Kavanagh Reconsidered Exhibition Booklet

Exhibition. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM

I know I was not important as I moved Through the colourful country, I was but a single Item in the picture, the namer not the beloved.

‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was a poet of contradictions. Though imaginatively identified with rural Ireland, he spent most of his adult life in urban settings, moving between Dublin and London and occasionally travelling further afield to Continental Europe and America. His writing reveals a preoccupation with place and community, but Kavanagh himself led an unsettled existence, changing addresses frequently and undertaking unplanned trips in search of work and creative renewal. Yet in spite of many challenges, he remained committed to the writing life. From his early pastoral lyrics, through the barren rural existence anatomised in The Great Hunger, to the late poems of spiritual renewal, Kavanagh remained convinced of poetry’s power to bear witness, a power akin to that of prayer. For him, art was an expression of love; he believed that attentive reflection was essential to any understanding of the human condition. Persistent disappointments, both in his writing and personal life, underpinned the bitter satirical work of the 1950s, which laid bare the faults of an Ireland on the cusp of modernisation. From that period of darkness, Kavanagh emerged in the last decade of his life to write with renewed energy of the capacity of everyday experiences to surprise and inspire.

His legacy for later Irish writers is profound, and far exceeds his pioneering representation of rural life. His work challenges readers to open their minds to what is new and rebellious in literature, and to recognise the shaping force of their own lived experience in the encounter with art.

Curator: Dr Lucy Collins, UCD School of English, Drama and Film

Cover, portrait left: Patrick Kavanagh, aged about 33; portrait right: Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce in a horse-drawn carriage, Bloomsday, Monkstown, Co. Dublin (courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

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Early Years Born in Inniskeen in 1904, into a family of subsistence farmers, Kavanagh experienced at first hand the challenges of rural life in Ireland before and after the establishment of the Irish Free State. Though he went to primary school at Kednaminsha, as far as literature was concerned, the young Kavanagh was effectively an autodidact. He enjoyed reading popular publications – Ireland’s Own and The Irish Homestead – and immersed himself in the poetry of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. This reading shaped his early taste in verse and provided the model for his first attempts at writing.

Despite the striking immediacy of his work, and his endless desire to surprise and provoke, Kavanagh remained attentive to literary tradition throughout his career. His force of personality is evident in almost all of his writing: it 2

gives his letters and commentaries vitality, and lends momentum even to his apprentice poems. Leaving school at the age of thirteen, Kavanagh lacked the motivation to follow a trade, instead drifting into a life of manual labour. His response to the place of his birth was mixed: he appreciated both the beauty of Inniskeen and the conviviality of rural life, but was distanced from it by his literary interests and his growing love of language.

Becoming a Poet By the late 1920s, Kavanagh’s poems had appeared in the Irish Weekly Independent and the Dundalk Democrat, but were heavily influenced by late-nineteenth-century sentimental modes. He was ambitious to gain a more sophisticated readership, however, and studied the Irish Statesman to learn what kinds of poems achieved critical acceptance. Encouraged by Æ’s publication of his work there, and by the selection of his poem ‘Ploughman’ for the British anthology Best Poems of 1930, Kavanagh was determined to gain access to Dublin literary circles. Without any advance planning, he set off on foot from Monaghan to the capital, and three days later arrived unannounced at Æ’s house; there he received a warm welcome and the first of many book loans. He returned to Inniskeen with volumes by Dostoyevsky, Melville, Whitman and James Stephens, often hiding them in the hedgerows in order to read them in breaks from farm work. In Dublin Æ continued his support of Kavanagh – whom he regarded as ‘a new young genius’ – and introduced him to other writers and editors, such as Frank O’Connor and 3

1. ‘The Faeryland of Song’ and ‘To a Lovely One’, ms. copybook, poems transcribed

by Peter Kavanagh; 2. Kavanagh’s Commonplace Book; 3. ‘A Train Journey’, ms. copybook in Kavanagh’s hand; background, To a Lovely One

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Seán O’Faoláin, who would be influential in the poet’s later life. With poems published in the Dublin Magazine and the Irish Times, Kavanagh soon had his first full manuscript accepted by Macmillan of London. This work contained little of his lived experience on the farms of Monaghan, but 1

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Ploughman and Other Poems appealed to a lingering taste for Georgian pastoral among some English readers. The book received a mixed reception when it was published in 1936. Though several reviewers praised individual poems, the collection as the whole was judged to be bookish: the poet’s ‘fresh, personal experiences… made dim’ by outdated Celticism.

