Poet Richard Murphy's memoirs deal with delicate personal issues, his Protestant gentry background and the literary milieu of his time. These extracts from The Kick feature telling encounters with such figures as Patrick Kavanagh, Cliuve Bell and Sean O Riada.
On my way from London to Connemara in June, 1950, aged 23, I broke my journey in Dublin, hoping to browse in Hodges & Figgis and meet some poets. I was told it was easy to meet poets in Dublin: go to McDaid's, off Grafton Street, and you would find Patrick Kavanagh drinking there with his disciples. I entered McDaid's in the lunch hour and introduced myself to Kavanagh, mentioning that I had started to review poetry for the Spectator. He looked pleased and began denouncing Dublin as a city with no critical values. I wondered why he continued to live there. He said the country for him was too full of ghosts. At odds with his tweed cap and shabby countryman's clothes were his horn-rimmed spectacles.
He introduced me to Anthony Cronin, a barrister who had little time for the law and much for poetry; to John Ryan, who was editing the monthly magazine Envoy; and to Valentin Iremonger, the Envoy poetry editor. Val invited me to submit my poems, and thereafter he wrote with good advice regarding my poems, which he was the first to publish in Ireland.
Kavanagh said Cronin was sure to win the A.E. Memorial Award next year, as he was the best of the younger poets. That was how I heard of a prize worth £100 given every five years to a poet under the age of 30. Iremonger had won it in 1946, and Envoy was carrying an advertisement asking for submissions before the end of 1950.
When McDaid's closed at 2.30 p.m, as the law required, I asked Kavanagh, as we strolled up Grafton Street, where or how I could buy his book, The Great Hunger, which was out of print. He replied that he would be going round to call on Mrs Yeats that afternoon, and if I would give him 10 shillings he would get a copy of the Cuala Press edition from her and give it to me in McDaid's at six o'clock. He took the money and I never saw him again for five years.
But the following spring I won the A.E. Award, another reason to stay in Connemara and keep out of Dublin. And, more than 40 years later at lunch in the Shelbourne, Tony Cronin remembered me as "a tall, lissom Anglo-Irishman who seemed a bit like a lamb that had strayed into a den of wolves".
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The A.E. Memorial Award acted as nitrogen on the hungry grass of my ambition to be recognised as a poet. I received the news and the cheque at my sister Mary's flat in South Kensington, London, on April 4th, 1951. Having won on promise rather than performance, I needed to prove that the five elderly judges in Dublin had made no mistake in identifying me as an Irish poet. Their decision gave me the moral support and means to live in the west of Ireland, with a chance to redeem the failure of my mid-term flight from Oxford to write a verse play at Lecknavarna.
When I rang to tell Harold Nicolson, he invited me to dine at the Travellers' Club. While Harold drank pink champagne, I drank water, basking in his benevolence and wit through course after course, until we moved to the smoking room for coffee. There, he pointed out an old man with startling white hair and a rubicund face dozing in a leather armchair, and asked,
"Would you like to meet Clive Bell?"
Confronting the provocative, urbane author of Civilisation, which our history master, Raymond Carr, had given me a gamma mark for writing about at Wellington College, filled me with awe. How would this icon of the Bloomsbury pantheon, brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf, regard my desire to bury myself in Connemara writing a long narrative poem?
"And who is Richard Murphy?" Clive Bell began, leaning back to look me over with a sparkling expectation of being amused by a new young protégé of Harold.
"Richard is a poet," said Harold, giving me a frisson of pride as he paused after the description; then he added with a benign ironical smile under his trim moustache, "who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and doesn't, as far as we know, do anything else."
At this, Clive Bell sat up, and, in the loud voice of men accustomed to laying down the law of England, causing heads to turn in our direction, declared: "Then he can't be a poet."
Trying to look as if I appreciated his wit, I kept silent and resolved more firmly to live in Ireland.
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By good fortune, in May, 1962, I had met Seán Ó Riada at a poetry reading in London. He had come in a white Aran sweater that matched the one I was wearing. My impression was of a man of immense charm and panache, who enhanced everything he said and did with a touch of comedy and heroism. The moguls of the film industry were trying to hire him as a composer, but his passion to revive Irish folk music in a modern form was keeping him in Ireland, where we both were to travel a few nights later.
We met at Euston station on the Irish mail train bound for Holyhead. As I was travelling third class, Seán invited me to join him for a drink in the first-class sleeping car. There, he introduced me to what he called "wedges" - a pint of Guinness followed by a shot of rum or whiskey followed by another pint of Guinness - more than I could handle; and he invited me to come to his house in Dublin some night to hear him rehearse a group of traditional musicians who spoke Irish.
