Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon
- 1 We Other Clerks: James Joyce and the Classical Temper
- 2 A Walking Mirror: Stendhal, Horace, Nietzsche
- 3 One Lone Paperback: Tolstoy and Religious Sensibility
- 4 Magic: The Centrality of W. B. Yeats
- 5 Instinct: Douglas Stewart and Sex
- 6 The Fume of Muscatel: Yeats's Ghosts
- 7 Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X
- 8 Absurdity: Camus Comes to Clones
- 9 Aristocracy: Andrew Marvell, W. B. Yeats and the Curse of Cromwell
- 10 The Consolations of Nothingness: William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Prayer
- 11 Deliberate Happiness: W. B. Yeats and the Inner Life
- 12 Stranger in Paradise: Dante and Epic Style
- Conclusion: What Then?
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X
from Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon
- 1 We Other Clerks: James Joyce and the Classical Temper
- 2 A Walking Mirror: Stendhal, Horace, Nietzsche
- 3 One Lone Paperback: Tolstoy and Religious Sensibility
- 4 Magic: The Centrality of W. B. Yeats
- 5 Instinct: Douglas Stewart and Sex
- 6 The Fume of Muscatel: Yeats's Ghosts
- 7 Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X
- 8 Absurdity: Camus Comes to Clones
- 9 Aristocracy: Andrew Marvell, W. B. Yeats and the Curse of Cromwell
- 10 The Consolations of Nothingness: William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Prayer
- 11 Deliberate Happiness: W. B. Yeats and the Inner Life
- 12 Stranger in Paradise: Dante and Epic Style
- Conclusion: What Then?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Innocence’Though Patrick Kavanagh is never directly mentioned in McGahern's fiction, he does make important appearances in two of the short stories, published fifteen years apart. The first comes in what is perhaps McGahern's funniest and most eccentric story, ‘My Love, My Umbrella’. The narrator is typically McGahernesque: a nameless, deracinated man at loose in the pubs and dancehalls of Dublin. He seizes upon a fleeting opportunity to ask a woman out on a date as they listen to a band outside the Scotch House pub, and they agree to meet at a later point in Mooney's. It is here that a figure very clearly based on Kavanagh is described: ‘I pointed out a poet to her. I recognized him from his pictures in the paper. His shirt was open-necked inside a gabardine coat and he wore a hat with a small feather in its band’. The narrator's date asks him if he can hear what the poet is saying to his companions who ‘continually plied him with whiskey’:
He was saying he loved the blossoms of Kerr Pinks more than the roses, a man could only love what he knew well, and it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the accident. The whole table said they'd drink to that, but he glared at them as if slighted, and as if to avoid the glare they called for a round of doubles. While the drinks were coming from the bar the poet turned aside and took a canister from his pocket. The inside of the lid was coated with a white powder which he quickly licked clean. She thought it was baking soda for his stomach. We had more stout and we noticed, while each new round was coming, the poet turned away from the table to lick clean the fresh coat of soda on the inside of the canister lid.
A quick glance at any contemporary reminiscence of Kavanagh towards the end of his life will confirm this description of a bright and sincere man brought down by drink, Dublin pub life and that world's attendant satellites.
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- Touchstones: John McGahern’s Classical Style , pp. 97 - 113Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016