation of Parnassus, the Muses’ sacred place, to the heart of the city. The stretch of canal near Baggot Street Bridge and Parsons bookshop has replaced Shancoduff or the fields of Drumnagrella as the piece of earth with which he feels most intimately associated. In bequeathing this place to future generations, the often egotistical poet is at his most unselfish and outgiving, for the choice of a canal seat as his memorial invites the passerby not to concentrate on the inscription, but to repose and contemplate the ‘fantastic’ beauty of an ordinary urban scene.

  While Kavanagh was feeling psychically rejuvenated that July, he still appeared a very sick man; neither was his mood as continuously benign and sunny as his prose and poetic accounts of his prolonged convalescence indicate. Illness had increased his self-obsessiveness. Sheila Bradshaw recalls how he arrived one day when she was lunching with her mother and talked in such graphic detail about his operation and the way this had affected his lavatory habits that she and her mother could take no more and had to leave the table.

  He visited Peter in London later in the summer. Ewart Milne, who met them in Collet’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, noticed the greyish pallor of his craggy face and how, as he stood glancing from book to book, he would put his hand up and touch his solar plexus region, as if something inside there was hurting. He told Milne that he had recovered and then, with sudden bitter ferocity, said, ‘But I’m in no shape for standing much of the savage streets of London.’ From his manner Milne surmised that he had a nervous malady rather than something physical, but he was moved by his encounter with the obviously sick man.5 He later paid tribute to him in an article in Irish Writing which rated him above Auden.6 For Kavanagh, there could be no higher praise.

  On 28 July the secretary of the Arts Council, William O’Sullivan, wrote to say that favourable consideration had been given to the publication of a book on the nature of the poetic mind, about which both Kavanagh and the council had already been in communication with the Taoiseach. The terms were that the manuscript be submitted to the Arts Council on or before 1 August 1956. It was proposed that the author be paid £200, £100 on the signing of the contract and the balance when the Arts Council had approved the book. Copyright would be vested in the Arts Council. After four exceedingly lean years Kavanagh was once again in funds.

  Towards the end of September, Patrick O’Connor was appointed curator of the Municipal Gallery. Kavanagh appeared to have forgotten his own former aspirations to this post and over the coming months he was a frequent visitor to the gallery apartment where he had once hoped to live. O’Connor painted him at this time, a portrait that recalled the poet as he had first known him, without spectacles.7 The O’Connors’ son Andrew liked Kavanagh because he was friendly and did not patronise him. Once he gave him a poem for Christmas which began:

  Andrew I have been trying to think of a Christmas present

  That your knowledgeable mind might hold in some regard

  A mechanical toy is good enough for a peasant

  And people who do not think do with a Christmas card . . .

  Andrew remembers that parental dinner parties at which Kavanagh was present were always lively affairs. One of the topics discussed there in October 1955 was the most keenly debated topic in Dublin that month: Archbishop McQuaid’s opposition to a soccer fixture between communist Yugoslavia and Ireland. So successful was the Archbishop’s orchestration of ideological opposition to this game that President Seán T. O’Kelly reneged on his agreement to greet the team, the No. 1 Army Band refused to play for the event and Radio Éireann would not broadcast the game.8 In private, at O’Connor’s table, Kavanagh was opposed to the ecclesiastical ban on the match; publicly, as when addressing a meeting of the L and H in UCD, he applauded the Archbishop’s stance. His public championship of McQuaid may be charitably regarded as a show of loyalty to the prelate who had befriended him for many years and had recently visited him in hospital; more cynically, it may be interpreted as a self-serving gesture, preserving good relations with a powerful patron who might be called upon again in the future. Kavanagh, who never hesitated publicly to criticise Fianna Fáil ministers or influential figures in the world of the arts and media, was always wary of any headlong collision with the Catholic Church.

  His conservative stance on ecclesiastical matters did nothing to dent his image with Dublin’s students, some of whom had adopted him as their guru. At the reading in UCD at which he endorsed the Archbishop’s illiberal and unpopular attitude to the Yugoslav soccer team, the young James Liddy was one of the student audience and in the elegy he wrote after Kavanagh’s death Liddy recalls how he immediately became fascinated by him:

  . . . I first met you at a UCD reading in 1955.

