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’:

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.