Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  26

  FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING

  (1965–1967)

  What am I to do

  With the void growing more awful every hour?

  (‘Personal Problem’)

  From November 1965 Kavanagh shared an apartment at 136 Upper Leeson Street with Robert MacBryde, Richard Riordan and Frank Henry. ‘The bard’, as Henry called him, had a small return room to himself up a short flight of stairs. MacBryde had fetched up in Dublin after a stint as painting tutor in Hedli MacNeice’s restaurant in Kinsale ended abruptly when he was caught pilfering drinking money from a guest’s handbag. He was penniless and Richard Riordan had undertaken to look after him. Riordan, one of Kavanagh’s favourite medical students, a surrogate son, was now a qualified doctor; the flat was in his name and he paid a large portion of the rent and expenses. For Kavanagh, whose alcoholic lifestyle meant that he was seldom well and who was also something of a hypochondriac, it was comforting to have his personal physician to hand. As well as being available for medical consultations and reassurance, Riordan saw to it that his patient’s prescriptions for Seconal were renewed: Kavanagh alluded to these sleeping pills, on which he had come to rely, as his night sweets or simply his sweets. The fourth member of the No. 136 gang, Frank Henry, was an habitué of McDaid’s, a gentle, retired schoolteacher from County Mayo, full of poetry and stories.

  While Richard Riordan toiled away in Baggot Street Hospital, the strange ménage of retired or semi-retired eccentrics he had brought together lived in relative harmony. Visitors formed the impression that both MacBryde and Riordan were protective towards Kavanagh and generally looked out for him. Frank Henry’s pension helped to sustain the household economically. MacBryde paid his way by taking charge of the cooking. His idea of a cheap meal was to stew a sheep’s head with carrots and onions. Most of the time the trio got by on beans and toast.

  No. 136 Upper Leeson Street was soon nicknamed 10 Rillington Place, notorious as the Notting Hill house where John Christie had carried out his grisly murders. It became a port of call for the McDaid’s set, Frank Henry’s sons Leo and Maurice and their friends, and for many of the young poets and their drinking companions. Daytime visitors to this bachelor pad, Thérèse Cronin recalls, were offered whiskey in an eggcup. At night young poets and medical students arrived with brown bags of stout from McDaid’s or O’Neill’s of Leeson Street and there were late parties — talking, singing and dancing into the small hours. When MacBryde was in a good mood, he would perform a highland fling, one hand up in the air like a ballerina.

  Kavanagh had often gone to bed or was asleep in the living room by the time the revellers arrived; they were bemused to see that he apparently drank in his sleep, for he lay with a naggin bottle in his hand or tucked into the waistband of his underpants and would put it to his lips without opening his eyes. Sometimes he would waken up and join in the fun. James Liddy remembers one evening before closing time when Kavanagh said he was dying and asked that a priest be summoned. Just as the few people present were on the point of taking him seriously, a party of after-hours drinkers turned up and he quickly revived.1 Maurice Henry recalls that the theory of poetry he propounded in his cups was ‘Open your fuckin’ eyes and observe.’ Occasionally, during those wild nights when the talking went on until the small hours, they would hear him pounding away on his typewriter about 6 a.m. At this period he was still turning in a column for the RTV Guide. Despite the congenial company, he hated his pokey room at ‘Rillington Place’. A huge man and much given to gesturing expansively, he disliked being cramped and confined. Although he put up with the constricted space in congested public houses, fellow drinkers noticed that he went outside every so often and took a walk around the block to get some fresh air and exercise. Mrs Veale and her daughter, who arrived on 23 December with some holly to decorate his quarters for Christmas, were horrified to find that his room was so mean and squalid, with newspapers and bottles strewn all over the floor.

  Kavanagh’s first assignment in 1966 was to write an obituary at Michael Foot’s behest for Brian Higgins, who had died in the Hammersmith hospital on 8 December of a rare heart condition. He was only 35. Higgins, who had published two books of poetry, had been drifting about London, jobless and penniless, for the previous six years, staying with one Soho acquaintance after another, a lifestyle all too familiar to his obituarist. Before the year was out, three other friends would also be dead.

  His second assignment that January was the Introduction to MacGibbon and Kee’s new abridged edition of W. Steuart Trench’s Realities of Irish Life (1868), an account of the experiences of a land agent in Ireland during the Famine years and thereafter. Since Trench was the agent who had sacked his paternal grandfather, Patrick Kevany (a fact he does not advert to), this book was of particular interest to him. Magnanimously, in the circumstances, he states his admiration for the book, praising it for ‘its courage: the courage to write about the apparently insignificant’, ‘its evocations of locality’ and its place-names.

  Towards the end of January Katherine told him of the existence of a Granada Fellowship at the University of York and suggested he apply for the 1966/67 academic year. He was immediately interested, asked her to make further enquiries and referred to it himself in the 3 February letter to O’Keeffe which accompanied the Trench Introduction. He applied but was not appointed. Perhaps news of his performance in Northwestern had filtered through, or his reputation as an abusive alcoholic had preceded him.

