Richard Murphy
Anglo-irish poet who berated the colonial system and was troubled by a sexual ambivalence
RICHARD MURPHY, the poet who has died in Sri Lanka aged 90, could be described as the last flower of the Anglo-irish literary renaissance. Brought up as part of the Britishoriented Protestant Ascendancy, he struggled, like predecessors such as Yeats and Synge, to find an accepted place in an Ireland whose rising Catholic majority, hell-bent on shedding any British identity, tended to reject his kind as not truly Irish.
Murphy’s celebrated series of poems The Battle of Aughrim (1968) took its title from the decisive battle in 1691 that led Ireland to have a landowning class that was mainly Protestant in religion and British in descent.
Reeking with anger for the cruelty inflicted on the defeated Catholic Irish, it begins with the question: “Who owns the land where musketballs are buried / in blackthorn roots on the eskar, the drained bogs/where sheep browse, and credal war miscarried?”
The poem was, Murphy said, inspired by his “underlying wish to unite my divided self as a renegade from a family of Protestant imperialists in our divided country”.
Richard William Lindsay Murphy was born on August 6 1927 at his mother’s ancestral home in Co Mayo while his father William Lindsay Murphy, a classics graduate of Trinity College Dublin, was based abroad in the Ceylon Civil Service. Like many of his background he was educated largely in England, leaving him with manners and speech that were not obviously Irish.
Inheriting from his father’s more gifted middle-class family a literary flair, young Richard starred academically at Wellington, where he had gone from King’s School, Canterbury. He so impressed CS Lewis at an interview that in 1945 he was awarded a “Demyship” in English, a form of scholarship specific to Magdalen College, Oxford.
It did not work out. He wanted to write poetry, not become a literary scholar. Troubled also by a sexual ambivalence, he had a breakdown and fled Oxford for the west of Ireland to realise his poetic vocation. He had to be coaxed back to complete the course for his degree.
He then got a job, which he found boring, as ADC to his now-knighted father, who had succeeded the Duke of Windsor as Governor of the Bahamas.
More congenial was a commission to write theatre reviews in The Spectator, to whose editor he was introduced by Harold Nicolson. His first review was a lofty attack on the low quality of the verse in TS Eliot’s popular play The Cocktail Party. The Listener, then the organ of the BBC, published Murphy’s early poetry.
On his way to his Connemara retreat in 1950 he was welcomed by the Dublin literary set in Mcdaids Bar. One of them recalled him as “a tall lissom Anglo-irishman who seemed a little like a lamb that had strayed into a den of wolves”. In 1951 he received an award for the most promising Irish poet under 30.
In 1955, while taking a course on French literature in the Sorbonne, Murphy encountered Patricia Avis, whom he married after her divorce. The Archaeology of Love, a poem that gave its title to his first collection published that year, is a lyric that he wrote for her.
Her controlling father, a wealthy South African businessman, bought them a house with land in Co Wicklow. A daughter was born and Murphy abandoned poetry for farming and domesticity.
The marriage did not survive the miscarriage of a son and a fling that Patricia had with the diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’brien. Murphy obtained a divorce in 1959.
He now settled in Connemara, where he acquired two trawlers to take tourists fishing or on expeditions to offshore islands. “Our best customers who gave little trouble and gave large tips,” he wrote later, “were English.”
He wrote poetry about the harsh life that had been endured by the local people with whom he enjoyed a warm relationship. His poem The Cleggan Disaster (1962), based on a local man’s account of the loss of 27 fishermen in 1927 (“the wind began to play, like country fiddlers/in a crowded room”), won an award at the Cheltenham Festival in 1962.
One of the judges was Sylvia Plath, who came with her husband Ted Hughes to visit Murphy the next summer. Hughes became a close friend after Murphy had resisted an attempted seduction by Sylvia.
The death in 1976 of his close platonic friend and gifted helpmate Tony White, a Cambridge graduate whom Murphy had first met in Connemara in 1959, was a bitter blow. It led to Murphy abandoning Connemara for Killiney in Dublin. He was now in demand as a visiting poet at American universities.
Around 1980 Murphy had a brief relationship with Anya Burnett, a potter from Belfast, which produced a son, William. The mother had no interest in marriage or in sharing the boy. As a result, he disappeared from his father’s life.
Murphy’s relationship with his own father, who had retired to Southern Rhodesia, ended in acrimony with Murphy’s poem The God Who Eats Corn (1963) berating the colonial system to which Sir William had devoted his life.
Murphy assumed guardianship for educational purposes of five teenage boys from Sri Lanka in the 1980s, having renewed contact with the country where he had spent part of his childhood while his father was Mayor of Colombo. The poems contained in The Mirror Wall (1989), based on songs inscribed on walls in Old Sinhalese, were a fruit of his newfound and deep love for that country.
Murphy had kept notebooks throughout his life. He drew on these for a rambling autobiography entitled The Kick published in 2002 and well described as a mixture of intimacy and reticence. “I was doomed to fail in my forlorn attempt to shed my colonial past,” he confessed.
It was to the former colonial world of South Africa that he went early this century to be close to his daughter Emily and her family. In 2009, after being robbed at gunpoint near her home in Durban, he moved on to Sri Lanka.
Murphy remained alive in mind into old age. In December 2016 he wrote a tribute to John Montague, the recently deceased Ulster Catholic poet, regretting past tensions created by their different backgrounds. “I always felt”, Montague had written, “that if Richard could confront his ambivalences, sexual and political, in a direct way he could surprise us.”
Richard Murphy is survived by his daughter and his son.
Richard Murphy, born August 6 1927, died January 30 2018