Kavanagh was delighted to accept Tommy Marks’s invitation to be Donagh MacDonagh’s successor. The honour compensated for the insult of not winning a prize and, in addition to the welcome honorarium of 150 guineas, there was the perk of four or five trips to London, all travelling and hotel expenses paid, for the three judges normally met four or five times a year, and mostly in London. The judging was to prove more onerous than he had bargained for and he certainly earned his keep. At least four to five hundred poems were collected every quarter and each had to be assigned a grade from A to C. Then a short list had to be compiled from those in category B or over. This short list was further discussed and divided into possible award winners and those sixty suitable for inclusion in the Guinness anthology of the best poems submitted in that year. At the final meeting the three winning poems were chosen and the selection of poems for the anthology was finalised. In 1959/60 Kavanagh’s fellow judges were John Press and Stephen Spender and each had to read through some 3,000 poems. John Press described it as ‘an unrelenting flow of verse’.8
As the summer of 1959 passed, Longmans grew increasingly anxious to run ‘the Irish fox to earth’ and conclude a deal with him. He was to be offered royalties of 10 per cent on a volume entitled Shancoduff and Other Poems. Agreement was reached on the royalties and the number of poems to be included, now reduced from forty-five to thirty. However the list of poems he was sent, as he was about to sign the contract on 21 July, filled him with dismay. ‘Prelude’ had been excluded, together with other comparatively recent poems such as ‘Who Killed James Joyce?’, ‘On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers’, ‘Birth’ and ‘The Self-Slaved’. The compilation of the list of titles had been so slipshod that the then title poem, ‘Shancoduff’, had been inadvertently omitted too.
Kavanagh did not absolutely insist on ‘Who Killed James Joyce?’, ‘On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers’ and ‘Birth’ and these three poems disappeared from the volume. The poems he was intent on collecting were ‘To Hell with Commonsense’, ‘Is’, ‘Song at Fifty’ and ‘Yellow Vestment’, to the exclusion of, if necessary, ‘The Road to Hate’, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, ‘I Had a Future’ and ‘Bank Holiday’. With the possible exception of ‘I Had a Future’, one can see his point. He was willing to trade poems he wished to retain for poems of similar length that Longmans had selected so that the number of pages would remain the same. On 26 July he wrote to Longmans again to reiterate that ‘Shancoduff’, still the title poem, and ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ belonged to his past, to his farming life and, if published now in a deliberate way would misrepresent him; both these poems could be used in the body of the work but should be dated. He had now added three further poems to those he insisted on including: ‘Dear Folks’, ‘Love in a Meadow’ and ‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’. He also made a further bid to jettison the title Shancoduff and Other Poems, suggesting another inconsequential title, Dear Folks. When Dear Folks proved unacceptable, he came up with yet another casual title, Just A Few Lines. Blackburn thought this too insubstantial for such a solid collection.
A letter to Anthony Cronin, signed Patrick Kavanagh MA Cantab, makes playful reference to his difficulty with his publishers, ‘short man’ and their reader, ‘Black burns’, who had an ‘Englishman’s attitude’ to Irish verse.9 While he made light of his troubles to Cronin, it was galling to be published by people who had so little understanding of his work. Negotiations on the proposed volume were postponed until 16 November when he was due in London in his capacity as a Guinness judge.
In September 1959 when Kavanagh was back in Dublin and on the lookout for accommodation for the winter, Jimmy Dwyer, a wit, raconteur and bon viveur, invited him to stay for a week or so in his home at 110 Baggot Lane, a mews at the back of Pembroke Road. He would come to regret this hospitable gesture for Kavanagh proved difficult to dislodge, and by the end of April the following year was still looking on Dwyer’s mews as his Dublin base.
Late in the evening of Monday, 19 October, as he was making his way to 110 Baggot Lane from Searson’s pub on Upper Baggot Street, he almost drowned, ironically in the stretch of canal beside Baggot Street Bridge which he had already celebrated in two sonnets. Most of those to whom he told his survivor’s tale in the following days believed he had stumbled and fallen into the water in the course of wending his drunken way homewards. He himself was firmly convinced that he had been the victim of an assassination attempt.
