The local hostelry for the inhabitants of No. 68 and their guests was the Holloway Castle. (The house’s most remarkable feature was its views over the exercise yard of Holloway Prison.) Cronin recollects how on one occasion when he was driving a thirsty crowd to the pub to avoid the ten-minute delay involved in walking there, the back doors of his dilapidated van opened and a passenger fell out and was being dragged. Cronin slammed on the brakes, but Kavanagh, for whom getting to the pub was paramount, urged him to drive on.16
After a fortnight in London, Kavanagh felt better than he had in years. Writing about this visit to the Archbishop, he presented Leland Bardwell’s and the Swifts’ flat, where tipsy writers talked into the small hours, as ‘enclaves of enthusiasm and love which give physical as well as mental health’. Dublin he now regarded as ‘an alien city’; he was aiming to make London his domicile.17
The Guinness poetry judges were meeting on Wednesday, 16 December, and he moved from his army bed in Leland’s or the Swifts’ to luxuriate in the quiet elegance of Brown’s Hotel, all expenses paid. He was uncomfortable in Brown’s, preferring to rough it with his friends, but took advantage of his expense account to order bottles of whiskey and whole roasted chickens on room service, sneaking them out in his briefcase to enjoy elsewhere or share with friends.
During consultations with Dr McQuaid on 17 November and 12 December as to the advisability of moving to London, Kavanagh did not confide one of his main motives for wishing to settle there. He had once again fallen in love, this time with a woman the Cronins had introduced him to, Katherine Barry Moloney, a friend of both Thérèse Cronin and Leland Bardwell. Dark-haired, plump, of medium height, and 31 at the time of their first London encounter, she was unlike the women who normally interested him in that she was neither very beautiful nor very young. However, she was extroverted, sociable, vivacious and fun-loving, a woman with merry, laughing eyes and a big smile, a zest for life and a talent for making and keeping friends. Kavanagh, homeless in both Dublin and London and still recovering from the trauma of the near-drowning, was probably drawn at first by her warm personality, openness and evident sincerity. He knew and liked her sister Mary, wife of Padraig O’Halpin, his neighbours on Pembroke Road in 1953/54. Once he had met Katherine with them in Bob and Sheila Bradshaw’s, but they had merely greeted one another in passing. Now he was attracted by her.
One evening when Katherine was in Leland’s house with a crowd of revellers, he began inviting her to join him in his army bed. When Leland left them to it, Katherine was still standing by the mantelpiece demurring and making excuses. The bed was too small; she wouldn’t fit. ‘Ah come on into bed. I won’t ate you’, Kavanagh was coaxing. His seductive technique was about as enticing as the wolf’s in the Red Riding Hood tale, but he eventually wore down her resistance. Next morning they were behaving openly like lovers, sitting around holding hands and looking into one another’s eyes. This was most untypical behaviour on Kavanagh’s part, for he was not given to public displays of affection. Katherine was radiant. It was the beginning of a loving partnership that was to culminate in marriage over seven years later.
Katherine Barry Moloney came from a prominent Irish republican family. Her mother was the eldest sister of Kevin Barry, the 18-year-old medical student courtmartialled and hanged in 1920 for being found at the scene of an ambush in Dublin’s North King Street in which a British soldier was killed outright and two others were mortally wounded. She had gone to London to plead with Lloyd George for clemency on account of her brother’s youth. Two thousand people gathered outside Mountjoy Jail on the morning of Kevin Barry’s execution and the hanging of this ‘lad of eighteen summers’ was immortalised in one of the best-known patriotic ballads. Thereafter Kevin Barry became a republican icon and Mrs Barry Moloney was the acknowledged guardian of the shrine. Katherine’s sister Helen recalls how in her youth men would show their deference to the family by kissing the children’s hands.
Their father was a pharmacist from County Tipperary whose training was interrupted by his involvement in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Afterwards he resumed his career, married, and moved with his family to Dublin, initially to Wilton Terrace near Baggot Street Bridge, thence to the southern suburb of Carrickmines and in 1939 to 3 Palmerston Road, Rathmines.
