Patrick Kavanagh's brilliant poetry & turbulent life | What Were We Like | History Podcast

[00:00:00]I often think of Kavanaaugh as kind of hovering between success and abject failure. The man about town, the kind of abrasiveness, uh the bellowing, >> he was there were people who didn't want to hang out with them, >> but the younger generation of poets seek him out and talk to him uh because they they regard him rightly as a serious revolutionary in terms of of the way he's writing poetry. So in we always I suppose have to remember when we come back to Patty Kavanaaugh it's the poetry that matters in the end >> not the rest of it welcome to what we like or e's history podcast with me Katrina Crow >> and me deer fer >> deer tell us about Patrick Kavanaaugh that's who we're going to talk about today >> we want to focus on Patrick Kavanaaugh today I've I've always been fascinated by Kavanaaugh. He was one of the first poets I came to >> as a student. I think largely because he was on the leavingert syllabus.

[00:01:03]>> Yes.

[00:01:04]>> And I think a lot of people that age respond in a particular way to poetry of Patrick Kavanaaugh especially when he composed poems about youth and sometimes frustrated youth. Um he was born in 1904 in the brilliantly named townland of Muker.

[00:01:23]>> Muker. uh this is the uh in the monet village of of ink. So I suppose what we want to do today Katrina is really look at how Kavanaaugh found his own rhythm um the impact and and legacy of his poems and there's a lot of drama and controversy associated with his life and times and he did often wreak havoc um but he shouldn't be defined by that either. I think we have to recognize you cannot make a living as a poet on poetry alone.

[00:01:54]>> No, he lived in extreme poverty.

[00:01:56]>> And we should remember that that this is an era before state funding.

[00:02:00]>> Before state funding, serious state >> except for the abbey theater which persisted all the way along. We have a clip of him here talking about himself.

[00:02:07]>> Let's hear him.

[00:02:09]>> I just like talking about myself in a direct way.

[00:02:14]The self is only interesting as an illustration.

[00:02:19]For some strange reason, whenever we talk about our personal lives, it turns out to be both irrelevant and untrue.

[00:02:30]Even when the facts are right, the mood is wrong.

[00:02:36]English commercial publishers and newspapers are mad for personal data, especially about people from Ireland.

[00:02:47]I love Irish men.

[00:02:50]America is now even worse.

[00:02:54]And the unfortunate peoples of my island home lap all this vulgarity up.

[00:03:03]He was such a brat.

[00:03:06]>> Now, that would have been from the early days of television.

[00:03:09]>> Yes.

[00:03:09]>> And he's embracing this opportunity to find a wider audience. But there aren't there clues there as well, Katrina, to the kind of character he was.

[00:03:18]>> As cranky as a box of frogs, if you ask me. Um, hard to deal with. We know that.

[00:03:24]Um, he's still I mean, the the amount of grimacing and twitching and general fidgeting that's going on is is extraordinary. But he looks quite well in that. His hair is combed. Uh his glasses look fine. He's got a nice jacket on. All of that that people used to complain about the way he looked and dressed. He obviously got dressed up for for this occasion to give us uh his views of the world. And he has many more views of the world in that >> self-portrait program that he did.

[00:03:51]>> Do you ever think that all the poets of his generation are living in the shadow of Yates?

[00:03:56]>> Of course. Uh but cabinet does really an extraordinary thing to get out from under the shadow of Yates. He he he doesn't do what Yates does, which is to focus on the nation as an idea, all those extraordinary big national poems that he wrote. He focuses on the parish, not the nation.

[00:04:15]>> He focuses on rural Ireland with all of its >> um often gross aspects. It's not the lake is of Inishree. It's a very different sort of thing that we're getting with cowdong and wasp nests and spraying potatoes and all the stuff that goes on on farms all the time. So in a way he makes it possible to write about a different kind of Ireland than has been written about before and this upset many of his uh >> but do you think that was his main ambition in life? His ambition in life was to be a great poet and to be well known for being a great poet. And he's he's on he's he's very self-critical right through his life which is greatly to his credit. He often doesn't like what he writes but he often wastes his time writing dog roll instead of getting down to the the hard business. Um we'll be looking at all of that as >> isn't there a clue there as well in relation to his his personal life or what's often referred to as his difficult personality. He's carrying a lot of chips on his shoulder. He's frustrated about a lot of things. Um but it's partly because of the ambitions that he had set for himself and the difficulty of trying to realize them.

[00:05:19]>> Yeah. He also thought that somebody might give him a job that he could get a job in an office, you know, as a an ordinary worker and and appealed to many many people, politicians and civil servants and all sorts of people to do it.

