The final meeting of the Guinness Award judges for 1959/60 took place in August. Anthony Cronin was hopeful of winning an award for his long poem ‘R.M.S. Titanic’ published in X in March, but Kavanagh took a malicious pleasure in sinking the poem. If one of the three Guinness judges graded a poem C, it was automatically disqualified for a prize, even if the other two judges had awarded it an A. Rumour had it that this was what occurred in the case of Cronin’s poem. Despite the secrecy supposedly surrounding the competition, Kavanagh gleefully and repeatedly informed fellow drinkers in the Duke of Wellington and elsewhere that Cronin was not ‘in the drum’. (‘The drum’ was an allusion to the method of selecting Irish Hospital Sweepstakes ticket winners by having nurses draw the tickets out of a drum.) Not only had Cronin been Kavanagh’s friend and confidant for a decade, he had been to the forefront in promoting his poetry in recent years. ‘You never intrude — a sure sign of love’, he had written to Cronin in 1956. While it might be argued that Kavanagh was being objective and principled in denying him a prize, his public gloating over Cronin’s rejection suggests that he was biased against him and did not wish to see a much younger man scoop an honour that he himself had failed to attain. Certainly some in London literary circles, including Thérèse Cronin, interpreted the matter thus, and the friendship between the Cronins and Kavanagh cooled.20 It is just possible that the Guinness judge was revenging himself for the fact that Cronin’s co-editor had lost a batch of his poems which were being considered for inclusion in a forthcoming P.E.N. anthology.
The evening before the awards ceremony Kavanagh, who, ostensibly, was still friendly with Cronin, had been drinking in the Queen’s Elm with him when the landlord of the premises, Seán Treacy, turned up. Treacy, an Irishman, liked the company of artists and poets and was the kind of landlord who would provide drinks on the house for writers and cash their cheques, so Cronin tipped off the semi-somnolent Kavanagh that the pub landlord was approaching. He had been sitting with his head lolling on his chest as if ill or in pain, as had become his wont, and was completely indifferent to the passing scene, but he sprang to attention on Treacy’s arrival. The next evening, Dom Moraes and Cronin, who both had a poem selected for the Guinness anthology and had therefore been invited to the awards ceremony, decided to extend an invitation to Seán Treacy, knowing that this kind of occasion would appeal to him. When they arrived at the Queen’s Elm they were told that Mr Kavanagh had called for Mr Treacy in a taxi and taken him to the Guinness reception. Kavanagh, having spotted a likely patron or a bottomless well of whiskey, had made haste to ingratiate himself. On the dais with Lord Moyne, he fidgeted and raspingly cleared his throat as the prizewinners read their poems.21 The prizewinners were Thomas Blackburn, David Wright and Louis MacNeice, with a special additional award to R. S. Thomas. Ironically, Kavanagh was passing judgment on Thomas Blackburn’s verse in the same year as Blackburn was tussling with him as to which poems should be included in the Longmans’ collection.
24
ROOTS OF LOVE
(1960–1964)
I have taken roots of love
And will find it pain to move . . .
(‘News Item’)
September and November 1960 were spent in London. By now Kavanagh was living openly with Katherine Moloney in her newly acquired flat at 47 Gibson Square, Islington. The poem he published in The Observer on 20 November, ‘News Item’, which begins ‘In Islington for the moment I reside’, is a covert love-poem to her disguised as a sometimes playfully affectionate tribute to Gibson Square and its environs. Though Katherine is not named in ‘News Item’, his love for her is the unstated reason for its buoyantly celebratory tone. Gibson Square has replaced Raglan Road as his ‘enchanted way’: ‘The length of Gibson Square/ Caught in November’s stare/ That would set you to prayer. . . .’ The poem concludes, ‘I’m as happy as I’ve ever been.’
