Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  This is exciting criticism because, although too soft on the satires, Cronin is the first critic to engage with the new confessional direction in Kavanagh’s poetry, the fact that the poet’s personal experience of urban life has now become his subject. He was also a close friend, so his advocacy of the new, more psychological and conversational verse would have been an immense encouragement to continue with this self-aware but also quite private and riskily self-revelatory mode.

  In September, Cronin, now literary editor of Time and Tide, was sent a new sonnet, ‘Leaves of Grass’, composed too late for inclusion in Nimbus. Wry at the expense of his early verse, this sonnet offers a quite different view of his poetic beginnings than the version he would soon promulgate:

  When I was growing up and for many years after

  I was led to believe that poems were thin

  Dreary, irrelevant, well out of the draught of laughter

  With headquarters the size of the head of a pin . . .

  Implicit in this sonnet was his current view that poetry should be comic, realist, intelligent and responsive to the contemporary world.

  Kavanagh was good on titles. The joke in his application of the title of Whitman’s vast, sprawling masterpiece to a sonnet recalls his cheeky entitling of ‘Epic’ four years earlier. Through his friendship with the Farrellys he had once again begun reading American poetry. John Farrelly, an enthusiast, talked to him about it and lent him books.

  Kavanagh had confided in Dede Farrelly his long-standing desire to visit New York, trusting to her kind heart and the fact that she could well afford to pay his fare. In November she let him know that her Christmas present was to be a return ticket. Anticipating that he might be nervous about flying such a distance, she booked him to travel by boat, first class. For visa purposes she swore an affidavit that she would take care of all his expenses during his time in the US. Once he reached New York she expected that he would spend a lot of time with his brother Peter.

  Kavanagh arrived in New York on 21 December.14 A light snow was falling and it was very cold, but the shops were decorated for Christmas and he loved the city lights. The thoughtful Dede equipped him with ear muffs and gloves. She took him to the Winslow Bar for drinks and then to the Algonquin Hotel where she had booked him in until the New Year. On Christmas Day he was ensconced in a hotel suite fourteen storeys above the snowy streets, a bottle of whiskey to hand, the television on, and by his side five stones of newspapers which an obliging bellboy had carried up for him. Bliss. He had breakfasted in his room and been serenaded by the bellboy singing Happy Christmas, then attended Mass at the back of St Patrick’s Cathedral and dropped into the Blue Bar for a drink. He was waiting for his brother to call and later he would dine with the Farrellys.

  Patric Farrell, head of the Joyce Institute, took charge of public relations, arranging a press reception for him at the Algonquin on 27 December which was well attended but sparsely reported. The journalists present or their editors disliked his negative and iconoclastic attitudes. According to the New York Daily News, he criticised the English, dismissed Churchill, disapproved of the IRA and praised Eisenhower. He was deliberately putting on a tough-talking act, but as a publicity stunt it was a disaster.

  Nevertheless, he was thrilled by New York, its lights, its energy, its bustle. He was happy to follow the tourist trail and the Farrellys’ apartment was so opulent that it seemed to him like Great Gatsby territory. Then, as his visit was prolonged into the spring, he moved into his own apartment on 86th Street, off Fifth Avenue. Just as he had posed as a French intellectual in Paris, in New York he quickly adapted himself to what he saw as the American way of life: drinking orange juice in the morning, having his shoes shined every day, reading the Washington Post, watching television and drinking bourbon on the rocks. Though happy in New York, he was nostalgic for Ireland and his favourite street was Third Avenue because it had so many Irish, even Inniskeen, names — Maguires, Duffys, Dalys, Lennons and Cronins.

