The last public event he attended in Dublin was the unveiling of the Wolfe Tone memorial by President de Valera in St Stephen’s Green on Saturday, 18 November. Its sculptor, Edward Delaney, had personally invited him, but the ceremony was a major political event and seating was reserved for VIPs with official invitations. When the ailing poet sat on a reserved seat, a steward attempted to use physical force to eject him. Kavanagh struck out and a minor scuffle ensued. The VIPs looked the other way; Charles Haughey attempted to intervene but it was left to the indignant Katherine to push away the steward and help her husband to leave. Kavanagh was so humiliated by the incident that he went home to Waterloo Road and cried. With less than a fortnight to live, he felt that he was still being dishonoured in his adopted city.
Yet he was fêted on all sides. Students clubbed together to make up the price of a few whiskeys so that they could buy an hour or so of his company. The upcoming generation of young poets revered him. In Sheehan’s or the Bailey he was surrounded by friends, admirers and fans, buying him too many ‘large ones’, killing him with kindness. In the mordantly witty sonnet ‘The Poet Down’, Michael Hartnett, who hated to see Kavanagh dissipate his time and his creative energies getting sozzled, casts a cold eye over the friends, acolytes and groupies thronging about him in the pub in the last months and weeks of his life, waking him before he was quite dead:
He sits between the doctor and the law.
Neither can help. Barbiturate in paw
one, whiskey in paw two, a dying man . . .
The poet is at bay, the hounds baying,
dig his grave with careful kindness saying:
‘Another whiskey and make it a large one!’. . .
They were designing monuments — in case —
and making furtive sketches of his face,
and he could hear above their straining laughs
the rustling foolscap of their epitaphs.31
27
‘SO LONG’
. . . You are lying asleep with your spectacles on,
Lenses that keep clouding over, needing a clean . . .
(Michael Longley, ‘“Epitaph” In Memoriam Patrick Kavanagh’)
‘Patrick Kavanagh never said “Goodbye”; he said, “So long.”’
(Joan Ryan)
Among the Death Notices in The Irish Times on 1 December 1967 was one that read:
Kavanagh Nov 30 1967 in the Merrion Nursing Home, Patrick Kavanagh of 67 Waterloo Road Dublin and late of Inniskeen Co. Monaghan . . . . Remains arriving at St Mary’s Church, Haddington Rd at 5.30 o’c this [Friday] evening. Funeral tomorrow [Sat] after 10 o’c mass to Enniskeen [sic], arriving 12.30 approx. American and English papers please copy.
While Kavanagh had been visibly ailing for many months, his death was sudden and unexpected.
The Abbey Theatre Company was scheduled to perform Tarry Flynn in Dundalk’s Town Hall from Thursday, 23 November, to Saturday, 25 November, and John Ryan drove him to Dundalk to attend the opening night. They travelled on Wednesday and en route stopped off at McNello’s pub in Inniskeen to join some members of the cast who were drinking there. Then they proceeded to Dundalk and spent the night in the Imperial Hotel. When Ryan left the following morning, Kavanagh was already seated in the lounge of the Imperial with a large Scotch. He was in a good mood and had given the waitress a generous tip of five shillings.1 Much of this, his last active day, was spent knocking back whiskey and by the time of the evening performance he felt quite ill.
When Annie and Mary arrived at the Town Hall, they found their brother sitting in the foyer; to their caring, professional eyes he looked a very sick man indeed and they wondered if he had suffered a slight stroke. As they greeted him, he recovered and seemed more like his old self. Satisfied that he was all right, they went to take their seats on the balcony. As the curtain was going up they saw him being helped to his seat by two ambulance men and became concerned about his condition. Mary went down and sat with him throughout the performance. Shortly before the final curtain he retired to Mulligan’s, a nearby pub, where he held court. He appeared to be in great form, greeting well-wishers, making introductions and receiving congratulations, but at closing time his sisters had no difficulty persuading him to return to Mucker with them rather than spend the night in the hotel.
