Twentieth century Irish writing has a few brotherly relationships to its name. William Butler Yeats and his hugely gifted artist brother, Jack. James Joyce's legendary reliance upon the industrious Stanislaus. The calm and loving bond between Samuel and Frank Beckett. The comradeship in arms of Patrick Kavanagh and his younger brother, the sacred keeper of the flame, Peter.
As we all know, what passes as a living dynamic relationship within any family can end as an overbearing posthumous custodianship, understandable as this may well be when the painful struggles of the past remain all too much alive in the present. Peter Kavanagh's chronicle of both his own and his brother's life together and apart makes for shocking reading. His poet brother was treated appallingly in mid-century Ireland. The official culture and many of its spokesmen were frightened, embarrassed, bored, bemused and uncertain about what to do with - and for - this remarkable individualist. Kavanagh in turn grew to despise and, contradictorily, seek out patronage from an established literary and political world within which he rarely found himself at home. This awkward, instinctive, playful and innocent man yearned for financial security and social cognition as a poet while living a difficult, sometimes impoverished life as a freelance journalist, broadcaster and lecturer, mostly in Dublin but periodically in London and further afield.
By comparison with the fate of other writers of the time in continental Europe, Kavanagh probably fared all right with a strong and solid family background and, when the time came, a farm of land at his disposal. That said, independent, post-revolutionary Ireland, Free State and Republic, was a state of profound political conservatism and religious conformism, whatever about the blind eyes turned on bohemian Dublin.
For those who did not fit in, as one woman writer of the time described it, Dublin felt like an isolation ward. Battling against the grain, Kavanagh's poetry of the 1940s, including the magnificent Great Hunger, are brave acts of cultural liberation. What he achieved, ahead of his time, was to free poetry in Ireland from the grand high aspirations of Yeatsian cultural nationalism and re-route a poetic course inwards, through poems of sublime simplicity in the voice of a man talking to an other - a brother, a neighbour, a lover, indeed a god.
The journey which Kavanagh took from his homeland in Co Monaghan to Dublin in 1930 and in the never-ending imaginings of both places in his poetry, autobiographical prose and correspondence, is the tap root out of which Peter Kavanagh has drawn this fascinating, bizarre and disturbing account of an Ireland that belongs to history.
Never far out of sight in the poet's writing - or in his brother's auditing of the writing - is Patrick Kavanagh's self-consciousness of what it takes to be a poet when the surroundings are hostile and contaminated by fakes and fakery. Peter Kavanagh's Chronicle is peopled with forces of opposition, what he calls "the enemies" and they are legend. From "a small vicious coterie in Dublin" the hit count includes Elizabeth Bowen ("an Irish novelist unreadable by anyone with sensitivity"), Thomas MacGreevy ("one of the flyboys from the continent of Europe who settle into Ireland and make a good living"), a host of writers still living, and the entire Irish literary community of newspapers, Arts Council, theatre and radio.
Seemingly friendless, alone and subject to self pity as a result of "the positive malice shown towards him as a poet" Patrick, a man of genius, is seen through Peter's eyes as martyred, even down to the rib Patrick retains as a souvenir from his critical cancer operation and which ultimately disappears from the mantelpiece. Surrounded by mediocrity, a constant refrain, Kavanagh survives carrying within himself the key contradiction: "I am a long-time cut off from country life. I never, as you said, belonged there". Yet he was to wonder aloud about his fate in leaving the countryside and settling in Dublin. "I wonder would I have been happier if I had never broken out of the Chrysalis?" Whichever way one reads it, by the mid 1950s Kavanagh had found some kind of new life for himself. "While recovering from a serious illness in the hot summer of nineteen fifty-five as I lay on the bank of the Grand Canal I learned the pleasures of being passive. The green still water, the light around gables". He travels here and there, meets Beckett, Sartre ("a short confab with an amusing J.P. Sartre") travels back and forth to England where his work is widely appreciated by fellow poets such as David Wright and George Barker. The following passage seems to sum up Kavanagh's own sense of himself at this time:
Happiness is not continuous. Happiness consists of those vivid moments which at the time, did not necessarily give us pleasure. There is a quality of Eternity in these moments of true happiness; we can live through them again and again. Across the street from me is the beautiful church of St Germaine de Pres (sic). Various people whom I know appear - Sam Beckett, Madam (sic) Hennessy, Robert Kee. They were drinking Bloody Marys that day and it was rainy weather. I think that luxury is a form of art. I was living in luxury and my imagination was free.
Would that Patrick Kavanagh had had a life of such "luxury". What his brother has achieved in this book is to show why this was not, alas, to be so. As Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, said at the unveiling of a statue to Patrick Kavanagh in 1991: "Let us remember him as he deserves to he remembered: not as an ornament to our literature - although he certainly is that - but as a poet who is still living among us, through his powerful and challenging poems and the force of his artistic conscience". Nothing more can be asked of any writer, whatever about the vicissitudes of his or her life and times.
Gerald Dawe's books of poetry include The Morning Train (1999). His selected essays, Stray Dogs and Dark Horses, was published last year. A poet and critic, he teaches at Trinity College Dublin
(Patrick Kavanagh: A Life Chronicle by Peter Kavanagh, ISBN: 0.914612.15.8 is available from 35 Park Avenue, New York 10016, USA, e-mail sacreddkepperaearthlink.net)