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AND SEE THAT NO POTATO FALLS: Patrick Kavanagh's Vegetable Love
1. "Every Irishman Has A Potato In His Head" According to Augustus Hare, the 19th century English writer and traveller, “Every Irishman has a potato in his head.” Criticised elsewhere for what’s been described as his “tendancy to diffuseness”, on this occasion Hare was being anything but diffuse, even if he was just repeating a commonheld belief that there was some extraordinary connection between the Irish and their staple diet. As it turned out, the events of the mid 19th century more or less proved him right, with the virtual halving of the Irish population by the Great Famine and its seismic after-effect in the shape of mass emigration. And though a darker connotation, fuelled by xenophobia, would be seized upon by publications such as Punch, with its infamous depictions of the Irish as little more than cave-dwellers, even a century later, and in a particularly generous mood, it might be possible to admit that at least one did in truth seem to have a potato in his head, and in his heart, and that was the poet Patrick Kavanagh. And Kavanagh knew that his potato was unlike anyone else’s. In ‘Peace’, he writes: And sometimes I am sorry when the grass Some small public recognition of this bond between the poet and the potato could be seen in Janaury of this year (2005) when, in the course of his Country Matters farming column in the Sunday Independent, Joe Kennedy took Kavanagh to task on a famous passage from the Great Hunger. Cows and horses breed Kavanagh’s potato seed, Kennedy wrote, which "gives a bud and a root and rots", has a characteristic finality that permeates his classic rural verse tragedy The Great Hunger...” However, “The poet didn't mention the handfuls of firm tubers from which, in turn, seed for the next year's crop would be chosen. Life goes on.” As a poet, Patrick Kavanagh was, like the farmer in the old joke who wins the Nobel Prize, ‘outstanding in his own field’. But his fields were less a place where one might stand and admire the heavens and the cosmos, as Yeats might be said to have done, for instance. Instead his gaze was downcast, earth-directed, his reach towards the stoney grey soil itself that came up over the toes of his boots and lodged itself under his fingernails and in the folds of his skin, his only distant, mysterious constellations – the potatoes, and all they would come to mean and signify, buried within. 2. Naming the Potatoes As a youngster, one of my own first contacts with the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (who died when I was just four) was finding his poem Spraying the Potatoes in a school poetry anthology. As a townie whose father had been raised on a farm, from an early age I suppose I was conscious of a whole area of learning and knowledge and practice that was just out of reach. And like any youngster, I was intrigued by the small potato pit which my father tended at the end of our large garden, and therefore delighted to find, in secondary school, that Kavanagh’s poem addressed at least some part of that local mystery. In the early 1970s, a town by-pass ploughed through our garden, consigning it to oblivion, so I suppose I was all the more interested in how Kavanagh’s descriptions might coincide with my own, already vague memories. Sure, in my case, there were no “barrels of blue potato spray” in our back garden, but there were those few trees that made up the orchard and even roses along the boundary wall with our neighbours which could be seen, or remembered, as “young girls hanging from the sky.” But the most extraordinary thing about Spraying the Potatoes was that Kavanagh had considered the specific varieties of potato important enough to name “the Kerr’s Pinks” and “the Arran Banners”. And one of the things that made that naming of varieties so special, in retrospect, was that many writers would not have bothered with, or risked, Kavanagh’s level of intimacy and even affection. One reason why Patrick Kavanagh was able to get it so right is hinted at in a recent book, Padraic Fallon’s A Poet’s Journal and Other Writings, 1934-1974, published just a few months ago. In a reprint of Fallons’ original review of Kavanagh’s The Green Fool, from the Dublin Magazine of October-December 1938, Fallon agrees that Kavanagh was born, definitely, a poet. “His book is not fine literature, if one sight it through a literary lense, but out of it there drifts, literally, the sights and sounds of the Monaghan farmlands and a people whose very bloodbeat seem to come out of the soil.” I’m very interested in that phrase there “come out of the soil”. Fallon goes on: “Luckily, however, he had plenty of time to take part in the life about him before he awakened to his poetic gift. The scenes and the people he describes for us are part of an experience that does not suffer from any litrary self-consciousness whatsoever. They are the juice of life.” In other words, Kavanagh’s committment to the stony grey soil of Monaghan, and to the produce of that soil, is the result of a natural and, in a sense, pre-literary immersion in the life and energies of his birthplace. Where the Great Famine of the 1840s seemed likely to blacken the name of the humble potato forever in Irish and non-Irish minds alike, here was the best-known Irish poet of the mid 20th century seeming to celebrate the variety, and beauty, of the plant itself, even in a poem like Spraying the Potatoes which was about the necessity of intervening that they might survive possible blight or infestation. If the name of the particular variety whose failure had caused the famine, the Lumper, itself seems lumpen and ugly in retrospect, Kavanagh was now writing of two