Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  I want to throw myself on the public street without caring

  For anything but the prayering that the earth offers . . .

  In ‘Question to Life’ he subordinates love of nature to the human love and affection that have been showered on him:

  . . . the passing gift of affection

  Tossed from the windows of high charity

  In the office girl and civil servant section . . .

  However, most of the lyrics are love poems and hymns to canal and street, country lane and cut-away bog. They are present-tense salutations, rapturously greeting the here and now or hailing the future with optimism:

  Green, blue, yellow and red —

  God is down in the swamps and marshes . . .

  O leafy yellowness you create for me

  A world that was and now is poised above time,

  I do not need to puzzle out Eternity

  As I walk this arboreal street on the edge of a town . . .

  Colour, never before prominent in his poetry, is a feature of this new verse, highlighting its sensuousness. Many of the poems exude a sense of plenty:

  O wealthy me! O happy state!

  With an inexhaustible theme . . .

  Most of the ‘noo pomes’ are poems about poetry: credos, manifestos, poetic stocktakings, announcements of future schemes and programmes, glimpses of ‘the Muse at her toilet’. Such pronouncements on poetry are frequently presented in an anti-literary or demotic style: ‘Therefore I say to hell/With all reasonable/ Poems . . .’

  A self-effacing stance is advocated in ‘The Self-Slaved’ and especially in ‘Is’, where he focuses on objects, on the other, rather than on subjective reactions:

  To look on is enough

  In the business of love . . .

  But this mood is not sustained. More typical is ‘High Journey’ which begins

  No, no, no, I know I was not important as I moved

  Through the colourful country . . .

  and then invokes a bardic self-image at least as inflated and arrogant as many of his former poses:

  . . . my rhyme

  Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved

  Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.

  O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously

  Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces

  Stumbled behind Jove’s page boy paging me . . .

  The view of poetry as irrational, Dionysian, ‘a delirious beat’ which pervades this sonnet is a recurring feature of this group of poems:

  Nothing thought out atones

  For no flight

  In the light . . .

  A new cult of casualness, ‘not caring’, is manifest throughout. Improvisatory techniques are exploited to convey an air of immediacy and lack of restraint. Repetitions, even triple repetitions, which were a feature of his own speech when he was being emphatic, are quite common: ‘Prometheus calls me on./ Prometheus calls me: Son . . .’; ‘I learned, I learned . . . I learned’; ‘I will have love, have love . . .’; ‘No, no, no . . . ’; ‘praise, praise, praise . . . ’; ‘beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God . . .’ Rhyme is foregrounded and the frequently off-chime and half-rhymes result in some unexpected and incongruous couplings such as ‘person’ and ‘arsing’, ‘thighs’ and ‘wise’, ‘prose’ and ‘noise’, ‘of’ and ‘love’. At this stage in his career he was obsessed with technique, especially with finding modes of expression that would seem spontaneous and uncontrived. In keeping with their openness to ‘ordinary plenty’, these poems admit any word or phrase however slangy or vulgar. Cliché is coupled with abstraction: ‘all that/Was part and parcel of/The wild breast of love.’ The uninhibited, vernacular, spoken style which he had been cultivating for years in his journalism and in such early fifties’ poems as ‘Auditors In’ (‘Let myself rip . . .’) allows him to lighten his verse. Yet for all its apparent casualness this verse has ‘a shapely form’: many of the lyrics are sonnets; the remainder are, for the most part, written in couplets. Their air of impromptu utterance and unrehearsed immediacy is the product of an art that conceals art.

  A batch of the ‘noo pomes’ was sent to Encounter in late September 1957 and he was overjoyed when Stephen Spender wrote back a week later to say how much he had liked these ‘violently beautiful’ poems. The first of this batch, the sonnet ‘October’, appeared in Encounter in January 1958, but through an editorial oversight Kavanagh’s name was not included in the list of authors on the cover and the poem was omitted from the List of Contents; the layout was also mangled. He was mollified when Spender apologised and promised to publish a group of poems in the near future: ‘Is’, ‘To Hell with Commonsense’, ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘High Journey’ (‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’) appeared in May. Two of his less good new pieces, ‘Requiem for a Mill’ and ‘Birth’, which he had given to the Irish Jesuit quarterly Studies, were in the spring issue. One of the finest of the new poems, ‘Question to Life’, a return to the adult, ironic yet celebratory voice of ‘Prelude’, the self-analysis and dialogue with his readers now compacted into sonnet form, was printed in Time and Tide on 12 April.

