Remembering P.J. Kavanagh

‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996.

He was right to call a volume collecting these Life and Letters columns (with a later series from the TLS) by the name A Kind of Journal, for they possess the kind of narrative impetus that makes classic diaries such as Woodforde’s or Kilvert’s so compelling. But they were also a poet’s work-books, just as living in rural Gloucestershire, as he had since 1963, was to be in a poet’s workshop.

For, despite the success in 1966 of his classic memoir The Perfect Stranger (which set the death of his first wife, Sally, aged 24, as the abiding marker for the rest of his life), Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was before anything a poet. His New Selected Poems came out only last year. The Spectator was also lucky enough to have him as its poetry editor, at a time when some other periodicals were beginning to lack the courage to publish poetry, despite its popularity.

He was not a nature poet exactly. He was sharply aware of the dangers of mere dabbling in rural life, quoting Peter Reading’s lines: ‘Phoney-rustic bards,/ Spare us your thoughts about birds.’ But he settled in a converted barn with his wife Kate and their two boys, earning his living by writing, after spending the 1960s in acting. He was no shrinking violet, and had thriven as a presenter, with David Frost and William Rushton, of the satirical Not So Much a Programme More a Way of Life.