  Katherine had been knitting a jumper for him over the Christmas break and when it had still not materialised by 25 February he sent her a whimsical reminder, addressing her affectionately as Kate:

  I have a vivid dream — or is it a dream — that I received the pullover yesterday. But it isn’t here now.

  Eventually the garment was finished and dispatched in the middle of March and he wrote to reassure her that it was ‘beautiful’ and not too big.2

  When John Montague came into McDaid’s on Thursday, 10 March, and announced that Frank O’Connor had suffered a fatal heart attack that afternoon, Kavanagh enthused, ‘Good news. Good news.’ Montague was shocked and told him so. He agreed that it was not a nice attitude.3 Two days later, when the Veales drove him and Robert MacBryde to the funeral service in the church at Westland Row, his mood had mellowed and he could recall O’Connor as he had first known him. The eulogies irritated him because he felt they did not do full justice to the friend and mentor of his youth. Turning to Seán White, he quoted Yeats:

  I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day . . .

  Later that same morning he is again reported to have belittled O’Connor’s writing. His moodswings were by now notorious.

  That April, Jimmy Breslin’s account of McDaid’s in the New York Herald Tribune included a vivid portrait of Kavanagh. Breslin came on him seated there, ‘hunched over in his rumpled overcoat with his arms folded’, a pint of stout in front of him. His tie was loose with the long end slung over his shoulder and he was wearing two pairs of spectacles, both ‘cockeyed’ and steamed up. His shoelaces were undone and the laces caught under his soles. He was listening to two elderly women discussing a remedy for lumbago and then he interrupted them in thundering tones: ‘There’s millions of Muslims from Khartoum to Calcutta, and they cure this ailment by . . . ’ The women tried not to hear any more. Then Keith Shaw’s son came into the pub and Kavanagh roared at him: ‘Your father has one lung of mine in his laboratory. Its the finest in the whole f . . . . . . laboratory.’ Breslin found Kavanagh ‘rude and rough and delightful and profane’, but he paid tribute to him as a poet as well as a ‘character’:

  In Ireland, where the poet is important, Paddy Kavanagh is considered the best today.4

  Unfortunately, a piece of journalism such as this, which turned Kavanagh into a live cultural monument and told readers that he was to be found in McDaid’s at any hour, had the effect of sending yet more American sightseers into the pub to stare at him or atte
mpt to engage him in conversation. He was pestered by literary tourists and frequently gave them short shrift.

  Soon the tourists were being redirected to the Bailey or to Sheehan’s pub on Chatham Street. The reason for Kavanagh’s rupture with McDaid’s was a misunderstanding over cheques. The head barman, Paddy O’Brien, knew that Kavanagh’s cheques were only promissory notes, and never attempted to cash them until he was tipped off that there was money in the bank to meet them. This system had worked quite well for years, until one day the owner, John McDaid, intervened unexpectedly and sent a batch of the poet’s cheques off to the bank. There followed an interview between McDaid and Kavanagh in an upstairs office, from which both emerged ashen-faced. Kavanagh never returned to the pub. Paddy O’Brien was so upset at the loss of one of his favourite customers that he sometimes joined him for drinks in the Bailey.

  A 61-year-old alcoholic in precarious health, Kavanagh was still trying to find work. Llewelyn Hughes, a literary agent and an admirer of Kavanagh’s writing, did his best to arrange a weekly newspaper column for him but on 22 March Kavanagh learned that The Observer, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph had all turned him down. Unable to better himself as a columnist, he asked the RTV Guide to increase his weekly pay from £6 to £10 and on 21 April compromised on £7.10. When Harvard University, in liaison with the British Council, renewed its derisory offer of $50 to record him reading his poetry, he again refused, scornfully dismissing the fee as a pittance ‘in a world of Fulbrightery and Sabbaticality’.

  On 1 April Brian O’Nolan died of cancer and Kavanagh attended the funeral in the church on Kilmacud Road. ‘The incomparable Myles’ was one of the few Irish contemporaries whose work and intelligence he respected. Though they were not drinking mates, they were frequently to be found in the same public house company, each aware of the other’s presence and conversation and addressing the odd comment to one another from time to time. Kavanagh missed him. There was really nobody left to talk to in Dublin now, he often remarked in the following months.

  Katherine and her friend Mary Graves arrived in Dublin on 6 April. They were on holiday until 16 April, but Kavanagh absented himself for most of their visit, leaving for Inniskeen on Easter Saturday, 9 April. Whatever excuse he proffered for his absence was plausible, because Katherine did not take offence and her next two letters are as affectionate and trusting as ever.

  During this April visit to Inniskeen his sisters saw him suffer an episode of ‘the rats’. One evening while he was sitting on the bed in his room eating his supper, he felt sure someone was whispering in his ears and he joined them in the sitting room, shaking all over with fright. He was so frightened that Mary sat up with him all night. After this he cut out whiskey for a couple of days.

