He had signed a contract with Four Square Books in August to bring out Tarry Flynn in paperback. The book had been rejected by Penguin in January and Cyprian Blagdan at Longmans had tried to find a publisher for it and failed. Four Square Books paid £150 down and he hoped to make more on the royalties. The money was rolling in that August. A freelance agent paid £100 for a recording of his work, intending to flog it wherever he could. In addition X paid £25 for an article on ‘Liberal Education’ written several years previously. It appeared in the next issue. Despite all this unexpected largesse, he did not believe in wasting any money on clothes and that month bought a ‘new’ jacket for £1.
In November David Wright organised the second of two poetry readings featuring Stevie Smith at John Lewis’s department store and this time he paired Smith with Kavanagh. They took an instant dislike to one other. Being neither young, beautiful nor accommodating, Stevie Smith did not arouse any chivalric response from Kavanagh. Talented women, especially if they were good enough to be his rivals, tended to provoke him to misogyny rather than respect. For Stevie Smith, Kavanagh was the stereotypical drunken Irish navvy: he had turned up the worse for wear, sang his poems in a thick Irish accent and overran his time. She declared herself tired to death of ‘the owld Irish harp’.4
Listening to Bertie Rodgers and John Montague arguing over the merits of Kavanagh’s poetry in the George, Timothy O’Keeffe of MacGibbon and Kee had conceived the idea of a Collected Poems. In the course of a couple of drinking sessions with Kavanagh in the Plough, the proposal was discussed and fleshed out. He was quite willing to go along with it, especially when he was assured that there would be a generous advance and that the task of actually collecting the poems and organising the volume would not be up to him. All he would be required to do was write a preface. His only stipulation was that the Cuala Press version of The Great Hunger be used. By 20 November 1961 the contract for Collected Poems had been signed. Kavanagh presented O’Keeffe with the typescript from which the Come Dance with Kitty Stobling selection had been made, but this excluded both his early and more recent work. O’Keeffe phoned John Montague in Paris to ask him to collect the rest of Kavanagh’s poems. Montague, who had just published his second collection, Poisoned Lands, was now recognised as an up and coming Irish poet, and since Kavanagh, like Pope’s Turk, tolerated no brother near the throne, especially a younger brother, relations between the two men for the most part now veered between fraught and unfriendly. So Montague suggested that Cronin or Jordan might be a more appropriate choice as selector. Cronin, he was told, was currently out of the country (he had moved to Spain) and out of favour, and it would be difficult for Jordan to make the collection while living in the same town as Kavanagh without arousing suspicions. O’Keeffe was of the opinion that if the project were not to founder, the selector’s name had better be kept anonymous, because Kavanagh would not relish another Irish poet having a say in the collecting of his poems. Martin Green was to be the firm’s front man in the venture and act as Montague’s collaborator. Green wrote to Montague stressing the need for secrecy:
Kavanagh is not the easiest man to deal with on business lines as you will know, and I think it is fairly important to keep the selector’s name out of sight . . . I would hasten to add that I don’t think he has anything against you, necessarily, but he might against anybody who was in the position with regard to his work that you are now.5
With ‘grave misgivings’, Montague accepted that he would serve as the anonymous collector of Kavanagh’s poems. The ruse worked and by publication date Kavanagh had no idea of Montague’s involvement. The two collaborators have since gone public on their contribution to Collected Poems. It appears that Montague collected and arranged the poems and Green dealt with the author and saw the volume through the press.6
Katherine was in Dublin for Christmas 1961, staying with her family, who now lived at 4 Winton Road, Rathgar. She was hoping for some time alone with Patrick in the aftermath of the festival, but it was not to be. He had become so ill by 28 December that he was admitted to Baggot Street Hospital where Keith Shaw, the surgeon who had operated on his lung, was now on the staff. This time the diagnosis was acute gastritis, a consequence of the alcoholic poisoning brought on by over-indulgence at Christmas. Even in hospital he was still drinking; his doctors had vetoed whiskey, so he made do with bottles of stout. He was also found to be suffering from malnutrition and was given injections to improve his appetite. A recurrent anxiety every time he got ill was that the cancer had returned. This time hospital tests gave him the all-clear.
On a snowy New Year’s Eve he missed the biggest party in town, the launch of the new Irish television station at the Gresham Hotel. By 6 January he had recovered to the point where he was being treated as an out-patient. His appetite had returned and he was positively cheerful, congratulating himself on having confounded his enemies by making a rapid recovery and ready ‘to write as many books as Hugh Kenner’. He convalesced with Annie in Inniskeen; the presence of a nurse and an orderly domestic routine helped him to feel safe.
The reprieve was short-lived. On 14 February he was back in Baggot Street Hospital for three weeks. This time he was admitted suffering from pneumonia and laid the blame on having slept on a damp bed during a weekend visit to Dublin. A lobe on his remaining lung was infected and the infection was slow to clear up. He was quite ill for the first week, unable to get up and dress. When Leo Holohan visited, he had been through a very bad night thinking ‘the grim monster was coming’ for him. A priest had called to see if his services were required but was told to go. ‘You should have given him a chance’, Holohan said. Kavanagh ‘glanced around the drab public ward where statues and rosary beads abounded’:
The Catholic Church would be in a bad way if it depended on that lot . . . Matter of fact, only for Mauriac, Waugh and myself and a few more they were done for.7
There were plenty of visitors; holding court from his bed was an aspect of hospital life he relished. Katherine sent worried letters from London and planned to go to Dublin at Easter.
When T. P. McKenna visited him, Kavanagh complained that he had nowhere to go to write his column for the Irish Farmers’ Journal. On the spur of the moment the actor offered to put him up in his home at Sandymount Avenue for a few days and duly collected him when he was discharged from hospital. The McKennas had a young family and Mrs McKenna was less than enthralled at having the convalescent poet as a house guest. However, she saw to it that a comfortable room with a table and electric heater was prepared for his use. Kavanagh generally liked his friends’ wives and Mai McKenna was no exception, but he made little effort to adapt himself to the domestic routine, refusing food at lunchtime and then vociferously demanding ‘grub’, by which he meant an Irish breakfast, at three o’clock when racing was about to be shown on television. He also had some even less appealing characteristics, such as peeing in the front garden. After a few days the maid refused to clean his room. It stank of spilt Guinness and the carpet was covered in stout bottles and newspapers except for a narrow passageway between the door and the table and bed.
As the second week went by and Kavanagh showed no signs of leaving, Mai McKenna could endure it no longer. On the eleventh day she confronted him in the hallway and blurted out that they could not keep him indefinitely. Kavanagh, who was on the third step of the stairs, paused and looked at her for about three seconds, then pronounced: ‘I pity you. You’re an ignorant woman.’ He forgave T. P. McKenna, but he never spoke to Mai again, cutting her dead when he met her in her husband’s company. After Kavanagh’s visit, the guest room was in such a mess that it had to be completely redecorated and the carpet thrown out.
He returned to Inniskeen where Annie tended him for the rest of March. Ingrate that he was, he publicly attributed his renewed sense of well-being by the end of that month to the ‘mild native air’ and being surrounded by the scenes of his ‘healthy, hot-blooded youth’, rather than to her devoted care. Good health ma
de him feel ‘thick-witted’, his dismissive way of expressing an unaccustomed state of placidity and contentment.8 Fearful of returning to the damp room in Upper Mount Street, he spent most of April and May in Inniskeen, lording it over the household. He could read and write in comfort in his room where a blazing fire burned morning and night; in the afternoons he took the bus to Carrickmacross or Dundalk for, despite several health warnings, he was drinking as hard as ever. His drunk and disorderly behaviour in the local towns earned him some unwanted attention from the gardaí. He had already complained to the assistant commissioner of the Garda Síochána, Willie Quinn, a native of Inniskeen, about being accosted by rough members of the force.
His presence on the evening bus from the local towns was dreaded by young women commuters, for he was in the habit of enquiring in a hoarse shout as to their identity or commenting on their physical attributes. In Inniskeen the pub he most frequented was McNello’s in the centre of the village; when the barmen there refused to serve him, he would shamble over to Magee’s.
Tarry Flynn, which had been out of print since 1949, was republished in paperback by Four Square Books in late spring 1962. At the end of June, sales had reached 12,378, with up to a further thousand copies sold by Christmas. With Kavanagh’s connivance, Larry Sheedy posted copies to the originals of six characters and then went to Inniskeen to interview them for the Farmers’ Journal. Kavanagh’s neighbour John Lennon readily acknowledged that the book gave an accurate picture of Inniskeen in the 1930s, but other interviewees were more cagey, some even refusing to admit that they had read the book, though the dog-eared copy was in plain view.9
Katherine was in Dublin in early May and they met for a few days. She had been compelled to move from Gibson Square which held happy memories for both of them. Kavanagh had left clothes, books and papers with her and she moved these to her new room at 19 Hargrave Park, Archway. Flats chosen with Patrick in mind had to be on the ground floor or up one flight of stairs at most. Due to thrombosis of the left leg and breathing difficulties, climbing stairs was now an ordeal for him. Some London landords objected to having an unmarried couple living together on their premises and at times he would have to pass himself off as Mr Moloney, a subterfuge he enjoyed. The main advantage of the Archway flat was that it had a telephone. Katherine was a good letter-writer; he liked hearing from her, kept sixty-five of the letters she sent him and sometimes read excerpts aloud in McDaid’s. While he loved getting post and hated bank holidays because there was no hope of any, he himself was a reluctant correspondent and generally only wrote for business reasons or when he wanted something. He now got into the habit of maintaining contact with Katherine through weekly phone calls. The Swifts left for the Algarve that summer, so he had no base in London other than Katherine’s flat.
Much of summer 1962 was spent in Inniskeen. When John Jordan, then a TB patient in Blanchardstown Hospital, wrote asking for ‘one or more or a hundred poems for consideration’ for the first number of the reconstituted Poetry Ireland journal, he was sent ‘Literary Adventures’, composed that June which begins:
I am here in a garage in Monaghan.
It is June and the weather is warm,
Just a little bit cloudy. There’s the sun again
Lifting to importance my sixteen acre farm.
There are three swallows’ nests in the rafters above me
And the first clutches are already flying.
Spread this news, tell all if you love me,
You who knew that when sick I was never dying.
(Nae gane, nae gane, nae frae us torn
But taking a rest like John Jordan).
Much of his poetry from now on refers to his illnesses or his alcoholism. The young poet Michael Hartnett had the temerity to mention in Kavanagh’s presence that the first three lines of ‘Literary Adventures’ were prose. Kavanagh sprang to his feet in a rage, spilling drink, called Hartnett ‘an insolent pup’ and left the table in the Bailey where he had been sitting surrounded by young fans. Later, Hartnett came to admire his poetry.10
He was ill again in August with the usual complaint, gastritis, so wretched with nausea, vomiting blood and stomach cramps that he felt he was dying. Once again he retreated to Inniskeen where Annie nursed him. He knew that the cure for his condition was regular meals and no whiskey but lacked the self-discipline for such a regimen. Instead, he swallowed raw eggs to help clear out the alcoholic toxins from his body and also drank large quantities of hot water as a remedy for his frightful hangovers.
At the end of September, Jack White, head of Public Affairs at Radio Éireann, invited him to do a programme for a ‘Self-Portrait’ series. This was a talk to camera by the subject about himself and his own life, lasting approximately 27 minutes. A script of about 4,000 words was needed and the fee for script and performance was £75. Kavanagh was quite agreeable to appearing on Irish television, but the mention of a script immediately raised suspicions that his views would be subject to censorship by the programme-makers. In his letter of acceptance he stressed that he must have ‘absolute freedom’ of speech; there must be ‘no such thing as “acceptable mss” or “amendments”’. Reassured by White’s ready acceptance of his conditions, he submitted a script by 20 October and went from Inniskeen to the Dublin studio, to be recorded, a week later.
He was delighted to find that his script was on a teleprompter, a comparatively new machine at the time. It turned what might have been a stressful ordeal into a doddle; he would appear to be talking fluently and confidently to camera while actually reading. His reading pace was too rapid and continuous to sustain the illusion of spontaneous speech, but his audience was taken in and even when ‘Self-Portrait’ was shown again in 1999, several commentators, not in the know about the teleprompter, were convinced that he was ad libbing. Jim Fitzgerald and the production team, for their part, were so pleased and relieved that an ordeal they had dreaded had turned out to be trouble-free, that Kavanagh was allowed to run five minutes over time.
‘Self-Portrait’ belongs to the talking head genre, a studio performance with no contextual shots of the places mentioned to distract from the poet’s on-screen presence. Kavanagh is seated facing his audience throughout, neatly attired in check jacket and tie, but so large that his chair does not contain him and he appears to be slouching in order to fit in. (By this stage of his life he had filled out and become a massive, broad-chested man.) He looks trapped and uncomfortable, sometimes shifting about and jigging his legs; however, since only his head and shoulders are on view most of the time, his squirming is not too obvious. He is tense and even pompous, and only occasionally ventures a smile. Though the main tenor of his talk is the importance of comedy and casualness, he exudes gravitas and grimness and generally appears unrelaxed.
On the evening the programme was being broadcast, 30 October 1962, he went to Dublin to swan about town receiving congratulations. Next day he returned to Inniskeen by bus to find that his appearance on national television had turned him into a local celebrity overnight. Inniskeen viewers, accustomed to his terse and frequently rude one-liners in McNello’s pub, were amazed to see him speak at such length and with such fluency. He, of course, did not apprise them of the existence of the teleprompter. They were proud that one of their own had acquitted himself so superbly in front of a national audience.
Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press undertook to publish the text of the televised autobiographical discourse in booklet form. The rich, densely packed text was more suited to the print medium than to television. In it he represents his career as a circular journey from ‘the simplicity of going away’ to ‘the simplicity of return’. Once again he claims that he was born as a poet during his convalescence from lung cancer on the bank of the Grand Canal and spurns all the poetry between ‘Shancoduff’ and his canal sonnets. The qualities he most values in literature are comedy, fun, gaiety, irresponsibility, lyricism, song. What distinguishes the true poet, he says, is ‘humourosity’ and detachment, ‘not car
ing’:
The heart of a song singing it, or a poem writing it, is not caring.
He has been ploughing his way through ‘complexities and anger, hatred and ill-will’ to return to the ‘weightlessness’ of some of his early poems. His achievement as he sees it is to have arrived ‘at complete casualness, at being able to play a true note on a dead slack string’.
While it is illuminating about his current aesthetic views, as an account of his poetic trajectory Self-Portrait is not merely idiosyncratic; it is wilfully misleading. Unfortunately for Kavanagh, the poem that was generally regarded as his masterpiece was written too early and in a mode he soon disavowed. After 1947, when it first became widely available, The Great Hunger overshadowed all his poetry. He never again matched it in length, intensity, technical brilliance, narrative power and social relevance. It galled him that to most critics and general readers he was known, principally, as the author of The Great Hunger. From 1950 onwards, after he had embraced a poetics of personality and the projection of the ‘I’ as person and poet had become central to his verse, in particular after he had got a second wind with his ‘noo pomes’ in 1957, he sought to sideline and relegate his early masterpiece. The prominence he gave to his canal bank convalescence in later accounts of his poetic career was a strategy to oust The Great Hunger from its dominant position and assert the significance of his later poetry. In Self-Portrait, as in the essay ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, it is airbrushed out of his autobiography. Later, in the Preface to his Collected Poems, he would forthrightly repudiate it. However, in the interest of privileging his post-1957 poems, the canal myth, as presented in Self-Portrait, discounts some of his best verse: the fine 1940s’ lyrics such as ‘A Christmas Childhood’ and ‘Art McCooey’, and the cluster of remarkable poems he produced in the early 1950s, including ‘Epic’, ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Auditors In’ and ‘Prelude’.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 59
