Cards of Gratitude

Kavanagh's Lecture Series

UCD, 1956

In the packed theater after the priestly introduction, the murmur from mouth to mouth turns on itself—the rumor to the effect that something is happening in the story of Ireland. Kavanagh, the beautiful but complex Ringmaster is back, the circus animals are docile and excited. Paddy swings to the left, where Irish Press journalists who have been providers for him stand along the wall; he refers to a current columnist: "Lennox Robinson, the official Protestant to the state. . . ."

After long applause the circus hive explodes. Paddy in mid-swarm invites me and my sister into the Professors' Room in the corridor leading to the great hall. The academy, which had never sung for me, now warbles cantatas.

After the ball is over, in O'Dwyer's a small drear crowd. The wall dark brown with spots, lounge tables. Day glasses turn into night glasses. The painter Paddy Swift is there, a dark Prince Hallish to Kavanagh's Falstaff. I take a seat in suspicion's labyrinth, buy my round. The small hunger maybe but the last loneliness.

By the facade of Earlsfort Terrace: if the Gaels have tears, they shed them now in disappearing sunlight before the second lecture. Leo Holohan and Paddy walking in slow friends' parlay execution mode, tired of La Mancha, tired of being On the Road. Leo in his large sweater, Paddy under his hat; no rest for men.

The room for the next lecture is not the Physics Theatre but an upper room in Earlsfort Terrace. Paddy talks about Roy Campbell's Penguin translations of the poems of St. John of the Cross and uses some of the poet's language; the night is bathed in a crystal cistern, and the young poet Dickie Riordain gets into the mood and verbally pours it over himself and the audience at the end of the talk. We sit metaphorically in a river of trees of flame, phosphorescent cedars, caressed breasts, Coplas pop songs of love, and sheen of blossoms that linger in the bar afterward.

"Let there be duende and the dancing of teeth," Paddy said. "We stammer, we have to be astonished." Paddy said, "Ezra Pound was Longfellow's great nephew," Paddy said. He was right, we laughed.

The Left Bank at Baggot Street Bridge

Parsons Bookshop, c. 1960

The ladies presided. Miss O'Flaherty and Miss King. Miss King was Gertrude, Miss O'Flaherty was Alice. Put it another way and more appropriately, Miss O'Flaherty was Adrienne Monnier and Miss King Sylvia Beach who owned adjacent bookshops on the Left Bank, but this was one bookshop. Replace James Joyce with Patrick Kavanagh, the Coupole café with McDaid's. Less kindly, for they were benign, some locals referred to them as Scylla and Charybdis, intimidating sirens perched by the waters of Baggot Street Bridge. Their songs took the shillings out of your pockets for words on paper.

Miss O'Flaherty was "May," Miss King was "Miss King." May could be seen eating supper in Caffolla's fish-and-chip shop across the street. Miss King was never seen to eat. Not that May wanted to be seen eating there; it was not quite her image of herself. May was talkative and somewhat vain. Miss King quietly said real things, including the best gossip. May's opinions were more forthright and expressed with an emphasis on morality befitting her Limerick origin; I can still hear her comments on Terence de Vere White fleeing to London with an author was not his wife. May kept the hearth, and Miss King, from a farm near Clifden kindled the fire.

When I said "O'Flaherty" to Patrick Kavanagh he replied immediately, "Liam or May?" May was very pleased with the response when I told her. May used to say to people, "James Liddy never did a tap of work in his life," a remark enthusiastically approved of by Kavanagh. Miss King thought maybe I did some work; she held out the possibility. She certainly took my part when needed and I stood guard by her corner of the shop, back left, where the real...