  Thank you for the twelve years. I

  was the excited, tender, young poet

  and you were human and funny. I was

  in love with everything — the way

  you took off and on your glasses,

  the pill bottle hiding in your big

  hand, how your eyes looked around

  for your laughs . . .9

  In the course of a visit to his sisters Annie and Mary in Longford in late November, Kavanagh learned that they intended refurbishing the Mucker homestead and retiring there. They would remodel the house, turning the kitchen into a living room, converting a shed into a kitchen and downstairs bathroom, and setting aside the second downstairs room for Patrick’s use. Their ownership of the house and Drumnagrella farm appears to have come as no surprise to him, for he received the news calmly. It suited him to have a comfortable home provided in Inniskeen with two competent nurses there to look after him should he need cosseting. He no longer had his brother at his beck and call. Peter had given up his post in London and had returned to the US in mid-November.

  Though the issue of Mucker ownership and residence was settled amicably during this visit, his sisters’ solicitor, O’Carroll of Carrickmacross, wrote to Kavanagh the following spring to inform him that he intended taking out probate on his mother’s will and to ask him to cease letting the farm and repay all moneys he had received from such lettings since 1945. Annie and Mary can have entertained no expectation that he would refund the money, but they probably wanted the legal position on ownership of the house and lands formally stated in writing.

  On 29 November Kavanagh returned to the Rialto Hospital for a check-up and Keith Shaw pronounced him cured. At Christmas the Archbishop visited him and promised that if he ever needed hospital care in the future, he would arrange with the matron of the Mater to admit him to a private room, all expenses paid. It was reassuring for the poet who now felt that his health was precarious. He had always been thin, but his illness had left him quite emaciated. He felt the cold and feared it as never before that winter and was always very well wrapped up, wearing both pullover and scarf. Yet, though his brother offered to treat him to a holiday in a warmer climate, he clung on in Dublin.

  21

  THE AMERICAN DREAM

  (1955–1957)

  So I take my cloak of gold

  And stride across the world . . .

  (‘Song at Fifty’)

  Although he still looked thin and frail, Kavanagh had recovered his energy sufficiently by autumn 1955 to resume writing and plan on publishing two books. At the end of September he asked Peter to return the manuscripts he had lodged in Barclays Bank during his illness. Within the following two months he sifted through this material and made two selections, one of prose and one of poetry, which he gave to a professional typist. The contents of the prose selection and its subsequent fate are not known. The poems were ready for dispatch to Macmillan at the end of November.1

  This was a bound collection of the poems published since A Soul for Sale (1947), but it
also included a few earlier ones overlooked at that time — ‘Shancoduff’, ‘To the Man after the Harrow’, ‘Peace’, ‘Beyond the Headlines’ and ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’ — all dated so as to distinguish them from more recent work.

  Despite the débâcle over The Good Son in 1949, Kavanagh had kept up a sporadic correspondence with Maurice Macmillan and had followed his political career with interest. When Maurice, who had been trying to become an MP for seven years, lost another election in November 1951, Kavanagh wrote to condole with him: he had listened to the election results on the wireless, ‘armed with a bottle of whiskey hoping to celebrate’, and he added, ‘On your account I turned Tory.’ The following summer he sent him a copy of Kavanagh’s Weekly. When after four failures Maurice finally succeeded in winning the Halifax seat in May 1955, Kavanagh sent belated congratulations. In November he asked Maurice to read the new collection he had just sent the firm. Whether Maurice did so is not recorded, but the poems were rejected and the typescript was returned on 9 January 1956. It was the final parting of the ways between the poet and the publishing family who had befriended him on and off for twenty years. The following January, Harold Macmillan became British Prime Minister. In a neat post-colonial manoeuvre, Kavanagh had succeeded in securing the patronage of the Irish prime minister just before the British prime minister’s firm abandoned him.

