Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland,
1922-1949
Writers
Patrick Kavanagh
The Green Fool (1939) Drumlin Country, South-east County Monaghan
‘The name of my birthplace was Mucker [. . .] the name was a corrupted Gaelic word signifying a place where pigs bred in abundance [. . .] Around our house there stood little hills all tilled and tamed [. . . ] Yellow flame-blossoms of the whin lit bonfires all over the landscape; the whin was as persistent and as fertile as sin and disease.
TIMELINE
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Lifepath
Patrick Kavanagh’s novel The Green Fool (1938) and epic poem The Great Hunger (1942) provide contesting phenomenological representations of the lifeworlds of small farmers living amongst the rounded drumlin hills and fields of south County Monaghan. The lyrical portrayal of his birth-place of Mucker, a townland in the parish of Inniskeen, was often laced with dry humour, laconic observation, and at times suffused with a mystic-like illumination of its surrounding vistas and social geographies: ‘a road, a mile of kingdom. I am king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing’ (1).
Kavanagh was born into the land owning family of James and Brigid Kavanagh on 21 October 1904. His father, in addition to farming, was the local cobbler. The additional income provided by this trade ensured that Kavanagh’s were relatively well off by local standards, and allowed James to purchase adjoining farming properties and expand his holdings. Kavanagh was the eldest son of nine children and the natural heir to the land. During the 1920s as Kavanagh lived the life of a south Monaghan farmer, he cultivated his poetry: ‘As I wandered about the roads and fields I composed my verses.’(2). His father’s death in 1928 left him torn between the land and his calling as a poet. To resolve his dilemma, he accepted an invitation from the poet AE Russell and travelled to Dublin.
Kavanagh published a collection of poetry entitled Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936, which established him as an authentic voice of the Irish countryside to Dublin’s urban literary intelligentsia. In May 1937 Kavanagh travelled to London and sought out literary patronage in earnest, hoping to secure some paying work as a writer, he arrived during the coronation of King George VI. On the basis of Ploughman, Helen Waddell, was able to secure him a commission to write a ‘peasant’ biography, due to the recent successes of Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growing (1933) and Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman (1934). In one of the low rent districts of London filled with Irish immigrants, he commenced writing. He spent five months working on his book before he returned to Mucker. Original titles for his first book included ‘The Grey Dawn,’ and ‘The Iron Fool,’ – the latter a phrase taken from Monaghan’s regional vernacular ‘meaning one who purposely pretends to be a fool,’ but his publisher amended the title to The Green Fool.
Kavanagh migrated to Dublin in 1939 and the city provided him the distance and crucial space to reflect upon the social and economic geographies which bound the small farming households of south Monaghan. His association with Sean O’Faoláin and Peadar O’Donnell, editors of the critical literary magazine The Bell would come to influence Kavanagh’s phenomenological framing of the impotent and sexually starved landscapes which emerged in the pages of his 1942 epic poem The Great Hunger.
Sources
Patrick Kavanagh’s collection Ploughman (1936) novel, The Green Fool (1938) and epic poem The Great Hunger (1942) provide contesting but poetic representations of the lifeworlds of small farmers living amongst the rounded drumlin hills and fields of south County Monaghan. The lyrical portrayal of his parish of Inniskeen, was often laced with dry humour, laconic observation, and at times suffused with a mystic-like illumination of its surrounding vistas and social geographies:
The bicycles go by in twos and threes-
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn to-night,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight
[. . . ]
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing. (1)
Kavanagh also possessed a mercurial personality, and critical voice, verging on acerbity; his depiction of landscape could also be starkly poetic and as sharp and incisive as a spade cutting into the unforgiving clay of a stony hillside:
The fields were bleached white,
The wooden tubs full of water
Were white in the winds
That blew through Brannagan’s Gap on their way from Siberia. (2)
The poetic sensibility of ‘dinnsheanchas’ informed Kavanagh’s depiction of the fields which his family acquired after purchasing twenty acres of farmland in the townland of Shancoduff in 1926. With the measured tones of a farmer, Kavanagh appraised the names and soil types of the four fields which composed the acreage:
'There were good names on these hills even though their soil was sticky and scarce of lime. Poets had surely put the names on them. Translated from the Gaelic they were: “The Field of the Shop”, “The Field of the Well”, “The Yellow Meadow”, “The Field of the Musician” .' (3)
Kavanagh noted that: ‘The Field of the Shop was a long briary garden as ill-shapen as ever puzzled the schoolmaster’s chain and brain.’ (4) The Field of the Well ‘was the best and the least perpendicular of all the fields. It had a well in the middle’, (5) and its waters ‘rose through yellow clay and had a soft taste’. (6) In contrast ‘the Yellow Field was true to its name; in wet weather its soil had the consistency and colour of putty, in dry weather it became hard and cracked like a canyon. Rushes ten feet high grew in this field.’ (7) The last field in Kavanagh’s poetical survey possessed a strange, almost mystical ambience: ‘ “The Field of the Musician” was a triangular acre under the shadow of the Rocksavage Forth. The sun hardly ever saw it. It grew a kind of tough grass, like wire. Something strangely mysterious seemed to hang around the Field of The Musician.’ (8) In his 1937 poem, Shancoduff, Kavanagh paid homage to his fields:
My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.
[. . . ]
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage. (9)
The four fields located on the north and west faces of Fort Hill confirm Kavanagh’s perspective: ‘The view from the top of the hills was fine if rather dark’. (10) as he sat in the fields to ‘listen to what music vibrates in the mystic imagination’. (11) The vivid images of place in The Green Fool originate from the early memories he possessed of his birth place in the townland of Mucker. One established, they circle outward to encompass the fields of Shancoduff and wider drumlin landscapes beyond, like ripples extending outward upon a pond of poetic imagination. Kavanagh’s earliest memories are rooted in the hillscape of his native townland, which sits on the rise of a small drumlin:
The name of my birthplace was Mucker [. . .] the name was a corrupted Gaelic word signifying a place where pigs bred in abundance. (12)
This townland was the location of his family’s ‘traditional Irish cabin’ (13) through which ‘the western sun, without regard for the laws of men, peeped through our small back window.’ (14) Details from his prose help us further imagine his birth-place’s approximate location: ‘The railway line to Carrick was visible from our back window. One hundred yards from our house was the railway gate-house and level crossing where the Mucker Road joined the country highway.’(15)
Kavanagh’s earliest memories is anchored in the fields of Inniskeen parish which surrounded his : ‘Around our house there stood little hills all tilled and tamed.’ (16) His prose style weaves a ‘poetic topography’ which can emerge in the mind’s eye of the reader:
Yellow flame-blossoms of the whin lit bonfires all over the landscape; the whin was as persistent and as fertile as sin and disease. The sunny side of the hills was good soil and boasted some tall thorn trees, but the black side facing the north was crabbed and poverty-stricken and grew only stunted blackthorns and sorrel plants. (17)
Sources
(1)Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ Collected Poems (Newbridge, 1972 ) p. 19.
(2) Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger, (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1942) p. 25.
(3) Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool (London: Penguin, 2001 [1938]) p. 204.
(4) Ibid., 206.
(5) Ibid.,205.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid., 204-205.
(9) Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Shancoduff’ in The Complete Poems, 13.
(10) Kavanagh, Green Fool, 206-207.
(11) Ibid., 207.
(12) Ibid., 8.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid., 14.
(15) Ibid., 9.
(16) Ibid. 8.
(17) Ibid.
Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922 - 1949 (Email)