Patrick Kavanagh and ‘The Leader’
The Poet, The Politician and the Libel Trial,
by Pat Walsh
©2010 Mercier Press
RRP €12.99

Would you be upset if your voice was described as ‘a load of gravel sliding down the side of a quarry’, had your face compared to that of a ‘gargoyle’ or you were nicknamed ‘The Ploughboy about Town’?

Paddy Kavanagh arrived in Dublin at 35, one of nine children raised in Mucker, Co. Monaghan. He was a big man, standing six feet-four inches, and hustling for work as a writer around the celebrity pubs at the time, usually The Palace, The Pearl and McDaid’s, he could not hide himself from public attention. He attracted comments like this one from J.P. Dunleavy: “This man, his powerful arms folding his big farmer’s hands across his chest, walked the streets like a battleship plunging through the waves… usually muttering to himself.” Contrasting the romanticism and spirituality of his poetry with his life, he was a contradiction. Benedict Kiely said of him: “He was a rough sort of man but he was touched by genius and by God.”

If I thought, with this book, I could put to bed the staleness I sometimes feel about Irish writers, by reading the juicy court case which is at its heart, I was wrong. If anything, it made it worse.

Kavanagh himself made the Irish Literary Movement one of the main targets of his ire, part of a very long list of gripes against the establishment. He railed against mediocrity. With the help of his brother Peter, they published ‘Kavanagh’s Weekly’ as a vehicle for bile and bitterness against the Irish society in which he had the misfortune to find himself.

The insults were flying, and personal slander and character assassination were the order of the day in the early 1950s by the time the libel case came to trial.

The author, Pat Walsh, who comes from Co. Mayo, and lives and works in Dun Laoighaire, has done painstaking research to bring us the details of the libel trial which was played out over two weeks in February 1954.

Kavanagh was grilled like a fish by John A. Costello, previous and future Taoiseach, as he was to hold the position twice. There were queues around the Four Courts to witness the battle, more bloodsport than cause célebre, brought on by the profile published in ‘Envoy Magazine’.

The man and his means were picked over; Kavanagh’s income was so spare as to resemble the accounts of a prayer meeting. Patrick got £450 in 1949 on the sale of the farm in Shancoduff frequently mentioned in his poetry.

A Monaghan neighbour is quoted as saying: “You’re the only bloody man that ever made money off that farm, although it was not with the shovel but with the pen.” His lifestyle habits were exposed, particularly his love of horses and gambling, and propensity to drink.

How long exactly, had it been, since he had worked? How often had he gone to Archbishop McQuaid for help? This was painful enough to read; the humiliation must have been awful for Kavanagh.

But when it came to the textual analysis of the articles, both his own, and the ‘Envoy’ profile being contested, even reading it was like being stretched on the rack.

To be honest, I was sorry I got into it. Context and content were swapped and tossed around to determine the degree and intention of insult. The etymology of quotes and of Patrick’s own neologisms were ransacked: Gurrier, Graftonia, Buckleppin’… But the most annoying and inconclusive thing was that no one would own up to what they had said: It was not clear who was responsible for remarks made in ‘Kavanagh’s Weekly’, during its short life. More importantly, the author of the ‘Envoy’ profile never owned up.

He really gets our sympathy the time he nearly has a nervous breakdown on the stand at the mention of Brendan Behan. Costello pursued this as he relentlessly continued to grind him down for the defence.

The case shattered Patrick’s health. He stated his case, insofar as was possible, as to why the article was so offensive. He proved himself a sensitive man in taking issue with the ‘Envoy’ invective, or else he could just have needed the money that damages would bring.

What did become clear during the course of the libel is that Patrick Kavanagh, author of ‘The Great Hunger’, genuinely feared hunger. Maybe the reader already knows the outcome of the trial. Pat Walsh’s faultless research brings it back to us in this blow-by-blow account.

‘In Europe’
by Geert Mak

Geert Mak is one of Holland’s most popular authors and journalists and in 1999 his newspaper, the Amsterdam-based NRC Handelsblad sent him on assignment to travel through pre-millenium Europe and report on the state of the continent.

“In Europe” is a collection of the columns Mak wrote on his travels. Mak certainly took the assignment to heart: in the course of the book he visits all the main European cities– Paris, London, Berlin– but also goes way off the beaten track to such places as Srebrenica, Gdansk, Odessa and even Dublin.
The book is equal parts travelogue and history. Mak uses his travels to create a history of the 20th century as seen trough the eyes of those Europeans who lived through it, particularly the two catastrophic wars of the period.

Mak used his reporter’s eye to describe the vividness of the countryside and cityscapes through which he travelled, his writer’s ear to interview individuals who had experienced Europe’s most terrible and terrific times, and his historian’s pen to narrate the passing of that most extraordinary of centuries.

Mak’s thesis is that there is no common European history. Each country has its own version of the events of the 20th century, depending on where you are, Russia, France, England, the history of WW2 is vastly different.

But Mak is, above all, an observer. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe’s well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape.

At Ypres, he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated there twice a day. In Warsaw, he finds the point where the tram rails that led to the Jewish ghetto come to a dead end in a city park. And in an abandoned créche near Chernobyl, where tiny pairs of shoes still stand in neat rows, he is transported back to the moment time stood still in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. In Europe helps Europeans discover the past that truly unites them.