“Patrick Kavanagh and the Migratory Experience” Address at the Patrick Kavanagh Weekend
Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, 26th September 2014
Earlier this year a very dear friend of mine from Monaghan, from ‘Blaney’, as he would put it, Kieran Duffy, died from a terminal illness at a very young age. He was a brilliant pianist who often played at Áras an Uachtaráin. He was also a former student of mine but, much more importantly, an outstanding teacher of English literature. He loved poetry and his favourite poet was Patrick Kavanagh. As he recited Kavanagh’s work, and talked about the setting of the early poems, he seemed to me to make a connection with the landscape of Monaghan that was exceptional.
Among the courses I taught in UCG, now NUIG, in years gone by, that were taken by Kieran were two courses relevant to this evening – one on the sociology of migration and the other on the sociology of literature. In teaching these there was an obvious temptation, that had to be avoided, to use the work of novelists and poets simply as evidence. Such cautions having been respected, however, if one wanted a source of insight into the truth of Irish existence, it was to the literature one had to turn. This was particularly so given the fact that the formal structure of the sociological theory then in vogue was heavily structural-functionalist, empirical in method, and incapable of handling qualitative material. This model described structures, identified roles, and the persons who constituted society simply fitted in neatly and without conflict.
What interested me then, by way of contrast, was the centrality of the migratory experience in the work of Irish writers – in the novel, short story or poetic form. It seemed to me, and to my students at the time, that there was a richness of Irish experience that was available to us in Irish writing of a literary kind, that the method of the social sciences at the time was missing. An exception might have beenThe Limerick Rural Survey of Jeremiah Newman and Patrick McNabb, in which I see, for example, Kavanagh’s Maguire. In our discussions, we proceeded, I remember, to discuss Patrick McGill, Dónal Mac Amhlaigh and many others. It was around this time that I came to the tentative conclusion that the migratory experience was of special significance in the poetry and prose of Patrick Kavanagh
It is for another day to reflect on why such a central experience as migration did not feature very strongly in the Irish curriculum. After all, migration dominates every period of Irish history and perhaps, sadly, the sense of loss associated with it, has returned as part of our contemporary experience.
I believe that it would be possible to sustain the suggestion that the main characters in global literature have been migrants, but in my suggestion that the migratory experience is helpful in the understanding of the work of Patrick Kavanagh, I am referring less to the generality of a literary form than to the relationship between the poet, his sense of place, and the forms of intimacy sought, discarded, reviewed, pursued in a new place, or sought to be recovered, even in memory.
There have been many very fine studies on the work of Patrick Kavanagh including the detailed works of Dr. Antoinette Quinn and the dedicated and illuminating work of Patrick Kavanagh’s brother, Peter, whom I met in 1996 at the unveiling of a plaque in St. Mary’s Church in Haddington Road. What I have to say today is but a modest reflection on one facet of the poet’s life –Patrick Kavanagh as migrant.
I suggest that Kavanagh’s journey between the rural setting of Monaghan and the city reveals some features of the migratory experience in general as well as his personal ones. He was, in my view, a particularly vulnerable migrant, ultimately unsuccessful, in both his leaving the point of origin and in his engagement with the city, a migrant who perhaps left it too late to leave his rural origins, and too late to re-enter a new and complex urban world. But the studies on his life and poetry reveal a far greater complexity within these polarities, a complexity based on the contested rituals of entry and performance in a community of the arts, that included literature and poetry, and whose energy was often derived from the capacity of vitriolic abuse as ‘The Paddiad’ might show.
The experience of migration can never be understood simply in terms of the features of the place of origin or the features of the point of destination. Migration is, above all else, about transience and all the implications of uncertainty that go with it. In the act of migration itself, imagination is infinite and the circumstances of the migratory move finite – creating a world of contradictions.
Given securities are ceded up and the search for significance in the persona is negotiated in conditions of strangeness, and with strangers, something for which there can never be but partial preparation or anticipation.
