Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  Healthwise, 1963 was no improvement on 1962. He was in Baggot Street Hospital from 2 to 7 January. In the throes of an inflammation of the stomach lining brought on by Christmas excesses, he looked forward to the distant day when he could compose an ode in honour of a decent stomach. At the end of February he returned from a visit to Katherine in London to go into hospital. On 9 March he described himself humorously as being ‘addicted to hospitals’.11 Being ill without any insurance cover was an expensive business, or would be if the medical bills were paid. He blithely ignored them. There were outstanding bills owing to Baggot Street Hospital for treatment and maintainance over a three-year period by April 1963 and they had handed the matter over to a debt-collecting agency.

  Somehow, despite his precarious health, he managed to sustain his weekly column for the Irish Farmers’ Journal until 9 March. At this point it was wound up. He had come to rely on the weekly stipend and missed it sorely. An old friend whom he had known in London in the late 1940s, Jim McGuinness, came to the rescue. McGuinness, later RTE’s head of News and Current Affairs, had responsibility for recruiting staff for the station’s weekly publication, the RTV Guide, and he offered Kavanagh a column at £5 a go. The offer was tentatively made for McGuinness felt that such a column was unworthy of him. The stipend was also £1 less than the Farmers’ Journal had paid, but Kavanagh was glad to have a regular income and began writing for the Guide on 5 April 1963, sending his early copy from Katherine’s flat.

  His brief was to act as a film critic, resuming an occupation he had abandoned, or that had abandoned him, fourteen years earlier. The column was entitled ‘The Film Page’ and the editor promised ‘a series of comment and opinion on films for the big screen’, featuring ‘the criticisms and witticisms of Patrick Kavanagh’. In fact, the column had no raison d’être other than his financial need and he never attempted to formulate a programme or policy for it. However, he gamely tried to fulfil his editorial brief and most of the early columns make some reference to film.

  From the start it was evident that he was completely out of touch with current film: he was going to the cinema in London for the first time in twelve years and catching up with the names of the new Hollywood stars. His column rarely offered an opinion on current offerings in the cinema (Dr Strangelove was an exception) or on the films being shown on television. For the most part he reminisced about films he had watched during his previous stint as film critic, discussed books on which recent films had been based, or chatted about some matter tangentially related to film. Within a month of taking up office, he was under attack from several sides and humorously bewailing his lot:

  Oh sad is my fate said the heart-broken Kavanagh

  The wild deer and wolf to a covert can flee;

  But as a film critic protection I have naw

  From once-loving friends who are gunning for me . . .

  To one reader who described him as ‘a meandering bore’, he replied that to meander and bore on a weekly basis was, in fact, a difficult chore. The most amusing response to the unstructured, rambling nature of his column was a verse by Kevin Faller entitled ‘P Kant’:

  The columns of Mr Patrick Kavanagh

  fill me with awe:

  placed end to end

  they would still

  avoid reaching

  whatever it was

  they started out

  not to intend.

  While he was generally perceived to have a special rapport with young adults, this was with young university students, intellectuals and budding poets, and he certainly did not hit it off with the younger readers of the RTV Guide. Two months into the job, he was aware that ‘a barrage of dog’s abuse’ was being showered on him by young readers, who thought he was too old to be a film critic. His frequent berating of the Beatles and of the current Beatlemania in his column further exasperated these readers. Perhaps because he was growing wearier, he put less effort into endearing himself to his audience; on the whole these columns tended to be briefer and more scrappy than those in the Irish Farmers’ Journal and as the years passed they were sometimes quite perfunctory.

  In spring 1963 Poetry Ireland carried one of the most buoyant, self-confident poems of his career, ‘Sensational Disclosures (Kavanagh Tells All)’. Written for the most part in jaunty vernacular couplets, it portrays him recovering from a phase of drinking and gambling and returning in vulgar good health to challenge and confound named contemporaries among the English poets. He is supremely confident that the critics’ endorsement of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling has left him, albeit belatedly, a poetic power to be reckoned with:

  Why wasn’t I told

  Of new gallups polled?

  At about the same time, James Liddy, a young Patrician, to use John Jordan’s term, launched a new journal. Named Arena, it was edited by Liddy and Liam O’Connor (and by Michael Harnett [sic] from the second number), designed by Liam Miller and, in the absence of any advertising whatsoever, financed by Liddy’s mother, ‘a one woman Arts Council’ as her son put it. The first number was an act of public hero-worship of Kavanagh. A drawing of him by Eddie Doyle dominated the front cover. He is depicted in an unpressed suit, open-necked shirt, tie and scarf, a pudgy and too young-looking figure, slightly hunched and grim-faced, recognisable as Kavanagh mainly by his folded arms and the combination of cap and horn-rimmed glasses. Following his own self-projection as Gulliver in a Lilliputian Dublin in poems such as ‘The Hero’ and ‘Dear Folks’, he is drawn as a towering figure posed in front of a diminutive terrace of Georgian houses. This first number led off with ‘Five Pieces’ by Kavanagh, none previously published: ‘The Same Again’, ‘Thank You, Thank You’, ‘About Reason, Maybe’, ‘That Garage’ and ‘In Blinking Blankness: Three Efforts’. Liddy paid his contributors well, cash on the nail; even so, Kavanagh was remarkably generous in the number and quality of poems he gave, considering that the magazine was a new and uncertain venture. On the whole, he was quite lacking in snobbery or elitism as far as the first publication of his poems was concerned.

  The near-sonnet ‘The Same Again’ is one of a number of ruefully comic poems he wrote about his alcoholism in the 1960s, a portrait of the artist as the town drunk. An unsparing sketch of an alcoholic ‘hitting the bottle hard’ in ‘the corner of a smoky bar’, wracked with stomach cramps and ‘Swallowing every digestive pill to be had’, it is also conscious throughout of the poet’s bardic role and of his audience, ‘the people in the streets who steer by my star’. Indeed, the humour of the piece is largely dependent on a sense of lèse majesté. The flippant rhyming of ‘bard’ with ‘hard’, ‘statement’ with ‘waitment’, ‘bar’ with ‘star’, ‘comic’ with ‘stomach’ ensures that the poem see-saws confidently between the pub and the poet’s public, indigestion and romantic afflatus.

  The concluding poem of the five in Arena, ‘In Blinking Blankness’, is his first public admission that his talent was drying up. It was not the end, however. Liddy recalls purchasing ‘The Poet’s Ready Reckoner’ for the second number of Arena in autumn 1963, after some hard bargaining one lunchtime in McDaid’s. Twenty pounds for a poem was expensive for a new magazine (Poetry Ireland had paid £5 for ‘Literary Adventures’ and six guineas for ‘Sensational Disclosures’) but it was a long poem and Kavanagh thought highly of it, laughing and crying over it as he read it to Liddy: ‘You see it’s mad. I have learned how to be mad.’12 The haggling over the poem’s price is in keeping with the text’s business-like title and attitude to writing as a saleable commodity:

  I never suffer now from malnu-

  trition. Or need for grog.

  I make a product I can easily flog . . .

  In most of these late poems Kavanagh has abandoned the tight discipline of the sonnet and is cultivating an ever more relaxed attitude in verse, building an apparently haphazard, arbitrary structure that corresponds to the speaker’s mood swings and non-sequential recollections or passing thoughts. Rhyming reinforces the casual, improvisatory nat
ure of the poem’s structure. Couplets predominate, but there are occasional triplets, alternately rhyming lines, unrhymed lines and lines where the rhyme is delayed and concluded much later:

  Must catch that rhyme that up there I left parking.

  There is no effort to mount a charm offensive as in earlier self-portrayals such as ‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’. ‘The Poet’s Ready Reckoner’ is frank about his moody, grouchy, opportunistic, exploitative characteristics, his arrogance towards his audience, his sense of victimisation. At one moment he sees himself as the guru of the London-Irish who had been misled by Behan, ‘behaned’ (he insisted on spelling it with a lower case ‘b’); the next moment he confesses that he couldn’t care less about this audience:

  . . . Into me never entered

  Care for you. I am self-centred

  But bunch of bums

  I throw you these bewitching crumbs . . .

  The galleys of Self-Portrait were ready in February 1963 and in August Liam Miller dispatched the proposed cover and the frontispiece. Kavanagh baulked. The cover was too pretentious, out of keeping with the cult of casualness propounded in the text, and the cover photograph, repeated as the frontispiece, was ‘vulgar, ostentatious and grossly stage-Irish’.13 He refused to allow Miller to proceed.

  The offending front cover photograph had been taken by Philip Pocock at the Leopardstown Races the previous July. Spotting Kavanagh sitting by himself, he took a sneak shot with his Leica M3. Then he thought better of it and approached the poet to ask if he could take a photograph. ‘You already have’ was the sharp response.

  Yet Kavanagh did agree to pose briefly, sitting back and looking directly and grimly at the camera, the left brace of his trousers gripped in his left hand. It was a summer’s day, so he was wearing an open-necked shirt and the photo shows him with jacket thrust well back to reveal a large expanse of stained shirtfront, the bottom button missing or undone and the jacket lapel also stained. He was probably quite drunk and looks bloated and truculent.14 While this image is decidedly casual, it is also undignified and does him no favours.

  According to Miller, Kavanagh at first professed himself delighted with the booklet and it was Miss O’Flaherty who pointed out to him that the cover photograph was insulting. He charged into the Dolmen office at 94 Baggot Street demanding that the book be scrapped and new photos substituted. Did Liam Miller have a camera? He did. Kavanagh left to change his clothes and came back in half an hour to have new pictures taken.

  Miller snapped him standing in some of his favourite spots: by the canal, walking on Baggot Street Bridge and looking into Parsons window, clad in hat and open mackintosh and wearing a sweater over a check shirt. He looks relaxed but also sober and respectable, not the drunken navvy Pocock had caught on camera. For the cover, Miller chose a head and shoulder profile shot, in which the hatless poet is staring down at something in the canal. His eye can be seen behind his horn-rims, focused on the object, alert and appreciative, and his whole face is given up to the act of contemplation; even his mouth seems to be registering what he is seeing — a remarkably vivid image.

  The Dolmen Press, which published quality editions of good Irish writing, was a small, one-man publishing house and the reprinting of Self-Portrait must have been quite a setback for Miller, but from posterity’s view it was worth it. The new images enhance the autobiographical text by providing an appropriate visual context, though they do portray Kavanagh as the Baggot Street bard and there are no complementary pictures of Inniskeen. Self-Portrait has become ‘A Letter and an Environment from Dublin’.

  Kavanagh was sufficiently mollified by 24 August to write a preface to the booklet, ‘Preface to a Preface’. Here he cavalierly announced that his brief autobiography was untruthful (which is true) and claimed that he could write confessionally only in verse. He also undermined the central tenet of the accompanying text, his poetic rebirth during his canal convalescence in 1955, by updating his conversion:

  My life has been a failure till I woke this morning, which is the 24th August, 1963.

  Because of all the shenanigans surrounding its publication, Self-Portrait did not appear until 1964, almost two years after the television programme on which it is based. By then Kavanagh was so well disposed towards Miller that he paid tribute to him and his Dolmen Press in a talk on BBC Wales.

  In autumn 1963 he was asked to make a record for Claddagh Records, a company founded in 1960 by Garech Brown, with John Montague as speech director. They aimed at recording the music of the older generation of musicians and the speech of the older generation of writers before it was too late. Proinsias MacAonghusa persuaded Kavanagh to make the first speech record for the fledgling company. The recording took place on 16 October; he arrived at the studio with his script prepared and spoke his lines in clear, crisp, authoritative tones, with an underlay of gravelly wheeziness that became more pronounced as the session proceeded.

  The first side of the record is devoted to prose but begins with a spirited singing of ‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’. After the final upbeat stanza which concludes, ‘Yet he lived happily/I tell you’, he drily interjects, ’I wonder!’ Most of this first side is based on short excerpts from Kavanagh’s Weekly, with an autobiographical introduction and linking commentary. He speaks with lively conviction, a little too fast, yet with a fine sense of pace and some amusing mimicry. His telling of the comic story of the two big toes from the Weekly is wonderfully entertaining, reminding us that he started life in an oral culture where the ability to tell a story well was highly prized.

  The second side of the record consists of a reading of nineteen poems, for the most part untitled, and with no commentary whatever. Surprisingly, he is far better as a reader of prose than of poetry. The poems are spoken quite briskly, in a business-like, detached fashion and he even seems unfamiliar with them, often spoiling the syntax by pausing too long at the end of carry-on lines. His voice is tiring as he reads and becoming rather hoarse towards the end. He entitled the record Almost Everything, suggesting a far more comprehensive garnering of his work than is actually the case. Almost Everything was not marketed until the beginning of September 1965 when an edition of 500 copies was released. There was little publicity, with the exception of a few newspaper reviews; nevertheless the record sold steadily.

  From late October he felt ill again, one of the symptoms being back pain. He was depressed about it, fearing that this time there was a problem with his prostate gland or kidneys. So though he went into Baggot Street Hospital to have some tests and to consult Keith Shaw in November, he was too worried at the prospect of bad news to enquire as to the results of the tests. He dreaded Dublin’s gossipmongers, too, and feared that if he were seriously ill, word would leak out. It was a depressing time. Marthe O’Connor’s death during the summer upset him dreadfully and Louis MacNeice’s sudden death from pneumonia in September was another reminder of mortality. He would often allude to MacNeice’s death that autumn and winter, speaking of him with respect and affection.

  Tired and in very low spirits, he turned to Katherine for solace at the end of November 1963 and spent the winter with her at 47 Gibson Square. (She had returned to a ground floor flat at this address the previous Easter.) Worried by his complaints of back pain and general debility, Katherine persuaded him to go for tests to London’s Royal Free Hospital, where he would be more assured of privacy than in Dublin. To his enormous relief, an X-ray and other tests in January indicated that the back pain was due to osteo-arthritis. He was advised to seek heat treatment and to do exercises.

  Three years previously he had retrieved the draft novels that Claire McAllister had packed when she was leaving Dublin in 1952. MacGibbon and Kee, who were gradually taking over as his publishers, had these retyped with a view to publication and in the euphoria that followed on his good news from the Royal Free Hospital he went to the British Museum most days in January to work on revisions.15 He liked the novels, and Karl Miller, the literary editor of the New
Statesman, who had been shown an excerpt, was very encouraging.

  Ensconced with Katherine and secure in her undemanding affection, he regained his buoyancy and optimism. Her combination of commonsense practicality and bohemianism meant that he was cared for without feeling caged and confined. At home she was the boss, taking on the maternal role he exacted from all his close women friends; in public, she deferred to him. In private he was Paddy to her; in company she called him Patrick, the name he preferred to be known by publicly. He had her flat to himself and could write and read and go to cafés while she was out at work; in the evenings they watched sport on television and went to the Plough. Unspoilt and accustomed to fending for herself on a modest salary, she took things as they came and was never moody or demanding. Yet for all her easy-going ways, he knew that he was safe with her: she was intensely loyal and trusting, the kind of woman who gives all the heart and remains unswervingly and uncritically devoted. He remained at 47 Gibson Square where he was ‘being looked after’ until mid-February.

  Had he and Katherine been able to conceive a child, he would have married her. Since she was content to share his life without marriage, it suited him to let matters drift and avoid total commitment. Katherine was his ‘London wife’, an arrangement that left him free to flirt with young women back in Dublin and to maintain his friendships with longstanding women friends such as Leland Bardwell, Joan Ryan and Elinor Wiltshire and, of course, with Sheila O’Grady, who regarded him as her bachelor escort. He was temperamentally secretive, an aspect of his general distrust of other people. Where women were concerned, his furtiveness was also tactical. At this stage of his life when he was writing very little, he more than ever looked to flirtation and snatched hours of female company in a pub to provide distraction and excitement and to alleviate the boredom of his long, empty days.