Towards The Great Hunger Despite this equivocal response, Kavanagh continued to write steadily, and

by October 1937 he had gathered some forty unpublished poems. Earlier that year he had departed for London, intending only a few week’s stay; indeed, the trip was so hastily planned that Kavanagh had left a gathering of poems in Dublin with F. R. Higgins and had nothing immediately to offer London journals. However, he made contact with the writer John Gawsworth, who loaned him money and introduced him to other literary figures, including George Bernard Shaw. Kavanagh struck up a friendship with Gawsworth, who anthologised three of his poems in Fifty Years of Modern Verse (1938). Keenly aware of the demands of the literary marketplace, 4

Kavanagh decided to try his hand at prose writing and was commissioned

by Helen Waddell at Constable to write an autobiographical prose work.

The completed manuscript was rejected by Constable’s reader, however, but was picked up by the publisher Michael Joseph, who suggested significant revisions and re-titled it The Green Fool. Kavanagh would later repudiate this work as inauthentic, but it was well received on publication by reviewers who praised its balance of lyricism and realism.

With the outbreak of World War II imminent, Kavanagh returned to Dublin.

There he shared accommodation with his brother Peter, while seeking commissions in newspapers and magazines. These were challenging times for the freelance writer, however: Dublin’s print industry faced major economic difficulties and Irish neutrality during the war alienated British publishers.

As a result Kavanagh had to content himself with writing occasional articles for the Irish Times and the Irish Independent while he looked for other

1. Ploughman and Other Poems (1936); 2. The Green Fool, amended page proofs 3. ‘My Room’, bound photo-reproduction of ms. poems; 4. Letter from Kavanagh to his sister Celia, c. 1933; background, After May.

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employment. He was published by Seán O’ Faoláin in The Bell from its inception; its championing of literary realism encouraged Kavanagh’s move away from nostalgic lyricism. Despite the prevailing view that Kavanagh was 1

the mainstay of the city’s pub scene during these years, he worked hard at his writing, investing considerable time in completing a new work of 2

fiction, provisionally titled Stony Grey Soil. This failed at first to find a publisher and, even after it had been substantially rewritten as Tarry Flynn (1948), it made little critical impact.

Though Kavanagh had been awarded the Æ memorial prize in 1939, he published little in the decade that followed. He continued to write, however, and in the absence of a public readership, his poetry evolved in significant ways. He became increasingly preoccupied by the inauthenticity of Revivalist portrayals of Irish rural life, and deplored the narrowness of outlook exemplified by De Valera’s Ireland. A passionate commitment to disclose lived realities was the driving force behind the single literary achievement for which Kavanagh is most remembered. The Great Hunger – a long poem of extraordinary thematic and formal daring – details the spiritual and sexual deprivation of Patrick Maguire, a subsistence farmer. Kavanagh began work on the poem in October 1941 and, as the text grew, found in it a means to address the crisis of rural depopulation, brought about by emigration and late marriage. Those who read the work in manuscript immediately recognised its importance; the English poet John Betjeman, then cultural

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attaché in Dublin, arranged for an excerpt to be included in a special Irish issue of Horizon magazine that appeared in 1941. The following year, the poem was published in full by Cuala Press, in a limited edition of 250 copies.

It would be a further five years before The Great Hunger appeared with a British publisher, however. It was reprinted in the Macmillan volume A Soul for Sale (1947), amply demonstrating Kavanagh’s movement from nostalgia to disenchantment during these years.

Trial and Error The 1950s were a challenging time for Kavanagh. Heavy drinking made him increasingly combative in his dealings with other writers, both in person and in print, and he had difficulty sustaining relationships. In 1949 he began 4 1. Typescript draft for Kavanagh’s Weekly; 2. John Betjeman, Collected Poems (1958); 3. Letter from Ferguson Ltd, rejecting Kavanagh’s job application; 4.

Telegram from the Civil Service Commission; background, First edition of Kavanagh’s Weekly signed by Patrick and Peter.

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writing a monthly ‘diary’ for John Ryan’s short-lived Envoy magazine, opening with trenchant criticism of his contemporaries and a warning against conservatism: ‘We must beware of looking for another Yeats. The enemies, or the fools, of art, always want another of the same thing’. To combat this tendency, he and his brother launched Kavanagh’s Weekly in 1952. Though early issues published work by a range of contributors, increasingly Kavanagh wrote much of the copy himself, including letters to the editor. The journal soon became a vehicle for attacks by the poet on those aspects of Irish life that he most vehemently opposed. Kavanagh’s increasingly embattled state of mind led him, in 1954, to take a libel case against the Leader newspaper after an unflattering portrait of him appeared in its pages. Kavanagh lost the case and was left further impoverished and with increased feelings of insecurity and depression. Convinced that his decision to live in Dublin was ‘the worst mistake of my life’, he gave poetic expression to his alienation in harsh satirical verse. To lift his spirits, Kavanagh moved to London for a time and later travelled to New York – a trip paid for by American friends John and Dede Farrelly. The New York press responded negatively to his iconoclastic remarks, but Kavanagh loved the energy of the city and enjoyed meeting American poets Conrad Aiken, Richard Eberhart and Allen Ginsberg and the influential publisher and editor of Poetry London, Tambimuttu.

