On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Seamus Heaney talks a lot about his childhood, growing up in Ulster, a land of borders and boundaries, linguistic, social, economic, religious. These borders became interior for him, even before he knew what it meant. He was Irish. The approved literary canon was British only. He thrilled to good writing, no matter from what culture it came, but it was when he encountered the work of Patrick Kavanagh, that the roof exploded, exposing the full sky the full air, a voice that spoke of his own experience, his own background. It was a revelation, it was recognition, it was a reclamation for him. If you grow up being told, insidiously and overtly, that you are “lesser than”, and that your background is not relevant – or, at the very least, that the mainstream culture is the Default, and anything other than that is “Other” … then of course there will be shame/secrecy/weirdness around who you are. In a heightened and divided political environment, merely saying “Here is what I feel about things” becomes a radical act. Heaney absorbed that.
Patrick Kavanagh is one of the great writers of the 20th century, and one of the major voices of Ireland. Angry, wild, unbridled, talented, fearless … he wrote what he knew, and he wrote big and bold. I wrote a post about Patrick Kavanagh here, with some good background and quotes from others on his work.
Patrick Kavanagh saw his role as poet was to “name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events”. And that’s what he did. As a member of a hated minority, his “naming” was a huge threat to the status quo, to the canon, to the majority’s sense of itself. Not for him Yeats’s Celtic twilight and fairies dancing in the grass … No. He had no patience for the Anglo-Irish literary aristocracy that romanticized the Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic poor. He was Catholic. He was poor. He was rural. He kept to that, kept to that voice, and spoke out the concerns, the ravaged history, the genocide (in his great epic poem “The Great Hunger” about the 1847 famine). Kavanagh was a political poet, for sure, but he was also a great writer of personal matters, his work keening with intense feeling, passion, an outcry against injustice, but always personal.
Like James Joyce, like Yeats (a man whose work he despised), Patrick Kavanagh is a giant looming on the Irish literary landscape. His reputation is more secure now but at the time of his writing he was sidelined. He was too Irish. Too pissed. Kavanagh took to his sidelining like a pissed-off martyr, consigned to oblivion, and taking that oblivion to mean that he had done something right. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say. Well, FINE. I’m glossing over a lot – the man had a long career and a built-in audience. But he was not taught in schools and so this vital voice of native Ireland was kept out of that all-important canon. Patrick Kavanagh died in 1967, and he wrote up until the end (although he was a pretty bad alcoholic – some of his best work came late in life). Kavanagh took on big topics like the famine, but he also wrote about everyday life, the landscape and people and events of his surroundings. And it was this element that thrilled Heaney to no end. Why … this man comes from where I come from. And he wrote about it!!
That’s the subject of the following lecture, given by Heaney in 1985. Heaney gives a taste of what it was like growing up in Belfast at that time: There were no literary publishers, no poetry “scene” (he would help create that scene), no literary magazines, nothing. Heaney had been searching for Northern Irish poets, obscure or well-known, that spoke of their life there, that gave voice to a specific place/people. He went to Queen’s University in Belfast. He remembers not once being taught an Irish writer, let alone an Irish Ulster writer. He knew they were out there. There was Louis MacNeice. Thomas Kinsella. John Montague. But unlike Dublin, Belfast was a cultural wasteland. And then, at one point, Heaney’s headmaster leant him a copy of Kavangh’s “The Great Hunger.”
Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Everything, at that time, was needy and hopeful and inchoate. I had had four poems accepted for publication, two by the Belfast Telegraph, one by The Irish Times and one by The Kilkenny Magazine, but still, like Keats in Yeats’s image, I was like a child with his nose pressed to a sweetshop window, gazing from behind a barrier at the tempting mysteries beyond. And then came this revelation and confirmation of reading Kavanagh. When I discovered ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ in the old Oxford Book of Irish Verse, I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately – but which I had always considered to be below or beyond books – being presented in a book. The barrels of blue potato spray which had stood in my own childhood like holidays of pure colour in an otherwise grey field-life – there they were, standing their ground in print. And there too was the word ‘headland’, which I guessed was to Kavanagh as local a word as ‘headrig’ was to me. Here too was the strange stillness and heat and solitude of the sunlit fields, the inexplicable melancholy of distant work-sounds, all caught in a language that was both familiar and odd.
The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.
