I wonder what Patrick Kavanagh would have made of this biography. When Alan Warner of Magee College suggested one, Kavanagh declared, with customary charity, that Warner was "a cod, but well-meaning, and English and very cute to think of this book". But when he realised the possible invasion of privacy involved, he nearly "went up a lamp post". Also, there is something ghoulish about a biographical sleuth trying to dissect your own life while you are still alive and kicking, and can still change the script.
And Kavanagh was unusually secretive, in a "country-cute" way, like the old farmer concealing his money in the mattress. But Antoinette Quinn has an advantage over her subject. From Monaghan herself, she presumably had ample opportunity to study what archaeologists or anthropologists might call The Monaghan Man, one of the more extreme versions of the Irish Male.
Biographies like this help us fill in our natural curiosity about our favourite writers, and Kavanagh was a legend in his lifetime. What did he have to hide? The first surprise is to learn that his father was a bastard, whose own father's name was really Patrick Kevany, a disgraced schoolmaster. Disgraced because he lived openly with the poet's granny, but did not marry her, perhaps because she was a lively woman who had already had a child by "the Tramp McHugh". Country matters, indeed!
It is a complicated story, of interest because of its effect on Kavanagh's father, who could be rough-tongued and irascible. "Bastardy impoverished the poet's father," says Quinn. "Patrick Kevany made some contributions towards his maintenance, but James did not otherwise benefit from his father's educational advantages . . . He grew up in a three-room cabin in a household whose senior male figure . . . carried on the lowly occupations of stone-breaker and farm labourer."
Kavanagh loved his cobbler father, who leathered him, as was the custom of the time. He was also beaten at school. He first glimpsed a Miss Cassidy, whom he would later describe as "a big woman with a heavy coarse face", walking with a clutch of canes under her arm. Quinn writes: "Seven or eight hard slaps of the cane on each hand at least once a day was commonplace, often accompanied by a box on the ear or a kick on the behind." Only once did his red pencil essays give a glimpse of his poetic future, when, in an essay on gardens, he wrote: "the lover of nature . . . can see beauty in everything. He can see the finger of God even in a nettle."
Otherwise Kavanagh seemed an almost normal Iniskeen adolescent, leaving school early to work on the small farm, which was meant to become his. And graduating to play for the Iniskeen Senior team, the Rovers. In goal, because big hands and big feet can seem shambling under other circumstances, but are a help when you are trying to stop a ball in a small space. For a decently reared girl, Ms Quinn shows a profound appreciation of the skills required to "gut your man": football in Monaghan, as in Tyrone, was related to the faction fights of old.
Kavanagh's double life began when, as he says, he began to "dabble" in verse. With little stimulus beyond the poems in the old school books, and no example beyond the local Bard of Callenberg, his persistence was impressive. The Bard published in the Dundalk Democrat, where Kavanagh had his first real poem, Address to an Old Wooden Gate. The Irish Weekly Independent ran a poetry competition, and Quinn tells us that, although he never got first prize, he was published 15 times "as one of a number of runners-up".
Then, on farming business in Dundalk, he happened to come on AE's Irish Statesman, which became his Home University. He made a pilgrimage to see AE, who received him with kindness, and loaded him with books such as Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which would become a talismanic book. AE wrote to Yeats, extolling "a new young genius . . . a small farmer in Monaghan, whose verses have a wild and original fire in them". He also said "it would be years before he is able to make his wild intuitions into art".
Generous and prophetic words, indeed, but a poet needs luck, and Kavanagh was not to be spoiled in that direction. The Irish Statesman folded because of a libel action, just as they had begun to publish his poems, leaving the Dublin Magazine as his main Irish outlet. And when he tried to make a bit of money with his autobiography, The Green Fool, it was shot down by Gogarty in another libel action. Indeed, libel actions would haunt his life; his illness was aggravated by the action he himself took against The Leader years later, an act of folly akin to Oscar Wilde.
Even world events were against him. His move to Dublin coincided with what he called "The Hitler War", and Macmillan lost interest, leaving him stranded. His early masterpiece, The Great Hunger (1942), sold only a few copies in its Cuala edition. So he had to scrape a living as a journalist, while hoping to stumble on the gold mine Auden accused Yeats of exploiting, "the parish of rich women". It was during this period that the legend of Kavanagh as an uncouth but gifted savage began to grow.
It did not help that Kavanagh tended to bite the helping hand. He seemed to subscribe more than most to the theory that you should never leave a good deed unpunished, and nearly everyone who helped him got scorched. AE escaped by dying, but Frank O'Connor, an early and loyal supporter, was blasted in an article called "Coloured Balloons". And later Anthony Cronin and myself received many a lick for trying to spread the good word.
An aspect that Kavanagh certainly tried to conceal was his love life. According to Ms Quinn he was "very susceptible to the charms of pretty women from puberty and regularly fell in love twice a year". She also observes that "he was a secretive man who had the knack of making each woman friend think that she was the only woman in his world". There is an early, unpublished collection dedicated to a mysterious Anna Quinn (perhaps a relation?), and in practice Patrick was as much of a Muse Poet as Robert Graves.
But he was no moonstruck calf; he also longed for fulfilment in the flesh. His efforts in that direction make a pathetic commentary on the peculiar morals of the period, presided over by his mingy patron, John Charles McQuaid. Ms Quinn teases out the story behind Raglan Road and does justice, at last, to the noble woman who became Patrick's wife. I have said enough to suggest that this is a brave, strong book. Brave because the brother is always in the background, commanding all approaches, like a spiritual bouncer. Strong because Quinn has mastered so much stray material from the files of old newspapers, the Standard and the Irish Press. There are the inevitable mistakes in detail, but one looks forward to her selection of Kavanagh's prose, and a new and better Collected. Kavanagh can descend from that lamp post!
John Montague, first Ireland Professor of Poetry, is the author, most recently, of Company, A Memoir (Duckworth) and Selected Poems (Penguin). He was the anonymous editor of Kavanagh's Collected Poems (1964)