Richard Murphy in Connemara - A talk by Benjamin Keatinge

Richard Murphy in Connemara
    A talk by Benjamin Keatinge

• Richard Murphy’s family background in
  Connemara
• A poet of other people: J.R. Ackerley, Theodore
  Roethke, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Tony White.
• Places: Milford, Salruck, Cleggan, Rosroe, Omey
  island, Inishbofin, Claddaghduff.
• Emblems of adversity: boats, storms and the sea;
  stones, building and ‘stone mania’.
• Voicing Connemara: solitude and nature; love and
  loss.
• Conclusion: ‘the unfenced Pleasure Ground of the
  sea’.

A Divided Inheritance
. . . “my ancestors, like those of most
people of Irish descent, had fought on
opposite sides [of the Battle of Aughrim,
1691]. I learnt that Patrick Sarsfield, who
had sailed away in defeat to France,
leading 10,000 Irish troups known as ‘the
wild geese’ to win victories abroad, was
my mother’s distant uncle.” (The Kick,
2002)
“In opposite camps our ancestors
Ten marriages ago,
Caught in a feud of absent kings
Lit matches, foddered horses ... marched
Halted, and marched into battle.” (‘Legend’)

The Pleasure Ground
“We loved our Pleasure Ground. A great grey
limestone wall wreathed in ivy surrounded it
on three sides, enclosing us with midges and
horseflies in a seedy paradise of impoverished
Anglo-Irish pride ... It was the happiest time of
my life ... [but] our pleasure ground period
didn’t last ... the planted symmetry had
vanished ... I felt guilty and lost.”

“In neutral Ireland, our walled demesne
While tilting you towards knight-errant books,
Groomed you to mount on war-horses to gain
Rewards beyond our laurels and our oaks.”
(‘Suntrap’, The Price of Stone, 1985)

The draw of the West
• “... this land of the dead which we entered, stark, desolate, uncultivated, storm-
  bound and profoundly mournful, appealed to me romantically more than the
  nurtured garden of civility we had left.” [Childhood visits to Salruck and Killary]
• “As a young and foolish novice treading on the heels of W.B. Yeats, obeying his
  command to ‘learn your trade’, I took a defiant step backwards [in leaving Oxford
  for Connemara in November 1946] to that lonely place, a mile on a muddy track
  across a bog to the nearest neighbour.” (In Search of Poetry, 2017)
• “The weather was harsh in May 1951 at Rosroe, when I left London after winning
  the AE Memorial Award . . . I had come on my own with a fountain pen and a
  typewriter to write poetry in a vacant stone house on the quay ... fetching water
  from a spring in a field of rushes . . . going to bed by candlelight, a draught in the
  doorway blowing out the flame.” (In Search of Poetry, 2017)

The Quay House, Rosroe

Wittgenstein and the ‘last pool of darkness’
• “. . . a strange man who had been very rich
  and given his money away ... a German
  translator [Tommy Mulcerrins said] ... the
  village boys made fun of him because they
  thought he must be mad.” (In Search of
  Poetry, 2017)
• “In Cambridge – amidst ‘the disintegrating
  English civilisation’ – Wittgenstein only
  rarely found conditions that allowed him to
  work, [he preferred] Norway and Ireland . .
  [places] that are barren, thinly populated.”
(Richard Wall, Wittgenstein in Ireland, 2000)
“He left, in my turf-shed rafters, a small sign
To question all our myths...Dear Wittgenstein.”

Sailing to an Island: Inishbofin

• “My older brother Chris . . . had hired . . . an old sailing boat of a local
  design known as a pookaun (Irish: ‘púcán) [which] had a bad reputation.
  Five men had been lost lost out of her in the Cleggan disaster of 1927, the
  year I was born . . . on 25th August 1952 [we] set out . . . from the quay of
  Rosroe near the mouth of the Big Killary harbour. We were planning to go
  to Clare Island, a place renowned for legends. We never got there, Contrary
  winds brought us instead to an island I had never heard of, called
  Inishbofin.” (The Kick, 2002)
“The breeze as we plunge slowly stiffens:
There are hills of sea between us and land,
Between our hopes and the island harbour.
A child vomits. The boat veers and bucks.
There is no refuge on the gannet’s cliff.
We are far, far out: the hull is rotten, [...]
What of those who must earn their living
On the ribald face of a mad mistress?
We in holiday fashion know
This is the boat that belched its crew
Dead on the shingle in the Cleggan disaster.” (‘Sailing to an Island’, 1963)