Neither is the act of migration a linear or simple experience. The urge to leave is not determined solely by any inadequacy of the place of origin, and, of course, a sense of place may obdure in memory long after the connection with it has been broken Then again, destination is rehearsed in the imagination long before, and often, after, the act of leaving itself. Leaving is thus never simply an act of rejection of, for example, rural life. Rather it is the balance between the rehearsed alternative of the city of the imagination and the familiar that has become less loved.
The flux that is at the heart of transience strikes at many of the taken-for-granted versions of Irish life. After all, the sedentary is not our common experience. Yet so much Irish scholarship assumes a kind of structure associated with property, the security of ownership, a neat allocation of roles in the community. When I was reading Patrick Kavanagh first, I had just encountered Family and Community in Ireland by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball which was an extended version of their work of the 1930s on rural Ireland, published as The Irish Countryman.
That work relates a neat allocation of roles between farmers, their wives, and their children. The participants moved in a structurally determined way through a structured existence of defined roles, and mostly in silence. Women stirred the coals in the fire as they prepared food for a morning where men would leave for farm-work and women would set about the domestic tasks of farmhouse and farmyard. These men and women have always struck me as the ghostly players in the abstracted and dangerously over-determined fantasy of a dubious theoretical venture.
I mention this because Patrick Kavanagh was writing his early poems, as a young man in his twenties, at the same time as this highly abstract model of Irish existence was becoming, among U.S. scholars in particular, the most influential version of Irish rural life. It is in this early Kavanagh work that we find the fullness of the rural experience, with all the beauty that proximity to a nature renewing itself offers to the innocent imagination, an imagination still available to the spiritual. Indeed I have been struck by the recurrence of ‘soul’ as a theme in Kavanagh’s poems.
“FREE SOUL
Yesterday I saw the Earth beautiful
Through the frosted glass of November’s tree
I peered into an April country
Where love was day-dream free.
And in the steam rising from the dung-heap
Another firmament was blown
Dotted over with fairy worlds
And lamped with silver stone.
Over the bleak grey-bearded bogs
I looked and beheld the last Atlantis
And surely it was not November
But a time the freed souls grant us.”
The ‘spiritual’, too, shifts in content, at times identifying the divine in nature’s renewal, at other times in the awe of clerical pomp, and yet again, even in a form of scrupulosity.
There is, I believe, more than one self being crafted in Patrick Kavanagh’s life journey. There is a self of the spirit that requires sensory expression, that is repressed by grinding rural economic circumstance; there is a poetic self that is seeking endorsement from the peers in that community of the arts; and there is a social self of transacted language. All of these projects are interconnected and mediated through the migratory experience.
The personal sense of the early poems is a truth insufficiently recognised. The Ireland of Patrick Kavanagh was an Ireland made safe with bounded fields that defined one’s status. Onto that status were layered all the requirements of respectability with its necessary restraint and the consignment of feelings to a silence that could not be broken without consequences for reputation. Yet none of this is sufficient to suppress entirely the imagination of a close encounter with nature and its sounds.
The spiritual hunger is reflected, I believe, for example in To a Blackbird –
“O pagan poet you
And I are one
In this – we lose our god
At set of sun
And we are kindred when
The hill wind shakes
Sweet song like blossoms on
The calm green lakes.
We dream while Earth’s sad children
Go slowly by
Pleading for our conversation
With the Most High.”
The politics of publication, the post-colonial circumstance of judging in light of what was acceptable in the metropolitan centre are important. Antoinette Quinn made a valuable point, I believe, in her Patrick Kavanagh – Born Again Romantic, when she referred to Patrick Kavanagh’s tendency to seek to publish his Georgian pastoral poetry in England in the 1930s, and to restrict his more direct poetry of Irish rural life to Irish publications.
