The Wrong Country. Gerald Dawe

are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in very high opinion’.29

      The ‘all that’ to which Mary refers is poetry and its presence in the public sphere of the city, and as she is about to discover, it is all very much visible:

      It was into this quiet flow of the evening that the poet came, a large man, agitated, without jacket, the shirt open, his thumbs hooked in braces that held up a pair of sagging trousers, a brown hat pushed far back on his head. Coughing harshly and pushing the chair around, he sat at the next table.

      ‘Don’t look around,’ McDonough leaned forward to say.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘He’ll join us if we catch his eye.’

      ‘Who is he?’

      ‘A poet.’

      ‘He doesn’t look like one.’

      ‘That should be in his favour. All the younger clerks that work in my place nowadays look like poets. He is the best we have. He’s the star of the place across the road. He’s practically resident there. He must have been thrown out.’

      The potboy in his short white coat came over to the poet’s table and waited impassively for the order.

      ‘A Powers,’ the order came in a hoarse, rhythmical voice. ‘A large Powers and a pint of Bass.’30

      The connection here between Patrick McDonough and Mary Kelleher, like the relationship dramatised elsewhere in ‘Peaches’,31 for example, is revealed through the life of poetry and the perceived public place of ‘the poet’ in modern society. The individuals are seen, and in turn see each other, in terms of how the imaginative life is reflected (sometimes comically, sometimes perversely) in Irish society’s altering self-consciousness during a decade of increasingly fraught social and economic change.

      In ‘Bank Holiday’, the lovers’ blossoming romance begins with a poem – W.B. Yeats’s ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ – and is conveyed through an encounter with Patrick Kavanagh, the unnamed poet (‘the best we have’),32 before concluding with the unnamed book of his which, by the look of it, is Kavanagh’s Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. You can read this fictional encounter in ‘Bank Holiday’ with the knowledge that, according to Antoinette Quinn’s essential biography of Patrick Kavanagh,33 the event in the story had its roots in an actual experience of McGahern’s. In the fictional reimagining, McDonough (a kind of latter-day Gabriel Conroy) is, for a second time, rattled by the poet’s comment:

      ‘You’re a cute hoar, McDonough. You’re a mediocrity. It’s no wonder you get on so well in the world’, the poet burst out in a wild fury … and stalked out, muttering and coughing.

      ‘That’s just incredible’, she said.34

      Incredible too that when McDonough and Mary return to McDonough’s flat, Mary asks, ‘Do you have any of the poet’s work?’ to which her soon to be lover retorts:

      ‘You can have a present of this, if you like.’ He reached and took a brown volume from the shelf.

      ‘I see it’s even signed,’ she said, as she leafed through the volume. ‘For Patrick McDonough, With love’, and she began to laugh.35

      As the narrative deepens into the couple’s romantic and physical attraction, that poetry book travels with Mary on her journey to in-laws in Dundalk (where else? – Kavanagh country!) and when she returns she remarks: ‘“I read the poems at last”. She put the book with the brown cover on the table. “I read them again on the train coming back. I loved them.”’36 Why not just put ‘the book back’? The fact that we have that ‘brown cover’ mentioned twice suggests a definite bond with an actual book, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, which did indeed have a brown cover. And in the Chekhovian passage that follows, McGahern and his character McDonough reveal their hand, for the ‘very pure love sonnets’ which McDonough refers to are undoubtedly the self-same sonnets in Kitty Stobling by which the real-life Patrick Kavanagh would be recognised for generations of readers to come:37

      ‘I’ve long suspected that those very pure love sonnets are all addressed to himself … That was how the “ignorant bloody apes and mediocrities” could all be short-circuited.’

      ‘Some are very funny.’

      ‘I’m so glad you liked them. I’ve lived with some of them for years.’

      Later, over dinner, McDonough asks Mary to marry him. So the phantom book of poems becomes quite literally a love token shared between both characters as the unlikely and contradictory poet-figure of Kavanagh turns into an ungainly muse-like cupid. This is not quite as fanciful as it might appear, since McGahern has got form in this regard.