[00:05:31]>> Uh you know when you think of it, Flan O'Brien spent his his life as Brienne Nuline working in the custom house in the department of local government. um and had a steady income coming in to support his his his work as a as a writer. Kavanaaugh never had that >> and his brother Peter has said who was really his sort of uh standby a bit like Stannis Lost Joyce was to James um who who looked after him a lot just said when we came to Dublin we lived in poverty >> and that is true I think really difficult times >> the trip to Dublin I'm thinking about his his early life um he was supposed to take over the running of the small farm farm um doing some cobbling as a a kind of a sideline.

[00:06:17]>> Yeah.

[00:06:17]>> Um but you know the mother was still there after his father died in in in 1929. There were two uh small farms and I mean that was the expectation for those sons.

[00:06:27]>> Well I think we have to look a bit at his life before he departs from Mcker.

[00:06:31]>> Yeah.

[00:06:32]>> Because in many ways that's where he gets the raw material for for a lot of his poetry.

[00:06:36]>> So he was the fourth child of a family of 10 and the first son. He had two other brothers. one one brother died in childbirth and the other was Peter who was the youngest in the family. There were 12 years between the two of them.

[00:06:48]Um his father was a cobbler uh and a a small farmer in a farmer in a small way.

[00:06:55]A very good cobbler apparently. They lived in a three groomed cabin in Mcker.

[00:07:01]Uh the father ran his cobbling business from the kitchen. So, you've got this poor woman trying to cook over an open fire and do all the things that women did in farms back in the day with children arriving every year and around the place. And in the meantime, dad's trying to fix somebody's old boots >> uh and doing a good job of it. Um he bought a farm with the proceeds of his cobbling business uh when Patrick was quite young and that was again upward social mobility, buying some land and having it. Patrick spent a lot of time working as people did then. the kids were lent out to neighbors and and those kids came back in a kind of metal arrangement. So everybody got a a go at at the kinds of things that you did on a farm. So by the time Cavan has grown up, he has a really clear idea of what it's like to work on a small farm. He his education was that he went to the local primary school did not do well there because he was a know as the teacher said and uh he always knew more than everybody else at all times. So he wouldn't listen. So then he was supposed to work with his dad on the cobbling while he did a small bit of farming on the side. He made an absolute hes of the cobbling because again he couldn't concentrate on it. The father said, "You've broken every single tool around the place. I'm fed up with you. Um go off with yourself." So he spent his time working as a sort of hired laborer uh working on farms roundabout and on the small farm that they had themselves and walking miles everywhere. So he he does all of this. He goes to London for a while, doesn't do very well there, and finally comes to Dublin in 1939, which he uh proclaimed to be the worst mistake he ever made uh in later years. 1939 was not a good year to be changing your life. It was the outbreak of the Second World War. He had at this stage published his first book of poetry which had received very good reviews. uh and he thought he would have a lovely time in Dublin literary society only to find that they didn't really like him. But let's have a look at one of his early poems during >> Well, I'm when I'm thinking about the early uh poems. I walked the Monatan Way a few years ago.

[00:09:12]>> Did you?

[00:09:12]>> In what's now called Patrick Cabinet Country.

[00:09:14]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:15]>> And it's absolutely beautiful and it's >> it's sparssely populated, you know, as a as a walk as a tourist destination. Um it's not a part of the country that would get kind of traffic that goes, you know, to the the greenway.

[00:09:29]>> It's not popular. Mon Cav and Mon are beautiful landscapes with drumlands and >> that's the thing. It's as stunning and you get a real sense of what he absorbed and embibed in terms of that kind of local uh environment. you think in particular one of his best known poems in a ski road on July evening um is a very good example of the early >> I think it gives us an idea of precisely what you're talking about sniffing out what's wonderful in the in the everyday so I'll just read it quickly the bicycles go by in twos and threes there's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight >> and there's the half talk code of mysteries and the wink and elbow language of delight half 8 and there's not a spot upon a mile of code. No shadow throne that might turn out a man or woman, not a footfall tapping secrecies of stone. I have what every poet hates in spite of all the solemn talk of contemplation. Oh, Alexander Selkerk knew the plight of being king and government and nation, a road, a mile of kingdom. I am king of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

[00:10:36]Now, that was one of the uh early poems um one of his most quoted. Even the mentioning of Billy Brennan's uh barn.

[00:10:46]>> Yeah.

[00:10:46]>> Um and this wink and elbow language of delight. That's what I find in in Kavanaaugh's poem. There is always a line or a phrase that encapsulates so much of what so many experience. But you can also see there's kind of spiritual side to him and and a sense of a god that's watching over everything and is running through uh everything.