varieties that might have been chosen for their attractiveness: “The Kerr’s pinks in a frivelled blue, the Arran Banners wearing white.” Not to get side-tracked too much, but after the lumper’s failure to resist the fungus Phylopterum Infestans in 1845 and subsequent years came a renewed understanding in the farming community that variety was a key to survival of all living things and therefore something that might be praise-worthy in and of itself. In fact, shortly after the Great Famine, rather than turning away wholesale from the potato as a crop to be relied on, as might have been expected, instead Irish agriculture made a concerted effort to introduce a range of new varieties of potato to this country. It is tempting therefore to think that Kavanagh, in Spraying the Potatoes, took a kind of ecological delight in naming “The Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue, the Arran Banners wearing white”, not least for the fact that the very subject, and title, of this wonderful early lyric is concerned with resistance and, like so much of Patrick Kavanagh’s work, with survival itself. 3. In the Lazy Beds Potatoes have long had something of a magical significance in this country. The fact that potatoes and milk alone provided all the necessary nutrients and vitamins to sustain a healthy adult was widely considered one of the many reasons for its rapid adoption as the staple diet of Irish peasants through the 19th and even into the 20th century, and for the presence of larger families in Ireland than in other European countries. There are even stories of Dublin physicians prescribing potatoes to childless women in the 19th century to help them become pregnant. The potato is also credited as the second fuel, along with coal, which made the industrial revolution possible in these islands. Because it could be transported and stored without fear of spoiling, it proved the ideal foodstuff for transportation from the countryside into the ever-growing industrial cities of the 19th century. In France, where there was initial resistance to the plant’s introduction, because of a suggestion that potato growing, requiring little manual labour or tending, was likely to give rise to laziness among the peasantry, the potato had been popularised by appealing to Republic patriotism. According to Larry Zuckerman in his The Potato: from the Andes in the 16th Century to Fish and Chips, The Story of How a Vegetable Changed History, “Growing the tuber on lands once kept fallow to amuse the nobility — heaths, parks, rabbit warrens, and the like — would promote agriculture and help erase the legacy of wasteful idleness.” This same connection between potato growing and idleness was clearly known to even Vincent van Gogh. In a letter he wrote to Theo about his painting The Potato Eaters, he felt the need to defend potato-growers from the accusation of laziness:
“I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food”. And just as Van Gogh saw meaning in the potato, so too did Kavanagh, for whom it became not just a physical and real, but also an historic and, most of all perhaps, a symbolic presence, in his work. This symbolic dimension is perhaps made most evident in an uncollected poem, written in May 1943, some four years after Kavanagh moved back from London to Dublin. In the poem Restaurant Reverie, Kavanagh goes so far as to actually address a potato, or, to be precise, half a potato: O half potato on my plate, You're boasted in the centre, too, And here he makes it explicit that, for all the depth of reality the potato brings with it to his writing, there is also and always the symbolic dimension: There’s something lonely far away But up brown drills new pink buds start Oh, here is life That Kavanagh here addresses the potato’s symbolic significance is only one small indication of his attraction to the plant. Tom Stack points out in his God and Patrick Kavanagh, activities such as ploughing and potato spraying are, in Kavanagh, precisely evoked and simultaneously transformed into metaphors for poetic and religious perception. And the poet’s brother Peter has written of an incident which throws some light on the same symbolic relationship: “I am a young boy aged about ten standing outside our house in Inniskeen. It is late February. I see a figure, somewhat vague, kneeling before a pit of potatoes down along the ditch which parallels the road. The potatoes had been harvested the previous October and placed there in inverted v-shaped form, then covered with potato stalks and weeds, and finally with six inches of clay to protect them from the frost of winter. “The figure I see has an empty sack over his shoulders to shield himself against the Siberian wind that blows down the valley between the hills. I go to keep him company. He is kneeling on a boss of straw and weeds. He has bared a foot or more of the clay covering the pit and is sorting out the potatoes that have not survived the winter. “His hands are large and powerful,. He thrusts them into the pit and draws out a pile of potatoes. He looks them over, discards those that are rotting and pushes the good ones behind him. He is part of the topography, a character from Biblical times, a writer of the Psalms perhaps. “He confides to me a secret. He is writing verse...” Poems and potatoes are both mysterious entities, seeds, cuttings, buried in darkness to produce new life. This conjunction of the sorting of potatoes, in a pit, and the writing of verse is something no young brother would ever forget, nor are the religious and historical associations. In Seamus Heaney’s ‘At a Potato Digging’, for instance, the potatoes that get thrown into the pit are described as “live skulls, blind-eyed”, and are seen later as the victims of the famine of 1845.
