Patrick Kavanagh

The first Bloomsday

“The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan was already drunk.”

20 x C + M + B x 14

By Alan Cunningham.

“London is the loneliest place I have known: this loneliness is the only holy thing in the city.”
The Green Fool, P. Kavanagh.

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It is Easter Sunday 2014 and the inscription 20 x C + M + B x 14 has been chalked onto most of the doors in the village of Pöcking, Bavaria.

Making Something of It

By Alan Cunningham.

When I read The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanagh, I read a book that – had I also been born in 1904 – I think I, too, could have written, exactly as it is; a book, however, that if I were to write it now would be a somewhat different book, being much more concise.

I believe in the possibility of exact replication because many of the thoughts expressed by Kavanagh in his autobiographical work – a very good book, by the way, but also a very flawed one – reflect attitudes and modes of behaviour that have changed little in Ireland in the intervening years, irrespective of external changes. I, and others, are evidence of this, as are events that have happened to me in that country.