After a brief visit to Dublin in December he was back with Katherine for Christmas and they watched The Bells of St Mary’s and lots of news and sport on television. Television was still a novelty for him and viewing it with Katherine was part of his new domestic routine. His old dislike of film extended to television, and most programmes, apart from documentaries, bored him, but he was a fan of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’. Katherine shared his love of sport, and the two of them were passionate spectators of all kinds of televised sports, jumping up and down on the sofa in their excitement and shouting encouragement at the screen or groaning loudly. She made no effort to curb his drinking, looking on alcoholism as an occupational hazard for those who did not have to work nine to five. However, she did try to introduce some routine into his life and saw to it that he had regular meals. A firm believer in the importance of good food, she exerted herself to provide the kind of cooking he enjoyed: bacon, egg and sausage, steak, roast beef and vegetables. He loved English sausages, larger and plumper than their Irish counterparts. Her letters to him often conclude with the admonition, ‘Eat well.’ She saw to it, too, that he was clean and well dressed. On most of his visits to her he was marched off immediately after arrival to buy shirts and ties. Katherine also dealt with his correspondence and did his typing. She did not think of herself as his secretary; it was merely an extension of her caring role.
He was still staying with her in the New Year. She was working as a bookkeeper with the Pharmaceutical Press in Bloomsbury Square and could not afford a lavish lifestyle but, in spite of his love of luxury, he adapted to her straitened circumstances and made an effort to contribute his share towards the bills. While he believed in exploiting rich acquaintances like John Ryan and was unable to curb his own extravagance, he had been reared in a frugal household, and associated domesticity with careful budgeting. Katherine, like his mother, was good at managing money and she did not expect him to lavish gifts or expensive meals on her. ‘Should we take a black taxi or a red taxi?’ he would ask her. When he was not in funds, they took the red taxi — the bus. Katherine shared many of Kavanagh’s interests: she played poker, she liked to bet on horse racing, and she was happy to sit chatting for hours in the pub, gin and tonic in hand. At ease in a man’s world, while also cooking, knitting, providing an orderly domestic context and proffering endless sympathy, she combined the traits he looked for in male and female companions.
He opened an account with the Chancery Lane and Holborn branch of the Westminster Bank at the beginning of February 1961. The move to a London bank was partly dictated by his unhappy experiences with his Baggot Street bank which had bounced about fourteen of his cheques the previous autumn but, in part, it also indicated his identification of himself as a Londoner at this period. He dealt with the Westminster Bank for most of the year. During the day he had Katherine’s flat to himself and could write if he felt so inclined. In the evenings she was happy to go to the pubs with him after work. One of their haunts was the Plough which was near her office and there they met Martin Green and Timothy O’Keeffe. Both were working for the publishers MacGibbon and Kee at the time, O’Keeffe as a literary editor. This firm would soon take over as Kavanagh’s publishers.
Patrick Swift, who was painting Kavanagh’s portrait at the start of 1961, was given a key to 47 Gibson Square so that he could let himself in every morning after Katherine had left for work. He would arrive with a selection of newspapers, waken Kavanagh, make his breakfast, go out to place the poet’s bets at the bookies, then work on the picture until the afternoon and cook him a steak for his lunch. Swift’s daughter Kate recalls one of these morning visits to Gibson Square. They found the poet in a low bed pushed against the wall and covered with an army blanket. Immediately he was wakened, Kavanagh asked her father to spread some newspapers beside the bed and proceeded to retch and vomit. Later when he had recovered, and was sitting for his portrait, he allowed the child to pull his hair. He pretended to like this and would shout, ‘Harder! Harder! Pull harder!’1 After all Swift’s solicitude during the painting sessions, Kavanagh did not like the portrait and thought that the pa
inter’s friendship for him had somehow interfered with his execution of the picture.
When he sat for Desmond MacNamara, who was sketching his head as a preliminary to doing a sculpture, he insisted on watching the races on television during the session, with the curtains drawn, so MacNamara had to sketch him by the flickering light from the TV screen. The sitting took place in the MacNamaras’ flat and their son was co-opted as a runner to place his bets. Scilla MacNamara, a keen punter herself, had an account with a local bookie, but this was not divulged to their sitter.