  By the New Year he had largely recovered his health and appetite and overcome his temporary aversion to alcohol. Oonagh and Patrick Swift, who had been living in London since November 1952 and had spent much of the previous year in Positano on an Arts Council award, were back in Dublin for the forthcoming birth of their first child. Kavanagh had stayed with the young couple in London and was very taken with Oonagh. He insisted on squiring her to Waiting for Godot at the Pike Theatre because he was fascinated by the play and went to see it repeatedly. For Oonagh, the performance was spoilt by his insistence on keeping up a running commentary on the production in a loud voice, just as he had once done in the cinema. The reason he gave for his infatuation with the play was that, unlike the ‘Ireland’ writers who continued as if Irish society were insulated from the existentialist despair sweeping Europe, Beckett ‘has put despair and futility on the stage for us to laugh at’ and ensures that we do laugh.2

  Kavanagh and Swift had resumed the close friendship they had enjoyed in the Envoy years. When Katherine (Kate) Swift was born, the obstetrician was presented with a lithograph of the poet. Swift, brimming with ideas and intellectual vitality as ever, was soon directing some of his energy into masterminding the more passive Kavanagh’s career. Whereas the painter was forging ahead, the poet was in the doldrums, with nothing to show for the three years since Swift had left Dublin. Macmillan’s rejection had left him very downcast. He pretended that he was glad not to be published by such a ‘stupid’ firm and blamed the refusal on its penchant for ‘thin Palgravian lyricism’, but he was whistling in the dark. He carried the rejected typescript with him around the pubs, showing it to fellow drinkers, sometimes claiming that he had typed it himself. The pale cardboard cover and green binding became quite grubby and some of the pages dog-eared from being hawked about and handled.

  Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and he decided that the poems should be published. He had to return to London in late February but persuaded Kavanagh to entrust the precious typescript to his brother, Jimmy, to have three copies professionally typed up. The story later circulated that Jimmy Swift crawled around the floor of the poet’s flat retrieving copies of poems from among the general chaos. In fact, Kavanagh handed Swift the bound typed copy of his poems which had some holograph corrections and, acting on his brother’s instructions, Jimmy took it to a typing agency in Clarendon Street, sent one copy each to David Wright and Martin Green in London and presented the third to the poet. A delighted Kavanagh agreed to swap his scruffy original for the clean new copy. He autographed the original for Jimmy but, in his cups at the time, misleadingly dated it February 1955 instead of 1956.

  At this time the poet David Wright, a friend of Patrick Swift whom Kavanagh had known since autumn 1952, was co-editor with Tristram Hull of Nimbus. This quarterly journal of literature and the arts was prospering and published such poets as Hugh MacDiarmid, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse and George Mackay Brown. It had printed Kavanagh’s poem ‘The Christmas Mummers’ in winter 1954 and was about to publish his article ‘A Letter and an Environment from Dublin’, in which he argued that Ireland’s appropriation of such inflationary terminology as ‘War of Independence’ and ‘ex-service-men’, and such deflationary terminology as ‘the Emergency’ for World War Two displayed ‘the pretentiousness and ostentation of a small country and a small people’.3

  David Wright was at home with a bout of flu when the poems came through the letter-box but, despite his illness, he was excited by the quality of the collection. Patrick Swift relayed his comments: ‘I am incoherent with enthusiasm; he is not an Irish poet, he is the Irish poet. This is the goods. All my life I’ve been wrong about PK.’4 Kavanagh was more or less unknown in London outside the Duke of Wellington circle in Soho. Wright decided to relaunch him in England by publishing a large swathe of poems in Nimbus and accompanying them with a laudatory essay by Anthony Cronin. Such a warm welcome from a London journal was an enormous boost to the poet who was still smarting from Macmillan’s cold reception.

  Kavanagh was quite proud of his new status as lecturer in the Extra-Mural Studies Department of University College Dublin. In spring 1956 he decided to publicise his role by giving a series of ten lectures under the university’s auspices. The Board of Extra-Mural Studies had not asked him to deliver any lectures. Indeed, some of those close to him at the time claim that the board gave him no encouragement whatever and would have preferred if he had treated the post as the sinecure it was intended to be. It was Kavanagh who insisted on lecturing because, according to some of his less admiring acquaintances, he relished the idea of an audience, ‘people looking up at him’. He longed to be treated as an authority in his own city.

