My father, who grew up in the Irish countryside, rarely said a bad word about anyone; gossip irritated him and though he sometimes listened, he always dismissed it after as being “made up”. The most withering insult I heard him deliver was about an academic known to my siblings for sexual misconduct with students, a rumour he found unsurprising. “You’d see him, sure, on the top deck of the bus, going home.” What this man did on the bus we can only imagine, but my father’s contempt was clear – the man was drunk and on show. Of the poet Patrick Kavanagh he simply said, “You’d see him about the place.”
Irish writers were often publicly sighted. The woman who came to “do” for my mother on a Friday walked up and down the hall with her hands behind her back in imitation of WB Yeats strolling along St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and the tea towel twitched behind her as the poet counted the meter of lines he was writing in his head.
This was before writers learned how to drive, clearly (some still don’t). Yeats’s daughter, Anne, saw her father on the bus one day: he was sitting on the top deck up at the front and he was swinging his forefinger to and fro, with the tiny movement that indicated he was mid-creation. Anne, who was about 15 at the time, knew better than to disturb the making of a new poem. When the bus stopped in Rathfarnham, she walked downstairs behind her father and followed at a safe distance to the gates of the house. The hand was still going when he turned up the avenue, and she came quietly after. As they approached the front door, Yeats spun around to her and said, very fiercely, “Who are you? And why are you following me?”
“I am your daughter,” she said.
Writing is a strangely vulnerable way to fame. The privacy of the sentiment that bound these men close to their readers was at odds with the public fact of them glimpsed in the street. My mother used to see Walter Macken at early morning Mass in Phibsborough. His novels were banned by the Catholic church and there he was, praying on his knees.
When I was a teenager, I pressed my father for details about Kavanagh, who was our greatest poet after Yeats, and whose work filled my adolescent heart to the brim. I was intrigued by the idea of my father at large in the big city, occupying the same space as writers like Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien who had recently been described in Anthony Cronin’s book Dead As Doornails. Something was happening, in the late 1970s, to the figure of the drinking Irish writer: he was becoming, by the very fact of his drunkenness, iconised.
“He was an awful bowsie,” my father said, meaning that Kavanagh was not worth bothering with. An “awful” bowsie was worse than a “bit of a” bowsie: such a man was not just unruly but also wrong-headed and incorrigible.
This seemed like a terrible dismissal of the great poet; it broke some unspoken Irish rule about our general, national loveliness. Kavanagh was bitterly proud of the “stony grey soil” of his homeland in County Monaghan. The beauty of his lines served to ennoble the poverty of his origins, and that seemed to be part of poetry’s project in the Ireland of my childhood – which was also the project undertaken by Yeats: to elevate the once colonised and derided, to bring a people high.
Kavanagh wrote about unrequited love, which was, in those days, the only proper kind. His 1946 poem On Raglan Road is still sung, to a popular tune, at that moment when an Irish gathering needs a little melancholy. The poem is not just about love’s disaster, it is also an anthem to my home town. “On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue.” The map of the poem turned all of Dublin into an “enchanted way”, a place where you might be smitten in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. The poet’s grief was a “fallen leaf” and we were as good as Paris, when it came to the business of love at first sight.
It is hard to read the poem without hearing the song in your head, but even with its help, the last couple of lines feel a little off. The poet sees the ghost of his love walking away from him “so hurriedly” and this rejection turns him into an angel, for some reason, while she turns into lesser stuff. “When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.”
More quietly resonant is Kavanagh’s Bluebells for Love, in which a couple walk through woodland looking at the bluebells – but sideways so as not to frighten them. “We’ll know love little by little, glance by glance.” Here, the figure of the angel is above the couple, glimpsed “smiling in a chance / Look through the tree trunks”. You might call it a poem about stealth, but it is also a beautifully modest thing about intimacy, shyness and hope.
The woman in the woodland was called Hilda Moriarty. She had travelled with him to Lord Dunsany’s estate in County Meath on a day in May when Kavanagh was on the scrounge for money. She was also the woman in Raglan Road who broke his angelic heart. Moriarty was Kavanagh’s inspiration. She was not just beautiful but also smart and, like many muses, far from passive. It was not just her unattainability that provoked the poem, but the female insight she reflected back at him, or back into him.
