ESSAY: In 1951, the then young poet Richard Murphy had tea with the writer Oliver St John Gogarty at his home in Renvyle, Co Galway, a meeting he recalled in a recorded talk broadcast at this year's recent Oliver St John Gogarty Literary Festival and published here, slightly abridged
I AM SORRY that my age of 81 has prevented me being in Renvyle. I am living in retirement in the ancient Buddhist city of Kandy in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, too far from Ireland to face the journey at this time of year. But I still have a voice that can travel.
Never having written about Gogarty, and with no books at hand, I must rely on imagination as well as memory in telling you about my one and only meeting with the mischievous, affable, quick-witted, ever-so-entertaining and sadly bitter old man in Renvyle House Hotel. He was 73 years old, renowned for his friendship with Yeats, who had included him in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, but embittered by Joyce's comic portrayal of him as the stately plump Buck Mulligan in the opening pages of Ulysses.
I was 50 years younger than Gogarty, and the time was the radiant summer of 1951. Aged 23, I had "chucked up everything" in London, such as reviewing poetry for the Spectator, "and just cleared off", as the poet Larkin was to write a little later. I had gone to live alone in a cottage built before the Great Famine as a coast guard station, beside the quay of Rosroe on the Big Killary, nine miles from where you are sitting. The tide reached up to a wall six feet from my bedroom window. The nearest well was across a barbed-wire fence at a mud-hole in a field of rushes and rocks.
My neighbours were fishermen, shepherds and subsistence farmers, who didn't bother with books other than Whitaker's Almanac. Perhaps they regarded books as "a dull and endless strife", as Wordsworth had written, or, in the words of Philip Larkin, when he was Librarian at the University of Hull, "a load of crap". I wanted to write an epic poem, against the grain of modern poetry, at a time when narrative verse was utterly unfashionable, the novel having replaced it. I had published no more than one poem in each of The Irish Times, Envoy and The Bell. What had brought me to Rosroe, at the back of beyond, was my astonishing luck, as an unheard-of dark horse running against the favourite, Anthony Cronin, in winning the AE Memorial Award of £100 given in Dublin every five years to a poet under 30.
That was enough for me to sign a five-year lease at £20 a year on the Quay House at Rosroe, simply furnished with iron beds and horse-hair mattresses, deal tables and kitchen chairs. A few years earlier the house had been briefly occupied by a German writer, who had encouraged the birds to eat out of his hand, but made them so tame in a few months that when he left they were gobbled up by the village cats.
Later I learned that this legend was inspired by Wittgenstein, the philosopher, who had been working at Rosroe on his Philosophical Investigations. In 1956, after my lease expired, the cottage would be sold to the Irish Youth Hostel Association, to become known as the Killary Youth Hostel, attracting crowds of young people to cheer up that lonely sad place.
With neither a telephone nor a car nor a wireless, and the nearest stop on the Galway-Leenane-Clifden bus route six miles across the hill and around two lakes, I depended for news on the postman, who came, wet or dry, from Renvyle. It took him all day, on a bicycle draped in yellow oil-cloth, as he had to stop and read some of the letters from abroad to people who lacked the ability. It must have been in June that he told me the owner of the Renvyle House Hotel, Dr Gogarty, who had written books, had returned from America, and it would not be a waste of my time to go and meet him, as he was a great talker, he could make a cat laugh.
The chance of meeting a man who had been a friend of the poet I most revered, WB Yeats, whose Collected Poems I had recently reviewed, was worth the effort of walking and cycling, avoiding puddles in potholes on the gravel road that wound up and down the hills along the weepingly beautiful coast from Salruck through Lettergesh and Tully Cross to Renvyle. In those days, only one bungalow marred the beauty of that coast, or relieved the relentless boredom, whichever way you like to look at it. And that fine afternoon, the only cars I may have passed would have belonged to Father Luddon at Tully Cross or Doctor Flynn at Letterfrack or my grandaunt, Violet Barber, at Salruck House. The only tractors I might have heard would have been bringing turf home from the bog.
THREE YEARS earlier, I had met Oliver St John Gogarty's son, who was running the hotel - can you believe this? - unprofitably, with a bar in the basement that he kept open, late into the night, for what were called "bona fide travellers" and one or two carousing residents, reputed to be "idle rich" or "rotten with money". One of these was an English lordly remittance man, who never removed the shades from his eyes. But now, I had heard, the writer's wife had taken control and was running the hotel herself, with no late night drinking but still at a loss.
There was not a guest to be seen, when I arrived, hot and nervous, but one or two might have been out fishing for salmon or sea trout on the lakes and rivers. Mrs Gogarty met me at the front door, and invited me to wait a while for her to find her husband and bring us tea. When Gogarty appeared, old and grey but far from sleepy, he looked neither stately nor plump, but sprightly and thin, quick and alert in his eyes, talking so fast and so well that he put me at my ease. No need to risk saying something stupid that might have provoked a clever mocking Dubliner's reply, whose wits had been sharpened by Joyce. All I had to do was listen and smile.
His wife came and went, leaving us alone with the tea things on the table. Having passed me the scones, Gogarty intoned, "'The butter is by your elbow, Father Hart' . . . Great poetry, that, don't you think, Murphy?" I grinned as if to seem to know, as he soon explained with mocking relish, that he was quoting a line of verse from an early play of Yeats called The Land of Heart's Desire.
Take heart, those of you who might be attending a poetry workshop: Don't be afraid of writing rubbish. Yeats did, and in the end managed, by working hard, which genius requires, to turn rubbishy magic into magical poetry.
At the table, I remember - and what harm if I am inventing a story about a man who loved invention? - Gogarty told me how, in a cycle race, (was it in the Phoenix Park?) he managed to get level on a sharp corner with the rider who was sure to win, and make him fall off his bike by saying something that gave him a shock. Sorry, I have forgotten what it was he said, and I cannot imagine. It's gone through the sieve of memory. No matter - the champion fell and Gogarty won by his wit.
After tea, he took me to the cottage where he was staying in the garden. A fire of damp turf was smouldering in the fire place. We settled comfortably into arm chairs, and his monologue resumed, bitter about Joyce the scrounger and his highly undeserved reputation. Gogarty enjoyed the chance of revenge that longevity had given him to denigrate Joyce on the lecture circuits in America. Not a bad way of living, he suggested, provided you weren't cheated by agents and publishers, who were mostly dishonest. "Mock mockers after that . . ." I heard in the voice of Yeats, but my memory may have been infected by that room's heady air of malice.
What Gogarty said about Yeats was memorable: "Yeats had been misled by news of an operation that promised to restore his potency. He went straight over to London without telling me. I could have warned him. When he came back to Dublin, I asked him why he had gone, and he replied, 'For years I had not been able to satisfy George: now I can'.. Yeats was driven crazy with lust, but he thought it helped his poetry."
Gogarty paused, as we heard footsteps . . . and in silence he got up, seized the tongs, and pulled a few burning sods of turf out on to the hearth, filling the room with smoke.
"My wife hates smoke," he said. "Now we will not be disturbed."