Lilliput Press has recently reissued Anthony Cronin’s memoir Dead As Doornails (1976) with a new short introduction by Joseph O’Connor (which can also be found in The Irish Times — subscriber only). I had long intended to reread Cronin’s account of literary Dublin in the 1950s, so I immediately ordered a copy.

I had first read it, borrowed from the library, in the early 1990s. I had been living in London for about 4 years and was feeling nostalgic, not for Ireland, but specifically for Dublin. Cronin has given us his recollections of seven men, four writers and three visual artists, whom he knew well in Dublin and/or in London’s Soho and the book is set for the most part in the 1950s. By the time Cronin wrote about them they were all dead (as doornails). The three central figures are Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, the others being Julian Maclaren-Ross (who stayed for a while with Cronin and his wife in Wembley when Cronin was literary editor of Time and Tide), a couple of Scottish artists both of whom had the same first name, Robert, (Colquhoun and MacBryde) and Ralph Cusack (who gave up painting and wrote a memoir titled Cadenza).

In this post, I intend to focus on Behan and Kavanagh. It’s quite likely that I’ll write separately about Flann O’Brien in future, relying on Cronin’s treatment of him in Dead As Doornails. (Cronin also wrote a biography of Flann O’Brien which I haven’t read and have no immediate plans to read.)

Cronin was, to start with, an unequivocal admirer of Behan’s talent. If most of the regulars in the Fitzwilliam Place basement known as the Catacombs had a party piece, Brendan Behan, he tells us, had “thousands” (p. 17).

He was a kaleidoscopic entertainment, but he was also fecund in serious ideas. He had a line in bemused wonderment about the activities of the world which was only partly an affectation, for he was genuinely naïve in certain ways and genuinely full of questionings. And he knew too when to drop the act and show himself capable of intimacy. The salt which makes penury palatable, ironic comment on all forms of possession and ownership, sometimes quite savage, he had in abundance. He had also in those days the remarkable gift of being able to realize and humorously illuminate the other person’s circumstance while comically examining his own … (p. 19)

In an early chapter, Behan and Cronin move to Paris, hoping to pass “a year or two on the Continent” (p. 41). Their trip is hopelessly underresourced: Behan has been paid £40 for the right to make a film of a short story of his. They have the idea of making their way through France and Italy as far as Rome, posing as pilgrims, hoping to be supplied with food and shelter by the devout along the way in the Marian Holy Year. He also considered the possibility, if they get to Italy, of defecting from there to Czechoslovakia. Cronin comments wryly on Brendan’s sense of geography. Yugoslavia might have been a better bet. As it turns out, only Cronin makes it to Italy, and he gets only as far as Milan. Behan has turned back at Grenoble. They meet again by chance in Paris.

By this stage, they are drinking almost all the money they can get their hands on, including the funds they are given by the Irish Embassy for their repatriation. Brendan also joined the Foreign Legion, in which he served overnight. As Brendan works his way through Cronin’s repatriation money, drinking and singing with a group of French workmen in a late-night café, Cronin, himself “miserable and angry” (p. 55) as well as drunk, sees for the first time that there is something disturbing about his friend’s behaviour:

Behind all the pseudo-generosity, the songs and toasts and exchanges of national good will, there was something frantic. It began to dawn on me that it was also something destructive, and this was a new side of him. He wanted to get rid of the money and get back into what was certainly going to be the gutter. (p. 56)

This adventure culminates in a farcically doomed attempt, with Cronin now hobbling shoeless, to stow away aboard an Irish ship from Rouen. That doesn’t work, of course, but through extraordinary good luck they both separately manage to get back to Dublin. (Behan is unwilling to risk travelling through England and Wales because, years earlier, he was released from prison on condition he never came back to the country. Later still, when his plays were being put on in London, he would overcome that wariness.)

Cronin became de facto editor of The Bell, with the final say exercised by its cofounder, old IRA man Peadar O’Donnell. Brendan Behan wanted Cronin to publish in The Bell part of the draft of what would later become his book Borstal Boy, but O’Donnell wouldn’t hear of it. The name of his fellow old IRA man was “anathema to him” (p. 88). This gave rise to some friction between Behan and Cronin, the former not understanding that the latter’s discretion was by no means absolute. In contrast, Cronin was able to make an arrangement with Peadar O’Donnell whereby he would pay £5 instant cash to Patrick Kavanagh for every poem of his that The Bell published.