According to the version of the episode he furnished a fortnight later to Walter Carroll, a friend who was then assistant solicitor at the State Solicitor’s office,10 he had left Searson’s at closing time on 19 October, not intoxicated, but in good form. As he walked home, Dinny Dwyer, who had not been on speaking terms with him for a year because of the exposé of the spray-painting racket, pulled up in a car and invited him to drinks in a nearby flat in order to effect a reconciliation. He accepted, talked over ‘old times’ with Dinny and two companions, had one drink and blacked out. His drink was drugged, he maintained; it was not a case that he had drunk one too many. The next thing he remembered was plunging into the icy water of the canal, but just before he was tipped over the bridge he heard a familiar voice saying, ‘Over you go, you fucker you’, and registered the presence of Dwyer and his companions. In his letter to Walter Carroll he mentioned that he had found his hat and a dog-racing card near the scene of the crime the next day and handed them to Sergeant Heffernan. He had actually found them on the canal bank rather than on Baggot Street Bridge which, as he acknowledged, suggests that he had not been thrown over the bridge but had entered the water from the bank.
Whether he fell or was pushed, it was fortunate that the water was shallow and muddy enough to enable him to somehow scramble to the side and claw his way to safety up the bank. Fortunate, too, that he was right beside the home of another friend and benefactor, Patricia Murphy, who lived at 1 Wilton Place. She was a qualified doctor and, though she had never practised, she had retained enough medical expertise to know how to deal with the shivering, shocked and muddy poet who turned up on her doorstep at about 1.30 a.m. Thanks to her ministrations he suffered no ill-effects from his ordeal and was out and about the city later that day. The daughter of a South African shipping magnate, Patricia Murphy was a wealthy woman and she treated Kavanagh to a new outfit and a new watch. He went into McDaid’s and the Bailey to show off his ensemble. ‘Only the best’, he repeated, looking admiringly at his new tweeds.
According to himself, his would-be murderers were disconcerted to find him revived and refurbished, seated on a barstool in McDaid’s holding court, like some imitation of Banquo’s ghost. When he was seen talking and drinking with the alleged arch-perpetrator of the crime in the days that followed, his explanation was that it was erotic for the murderee to be close to his murderer. He was soon mythologising his recovery from this brush with death and dramatising himself as ‘the man they couldn’t kill’. Mischievously, he wrote up the incident for the Irish Farmers’ Journal a month later without naming the accused or alluding to their motives.11
To the end of his life Dinny Dwyer maintained his innocence. When Anthony Cronin asked one of the alleged perpetrators whether he had actually dumped Kavanagh in the canal, he replied, ‘I didn’t throw Kavanagh into any canal, but I’ll tell you this much — the man I’d like to get my hands on is the fellow that pulled the ould bollocks out.’12
Patricia Murphy, who dealt so competently with the soggy poet on the evening of his canal misadventure, was better known to English readers by her maiden name, Patricia Avis. Her poetry had been published in The Listener, in G. S. Fraser’s 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, and in Larkin, Dobrée and MacNeice’s New Poems, 1958. Divorced in June 1959 from her second husband, the poet Richard Murphy, she had only recently set up house on the top two floors of 1 Wilton Place, near Baggot Street Bridge. She had moved in literary and intellectual circles since her time as an Oxford student and she now kept open house for Dublin poets and writers. A
heavy smoker and drinker herself, she had a good supply of alcohol in the house and both Brian O’Nolan and Patrick Kavanagh often partook of her hospitality. In 1959 she was a tall, handsome 30-year-old, but no gossip attached to her relations with Kavanagh. She had her lovers and he was somewhat in awe, even a little frightened, of her, for she had a temper.