He was ill most of the night and Annie and Mary kept checking on him. On one of her visits to his room, Mary found that he had fallen out of bed and was lying on the floor. He was too heavy for her to lift, so she took the mattress off the bed, made up a makeshift bed on the floor and rolled him on to it. The sisters sent for their GP, Dr Creedon, in the morning. As he gave her a cheque for £3, Patrick joked that she was the first doctor he had ever paid and she countered that she would have preferred payment in kind: two tickets to Tarry Flynn.2
Annie and Mary tried to phone Katherine to tell her that Patrick was very ill, but it was late on Friday evening before they made contact. On Saturday her sister Judy drove Katherine to Mucker. They stayed overnight and took Patrick back with them to Dublin the next morning. Though he complained that he felt he was dying, nobody really heeded him; at this stage of his life he often felt so poorly that he voiced premonitions of death and he always rallied. He did not want to make the journey, but there was a consensus that he would be better off in a hospital or nursing home. Annie and Mary were in their late sixties and they could not cope with nursing him. He was an exceptionally heavy man and difficult to turn in the bed or lift if he fell to the floor. Once in Dublin, Kavanagh’s friend and personal physician Richard Riordan was called and he arranged for him to be admitted to the Merrion Nursing Home at 21 Herbert Street on Monday. He was suffering from pneumonia and general physical deterioration.
Katherine was in daily telephone contact with Annie and Mary. On Monday and Tuesday she reported that he was critically ill. On Tuesday evening he was anointed. A priest had called into his room and asked him if he would like to receive Extreme Unction. He had answered, ‘I don’t mind.’3 Although neither she nor Patrick were always practising Catholics, Katherine was not surprised; she knew that he had an ‘inner faith’. By Wednesday his condition was improving and Richard Riordan was hopeful that he would pull through. Katherine had taken the day off work and spent most of it in the hospital. Before she left that evening, he grabbed her hand urgently and said, ‘Katherine, get me out of here. Put me into a public hospital or something, because this is going to cost so much money, and if it goes on too long, there won’t be any money left for you.’ She was deeply touched that he was worrying about her welfare when he was so ill himself, but she was not prepared to economise where his health was concerned. Even though he seemed so much better, she took the precaution of hiring a nurse to stay with him overnight. On Wednesday evening she said what was to be her last goodbye, leaving him in the nurse’s capable hands. Richard Riordan and Leo Holohan were also present.
About 1 a.m. on Thursday she and her sister Judy were wakened by a phone call from the nursing home: Patrick was dying. Judy drove her there, but they were too late. He had died at 1.25 a.m. Leo Holohan, who was present, reported that his dying words, which he kept repeating were ‘Oh God, I believe.’4 The death certificate recorded the cause of death as pneumonia.
Annie had decided to visit her brother on Thursday to see for herself how he was, but she and Mary were wakened by the gardaí banging on the door in the early hours of Thursday morning. It was Katherine’s only way of getting a message to them because their telephone was not connected to the exchange between midnight and 9 a.m.
That day in the Dublin daily and evening newspapers, reports of Kavanagh’s death, ‘Greatest poet since Yeats’, vied with news of the foot and mouth disease on the front pages. Immediately on learning of the death, Dr McQuaid sent a handwritten letter of sympathy to Katherine, telling her he would like to have visited Patrick in his last illness and that long before the marriage he ‘had arranged that at the shortest notice the poet would be received and car
ed for in the Mater Private Nursing Home. But it was not God’s will.’
Kavanagh’s corpse was laid out in the nursing home and a stream of friends and ‘affectionados’ came to pay their respects. Seamus Murphy, whom he had first met as a fresh-faced young man in Cork in the early 1940s, took a mould for a death mask. Heavy fog at Dublin Airport on Thursday and Friday delayed those travelling from abroad for the funeral, including Kavanagh’s sister Celia and brother Peter.