Cronin considered Kavanagh “a man of genius” (p. 82), and points out that most of the poems that were included in the poet’s third and most highly regarded collection, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960), were ones that had first appeared in The Bell:

They were the first products of Kavanagh’s late maturing, the first examples of the kind of poetry that made him important; and if I mention the matter now it is partly to put the record straight and partly because my opinion of myself as an editor was not very high, nor, dear knows, was I encouraged on any side to take a much higher one than I did, so that I look back now with a sort of bemused wonder on the strange excellence of many of the things that actually did get into the magazine. (p. 108)

(It’s worth remarking that that “put the record straight” tone of somewhat abashed self-assertion is not at all typical of Cronin’s style elsewhere in the book.)

Kavanagh could not stand Behan. Cronin devined “an element of fear” (p. 86) in the countryman’s attitude towards the Dubliner. This fear can hardly have had a physical basis, as Kavanagh was much bigger. More than once he suggested to Cronin that Behan was “evil”. Anyway, Cronin’s friendship with Kavanagh played some part in his growing distance from Behan.

Kavanagh always seemed to be short of money and, when a publication titled The Leader published a sketch suggesting that he was a sponger who rarely paid for his own drink, he thought he saw the opportunity to obtain a handsome libel settlement. But the paper fought the case (though without pleading justification), leading to Kavanagh’s being cross-examined by its senior counsel, John A Costello, then back at the bar between bouts as Taoiseach. Costello asked the poet about his insciption on the flyleaf of a copy of his novel, Tarry Flynn, to Behan. No issue in the case turned on the inscription, but it made Kavanagh look like a liar and must have affected the jury’s estimation of him.

The jury found that there had been no libel. The Supreme Court overturned their verdict and ordered a new trial which never took place, the case having settled in the meantime. Presumably, therefore, Kavanagh got some money out of it but nowhere near as much as he had been hoping for, and it can be expected that the costs would have been out of proportion to the damages. The general impression was that Kavanagh had lost the case (as in a sense he had). Cronin assumed (wrongly, he later believed) that it had been Behan who had given the book with its damaging inscription to the paper’s lawyers and for a long time refused to speak to Behan, who once physically ambushed him as Cronin was leaving the Bailey near closing time.

I was a prig of course, indulging myself in a little bit of drama in which I was the haughty incorruptible and Brendan the indubitable villain. I was to pay a penalty. We should beware of the grand gestures which it costs us nothing to make. (p. 130)

Notwithstanding this acknowledgment, the two were never fully reconciled. When The Quare Fellow was being put on in Stratford East by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company, Cronin didn’t go because he mistakenly thought it would entail an expedition from London to deepest Warwickshire. Of Behan’s very public flameout, which like much of what he did had the air of a performance, and which of course led to his death, Cronin writes:

Chief among the new precipitating elements must have been the knowledge that with his plays (all two of them) rewritten by other people and his books increasingly the products of “collaboration”, he was not in fact functioning as a creative artist at all, and the whole thing was to a large extent a tawdry fraud. Deaths of his kind are preceded by a death of the spirit. There is a sense in which he was the victim of society as clearly as if society had taken him out and shot him, but he was, one is forced to conclude, a willing victim … (p. 200)

It was only recently, after I read this piece in The Irish Times that I realized that Behan and my father may have known each other. At any rate, they were both locked up in the Curragh during “the Emergency” (known to the rest of the world as the Second World War). I see that Behan refers to this period as his internment, which is also the term my father used, though I found out after his death that he had technically been convicted of membership of an illegal organization by a Special Criminal Court (which in those days would have been a military tribunal). I believe that after the war was over my father was pardoned. At any rate, he was given back his Civil Service job, apparently on condition that he made no further trouble. He was transferred to the west of Ireland (to Ballymote, County Sligo) where he met and married my mother, fathered me and my three younger sisters, and died young, at 53.