A few months after settling in Dublin, she launched a short-lived quarterly literary journal, Nonplus. Probably as a gesture of gratitude for her rescue of him and for the hospitality she extended during the week following his misadventure, Kavanagh’s contribution to the first number in October 1959 was extraordinarily generous. It carried a lengthy sequence of his poems and prose pieces, beginning with the quatrain poem ‘Freedom’ (untitled), followed by an essay, ‘Nationalism and Literature’, which concluded with the poem ‘Love in a Meadow’ (untitled), then another essay, ‘Violence and Literature’, which concluded with the sonnet ‘Winter’ (untitled), then the sonnet ‘Canal Bank Walk’ (untitled), then a third essay, ‘Suffering in Literature’, followed by three sonnets, numbered 1, 2, 3, but otherwise untitled and referred to as ‘three coloured sonnets’. The three were ‘Yellow Vestment’, ‘Miss Universe’ and ‘The One’. The sequence concluded with the sonnet ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’, again untitled.
The three essays had not been published previously and, of the seven poems, four were available only in the limited edition Recent Poems; two had appeared in Encounter and the seventh, ‘Winter’, was making its first appearance in print. Moreover, five of these poems were among the best Kavanagh ever wrote. The administrators of the Guinness Poetry Awards requested the three ‘coloured sonnets’ and ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’ and he had to write back to inform them that his poetry was not eligible for an award because he was a Guinness judge. The lengthy sequence of prose and poetry was a remarkable coup for a new journal. While long-term gratitude was not Kavanagh’s forte, he was capable of immediate overwhelming emotion and, for all his public-house bravado, he knew that without Patricia Murphy’s ministrations he could have suffered hypothermia or caught pneumonia.
Apart from the launch of Nonplus, the other most exciting literary event in Dublin in October 1959 was the dispute over the forthcoming production of The Ginger Man at the Gaiety Theatre. As the row escalated, the supporters of the play gathered in the Bailey where John Ryan, Brendan Behan and Kavanagh, among others, rallied to Donleavy’s defence. John Ryan had bought the Bailey pub and restaurant in 1958 and Kavanagh now commuted between it and McDaid’s. The Bailey was a source of free booze and free meals and cashed the poet’s notoriously unreliable cheques. On the occasion of the row over The Ginger Man, Kavanagh is reputed to have pronounced: ‘In a mini metropolis long dead, Donleavy has at last set the city alive once more.’13 The play, which had its première on 26 October, was taken off after the third performance.
It was unusual to find Kavanagh lined up with ‘the official liberal opposition’ as he termed it. Most post-war censorship of the Dublin press and theatre emanated directly or indirectly from the diocesan Chancellory at Drumcondra and he had never been known to challenge it publicly, partly because of his role as the Archbishop’s beneficiary, but also because his ‘Olympian’ critical standards led him to cast a jaundiced eye over most of Dublin’s literary or journalistic offerings.
Since the cancer operation, Dr McQuaid had maintained an interest in his protégé’s welfare. When Kavanagh was still living in No. 62, the Archbishop’s chauffeur-driven Humber would draw up outside at Christmas-time and the priest at the wheel would be sent to ring the doorbell and summon the poet. Kavanagh, who checked the identity of all callers to the front door in a car mirror he had rigged up for the purpose, would join his Grace in the car rather than let him see the state of his flat. On the first occasion he confided in the priest that the visit was inconvenient because he had a woman with him. When Dr McQuaid was told, he showed his sense of humour by responding, ‘Some good woman from the Legion of Mary, doubtless.’ The Archbishop always brought gifts, including some black woollen garments surplus to episcopal requirements about which Kavanagh was rather disparaging; these included mufflers, sweaters or gloves hand-knitted by diocesan nuns. One such despised gift was a black cashmere cardigan which Joan Ryan pointed out to him was a really expensive garment. By way of illustration she mentioned how much she had paid for a cashmere cardigan for her young son. ‘Weigh them both’, Kavanagh said. The child’s cardigan weighed a few ounces, the Archbishop’s a few pounds. When he had calculated how much the Archbishop’s gift had cost, he was quite impressed and began to fantasise playfully that its purchase had beggared a few orphanages or that charity bazaars had been run to meet the expense.
