If I seem to be a bit wobbly about Yeats’s simple greatness it is not so much the detachment of his verse as his ability to integrate himself with bourgeois society . . .
Despite his own aspirations to moneyed middle-class status, ‘bourgeois’ was one of his favourite insults.
On 13 June he set out for Dane, Wisconsin, with his brother’s family. It was ‘the middle of nowhere’, so he stayed only twelve days. In a museum in Madison he was moved by the story of the Indians; it was ‘too sad’ for him. His verdict on Madison was similar to Dr Johnson’s on the Giant’s Causeway: ‘Worth seeing but not worth travelling to see.’ He had over-extended his visit to the US and had to pay a supplement on his return ticket. Rather audaciously in the circumstances, he had the airline telephone Northwestern and ask the university to guarantee the extra fare. Northwestern had already paid him a thousand dollars in expenses, but in order to avoid any further ructions and hasten his departure, the university obliged and he flew from Madison via Chicago to London on 25 June.
Immediately he installed himself with Katherine. She had asked him to bring her a small gift, even some tipped cigarettes, but whether he remembered or not he was made welcome. All his old friends and acquaintances in Soho and the Plough were regaled with tales of his exploits at Northwestern. While he was lunching in the Garrick Club with Tommy Marks in mid-July, Stephen Spender approached him and said, ‘You lost me a job.’ He had been poet in residence in Northwestern and was fired as a result of the symposium débâcle. Spender did not hold it against him because he had walked straight into a job with the Library of Congress; in fact, he invited Kavanagh to record for the library the following winter, fare paid.
Kavanagh’s last published poem proper was a sonnet entitled ‘Yeats’. It appeared in the third issue of The Holy Door, a journal launched in 1965, which derived its name from the final couplet of Kavanagh’s poem ‘Thank You, Thank You’, quoted on the cover just below the title: ‘For most have died the day before/The opening of that holy door.’ The nominal editor was a young poet, Brian Lynch, and it was published from his home address at 156 Botanic Road, Glasnevin, but he was fronting for James Liddy. Liddy wanted an amateurish-looking publication, the opposite of the stylish, flamboyant Arena, so the journal was roneoed rather than printed. The sonnet on Yeats was probably prompted by Kavanagh’s disastrous visit to the Yeats symposium in Chicago and was certainly written after it, since it is still caught up in the academic quarrel at Northwestern:
I don’t care what Chicago thinks, I am blind
To college lecturers and the breed of fakes . . .
Himself aged 60 at the time of writing, Kavanagh seizes on Yeats’s ironic self-description, ‘A sixty-year-old smiling public man’ in ‘Among Schoolchildren’ and modifies it to read ‘the sixty year old public protected/Man . . .’ His implicit self-comparison with Yeats highlights his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Yeats is presented as a man triply safe and shielded: ‘protected/By the middle classes and the Big Houses’ and sheltered ‘by the dim Victorian Muses’. Kavanagh, who craved the patronage of aristocrats and the middle classes, is nakedly envious of Yeats’s assured public status while still denying him ‘what it takes in the living poetry stakes’.
At 60 his own finances were as precarious as ever. Though recklessly spendthrift when he had money, he had none of the insouciance that often accompanies such extravagance, and no sooner had he drained his funds than he was prey to anxiety as to where the next pound was coming from. In particular, he set great store by the reassurance of a regular income, however small. He was, therefore, appalled to learn that the Revenue Commissioners had begun docking his UCD salary earlier in 1965 to recoup some of what he owed them. In addition, the Irish newspaper strike in July and August, which meant that the RTV Guide suspended publication, left him cash-starved. Before returning to Dublin in July, he had agreed to the publication by MacGibbon and Kee of a Collected Prose to be edited by Niall Sheridan, and when Timothy O’Keeffe informed him on 10 August that the contract was ready, his response was, ‘Maybe you could send the agreement and the cheque in the same envelope.’ Thanks largely to O’Keeffe, he had enjoyed a steady trickle of advances and royalties from MacGibbon and Kee’s republication of his writings over the past few years but, unless he consented to the relaunch of The Green Fool, this stream was set to dry up after the Collected Prose. He was, in fact, more broke than he had ever been. On 7 September the Royal Bank of Ireland informed him that his account was overdrawn by £381.10.3. He was not so exercised by the size of the debt as by the consequent cancellation of any further overdraft.