[00:11:13]There's also the stony gray soil that he becomes.

[00:11:17]>> One of his most famous poems is the stony gray soil of Monahan. When I was much younger and I would go out drinking when I probably shouldn't have been doing that, my father I don't believe that >> my father would greet me the next morning with a cup of tea and an aspirin being a darling man as he was and he'd say you're burgling the bank of your youth which is a quote from that poem and I'd say go away with you that's grand thanks for the aspirin.

[00:11:40]>> You said go away with you. Yeah. And now you're burgling the bank of your mature years as well.

[00:11:46]>> I intend to continue burgling as long as it's possible. So when he comes to Dublin in 1939, uh he thinks he's going to have a lovely time. Now he gets in. People are very nice to Cavanaaugh right through his life. Particularly Frank O' Connor who was always his ally and got no thanks for it.

[00:12:01]>> One of the world's great short story writers. One of the world's great and one of another of the world's great choice short story writers was Sha Whailon who was the editor of the Bell Okconor to be the poetry editor of the Bell magazine which was the one everything was everyone was reading >> and that was important also because it was it was established in 1940 >> exactly >> so it's just after Kavanaaugh comes up to Dublin there are opportunities here because Sha fail would have said that his role as editor uh of the bell was to sniff out the individual bits of veracity amidst hidden amidst the dust heaps of convention. So he in a way you could say that Kavanaaugh was ideally suited to that but he seems to have >> in theory but then in practice it turns out that her whilon even though he was publishing his poetry didn't like what you might call now it's dirty realism >> um cowdong and potato spraying and wasp nests and all the rest of it and he wrote to Okconor I'm sick and tired of turf smoke and ansties that's a reference to the Taylor and Anie which was the big case at the time and all that I'm a city bloke and So are you cabinet doesn't wash his poetry's ears.

[00:13:06]>> Oo >> all the snobbery of the literary establishment is comes out in that sentence there where he says that and that's what he was up against. Now there is a clip of him being very bitter about the Dublin literary establishment which we can have now to get the man himself telling us what he thought.

[00:13:23]>> When I came to Dublin in 1939, the Irish literary affair was still booming.

[00:13:30]It was the notion that Dublin was a literary metropolis and that I of the island as invented and patented by Yates Lady Gregory and Sing a spiritual entity.

[00:13:42]I met many of these writers and I'm afraid I taught them hardness. Fred Higgins had the Irish quality.

[00:13:49]The conversation and ports pub had all the richness and ciosity that Hub and Everson said old Dublin conversation has to me even then it was tires and brittle between journalists and civil servants no new humor at all and of course the thought so much of poetry they didn't believe in the poet I am not sure you're complaining merely stating a Two ridiculous facts.

[00:14:22]It was all my fault. What was I doing there? Wasn't I old enough to know to the dipper?

[00:14:28]Shouldn't they have cotton down?

[00:14:31]Ah, well, we live and we sometimes die.

[00:14:34]>> What a crank. Um, he says there they they love the poets, but they didn't want the poet Aton, as he says.

[00:14:40]>> So, it's grand. They they throw you lovely compliments about the the quality of your beautiful pastor poetry, but they won't give you any money. uh and that's what he's giving out.

[00:14:48]>> Well, that's the difficulty for him during those years as well that because the money isn't there, he has to start hunting down bits and pieces of >> So, what was he getting after?

[00:14:57]>> Well, he was film critic for the standard uh newspaper at one stage. He does various uh journalistic pieces. He does features, he does book reviews.

[00:15:06]He's quite a sharp pen which matches his sharp tongue. Uh he even writes a gossip column in the Irish press newspaper under the name Pierre's Plowman. Um and he was also of course this is what's interesting about the this period of of his freelance career. Uh he's good at capturing the begrudgery and the resentments and really the pettiness that could accompany commentary on relationships in particular on on the quest for love and companionship. Um, you know, when he was younger in in Muker, uh, he often found himself very sexually frustrated. Um, and that found expression in in in various different ways, but he was also good at capturing conversation. Um, he's like an early Mave Biny Mave Biny as a journalist was great.

[00:16:01]>> The great eavesdropper, >> the great eavesdropper, you know. Um, and in 1938 in the Irish Times, um, so you know, even before, uh, he he makes the march, uh, in into the Dublin literary scene, uh, he captures a conversation between two oldish girls, as he describes them, as they knit the garments of their souls beside a cobbler's bench. So again, he's drawing on the uh, the cobbler's hinterland. I hear Mary Handlin is getting married.