This, I believe, illustrates the interesting and more general point of Irish writing in English in the early decades of the 20th century and it extends beyond Patrick Kavanagh. The assumption that guided a politics of publication, as it were, was that if one’s work was to be treated as serious literature, it had to be published in London. One only has to look at the correspondence between Liam O’Flaherty and his English mentor Garnett for an example of how the pressure to produce work that would satisfy a wider readership became such a self-inflicted pressure as might lead to the devaluing of what was proximate, close to one’s senses, but limited in its being perceived as local.
The experience of migration is, of course, an inevitable departure from the warmth of certainties. Yet this departure is never totally complete, and the literary expressions of migration very often recount a cycle of return and redemption. I do not suggest that this happens in the case of Patrick Kavanagh, but I was very moved by Antoinette Quinn’s end piece in Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, where she quotes a friend as recalling Patrick Kavanagh saying, on his death bed: “In God I believe”. In between the point of origin and destination is the most complex and dangerous space of the migrant’s existence. One could suggest, too, that regarding ourselves as migrants in time, it is in the middle period, when consciousness of the finitude of existence is unavoidable, that the greatest changes take place. In many respects, I see all of that in Patrick Kavanagh’s life, a life too late in its leaving, too late in its arrival for new encounter.
Engaging with the city begins with a note of optimism but that optimism will fade. It is an insufficiently recognised feature from the study of migration, that migrants frequently rehearse their return, as John Berger showed in his A Seventh Man. Migrants go to railway stations not only to encounter people from their own region who are new arrivals but to subconsciously rehearse the journey they themselves hope to make as they return. I believe that Patrick Kavanagh’s experience of transience, in the city, with all of its insecurities and uncertainties, made that impossible for him. The negotiation of the different selves, in his case, required an urban setting, an engagement with what might have been a piranha tank, but it was a circle within which he, and understandably as a writer, sought to function.
The urge to belong is a feature of migratory transience. The migrant is attempting to enter a world that is not only strange to him or her, but where the accommodation of the stranger is not defined in terms of any automatic hospitality. An artistic community in the throes of conflict – in an atmosphere of authoritarian philistinism – no doubt presented its special challenges. A type of performance is called forth which may lead to the adoption of a persona that fits the required version of the stranger. It may also suggest the usefulness of the discarding of previous identities in the effort to acquire the necessities for entry into a new world. Sometimes these influences are balanced if the migration is of a circulatory kind. The new is brought home and while it may introduce changes in that from which one had earlier departed, a reassurance from origins is available, – but, of course, the point of origin has been crucially changed.
If the migration, as in Kavanagh’s case, is not circulatory but consists of an endless flux of moving from one location to another, within and between urban settings, the requirements of intimacy as well as the possibilities of imagination are changed. The search for recognition in a new, fairly artificial, world of critical reception is a very different experience from the disconsolate personal adjustment to the wet drills of the field at one’s point of origin.
It is one of the features of the life of the migrant who has left with the intention of not returning, that there is an attraction in the heady consumption of the new experience of urban sociability, where day and night are blurred experiences – even if one has left late, with a sense that one must absorb it all to make up for the experience of a life deferred. This experience is, of course, full of danger, leading to a cruel sense of disappointment and disillusion. I believe it occurred early in Patrick Kavanagh’s experience.
“PEGASUS
My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs.
I offered him to the Church – the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs.
One said: ‘Let him remain unbid
In the wind and rain and hunger
Of sin and we will get him –
With the winkers thrown in – for nothing.
Then the men of State looked at
What I’d brought for sale.
One minister, wondering if
Another horse-body would fit the tail
That he’d kept for sentiment –
The relic of his own soul –
Said, ‘I will graze him in lieu of his labour.’
I lent him for a week or more
And he came back a hurdle of bones,
Starved, overworked, in despair.
I nursed him on the roadside grass
To shape him for another fair.
I lowered my price. I stood him where
The broken-winded, spavined stand
And crooked shopkeepers said that he
Might to a season on the land –
But not for high-paid work in towns.
He’d do a tinker, possibly.
I begged, ‘O make some offer now,
A soul is a poor man’s tragedy.