At the end of January Kavanagh had to return to Dublin to give his UCD lectures series. He moved into a flat on Haddington Road, a short-lived tenancy. On 1 March he was evicted for some unspecified damage to the property. He was ‘given the run’ from several flats in the area, according to Noel Henry, then a tenant at 57 Haddington Road, the reason being generally non-payment of rent or the squalor in which he lived. On one occasion he was evicted because tenants in the house had complained of a bad smell which was traced to his stash of unwashed socks. Other flat-dwellers in the area were either unaware of or unimpressed by his genius and he was generally regarded as scruffy and ‘a bit of a bum’. They were astonished that ‘posh types’ used to call at Tommy Ryan’s pub, 51 Haddington Road, to collect him and bring him off to dinner and also that he often had attractive, well-dressed young women in tow. Henry remembers sitting with him on the steps of No. 57, where he kept up a running commentary on all the passersby; he had a ‘cynical wit’. His habit of buying a couple of eggs and eating them raw as they sat and talked was also remarked upon.2 Soon, he no longer dared show his face in Tommy Ryan’s pub, where he used to play rings, because he had undertaken to place a bet for a number of regulars there and when the horse duly won he did not pay up.
Through his friend Tommy Marks, managing director of Guinness’s Harp Lager division, Kavanagh was given two commissions. One was to contribute a couple of pages on ‘Irish Toasts’ to The Harp Book of Toasts, edited by John Pudney, published in 1963; the other was to compose a poem of between 50 and 200 lines on a subject of his choice for the 1961 Festival of Poetry at the Mermaid, organised by the Poetry Book Society.
His poem ‘The Gambler: A Ballet’, for which he was paid twenty guineas, was ready at the beginning of May. It was a lengthy but otherwise insubstantial piece, 117 lines in all, with an introductory section of 28 lines and the poem proper written in triplets. The triplet form, already used in ‘News Item’, was one he favoured in the early 1960s; triple rhymes were suited to the mood of comic insouciance he wished to evoke. Instead of a poem on the mode of gambling to which he was addicted — race-track and off-course betting — the imagery is based on roulette and dance. Why he wrote about roulette remains a mystery, but the inclusion of dance metaphors undoubtedly arose from the conflation of the Guinness commission with the commission to write the libretto for a ballet.
Patricia Ryan, artistic director of the Irish National Ballet, had conceived the then quite innovative idea of combining dance with a literary libretto. The previous year Donagh MacDonagh had offered her one of his poems; she commissioned a score from Dr A. J. Potter and her idea of a ballet with a lyrical libretto came to fruition in summer 1960 as the very successful Careless Love. The second time round she commissioned a libretto from Kavanagh, giving him a completely free hand with the subject matter. At first he was unenthusiastic, but the National Ballet was funded by the Arts Council and at the mention of a £50/£100 fee he agreed to undertake the project. Coaxing the actual libretto out of him was an altogether more daunting task and she was to experience similar difficulties in prising a score out of Archie Potter. Kavanagh produced the libretto he entitled Gamble No Gamble in dribs and drabs on scraps of paper which he doled out to Patricia Ryan in the Bailey over a couple of months in exchange for doubles of ten-year-old Jameson. The pieces of paper were handed over in no apparent order or sequence and she was left with a disorganised, confused mess which her friend Christopher West assembled into a script with an Introduction followed by a poem in triplets. Of this script all that survives is the Introduction and the opening stanza, both of which correspond exactly with the Explanation and opening stanza in the poem ‘The Gambler’ submitted to Guinness. Many of the stanzas in the Guinness poem are also familiar to those who were involved in the ballet. The conclusion of the two pieces is quite different, however, so it is likely that the material was the same or substantially the same in both instances, but that Christopher West arrived at a different ordering from Kavanagh.
