Legend of the fall

TheLastStraw: I finally got around to reading Antoinette Quinn's powerful biography of Patrick Kavanagh recently.

And call me an old romantic, but amid all the poetry and poverty and hard drinking, what really struck me about Kavanagh's life was his amazing capacity for falling in love.

Even allowing for the fact that poets would always be a high-risk group, and bearing in mind that they didn't have television back then and people had to make their own entertainment, the frequency with which he embarked on passionate-but-doomed love affairs was startling. In the early 1940s, he seemed to be averaging one a year.

We're not talking about mere sexual liaisons here. In late 1943, for example, after a whirlwind romance, he became engaged to a woman called Nola O'Driscoll. He even found a flat for when they were married, an outcome that would depend on him securing a steady job in the meantime. Unfortunately he didn't get the job, and the heart-broken couple called off the engagement in early 1944.

But 1944 was "not an altogether unhappy year", Quinn writes. By autumn, "Kavanagh had once again fallen in love". It's a strange phrase "to fall in love", implying as it does an accident, or at any rate something you'd avoid given advance notice. It is instructive to learn that in 1959, when he was still falling in love, Kavanagh also fell into the Grand Canal, near Baggot Street Bridge. The popular opinion at the time was that he had just been drinking too much and stumbled. But according to the book, he himself believed it was "an assassination attempt".

He named the supposed culprit as a former friend, a spray-paint merchant, who once gave him a job canvassing business for the company. The poet had since written a hard-hitting and possibly libellous exposé of the paint sector - "Memories of a Spray-Paint Canvasser" - in the Farmers Journal, thus providing his ex-friend with a murder motive. On the night of the canal incident, Kavanagh claimed he had been invited for a reconciliatory drink. The drink was allegedly spiked. And the poet further alleged that he regained consciousness as he was being thrown off the bridge, with his former employer's words - "Over you go, you f****r!" - ringing in his ears.

I quote the story by way of providing context for Kavanagh's romantic adventures. By the end of the book, I had lost track of the number of his accidents, love-wise, and had to resort to checking the index. Disappointingly, this did not have a listing for "Love, PK falls in, 87, 103, 121, 142, 174"; whereas it did have one for "Grand Canal, PK falls into, 384-86, 388". But I eventually found what I was looking for under the sub-sub-section "Kavanagh/relations with women/love affairs".

And the list was impressive.

Not all the women fell in love with him, of course. But then, historically, the concept of falling in love has not always been the same for both genders. Even after a bad fall, a man could usually get up, whereas a fallen woman often had trouble regaining her balance.

The phrase, and maybe even the concept, seems to be going out of fashion. In the era of double-income mortgages, a young person needs to find a strategic partner rather than someone who may be temporarily unbalanced by desire. Even the term "love affair" has lost its gloss. Too often featured in stories about oversexed soccer players, the word "affair" has come down in the world, like a once-posh hotel that has dropped from five stars to three and opened a nightclub.

Maybe the popularity of romance is inversely proportional to economic well-being. There was a war on and times were grim when Kavanagh wrote (about the 1944 woman): "In Grafton Street, in November, we tripped lightly along the ledge/Of a deep ravine." In the peace and prosperity of November 2005, with Grafton Street pedestrianised and paved in Eurobrick, it's hard for us to imagine the dangerous thrill he once felt there.

For all his accidents, there was usually a voluntary element in Kavanagh's romances. During his first official affair, when he "fell very badly" (from a safe distance) for a woman called May Crawley, he was driven to write poetry about the misery of unrequited love. The misery was apparently unjustified. His hard-headed mother believed the woman would have had no hesitation requiting if given the chance.

He was not always so in control of the situation. When he wrote in Raglan Road that he "loved too much", he certainly wasn't exaggerating and the regret was probably genuine. But whether it was love he was falling into, or just the canal, he never seemed to need much pushing.