  Between them the Farrellys and Patric Farrell saw to it that he was invited to lots of parties with the rich and famous. He met the Dartmouth poet Richard Eberhart. Farrell introduced him to the critic William Troy and his wife, the poet Leonie Adams, and to Conrad Aiken and his wife. The Ceylonese publisher and editor of Poetry London, Tambimuttu, was in town and Kavanagh was in great form discussing poetry at his East Eighties walk-up, though he fell asleep and Tambimuttu, fearing he might be lumbered with him overnight, insisted on his removal. Even after he had his own apartment, Kavanagh spent much of the day with the Farrellys, who lived about ten blocks away at 210 East 72nd Street. Their expensive east side home was a stopover for poets, especially the Beat poets. Jay Landesman remembers ‘long nights at Didi’s [sic] with George Barker, Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlowski’. Already an admirer of Barker’s poetry, Kavanagh was very excited by the Beats’ poetic experiments. His anecdote about his acquaintance with Ginsberg, however, turned on their alcoholism. They met by chance on Fifth Avenue on the one day in many months that Kavanagh was off the booze. When Ginsberg couldn’t persuade the Irish poet to join him, he roared after him, ‘OK Kavanagh, goodbye FOREVER!’

  Kavanagh also visited other places on this trip. He went to the race track at Hialeah in Florida in January; he was in Wisconsin and Boston and also Washington, where he visited Ezra Pound twice in St Elizabeth’s. By St Patrick’s Day he was back in New York and Eamon Gallagher, who was on the staff of the Irish embassy, gave him his invitation for the parade reviewing stand. The official Irish party, who were in formal morning dress, were not amused when he turned up there the worse for drink with a clay pipe stuck in his battered old hat. He was persuaded to leave.

  While Kavanagh felt that he was well and enjoying life, to some American eyes he appeared a physical wreck. His operation had left him with breathing difficulties and he conversed abruptly and unevenly in short bursts. When a speaking engagement was arranged for him at a Catholic College in Tarrytown, the nuns turned him away at the gate because his clothes were shabby, he spoke strangely in short, rapid spurts and they thought he was drunk. In general, he was acquiring a reputation for being a disorderly and abusive alcoholic and much too primitive in his social habits. Some New York hostesses shrank from inviting him to their homes because he was not house-trained, urinating everywhere except the lavatory bowl. Fellow guests at parties remember how he would pounce on some woman present and touch her or kiss her. One remembers him raking a very young girl’s back with black fingernails and looking everywhere for his ‘Baby Doll’ after she had made good her escape. Baby Doll was a film disapproved by the Archdiocese of New York which he had seen during his trip. The combination of bourbon and foreign society had loosened Kavanagh’s inhibitions as far as making public overtures to women was concerned. Claire McAllister, who had returned from Dublin to her home town of Grand Rapids at the end of her relationship with Patrick Swift in 1952, visited him in New York. He was happy to renew the acquaintance and they dined together a few times either alone or in a group of friends and even danced together.

  Nowhere in his account of these months in New York does Kavanagh mention his poetry; his social schedule was so full and his consumption of whiskey so colossal that Mrs Farrelly does not think he could possibly have fitted in any writing. Drinking was now his ‘daily work’. Most days he was senselessly drunk by late afternoon or early evening. In this connection he was fond of quoting from his poem on Thomas Moore’s statue: ‘His morning gentleness was the evening’s rage.’ ‘New York floats on whiskey’, he wrote in a ‘Letter in Verse’ to Patrick Swift.15 It is clear from this letter that he remained on good terms with the Farrellys throughout his stay in New York:

  Dede is well and I’m sure the same

  And nothing sorry that I came . . .

  He was enjoying himself so much that it seemed as if he might never leave. As he once playfully said of himself, ‘I am not a traveller. Wherever I happen to be I incline like the shamrock to take root and . . .
well, hardly flourish, though underfoot I’m trod.’16

  Eventually, he sailed from the US in mid-April. It has been inferred from the fact that he made this return voyage as a steerage passenger that Mrs Farrelly had dumped him. In fact she had bought him a first-class return ticket but he probably traded it down to release spending money for the trip. Accustomed to mixing with some of the elite of New York society, he was unhappy to find himself the fellow passenger of ‘resentful beaten Irish labourers’, a resentment largely provoked by his lordly airs.