Despite the travel delays at Dublin Airport, the church in Haddington Road was packed for the arrival of the coffin at 5.30 p.m. on Friday evening and for the funeral Mass, celebrated by the poet’s nephew, Father John Quinn, the following morning. The mourners, in addition to Katherine, Kavanagh’s immediate family and a wide circle of Dublin friends, included the former Taoiseach, John A. Costello, Counsel for the prosecution in the 1954 libel case, and Professor Jeremiah Hogan, President of UCD; Garech Brown, whose company had made the record, Almost Everything; Edward Golden, president of Actors’ Equity and members of the Abbey Theatre Company, which had so recently toured with Tarry Flynn. The Irish President was represented by his aide-de-camp and the Minister for Education was also represented. Other State representatives included Mervyn Wall, secretary of the Arts Council, Chief Justice Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, Erskine Childers, Minister for Transport and Power and TD for County Monaghan, and Senator Eoin Ryan. (Joan Ryan was in hospital.) David Wright had travelled from London, as had Kavanagh’s publishers and friends, Martin Green and Timothy O’Keeffe. Among the numerous young poets who had come to make their farewells were Leland Bardwell, Paul Durcan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Brian Lynch, John Montague and Macdara Woods.
After the Mass the funeral cortège travelled along Pembroke Road, Raglan Road and Waterloo Road, a farewell to the streets that the poet had made his beat since 1943. It then set off for Inniskeen in dense fog and was joined by many of his Monaghan neighbours at Ardee. The cortège stopped briefly as it approached Inniskeen and the hearse and chief mourners detoured to pass by the family home at Mucker. Near the chapel a crowd of four or five hundred from the parish and neighbouring districts was waiting. Among them was Patrick’s sister Sissie McLoughlin; she had come from Donegal for the funeral, though she was dying of cancer herself. The mourners walked after the cortège for the last quarter-mile.
On a desolate wintry day Patrick Kavanagh was buried. As the candles fluttered and the crows flapped overhead, Leo Holohan spoke the funeral oration5 and three fellow poets read a selection of his poems: John Montague, ‘In Memory of My Mother’; Seamus Heaney, ‘A Christmas Childhood’; David Wright, ‘Shancoduff’. Dr Richard Riordan concluded the readings with the sonnet ‘1954’. Afterwards, in Dan McNello’s pub, Katherine sat surrounded by mourners. Reminiscences of the poet as Dubliner and Londoner were exchanged with those of locals who recalled his prowess as a footballer, ‘a good man in the goal’.6
REFERENCES
List of abbreviations used:
APC
A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose
BA
Peter Kavanagh, Beyond Affection
BL
British Library, London
E
Envoy
GF
The Green Fool
GH
The Great Hunger
HRHRC
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin
IFJ
Irish Farmers’ Journal
II
Irish Independent
IP
Irish Press
IT
The Irish Times
JIL
The Journal of Irish Literature
JJP
John Jordan Papers, the National Library of Ireland
Annie K
Annie Kavanagh
Celia K
Celia Kavanagh
PK
Patrick Kavanagh
Peter K
Peter Kavanagh
KA
The Kavanagh Archive, University College, Dublin
KW
Kavanagh’s Weekly
LF
Peter Kavanagh (ed.), Lapped Furrows
LML
Lockwood Memorial Library, SUNY, Buffalo
MCQA
The McQuaid Archive, the Chancellory, Drumcondra, Dublin
MGC
‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, Studies, Spring 1959
MML
The Mugar Memorial Library, Boston
NA
The National Archives, Dublin
NL
The National Library of Ireland, Dublin
QUB
The Queen’s University of Belfast
RUL
Reading University Library
S
The Standard
SK
Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper
SP
Self-Portrait
TCD
The Library of Trinity College, Dublin
TF
Tarry Flynn
UCD
University College, Dublin
Victoria
Archives and Special Collections, McPherson Library, University of Victoria Library, Victoria, B.C., Canada
Chapter 1
The story of his father’s illegitimacy was first broken by Peter Kavanagh in Sacred Keeper, 13–14. Sr Una Agnew’s pioneering research on the Kavanagh genealogy is in The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh, 140–56.
