After years of hard dedication to his craft, that would produce one of the mid-century Irish ‘classics’ in The Great Hunger (1942), and having fought against what he saw as the establishment in Dublin (and elsewhere), Kavanagh’s health, like Behan’s before him, gave out. But out of his illness – lung cancer and the complications of an unsteady lifestyle based around the pub – Kavanagh’s rebirth took place in the mid-1950s, as he was to remake his writing life by the Grand Canal:
So it was that on the banks of the Grand Canal between Baggot and Leeson Street bridges in the warm summer of 1955, I lay and watched the green waters of the canal. […] I was born in or about nineteen fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal.24
Come Dance with Kitty Stobling,25 which was finally published in 1960 after Kavanagh’s arduous search for a publisher, is addressed to his muse and contains a great lyrical lightness of touch, surrounded by some scars of struggle, as health and moral freedom are restored. It is a great book, as important in its way as, say, W.B. Yeats’s magnificent volume of 1928, The Tower. Come Dance with Kitty Stobling is a hymn to rebirth but it is also a remarkable poetic testament to the resilience of the imagination and the ability of Kavanagh to transcend the demeaning, niggardly and cramped atmosphere that had contaminated so much of the Irish literary scene by the 1950s.
As the Northern Irish, London-based poet Louis MacNiece remarked of the Dublin of a decade and a half beforehand, in 1939 just as the Second World War is declared:
I was alone with the catastrophe, spent Saturday drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs. Sunday morning the hotel man woke me (I was sleeping late and sodden), said, ‘England has declared war’.26
Kavanagh’s Kitty Stobling takes on what remains of this ‘literary world’ post-war in ‘The Paddiad; or, The Devil as a Patron of Irish Letters’, while caustically pointing his finger at those who promote its fading glories outside the country. This is the prefacing note to the poem:
This satire is based on the sad notion with which my youth was infected that Ireland was a spiritual entity. I had a good deal to do with putting an end to this foolishness, for as soon as I found out I reported the news widely. It is now only propagated by the BBC in England and in the Bronx in New York and the departments of Irish literature at Princeton, Yale, 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.