His house was on Galloping Green in Stillorgan, and his group was known as Ceoltóirí Chualann. The sound of the uilleann pipes, a goatskin drum, a flute, a penny whistle and two fiddles, with the verve that Seán brought out in six Dubliners, most of whom had done a hard day's work in an office or on a bus, enchanted me as if it were coming from the ground out of a hawthorn-ringed rath, bringing the music of the dead to life with renewed vitality.
The music was oral, made up at rehearsals and not written down. Spontaneity was in vogue in the London theatre, a breakthrough from the Old Vic and all rigidities of Shakespearean actors. Joan Littlewood had encouraged her cast at Stratford in East London to improve Brendan Behan's play, The Hostage, by extemporising. Ó Riada's group was at once spontaneous and archaic, wringing from the past a passionate sound that ranged with pathos and humour through all the emotions from grief to joy.
After this rehearsal, we talked about my idea of a long poem on the theme of the Battle of Aughrim, and I asked Seán to provide the music. We agreed that his music and my words should not compete for the listener's attention, but be heard separately. On a later occasion, I recorded at his house the traditional Irish melodies he had in mind for the subject. He played them on his pianola, and I listened to them again and again in Cleggan over the next few years, to infuse the words I was writing with their spirit. But I wanted the music to evoke the spirit of both sides in that conflict. Seán gave me only the tunes of the defeated. So, to counter these, I obtained LP recordings of Henry Purcell's music, with trumpets resounding in Westminster Abbey and a clavichord tinkling in a tower.
A little research was to prove that my ancestors, like those of most people of Irish descent, had fought on opposite sides. I learned that Patrick Sarsfield, who had sailed away in defeat to France, leading 10,000 Irish troops known as "The Wild Geese" to win victories abroad, was my mother's distant uncle. My stance was anti-triumphal, anti-militarist . . . the poem grew slowly, because organically, from bits and pieces of my life and reading in Ireland between 1962 and 1967, not as a set-piece epic about a battle in the 17th century. My underlying wish was to unite my divided self, as a renegade from a family of Protestant imperialists, in our divided country in a sequence faithful to the disunity of both. The poetry was to occupy a no man's land between music, myth and history.
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One afternoon in July, 1964, when the weather was too bad for my hooker, the Ave Maria, to sail with tourists from Cleggan to Inishbofin, I answered the phone at my house in the village, and heard a voice with a deep rich sound say:
"O'Grady here!" This puzzled me, so I asked:
"Who is it?"
"O'Grady here!"
I had read but not met the poet, Desmond O'Grady, who lived in Rome, where he wrote in a style less influenced by Philip Larkin than by Dylan Thomas and George Barker. The vatic voice made me guess that the caller was the poet, who then made a portentous announcement:
"I have come 3,000 miles to see you."
"How good of you!" I replied, never having met or spoken to him before.
"Where are you now?"
"In Clifden."
"Could you come to Cleggan and we'll meet at the Pier Bar?"
"I'll be there," he said, and I gave directions to a woman who had driven him from Limerick in her car. I searched my shelves and was relieved to find his second volume of poetry, Reilly, published three years earlier by the Phoenix Press. Armed with O'Grady's poems, I went down to the Pier Bar to alert Eileen O'Malley, who was serving two or three local customers. A car eventually drew up at the gate, and out of the passenger seat stepped a man aged 29 whose stature seemed magnified by enormous intensity. I thanked him for coming 3,000 miles to see me.
He brushed that aside, with: "Where is the sea? I love the sea. I want to drown myself in the ocean!" "The sea is very close," I said, pointing, "just the other side of that low wall." He started to walk towards the wall, as there emerged from the back seat a sad, thin, old man of austere equanimity, who headed for the bar. The driver was a warm-hearted Limerick woman, Eileen Donovan, trying to help two wayward Limerick poets. She explained that Desmond was depressed about his father, who was dying, and he had talked of killing himself. I reached the seawall at the same time as Desmond, who thereupon flung his arms wide as if for the ultimate embrace, and sang: "The sea and I, O'Grady, here I come!" As the tide was far out, I warned him not to jump from there because he might break a leg on the rocks.
"Where can I reach the sea?" I gave him instructions that would take him farther away from the deep water at the end of the pier.
"If you keep walking under that cliff, you'll find a better place where you could jump into the sea." I hoped that fresh air and exercise would calm him down, knowing there was no danger of drowning there for the next three hours of the tide. Off he went, facing a cold, north-westerly breeze from across the bay, calling to the sea, "I'm coming," while his companions and I took shelter in the bar.
"He'll be all right in 10 minutes," Mrs Donovan assured me. "It will do him good to have a walk by himself by the sea."