I remember my father referring dismissively, indeed contemptuously, to Brendan Behan. I was too young to understand exactly what he had against Behan — I was not yet a teenager when my father died — but I have the impression that he thought that the writer both exaggerated the extent of his involvement in secret Republican activities, and strayed close to dangerous indiscretion about those he had been involved in. If I had to guess, I’d say that similar considerations may have been the reason for Peadar O’Donnell’s dislike.

As I mentiond above, Cronin believed that the poems he published in The Bell and which were later collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling marked the beginning of Kavanagh’s mature work and were “the first examples of the kind of poetry that made him important”. He describes them as having been written:

… in a direct, conversational manner with ironic undertones which used Pembroke Road, the flat, the bookmakers, the days he spent, either as themes or images, and which were written in something approaching the conversational manner of the living man, with a sort of humorous but tender advertance to the fact that they were being written at all and that they were poetry. (p. 108)

Antoinette Quinn, Kavanagh’s biographer as well as the leading scholar and editor of his work, says in her introduction to the Selected Poems:

Kavanagh’s intolerance of cultural nationalism and his unwavering focus on the contemporary left him peculiarly unsympathetic to the various linguistic devices to which Irish poets had recourse in order to emphasize their racial difference from English poets … English was for him the normal vernacular of Ireland and he experienced no postcolonial anxieties on this score; it was the Irish language which Independent Ireland was endeavouring to revive that appeared to him an “acquired speech”.

Kavanagh believed that poetry should avoid artificial diction and express itself in a personalized vernacular. (Selected Poems, xxviii)

Unfortunately, Kavanagh’s eschewal of the devices on which his predecessors had relied, such as national(ist) mythology and Yeatsian occultism and mysticism, may have led him to run out of material more quickly than he might have hoped. Though he must have read widely when he was younger, Cronin remarks that in his later years he hardly seemed to read at all. He reports a conversation in which Kavanagh said that, whereas Auden had “a well-stocked mind”, replete with philosophy, psychology and other mental “furniture”, Kavanagh had nothing comparable.

”… Of course it’s junk, but it does to make a blaze, it creates energy and a sort of warmth, and when you get the blaze going you might succeed in saying something. But I’ve read nothing and have no rubbish to burn. None at all, no philosophy, no nothing. And you can’t go on writing lyrics.” (p. 144)

In the absence of philosophy or psychology, something like Yeats’s Celtic myths and mist, specious as they were, might have constituted combustible matter. Indeed, Kavanagh’s “no rubbish to burn” calls to mind Yeats’s “foul rag and bone shop” and may well be a direct reference to it. Cronin adds:

He had written his poems of celebration and then he had written some celebrating the writing of them. And that was that. (p. 144)

On first reading Cronin’s book almost 35 years ago, I was shocked. It was no surprise to me to learn that these literary figures had lived most of their lives in poverty, or that they had passed much of their time in pubs, drunk; but I was genuinely taken aback to discover that their existences had, in general, been so miserable. The book is a record of litrary (or painterly) careers barely getting off the ground before ending in failure. Behan, Kavanagh and “Myles” were all stymied by poverty, by alcoholism, by artistic obscurity (at least some of the time) and a lack of opportunity. And crucially, Cronin points out, by the Second World War.

The creative and personal lives of nearly all the figures in this chronicle were much more deeply affected and distorted by the war than may be immediately apparent. In the case of both Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan the effect was a curious provincialization. In both cases, because of the war, Ireland, or, to be much more exact, Dublin, became the sole matrix which formed the developing artist and man. (p. 139)

Until I read Dead as Doornails, the very idea that I might not have enjoyed being an author in the Dublin of the 1950s (or 60s) was too absurd to have even crossed my mind. My reaction to reading the book was the beginning of my disenchantment with Dublin (a process which, however, wasn’t completed until I returned to live there 20 years later).

Editions: Dead as Doornails, The Lilliput Press paperback (with flaps), 2026;
Patrick Kavanagh, Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by Antoinette Quinn, Penguin Modern Classics, 1996, 2000.