4. The Great Hunger In the opening section of his long poem, many would say his masterpiece, The Great Hunger, Kavanagh’s alter-ego Patrick Maguire, as ever out in a field and struggling with nature, barks a sequence of orders that are at once disjointed and yet held together by a concern for success in the job in hand: “Move forward the basket and balance it steady Here’s Kavanagh using something not unlike Joyce’s stream of consciousness, reconstructed as dialogue, or monologue in fact, but what interests me most about it today is that reference to the potatoes: “And see that no potato falls / Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass”, as if potatoes were not just the fruits, or the vegetables, of Maguire’s labours, but in a sense also the passengers entrusted to him for this perilous journey. “And see that no potato falls,” is of course a simple barked command of one labourer to another, but it’s also a recognition of responsibility, what these days might be called a mission statement. For the potato has huge poetic significance for Kavanagh the poet, even as it also has practical significance for Kavanagh the farmer. The poet draws on and amplifies the farmer’s knowledge and experience. He finds and makes something new of it, as the singer of songs in the corner of a pub will make something new, and with an independent life of its own, of the events of the day. For Kavanagh the potato is associated first with death, and only then, long after, an afterlife. “Maguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather —/ An old man fondling a new-piled grave.” Here, as in the Heaney poem, the labourers of the Great Hunger are seen as grave-diggers. In the interring of the potatoes, Maguire sees his own burial. “The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field / Where the seed gets no chance to come through” to what Kavanagh calls, in a typical throw-away rhyme, “the fun of the sun”. The object of Maguire’s devotion, the potato has trapped him in a ritual which promises to release him, but there is always the doubt that the miracle will occur again; there’s always this need to dig down with his hands into the earth to be sure that the potatoes are still there, have survived. 5. Dining Out in The Great Hunger Almost 40 years after his death, Patrick Kavanagh’s connection with the potato, in the popular mind, extends far beyond his poetry. In the Patrick Kavanagh pub, on the corner of 33rd and 3rd in Manhattan, a choice of mashed or baked potato is an honouring of the great man’s Great Hunger. And a Google search for pages that contain the words Kavanagh and potato throws up, as well as the obvious quotations, some interesting observations. Such as this discussion group in which one contributor responds to a reference to Kavanagh by asking: "Is this the guy that writes about potatoes and stones? We love hearing about Ireland and its potatoes and stones and those little white thatched houses that you all live in over there, hope to visit your county some time" — Becky Henning, Texas. To which another contributor replies: Despite the depth of response by Kavanagh to the potato as both object and symbol, Augustus Hare’s dismissive “Every Irishman has a potato in his head” still has its adherents. And yet, whatever about the crudity of the sentiment, and the expression of it, the juxtaposition of the words Patrick Kavanagh and Celtic Tiger is certainly an uneasy one. When discussing Kavanagh, of all poets, it’s hard not to believe that there must be some kind of special significance in the fact that the word poverty contains the word poet, is home to it, even traps it, as one might say. More than most, Kavanagh was a poet who often struggled to get by, and when he wrote a poem, or anything else, wanted to be paid for his work. For Kavanagh was a working poet, the way his people before him had been working people. 6. Apples vs Potatoes : Yeats vs Kavanagh “And see that no potato falls.” The real, and perhaps most telling illustration of what the potato meant for Patrick Kavanagh can be found in a poem already mentioned, Spraying the Potatoes. While Kavanagh’s vision darkened over the years and, like many poets, he came to regard much of his earlier work with, at best, distance, at worst, hostility, there is in that poem a kind of key to what made him the poet he would become. Though first published in July 1940 in The Irish Times, and therefore coming from a part of his life when he had yet to discover the real extent of his frustration with the depiction of the Irish peasant in the work of Yeats, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ already contains more than a hint of the rivalry that would almost consume Kavanagh and endanger his own writing. In his Lives of the Poets, the Mexican born British poet, and publisher, Michael Schmidt, sums up that jealousy and rivalry in a startling way: “Yeats was to become his bete noir,” he writes of Kavanagh. “There was jealousy that Yeats defined the space within which Irish poetry might be recognized. Yet time after time in his prose and verse there are echoes — phrases, cadences, grandiloquent attitudes — of Yeats.” He goes on to say: “Satire was not to be Kavanagh’s effective vehicle, as it was (Austin) Clarke’s. Too much the romantic, too much the countryman, the city was not properly in his blood, and satire is an urban genre. It is the ragged muse he serves best, and against which he turned in Dublin, tying to shed his peasant identity.” The implications here are two-fold and worth thinking about. The first is that, in terms of writing poetry, Yeats was not only Kavanagh’s biggest competitor, he was also one of his great influences. The second is that Yeats’ portraits of the Irish peasantry were one of the things that determined Kavanagh to find a way out of and away from that same background, though it was the one in which he was, quite literally, grounded.
As it happens Kavanagh’s last published poem, which appeared in The Holy Door in 1966, was entitled ‘Yeats’. According to the note in the Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn, the poem was written afer a Yeats Centenary Symposium in Chicago in 1965 at which, as she puts it, Kavanagh’s contribution “provoked such outrage that the symposium broke up in disarray.” Kavanagh’s battling with the ghost of Yeats is there in every line, but perhaps most clear, most unprotected, in the closing four: Yes, Yeats, it was damn easy for you, protected But if Kavanagh is here openly addressing his frustration and anger to the shade of Yeats, there are still present those very echoes of Yeats Schmidt has noticed elsewhere. One of the most interesting echoes I’ve come across myself is this one. Think of those famous Yeats lines in The Song of Wandering — “the silver apples of the moon / the golden apples of the sun”. And now hear Kavanagh’s echoing lines in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, “The Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue, the Arran Banners wearing white” — a rhythmically and grammatically almost identical couplet, but where Yeats is upward-looking, highly conscious, reaching for myth and alchemy and trancendence, Kavanagh is downwardly focussed and directed towards the far more mundane potato, an underground and sexually-charged symbol, a thing of seed, and root and tuber one can almost believe, as was once widely believed, shared dark and magical properties with its near-cousin, the mandrake. Not only is it difficult not to see the influence of the one poet on the other, but it is almost impossible to believe that the echoes are anything other than intentional on Kavanagh’s part. For while Yeats can image a time when he is “old with wandering / through hollow lands and hilly lands” and will reach up to pluck these fantastical apples like some individuated alchemist direct out of Carl Jung, Kavanagh in a hill country all his own, must drive his mud-gloved hands into the soil to unearth the somehow far less glamorous or numinous, but for all that none-the-less potent potato. Even Yeats’ choice of qualifying adjectives, the mythically-suggestive “golden” and “silver” only amplify the reach, in every sense of the word, of his image, while Kavanagh stays firmly rooted in the real and tangible, localising rather than generalising through the specifics of “Kerr’s Pinks” and “Arran Banners”, allowing only that single descriptive adjective ‘frivelled’ — applied to the colour blue and not the potatoes, it should be noted — to suggest anything other the reliability of what meets the eye. (Keen readers may have noticed that the poet Ciaran Carson in his poem ‘The Holiday’ describes the lids of a waitress’ eyes as ‘frivelled’, though an extended meditation on the use of the word ‘frivelled’, which would appear to be absent from the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary — surely a thesis here for somebody? — is sadly outside of the reach of this keynote address.) In ‘A Christmas Childhood’, like ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ another poem from 1940, the potato and the apple come closer to each other than almost anywhere else in the work. One side of the potato-pits was white with