Richard Murphy in Connemara a Talk by Benjamin Keatinge 5Th May 2018
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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.