Patrick Kavanagh: A personal view of a poet and a legend
It is a heinous crime to judge a man or woman on their appearance. The dullest mind never knows what magic lies beneath the surface of another. For example, there are those who are slightly awkward. This can take different forms, either verbally like not having the right words, forgetting a name or physically, like the time Patrick Kavanagh almost toppled a table when trying to cross his legs in a London cafeteria. Apparently, he was being interviewed by an important publication and most likely his nerves got the better of him.
The polite uncomfortableness of Kavanagh’s unintended predicament struck a chord with me. More importantly, he had a magical genius for the arrangement of words. Hidden behind a physique built on working the land, it was in words and poetry his forte lay and thanks be to God, he was not afraid to put them to effective use.
Demanding work never harmed a soul, people used to say. I remember as children our first introduction to the ‘stoney grey soil’ of Monaghan, literally speaking. It was the early 1980s in a field near Drum, which had been shored and reseeded. We helped our father for the summer, gathering a plot of stones each day until the 20-odd acres was complete. The sun was scorching at times, and we wore straw hats that made us think of John Wayne setting off on an adventure each morning. At the end of each day the trailer load was drawn to an area and emptied where a shed and yard was to be built.
When it came to Kavanagh’s brilliant poem on the ‘stoney grey soil of Monaghan’, I could fully relate to the wonderful sentiment of what he was saying. Of course, all them stones had to be picked because they would destroy the forage harvester during the next summer’s silage making season.
It has been said by those who met the bold Paddy Kavanagh seated by the Dublin Canal that he sometimes looked a tetchy, cross-looking lad. But anyone might look so, if they were in a moment of privacy trying to convert their thoughts into poetry. The writer’s journey is a lonely business at times and takes a certain mood and temperament to do it right. Kavanagh’s classic booklet, published in 1964 and titled ‘Self Portrait’, lifts our eyes to peer slightly through the chink and to gaze on his views about the ‘self and writing’.
He explains: ‘For years I have tried to find a technique through which a man might reveal himself without embarrassment.’ In typical self-deprecating fashion, he then adds, ‘my life has been a failure till I woke up this morning, which is the 24th August 1963.’ He continues that, on this day, he saw ‘a wonder question mark: There is today and tomorrow.’
Evidently, he detested dwelling on himself. It was not a topic for conversation. Such musings, he likened ‘to be both irrelevant and untrue’ since people will want to depict the best improved version of themselves. (The age of social media does both in showing the best and worst.)
The English press and publishers alike both bemused and irked Kavanagh, as did their salacious comrades in America who dug into the nitty-gritty of people’s lives. A matter to which he responds in typical Kavanagh-esque fashion when he talks about how the ‘unfortunate peoples of my island home lap up all the vulgarity when it is dished out to them’.
But what about telling the world of his childhood? Kavanagh tells us he would have to make it sound ‘out of the common just as journalists do when reporting on foreign countries’.
His frank wisdom on the stresses of his childhood is something he shares in an honest confession. His country boyhood in Inniskeen is now alas from a bygone time where he experienced what he called, ‘the usual barbaric life of the country poor.’
Poverty, according to Kavanagh ‘is a mental condition’ and not something you can choose for yourself because it is ‘anxiety about what’s going to happen next week’. How many people today may feel that awful sensation? The answer I would hazard a guess is that many probably still do.
Saving grace
In my schooldays, what appealed to me was that Kavanagh was a man who walked and worked the land. Some tell me, in his youth he hid the odd book in the hedges to nourish his need for literature when out working in the fields. A genius was in their midst, and many knew it not, it may have been later said.
Dublin was Kavanagh’s saving grace where he could get on with the business of writing. In the public houses, he relaxed where his humour roamed free, generous betimes, like when he offered a round and an American lady at the bar noticing how everyone had requested a drink, piped up, did you not see me, Paddy. His uproarious response: ‘How could I miss you … that smile’s been going between those two ears like a skipping rope.’
Thirty-nine years ago, a man told me a great story. It was early one morning in Rathmines Library and generally quiet when our witness heard strange scratching sounds coming from behind the shelves. He walked forward, peeped around the far side, and saw nothing. After going past another shelf or two, he spotted a man in a trench coat with his hands up to his face.
The coated individual turned around to reveal he had been dry-shaving his face using a cut-throat razorblade. To my friends’ shock it was none other than the bold Patrick Kavanagh. A poet and a legend!
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