  Once the series of public lectures had been agreed, UCD advertised it prominently in The Irish Times on 21 February 1956. There were to be ten lectures on successive Tuesdays at 8 p.m. in the Physics Theatre at Earlsfort Terrace, beginning that evening and concluding on 1 May. The ad gave a complete list of lecture titles: ‘Poetry in Ireland’, ‘Poetry in the World’, ‘Personal Anthology’, ‘The New Criticism’, ‘The Comic Muse’, ‘Poetry of Country Life’, ‘Poet as Historian’, ‘The Poetry of Living’, ‘Prose Poetry’, ‘The Poet as Guide to Happiness’.

  Although it was snowing heavily, the Physics Theatre was packed out for the opening lecture. When John Jordan learned that no university dignitaries would be attending, he decided to remedy the deficiency by dressing up in academic robes to introduce the speaker on UCD’s behalf. Kavanagh thought that Jordan was trying to steal his thunder and referred to him dismissively as ‘the youngest man I know’.

  Jordan recalls that in this first lecture Kavanagh dazzled his audience with a display of erudition, quoting from Gautier, Cocteau, Rimbaud, Blake, Swinburne, St Augustine, Mallarmé, Goethe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Von Hofmansthal.5 He was also very amusing and often had his hearers in fits of laughter. The magnetic presence that people were beginning to remark on was much in evidence; his ‘impact from the lecture rostrum’ was ‘immediate and compelling’. Never a man given to consecutive reasoning, his lecture kept taking unexpected turns and surprising detours. At one point he gave a ‘resounding if not too considerate rendering’ of ‘Clare’s Dragoons’ in illustration of a point.6 The audience, many of whom were personal friends, were not the kind of people who customarily attended university lectures or lectures on poetry, yet they enjoyed themselves hugely. At the end of his triumphant first evening, the speaker was borne away to celebrate by the racehorse-trainer, Jack Foley.

  There are quite discrepant accounts of this first series of lectures. K
avanagh noted that they had got a bad press, but he was pleased with the audience response:

  Nothing like the reception I received was ever known, in Ireland—with, someone said, the exception of Parnell. It was like a Secret Society every Tuesday, an orgy. It was a great success with the authorities also. It was fame, the rumour going around, in contradistinction to the notoriety of the press. . . .7

  Others tell a different tale. As Jordan relates it, the audiences began to dwindle, and Kavanagh ceased his dazzling name dropping and, casting academic caution to the winds, embarked on some outrageous and provocative attacks on the liberal establishment. A newcomer to the business of university lecturing, Kavanagh had completely underestimated the amount of labour involved in scripting ten hour-long lectures. His notes show that he had put a lot of effort into the first lecture; after this the scripts trail off into a few paragraphs, notes and names.

  Jordan actually attended very few lectures, but Jimmy Swift, a regular attender, corroborates his account. There was a large crowd the first night and a respectable crowd for a few weeks, then the numbers began to fall off. Before he went back to London in late February, Patrick Swift had asked his brother to attend the lectures and to bring others along, so that the series would not collapse. Jimmy used to persuade whoever his drinking companions were on Tuesday evenings, three or four, to come along for the hour or so. Kavanagh would stay drinking in a pub on the corner of Leeson Street and Dominic O’Riordan, a young civil servant, would pop across to the Physics Theatre and check on the numbers present. Kavanagh would not set out until he was told there was an audience of six; then he and a few friends would saunter across to the lecture hall. He would customarily begin by noting that Landor considered an audience of six or seven to be the perfect number. After the first lecture he didn’t have a prepared script and talked off the top of his head, often beginning with a diatribe about Dublin culture. He spoke about poetry, racing, dogs, anything that came to mind, and would even break off to listen to racing results on radio. These ramblings were interspersed by some remarkable observations. For John McGahern, the most interesting was his comment that the sonnet was like an envelope for a love letter: the perfect way of wrapping up your love letter and sending your love was in the envelope of the sonnet.8