Personal Insights: Grieving for my mother with the ghost of Patrick Kavanagh

Barrister and writer John-Paul McCarthy reflects on how his mother's unsuccessful battle with cancer and subsequent death fostered a renewed reflection and insight into the life and work of legendary Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh.

A statue of Patrick Kavanagh on the banks of the Grand Canal, Dublin

ODDLY enough, my first thought after I learned that my mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer last year was the Grand Canal in Dublin, even though I’ve never been there.

My mother was born in Dublin, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. In my mind’s eye, I saw a man lying on the grass there, shoeless, sockless, screening the sun with a Panama hat.

This was a large man, one who looked actually like his creator had thrown his various parts together in the dark. Nothing seemed to quite fit his frame. His thick glasses were too tight for his head, his nose too long for his face, and his hands were so big, they were closer to weapons than instruments of humble bone.

He was reclined on the grass though as I imagined him. A tranquilised Frankenstein working on his tan.

The man was Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) of course, and I thought of him because this was the radiant Irish summer of 1955, and he had just been discharged from Baggot Street Hospital, though he might as well have walked out of a clinic in Bel Air given the forecast.

Outside the cancer ward, he could see what he remembered later as a lazy veil of woven sun, and he surrendered headlong to its gravitational pull once discharged. Fate gave him a pass that year.

My mother would get the same verdict, I thought. The dates settled the question. If lung cancer wasn’t a death sentence in Kavanagh’s time, it surely must rank as an even less formidable foe six decades later. It wasn’t to be though. Unlike his tumour, hers was inoperable.

There would be no surgery, and the doors of her senses would be shut, one by one, within eight months. And so for the first time in my life, Kavanagh put me wrong.

In retrospect, part of me was always mentally preparing for my mother’s recuperation, and I wanted her to copy him. I’d take her to her very own canal after we got her out of the hospital. She’d marvel again at the beauty of the basic elements: water, sun, air and earth.

She neither read nor wrote poetry herself, but I was sure she too would feel what Kavanagh felt that summer, when she herself was a babe in a small house somewhere in Drimnagh, this being a disagreeable pit-stop on her father’s work-related journey back to Cork City from post-war Dagenham.

In my fantasy, she too would be reborn by the banks of some urban canal, or if that didn’t suit, we’d find a proper beach. Like her eldest son, my mother couldn’t swim, but she liked instead to paddle at the edge of the Atlantic.

Ballyheighue in north west Kerry was a favourite holiday spot. I loved the place too initially, and haunted the town’s videogame arcade so enthusiastically that my Junior Cert prospects were briefly imperilled by Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and those agile plumbers, Mario and Luigi.

As I got older though, I associated the place more and more though with James Anthony Froude’s ugly Victorian polemics, and with Roger Casement’s inelegant arrival nearby in what was effectively an underwater taxi paid for by the German navy. None of this meant anything to my mother.

She adored the sea view, largely as she used to say because the view from our house in Cork City was so constricted by contrast. We were flanked there by an industrial estate, a Traveller’s encampment full of horses, and a glass palace that turned out to be Apple Computers.

As Kavanagh had it, the sea by contrast fed the gaping need of her senses, and did indeed enrapture her for a time. It was probably only natural that I’d imagine that kind of resolution for her cancer.

Kavanagh had twelve good years after his surgery, and these years included marriage, the publication of his collected poems, and all the metropolitan adulation he could wish for. He put me wrong during her illness of course, but that was largely because I wanted to be put wrong, and my thoughts were easily divertible from the horrors of ketoacidosis to fantastical images of sunny rapture.

I see now that I was guilty of what Kavanagh once called “gerrymandering the constituencies of the soul so as to segregate disagreeable elements and to provide one’s own narrow outlook with a safe seat.” He was still waiting for me though at the other side of the hospital, and I’ve come to see something new in his work that eluded me before. His finest poems are known collectively, of course, as the canal bank walk poems, these being the ones written in the aftermath of his cancer.

It’s said that the cancer changed him fundamentally, and that the tumour burnt away all those professional resentments that so disfigured his earlier work.

The suggested equation is a simple one: the thing survived unlocks sympathy, or put another way, lung cancer swells the heart. This is actually a revolting idea if you consider it, on a par with poor Oscar Wilde’s crazed reflections on the supposed gift of suffering in C Wing at Reading jail.

As if great art somehow requires suffering to make itself known. In Kavanagh’s case, the argument is that his escape from the chest hospital also allowed him to escape from the old prejudices and defects of his personality. Reading him again and again since my mother’s death in March, I would dispute that argument.

His finest work is not indebted to those awful months after his initial diagnosis in 1955. His insight and his genius in other words have nothing to do with the shock, or the physical pain, or the terror he must have felt in the first few hours and days after his anaesthetic.

The sentiments of the canal poems – modesty, compassion, and what he liked to call ordinary plenty- were all there within him decades before the knife. These sentiments run through his earliest efforts in Monaghan like an Ariadne’s thread.

They were partially suppressed by poverty, hunger, and general bad luck, but never fully overwhelmed. The canal bank poems crucially do not express any gratitude to his cancer, nor does he use them as vehicles for any slack uplift of the what-doesn’t-kill-me-makes-me-stronger variety.

He doesn’t mention the cancer because he beat it, and because he owed those few harrowing months nothing.

Likewise, my mother’s illness didn’t ennoble her at the end, nor did it make me a better or braver or more sympathetic person.

We felt its progress at the time as a kind of destitution, and in its swiftness and thoroughness, it degraded us all.

It left no lessons behind worth absorbing. To pretend otherwise is really a refusal to mourn, a failure to feel the weight of the loss in your hand.

If we had actually made it to some canal bank though, and sat together say in the tremendous silence of mid-July, I wouldn’t have had her reflect on the meaning of her cancer, nor tell me about the merciful cosmos that spared her. I’d not have had her say anything at all actually, save listen to me as I told her:

I will have love, have love 

From anything made of 

And a life with a shapely form 

With gaiety and charm 

And capable of receiving 

With grace the grace of living

* John-Paul McCarthy was born in Cork City in 1981. He did his Leaving Certificate at the Gaelscoil in the North Monastery AG and writes in Irish about politics and culture for Tuairisc. He also practices as a barrister in London.

 

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