Poet, literary commentator, columnist, sometimes actor and former British soldier PJ (Patrick Joseph) Kavanagh cut a striking figure with his strong, handsome, hawk face, his pipe, hat, scarf, tweeds and air of determination and shyness. The quintessentially English appearance and clipped, public school accent cloaked a complex, searching and unique mind and soul, an infectious sense of humour, and a deep-rooted sense of Irish identity.
Kavanagh was born in Worthing, West Sussex. Both his parents were of Irish descent and he formed a lifelong love of Ireland, declaring in a recent radio interview on RTÉ's Arts Tonight that he had always felt a foreigner in England.
His father, Ted Kavanagh, wrote the wartime hit radio comedy It's That Man Again, and the young Kavanagh took up acting in Oxford, where he attended Merton. A stint in the British army saw him serve with the Inniskilling Fusiliers, and he was injured in Korea while serving with the Royal Ulster Rifles ("the people waiting for us to go").
Kavanagh's army experiences, his time as a broadcaster in Paris, and his work with the British Council in Barcelona are detailed in his classic memoir, The Perfect Stranger, first published in 1966 and reprinted earlier this year.
Love and marriage
The centrepiece of that book was Kavanagh’s love for, and marriage to, Sally Phillips, whose tragically early death from polio cast a kind of bright shadow over the remainder of his life and work. The memoir also contains a vivid description of the young Pearse Hutchinson in his element among the Catalan poets and in the bars of 1950s Barcelona.
Kavanagh and Hutchinson became lifelong friends and together organised the first public readings of Catalan poetry in Franco’s Spain. Their extensive correspondence, a treasure trove of poetic and cultural insights, is housed in the Pearse Hutchinson Archive at Maynooth University and among Kavanagh’s papers at the British Library.
Kavanagh was for many years a columnist with the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. Some of those prose works were collected in A Kind of Journal (2003). The range and richness of his eye includes observations on Frank O'Connor and Donegal, Buddha in Kilmainham, and Watching the Rain at Lord's (he was a dedicated cricket man). He also edited the poems of Ivor Gurney, who had shared his love of the Cotswolds.
Individual poetry collections included About Time, Edward Thomas in Heaven, Presences and Something About. He also published four novels, several book "for older children" and the marvellous Voices in Ireland: A Traveller's Literary Companion, one of the most comprehensive and acute works on Irish landscape and literature.
The other Kavanagh
PJ Kavanagh was proud to share his name with the great Monaghan poet whose work he admired and whom he met on two occasions. In the first of those encounters, Irishman Kavanagh’s only words to him were: “Why don’t you change your f***in’ name?” The second time around, the stubborn Inniskeen back stayed firmly turned on his English namesake, though a hand reached backwards to accept the proffered glass of brandy.
PJ Kavanagh’s poems were notable for their supple playfulness, their deceptive plainness, and the singularity of their observations – on nature, friendship, landscape and “the pursuit of something that was out of reach”.
As Derek Mahon wrote in his introduction to Kavanagh's New Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014): "He marked out his own path, pursued his own truth, spiritually and artistically . . . /As it is for Eliot in Burnt Norton, his time is eternally present: boyhood and youth, past lives and what Pound called 'Chesterton's England of has-been and why-not'. Time has been his friend: a lifetime's dedication has produced its rich results."
Kavanagh was also a versatile actor who played many roles on stage and screen, including a memorable turn as the Nazi memorabilia-collecting priest, Fr Seamus Fitzpatrick in an episode of Father Ted; and as a thinly disguised version of British politician Airey Neave in Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda (1990).
He last visited Ireland in May, when he called to the Dublin offices of Poetry Ireland and bought a pipe and tobacco near Trinity College.
One of Kavanagh's poems of Ireland is Yeats's Tower, written at Thoor Ballylee in August 1957:
“You will forgive the thought/That made me in your hall/Write with a tinker’s coal/My small and grateful name. Things being as they are/You’ll understand the fear/That I may never pass this way again.”
He is survived by his wife, Kate, sons Cornelius and Bruno, and three grandchildren.