Harvard and New York universities.
I have included this satire but wish to warn the reader that it is based on the above-mentioned false and ridiculous premises.
A timely warning for those today uncritically advancing the notion that Ireland is a unique ‘cultural nirvana’. But the poems kick free of this kind of polemic and become ‘spiritualized’ – airy contemplations on the meaning of being; a cumbersome phrase for what is, in Kavanagh’s idiomatic English, so deceptively easy on the ear.
The sonnets, opening with ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’ continue throughout the collection with ‘October’, ‘Dear Folks’, ‘Yellow Vestment’, ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’, ‘Miss Universe’, ‘Epic’, ‘Winter’, ‘Question to Life’, ‘Peace’, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ and ‘The Hospital’. They form the poetic core of the collection. And in this re-centred world of his imagination, Kavanagh created what, in John McGahern’s words, was a lasting vision, one of the great legacies of the period.
‘[Kavanagh had] in The Great Hunger,’ McGahern remarks,27 ‘brought a world of his own vividly to life. The dumb world of de Valera’s dream had been given a true voice.’ McGahern continues: Kavanagh ‘had an individual vision, a vigorous gift for catching the rhythms of ordinary speech, and he was able to bring the images that move us into the light without patronage and on an equal footing with any great work’.
Patrick Kavanagh’s is a truly pitch-perfect, Irish-inflected voice, talking away to itself in these sonnets and is no longer troubled by the literary business of reputation and/or recognition. It is a wonderful achievement which Kavanagh would bequeath to a generation of poets coming behind, who would, unlike him, achieve international acknowledgement. Alongside the early books of Thomas Kinsella and John Montague, and the breakthrough of Austin Clarke’s Ancient Lights (1955), Come Dance with Kitty Stobling set a high watermark for Irish poetry, particularly when placed alongside the achievements of, say, Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived (1955) or Robert Lowell’s masterful, shape-changing volume, Life Studies (1959). In poems such as ‘The Hospital’ or ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’, Kavanagh’s imagination declares a revelation earned and honoured through hard-won experience:
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.28
Though published in the first year of the 1960s, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling ponders the past decade from its mid-point, and in ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ secures a most potent image of the time. We should recall that Kavanagh had been through a lot personally – he had lost a court case for libel against the Leinster Leader newspaper, experienced increasing ill-health, and cancer would be later diagnosed. He was fifty at the time, a relatively young man to our way of thinking; yet, in a poignant sense, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ is a reflection, as is much else in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, on Kavanagh’s surviving his own life and times. The last line, both as realisation and freedom, carries a powerful resonance to this very day;
But tonight I cannot sleep;
Two hours ago I heard the late homing dancers.
O Nineteen Fifty Four you leave and will not listen,
And do not care whether I curse or weep.29
Whether to ‘curse or weep’ as time passes is a perennial question, but perhaps Brian Fallon has defined best the cultural legacy of the 1950s:
Yet many still remember the Fifties as a grim, grey, rather bitter decade, which no doubting some respects they were. Internationally the Cold War had reached a stage of permafrost, and the mushroom-shadow of the Atomic Bomb hung over Europe, though there was still real faith in the capacity of the United Nations [Ireland was admitted in 1955] to maintain an international balance of power. Money was short, so too were jobs, and writers and artists in particular were badly paid; it was a period when many of them had to take casual employment of all kinds to tide them over until better times, and a number emigrated temporarily to London … Yet underneath it all there was in fact a considerable life force.30
The 1950s are a kind of alter-image of today31 when what we now know was happening was not exposed publicly or challenged politically – the sexual abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church; the appalling conditions that young women were condemned to work under in the Magdalene laundries; the narrow-minded complacency of the ruling elite. Lessons are rarely learnt from history, but the 1950s certainly show how best to counter the understandable anger and rage about political and moral failure of both church and state in the Ireland of that time.
In 1950s Ireland we can see our younger selves reflected as an age of innocence but also one full of dark secrets and wrongs. This proves the incontestable point that we neither need to go, nor should even consider going, backwards to realise that a soft-centred, remodelled nationalism – the very thing that Patrick Kavanagh railed against – is not what is needed today to rectify Ireland’s problems, simply because it does not work, any more than a refashioned imperial nostalgia works for Britain. If the 1950s prove anything in Ireland, it is by way of a rebuke and an inspiration; about the political need for a level-headed Mark II of the Whitaker generation who will coolly and calmly focus upon the historical fault-lines and fissures in Irish society in an effort to work through and plan how best to fix these while, at the same time, realistically appraising Ireland’s future standing in the eyes of its own citizens, as well as in the rest of the world.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PASSIONATE TRANSITORY: JOHN MCGAHERN
On the occasions when I met John McGahern in Galway or Dublin, or once farther afield in Poland, the conversation often gravitated towards poetry. He had both an imaginative understanding of poetry and the professional interest of a one-time teacher and university lecturer, but also as an observer of the literary world in Ireland, Britain and in the United States, where poets featured either as individuals he had come across or whose work he knew by heart. McGahern’s knowledge of poetry is shown throughout his own writing, both in the fiction but also in the literary journalism he published over many years. He was an intensely lyrical writer himself and the sense of language in which his fiction revels is very close to a poet’s understanding. In the short piece called ‘The Image’ he remarks, ‘The Muse, under whose whim we reign in return for a lifetime of availability, may grant us the absurd crown of Style, the revelation in language of the unique world we possess as we struggle for what may be no more than a yard of lead piping we saw in terror or in laughter once.’1
That sense of things conveying emotional meaning filtered through the imaginative control of his prose is a discipline close to the highest forms of poetry-making. It is little wonder that of the poets McGahern returned to most – Philip Larkin, Patrick Kavanagh and, less often, W.S. Graham – each is known for his lyrical control of difficult emotional states, existential mindscapes and desires, and the ‘struggle’ to re-enact transcendent silences.
It is possible to read McGahern’s fiction as an epic search for a prose equivalent of poetry; to render in descriptive English the speech rhythms of a way of saying and seeing things, infused with the intellectual and literary allusions of his own educational upbringing in Ireland, alongside the cultural inflections of the life he discovered as a young writer in the Dublin of the 1950s and beyond, growing into the artist he became.
It would take