  That spring Kavanagh assembled a large collection of poems for publication. He had added all his post-1955 poems to the pre-Nimbus collection which Macmillan had declined and had the new collection typed up and bound under the title Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. Friends from his London circle, especially David Wright and Anthony Cronin, were actively seeking a publisher for this volume throughout 1958.

  Meanwhile, Peter wrote from New York on 17 May to say that he was starting a private press and had set part of ‘To Hell with Commonsense’. Would his brother be interested in having a private edition of 50 copies of his verse? Patrick was quite encouraging. He promised to send on ten new poems for the book, envisaging ‘a neat sweet collection, about fifty pages’. Twenty-five copies could be sold in Parsons bookshop at ten guineas a time. He suggested that the press be called by some noncommittal name such as the Johnson or the Anvil, rather than appear as a family venture. At the end of June he advised Peter to carry on and not worry unduly about misprints, ‘the more mistakes — or nearly — the better’. The poems had been written in ‘a spirit of “it doesn’t matter”’, so the printing could follow suit once the meaning was clear; there was no need to reset except when the page was a ‘complete botch’.

  For all his cavalier attitude towards misprints, Patrick was annoyed by some of Peter’s errors and in some cases by the layout. On 18 July he pointed out a number of mistakes which ruined the sense: ‘pre-cooken’ in ‘Requiem for a Mill’ should be ‘pre-cooked’; ‘arising’ in ‘Song at Fifty’ should be ‘arsing’; ‘sleers’ should be ‘leers’ in ‘Dear Folks’; in the same poem, ‘fires of vanity’ had been substituted for ‘fires of comedy’; also there should be a division between sonnets on page 9 and the printing of the sonnet ‘October’ followed the misprinting in Encounter where one line was divided in two and a full stop omitted after ‘youth passing’. He wanted the four-line poem ‘Narcissus and the Women’ to be printed on a separate page. For those who think of Kavanagh as a poet who never revised or was involuntarily slapdash, this catalogue of complaints about the printing of his poems is instructive.

  As he had promised, his brother sent the sheets for twenty-five copies to him in Dublin, but he delayed taking them to the binder and seemed set to ignore the edition despite Peter’s prodding. In mid-October he finally caved in and by the end of the month the limited edition of twenty-five was on sale at £5 in Parsons or obtainable directly from himself. It was entitled Recent Poems and bore no publisher’s imprint. Peter published twenty-five copies in the United States under the Peter Kavanagh Handpress imprint.

  The publication of Kavanagh’s new, finely crafted, celebratory lyrics in Encounter and elsewhere once again drew attention to the gulf between the delicacy and grace of his verse and the coarseness and abrasiveness of his daily speech and manner. The write
r of ‘But nothing whatever is by love debarred’ crudely dismissed a would-be wife (Sheila O’Grady?) as ‘too hard in the horn’.4 A woman who had the temerity to expect him to stand her a drink, hinted broadly: ‘Can’t you see I have a mouth on me?’ ‘How could I miss it,’ he snapped back, ‘and it hanging between your two ears like a skipping-rope.’ Above all, he was repeatedly and calculatedly nasty to blue-rinse American women. One of his ploys was to sit sullen and taciturn, allowing them to ply him with whiskeys and then, in apparently mellow mood, pronounce: ‘I like Ike.’ When the woman beamed approvingly, ‘Ah, good, you like Eisenhower’, he would reply, ‘No, Eichmann.’

  John McGahern once asked Patrick Swift ‘how he rhymed Kavanagh’s often boorish self with the sensitive and delicate verses’. Swift’s first response was the conventional ‘separation of Art and Life’, but then, laughing outright, he gave his personal explanation of the phenomenon: ‘All those delicate love poems are addressed to himself, even if it is sometimes by way of God. Such sensitivity would be wasted on a mere Other . . .’5 The discrepancy between the fervour and elation of the ‘noo pomes’ and his everyday demeanour is once again evident in a brief exchange with Liam O’Flaherty on the morning of 8 October 1957:

  ‘I’m going to emigrate,’ he said, clasping his sides with his apelike arms. ‘Where?’ I said excitedly, hoping he was in earnest. ‘To the fuckin’ moon,’ he said. ‘So I wouldn’t have to see Brendan Behan any more. It’s my only chance to die happy.’6

  Clearly praise of ‘the way it is’ did not include a reconciliation with his arch-enemy.