Patricia Ryan found herself faced with the task of devising a ballet set in a casino in which the speaker is a gambler and the black, the red and the white represent three kinds of women, the intellectual, the whore, and the virgin, who in the end turns out to be a slut. In the ballet she choreographed, based on this material, dance and verbal score were interspersed. The role of the gambler was split between two guest artistes, the then Abbey actor T. P. McKenna and a dancer from London, Charles Schuller. While McKenna spoke Kavanagh’s lines, Schuller stood back to back with him; then he enacted the lines in dance. The dance troupe was arranged in the form of a roulette wheel which spun round very fast, too fast for the comfort of the dancers, who found the music very difficult to dance to. T. P. McKenna was also to have his problems, trying to project his lines over a forty-piece orchestra at a time when the actor was not equipped with a hidden mike. ‘The black’, ‘the red’ and ‘the white’ were three solo female parts, costumed accordingly, with Ciara O’Sullivan as ‘the black’, Gay Brophy as ‘the red’ and the principal part of ‘the white’, portrayed as both a virgin and a slut, performed to much critical acclaim by Judith McGilligan. Patricia Ryan collapsed the divide between the speaking and dancing personae of the gambler by assigning the last words in the libretto, ‘You are nothing but a slut’, to Schuller. ‘The white’ as slut performed a concluding dance and the dancers who formed the roulette wheel all fell to the ground as the curtain went down.
Patricia Ryan’s difficulties in mounting the new ballet were compounded by a theatre strike in Dublin that summer, which meant that she could not use the Olympia. Ria Mooney came to her rescue by lending her the old Queen’s Theatre, which the Abbey-in-exile was using, and it was there that Gamble No Gamble was premièred during a five-day season sponsored by the National Ballet (Ballet Naisiúnta) in association with Radio Éireann from 30 May to 3 June. There was no stage set, only a backdrop painted by Patricia’s husband, John Ryan, an impressionistic swirl of cloudy forms. The first performance on Thursday, 1 June 1961, met with a rapturous reception, as did the performances on the Friday and Saturday.
When Patricia Ryan invited Kavanagh to the première, he snorted derisively: ‘What would I be doin’ lookin’ at a lot of wimmen leppin’ around the stage.’ To her amazement, he showed up on the opening night in evening dress. At the end of the performance he and an equally footless Archie Potter were steered on to the stage to take a curtain call, whereupon Kavanagh proceeded to address the audience at length, referring to the ballet as ‘my ballet’ and taking all the credit for himself. Fortunately, Patricia Ryan had a good sense of humour. The ballet was repeated the following year in the Olympia with Derek Young as the dancer and Gordon Coster as the speaker.
Kavanagh had found a room to rent at 37 Upper Mount Street from May 1961 onwards. Leland Bardwell, her partner Fintan and their children were sharing a large flat at No. 37 with an elderly lady, Violet McWeeney, known to all as Auntie Vi. Vi had fallen on lean times and was glad to have someone to share the rent and household expenses. When Leland told him that Auntie Vi had a spare room, he went along to meet her. It was a damp room at the end of a corridor, but since he would be spending much of his time in London or Inniskeen, he was not unduly fussy. The old lady liked to have a flutter on the horses and every afternoon she hobbled out to the bookies. With their shared love of gambling she and Kavanagh hit it off immediately. They spent many hours poring over the racing columns of th
e newspapers and discussing the likely chances of the various horses tipped.
He was to stay in her room on and off over the next four years, though when Leland Bardwell and family moved to a flat at 33 Lower Leeson Street, he often preferred to bunk down there. When he was Leland’s guest, she was dispatched every morning to fetch a naggin of whiskey (the hair of the dog), without which he could not start the day. She recalls how he would cover her toddler’s eyes with his hands so that the child would not see the mother leave and howl.
Kavanagh was in poor health in the summer of 1961 — probably psychosomatic he himself thought — but back in London with Katherine he was in great form. ‘Supreme health is the essence of genius’, he said.3 His excuse for being at Gibson Square in August was the final meeting of the Guinness judges on 24th and 25th. In this the final year of the award his fellow judges were William Plomer and Cecil Day Lewis. The Guinness Poetry Awards, which Lord Moyne presented in London on the evening of 4 October 1961, went to Robert Graves, George Barker, William Snodgrass, Derek Walcott and Rex Warner. As usual, the presentation of the awards was accompanied by a lavish party. When it ended too early for Kavanagh’s liking, he intoned ‘Silent, O Moyne, be the roar of thy waiters.’
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 58