  The crossing was exceptionally stormy and most of the passengers were ill and took to their bunks. He overcame his own seasickness by an act of will: he had just drunk a couple of glasses of brandy when the first pangs seized him and he said to himself, ‘I’m damned if my two glasses of brandy are going to get lost.’ After that he couldn’t get sick and sat drinking whiskey by the neck when the tables were heaving so much that it was impossible to set a glass on them.17 He broke his journey in London to visit Oonagh and Patrick Swift, who found him very Americanised, except for his battered hat.

  Dede phoned him in London and he wrote to her several times. She had hoped to have a welcome home letter waiting for him when he returned to 62 Pembroke Road. However, her letters of April and June also bring the first intimations that she may not be able to sustain her former level of patronage. The price of lead on which much of her wealth depended had plummeted and her bank account was overdrawn.

  In Dublin in early May, Kavanagh tried to prolong his American idyll by ordering his whiskey ‘on the rocks’. A barman, more familiar with the Irish colloquial meaning of the phrase, is said to have responded, ‘No drinks served on credit here, Mr Kavanagh.’ Shortly after his return from the US, T. P. McKenna introduced him to Michael Coffey, a director of Guinness’s Brewery, in McDaid’s. Kavanagh claimed that as a shareholder in the Guinness company he had a right to know how much Coffey earned and was most persistent about it. (He was always curious about the earnings of successful professionals or businessmen.) In order to deflect his attention, Coffey asked if he had done any lecturing in the US and added teasingly, ‘I suppose you weren’t up to it.’ Kavanagh immediately bridled: ‘Don’t dare to presume intimacy with me,’ he snarled. Coffey, a rather shy and diffident man, apologised: ‘I didn’t mean it, Mr Kavanagh.’ ‘I know you didn’t mean it,’ he retorted; ‘that makes it worse.’ Like many who knew him only by reputation as a rough diamond, Coffey was surprised to find that he was so thin-skinned and easily offended.

  When Robert Frost was in Dublin for four days from 15 June for the conferring of an honorary degree by the National University, Kavanagh attended his poetry reading in UCD. He was hurt to be excluded from the various ceremonial luncheons and dinners given in the American poet’s honour, culminating in a reception by President O’Kelly at Áras an Uachtaráin to which Austin Clarke was invited. He construed this exclusion as a deliberate official snub, but it was probably a slight to his person rather than his poetry; the powers that be were not going to risk an exhibition of the drunken, disruptive behaviour of which he was all too capable.

  From 1958 Kavanagh could no longer deceive himself that Mrs Farrelly entertained any more than a kindly affection for him. By then she had supplanted Cass as George Barker’s partner. He would meet them as a couple in London in 1959.

  22

  NOO POMES

  (1957–1958)

  . . . give me ad lib

  To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech

  For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven

  From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

  (‘Canal Bank Walk’)

  In May 1957, shortly after his return from New York, Kavanagh was offered a post as columnist for the Dublin monthly magazine Creation. Subtitled ‘The Irish Journal of Fashion and Decor’, Creation was not the kind of enterprise with which one would readily associate the dishevelled and decidedly undomesticated poet, but it paid five guineas per column which was good money. His stint as columnist lasted for seven months from June through December and during this period he regaled his readers with an account of his trip to Paris and Nice and three descriptions of his stay in the US. In mid-November the editor decided that a column he had submitted on ghosts was not suited to their readers and when in December he returned for the third time to his US visit, it was clear that he was running out of appropriate subjects and the column was terminated.

  While all his writing for Creation was autobiographical, the most intimately revelatory column was October’s where he aired his views on bachelorhood, attributing it to idealism: marriage is such a source of joy that the ‘idealistic man does not want to fritter away the cash of that potential except at the Moment of Truth’. In fact, he had recently turned down an opportunity of marriage. During the summer he had been proposed to by a determined woman and when he proved unenthusiastic she had sent a priest to discuss the matter with him. He felt cornered and was badly shaken by the experience. Though he did not name the woman in the case, it was most probably Sheila O’Grady whom he had been stringing along for five years. She and her sister had inherited the family house in Sandymount on her father’s death, so she was in a position to offer the poet the comfortable middle-class suburban home he had once craved. However, he considered her too old for him, though she was thirteen years his junior. If the woman was indeed Sheila O’Grady, he managed to extricate himself without sacrificing his friendship with her; they were photographed walking together on O’Connell Street the following year. He was limpet-like in his relationships and it was generally up to the woman to free herself, which Sheila O’Grady was too much in love to do.