Katherine arrived in Dublin for a ten-day holiday on 24 September and they attended When The Saints Go Marching In, Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of The Dalkey Archive, at the 1965 Dublin Theatre Festival. Kavanagh went to scoff — ‘Next thing they’ll be doing will be Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’ — but thought it a ‘marvellous adaptation’. Yet whatever derogatory verdict on the first act he uttered when he met Brian O’Nolan in Groome’s Hotel at the interval plunged the unfortunate author into such gloom that he could not face sitting through the rest of the performance.16 As usual when Katherine came to Dublin, he played down their relationship by not being seen publicly with her too often. This time he went to Inniskeen for a few days during her visit. He would join her in London on his way back from an international writers’ conference in Rome a couple of weeks later.
In Rome he was quite excited to meet Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. While he spoke no French and his Monaghan-accented English would have been unintelligible to Sartre, he insisted that they had an interesting conversation about his refusal of the Nobel prize. They were able to communicate, he said, because both were ‘city men and knew the score’.17 With his usual propensity for creating comic situations, Kavanagh managed one embarrassing episode during his stay in Rome. In the course of a party at the Soviet Russian Ambassador’s residence, he locked himself into the only gents lavatory and mislaid the key. His host, the Rome-based poet Desmond O’Grady, had to wriggle in over a partition to rescue him. Outside, a small queue had formed, headed by the editor of Novy Mir, who broke into a grin when he recognised comrade Kavanaghvich.18
While he was in Rome the fashionable Queen magazine ran a feature inviting well-known persons to name the individuals from any era they would choose to be their parents. The Rolling Stones manager, Andrew Oldham, selected Kavanagh as his father and partnered him with Mary Queen of Scots. Such an incongruous compliment signalled that he was beginning to attract a youthful following in London as well as in Dublin.
By summer 1965 Kavanagh had virtually ceased to write poetry. His lifestyle militated against it. Alcoholism left him with only a few hours of full alertness in the day, the morning hours, when his bout of retching and vomiting was over and he had downed a naggin of whiskey but not yet embarked on the day’s drinking proper. Although plagued by insomnia, he did not write at night; instead, frightened by the darkness and loneliness of the small hours, he dosed himself repeatedly with whiskey and Seconal to bring on sleep. His peripatetic life meant that his papers and books were scattered between at least three locations: some in Katherine’s flat, some in Mucker, some in a selection of friends’ houses in Dublin. If he did feel like reworking a discarded poem or article, the chances were that it was not to hand, or else the particular anthology he felt he needed to ‘kickstart’ his writing was somewhere else. Moving about as he did in quest of an elusive contentment or to stave off boredom, he had no regular work routine or discipline. Then, too, he had always claimed that creativity required enormous energy and he was now perpetually tired and often ill. He had so many maladies — stomach ulcer, thrombosis of the leg, liver ailments, a tendency to bronchitis, an irregular heartbeat — that as soon as one medical problem was controlled, another started up. Sometimes, because of his one lung, his breathing was so laboured that he had to take long pauses between sentences. It was pitiful to watch him heave a
nd wheeze as he struggled to breathe. By now his huge frame was like a heavy burden whose weight exhausted him.
Something of the anguish he felt as his poetic powers deserted him is revealed in ‘Personal Problem’. In this, the bleakest poem he ever wrote, he analyses his creative impasse with unsparing honesty and lucidity. The kind of poetry he prized was lyrical, dictated by the pull of his affections and intent on recapturing a momentary happiness, a buoyant mood. He had always despised what he saw as the dreary plodding of more erudite and more craft-conscious poets such as Austin Clarke. Now he acknowledges that the amateurism he had preferred to a dedicated professionalism was of its nature precarious and evanescent, unsuited to ‘the tiring years’. Lack of discipline and application, waiting for inspiration to strike rather than searching out a subject, have proved his undoing:
What am I to do
With the void growing more awful every hour?
I lacked a classical discipline. I grew
Uncultivated and now the soil turns sour,
Needs to be revived by a power not my own,
Heroes enormous who do astounding deeds —
Out of this world. Only thus can I attune
To despair an illness like winter alone in Leeds.
The last line and a half are the most desolate he ever wrote, bringing together psychic and physical pain, loneliness, chilly exile and, above all, loss of the power to ‘attune’. It was probably Thomas Blackburn, a Poetry Fellow in Leeds University in 1959, who told him of the grimness of the winter term in that city.