[00:16:31]The mere mention of a girl getting married was g to this pair. Ah, she is indeed, one of them would say. Well, she's not much, and the fellow that's marrying her must be a fool. Sure, some girls would take anyone. I wonder is she getting married decent?

[00:16:49]Just. The word just was more eloquent than it appears on paper. It was steeped in the venom of a thousand repressed desires.

[00:17:01]doesn't hold back, does he? Um, when he says just, he means probably that she's pregnant, but it's not showing yet and she'll just about get away with it. I mean, he was ferociously misogynist, >> but but isn't it very accurate?

[00:17:17]>> Uh, well, yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that that >> it's authentic, isn't it?

[00:17:21]>> It's authentic, but he chooses that kind of conversation rather than another.

[00:17:25]That kind of conversation could very well take place and certainly did and probably still does to this day, my dear. Nowadays, it would be arguing about whether you can afford the the $10,000 dress that you you're supposed to wear for your wedding as opposed to so and so down the road you can't. We've become much more materialistic. But there this is about uh somebody getting married when it was I mean remember marriage rates and you know this because you're the master of statistics of demography. Marriage rates were still very low in Ireland at this point in time. But they were astonishingly low.

[00:17:55]And I mean, >> uh, so getting married was a big deal if you were a woman. And if you weren't, it was either stay on the farm and look after the old people and not inherit it because that was going to the sun or get on the boat and go to the bright lights of Birmingham or London.

[00:18:09]>> Well, listen to this figure, Katrina.

[00:18:10]Um, this is in the early 1940s. There were 73 married women per 10,000 women in Ireland compared to 142 per 10,000 women in the United States.

[00:18:22]>> There you are. 73% of Irish adult males were unmarried compared to just 30% in the United States. Um so there is this um extraordinary demographic uh situation u in Ireland there is >> and you know that exchange he was capturing there about marriage and and the gossiping and the bitching that's going on and you can detect the sexism in it as well which we'll be coming back to at a later stage. Uh but there's a rawness as well and uh a real sense of frustration underpinning a lot of those figures uh that I've mentioned and they really find brilliant expression in Cavana's The Great Hunger.

[00:19:04]>> Great hunger is >> the great hunger was published in in 1942 and it traces the fortunes of of Patty Maguire uh a bachelor farmer uh who's really living a life of of frustration. Now, it's 759 lines, uh, this poem. Um, just to give you a flavor of it, watch him. Watch him. That man on a hill whose spirit is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time. Um, >> such a sad image, >> but think of the image as well of Patty Magcguire, this bachelor farmer, and his mother and the sense of enttrapment.

[00:19:39]And he writes about the mother being of course the great love. He loved his mother above all others. The problem is as is put in the poem, she's wife and mother in one.

[00:19:54]>> Yeah.

[00:19:54]>> And when she died, the knuckle bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside. And he was 65. So she dies at 91. He's 65. He's still being referred to as a boy.

[00:20:08]uh and he's capturing that kind of rawness and and and the smoldering resentment.

[00:20:12]>> That was the infantilization that befell a lot of people who stayed at home with the old people uh for much longer than they should have because they had no choice.

[00:20:22]>> Yeah. And I mean he can only kind of gaze with hopeless desire at at at young women on the road. Uh he must wait when he's at home uh until the family are asleep before he can kind of masturbate fertively uh into the fire's ashes. Um, and you know, the fields are growing fertile, but what's happening to his body? It's it's shriveling. You know, no cash, no drama. That was how his life happened. No mad hooves galloping in the sky, but the weak washy way of a true tragedy, a sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

[00:20:56]>> That is a terrifying line, isn't it? for this is a man of 65 he's writing about and that he's contemplating death at this stage and can see no hope for a future. And of course there isn't.

[00:21:07]>> Yeah, >> that's it.

[00:21:08]>> There's no way out. And you talked about Yates, >> you know, this is far from from Yates.

[00:21:15]>> Um but you could also say that this is also a turning point in 1942 because he's really breaking with tradition.

[00:21:23]This isn't about a reverence uh for for rural Ireland. It's about underscoring the the desolation and the suffocation.

[00:21:31]>> And even though Kavanaaugh knew a lot about folklore and mythology and all of those things and took a big interest in it, he doesn't choose to use that in his poetry. What he uses for mystical purposes is Catholicism, which is an interesting step. But he is breaking with like this is the end of Singh and Lady Gregory and Yates and their romantic version of the west of Ireland which sused Irish society for decades afterwards.

[00:21:58]>> Um and people saying things like you can't eat the scenery, didn't cut the mustard for for urban dwellers. This was the real Ireland. Uh and Deera definitely promoted it beyond anything else. What he's saying is this is what it's really like.