Katherine was the second youngest of five children and, like her three sisters, she attended Scoil Bríde on Adelaide Road. This was an Irish-speaking school run by Louise Gavan Duffy, modelled on the schools once run by Patrick Pearse. Mrs Moloney, theoretically socialist, was in practice quite snobbish and, after Scoil Bríde, her daughters all attended ‘Loreto on the Green’, an upmarket secondary school run by the Loreto nuns beside St Stephen’s Green. Katherine was happy at school. An academically undistinguished student, she was a keen camogie player and represented her school in at least one match in Croke Park. That she had played camogie in Croke Park was a feat which Kavanagh found most entertaining and he liked to tease her by constructing Michael O’Hehir-like commentaries about her prowess on the field.
When school was over, the only career that appealed to her was librarianship because she enjoyed reading but, like many other middle-class women of her generation, she was sent to secretarial college instead and began working as a clerk with the Irish Tourist Board in O’Connell Street at the age of 18. At 25 she eventually rebelled against the restrictions of respectable home life at 3 Palmerston Road and made a bid for freedom by spending a year in Paris. Quite by chance she met two other young Irish women who were also spending part of the year in Paris, Patsy Sheridan and Thérèse Campbell, who was to marry Anthony Cronin. The three became close friends.
After her year in Paris, Katherine moved to London where she earned her living as a bookkeeper. She was good with figures and was quite content in this line of work. Through her friendship with Leland Bardwell and the Cronins, she began mixing in a circle that included writers and painters. Though neither literary nor intellectual herself, she was at ease with artists, sympathetic to their problems and accepting of their sometimes drunken and bohemian ways.
Kavanagh preferred to court women who were not rival artists and did not pit their intellects against his. All he demanded of his women friends was that they be sufficiently intelligent and sympathetic to listen to his views on literature with some degree of appreciation and understanding. When he met Katherine first, he talked incessantly about Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. She could not comprehend why he was so obsessed with it and ventured to say so. Patiently he translated it into terms she could understand: ‘It’s like having a baby.’ It was a trite metaphor but new to her, and for ever after she understood what writing and publishing meant to him and was unfailingly supportive.
Kavanagh had met Tom Blackburn to discuss the Longmans volume in November and again at the time of the Guinness meeting in mid-December. By this stage Blackburn’s opposition was worn down to the point where he agreed to scrap Shancoduff and Other Poems and go back to the original title, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (or Strobling as he wrote it) which now seemed to him to have ‘a quality’, to be ‘live’. He and Kavanagh reached an amicable settlement as to which poems went in and out. ‘Shancoduff’, ‘To the Man After the Harrow’ and ‘Peace’ were in, but were to be dated so as to set them apart from more recent work. For the rest, all Kavanagh’s ‘must haves’ were among the thirty-five poems to be printed. After a protracted struggle, he had finally got his way about the title, the distinction between early and recent material and, to a certain extent, the contents of the volume.
When the Arts Council returned the typescript of The Forgiven Plough on 20 November, having decided against publication, it would only have confirmed Kavanagh’s view that his future lay in London. He was back there for Christmas, his third visit in two months. Katherine was the magnet, of course, but with Leland Bardwell, Anthony Cronin, Elizabeth Smart, Patrick Swift, David Wright and an expanding circle of Soho writers and artists to fraternise with, he had
nearly as many friends in London as in Dublin. ‘A Summer Morning Walk’ recalls his drinking binge that Christmas and the attendant hangovers in the ‘Paddington crater’ (the Swifts’ basement flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace):
Lying on a bed in a basement, unable
To lift my sickness to a fable,
Hating the sight of a breakfast table.
On Christmas Day stretched out, how awful
Not heeding the Church’s orders lawful
While everyone else is having a crawful.
It is black all round as terror stricken
I climb stone steps, trying not to weaken,
My legs are taking a terrible licking . . .
I was as sick as the devil’s puke . . .
In a draft version of this poem, he makes his way to the George on Christmas Day to meet the blind poet John Heath-Stubbs and is joined by David Wright, George Barker and an unnamed Soho queer.
By 1960 Kavanagh’s alcoholism had reached the point where he was sometimes ill enough to require hospitalisation. To ease his stomach pains, he had started taking bread soda which relieved the symptoms of acidity in the short term. From now on he was never without a small bag of bread soda about his person and was notorious for dosing himself on it during drinking sessions. Wherever he went he left a trail of white powder in his wake. Rather than admit that whiskey was making him ill, he sometimes blamed the bread soda, and in the long term it would have exacerbated his symptoms.