  By 20 April he was in fine fettle once more and off to Dublin to open an exhibition by the young painter Michael Farrell in the Dawson Gallery the following day. The sisters enjoyed getting him ready: washing his white shirts, sponging his sports jacket and seeing to it that he had some clean handkerchiefs. Mary polished his shoes. He was their man and the two spinster sisters were like surrogate mothers or wives fussing over him. He was an exacting and surly charge, but they tolerated his moods and his rages, consoling themselves that he was fundamentally healthy while ‘he could still roar at them’.

  A week later Annie reported that he was in great form, eating like a horse and drinking alcohol like a fish. While he was in ‘the jigs’, he swore he would never touch alcohol again, but that resolution had lasted only a day or so. Annie’s diagnosis was that the alcohol was burning his insides and causing laceration of the stomach. When she told him to his face that he was a dipsomaniac, he bawled her head off. However, she thought that he was as strong as a bull and was pleased that he was eating so well, averaging five eggs a day plus meat and milk.5

  He returned to Dublin on 26 April and was still there on 2 May when he visited Vivien Veale in the Joyce tower to apologise for calling her a bourgeoise on the telephone. The next time he phoned the tower was to tell her of Robert MacBryde’s death on 6 May.

  MacBryde had been knocked down by a passing car as he crossed the road from the pub after closing time the previous evening; he died shortly afterwards in St Vincent’s Hospital. The Leeson Street flat-share had recently ended, but Kavanagh, who was staying with Joan and Eoin Ryan, had been drinking with him in O’Neills of Leeson Street. They had just gone their separate ways when the accident happened. After MacBryde’s death he retreated to Inniskeen and went on a bender. His sisters reported that he was ‘up and down all night drinking milk, water and bread soda’. When Annie suggested that he give up the whiskey before he killed himself, he told her to go to hell and mind her own business.6

  The prolonged bank strike from 6 May was a godsend to customers such as Kavanagh, whose account was almost permanently overdrawn. He was probably one of the many who took advantage of John Ryan’s generosity in cashing dud cheques during this period, a reckless goodwill that helped to put the Bailey out of business.

  John Berryman, who spent much of 1966 in Dublin finishing his Dream Songs, was eager to meet Kavanagh but, though he lived in the Irish poet’s part of town, staying for a couple of months at the Majestic Hotel off Lower Baggot Street and then renting a house off Northumberland Road, the two contrived to miss one another. Since both were alcoholics with an interest in sonnet form and confessional verse, they should have had much in common and, given Kavanagh’s supposed longing for the companionship of talented writers, he should have welcomed a Pulitzer prizewinner. Possibly because he had taken against Liam Miller, a friend of Berryman, possibly because he feared the threat to his own eminence in Dublin literary circles, he deliberately avoided the American poet. Berryman’s local, where he did much of his writing, was Jack Ryan’s pub in Beggar’s Bush, not one of the Irish poet’s haunts. Finally, John Montague persuaded Kavanagh to attend a Berryman poetry reading on condition that Liam Miller’s name was not mentioned. He arrived with a cohort of supporters and remained at the back of the hall. In his introductory speech Berryman thanked Liam Miller, whereupon there was an immediate eruption from Kavanagh, followed by a noisy exit.

  At the end of May, Katherine wrote chiding him that he had not been in London for almost six months. While they still telephoned each other regularly and she wrote frequently, they had spent very little time together in 1966. However, he was staying with her at 6 St Stephen’s Crescent from 18 June. He had been asked to open the proceedings of the New Moon Carnival of Poetry and the Arts at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 25th. The intention was ‘an international liberation of poetry and all the arts in an act of communal celebration’. It was an anniversary of the reading at the Albert Hall on 11 June the previous year when Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti performed and upwards of 5,000 young people turned up for a marathon poetry reading in which about seventeen poets participated. ‘Poetry had entered the showbiz class’ was how Kavanagh put it.

  In 1966 the poetry reading attracted an audience of 3,500, mostly teenagers. Among his fellow guests were Stevie Smith, Robert Graves, whom he mischievously referred to as the ‘son of the author of Father O’Flynn’, and Spike Milligan. The Daily Express gave a sensational report of the happenings, mentioning obscenities, drunkenness and general rowdiness. Kavanagh’s opening speech was persistently interrupted by a heckler with a loudhailer; his supporters dealt decisively with the nuisance, but he cut his address short and retired to the bar, so he claims to have witnessed none of the later revelries complained of in the Express.7

  He stayed on in London until the middle of July. George Barker was there, riling him as usual. For, while Kavanagh admired Barker’s poetry, the esteem was not mutual. Barker taunted him that he lacked sophistication. It was during this trip that a barman, seeing Kavanagh produce a small bag of bread soda from his pocket and begin taking pinches of it, thought he was snorting cocaine and summoned the police. According to his own calculations, he was consuming about a ton of bicarbon
ate of soda per annum by this stage.8

  Back in Dublin, Christopher Fitz-Simon wrote on behalf of Telefis Éireann to propose a half-hour programme to take the form of a recorded script, with film shot later at the appropriate locations. The recording date would be mid-July, with filming taking place in early August and the fee was £50 and expenses. Both the proposal and fee were acceptable.