Renewal The final decade of Kavanagh’s life was marked by an extraordinary burst of creative energy. A cancer diagnosis and life-threatening surgery yielded late poems of great simplicity and spiritual intensity. Some of these were hand printed by his brother Peter as Recent Poems (1958) but a more varied selection of nineteen poems – including satires – had appeared in the London literary journal Nimbus in 1956: ‘I am incoherent with enthusiasm’, wrote its editor David Wright, ‘he is not an Irish poet, he is the Irish poet’.

This publication whetted the appetite of the British poetry reading public for more of Kavanagh’s work and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling was published by Longman, Green and Company in 1960, and selected as the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice for that year. A glowing review in the New Yorker noted the remarkable renewal of Kavanagh’s talent, ‘not so much by a process of orderly growth as by a continual breaching of boundaries’.

2 1. Typescript, ‘Patrick Kavanagh on America’; 2. Corrected typescript, ‘A Visit to Ezra Pound’; background, Letter to Sheila O’Grady.

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In spite of all the vicissitudes of his personal and professional life, Kavanagh’s 2

energy for creative invention remained.

In this late work Kavanagh transcends his difficult relationship with his peers;

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here his early love of nature is restored but with an added philosophical resonance. Poems such as ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘The Hospital’ are memorable for their joyous and inventive treatment of the city to which he had given the greater part of his creative life. This development provided a form of creative resolution, as the poet himself noted: ‘curious this, how I had started off with the right simplicity, indifferent to crude reason, and then ploughed my way through complexities and anger, hatred and ill-will towards the faults of man, and came back to where I started.’ Yet in spite of their wit and immediacy – and their close connections to the poet’s own life and experience – the poems from this phase of Kavanagh’s career also show how much he had learned from his reading of both British and American poetry. In praising the work of Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, in particular, Kavanagh aligned himself with the more transgressive poetries of the time. When in 1965 his brother Peter persuaded him of the lively interest in Irish writing among readers and academics in America, Kavanagh planned a return visit. His trip to Northwestern University for a Yeats Symposium was marred by his antagonism of its conservative audience, however. Once again Kavanagh’s disparagement of both poets and critics lost him valuable support. His negativity made him seem unreceptive to changing aesthetic values, but it indicated his continuing need to generate creative energy through conflict.

The final phase of Kavanagh’s life was marked by significant health problems, 3

but a greater degree of personal happiness than he had experienced before.

His relationship with Katherine Moloney brought much-needed stability and, after a prolonged period travelling between Ireland and England, where Katherine lived, the two married and settled in Dublin. This resolution of a turbulent private life was matched by a quietening of his poetic voice. Yet Kavanagh’s work in the last decade of his life would strengthen his reputation both in Ireland and abroad, and forms a fitting conclusion to his Collected Poems, a volume which remains essential reading for all lovers of Irish poetry.

1. Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960); 2. Typescript of one of Kavanagh’s extra-mural lectures at UCD; 3. Notes on Jonathan Swift for lecture to be delivered at UCD; background, Letter from Catherine Moloney.

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FURTHER READING Allison, Jonathan. ‘Patrick Kavanagh and Antipastoral.’ The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Ed. Matthew Campbell.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 42-58.

Goodby, John. Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Fryatt, Kit. ‘Patrick Kavanagh’s “Potentialities”.’ The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry. Eds Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 181-195.

Heaney, Seamus. ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal: The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh.’ Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber, 1980. 115-130.

Kavanagh, Patrick. Collected Pruse. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967.

Kavanagh, Patrick. The Complete Poems. Ed. Peter Kavanagh. New York: Peter Kavanagh Hand Press; Newbridge, Co. Kildare: The Goldsmith Press, 1972.

Quinn, Antoinette. Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003.

Quinn, Antoinette. Patrick Kavanagh: Born-Again Romantic. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991.

Kilcoyne, Catherine. ‘Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic “Dispensation”: Re-reading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger.’ Irish University Review 42.1 (Spring 2012): 88-104.

Lynch, Brendan. Prodigals and Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2011.

I would like to acknowledge the help and support of the following in the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin: Evelyn Flanagan, Eugene Roche and Daniel Conneally in Special Collections, Ursula Byrne and University Librarian Dr John Howard. I’m grateful to Kate Manning for advising on relevant holdings in UCD Archives and making these available. Thanks also to Ger Garland who designed the exhibition panels and booklet. It was a pleasure to work on the Kavanagh materials with students on UCD’s MA in Anglo-Irish Literature: Amanda Byrne, Eanna Gordon, Marita Gorman, Rachael Groat, Patrick Kelleher, Laura Loftus, Harry Ó Cléirigh, Megan Shaw, Paula Daniela Silva Marinho, Loic Wright and Zoe Yohn.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM James Joyce Library

ISBN: 978-1-910963-13-5 © UCD, 2017

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