  Leo Holohan, one of the few who refused to distinguish between the man and the poet, was irritated by those whose attitude to Kavanagh was ‘As a poet, yes; as a man, no.’7 His own holistic viewpoint was to be sorely tested when he accompanied the bard to Kilkenny at the end of February 1958. Frank McEvoy’s record of his lecture to the Arts Society there begins:

  Well Kavanagh has come and gone: like the monsoon, the mistral, Hurricane Annie: things will never be the same again . . .8

  Frank McEvoy, one of his Kilkenny hosts, met Kavanagh and Holohan in the Metropole Hotel bar and walked with them to the lecture venue in the Tech. The other lecturers and poets McEvoy mentioned by way of small talk en route were all dismissed by Kavanagh as ‘No f . . . ing good.’ His own talk consisted of scabrous anecdotes about other poets spoken at the top of his voice interspersed with cries of ‘I must find a pisserie. Where is there a pisserie?’ Passersby on the High Street stared. At the Tech. he was anxious to get his lecture over with and cut short the chairman’s fulsome introduction by snorting loudly and shifting about noisily on the platform. Once behind the lectern he donned a pair of glasses held together with sticking plaster and began impressively: ‘Parnassus is not a place; it is a point of view.’ Then he went on to moan about the provincial scene, the dreariness of the local community; he knew how terrible it was because he came from a similar place. His talk, which ranged over his opinions of O’Casey, Joyce, Yeats and his own illness and poetic rebirth, was punctuated by groans about how truly terrible everything was. When an imperious lady from the hall asked why he found Kilkenny so terrible, he was not intimidated by her foxhunting tones; rather the reverse. ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ he thundered. ‘It’s bad manners to interrupt the lecturer.’ No one in Kilkenny had ever dared to shut up Lady Bellew. It gradually dawned on the organisers that what he found so terrible was the prevalence of older women in the audience. He had hoped for an audience of 14 to 20-year-olds, he said.

  However, when he began reading his poems, the mood of the occasion changed utterly. He recited four sonnets he had composed the previous autumn, beginning with ‘Leafy-with-love banks’. The audience grew still, spellbound by the quality of the poetry. Once back in the Metropole he consciously set about breaking the spell, entertaining those of his audience who had joined him with stories about his visit to Ezra Pound in the biggest madhouse in the world where buck niggers walked about showing off their penises. Disgusted by such grossness, his listeners began to disperse. Spotting Lady Bellew among those who remained, he asked her if she were ‘a Prod’. She was. ‘I hate Prods,’ he said and, as McEvoy tells it, ‘let his head fall sideways in a stupor and put out his tongue’.

  The evening concluded with a lengthy haggle over his fee. The agreed fee was three guineas plus reasonable expenses, but he bargained it up: ‘Ten pounds and I’ll pay my hotel bill’; ‘Six guineas and you pay my bill.’ He eventually settled for six guineas and paid his own bill. He was getting sleepy, but as he turned in for the night he addressed himself to two plump ladies seated on a sofa. Earlier he had said that one of them was ‘too f . . . ing auld for him’. Now he ordered them, ‘Stay around because I might want to plough one of yez afterwards.’ Clearly he was in a mood to épater la bourgeoisie and this, his parting shot, had to be memorably uncouth.

  His later comments on the Kilkenny visit indicate that his ungenteel conduct was a deliberate strategy to discourage any literary hobnobbing on the part of his cultural inferiors, though he also positively enjoyed discomfiting the polite middle classes. This visit confirmed his belief that art was wasted on what Myles na gCopaleen would have called ‘the plain people of Ireland’. Whereas many middle-class folk regarded Kavanagh superciliously as a mere peasant or bogman, in his own estimation he was an aristocrat, a member of an exclusive caste. His contempt for the cultural aspirations of helots is stated in no uncertain terms in ‘Art for Ballydehob’, an essay in which he refers to his Kilkenny visit:

  These people are not of the slightest account in the business of art. They are, in fact, its enemies, barbarians who should be treated as such and kept sawing wood and drawing water as happened in ancient Athens. To consider such people is to drag down the glorious individual spirit from the slopes of Parnassus . . .9

  After the collapse of his Creation column, Kavanagh began casting about for a means of regularly supplementing his income from the UCD lectureship. What he needed to provide a reliable, regular source of revenue was another newspaper column. So when Patrick O’Keeffe, the editor of the Irish Farmers’ Journal and an admirer of his poetry, approached him one Sunday morning on his way out from Mass and asked him to write a weekly column, he was only too happy to oblige. They agreed on a figure of six guineas and the column got under way the following week, 14 June, with an article on ‘My Birthplace’. It was easily earned money because he had a fund of rural reminiscences which he could jot down quickly. Larry Sheedy, deputy editor of the journal, recalls that Kavanagh submitted his copy badly typed, and was canny or experienced enough to write a dispensable opening section, knowing that most sub-editors feel obliged to knock out the first paragraph. In fact, he sometimes made a little game of this: he would hand in his copy, leave the office, walk down a few steps of the stairs and then come back and say, ‘Did you knock it out yet?’ The first paragraph was generally gone by then. When Sheedy wielded the blue pencil on other parts of the column, he would abuse him roundly for it.

  The offices of the Irish Farmers’ Journal were next door to the RAF Club in Earlsfort Terrace and close to the university, so it was only a short detour off his trip into McDaid’s or the Bailey. When he was in Dublin he was a weekly visitor and sometimes dropped by several times a week. Sheedy knew when he was about to arrive because he always harrumphed as he got to the top of the stairs; he would cough three times, then pause for fifteen seconds before opening the door. This routine never varied. Some of his visits were social calls — he’d drop in for a chat or to see if anyone was free for a drink — but the main reason for his presence was that he delivered his copy in person in order to receive immediate payment. Sheedy would initial a chit for the cashier, indicating that an article had been submitted, and Kavanagh would go to the central office and collect his six guineas there and then. He liked to get an advance on his money, to be about three weeks ahead in his payments, and he would try to persuade Sheedy to provide chits for unwritten ar
ticles. He used the journal like a bank, drawing out cash when he was short of spending money: ‘I’ll have the article for you tomorrow. Can I have the chit now?’ he’d ask Sheedy. They would haggle goodhumouredly over this. By refusing any further advances, Sheedy could blackmail Kavanagh into producing the goods.

  When Sheedy was insistent on receiving an article and he was stumped for inspiration he would ask: ‘Right. What do you want me to write? Just mention the topic.’ Sheedy, himself a countryman, or Noel O’Reilly, a colleague from Cavan, would come up with some suggestion: ‘OK, Paddy, a reflective piece on harnessing a horse or landing up the potatoes.’ When Sheedy or O’Reilly suggested further embellishments, he would wheeze back at them: ‘I only asked you what you wanted me to write about; I didn’t ask you to write it’, and off he’d go to earn his six guineas. Sometimes he would fold his arms, clear his throat with a harsh bark and there and then speak the article he would write for next week.10

  Though his column for the Irish Farmers’ Journal was largely hack work, Kavanagh could not write anything that did not bear the stamp of his personality and reading his weekly offerings is like listening to him talk unpatronisingly on a diverse range of subjects that interested or affected him: horse racing, cockney slang and the argot of the underworld, eccentricity. Sometimes he resorted to ‘I mind the time’ stories, providing a wealth of information about life in rural south Monaghan in the first forty years of the century. He also shared recent experiences such as a trip to Barcelona from Nice with John Farrelly in summer 1956.

  ‘Memories of a Spray-Paint Canvasser’ on 21 June was of this ilk: a whistle-blowing account of his summer job with Dinny Dwyer four years previously. Thoughtlessly or deliberately treacherous, it presented the barn-painting business as a racket, discrediting Dwyer with the very readership on whom he was dependent for a livelihood. The two men quarrelled bitterly over the article and were not on speaking terms for over a year. The editor was aware that he had been very unwise to allow publication but, so far as he and other journalists can recollect, while Dwyer may have threatened proceedings, he did not actually sue and received no financial settlement. According to Kavanagh, Dwyer instead took the law into his own hands and bided his time, waiting for over a year before revenging himself.