Now that he had virtually stopped writing, Kavanagh was more famous than ever before. In the Irish reading public’s estimation, he was ‘their grand old man of letters’, the author of a substantial volume of collected poems and, as such, entitled to rest on his laurels. Established friends and a new retinue of admirers, knowing him to be a sick and troubled man, rallied round to make his declining years as easy and comfortable as they knew how, pandering to his every request, indulging his whims, happy to be of service. Kavanagh, for his part, was never shy of exacting the tribute that he considered his due. At Parsons, May O’Flaherty not only reserved his cow-stool for him, but acted as his personal assistant, passing on messages, making up parcels, keeping or forwarding mail as instructed; he sometimes shaved and breakfasted at the back of the shop. John A. Costello would call at Parsons on the off chance that he might need a lift. Patricia Murphy, John Ryan and Dinny Dwyer willingly served as chauffeurs, as indeed did any of the younger poets such as James Liddy, who possessed a car, or the better-off medical students from McDaid’s. There was almost always someone available to drive him to the airport when he flew to London or to Amiens Street Station to catch the Dundalk train. Leo Holohan remained a staunch friend through every vicissitude; John Ryan stood him innumerable drinks and meals in the Bailey; Dinny Dwyer invited him to his Greystones home during the summer months; he was still a frequent visitor to the Wiltshires’ flat at 25 Raglan Road and to Patricia Murphy’s home at Wilton Place; when John Jordan was in Dublin, they met every second day. He often went to Sheila O’Grady’s Sandymount home for Sunday lunch: her ardour had never cooled. Leland Bardwell, though she was hard up herself, offered board and lodging at 33 Lower Leeson Street; he also stayed with Joan and Eoin Ryan and spent many a relaxed hour chatting with Joan over toast and scrambled eggs in her warm kitchen.
Unfortunately, such pampering had the effect of making him ever more petulant and demanding. Hugh Leonard, who travelled back with him from Rome, was mortified by his treatment of a British air stewardess. When the half-bottle of whiskey he had ordered was not immediately forthcoming, he hissed at her in a ‘croaking whisper’ audible for several rows: ‘English bitch . . . . Lancashire trollop!’19
As the most eminent living Irish poet, Kavanagh enjoyed a cult status among the newer recruits to what he called ‘the standing army’ of Irish poets: Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Brendan Kennelly, James Liddy, Brian Lynch, Hayden Murphy, Macdara Woods. All of them honoured him and felt privileged to spend time in his company, even on bad coughing and sweating days. Though he was clearly in failing health, he still radiated enormous energy. There was always the chance that he would break into one of his amazing monologues, when his talk might range from the lamination of razor blades, through some of the sexual aberrations he had read of in Havelock Ellis, to his own love affair with a steam threshing machine. He sat in McDaid’s or the Bailey like a king surrounded by his courtiers.
To the young urban poets of this generation he was the author of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and the poet who had published in X, rather than the writer of The Great Hunger. Even though he was publishing very little, he was still reading the new journals and keeping abreast of what the young were writing. He talked to them about their work and quoted lines and phrases that had caught his attention; they felt he had genuinely read their poems and not just skimmed them. While outside this charmed circle, many people found him scowling and angry-looking, among the young poets who steered by his star he was noted for his sudden smile, sometimes a grimace, which invited them to share his enjoyment of life’s humour and absurdity. Sometimes he could be quite zany, and he was always unpredictable. Life in his company was never dull. One of his kindlier manifestations of displeasure was to say, ‘If I give you five pounds will you go and throw yourself in the Liffey.’ The young took his moodswings in their stride and his manifest contradictions as, sitting well-scotched in the corner of McDaid’s, he denounced the bohemian life and what he called ‘looseness’. His sudden rages were, largely, a public display of ferocity; on a one-to-one basis he was caring and kind.
Once when they were snowed in together in Leland Bardwell’s flat, Kavanagh asked Macdara Woods to ‘stoup’ his sore finger (understanding the meaning of ‘stoup’ was a test of authenticity) and the young poet treasured this opportunity for some private time with his hero. He reminded Woods of his kindly old farmer uncle. Whereas in the past, Kavanagh had been looked on by many Dubliners as a scrounger, always on the look-out for a free drink or a loan, he now appeared to the young to epitomise old-fashioned country decency. Macdara Woods recalls that, when Paul Durcan’s father had unexpectedly bawled him out over the phone for leading his son astray and he was shaken and upset, he went into McDaid’s and confided in Kavanagh. The older man comforted him and slipped him a ten-shilling note to buy the two of them a drink. His own double whiskey made large inroads into the money, but the gesture was heartwarming.
