Imperfect

I've been on a P.J. Kavanagh jag recently. Paradoxically first reading a more recent memoir (Finding Connections 1990) which focused on the old dead; and now his first book (The Perfect Stranger a memoir of love and survival 1966) about a tragic young death. The death of young people is normally tragic, dying in the fullness of his years less so. The ever young [Sally 24] and the finished up old [PJ 84]are buried in the same grave, same churchyard [R] in Westwell, Oxforshire [photo Tom Robinson wikimedia commons]

The Perfect Stranger apparently found it difficult to find a publisher. It's partly because PJK is not as good a writer as he thinks he is: some of his run-on sentences baffle me and I'm a native speaker. As a poet, he claims a pretty good internal critic, but if the lines cross this bar then the poem is Good, and several examples finish up in this memoir. I'm not judging - I skip embedded lyrics because they are a detour or paraphrase. This self-satisfaction extends to other areas of his life. Recently, Dau.II accused me of weaponized incompetence when I said that such-a-thing was outside my wheelhouse. Blokes are allowed A Lot of this even in these modern times: can't cook, can't do laundry, can't make a bed (it's only a duvet, wot's to make??), can't clean a toilet. Thus when PJK is called up for National Service, he can't march, he can't make his bed, can't master army book-learning. When, through privilege, he lands an entry-level job in early television it was "by this time I more or less agreed with the general tacit assumption of my uselessness" because infrastructural grunt work is beneath him.

In a 1991 Foreword to a reprint of The Perfect Stranger, he is irked because 25 years of librarians and booksellers have classified it as autobiography rather than the memoir of love and survival which it seems to the author. But FFS, the love interest doesn't walk on stage until the final quarter of the book: the first ¾ is solid autobiog fodder: cruelty at school, continental adventures, getting shot in Korea, being employed [he is apparently too useless for it to be called work] on the stage, in telly, in publishing. 

In 1989, I retired (again!) from working in a British University and looked for other work. One of my ventures was to apply for/to the British Council  - a UK govt quango that shows the flag abroad through culture and things intellectual / educational. I passed the first round of the hiring process well enough to be invited to interview in the London head office. It never went further for me [who knows? wrong tie, looked stupid, sounded stupid, went to college in Dublin?]. In 1958, it went much better for PJK and his shining new, not to say numinous, wife Sally. He was deemed appointable and they were posted to Indonesia; which everyone agreed was the shittiest, most dangerous station on the British Council register. 

There, like Pat the Salt at about the same time, they kicked over the traces of colonial exclusivity and talked to their staff, respected their students and trenchered down the local food. It was going to be wonderful and then ". . . at four o'clock in the morning, midsummer's day, Sally Died"

The End