And it was the same with ‘A Christmas Childhood.’ Once again, in the other life of print, I came upon the unregarded data of the life I had lived. Potato-pits with rime on them, guttery gaps, iced-over puddles being crunched, cows being milked, a child nicking the doorpost with a penknife and so on. What was being experienced was not some hygienic and self-aware pleasure of the text but a primitive delight in finding world become word.
I had been hungry for this kind of thing without knowing what it was I was hungering after. For example, when I graduated in 1961, I had bought Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems. I did take pleasure in that work, especially in the hard-faced tenderness of something like ‘Postscript from Iceland’; I recognized his warm and clinkered spirit, yet I still remained at a reader’s distance. MacNeice did not throw the switch that sends writing energy sizzling into a hitherto unwriting system. When I opened his book, I still came up against the window-pane of literature. His poems arose from a mind-stuff and existed in a cultural setting which were at one remove from me and what I came from. I envied them, of course, their security in the big world of history and poetry which happened out there, far beyond the world of state scholarships, the Gaelic Athletic Association, October devotions, the Clancy Brothers, buckets and egg-boxes where I had had my being. I envied them, but I was not taken over by them the way I was taken over by Kavanagh.
At this point, it is necessary to make one thing clear. I am not affirming here the superiority of the rural over the urban/suburban as a subject for poetry, nor am I out to sponsor deprivation at the expense of cultivation. I am not insinuating that one domain of experience is more intrinsically poetical or more ethnically desirable than another. I am trying to record exactly the sensations of one reader, from a comparatively bookless background, who came into contact with some of the established poetic voices in Ireland in the early 1960s. Needless to say, I am aware of a certain partisan strain in the criticism of Irish poetry, deriving from remarks by Samuel Beckett in the 1930s and developed most notably by Anthony Cronin. This criticism regards the vogue for poetry based on images from a country background as a derogation of literary responsibility and some sort of negative Irish feedback. It is also deliberately polemical and might be worth taking up in another context; for the moment, however, I want to keep the focus personal and look at what Kavanagh has meant to one reader, over a period of a couple of decades.
Kavanagh’s genius had achieved single-handedly what I and my grammar-schooled, arts-degreed generation were badly in need of – a poetry that linked the small farm life which had produced us to the slim-volume world we were now supposed to be fit for. He brought us back to what we came from. So it was natural that, to begin with, we overvalued the subject-matter of the poetry at the expense of its salutary creative spirit. In the 1960s I was still more susceptible to the pathos and familiarity of the matter of Kavanagh’s poetry than I was alert to the liberation and subversiveness of its manner. Instead of divesting me of my first life, it confirmed that life by giving it an image. I do not mean by that that when I read The Great Hunger I felt proud to have known people similar to Patrick Maguire or felt that their ethos had been vindicated. It is more that one felt less alone and marginal as a product of that world now that it had found its expression in a work which was regarded not just as part of a national culture but as a contribution to the world’s store of true poems.
Kavanagh gave you permission to dwell without cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life. Over the border, into a Northern Ireland dominated by the noticeably English accents of the local BBC, he broadcast a voice that would not be cowed into accents other than its own. Without being in the slightest way political in its intentions, Kavanagh’s poetry did have political effect. Whether he wanted it or not, his achievement was inevitably co-opted, north and south, into the general current of feeling which flowed from and sustained ideas of national identity, cultural otherness from Britain and the dream of a literature with a manner and a matter resistant to the central Englishness of the dominant tradition. No admirer of the Irish Literary Revival, Kavanagh was read initially and almost entirely in light of the Revival writers’ ambitions for a native literature.
So there I was, in 1963, with my new copy of Come Dance with Kitty Stabling, in the grip of those cultural and political pieties which Kavanagh, all unknown to me, had spent the last fifteen years or so repudiating. I could feel completely at home with a poem like ‘Shancoduff’ – which dated from the 1930s anyhow, as did ‘To the Man after the Harrow’ – and with ‘Kerr’s Ass’ and ‘Ante-Natal Dream’; their imagery, after all, was continuous with the lyric poetry of the 1940s, those Monaghan rhapsodies I had known from the Oxford Book of Irish Verse. This was the country poet at home with his country subjects and we were all ready for that. At the time, I responded to the direct force of these later works but did not immediately recognize their visionary intent, their full spiritual daring.
