Adapter and verse – An Irishman’s Diary on Thomas Kinsella

The recent celebration of Thomas Kinsella’s 90th birthday was a timely reminder of many things, not least of his extraordinarily powerful and distinctive poetic voice in that interregnum between the poets of the 1940s and 1950s and those Northern voices of the 1960s and later. His work was strikingly saluted in these pages recently by the poet Harry Clifton. There is also, however, a less well-remembered aspect of his career, when, as a young civil servant, he served as private secretary to the then secretary of the Department of Finance, TK Whitaker.

Both men, of course, spoke Irish fluently, and it was probably no coincidence that this was part of the reason why Kinsella, as a young civil servant, was chosen as private secretary to the most powerful civil servant in the country.

Whitaker was not averse to sharing some of Kinsella’s reflected glory

“He was a very capable civil servant – ‘my private secretary the poet’, I must say I basked in it”, he said many years ago. “I wasn’t directly written about, he focused on more notable people than me. He had some remarkable things to say about Charles J Haughey.”

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This was a lightly coded reference to Kinsella's poem, Nightwalker, in which he commemorated the man known as "The Boss".

“It is himself in silk hat, accoutred in stern jodhpurs / The son husband coming in / His power climbs the dark / to his mansion in the sky, / to take his place in the influential circle / mounting to glory on his big white harse.”

I have yet to decide how or whether my ready acceptance of such largesse can be comfortably included in any discussion of journalistic ethics

Kinsella was a lode-star to many university students in Dublin at the beginning of the 1960s, and was depicted by some of the less charitable commentators of that era, possibly for that reason, as “the poet of the bed-sits” – a sneer which reflected much more on his critics than it did on him.

It was the early 1970s before I ever to meet him and his amazing wife Eleanor, personally. It was at a conference organised by the American Committee on Irish Studies in a university in Carbondale, Illinois, where Kinsella was in the middle of a stint as a visiting writer.

From memory, I think that the only reason I was there at all, having at that time little to do with universities and even less with literature, was because Maeve Binchy of this parish had been offered a free ticket on one of the first transatlantic Aer Lingus jumbo jets to the US and, unable or unwilling to go herself, had bestowed it on me. I have yet to decide how or whether my ready acceptance of such largesse can be comfortably included in any discussion of journalistic ethics.

One of the highlights of that expedition was getting into a taxi with Seamus Heaney – another luminary of the conference – and the two of us commanding its startled driver to take us to each of the pubs in Carbondale in rotation until we could find one that served Guinness. He did. The bar was called “Napoleon’s Retreat”, for reasons which now escape me.

This establishment was situated in a dimly lit basement redolent of a persistent US attitude of disapproval of alcohol dating from the Prohibition era, but it had a jazz band as well as Guinness.

Later, back in the groves of academe, Kinsella was reminiscing about his time in the Irish public service and, in particular, about his memories of Whitaker. His superior, he told us, had once invited him as a person of proven literary ability to select a few books to stave off boredom on a long journey to the a meeting of some international institution – in all probability the World Bank – in Washington.

Kinsella did as requested, supplying his superior with some carefully chosen novels, and thought no more about it. When Whitaker returned from his international conference, Kinsella asked him whether he had enjoyed the books that he had chosen for him.

Whitaker thanked him for what he had done to lighten the tedium of the journey and, perhaps, of the conference itself, but added that he would prefer, should such an occasion arise in the future, to be supplied with reading matter that was “not quite so racy”.

I was a very young journalist, and never thought of asking Kinsella exactly what titles he had given to Whitaker to stave off the tedium of a transatlantic flight.

Ah, well. You win some, and you lose some.