“I upbraided him,” she said, in a television interview some decades later, “about his writing about cabbages and turnips and potatoes because he said he was a peasant poet. So I said you should write something else. ‘Oh’ he said. ‘I will, I’ll write something else’ and that was the origin of Raglan Road.”
Moriarty was happy to own her role in the process of creation, which gave her an echoed, perhaps more perfect fame. Similarly, Maud Gonne was happy to be the symbolic object of Yeats’s early love poetry, which was an act of public, sometimes political speech. The sexual reputations of such women were safe. As everyone knew, the poet did not sleep with his muse, that was the whole point. He just yearned. Like Dante’s Beatrice, her primary function was to remain passive and admired.
The job of being a muse has gone right out of fashion – or it has retreated into the fashion business, where designers still laud certain models as their ideal. Here, as in painting, the relationship is intensely visual. The “bemused” artist spends an abstracted, untrackable amount of time looking at the woman he is painting. In this state of “thrall”, of being struck, slain, frozen, the artist possesses the unattainable woman by reproducing her, and the viewer is smitten by the image he makes.
There is a kind of creepiness to all this too – as we now more easily intuit. The artist is almost entirely self-involved, his idealised muse may be admired, but she is also robbed of the right to be real.
“I was very young at the time and he was quite old,” said Moriarty of her difficult suitor. In the autumn of 1944, Kavanagh was living in a boarding house on Raglan Road, unemployed and surviving on hand-outs from, among others, archbishop John McQuaid. When he met Moriarty and became infatuated, he was well known and 40, she was 22, and considered one of the most beautiful women in Dublin.
Moriarty originally wanted to be a writer but when she was 16 her father, who was a doctor, brought her to Dublin to study medicine as he had done. She was flattered by the attentions of a poet and was kind to him, even when those attentions became onerous. As his biographer Antoinette Quinn writes, Kavanagh waited for her at certain times in the street, and sat watching her in cafes where she socialised with friends. “He came to know all her haunts and stalked her.”
To all appearances, Moriarty seemed to have the upper hand. Kavanagh may have been highly literate but he was uncouth and she tried to smarten him up a little (he had horrified another date by arriving smelly). In a joking article, Kavanagh described himself as an ill-kempt knight taken in hand by a lovely lady. This, according to Quinn was the kind of infantilism you might expect from a man who had lived with his mother until he was 35. It is a private emotional dependency “at odds with the misogyny he affected in his writings”. By the end of the year, Kavanagh, like the true stalker he was, ignored Moriarty’s attempts to rebuff him, and turned up when she was on dates with other men. These finally included Donogh O’Malley, later the minister for education, whom she met in 1946 and went on to marry.
Persistence in the face of rejection, a fantasised union that becomes more “real” the less it is wanted, these are familiar to those in the public eye who have fans maddened by adoration. They will also recognise the turn from idealisation to nastiness in Kavanagh’s letter to Moriarty, which is held in the National Library of Ireland. This opens with the line: “I like you because of your enchanting selfishness.” Kavanagh knows he should not write, she will not answer, and yet he does write because: “I am in such good humour regarding you that I want you to know it. Remembering you is like remembering some dear one who has died.”
Back in the day, this shift from unwanted to malevolent attention was not called out, because unrequited love was all the rage. The beauty of Kavanagh’s poetry made every discomfort Hilda experienced worthwhile. It almost made the relationship mutual. He kept a painting of her propped up against the wall of his bedsit for some years, and when he died, in 1967, she sent a wreath of red roses to the funeral in the shape of the letter H. After that, it was back to the business of being herself: when her husband died the following year, Hilda ran unsuccessfully for his parliamentary seat, then returned to work as a doctor with a particular interest in social medicine.
It is nice to be adored, until it isn’t. You might think that women are done with all that, but it never seems to go away. Living online puts us all in thrall to our idealised image, even if some feminists now produce these images themselves. The crush has not gone out of fashion.
And when the readers are disappointed in a writer’s feet of clay, I think, “What did you expect? They were just making it up.” You might say that all writers are stalkers, obsessively chasing something that is not real, trying to possess something that can not be possessed. The higher they go the lower they feel perhaps, like smelly Kavanagh and his angelic sublime.
Meanwhile, in every Q&A I have ever done as a writer I am asked where I “get my inspiration”, as though such a thing must always come from an outside source, as if the writer’s gaze is fixed upwards waiting for some beautiful beam of light. And I say, “I don’t do inspiration, I just write.”