He’ll draw your dungiest card,’ I said,
‘Show you short cuts to Mass,
Teach weather lore, at night collect
Bad debts from poor men’s grass.’
And they would not.
Where the
Tinkers quarrel I went down
With my horse, my soul.
I cried, ‘Who will bid me half a crown?’
From their rowdy bargaining
Not one turned. ‘Soul,’ I prayed,
‘I have hawked you through the world
Of Church and State and meanest trade.
But this evening, halter off,
Never again will it go on.
On the south side of ditches
There is grazing of the sun.
No more haggling with the world …’
As I said these words he grew
Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him
Every land my imagination knew.”
Patrick Kavanagh’s work was possessed of an intimacy of place, the personal, and the contemporary flux of life. I was very moved by Peter Kavanagh’s Patrick Kavanagh – A Life Chronicle, being as it was, not just an attempt to make Patrick Kavanagh’s work available, as Peter Kavanagh put it, “to future scholars”, but an extraordinary testament to a relationship between brothers. That book catches, too, the atmosphere of the time – the heady, exciting, abandoned, bohemian, if precarious and often impecunious, existence of writers in a state that had placed respectability and property as higher values, and certainly above any aesthetic impulses to which the disparate and diverse community that imbibed with abandon in Dublin aspired.
The book is valuable too, among other reasons, for its enabling us to relive the story of Kavanagh’s Weekly, and so much more. For example, the struggle for publication, and Peter’s role in it, often without the co-operation of his brother Patrick. The unrealistic search for employment in an inhospitable environment, made more difficult by a diminishing willingness to make any concession.
I began my reflection on the experience of Patrick Kavanagh as migrant by saying that literature should never be reduced to the status of evidence for a sociological model. This is not to say that it is not richly suggestive of a truth that defines the social: its sociological insight may be generative of good hypotheses in an appropriate phenomenologically-based sociology, as is suitable for our historical and contemporary life.
The Green Fool, The Great Hunger, Tarry Flynn have an importance of a social, anthropological kind. Even with all the later reservations of their author piled upon them, even their rejection, as literary pieces, they have a life of their own. This is a life that even the author cannot take from them. They have had a major influence. The importance that Antoinette Quinn, in her Patrick Kavanagh – Born Again Romantic, attaches to Shancoduff is something with which I very much agree.
“In Kavanagh’s country verse, familiarity breeds affection and in Shancoduff, where he achieves a perfect marriage between the roles of farmer and poet, his insider’s knowledge of small-farm life gives substance and specificity to his customary reflectiveness. Not a single abstraction intrudes into the poem. Yet his apprehension that critical reaction to his local poetry would be unfriendly proved correct. Inniskeen Road: July Evening was ignored by most contemporary critics and Donagh MacDonagh noticed it only to lament its unfortunate conclusion. John Gawsworth and Maurice Wollman both passed up the opportunity to anthologise Shancoduff. Published in the Dublin Magazine in 1937, it was not collected until 1960.
‘Shancoduff’ is radically innovative not only in its blend of agricultural realism and an unobtrusively Catholic ethos (Armagh, Glassdrummond Chapel), but, more fundamentally, in its fashioning of a distinctively new poetic personality, affectionate, playful, vulnerable. This not descriptive or symbolic verse; it is entirely self-creating, using others to distinguish the self.”
I agree with Dr. Quinn’s assessment and I suggest that the migratory experience of Patrick Kavanagh is a crucial element in his poetic achievement.
If I may read ‘Shancoduff’ -
“SHANCODUFF
My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot’s wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.
My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.
The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: ‘Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor’
I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?”
Perhaps, in this there is redemption.
In his location of the poetic instinct, the craft, the struggle of it all, Patrick Kavanagh brought, not only his place of origin, his experience of migration, into appropriate consideration as worthy of poets and their audience; he also brought the Ireland of his and our times, with both its beauty and its savagery, into our consciousness. That is probably why so many people have their favourite Kavanagh poem. It simply rhymes with their existence. Long may it continue to be so.