Show my book or I’ll wreck joint, said poet
POET Patrick Kavanagh threatened to wreck several Dublin bookshops if they did not display his novel in the window, newly released 80-year-old Department of Justice papers reveal.
The author of On Raglan Road was even investigated by gardaí in 1938 after storming into at least five stores demanding they put his book in the window.
He fumed at the manager of Fred Hanna’s bookshop on Nassau Street and demanded to know why his novel, The Green Fool, was not out on display. ‘You have 15 minutes to put my book in the window. This is an ultimatum,’ he warned the bookseller.
And he assured him that he would ‘wreck the joint’ if his conditions were not met.
After finding his book was not in the window of Hodges Figgis either he began to fling other books across the shop, telling staff in attendance: ‘Be careful. I will break every bloody bookshop in the city up.’
He also visited The Grafton Book Shop, where he was told that authors could not threaten every seller and force them into displaying their books.
Its owner, Anthony Dempsey, refused to sell the semi-autobiographical novel at all believing it to contain ‘anti-Catholic’ content that would offend clerical customers. Mr Dempsey said he could not be compelled ‘by law’ to sell the book.
Kavanagh retorted that the most important law was the ‘law of the poet’. A garda who wrote a report on Kavanagh’s threats revealed that he asked a priest about the book and what action should be taken.
The priest told him that Kavanagh was ‘obviously seeking’ publicity and a prosecution would give him that.
The sergeant’s report revealed that the shop owners felt Kavanagh was either convinced that there was ‘an organised attempt on the part of the booksellers generally to boycott the sale of the book, giving it little or no prominence’ or ‘was seeking notoriety or publicity in endeavouring to create a scene’.
The Green Fool charted the poet’s upbringing in rural Ireland and depicted life and society in Monaghan in the early 20th century.
Kavanagh, who died in 1967, was best known for his poetry including On Raglan Road, Canal Bank Walk and Iniskeen Road: July Evening.
One of his most famous poems, Epic, depicts a petty land dispute in Monaghan in 1938 over a tiny strip of land and compares it to the Munich agreement that same year, when the European powers tried to curtail Hitler.
It now emerges that Kavanagh was that same year going from one Dublin book shop to another threatening them if they didn’t display his book.