On 16 October 1959 Dr McQuaid wrote saying that he had heard Kavanagh was ill and could he do anything to help. His letter arrived just two days before the near-drowning episode and in his vulnerable state afterwards, Kavanagh turned to him for counsel and help. While publicly he preened himself on having survived an assassination attempt and fantasised himself as a hero, he was quite shaken by his near-brush with death. His main concern, he told Dr McQuaid, was where and how to live for the future. He had come to a crossroads in his life and was seriously considering moving from Dublin to London, but he wanted to talk it over before reaching a decision. There was also the matter of his overdrawn bank account. His Grace could help by guaranteeing his creditworthiness to the manager of the Munster and Leinster Bank in Upper Baggot Street, who was harassing him about his overdraft and threatening not to honour his ‘small cheques’.14 Despite living rent-free for the summer, he had managed to drink and gamble himself into debt.
Still traumatised by his near-drowning, he decided to escape to London for a while towards the end of October. When he got there he could talk of little else at first. He stayed with Oonagh and Patrick Swift, who were renting the garden flat of 9 Westbourne Terrace, a large Victorian house where Elizabeth Smart and her children lived on the top floor. Oonagh, under her mother’s name, Agnes Ryan, had co-authored a cookery book with Elizabeth Smart; she was an excellent chef, and Kavanagh appreciated her cuisine. The Swifts’ daughter, Kate, remembers that he spent a lot of time sitting in the kitchen.15 As was his way, he was making himself at home with his friend’s wife, looking for domesticity or maternal competence rather than sex. He wanted Oonagh’s full attention and when she tried to read, he would pull the book out of her hands. Exasperated, she thumped him one day and discovered that he liked to be hit by a woman; it reminded him of relations with his mother and made him feel secure. So much did he consider himself the pivot of the household (‘And truth is my true/Husband is you’), that he would turn quite truculent if Oonagh wanted to delay dinner because her husband was late.
Patrick Swift and David Wright were launching a new journal, X, later in November; he had two poems, ‘Living in the Country’ and ‘Lecture Hall’, in the first number and one of his reasons for being in London was to share in the excitement of his friends’ new venture. X sold well — usually 3,000 copies — and it made an instant impact, being praised in The Observer and The Times Literary Supplement.
The flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace was itself a mini-Soho with frequent traffic between the top floor, where Elizabeth Smart’s ex-lovers, George Barker and Sydney Graham, and other writers might be visiting, and the basement flat, where David Wright frequently came and went, the young Yorkshire poet Brian Higgins sometimes slept on the living room floor, and Dom Moraes might be found in the kitchen frying kidneys for breakfast. Friendly though he was with the Swifts, Kavanagh, whose normal distrustfulness was exacerbated by alcoholic paranoia, feared that they were reading his mail.
He also occasionally stayed at Leland Bardwell’s flat at 68 Carleton Road, another gathering place for writers and artists. An attractive young Irish poet and writer, Leland’s hospitality was legendary; there were mattresses all over the floor of her flat and it was a venue for after-pub carouses. Kavanagh, as an honoured gues
t, was assigned an army bed rather than a mattress. By 1959 he did not have the stamina for late-night parties and retired to bed early, unless the talk was especially interesting when he sat up and joined in. At the end of October, Thérèse and Anthony Cronin had moved from Hearne Farm into another apartment in the same house as Leland so, just as at Westbourne Terrace, there was always interesting literary companionship to hand.
Anthony Cronin recalls that Kavanagh was very selective and quite snobbish about the company he kept at this stage, checking up on the credentials of any new writers and artists he encountered before admitting them to fellowship. His myth of London as a centre of artistic excellence, where he and a group of gifted poets and painters would engage in mutual admiration, meant that he did not wish to consort with second-class citizens. Initially, he was uncertain about the status of the artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, a couple known as the Roberts, who were also staying with Leland, but gladly welcomed them as drinking companions once he had been assured that they had ‘merit’ and were about to mount an exhibition. Likewise with Julian MacLaren-Ross, to whom Cronin introduced him. At first Kavanagh found him a bore, but once he ascertained that the bore was the author of Bitten by the Tarantula, he was prepared to be friendly.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 56