Cleggan and Claddaghduff
‘The Cleggan Disaster: Years Later’
Whose is the hulk on the shingle
The boatwright’s son repairs
Though she has not been fishing
For thirty-four years
Since she rode the disaster [...]
Where are the dances in the houses
With porter and cakes in the room,
The reddled faces of fiddlers
Sawing out jigs and reels,
The flickering eyes of neighbours?
The thatch which was neatly bordered
By a fringe of sea-stones
Has now caved in.

Courage, endurance and loss
        ‘The Cleggan Disaster’
The men began to pray. Stack-
funnelled hail
Crackled in volleys, with blasts on the
bows
Where Concannon stood to fend with
his body
The slash of seas. Then sickness
surged,
And against their will they were
gripped with terror
He told them to bail. When they lost
the bailer
They bailed with their boots, casting
overboard
Two costly nets with a thousand
mackerel.

Recovery and hope
• “Why does she stand at the curtains
  Combing her seal-grey hair
  And uttering bitter opinions
  On land-work and sea-fear,
  Drownings and famines?
  When will her son say,
  ‘Forget about the disaster,
  We’re mounting nets today!’”
  (‘The Cleggan Disaster’)
• “And in memory's hands this hooker
  was restored.
  Old men my instructors, and with all
  new gear
  May I handle her well down
  tomorrow's sea-road.”
  (‘The Last Galway Hooker’)

Energizing Connemara
• “In the spring of 1961, when the Dolmen
  Press published my poem ‘The Last
  Galway Hooker’ in a slim volume ...
  designed by Liam Miller, the booklet
  competed on a shelf with Smithwick’s beer
  and Bachelor’s baked beans for the
  custom of tourists drawn to the Pier Bar
  by my antique sailing boat. We were
  energized by a new spirit of growth . . .”
  (The Kick, 2002, p.220)
• “I hated business, but got embroiled out of
  necessity and the wish to belong, to
  ‘impatriate’ myself in ... Connemara ... the
  whole question of who or what is a tourist
  or what is a native, becomes questionable
  in the Pier Bar, ... truly I was a native . . .”
  (In Search of Poetry, 2017)

The World comes to Cleggan
• Letter from Charles Monteith of Faber
  and Faber to Richard Murphy, 30th
  November 1960.
“My dear Richard,
                 Very many thanks
for sending me the final version of
Sailing to an Island which I
admire enormously and which I’m
delighted to have. . . I met Toby
Robertson at a party last
weekend, and heard that he’d
been on the Bofin and how much
he enjoyed it all. If things go on
like this, Days Hotel will turn into
the Garsington of the ʼ60s!”

Theodore Roethke at Inishbofin, 1960
• “Roethke was like a defeated prize-fighter,
  growing bald, groggy and fat ... A strong
  attraction for Roethke was Miko’s pub.
  Dark mildewed walls imprisoned in a
  sense of damnation its customers ... The
  poet appeared in their midst as a big-
  mouthed Yank, flush with dollars and
  bravado . . . Insanity was the stinking
  wound that went with his talent.” (The
  Kick, 2002)
“A storm shot up, his glass cracked in a
gale:
An abstract thunder of darkness deafened
The listeners he’d once given roses, now
hail.
He'd burst the lyric barrier: logic ended
Doctors were called, and he agreed to sail.”

J.R. Ackerley
• “In June 1966, a year before he
  died, he stayed at my cottage in
  Cleggan, Co. Galway. Feeling
  isolated by his deafness, he
  would sit in a deck chair on the
  tiny lawn, taking ticks out of
  the ears of a sheepdog Nero ...
  He bought his own gin and
  drank rather a lot, but never
  lost his courtesy, poise and
  intelligence.” (The Kick, 2002)

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
• “Both she and Ted had encouraged
  me to write dramatic monologues,
  rather than straight narrative, in ‘The
  Battle of Aughrim’....”
• “Richard Murphy’s verse is classical
  in a way that demonstrates what the
  classical strengths really are. It
  combines a high music with
  simplicity, force and directness in
  dealing with the world of action. He
  has the gift of epic objectivity: behind
  his poems we feel not the assertion of
  his personality, but the actuality of
  events, the facts and sufferings of
  history.” (Ted Hughes)