  An unusual commission that came Kavanagh’s way in late autumn 1957 was to name some wrought-gold jewellery designed by Lunia Ryan (John Ryan’s sister-in-law) to be displayed in the Petite Salon at the Brown Thomas department store during the first fortnight in December. For naming thirty-four pieces in 1957 and forty-six in 1958 he was paid £3 a time.1 Reading the catalogues accompanying the exhibitions, it would be difficult to guess that the namer was Kavanagh, for his brief was to be ethnic and many of the names derived from Irish history and mythology or from Yeats’s plays and poems.

  The 1955 collection which Macmillan had turned down was still doing the rounds of publishers by early December 1957. He had given a copy to Tambimuttu when they met in New York, and other Soho friends, especially David Wright, had been trying to find a publisher. David Archer of the Parton Press offered to do a de luxe edition designed by George Barker. Kavanagh was not ‘wildly enthusiastic’ because by then he had started to write ‘noo pomes’ and was no longer satisfied to be represented by his pre-1957 work.

  After an interval of over six months, when he appears to have written no verse other than a doggerel epistle to Patrick Swift, he suddenly started writing poems again the summer after his return from New York. In July he reported that he had discovered a ‘new mood’ in poetry; he was ‘writing verse in a new style’. Between late June and October he produced about seventeen poems that he described as ‘a new kind of poem with new words’. They included ‘Is’, ‘To Hell with Commonsense’, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’, ‘The One’, ‘Yellow Vestment’, ‘Miss Universe’, ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’, ‘October’, ‘Song at Fifty’ and ‘Question to Life’, and would form the nucleus of his next collection. It is impossible to date these poems precisely. Later he would claim that he had produced all of them in an orgy of energy in one week, but it is more likely that he produced them in at least two phases: one cluster by early July and another in September/October.

  He was so delighted by and so grateful for the sudden, unexpected surge of lyrical energy in the summer and autumn of 1957 that he constructed an elaborate personal myth to enhance its significance, announcing that he had been reborn as a poet during his convalescence on the bank of the Grand Canal in July 1955.2 Because
Muhammad had set out from Mecca for Medina in July, he co-opted the Muslim concept of the hegira to describe the poetic journey on which he himself had embarked in that month. While the trauma of his recent serious illness had renewed his appreciation of ‘the common and banal’ sights and sounds of the living world in the summer of 1955, the poetry arising from this blessed mood of healing and delight was delayed for a further two years. In fact, all this new verse probably owed at least as much to his prolonged holiday in the US in 1957 as to his canal convalescence in 1955. Privately he referred to his ‘new’ poems as ‘noo pomes’, using the American pronunciation.3 It is likely that the six-month liberation from the coteries, routines and hostilities, in which he remained enmeshed so long as he stayed in Dublin, revitalised him psychically and imaginatively. Even though he was taking a holiday from writing in New York, he was perusing anthologies of North American poetry. He was also encountering the latest American literary phenomenon, Beat poetry, and exchanging opinions with the Beat poets themselves. Their verse, so zany, wild and anti-bourgeois, jolted his imagination as his reading of Auden had done back in 1941.

  Though his late 1950s’ poetry does not make a complete thematic or stylistic break with his previous verse, it does represent a fresh departure. The outlook and mood are different. These ‘noo pomes’ are utterly celebratory. The anger and self-pity — ‘wrath/ With its self-righteous/ Satirizing blotches’ — he had been trying to eradicate since ‘Auditors In’ have been extirpated. At times the poet who had so often kicked against the goad is reconciled with the way life has treated him, with ‘The way it happened, and the way it is’; in most of the poems he goes further and is euphoric, exuberant, maniacally delighted to be alive: