In Ireland, Padraic Fallon damned the book with faint praise, adding insult to injury by wishing that the author of Tarry Flynn had concentrated more on writing autobiographical fiction, but Brendan Kennelly in Dubliner and Basil Payne in Hibernia were enthusiastic, and John Horgan in the Catholic Herald found the poetry ‘very seldom disappointing, always original, perennially honest’. Despite its quite hefty price of 42 shillings, Collected Poems was virtually a bestseller in Dublin.
With Kavanagh’s full knowledge and consent, albeit grudging consent, Tim O’Keeffe on behalf of MacGibbon and Kee had entered into a contract with Devin-Adair of New York to co-publish Collected Poems. Kavanagh looked down on Devin-Adair, the American publishers of Tarry Flynn, as ‘shanty Irish’. In late 1963 when Tim O’Keeffe, having failed to find any other north American publisher, was attempting to close the deal with Devin-Adair, Kavanagh’s brother strenuously objected. In desperation, O’Keeffe wrote to the poet on 10 November, telling him that his brother was ‘raising hell’ and, that useful though it was to have ‘someone on the spot looking after’ his ‘interests’, ‘there is a point at which nothing can ever get done for you’. Kavanagh was still reluctant to be published by Devin-Adair, but ‘not to the point of saying no’, and a further £150 advance was sufficient inducement for him to break what O’Keeffe referred to as ‘this deadest of deadlocks’. The contract MacGibbon and Kee negotiated with Devin-Adair involved giving 1,500 sheets of Collected Poems to the New York publishers in exchange for 2,000 unsold sheets of Tarry Flynn.
While MacGibbon and Kee acted as his agents and he was therefore not asked to sign the agreement with Devin-Adair, Kavangah was doubly a party to the contract. Not only had he empowered MacGibbon and Kee to negotiate on his behalf and been aware of their deal with Devin-Adair, he had also accepted an advance for a hardback edition of Tarry Flynn, based on the exchange of Collected Poems sheets and Tarry Flynn sheets. However, once Collected Poems had been published in London, his latent unhappiness with the Devin-Adair deal surfaced and he began trying to weasel out of it from early August. When Peter was on holiday in Ireland that month, he confided his misgivings. The upshot was that Kavanagh vested his brother with power of attorney to block the Devin-Adair edition and also gave him US publication and distribution rights in Recent Poems backdated to 1958.8 Since he had conferred world rights in Collected Poems (which included all the poems in Recent Poems) on MacGibbon and Kee in 1961 and given the firm the sole right to place Collected Poems for printing and or publication in the US on the best terms that in their judgment were obtainable, the two documents conferring conflicting rights on Peter were in bad faith to say the least. As O’Keeffe pointed out to him, the best terms (indeed the only terms) that MacGibbon and Kee could obtain were with Devin-Adair, so they were not in breach of contract. Martin Green wrote a placatory letter pointing out that Devin-Adair had a limited number of sheets and that the situation could be reviewed once these were disposed of.
Back in the US after his August holiday in Ireland, Peter was advised that it would cost $3,000 to injunct the Devin-Adair edition, and since neither he nor Patrick could afford such a sum, he decided that one way to proceed was to denounce it publicly instead, which he did.9 Not realising the duplicity of which Kavanagh was capable, O’Keeffe and Green blamed Peter for attempting to block the US edition. By this point in Kavanagh’s life, that ‘kink’ in his character, which had so often led him unpredictably and abruptly to turn against even close friends, had become so twisted that he was ready to thwart O’Keeffe and Devin-Adair against his own best interests. Alcoholism would have exacerbated his temperamental cussedness and his peasant suspicion that in all deals people were out to trick or best him. Blinded by prejudice against Devin-Adair, he was unable to see that it was in his best interests not to risk or delay the long overdue republication of Tarry Flynn in hardback and that the denunciation of Devin-Adair to the editors of journals which might carry reviews of Collected Poems was earning him the wrong kind of publicity in the US.
American publication of Collected Poems went ahead. It sported an orange dust-jacket, rather than the more restrained grey with navy spine and navy and white lettering favoured by MacGibbon and Kee. The poet Louise Bogan’s review in the New Yorker revealed a remarkable understanding of Kavanagh’s restless, subversive talent. His poetry, she noted, ‘kept on renewing itself not so much by a process of orderly growth as by a continual breaching of boundaries’. His ‘chief object of detestation’ had come to be ‘the coat-trailing charming Irish semi-clown — a tragicomic caricature designed . . . for the foreign trade.’ She understood why he was not rated by the more official and solemn post-Yeatsians and she concluded by saluting him and cheering him on:
Far from officialdom of any kind, Kavanagh survives and flourishes in that invigorating region where, without respectable let or hindrance, the wild rivers run and the wild timber grows.
Such a review illustrated that the Devin-Adair publication was no barrier to notice by good reviewers in respected journals. When, later in 1964, Peter drew Patrick’s attention to the US publication of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Self-Portrait by Dufour, he replied on 4 December, ‘Dufour doesn’t count’. Since all the poems in Recent Poems were included in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, it seems that his sole interest in Peter’s US rights was as a device to obstruct Devin-Adair.
The publication of Collected Poems in summer 1964 brought Kavanagh back into the media spotlight. He was interviewed by Proinsias MacAonghusa in the RTÉ series ‘Image’ on Monday, 12 October, a 30-minute slot. The previous day the Sunday Press carried an interview by Niall Carroll, with an accompanying photograph by Colman Doyle. Celebrity had not sweetened Kavanagh’s disposition and Carroll and Doyle found the going rough when they went to Carrickmacross to meet him by appointment in Mooney’s Bar. When he at last relented and gave the promised interview, he refused to talk about Collected Poems and chose to be outrageous and unpredictable, praising Ian Paisley, then a political and ideological bogeyman in the Irish Republic and, in defiance of his own repeated denunciation of the cult of the Beatles in the RTV Guide, declaring himself ‘a Beatles fan’. Asked what was the greatest thing he ever wrote, he replied ‘A cheque for £5,000 which did not bounce.’ Appealed to as a sage, he queried whether a sage was a kind of cabbage. He was most anxious not to have the Sunday Press propagate a view of him as a man returning to his roots and insisted that the writer needed to live in cities. When Colman Doyle wanted to take a photograph, he reverted to his original truculence. He would not pose unless he was paid £20. The photographer pleaded. ‘No money, no snap’, Kavanagh growled. Doyle was forced to sign an IOU.10 Then Kavanagh posed in the main street, grinning broadly as if in the sunniest humour.
At the end of August, Violet McWeeney gave up her tenancy at 37 Upper Mount Street. She wrote to Kavanagh reminding him to collect all his papers and belongings, including the clothes on the back of the door, because this time there could be no going back. She was sorry to lose the connection with him; she had enjoyed his occasional companionship.
In September he took up residence in the Halcyon Hotel on Dublin’s South Anne Street where bed and half-board cost three guineas a week. It was an ideal solution to his accommodation problems, a base in the city centre where he could live in civilised comfort within strolling distance of McDaid’s and the Bailey. He spent the winter months there.
On 27 November 1964 he gave a reading at Queen’s University, Belfast. The venue was packed and the audience brought out the best in him. He read a selection of poems and the Kavanagh’s Weekly sequence from his then still-forthcoming record, Almost Everything, and sang ‘From a Munster vale they brought her’. Soon afterwards his mood turned nasty. At a post-lecture reception he responded to one of the guest’s questions by throwing his glass at the wall and snarling ‘I’m doing no more talking until I’m paid.’ He was in Queen’s at the invitation of the Students’ Union and did not trust them to come up with
the readies.
Dublin was particularly lively in the run-up to Christmas, with the Swifts and the young Yorkshire poet Brian Higgins in town. He did not join Katherine for Christmas as he had promised. His recent fraught relations with Tim O’Keeffe and Martin Green, who were her friends and sometimes used her as mediator, probably made it more politic to stay away. Instead, a Christmas break with Annie and Mary in Inniskeen from 24 to 28 December provided a much-needed respite from festive over-indulgence. However, during his Saturday evening phone call to Katherine on 9 January, he told her he was down with flu, probably a euphemism for acute gastritis, though he was also prone to bronchial infections.