1.‘Dictator’s Geneology’ [sic] in To Anna Quinn, Third Poems by Patrick Kavanagh (1938) Ms. 9579, NL.
2.Records of the Royal Albert Institute, UCD Archives.
3.All data on Kednaminsha school and its teachers from Education Register, Ed 1/73 and Ed 2/37, Folios 18 and 116, NA.
4.Larry Meegan (ed.), The Inniskeen Story, 183–9.
5.ibid. Chapter 1.
6.PK’s notes on family history in KA.
7.‘Tramp’ probably designated one who had been evicted from his home and farm because he could not afford the rent.
8.All data on Tullamore Workhouse from Minute Books of the Board of Guardians of Tullamore (1839–1921), Offaly County Library.
9.SK, 14.
10.Family Commonplace Book, KA.
11.PK to Peter K, 29 July 1942, KA; LF, 75.
12.The Sunderland Yearbook, 1905, 109.
13.PK’s notes on family history in KA.
14.The document signing over rights in the family home and land to the heir was known as ‘the writings’. Michael Callan’s document is in KA.
15.Based on SK, 20 and numerous descriptions by PK.
16.Census of 1901, NA.
17.RTV Guide, 21 January 1966.
18.Celia K, ‘A Memoir of Peter Kavanagh’, courtesy of Maureen Lynch (Lucy Kavanagh’s daughter).
19.Ms. 3220, NL.
20.BA, 4.
21.Farm purchase document in KA.
Chapter 2
Where not otherwise stated, this account of Kavanagh’s childhood is based on The Green Fool.
1.The confusion over Kavanagh’s date of birth was noted by Agnew, op. cit. 56–7.
2.SK, 18.
3.ibid. 19.
4.KW, 19 April 1952.
5.James Kavanagh’s Cobbler’s Account Book, Ms. 3220, NL.
6.S, Easter Supplement, 1948.
7.RTV Guide, 25 June 1965.
8.IP, 15 December 1942.
9.IFJ, 27 December 1958.
10.Celia K, ‘Memoir of Peter Kavanagh’.
11.IFJ, 24 January 1959.
12.IFJ, 1 April 1961.
13.‘Journeymen Shoemakers’, IT, 16 July 1936.
14.PK, ‘Old Wives Tales of Ireland’, Family Doctor, July 1952.
15 Larry Meegan (ed.), The Inniskeen Story, 183.
16.Dr Bernard Ó Dubhthaigh, ‘The Last Native Irish Speaker in Farney’, ibid. 175–81.
17.e.g. The Bell, January 1948.
&n
bsp; 18.Testimonial from Roscommon employer in KA.
19.Celia K, loc. cit.
20.IFJ, 26 May 1962.
21.From exercise book containing some of Kavanagh’s school essays in KA (Kav/B/162). Augustine Martin noted these points in ‘That Childhood Country: Extracts from a Biography of Patrick Kavanagh’, Irish University Review, 23.1, Spring/Summer 1993.
22.Noted on Kednaminsha School Register.
23.KW, 10 May 1952.
24.IFJ, 16 May 1959.
25.SK, 14.
26.IFJ, 1 April 1961.
27.TF, 6.
28.KA.
29.Agnew, op. cit 57, gives the date as 16 June.
30.IFJ, 11 October 1958.
31.Meegan, op. cit. 151–2.
32.Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, 197–201.
33.This incident may have been invented. Mangan’s poem was in Lucy Kavanagh’s Intermediate Poetry Book.
34.The Patrician Brothers’ secondary school in Carrickmacross was called the High School.
35.Salaries Book, Co. Monaghan, 1917–1918, 5498, Kidnaminsha [sic], NA.
36.Ms. 3214, NL.
Chapter 3
1.RTV Guide, 15 January 1965.
2.IFJ, 6 December1958.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 67
