Poet Cornered: An Irishman’s Diary about Antoinette Quinn

Antoinette Quinn, who died this week, was a highly regarded academic and literary critic. But for better or worse, the thing she will be publicly remembered for is her 2001 biography of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. Nobody was better qualified to write it. Born near Ardee, Quinn moved the few miles north to Kavanagh's Inniskeen early in life. And she later made the study of his poems a speciality. Her 1991 book Patrick Kavanagh – Born Again Romantic is probably the definitive critical work on the subject.

Even so, the biography was, in John Montague’s word, “brave”. And it needed to be because, as he elaborated, “the brother is in the background, commanding all approaches, like a spiritual bouncer”.

The brother was Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s younger sibling, although by then in his 80s. He had supported Patrick financially and otherwise throughout his life and was entitled to be protective. But he was, as they say around Inniskeen, a fierce man. His combative attitude, even in old age, made the opinionated Patrick look mild by comparison.

His most notorious feud centred on the poet’s late marriage to Katherine Moloney, something Peter knew nothing about until returning from the US for his brother’s funeral. He never accepted the relationship, or the implications for copyright that resulted. The row followed all three protagonists to their graves, eventually. In 1998, Peter removed and destroyed Katherine’s headstone. Then, after he died himself in 2006, persons unknown removed the nameplate from his. Now, of the trio, only the poet is identified, like a crucified Christ flanked by obscure sinners.

It was around passions this deep that Antoinette Quinn had to tread in the biography. But the result was nevertheless a critical and commercial triumph, hailed as “the book we’ve been waiting for” by Anthony Cronin and vying with Harry Potter among the bestsellers of the time.

You sense reading it, however, that aside from the brother’s disapproval, it also exacted a more personal price. In her preface, the author explained the dilemma involved in writing about Kavanagh, via a conversation she’d with “an aunt and a niece” – representatives of “two sorts of reader”.

The aunt remembered Kavanagh as “a big, rough, angry-looking man” whose way you’d jump out of on the footpath because “he looked as if he’d push you into the traffic”. The niece, by contrast, knew only his poems, her favourites at school, and didn’t want to hear anything “nasty” about their creator.

Quinn hoped that the “warts and all” biography wouldn’t spoil the poetry for anyone. But Kavanagh the man could be hard to love. And although she met him only once in person, you couldn’t help feel that, after researching the book, she was struggling even to like him.

Still, he could hardly have disagreed that, in that and her other works, she did him justice. It was the abiding cause of Kavanagh’s life to establish himself as Irish poetry’s main man, post-Yeats, something he succeeded in eventually (even if he now appears to have been a John the Baptist for Seamus Heaney).

But as Quinn’s friend and colleague, Prof Nicholas Grene, told mourners at her funeral, she had done more than anyone to bring his work to an international audience, something that escaped him in life.

The funeral service was in Mount Jerome – a pleasantly neutral space, far from the graveyard wars of Inniskeen. There, the public work aside, we also heard much about her personal life, which seems to have been full of love and laughter.

Having spent a brief time as a nun before her true vocation took her instead to the cloisters of Trinity College, she ended up blissfully married, to Brian Crowley, for 25 years. The last of these were a struggle with serious illness. But when further treatment became hopeless, she was stoic. “I’ve had a wonderful life and I’m happy to go,” she told family.

I met her only once, some years ago, in of all places a pilates class (beginners). She was probably trying to cope with the chronic back pain that forced her early retirement from Trinity.

But pilates was still a bit misunderstood at the time, as it still is in some quarters. And after introducing herself, she must have had an alarming thought because she quickly added a warning: “Don’t write about this!” It was of course a little hurtful that, just because I was a journalist, she expected me to be indiscreet. Even so, I assured her she could relax. “I’ll never tell anyone.”

@FrankmcnallyIT