Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Patrick Kavanagh (Review of By Night Unstarred)

Patrick Kavanagh repudiated his early and best-known book The Green Fool as “Stage-Irish autobiography,” and in one sense his so-called “autobiographical novel” By Night Unstarred looks like an attempt to reclaim Irish rural life from the lush romanticism and sometimes strained folksiness that marred the earlier venture. Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh’s only other major fictional work, also has its roots in his formative years and like The Green Fool concerns itself with the growth of the poet against the background of the Irish countryside. Although Kavanagh was much more pleased with Tarry Flynn — modestly finding it “uproariously funny”—both it and The Green Fool are damaged by Kavanagh’s semi-mystical love of nature and a certain platitudinous idealism that occurs whenever the subject of the poet’s privileged insight and depth of feeling is raised.

By Night Unstarred on the whole avoids these pitfalls; largely, I suspect, because the main portion of it has nothing to do with poets or poetry. Although claiming to be a “novel,” the book really consists of an unfinished short novel and a short story that would have been far better left unjoined. Peter Kavanagh, the author’s brother and the editor, has sought to produce a unified work of fiction by labelling the two disparate stories parts 1 and 2, and by supplying an apologetic explanatory interjection that in the end only exposes the artifice of the link.

Part 1 is far and away the most successful of the two, and, not surprisingly, the least autobiographical. Set in the parish of Ballyrush near Dundalk at the beginning of the century it charts the remorseless rise to prosperity of a weaselly Irish peasant called Peter Devine. Initially an impoverished farm labourer, he impregnates the local half-wit Rosie and has to flee the wrath of her family and the censure of the parish. He returns seven years later an obsessed and oddly motivated man. Maniacally set on becoming the richest man in the county, he courts the bulky daughter of the wealthiest farm-owner in the district and enlists the help of various colourful local characters to this end. By sly manipulation and unscrupulous use of the village gossips a myth grows up about his eligibility and fairly soon he is accepted as a suitor. Devine’s sole interest is in wealth and his romantic yearnings are wholly subservient to this drive (“When he noticed her wobbling breasts beneath the loose blouse he dreamt of the field before the door with the deep hollow in the middle”). Ultimately his dedication proves highly successful, and in material terms Peter Devine triumphs in everything he does from siring children to planting potatoes. The end of part 1 sees him poised on the edge of bourgeois prosperity — a rich mill owner and county councillor — with his financial horizons beginning to broaden: “The priest had smoked three cigarettes since coming into the room: a bit of money in a cigarette factory would be no dead loss, he thought.”

The strength and vigour of Kavanagh’s portrayal of the villagers of Ballyrush are due to the constancy of his ironic gaze; a steadfastness of viewpoint that The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn sadly lacked. Kavanagh sees all too clearly that country people are as pusillanimous, bitchy and determinedly mercenary as the rest of us, if not more so: “The misfortune of a neighbour provided nearly all the best delights of that part of the country.” And Peter Devine, who dominates part 1, is explicitly alluded to as a personification of “the slime-stuck peasant unconscious of cities, of cultures, of everything but the power of money.” There is a sharp Flaubertian cynicism in evidence, free from any romanticism or fond simplicity, which makes Ballyrush as mordant a picture of a rural community as Yonville in Madame Bovary.

Part 2 jolts uneasily some decades ahead and the central figure now becomes “Patrick Kavanagh” (in an Isherwoodian third-person return to his younger self) fruitlessly searching for a job in Dublin. The Devines have resurfaced as the De Vines, now, thanks to Peter’s acumen, a large, vastly wealthy and powerful Dublin family with an interest in the arts. Patrick’s attempts to advance himself — and thereby to marry the girl he loves — are continually thwarted by his refusal, or inability, to ingratiate himself with the monolithic De Vine family. The cynicism of part 2 is of a more embittered and personal sort. Kavanagh’s skilful, distanced irony turns to shrill vituperation and the personal venom is all too apparent in the vignettes of literary and middle-class poseurs.

This is where the autobiography obtrudes and once again Kavanagh returns to the question of the poet’s role and function in society which, with the weight of personal invective behind it, inevitably damages the fiction. By all accounts the first fifty years of Kavanagh’s life were remarkably unpleasant and frustrating, and it seems he had every justification for bitterness and self-pity. And it’s the self-pity in the end that emerges and weakens this section of the novel and which makes “Patrick Kavanagh” such a hard character to sympathize with.

1978