What is The Kick about?
The Kick is a page-turner, based upon private diaries kept over the long life and disjointed times of the poet Richard Murphy. Born (1927) in the relics of a walled demesne near Kilamine, County Mayo, he was shipped out and back twice to the British Crown Colony of Ceylon, where his father was a colonial administrator. Thereafter he was moved every two years or so to a different boarding school for boys, mostly in England, until he won an Oxford scholarship at 17. There he encountered Ken Tynan (a bit older) and C.S. Lewis in extraordinary circumstances. One life story follows another in a continuous, witty, ironical narrative of surprising events.
Murphy writes, according to Karl Miller, with candour and dignity, for example about personal issues, such as his ambivalent sexuality at a time of legal intolerance. This once led him into a risk of blackmail or prison in London at the age of 22. But dark events are countered by sea-light in this redeeming book.
The fear of death from a German rocket falling on Wellington College in 1944 starts Murphy writing sonnets. He’s aware that he’s not a born poet and until T.S. Eliot accepts his volume Sailing to an Island for publication by Faber in 1963, he does not presume to call himself a poet. Sheep-farming in the Wicklow Hills and reseeding marginal land with deep-rooting herbs with lovely names, such as chicory, burnet, yarrow and wild white clover, take all his attention during his marriage – to the dismay of his wife.nbsp;
Then after his divorce in 1959, meeting Tony White from London on the quay of Inishbofin, Murphy begins another life as the owner of an old Galway hooker, the Ave Maria, which ‘puts Inishbofin on the tourist map’, and revives the art of small boat-building in Bofin.nbsp;
Lively, entertaining descriptions of tourists and the awful hazards of Murphy’s greenhorn inexperience as a sailor, are interspersed with Pat Concannon’s own narrative of his seven-hour struggle to hold on to his nets to save his crew of four men in an open rowing-boat caught out one late October night in a hurricane known as the Cleggan Disaster. On Pat’s account, Murphy’s poem ‘The Cleggan Disaster’ was based. The Kick carries a stunning photograph of Concannon and Murphy on the island in 1976.nbsp;
Later we read of Murphy’s passion for building in granite, in Cleggan and on Omey Island. Only after he has bought High Island to preserve it, and has gone there on seven fine days with six men and materials for rebuilding one room of the Miners’ Hut, does he go to the inaccessible, uninhabited island by himself in a dinghy with nothing to do for four or five days at a stretch but write notes for poems in his notebook.nbsp;
The strenuous activity of crossing the rough tidal water to and from High Island and surviving while there on his own, compete for his attention with poetry while inspiring it with lyric content. nbsp;The memoir expresses his love of islands and the people who used to live on them that we find in Murphy’s poetry, completing our view of men who used to scrape a living from the sea in curraghs and rowing boats, and women who toiled and suffered at home with land and shore work – picking winkles and seaweed – on the islands of Inishbofin, Inishark and Inishturk.
Some readers may be more intrigued by Murphy’s many encounters with influential writers. J.R.Ackerley, the famous Literary Editor of the Listener, invites Murphy, aged 23, to meet him in a pub near Victoria Station. The same year, 1950, Murphy meets Paddy Kavanagh and Tony Cronin at McDaids, where Kavanagh tells him that Cronin will be winning the Ǽ Memorial Award for Poetry the following year. Murphy enters the contest and wins. He spends the money moving to the old Coast Guard cottage on the Quay of Rosroe, his bedroom window within two metres of a high tide.nbsp;
Much later, Conor Cruise O’Brien stays as the guest of Murphy and his wife for a weekend at Lake Park that wrecks their marriage. The house and sporting estate in the Wicklow Hills were bought from Edna O’Brien’s husband in 1956. After Murphy’s divorce, there’s a riveting long passage about the American poet Theodore Roethke, who comes with his young wife to visit Murphy on Inishbofin and goes crazy there. In the pub on the quay he teaches Murphy how to knife-fight with a hood in a Chicago speakeasy during the Depression.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath come on a visit to Murphy’s house in Cleggan, five months before her tragic death in London. Through much of the book, John McGahern makes the most striking, insightful remarks. WH Auden appears once, in a carapace of aphorism, at a dinner with Barbara Epstein in New York. Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler, Derek Mahon, Norman MacCaig, and the young poet who becomes Murphy’s mentor, Dennis O’Driscoll, with his wife Julie O’Callaghan, appear most memorably at the wonderful Kilkenny Festival of 1975. The festivities are marred only by news of the horrible sectarian murder of a cousin of Heaney on the border.nbsp;
Murphy writes with affectionate lack of sentiment about the Protestant gentry from which he comes. The literary milleux in London, Dublin and New York are described with serenely devastating honesty. Here too are disturbing memories of discrimination against Irish Travellers, and of extreme violence in Sri Lanka. The Kick is the record of a lifetime's engagement with the fracturing tensions of personal life and with the more obviously violent legacies of Anglo-Irish history. It demonstrates the qualities that Ted Hughes recognised in Murphy's verse: 'It combines a high music with simplicity, force and directness in dealing with the world of action.'nbsp;
Richard Murphy (born 1927) is one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets. He is particularly known for poems that draw on the people, the landscape, and the history of the west of Ireland. His Collected Poems (Gallery Press) was published in 2000. Lilliput Press published Murphy’s Poems 1952-2012 with a revised text and appendices in 2013 and nbsp;The Poetry Book Society gave it a nbsp;Special Commendation.Murphy’s awards include the Cheltenham Award and the American-Irish Foundation Award. The Kick: A Memoir nbsp;was shortlisted for the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.