The old man sitting beside me said: "My name is Ryan. I'm a bad poet. May I buy you a drink, Mr Murphy?" As their host, I stood the round, but a few minutes later he uttered the same words in a different order: "I'm a bad poet, Mr Murphy. May I buy you a drink? My name is Ryan." As we were talking, the door burst open, and in staggered O'Grady clutching his forehead, with blood all over his face. Eileen O'Malley screamed, but mercifully conducted him round behind the bar through the door into her house.
"May I buy you a drink, Mr Murphy?" the old man asked, varying his mantra. "I'm a bad poet. My name is Ryan. I live in Limerick. Do you know Limerick, Mr Murphy?"
"Not well," I replied, though I had studied its history, and had recently written a poem about Sarsfield at the siege. When Eileen returned with O'Grady, having washed his face and stuck a plaster on a little scratch on his forehead, I put the book into his hand, and asked him to read a poem. He stood by the fire, facing the backs of the local fishermen, who craned their necks to watch. Transformed by our attention, he began telling a story, in full control of himself and his audience.
"Ten years ago I fell in love with a classical pianist, my age, and I asked her to marry me. She replied: 'I must go to confession.' I said again, 'Will you marry me? I want you to answer me now.' She said she had to go to confession first. On her way to confession, as she was crossing a road to reach the church, a car killed her." There was silence in the bar, except for a sigh from O'Grady. Then he read us the poem. His performance was a triumph, so we got on well. When I mentioned that I was planning my first tour of readings in the US for the fall semester, he wrote a postcard at the bar introducing me to Prof John Kelleher at Harvard. That was generous. By now I felt safe enough to ask a risky question.
"I heard that you and John Montague read together at the Poetry Center in New York. How did it go?"
"I won," said O'Grady, "I won."
"Did you regard it, then, as a competition?"
"I did. It was. I won."
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At the Portobello Studios of Radio Éireann in Dublin, Seán Ó Riada, wearing dark glasses and smoking thin cigars, directed Ceoltóirí Chualann at a recording of his music for my poem, 'The Battle of Aughrim' on the last Sunday in May, 1968.
Paddy Maloney - "the greatest piper in Ireland" - complained of fatigue, having played in a pub all the previous night until five in the morning. At first his pipes were too cold, and later they were too hot, so he walked out on to the street, saying he needed to clear from the pipes the smoke of Seán's cigars. The studio manager complained that the harpsichord was emitting a "string jangle", so he came round from his glass booth and went into action like Buster Keaton in a silent movie, removing the top of the harpsichord and wedging the music stand with books. These preludes ended when Ó Riada charmed the musicians into producing heroic rhythms and sounds beyond the power of words.
The musicians played by ear with feeling and dignity. Never mind that the poem's balance of opposing forces was dissolved by the passion of Seán's Irish nationalism. He didn't want his music to reconcile the ancient conflict, but to win.
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During one of my daughter Emily's summer holidays in Cleggan, perhaps when she was 12 years old in 1968, we received a sudden invitation to dine with Robert Shaw and Mary Ure at the Renvyle House Hotel.
The dining-room was crowded with guests who pretended not to be listening but could not help turning to look when the great actor raised his voice. He was talking to me, ignoring Mary and Emily, and during the main course Mary interrupted, in a lyrical voice that could reach every ear in the room without shouting, to ask Emily if she had ever acted in a play at school. With more shame than pride, Emily said she had played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Mary replied: "How wonderful! I had to play that part at school, and everyone teased me about Bottom having the ass's head, but really it's the best part in the play." Emily was glowing with this encouragement from one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, when Robert roared,
"If I'm not going to be allowed to speak, I'm going upstairs to my room."
There was dead silence as the manager glided over to our table to inquire if Mr Shaw was enjoying his meal. Then Robert's monologue resumed. After the dessert, the manager came to say he had prepared a special place for us to have our coffee and liqueurs where we'd be comfortable and not disturbed by other guests. He led us a long way down to the far end of the basement. There was a ping-pong table, and Robert, in a mellow mood, offered to play with Emily. She accepted the challenge, and defeated him by a very narrow margin in two games. I was so sure he had let her win out of kindness that I thanked him when Emily left the room for a moment.
"Didn't you notice I was playing with my left hand?" he asked abrasively. Mary intervened: "Robert can play as well with his left hand as with his right. Before acting in a film that required him to do this, he hired a world champion table tennis player to teach him."
The Kick: A Memoir by Richard Murphy is published by Grant Books. Price: €30. Richard Murphy will give a Rattlebag public interview conducted by Myles Dungan on Tuesday at 8 p.m. in the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin (tickets from 01-2083445). He will also be reading at Eason's, Galway, next Friday at 6.30 p.m. (tel: 091-562284) and at the Model Arts & Niland Gallery, The Mall, Sligo, on Wednesday, June 19th, at 8 p.m. (tel: 071-41405; tickets: €8/6)