[00:22:12]>> Yeah. uh and that is a very big moment >> but I often wonder Katrina can we think of contrasting that with the beautiful tenderness of something like a Christmas childhood >> Christmas childhood is such a beautiful poem and it's it's his uh you can see even though his family was apparently not at all outwardly affectionate as as many Irish families weren't they never hugged or kissed each other none of that was going on that you feel this net of affection and love coming from that poem his father playing the meloian. His father was a very good musician. Um Patty apparently joined the the local pipe band at one stage, but not none of them was any good. They knew three tunes and they played all three together at the same time on Christmas day outside the church and were shouted out of it for being terrible. But his father playing the was a lovely thing and he would play it on Christmas morning outside the gate of their uh house. Um there were stars in the morning east and they danced to his music as they say here. Um it's a really beautiful poem and there is that sense which I suppose is true of everybody that the place you grow up in and spend your childhood in has a magical resonance for you that doesn't go away and that there's always even if you have suffered there even though it's difficult there's there's a pull back at all times to it. Yeah.

[00:23:30]>> So when he reflects back in this kind of way it's really beautiful.

[00:23:33]>> Yeah. Now Katrina, when we consider okay that that's the artistic side uh and the various achievements they're still not making them any money you know uh and I often think of Kavanaaugh as kind of hovering between success and abject failure and he's also developed a drink problem.

[00:23:54]>> He has that gets worse as he gets older.

[00:23:57]>> Yeah. There's a humiliation as well in in not having money and having to borrow money and perhaps an insecurity uh about being the countryman in the metropolis.

[00:24:06]>> Yeah, there's no doubt about it. Money worries were definitely there all the time and they explain to some degree his irasability and uh irritation with the world >> and he does try and tap his brother Peter from money. Peter became an academic in in in the United States uh in in 1946.

[00:24:22]>> Uh and Peter financed this venture that became known as Cavana's Weekly which was a journal of literature and politics. And Patrick Cavner wrote most of it himself. And I mean if anything was going to give him a platform to vent his frustrations, it was this. It only lasted 13 weeks.

[00:24:42]>> There was no editor to keep him under control.

[00:24:44]>> No. And he had a lot of targets, you know, radio Aaron, uh, the Irish army, I discovered, um, he suggested that the only thing the Irish army were good for, um, defending a field of turnups against an invasion of crows.

[00:24:59]>> So unfair.

[00:25:00]>> And he suggested that there are their numbers should be reduced to to 500. Um, and this is this sums it up really, Katrina. He wrote this, "All the mouthpieces of public opinion are controlled by men whose only qualification is their inability to think," >> which is a version of, "They're all out of step except my Johnny." I mean, yeah, everyone's wrong except him, which is not an attractive quality. Now, doesn't that lead to this problem, I suppose, of the man about town, particularly in the uh in the 1950s, >> the kind of abrasiveness, the bellowing, >> he was there were people who didn't want to hang out with them because they were afraid of his sharp tongue and his general carry on and his insatiable appetite for drink. But he was popular with with the people he was popular with found him endearing and pleasant. and the younger generation of poets who are coming up at this stage uh are starting to seek him out and talk to him uh because they they regard him rightly as a serious revolutionary in terms of the way he's writing poetry. So in we always I suppose have to remember when we come back to Patty Kavanaaugh it's the poetry that matters in the end >> not the rest of it but he did have a serious legal controne >> in the 1950s which again was him seeking money uh in desperation maybe tell us something about that dear >> yeah there was a Dublin newspaper called the the leader which published a very unflattering uh profile of him and it was unsigned this was published in 1952 uh and he sued for liel And the case came to trial in 1954. Now the article which as I say was unsigned, it described him hunkering over a bar stool in McDade's pub uh which we still have today, sponging drinks, coughing and gambling, an unsuttle poser and overbearing. Okay.

[00:26:47]>> Now he strongly suspected Brendan Bean of course Brendan Being Behin the roaring Brendan Beh has really come into his own during this period as well. or else the poet and diplomat um Valentine Ironer um now he sued he was hoping to get £500 in an out of court settlement. Now that's you know that would have been a serious uh settlement. Um but he was conscious that way back in the late 1930s another writer Oliver Singen Gogerty had successfully sued um Kavanaaugh over a reference in Kavana's book the green fool suggesting Gogerty had a mistress and Gogerty was awarded £100 in damages and 300 costs. Isn't it interesting the imbalance?

[00:27:32]>> It's an awful lot of money for Patty damages to absorb.

[00:27:36]>> Um it also put the Green Fool out of print for a very long time which was a terrible loss to everybody because The Green Fool is a really interesting book.