After his Christmas drinking spree in 1959 he felt so ill that he thought he would have to go into hospital. Worried that his severe stomach cramps were due to cancer and preferring to be hospitalised in Dublin, he returned in mid-January. Once in Dublin he felt well enough to travel on to Inniskeen where he would have a nurse in constant attendance. Within a fortnight Annie had nursed him back to health. He still felt tired but was pleased to note that he was not losing weight, indeed gaining it, which he interpreted as a sign that he was not suffering from cancer.
Too much whiskey was the problem, as he knew only too well, and after this cancer scare he tried to cut down on it, reducing his daily consumption to four glasses, one day only three glasses. He also took vitamin pills to boost his energy levels. Once he was cured he wanted to escape: Inniskeen was good ‘for health of body but awful otherwise. Socially plain hell.’
Much of 1960 was spent to-ing and fro-ing between Dublin and London, with occasional interludes in Inniskeen. He was in London from the middle of March to 8 April, there again in May and from 20 June to 11 August. In London he generally stayed with the Swifts, especially after Leland Bardwell had moved to Dublin in May, though increasingly he was spending his time with Katherine Moloney, who had a flat at 2 Mornington Place. He had never lived with a woman before and was hesitant about doing so now, but already their relationship had moved on past the phase of merely dating or drinking together in Soho. She was beginning to look after him and, in the only extant letter of those she wrote him that year, her tone is quite wifely, telling him that she has had his jacket and trousers dry cleaned and reminding him to buy a new shirt and tie before leaving Dublin so that he will be ‘respectable’ for a meeting of the Guinness judges.18 From the time he began living with Katherine in London in 1960, Kavanagh appears to have become sprucer. Meeting him on Grafton Street in January 1961, Liam O’Flaherty remarked on the fact that he was ‘dressed reasonably well and clean’, and behaving in more gentlemanly fashion, too, ‘raising his hat courteously and bowing to somebody that passed’.19
By February Come Dance with Kitty Stobling was in page proof and Longmans entered it for selection as the Poetry Book Society’s summer choice. It should have succeeded on its own merits in any case, but the fact that one of the society’s two selectors for 1960 was David Wright stacked the odds in Kavanagh’s favour. The glad tidings were communicated to him on St Patrick’s Day. Selection as the Poetry Book Society’s summer choice, as well as guaranteeing sales to society members, would boost sales in general, so Longmans decided on an initial print run of one thousand. The book’s price of ten shillings and sixpence was also determined by the Poetry Society which sold books to its members at this price and encouraged publishers to cost their books accordingly.
The prospect of royalties was welcome because, owing to poor health and general tiredness in January, Kavanagh had allowed his column for the National Observer to lapse. Neither did he contribute to the Irish Farmers’ Journal between 9 January and 11 June so, apart from his UCD salary, he had no regular income at this time. It is probable that money changed hands when he met the Archbishop by appointment on 11 March. He had written to inform him of his ill health at the beginning of the month, making no reference to the alcoholic origins of his illness but stressing that healthy country food and fresh air had cured him.
In Dublin his base was still Jimmy Dwyer’s mews, though he knew he was overstaying his welcome. Uncertain about holding on to this address, he began using Parsons bookshop as his Dublin poste restante, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life. May O’Flaherty was happy to be entrusted with the poet’s mail; it was a way of maintaining their relationship now that his visits to Dublin were so sporadic. He was in Dublin in April marking his third batch of 450 poems for Guinness and was considered to have discharged his duties conscientiously enough so far to be asked to act as judge for the following year, the fifth and last year of the Guinness Awards.
He was in London in May to read The Great Hunger on the BBC Third Programme. The programme, organised by Louis MacNeice, was broadcast on the 13th; it included a short introduction as well as the reading and ran for 50 minutes. He had come to dislike and even repudiate this poem, whose tragic narrative and sociological concerns no longer chimed with his new comic and detached aesthetic. Nevertheless, he was delighted to be asked to perform it on the BBC. That month his application for a Fulbright award to visit the US was turned down; he had not filled in the date of birth section on the form, but he was so far over the age limit that his ineligibility was recognised.
