PJ Kavanagh

Born 6th January 1931 Died 26th August 2015

PJ KAVANAGH, the poet, novelist, broadcaster, actor and columnist, died in August at the age of 84. The sudden death of his first wife Sally when he was just 27 was the defining moment of his life and work. As Brendan Walsh in his obituary of Kavanagh in the Tablet put it: ‘He felt that having been dealt this devastating blow the rest of his life had been a series of compensations. He was to find happiness in a second marriage, raising two sons with his wife Kate and clawing his way back to a wry sort of joy through the camaraderie of acting and the solitary search for the right word as a poet and writer.’ Kavanagh’s memoir of Sally, The Perfect Stranger, was turned down by five publishers but became a classic, described by Richard Ingrams as ‘one of the best memoirs I have read’.

Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was born in 1931 in Worthing, Sussex. His father was Ted Kavanagh the creator of

ITMA, the hugely popular radio comedy starring Tommy Handley. It was a rackety upbringing and, in a poem, Kavanagh recalled his father’s world as a ‘vast/gillray cartoon (only kinder)’. He went to Douai, the Benedictine public school, then studied English at Merton College, Oxford, where he met

Sally, daughter of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann; they married in 1956. She died of polio a year later.

He settled with Kate, a translator, in Elkstone, Gloucestershire, in 1965, where he worked every day in a tiny ruined cottage from 10 till 6, then went to the village pub for an hour. Supported by his acting and journalism, he published several volumes of poetry, including Life Before Death (1979), An

Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). Michael Caines in the

Guardian wrote: ‘Mysticism and the natural world were among this Roman Catholic countryman’s abiding concerns.’

The Daily Telegraph obituarist found Kavanagh ‘chose the country in which to do his poetic work, but was no facile nature poet. Equally, he was a convinced Catholic but his religion was not easy. He demonstrated in his poems that, by looking intently, the unseen becomes more obviously real: “There is something about. It would be treason to deny it. Not something religious, that is a slippery word. Or spiritual. There is joy or hope. I think it’s joy.” ’