[00:27:44]>> But anyway that you know it came to trial in 1954. Um there's a striking photograph of of Kavanaaugh marching up for his court appearance. Uh dressed very well uh looking very serious. He was 49 at that stage. There was some woman keeping an eye on him there. We we we don't know who.

[00:28:01]>> And he was grilled for 13 hours uh by John A. Costello. John A. Costello who is a senior barristister. He has also served as tishuk from 1948 >> declared the Irish Republic most famously.

[00:28:14]>> Absolutely. Uh and Cavana's case, what's the essence of Kavana's case? He said that the the article published in the leader held him up to odium ridicule and contempt and damaged his reputation. Uh but the leader's defense is that it's fair comment. Um but there's quite a turning point after the um uh questions begin. There were one t over 1,200 uh questions were asked by Costello.

[00:28:40]>> Um so it's a very rigorous uh cross-examination, but he was asked a question about his relationship with Brendan Behan. Uh and he completely denied uh that he and Beh.

[00:28:51]And then the moment of drama. A copy of Tar Flynn was exhibited. It had an inscription for Brendan, poet and painter, on the day he decorated my flat, Sunday the 12th, 1950, >> which was only four years before.

[00:29:06]>> And of course, that was Brendan's uh day job uh while he wasn't busy in in the IRA uh and writing. Um that was the family business. They were painters.

[00:29:15]>> Yeah.

[00:29:16]>> Um so, you know, this obviously did great damage to his case. Um and cost interestingly always focused also focused on all the satiric material that Kavanaaugh had been responsible for himself. You know >> don't be called pot calling kettle >> pot calling kettle. Absolutely.

[00:29:31]>> Yes.

[00:29:31]>> Now the jury found against Kavanaaugh.

[00:29:33]This was a jury trial. Uh and Kavanaaugh actually eventually appeals to the Supreme Court. Uh do you know who that was funded by?

[00:29:39]>> Tell us.

[00:29:40]>> Jack B8 the painter and TS Elliott.

[00:29:44]>> That is amazing.

[00:29:45]>> Yeah. So uh he had >> I have no idea what Elliot thought of Kevin but obviously he thought highly of him if he prepared to a court case for him.

[00:29:52]>> Uh so it appealed to the Supreme Court.

[00:29:53]The Supreme Court actually um found in his favor and suggested the high court judge at the original trial had misled the jury regarding innuendos.

[00:30:01]>> Now this was all about the technicality of liable law uh and how to interpret um what could be considered innuendos. Um but there weren't enough funds uh to >> he couldn't take on another case >> for for a retrial, you know. So there was an undisclosed settlement made to Cavan and his legal team. I I'm pretty sure it was nowhere near uh the sum of money that he had in mind. Uh but that trial had a huge impact on him.

[00:30:26]>> Yes.

[00:30:26]>> And again it was humiliating and it was a very public downfall I suppose you could say. Uh and he wrote a very desolate poem um that year 1954.

[00:30:36]>> He was set on New Year's Eve. Uh he'd had that terrible year. Um and there's quite a well-known line in it. My lamp of contemplation you sought to shatter to leave me groping at madness under a low sky. Oh 1954 you leave and will not listen and do not care whether I curse or weep.

[00:30:56]>> He's feeling very sorry for himself.

[00:30:58]>> There's a real there's a real low point there. And then he discovered he had lung cancer. Um and he had treatment for that. And when he spent the summer of 1955 conilelesing, he's inhabiting a new environment >> that produced a brilliant poem called the hospital that everyone agrees is one of his great poems.

[00:31:17]>> Yeah.

[00:31:17]>> He was able to do that to describe a new experience to him in a really fresh way that that that people wouldn't have thought of before.

[00:31:26]>> And there's also the Grand Canal then.

[00:31:27]>> Yes. the sunshine on the bank of the Grand Canal which seems to have really reinvigorated >> his his his creative uh juices. There there there are those and he himself who said that he had a sort of rebirth of a po as a poet after you see let's remember who the hell got cured of lung cancer in 1955. He was incredibly lucky >> they got it in time and surgery took away one of his lungs but I mean he might easily have died. So there there's this extraordinary uh moment when he just revives himself as a poet. And we have a clip here where we've got Paul Durkin who was one of a cabinet's great admirers reciting one of the beautiful Canal Bank poems. Leafy with love banks and the green waters of the canal pouring redemption for me that I do the will of God.

[00:32:30]Wallow in the habitual the bale.

[00:32:36]grow with nature again. As before I grew the bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third party to the couple kissing on an old seat.

[00:32:54]And a bird gathering materials for the nest, for the word eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.

[00:33:12]Oh unworn world, enrapture me and capture me in a web of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beach.

