On March 30th, Drama On One will broadcast Eternal Lanes of Joy, written and directed by filmmaker Pat Collins (That They May Face The Rising Sun), and based on an episode from the life of writer Patrick Kavanagh - listen to Eternal Lanes of Joy above.
Below Pat describes the origins of his 'road movie for the radio'.
I was in the south of Spain on holidays with my family and reading Laurie Lee's memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - a beautifully written account of his journey on foot from his home in the Cotswolds down through Spain from Vigo in the north to the southern coast - when I began to think of Patrick Kavanagh’s more modest mission, his decision in 1931 to walk from his home in Mucker, Co. Monaghan to Dublin city, to the house of the poet and philosopher A.E. Russell. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, a very deliberate setting out on his poetic path and a symbolic journey that would affirm his own idea of himself as a poet.
There was something romantic about Kavanagh’s quest. In The Green Fool he wrote "The blood of tramps was in my veins; my father’s father had come from the west; he had taken the road Queen Maeve took when the cattle fancier was on the chase of the Brown Bull of Cooley." Kavanagh had also read the extraordinary Irish American writer Jim Tully, who wrote such vivid accounts of his life on-the-road in Beggars of Life (1924) and Circus Parade (1927). It’s easy to imagine how restless Kavanagh had become; a working farmer but also a poet and dreamer. The critic Louise Bogan said his astonishing talent "kept on renewing itself not so much by a process of orderly growth as by a continual breaching of boundaries."
When I began to think of Kavanagh’s journey in terms of recreating it, I didn’t want to stick strictly to the facts. Documentary would be too confining. A feature film takes too long and costs too much. I imagined radio could possibly be a more liberating way of working. I floated the notion of a radio drama to RTÉ radio producer Kevin Brew, who offered me great encouragement, and Darren McCreesh, Manager of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre who also got behind the idea.
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Listen: In The Wings - the making of Eternal Lanes of Joy
My interest was Kavanagh and his quest – his romantic setting out – but it was also the prospect of trying to recreate the sound of Ireland in 1931. Nearly impossible now to know for sure what it would have sounded like but we knew that nightjars, corncrakes, curlews and steam trains all would feature. And judging by newspapers at the time, there was much more noise than we would imagine. The great sound recordist Chris Watson provided some of the guidance in this regard and we discussed a lovely project he was involved in - recreating a soundscape in the National Gallery London to accompany John Constable’s 1826 painting The Cornfield.
As the drama opens, Kavanagh is looking back on his life– a re-imagining of Self-Portrait that was broadcast on RTÉ in 1962. We then travel back in time to recreate the encounters he might have had. But it is also introspective and meditative and time is continuously shifting - as in his poem Wet Evening in April:
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.
Originally we toyed with the idea of having two actors - a young Kavanagh and old Kavanagh – but once we thought of Mikel Murfi, that was the end of that. We had seen how he could portray multiple people with just the subtlest change of tone in his incredible stage work and were very happy when he agreed to take the part. We were also delighted to work with such great actors like Catherine Walsh, Rosaleen Linehan, John McArdle, John Connors, Charlene McKenna, Eamonn Owens and Eamonn Hunt.
When Kavanagh reached Dublin he went to the house of AE who would become one of his guiding lights. Through AE, he acquired a collection of contemporary poetry and prose, including books by Dostoevsky, Melville, Walt Whitman, James Stephens, and many more.
The title Eternal Lanes of Joy comes from his poem Prelude:
...’Gather the bits of road that were
Not gravel to the traveller
But eternal lanes of joy
On which no man who walks can die.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Una Agnew for her inspiring book The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh and for discussing Kavanagh’s work with me. And I’d like to thank her brother Art who drove me around the roads of Inniskeen; and all the crew at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre who were passionately involved in sharing their enthusiasm for the great poet.
Lastly, I’d like to thank the RTÉ crew of Damian Chennells and Kevin Reynolds but in particular the producer Kevin Brew whose vast experience and insight into the world of radio and sound was of immense guidance to me.
Drama On One will broadcast Eternal Lanes of Joy, written and directed by Pat Collins, at 8pm on Sunday 30 March on RTÉ Radio 1 - listen to more from Drama On One here.
