Essay: With commemorations of the centenary of Patrick Kavanagh's birth in full swing, poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Macdara Woods remember Katherine Kavanagh , his widow.
Remembering Katherine Kavanagh is revisiting the cheerful, unprosperous world of literary, artistic and political dissent of Ireland at the mid-century. For her younger friends, such as the two of us, she recalled its energies, its enthusiasms and prejudices. At the centre of that world was the experience of emigration, not just to Britain - Paris or Spain could be reached, just about, and Patrick Kavanagh mentioned with approval a young poet's brave advance on Rome - but given an essential flavour by the constant traffic back and forth to London. Many who found Ireland's conservative, censored society hard to take, remained bound by a strong adhesive to their place of origin, to the people and the traditions of rebellion; and that was true of Katherine.
London in those decades had a shifting Irish population including the jobless, the shiftless, and the students occasionally labouring in factories, on the building sites, in the National Health, or temping in offices, as well as those longer-term migrants who never thought of themselves as really living in England. For all of them there were the discomforts of the ferries and the rush of arrival in those homes from homes, nodes of news and excitement and coin-operated phones and luggage and messages left with barmen, which were the pubs of emigration. In London there was the hospitality of the flats and bedsits of the established, for whom too there were homecomings and continuities constantly reinforced with the Irish base. People like Katherine would help newcomers to find a place; she knew the pitfalls, having suffered herself at the hands of Rachmanite landlords.
Born Katherine Barry Moloney in 1928, in Wilton Terrace Dublin, into a family with strong Republican connections - her mother was a sister of Kevin Barry, executed during the War of Independence - dissent and independence were a part of her nature. After school at Scoil Bhríde, and Loreto, Stephen's Green (which may have started her characteristic enthusiasm for sport - she was very proud of having played camogie for Leinster in Croke Park), there was a time in Bord Fáilte, and then she supported herself in office jobs in London in the 1950s and 1960s, while exploring Soho, the lively world of painters Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, writers Colin MacInnes, Brian Higgins, Paul Potts, Anthony Cronin, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart. She loved the city too, London rituals, Portobello Road and its market.
It was in Leland Bardwell's London flat that Katherine met Patrick Kavanagh. He too had found Ireland narrow and felt appreciated in the London literary and artistic world. Leland recalls them "holding hands like two teenagers" - he was 54, she was 29. For nine years he commuted, praising her Gibson Square neighbourhood in a fine poem of 1960, 'News Item'. It was a world that revolved around pubs: the Cumberland Stores favoured by Martin Green and Tim O'Keeffe of McGibbon & Kee, his publishers, the Plough in Museum Street. Katherine drank halves of bitter; she had to get up for her job and couldn't afford hangovers. Later in her Bayswater local, where he would wait for her to come back from work, he was known as the Professor as he read his newspaper. They would go back to her place for some serious attention to any and every kind of sporting event on television. And he swore by her cooking.
When his health got worse she moved to Dublin and they married in the Church of the Three Patrons, sadly only half a year before he died in 1967. She went back to London often for holidays, to see friends there and in the country, but Dublin was her home after Patrick's death and she continued to work there until her own health failed in the mid-1980s.
She remained very much a political person, in the years of Anti-Apartheid marches and civil rights demonstrations, her friends including many activists from Margaret Gaj to Alice Leahy, and she was a fixture in the Dublin literary world.
She was all her life a great reader, a great borrower and lender of books, a person of literary as of other enthusiasms and fierce loyalties. She claimed to have been present at more poetry readings than any one else alive, and it was probably true
Her Dublin writer friends, John Jordan, James Liddy, were joined by many younger poets and she was fond especially of those who had known Patrick: Paul Durcan, Macdara Woods and Brian Lynch. James Liddy introduced her to the young Gorey writers Eamonn Wall and Philip Casey. When we were founding Cyphers with Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson, she contributed money - not a lot, but she never had a lot of money - to get the first and second issues off the ground. Even more welcome, she taught us how to keep accounts and helped us with them. Poetry, politics and friendship were all of a piece for her when we knew her, and they were all fun.
She had always lived in small spaces and her small crowded room in Rathgar was full of photographs, of mementoes of outings like the excursion with Macdara and her sister. Mary O'Halpin. to Vinegar Hill or a big Anti-Apartheid march with Dickie Riordan, who had been best man at her wedding, as well as another friend, Edward McGuire's, drawing of Kavanagh. Her friendships were long-term and implacable loyalties and extended readily to friends of friends. Eoin and Joan Ryan, who had hosted their wedding reception, Leo Holohan, Dickie, were loved as friends of Kavanagh's. People who had been to school with her, people she had known in London, remained close. A great lover of gossip who could be extremely discreet when asked, she became involved in family lives, she was the constant left-wing godmother.
Her health declined, no doubt partly because of her ferocious tobacco addiction, but it was not until a mugging which made her so fearful that it deprived her of the will to drive her car that she stopped going out everywhere. She still saw her friends and made new ones, holding court on Sunday afternoons with iced cake and plenty of tea, and lashings of drink for everyone - she no longer drank herself. Children played in the overgrown garden outside while Katherine demanded all the news and gave her still uncompromising opinions. The last time we saw her she was in a nursing home and once again she was watching sport - cricket - on the television, but asking after everybody she knew.
She died in 1989, and is buried with Patrick Kavanagh in Inniskeen.
Kavanagh night: verse on stage
A Patrick Kavanagh Centenary Celebration organised by the trustees of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, RTÉ Radio 1 and the Gate Theatre, Dublin, takes place at the Gate tomorrow night at 7.30pm The evening will be in two parts. The first, which will be broadcast live on RTÉ Radio 1 at 8 p.m., consists of Macdara Woods, Leland Bardwell, Tom McIntyre and Dermot Healy reading Kavanagh's 'The Great Hunger'.
In the second half Paul Durcan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and John Montague will be joining the other poets to read their favourite Kavanagh poem, plus one of their own. The evening will feature music played by the uileann piper Peter Browne.
Tickets from the Gate Theatre Box Office (01-8744045/6042)