STROLLING DOWN Dublin's Grafton Street yesterday, I suddenly found myself thinking about Patrick Kavanagh, and one of his verses in particular: "On Grafton Street in November/we tripped lightly along the ledge/Of a deep ravine where can be seen/The worth of passion's pledge". If Kavanagh were walking the street now, it struck me, he would be in more danger of tripping, lightly or otherwise, on the red-brick paving. Laid down during the last recession, the bricks are in increasingly dire condition: loose, cracked, or just uneven. The stretch between Brown Thomas and Marks Spencer is especially distressed, writes
FRANK MCNALLY
There are no ravines in the street at the moment, luckily. It must be the downturn, but there don’t seem to be nearly as many holes being dug in Dublin streets generally as there were during the boom. Even so, were Kavanagh alive and (as usual) short of money, the tripping potential of the bricks might present an opportunity.
He was not above raising corporate sponsorship in this way. In July 1940, for example, he took a case against the B I Steamship Company, after one of its horse-drawn drays allegedly knocked him off his bicycle at the junction of the quays and Tara Street.
Kavanagh sought compensation for the “grievous bodily damage” and “great mental anguish” caused by the accident: claiming his bike was wrecked, his clothes ruined, and his nerves so badly shattered he couldn’t work for six weeks. B I countered that there had been contributory negligence on his part.
Either way, the evidence suggests the plaintiff was exaggerating. Even his devoted brother Peter, in a mostly hagiographical account of the poet’s life, wrote that he “deserved nothing” from the case. In her much more rounded autobiography, Antoinette Quinn notes that during his supposedly stricken period, he had two features in The Irish Times and continued working on a novel.
The crucial exhibit for the prosecution, however, was an article in the Irish Independent that, by a happy coincidence for Kavanagh, appeared the day of the hearing. It was his account of the annual Croagh Patrick climb, in which he had just partaken. And having had an earlier piece about the Lough Derg pilgrimage spiked for insufficient piety, he made no mistake this time.
“Croagh Patrick is the glorious, singing, laughing climb of an Ireland young in spirit and truth and enthusiastic in performance,” he gushed. A sentiment that struck a chord with one particular reader: the judge. After establishing that the plaintiff was the author, he complimented him warmly. Whereupon Kavanagh pressed home his advantage.
Asked how much he earned from writing, he did some quick multiplication and suggested an average of £5 a week. So, throwing in extra for the bike, the clothes, and the nerve damage, the admiring judge awarded him £35. An amount, as Quinn notes, that Peter Kavanagh the teacher (and the poet’s usual source of funds) would have taken nearly three months to earn.
One of Patrick Kavanagh’s life-long obsessions was the artist’s need for patronage. He was also possessed, by his own account anyway, of a fierce morality that compelled him to tell the truth regardless of consequences. But in pursuit of the first goal, he was happy to cut corners with the second. There was a time and place for honesty.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, when I spoke earlier of my “suddenly” thinking about Kavanagh, that was a bare-faced lie. The truth is that, some months ago, in a rash moment, I agreed to give the opening talk at this year’s Kavanagh Weekend, which was comfortably far away at the time.
The event is now upon us, however. And as a result of my former rashness, I am currently unable to think about anything else. Kavanagh haunts my every waking hour, including the one between 3am and 4am last night. But if not to my own contribution, I am at least looking forward to the rest of the weekend, which starts tomorrow in Inniskeen. In fact, the Kavanagh “fringe” opens in nearby Carrickmacross tonight with the launch of an exhibition of paintings and poems inspired by that much-translated fragment of ninth-century Irish verse: “The Blackbird of Belfast Lough”. Basil Blackshaw, Seamus Heaney, and Ciaran Carson are among those represented.
The weekend’s various readings, musical performances, and tours will also include an event about which Patrick Kavanagh might have mixed feelings. By common consent, he loved children. On the other hand, he thought there were far too many poets in Ireland, cluttering the field for genuine geniuses such as himself. So the publication of an anthology from the sixth-class students of St Daigh’s National School, and even more competition, might leave him conflicted.
Still, given his latter-day exaltation of the comic spirit in poetry, he could hardly but enjoy such contributors as Sarah Duffy (aged 11) and her poem Houses: “I like old houses best, don’t you?/They don’t go cluttering up a view/With roofs too red and paint too new/With doors too green and blinds too blue/Their bricks may be dingy/Their clapboards askew/But they’ve learned in a hundred years or two/Not to go cluttering up a view!” And although he himself ultimately rejected the poetry of sociological comment, Kavanagh would also surely admire the technical mastery of the haiku by Padraig Deery (11), which packs much hard-bitten realism into its 17 syllables: “Jack goes to the pub/Drinks Harp, Guinness and whiskey/Staggers home for tea.” Details of the Kavanagh
Weekend are at www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com