Most of the younger poets who sought Kavanagh out and even vied for his affection and companionship were male, but Eavan Boland, then in her early twenties, also revered him. She has said of this time:
Yet to everyone who is a young poet there is always one admiration which is part of everything they hold dear about poetry itself — its unreason, its power. Kavanagh was mine.
She first met him in Roberts’ café at the top of Grafton Street. He was seated at the same table eating a Wimpy from a paper napkin and ‘muttering in gusty exclamations under his breath’. She had never been introduced to him, but he was a familiar figure, ‘like a beloved monster in a child’s fairy tale’. While he harshly rebuffed many who intruded on his privacy, he was gallant with Eavan. As he talked to her, his voice was ‘like a radio crackle, picking up a continual static from his prejudices and fixed ideas’. His conversation was a ‘catalogue of dismissals’ for, while well disposed to younger poets, he was scornful of those of his own generation. One exception was Louis MacNeice. MacNeice was a king, he told her; he was ‘like an eagle with a retinue — and he pronounced the word with a rolling “r” — of little birds after him.’ The description she thought seemed appropriate to himself.20
On a return train journey from Dundalk to Dublin in September 1965 he was joined by two young local women, Constance Short the future artist, and her sister Rosemary. To his delight, when he asked what they knew of him, Constance began reciting ‘Shancoduff’, which she had learned at school and knew
off by heart. Rosemary told him she had bought a copy of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. The discovery that his poetry was being read and memorised by young women in Hackballscross, a few miles from Inniskeen, was immensely gratifying, the kind of fame he dreamed of. Constance corresponded with him afterwards but shied off when he suggested a meeting in Dublin. Her familiarity with his poetry had led her to fear that what he might have in mind was ‘a young girl’s lovely fall’. She was probably right.
He was by now notorious for flirting with or proposing to almost every young woman who came his way. In McDaid’s, where he was surrounded by young people, mostly aspirant writers and medical students, he offered exotic rewards in return for sexual favours from female students or the sisters and girlfriends of the young men: a holiday in New York, a visit to Tiffany’s.21 They did not take him seriously and played along, treating it as a game. Some less worldly young women were quite scared by his unwanted advances and offers of marriage. Even 15- and 16-year-olds were approached. A teenage shop assistant to whom he proposed every time he entered Parsons used to hide behind her boss when he arrived. Puzzled and dismayed by his behaviour, May O’Flaherty asked why he was pursuing the youngster; he replied that her ‘joy of life’ attracted him.22 As alcoholism prematurely aged him and he was increasingly racked by ill health, he was avid for youth and gaiety, the qualities that he thought all good poetry should possess.
In September 1965 a casual meeting in Parsons introduced Kavanagh to an adoptive family who were to prove a rich source of affection and companionship over the coming two years. He came upon Gay Veale leafing through his Self-Portrait and talked to her. He invited himself to her home to meet her mother, Eileen, an omniverous reader, who had read his Collected Poems. The Veales lived in a large comfortable house on Lower Churchtown Road. Mrs Veale, Kavanagh’s near-contemporary in age, though considerably better preserved, had been widowed about fourteen years. Her elder daughter, Vivien, in her early twenties, was curator of the Joyce Museum at Sandycove. From September on he was a frequent visitor to Chuchtown. He fell in love with the entire family, individually and collectively it seems; even with their cat, Héloise. Their home became something of a domestic haven/heaven for him, a place where he could relax in the company of attractive, intelligent women. He wished to bask in the Veale women’s undivided attention; when Vivien worked at her hobby of rug-making in his company, he peremptorily ordered her to stop. He phoned each of the family repeatedly and visited Vivien in the Joyce tower in Sandycove. From her office in the tower she would hear him tramp up the stairs, pausing at every step to mutter ‘Jesus Christ’. Given his habit of trying to date any good-looking young women who came his way, it was not surprising that he wished to court the Veale sisters. As usual the attraction was not mutual, though they respected him as a poet. ‘It will be a black evening for me’, he would say dolefully as Vivien put him off with some unlikely excuse such as the wetness of the evening. More surprisingly, he paid court to Eileen Veale as well as to her daughters. He was fobbed off graciously and instead adopted as a family friend. Eileen Veale was an excellent cook and home-maker and he was often invited to stay to dinner. In addition, all three women liked to drive and were happy to ferry him about. A ready-made family was probably what he really wanted and he was happy to settle for this arrangement over the next couple of years, though every so often he tried his hand at dating or proposing.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 63
