Not a Damn Thing

Nick Laird

  • Collected Poems by Patrick Kavanagh, edited by Antoinette Quinn
    Allen Lane, 299 pp, £25.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 7139 9599 8

In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But:

Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded.

k: I see you do be writing for a paper called the New Yorker.

me: I do.

k: I dare say for a piece in a paper like that you might get big money.

me: Begod, you might.

k: I dare say you might get $500.

me: You might, indeed.

k: You might even get $1000?

me: Still, I’d say $500 wouldn’t be too bad, wouldn’t you?

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