frost - And moving to The Great Hunger, which Seamus Heaney has called Kavanagh’s “anti-pastoral masterpiece... a poem that throws up language as dark-webbed and cold-breathed as the clay the potato-digger kicks up in its opening lines”, it is in this poem that Kavanagh most clearly delineates the contrast between apples and potatoes, or, as I would have it here, between the Yeatsian macrocosmic and his own microcosmic instincts, moving from the wet clods from under which the potatoes will have to be dug, to an image of apples “hung from the ceiling for Hallowe’en”. In a poem in which the repeated use of the world drills, as in a potato drill, also suggests punishing routine, Patrick Maguire can be seen “lost in the passion that never needs a wife”, that is farm labouring, rooted in and cursed by the earth, unaware of the meaning of his effort: “What is he looking for there?” Kavanagh asks with authorial distance. And answers: “He thinks it is a potato, but we know better / Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.” Surrounded by potatoes, Maguire is almost — one thinks again of August Hare — potato himself:
The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy, Symbol of survival and sustenance, object of desire and also of a kind of enslavement, the potato has many meanings in the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh but it is always an actual potato, as one would find it hard to argue that Yeats’s apples were ever actual apples that could be plucked and held in the hand or consumed. Much has been made, and rightly so, of Kavanagh’s distinction between the parochial and the provincial, and one can see in it the inspiration for John Montague’s notion of “global regionalism”. At a very simplistic level this means that Kavanagh had the courage to tell small truths, to report particulars, to refuse what he called“that atrocious formula which was invented by Synge and his followers to produce an Irish literature.” However much he might have borrowed from Synge’s same ‘followers’, Kavanagh gave voice to a kind of hurt desire, for the soil and love, that makes his best work of world importance. In a note accepting his Poetry Book Society Choice for Come Dance with Kitty Stobling in 1960, Kavanagh recalled: “I used at about the age of twelve to make up useful ballads telling about football matches, dances etc. More than thirty years later I heard one of those ballads being sung” — Farrelly climbed in by the window And the memory and its stage Irishness horrified him. One of Kavanagh’s huge achievements and contributions as a poet was his earthing of Irish poetry, his refusal of identikit characters and scenes and his insistence on the particular. Every Irishman has a potato in his head, and the peasant ploughman is himself half a vegetable.
“And see that no potato falls”. And yet, in fact, over the past few weeks since I chose that line from The Great Hunger as the convenient title for whatever random thought I might have on Kavanagh in the meantime, the line has since come to seem like anything but an accidental choice. Flicking through the Collected Plays of William Shakespeare the other day, looking for something else entirely, I rediscovered a passage in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act V, Scene 5) that I’d noticed years ago and wondered if I’d ever find a use for. In it Shakespeare has Falstaff refer to Kavanagh’s beloved plant, though the reference is one of Shakespeare’s few known anachronisms. In fact, at the time the play is set, the potato had not yet been introduced to this part of the world, and this is one of the reasons why Falstaff’s line is often quoted in literary companions and such like. But what seemed utterly wonderful about it the other day was the line itself. What Falstaff famously says is “Let the sky rain potatoes.” One of the great bumbling fools of English literature, glutton and hedonist, Falstaff is, as ever, celebrating wastefulness and wantoness. “Let the sky rain potatoes,” he calls out with a kind of abandon. Patrick Kavanagh meanwhile, a hurt man of the hurt earth, in part poor farmer, in part mystic, in part ecologist before his time, a man with a thirst and welts on his hands, who knows the worth of the potato, both as foodstuff and spiritual foodstuff, three hundred years later, seems to reply, “And see that no potato falls.” * Pat Boran, November 2005 |
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WB Yeats Siegfrid Sassoon William Shakespeare Ted Hughes Seamus Heaney Eavan Boland Paula Meehan Stephen King WH Auden Harry Potter JR Rowling Maeve Binchy