[00:33:27]Feed the gaping knee of my senses.

[00:33:34]Give me ad lib to pray unself-consciously with overflowing speech.

[00:33:43]For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven from green and blue thing and arguments that cannot be proven. One of the great lines out of that poem is wallowing in the habitual uh which is that sense of as that you've emphasized a few times during this uh of finding the extraordinary and the ordinary and he does and it's absolutely appropriate that that gorgeous statue of him uh is actually on the banks of the the Grand Canal near Bagger Street Bridge which was his territory where he wandered around sitting there with one leg crossed over the other >> contemplating the water. It's really >> just listen to Paul Durkin reading that poem as well.

[00:34:35]>> That was Paul. is a reminder of of one of the great tributes that was paid to Kavanaaugh and it was from Durkin and he said >> I don't like the poems of Patrick Kavanaaugh I believe >> I believe in them >> and and you can hear it in the >> and he was one of the young poets who knew him before he died so they they it was sort of passing on the baton if you like from one generation to the next >> so there was that um period of contemplation of of relative uh satisfaction um and we also then have his personal life, his his love life. Um, he did have a particular interest in a romantically unavailable Kerry woman called Hilda Marart Morart Morarti.

[00:35:21]>> Um, one of the interesting things about this is that he crops up in the archive of John Charles McUade of Dublin. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:28]>> Uh and John Charles McUade, it seems, wasn't averse to supplying him uh with some of life's comforts, including the alcoholic comforts. Um and he described Hilda Morerti, this is cabinet, as a charming, virtuous girl whose uncle is the parish priest in Bali Fer and who does not go to dances. I mean, he is so keen to emphasize her impeccable uh respectability.

[00:35:56]Um, >> is she not exactly the kind of girl that would have nothing to do with him?

[00:36:00]>> Well, it's just this emphasis again on kind of class and and moralism. Like there's a very old-fashioned >> side to uh Kavanaaugh that's apparent in that. Um, but Katrina, what did it inspire? Ultimately, >> one of the great love songs of all time, Gralin Road. Everybody knows it. It's regularly voted the favorite song of everyone in the country because he had the good sense to give it to Luke Kelly in a pub. Uh, it was written in 1946 but didn't emerge until much later and Luke Kelly immortalized it and I would defy anybody including yourself to do better than Luke in terms of of singing this song. It is a remarkable recording and it will resonate through the ages. But it's a fantastic poem. It's also as arrogant as is possible to be because the last line of it is, uh, I had wooed not as I should, a creature made of clay. When the angel woos the clay, he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day. The angel here is not the lovely woman he's madly in love with. It's himself, and he's made the huge mistake of falling in love with a mortal woman, thus losing his wings at the dawn of day. Get a grip. It's still a great song. You leave Patty alone. Now, >> it is still a great song.

[00:37:15]>> Now, there was another woman, Katherine Barry Maloney, uh who he eventually married in April 1967 after a 9-year uh relationship.

[00:37:25]>> Yeah.

[00:37:26]>> Um so, Hilda Mararti is unavailable. Um and when you look at Katherine uh herself and her own uh family story, I mean, she really was from Republican royalty. She was, >> if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms, she was um >> she was something to Kevin Barry. What was that?

[00:37:45]>> She was Kevin Barry's niece. Kevin Barry uh of course executed the UCD medical student executed during the war of independence. But >> he was very young.

[00:37:52]>> Even within in the wider family, her grandfather was PJ Maloney and he was a TD in the first Doyle in 1919. Her uncle, Captain Patty Maloney, was killed during the war of independence and tipperary. Um, and her mother, uh, Kathy Barry, she was general secretary of the Republican prisoners dependence fund. So they're very knitted in. So she's entirely caught up with >> um, and >> she was educated in Dublin. She went to Loretta College in on the green and she trained to be a secretary and and was employed uh in various businesses but she moved to London in the early 50s and she was working in a variety of different office jobs and she was moving in uh artistic circles >> um and she met cabinet in the London flat of the poet Leland Bardwell and they had this this nine-year uh relationship. She moved back to Dublin and and and worked in an engineering uh company. Uh and again she was very uh encouraging herself uh of of younger writers. Um you mentioned Paul Durkin uh there there were there were others who who who were encouraged by her. Uh she lived until 1989. Um and I'm not sure Kavanaaugh's approach to courting her uh was overly romantic.

[00:39:10]>> Does he give us his views on that matter? Well, it was more one of his biographers, Antinet Quinn, uh points out uh that his wooing strategy consisted of saying, "Ah, come into bed.

