Collected Prose : We have, in Ireland, the figure of the Lovely Man. In literary terms, the Lovely Man is he who threatens no one, praises everyone, and rises, like a bubble in a beerglass, through sheer vacuity.
Such charmers have been with us since the founding of the State. Patrick Kavanagh, for better or worse, was never one of them.
Antoinette Quinn, in her life of the poet, has detailed the unlovely aspects of his dress and character, and returns relentlessly to the subject in her introduction to these, his occasional writings. Why anyone should care, at this stage, about Kavanagh's dishevelment at Áras an Uachtaráin receptions or his inability to know his place in the pecking order, I do not know. As time has shown, his sense of superiority to others present at these deadly affairs was only too justified. The state of the poet's socks no longer troubles the Dublin air. The state of his mind is only just beginning to.
What then was the problem with Kavanagh, where others were concerned? I would state it, roughly, as follows: as long as a poet sticks to the writing of poems, he is socially harmless. But the volatility of the poetic mind expressing itself in prose, with its dangerous social dimension, threatens everyone. Essays included here on Frank O'Connor and F.R. Higgins illustrate the dilemma. On the one hand, they are savagely hurtful towards two men who were well-disposed. On the other hand, they happen to be true, and their truth - for which the poet paid a terrible price socially - was a liberating one for the nation as a whole. Do the claims of friendship outweigh the claims of truth? It depends who you ask.
Kavanagh, Quinn seems to suggest, eschewed the violence of his earlier opinions and mellowed towards the end of his life. It is hard to tell, because this selection is not arranged chronologically - a good idea, as it scrambles the elements of the myth and forces us to look at it afresh - and partly because a moralist and a lyricist walk hand in hand through the potato fields of memory and imagination, digressing endlessly and effortlessly into each other in almost every piece. Whatever the matter in hand, the whole personality of the poet is brought to bear.
New elements - and there may be others yet to unearth in the uncollected journalism - add to his many-sidedness. The desire, for instance, to go soldiering (how many poets are frustrated men of action?), or his wise and humorous treatment of a "gay issue" (the Casement Diaries). Yet the iconoclasm, the capacity to go against the grain in matters of taste, stayed with him right to the end, as his 1965 centenary piece on Yeats, included here, seems to prove.
Throughout his writing life, Kavanagh seems to have been in two minds about his great predecessor. The "American" Yeats of the Celtic Twilight he had no time for. But the later "European" Yeats, awake to the great crisis of consciousness beyond Ireland, though soon to include it, seems to have touched a chord. Synge, Higgins, "Bertie" Rodgers et al. are linked with the early Yeats as purveyors of a "Protestant myth" of Ireland for export, especially to the US, while the "Catholic European" Joyce and George Moore join forces with the later Yeats and Samuel Beckett on a different escape route, to placelessness and truth. Yeats, while never an example, was always a touchstone.
Occasional prose, for a poet, is a way of elaborating or refining a system of values by trying it out on a public. Kavanagh was no exception. The pieces collected here are variations on two or three central themes or tenets. The redemptive power of poetic imagination ("I do not remember, I see . . ."); the "lie" of Ireland as a spiritual entity; and distrust of "the liberal opposition" as "part of the regime". Cyril Connolly's Unquiet Grave, with its mix of aphorism, quotation and lyrical diary was his preferred model for any volume of such writings. "Ours," Kavanagh explained, "is the age of the magpie."
Decades later, the present selection, with its lyrical sketches, intuitive aperçus and immortal asides, is surprisingly close to the original blueprint.
It was Kavanagh's tragedy (though he outgrew the idea of tragedy) to have passed his writing life as a European mind in the decades of Ireland's greatest isolation from Europe.
His true peers, far from being O'Connor and O'Faolain, are Cyril Connolly and Albert Camus, whose Enemies of Promise and Lyrical and Critical respectively, do for their home places what A Poet's Country does for ours - project back into an Edenic childhood, and forward to an engagement with the politics of the Fall.
Harry Clifton was 2002 Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. Berkeley's Telephone and Other Fictions, his most recent book, is published by Lilliput Press
Patrick Kavanagh: A Poet's Country. Selected Prose. Edited with an introduction by Antoinette Quinn. Lilliput Press. 320 pp.