PJ Kavanagh obituary

On St George’s Day 1951, the second day of the battle of the Imjin river, Second Lieutenant Patrick Kavanagh of the Royal Ulster Rifles was shot. While comrades in the Gloucestershire Regiment made a defiant stand against the Chinese army, and many of Kavanagh’s friends were killed or captured, he was taken to hospital with what turned out be merely a flesh wound. A doctor called it a million-to-one shot, without which the Korean war could have denied Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, his future life of broadcasting, acting, writing poetry – and writing much else besides, including a remarkable memoir, The Perfect Stranger.

Even before national service loomed into view, Kavanagh’s life had been eventful. He was born in Worthing, Sussex, son of Agnes (nee O’Keefe) and Ted. His father was the prolific creator of It’s That Man Again, the hugely popular radio comedy starring Tommy Handley. During the second world war, the family was “bombed from flat to flat”, as Kavanagh later recalled in verse; life was “a show on the road, a series of one-night stands”, his father’s world “a vast / Gillray cartoon (only kinder)”. It was a peripatetic and somewhat ragged upbringing, including a period when Kavanagh attended a convent school in Barnes, west London. He had a holiday job as a redcoat at Butlins, took acting classes, and met the jazz musician Charlie Parker in Paris while working there as a newsreader.

After the war, he studied English at Merton College, Oxford, but more importantly met Sarah Philipps, known as Sally, daughter of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the artist Wogan Philipps (later Lord Milford), and fell in love with her. They married in 1956, and went the following year to Indonesia, where Kavanagh was employed by the British Council. In 1958, his wife contracted poliomyelitis; she died in Java.

This is the life described in The Perfect Stranger, a joyous yet unsentimental account of Kavanagh’s early life and his few years with Sally. A story of love and tragic loss, and also a “sometimes funny, sometimes painful account of youthful pretension and awkwardness, self-righteousness and self-doubt,” as David Nicholls called it in the Guardian, The Perfect Stranger was turned down by several publishers before Chatto & Windus published it in 1966. It won that year’s Richard Hillary prize.

Kavanagh’s first collection of poems, One and One, had appeared in 1959, but there was to be nothing else in book form until after the success of The Perfect Stranger. He moved to Gloucestershire in 1963, “by a lake / Not even the Green Dragon locals know is here”, and married the translator Catherine Ward two years later (“I would if I could write new words for women / because of you”). They settled in Elkstone, a village halfway between Cheltenham and Cirencester, where Kate masterminded the conversion of a barn into the home in which they would raise their two sons; Kavanagh adopted a ruined cottage as his study. They leavened the solitude with regular trips to London.

Indeed, in the winter of 1964, exploiting his talents as a performer, Kavanagh found himself co-presenting Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, a short-lived satirical television show, alongside David Frost and Willie Rushton. Kavanagh’s later broadcasting and acting career took in work as varied as the documentary Journey Through Summer (1973), a perambulatory exploration of Britain; presenting Radio 4’s Poetry Please! (“A surprising number of requests,” he observed, “come from people who ... have read little or no poetry since they left school”); and, in 1998, playing a cameo role in Father Ted, as Father Seamus Fitzpatrick, a collector of Nazi war memorabilia, whose relics include an actual surviving member of the Wehrmacht. After that, Kavanagh, a lean pipe smoker with a distinctive face and voice, was plagued with offers of more work playing Irish priests.

The author of Voices in Ireland: A Traveller’s Literary Companion (1994), Kavanagh had declared in The Perfect Stranger that “my blood on both sides of my family is Irish as far back as anybody can be bothered to trace.” This ancestry informs his travel book Finding Connections (1990) and his poetry. He adopted the pen name PJ Kavanagh in deference to the great Patrick Kavanagh, whom he met twice. “Why don’t you change your fuckin’ name?” was the only thing of any significance the older man said to the younger. At their second meeting, PJ was advised to buy Patrick a placating drink. The poet of The Great Hunger and On Raglan Road refused to turn around but instead stood “with his hand cupped out behind him for the brandy”.

Supported by his journalism, Kavanagh continued to publish volumes of poetry, including Life Before Death (1979), An Enchantment (1991) and, lastly, Something About (2004). He was awarded the Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley award for poetry in 1993, following the publication of his Collected Poems; his New Selected Poems appeared last year.

As the title of a 1974 collection, Edward Thomas in Heaven, might suggest, mysticism and the natural world were among this Roman Catholic countryman’s abiding concerns. He had “an eye for rural things”, as Frank Kermode put it, but “all are subdued to the colour of his own mind”. Wary of the “nature poet” label, Kavanagh could wryly see himself as some of his critics did: as “a man who woos a rural muse / ... suitably dejected”. “Quiet”, as he surmised, is indeed a predictable critical adjective for describing his knack for coaxing verse that was fairly traditional in form into conveying what John Bayley called “the impression of talk”.

Writing of himself in the Yeatsian third person, Kavanagh suggested that the natural “surfaces” the poet sees serve primarily as a “mesh for what lies under”: “A net that he could cast and then pull up, / Dazzled, by the light that has been caught.” Notwithstanding the exceptions, joy and hope were, for him, keynotes of his work. In answer to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, he could write: “No melancholy, long, withdrawing roar / Today”. Hence Kavanagh’s admiration for the different yet complementary work of fellow poets such as that of his American friend Peter Kane Dufault, who wrote what he called “nature poems for grownups,” and, despite their occasional, fierce disagreements, that of Peter Redgrove (with whom he once undertook a drunken road trip together in a borrowed car around the west of Ireland).

Kavanagh’s further literary projects included editing the Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982), The Essential GK Chesterton (1987) and, with James Michie, The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1985). A Song and Dance, the first of his four novels for adults, appeared in 1968, and received the Guardian fiction prize. One of his two children’s books, Scarf Jack (1978), was adapted for television. He wrote columns for the Spectator (Life and Letters, 1983-96) and the Times Literary Supplement (Bywords, 1996-2002) that often emphasised the meditative, nature-tracing, side of his personality. By contrast, in one early poem he presented heaven as “big rooms filled with laughing.”

Kavanagh is survived by Kate and their two sons.