Publication date for Come Dance with Kitty Stobling was 20 June. A plain brown hardback with gilt lettering and no dust-jacket, it was a slim volume at forty-four pages, but visually a very attractive book. Margins were generous and the layout of the thirty-five poems on the cream pages was uncluttered. The two canal sonnets, which shared the opening page, got the book off to an impressive start as well as announcing the theme of poetic rebirth. ‘Is’ and ‘To Hell with Commonsense’, the two touchstone pieces of his recent poetic, on the following two pages established the new carefree, vernacular tone. The three disputed early poems were dated both on the Contents pages and in the body of the work, ‘Shancoduff, 1934’ (as it appears in the list of contents) being interestingly juxtaposed with ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’. The satires, which strike a discordant note in a volume of personal mood pieces, celebratory or confessional lyrics, are corralled at the end, the two weaker ones redeemed by the sprightly ‘The Paddiad’, with which the book concludes.
Come Dance with Kitty Stobling was very widely reviewed in Britain as well as in Ireland and the reception was markedly cordial, with near unanimous critical agreement on the excellence of the recent sonnets and ‘Auditors In’, and a more mixed response to the satires and to ‘Is’ and ‘To Hell with Commonsense’. In general, English critics had come to regard Kavanagh as the most significant Irish poet since Yeats. The reception from Irish poet-critics was more mixed, with admiring reviews from Anthony Cronin and Thomas Kinsella, a relatively appreciative review from John Montague, but with John Hewitt raising the old charge of technical ineptitude. Two essay-length assessments of Kavanagh’s oeuvre were provoked by the publication of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. Basil Payne and John Jordan, both writing in Studies in autumn 1960, arrived at a broad critical consensus: they let Ploughman off lightly as juvenilia and agreed that the newest volume represented his best work to date; both thought that love was the fundamental theme of the later poetry. Like Cr
onin, Jordan encouraged Kavanagh’s growing tendency to use verse as an instrument towards the comprehension of his own experience in from ‘Auditors In’ through ‘Prelude’. And, in opposition to the neo-Gaelic school and Hewitt, he hailed Kavanagh as ‘a major craftsman in words’.
Despite the rather cautious welcome extended by some Irish critics, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling sold well in Ireland. It was the first time since 1947 that a volume of Kavanagh’s poetry had been available in a commercial edition and there was a large public eager to read him. The book went into three impressions and two thousand copies had been sold by Christmas.
He spent most of the summer in London, ‘promoting his book’, as he put it, in reality basking in his success and toasting it too frequently. He was in great form, lapping up all the publicity and revelling in being a Soho celebrity. Accustomed to collecting payment for his journalism as soon as, or if possible before, it was published, he began pestering Blackburn about royalty payments by the end of June, phoning him most days, undeterred by his protestations that he had nothing to do with Longmans’ financial arrangements. A fortnight after publication the harassed poetry adviser was asking Longmans to get ‘the old peasant’ off his back. Kavanagh was once again in dire financial straits. On 22 August he was £81.2.0 overdrawn and his bank, the Munster and Leinster at 52 Upper Baggot Street, was threatening to bounce his cheques; on 28 August the overdraft had risen to £90.12.0 and the bank warned that it would definitely not honour his cheques. Even after a £30 lodgment from Guinness on 17 September, his cheques were still being referred to drawer.
An autobiographical piece of 500 words on how he became a poet, composed for the Poetry Society Bulletin in April, may have set Kavanagh thinking about writing his memoirs and in August he decided to cash in on the critical success of his poetry by proposing an autobiography to Hutchinson. As soon as Hutchinson had taken him up on his offer, which it did with gratifying alacrity, he requested a large advance so that he could settle down and write for a few months in comparative ease. Hutchinson preferred to pay their £300 advance in instalments and he was compelled to agree to this, for him, unsatisfactory arrangement. However, their £95 advance in late November brought his bank account into the black, though the manager still refused overdraft facilities. Whether Kavanagh really intended producing an autobiography or whether he regarded the venture as a mere fund-raising exercise is unclear. (There are no fragments of the projected autobiography among his papers.) The book was due with Hutchinson at the end of June 1961, a date calculated with a monthly income in mind rather than a realistic deadline. Thereafter, a trickle of reminders arrived from Iain Hamilton and others at Hutchinson and, finally, in May 1963, when nothing had been received and letters were going unanswered, a demand for the refund of the £300, which was, of course, ignored.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 57