From 21 January he was a patient in the Meath Hospital. Instead of the prostate gland operation he had feared, he was being treated for bladder dysfunction. A procedure to distend his bladder, performed by Dermot O’Flynn, brought considerable relief and he was soon feeling well, but he was hospitalised for almost three weeks, until 9 February. The hospital suggested that he consult a psychiatrist, presumably in order to receive some counselling on his alcoholism. ‘What chance would a psychiatrist have against a poet?’ was Kavanagh’s response. Later, when the hospital tried to collect the outstanding medical fees — £70.13 for the bed and 25 guineas for the consultant — he grinned sardonically, ‘Now who needs a psychiatrist?’ When he had been discharged from the Meath, he returned to the Halcyon Hotel for the remainder of February and March.
One of the hazards of alcoholism was injuring himself. During the DTs after one alcoholic spree, he mistook his ring finger for an assailant and pulled a tendon in the ensuing tussle, which left him unable to type. In early March he lost his footing while drunk and badly sprained his wrist. He was again unable to type for weeks and used the injury as an excuse not to fly to London for the republication of Tarry Flynn in mid-March. He was probably still embarrassed about meeting O’Keeffe and Green.
MacGibbon and Kee’s new edition, masterminded by Tim O’Keeffe, was the first hardback publication of the novel since the Pilot Press and Devin-Adair editions of 1948 and 1949. The book had a very short shelf life at the time and the paperback reissue in 1962 had largely been ignored by the reviewers, so this 1965 edition was effectively as important as a first publication. The reviews were heart-warming. Terence de Vere White was in raptures about the novel both privately and in The Irish Times where he named it ‘one of the few great Irish books of its time’ and concluded: ‘To be Irish and not to read it is to sin against the light.’ Neville Braybrooke in The Spectator found the novel’s prose ‘humorous and lyrical’ and Iain Hamilton in the Daily Telegraph praised the book’s ‘hard-edged precision, lack of sentimentality’ and its irony. The Yorkshire Post was also complimentary.
Nineteen sixty-five was the centenary of Yeats’s birth and Kavanagh began the year by re-reading Yeats’s Collected Poems. At this point he was reading the poems for their biographical content, fascinated by the sharp contrast between Yeats’s life and his own. His ‘strongest’ impression was of ‘the protection and also some obvious patronage which he [Yeats] received from his class, then the ruling class’. He was also conscious of the reciprocal sense of order in the life and the oeuvre: Yeats’s life was ‘a wonderfully integrated well-designed life’, his poems and his life alike were ‘beautifully secure and complete’. ‘It could never happen again’, he mused.11 It certainly had not and would not happen to himself. He had been invited by Northwestern University, Chicago, to take part in a centenary symposium on Yeats in April, all expenses paid. And when Professor Donald Torchiana wrote asking for a lecture title in early February, what he proposed was ‘Yeats’s luxurious background’.
While he was pleased to be invited by Northwestern and found the prospect of a free holiday in the US irresistible, he had serious reservations about appearing to do obeisance to Yeats by attending a symposium in his honour. The best way to benefit from the free trip without sacrificing his dignity and his integrity as poet and critic, he decided, was to attend but treat the occasion with contempt. Meeting James Liddy in Parsons bookshop shortly before he left Dublin, he parodied Pearse’s words at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa: ‘The fools, the fools, the fools, they have already paid me.’ He assured Liddy that he would break up the proceedings after half an hour.12
Patricia Murphy drove him to Inniskeen for a quick visit on Friday, 23 March, so that he could pick up some books and papers and any presents Annie and Mary wished to send to Peter’s family whom he would be seeing in New York in April after the symposium. Peter had married Ann Keeley the previous year and they had a baby daughter, Keelin. The sisters decided not to send any knitted articles to New York with Patrick because he would ‘lose them or sell them’.13 On Thursday 29th he flew to London to spend three weeks with Katherine at 6 St Stephen’s Crescent. He had contrived to have the poem ‘On Rampas Point’ printed in the New Statesman three days in advance of his arrival. Its literary editor, Karl Miller, had befriended him and when he left for the Yeats Symposium in Chicago on 20 April his departure was reported in the New Statesman. Miller gleefully noted Kavanagh’s understatement as to the stance he would adopt towards Yeats at the symposium: ‘I don’t think I’ll be for him, do you?’