[00:39:22]I won't at you." Um, and there's reference, of course, to uh his also his guarding, his guarding of that relationship uh that he regarded as a private matter. Um >> didn't talk much about it. you know, it wasn't uh something that was going to be um about public consumption or or or great, you know, public visibility for them as a married couple. At least that's the uh impression I get.

[00:39:52]>> Well, there's a lovely clip that we have now of a number of women including Katherine Kavanaaugh, his wife, uh Theres Cronin, Tony Cronin's wife, Joan Ryan, and Leland Bardwell, who's just been mentioned, talking precisely about his attitudes towards women. So, let's have that. He loved women first of all.

[00:40:10]He absolutely adored women. He he made you feel very important even though you weren't beautiful or anything. You know, >> he seemed to have this this this inner kind of feeling for for for a woman's mind and therefore you could you you you could communicate when when I got over my shyness with him and that in the beginning you could communicate with him. He could understand and he loved he loved. I remember once I I was just saying oh yes I was quoting Thurber and for years later whenever he saw me coming he used to quote it back to me a woman's place is in the wrong and that to him summed up all his notions of uh what it was all about that was just perfect >> he was absolutely fascinated by every thing about a garden your hair your clothes the quality the cut everything.

[00:41:06]And uh in those days I worked with Cibil Connelly and I used to wear a lot of very nice way up market clothes. Not saying that I still don't but uh h Patty loved that. He loved success of all kinds really. And uh he loved he loved handsome beautiful women and he felt that beautiful women were more in fact he says somewhere that beautiful women were more intelligent than than plain ones because because intelligent men took so much notice of beautiful women.

[00:41:36]They rubbed the intelligence rubbed off on him. He was an awful shoving his stomach afraid.

[00:41:42]>> Oh he did very very elegant women too.

[00:41:45]Yeah, like like Joan Ryan and Hilda Morerti who of course Raglin Road was written to >> Katherine is very nice isn't she? Uh she does pause before she mentions Hilda Mararty however and says Raglin Road was written for her. Actually it' be very hard not to be jealous of of the person for whom Raglin Road was written.

[00:42:10]>> Trina, are you a silly feminist who was never feminine? Uh not at all darling >> because this was another assertion from uh Patrick Cav about women. It's interesting the references that were made there to his attitudes.

[00:42:23]He referred to silly feminists who are never feminine have created the notion that women like equality that they must not revert to the bad old days when they were mere chattles. As far as the parents are concerned, the daughters are chattles and the daughters are never more pleased to know that they are being bargained for as chattles. There's not much pleasure in having your dignity and being eligible for parliament if no one wants you. On a deeper level, there is even pleasure for a woman in the thought of being a slave.

[00:42:51]>> Oh, That is all absolute patriarchal nonsense.

[00:42:55]>> And it's very unattractive and miserable. So, we're not we're actually going to pass over that, not in silence, having said our bit, uh on to um the end of this podcast.

[00:43:06]>> This is about a rounded portrait. It is a rounded portrait and certainly that was in it. At least he got somebody to marry him before he died. Now I know it was only a couple of months before he died. The relationship was longer than that. But you know I'm glad.

[00:43:19]>> Yeah.

[00:43:19]>> I'm sure there were many opportunities before that that he just didn't make an effort.

[00:43:23]>> If Come to bed I won't date you was his his idea of a chat up line. I'm not sorry it didn't improve earlier.

[00:43:30]>> He died Katrina in 1967 from pneumonia.

[00:43:34]the last photograph of him actually outdoors at a a particular commemorative uh event. Um thinking about some of the tributes that have been uh paid to him.

[00:43:45]Sheamus Heeney who of course achieved such renown as a poet.

[00:43:50]He credited Kavanaaugh with giving him the inspiration to write about his own world and and and the local and the parish that you uh mentioned there that he found something that was new and authentic and liberating in >> and that's a very important point to make. Yeah.

[00:44:06]>> I wonder do we remember him too much for his tribulations and his frustrations and his his patriarchal attitudes. um you know the poets in particular loved >> him have been >> unstinting in their praise of him >> and maybe we should finish with what you told us about Paul Durkin again you said I don't like the poems of Patrick Kavanaaugh I believe in them you've been listening to what were we like uh or sister podcast which you will find every Monday morning on the radio player or wherever you get your From then I flew a heavy spirits never fail and landed at the g as the ship was sailing. Captain bey said the daddy when I jumped aboard a car and found her body it was down among the pigs played some rigs done some gigs to walk around.

[00:45:03]mobile and mouth and holly hand wished himself would stand or better off instead on the rocky road. The double in 1 2 3 4 5. Hot the hair and turn her down the rocky road.