Looking for Inspiration: High Island
1. In air, over mid-atlantic
2. A congregation of gulls, storm
petrels, seals – the text, the service
3. The voice in the well
4. 7 apocryphal legends about High Is.
5. The Saint’s curse on desecrators
6. High island as a radio receiver of
cosmic or historic signals – various
tuned by the weather
7. Fifty metaphors of High Island
8. High Island as a woman
9. High Island as a man
10. Ireland as a graveyard of
bachelors
11. High Isl. as an orchestra and choir
12.Seven kinds of sea-emissaries to
High Island
13. An audit of duties, non-duties, +
one masquerading as the other
14. Decline and fall of Inishbofin

Solitude
• “Tonight I’ll keep a vigil in the holy
  circle of the hermitage to celebrate
  the feast of St Gormgall and the
  hatching of stormpetrels in his and
  his hermits’ graves. I feel more
  affection for everyone when I’m
  alone on High Island than when I’m
  among a crowd. Love, the supreme
  good, the redeeming harmony in
  every person, in all of nature, needs
  detachment and space as well as
  intimacy. Simply by being alone in
  this place at this time I feel its
  force.”
(extract from the High Island
notebooks in The Kick, 2002, p.291)

Nature
• “Quicken your tune, O improvise, before
  The combine and the digger come,
  Little bridegroom.”
(from ‘Song for a Corncrake’, High Island, 1974)
   • “A solo tune
      Is dying with passion
      From someone out there to come quickly
      Come back!         come back!
      I’m here here     here”
(from ‘Nocture’, High Island, 1974)
• “Waif of the afterglow
  On summer nights to meet your mate you
  jink
  Over sea-cliff and graveyard,
  Creeping underground
  To hatch an egg in a hermit’s skull.”
(from ‘Stormpetrel’, 1974)

Stone and Stone Mania
“Hovels to live in, ruins to admire
From a car cruising by,
The weathered face caught in a sunset fire,
Hollowed with exility;
Whose gradual fall my purchase would
complete,
Clearing them off the land,
The seven cabins needed to create
The granite house I planned.”
(from ‘Little Hunger’, 1974)
“To regain control of this drift of days I’ve lost
in
my passion for building in granite, . . .”
(from ‘Stone Mania’, 1985)

Love and Loss
• “All that I ever wrote in these
  notebooks ... was written with an
  underlying assumption that Tony
  would be the one to read with
  complete understanding all I had
  written, that he would outlive me,
  and that he would make sense of the
  confusions in my life . . .” (The Kick)
• “You were standing on the quay
  Wondering who was the stranger on
  the mailboat
  While I was on the mailboat
  Wondering who was the stranger on
  the quay.”
(‘Double Negative’, High Island, 1974)

Literary images of the West
1. Adversity: “Ten children were born to us, but they had no good
   fortune. God help us!” (Tomás O’Crohan, The Islandman, p.147)
2. Sorrow: “Then I turned back again in the teeth of the rain, and
   sat over the fire with the old man and woman talking of the
   sorrows of the people till it was late at night.” (J.M. Synge, The
   Aran Islands)
3. Nature: “He was a bull, as huge a bull as was ever on dry land.
   He shoved his snout under the seal next to him and flung him
   into the air as high as a boat’s mast ... Then began the fight at
   the fair when the rest of them saw that.” (Tomás O’Crohan, The
   Islandman, p.183)
4. Solitude: “The sense of solitude was immense. I could not see or
   realise my own body, and I seemed to exist merely in my
   perception of the waves and of the crying birds, and of the smell
   of seaweed.” (J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands)

“That unfenced pleasure ground on the edge of the sea”
“So I went back to that older earlier
unfenced romantic pleasure ground
in the treeless hills of Connemara on
the edge of the sea. There, aged
nineteen, I abandoned myself to
mountains, lakes and waterfalls . . .
As I grew older the Pleasure Ground
sank through decay into oblivion, as
the old people died the the young left
the country. So I searched for
grounds of pleasure that excluded
nobody, till I found them by living
with friends I loved among people on
or near the sea.”

Richard Murphy 1927-2018