Chicago disappointed him. He found it quaint and provincial and all the people he met ‘bourgeois’. Evanston, where he was staying, was a dry suburb. There was no bar in the hotel and he had to drink in his room. The symposium went on for three days and nights and the first two days passed peaceably. He addressed a large sophomore English class, reciting some of his poems for them, and he interacted well with small groups of students. In general, he was on his best behaviour, never quite drunk, though always high, conversing civilly at various social gatherings, even when his glass of bourbon was perceptibly tilting.
Then at the actual symposium on Friday 30 April all hell broke loose. Thomas Kinsella and W. D. Snodgrass were the first speakers and they spoke at length. Kavanagh had asked to speak last. Donald Torchiana, who has left a graphic account of the occasion, tells how Kavanagh sat through the previous two lectures, ‘gloomy and saturnine, pendant on the horizon like a Connacht bishop’. Then he made his statement, reading from a prepared script. From the outset he launched into a series of subversive comments guaranteed to rile large sections of his audience:
By coming this long distance to speak about or around W. B. Yeats it presumes that we think him a great poet and a great man. Yet I have always had reservations about Yeats. The fact that he wasn’t Irish and never wrote a line that any ordinary Irish person would read is not against him. No true poet ever wrote for the ordinary man and woman . . .
The opinions on American writing which followed were guaranteed to exasperate more conservative listeners:
. . . the only people in America that are alive are men like Jack Kerouac. On the Road is an excellent book, one of my favourite books about America since Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. And I like Corso, Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg very much . . .
From this point he launched a hydra-headed attack, coupling Yeats with some of the canonical names in American literature as a group of Anglified writers and pronouncing that there was no such thing as an American or Irish literary tradition. He concluded on a characteristic note, lauding comedy, though doing so in a way calculated to dismay and antagonise his American audience:
So we must love humour; that’s all that matters, the gaiety of spirit, comedy, fun, enjoying yourself. That’s all there is to it and all this pretension and bawling lecturology that’s Americanism is disastrous and shocking . . .
When Padraic Colum, speaking from the floor, asked him to explain his hostile attitude to Yeats, he answered in a monosyllable, ‘Spite’. As tempers rose among the panel and the audience, Stephen Spender, the moderator, intervened to say there was no point in continuing a discussion which amounted to little more than a trading of insults. The proceedings broke up in considerable disarray. Kavanagh had achieved his aim, but it was a Py
rrhic victory. As word of the shenanigans at Northwestern spread, the doors of English departments were firmly shut against him. There would be no further invitations to lecture on the American circuit. Worse still, he had alienated an Irish-American academic grouping who would have included his poetry or fiction on university courses and introduced his work to future generations of students.14
From Chicago he proceeded via Louisville to New York to stay with Peter’s family, taking in the Kentucky Derby en route. Dismayed at their cramped living conditions, he at first intended to move out and rent a room of his own; instead he stayed six weeks. His love of children had not deserted him and he was delighted to play uncle to his baby niece.15 The World’s Fair was on; he visited the Irish pavilion, which he described tongue-in-cheek for his RTV Guide readers: ‘Literature in the shape of cubes about the size of biscuit tins hung from the ceiling with names and portraits thereon.’ There was no Kavanagh cube; he had been asked by the organisers to submit material but had ignored the request. Following on the warm reception of Collected Poems and Tarry Flynn, he was more secure about his reputation than he had ever been. Tarry Flynn seemed set to generate further income as well. John Watson of Mayflower Books had arranged to meet him in New York to discuss a new paperback edition. That July, Mayflower Books decided to add Tarry Flynn to its list, though four years were to elapse before publication.
During his stay in New York, the Irish Times Yeats Centenary Supplement of 10 June carried Kavanagh’s essay on ‘George Moore’s Yeats’, where he once again rehearsed his ambivalence towards, or envy of, what he saw as Yeats’s comfortable, moneyed life:
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 62
