Michael Moynihan: Murphy's wisdom and works leaves a legacy carved in stone

Off the top of my head, I can think of few others whose physical impact on the city remains so visible, says Michael Moynihan

Memorial plaque at the former home of Brian Dillon at Dillon's Cross, Cork being repaired by Seamus Murphy, sculptor. 06/05/1952 Ref. 467E Old black and white the arts monuments patriots

I had the ultimate column-affirming experience strolling through town the other day, when a car pulled in and the driver leaned out the window.

“I like what you’re writing,” he said to start with. I preened a little. Affirmed.

Then: “But you know what you should be writing about, don’t you?” (Roget’s Thesaurus contains antonyms for ‘affirming’ such as ‘negating’, ‘repudiating’, ‘dispute’, ‘counter’. That territory).

“Well, I’m always open to suggestions,” I said, “But I’m full up this week.” I then pretended to get a phone call, made the universally-recognised ‘have to take this’ wincing gesture and ducked into the nearest doorway to escape. I'm a coward. I make no apologies.

I mention this because I had no need of inspiration either divine or profane this week. For quite a while I was interested in writing about a particular person and his impact on Cork.

Off the top of my head, I can think of few others whose physical impact on the city remains so visible, while also leaving a written testimony to a vanished way of life.

Oddly, this came about because of another car-related issue. Stuck at the traffic lights near Dillon’s Cross recently, one of my research assistants pointed out the window at the wall of a nearby house: “Who’s that for?”. It was the plaque commemorating Seamus Murphy’s home.

The bare facts of his life are quickly established. Born in 1907, he found his vocation early on.

“Daniel Corkery was my teacher in St Patrick’s,” he told RTÉ Radio in the 70s.

“He sent a group of us to the School of Art. I went to the modelling class and was there about six months when a monumental firm was looking for a likely apprentice as a stone carver.

“I worked [there] for a month — I was 14 — and I loved it.”

After the month’s trial, he was retained in the yard: he would go on to make a career for himself as a sculptor, going to Paris to study with the Irish-American sculptor Andrew O’Connor before returning to Cork to set up on his own. Eventually, he became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. He passed away in 1975.

One of the first things about Murphy that always struck a chord for me was his immediacy. Even as kids strolling into the church in Blackpool on a Sunday, we knew that he had designed the church and carved many of the figures there.

On weekdays as we walked to school in the North Mon, we knew that his workshop was where the stone water trough stood at the corner of Watercourse Rd.

(Once a bank stood next to the workshop. Now it’s flanked by a betting shop. Perhaps the Tuatha de Danann worshipped some Goddess of Financial Uncertainty on the spot, millennia ago.) As we got older and cast our nets further, we found that Seamus Murphy had left his mark in plenty of other places in his native city — from the famous little water trough for dogs secreted under a shop window in St Patrick's Street to quite a few sculptures dotted around the college.

He remained an inspirational figure as we got older and more pretentious, because we began to see what he had done. He had created a life for himself and his family out of an art form, as his friend Ben Kiely said when Murphy passed away.

(A clarification for younger readers: there was a time when strict legislation dictated that a day could literally not pass by in Ireland without Ben Kiely’s sonorous northern tones emerging from the wireless.) “Because he had to live and because it was very difficult for a sculptor to make a living,” said Kiely, “And Seamus worked through harder times than any sculptor now would have to work through — it meant he had to do a lot of what he would have called 'journeyman work'.

“But remember, he never skimped anything. Everything he did was a work of art, though he wouldn’t have described it that way. He just did everything to perfection.” 

So far so good. You may or may not be a fan of sculpture, but you are probably happy enough to accept as an article of faith that Seamus Murphy was a very accomplished artist in his field.

However, not content with mastering one art, he then wrote what is, for me, one of the greatest of all Irish books: Stone Mad, an account of the stonemasons and carvers he learned from and worked with as a young man.

Published in 1950, it remains a terrific read. It’s a book set for the most part in Cork, but with none of the false come-here-to-me-like nonsense that is widely touted as authentic Cork speech.

It deals with a highly specialised craft, but makes no allowances for the reader’s ignorance of technical terms and phrases, and is all the better for that.

And, of course, it strikes the elegiac note, because it is a requiem for the skills of the men Seamus Murphy knew. Their craft is dying even as they banter in the yard, but the writer avoids sentiment in his narrative the way a sculptor chips away extraneous material (this, by the way, is as intricate a sculpting metaphor as I am willing to try).

“He would have called himself a ‘stonie’,” said Kiely.

“They belonged to the Middle Ages — the story he tells in the book about the old stone carver working on a gargoyle on a church with the parish priest shouting up at him ...

“When the carver goes away there’s the parish priest, immortalised as a rather stout gargoyle on his own church. That’s straight from the Middle ages.

“These were the people he grew up with and wanted to talk about. He would talk with greater enthusiasm about greyhounds than about art, but he was obviously a whole man. He was interested in everything.” 

This was a very astute point from Kiely. In Murphy’s own words — again, in an RTÉ Radio interview — he sketched out a telling manifesto of his own: “In all the nonsense written about art, and it could fill several libraries, it’s all about refinement. You refine something that’s well made, and that then becomes a work of art.”

For this columnist, he remains an iconic figure — not least for practical gems of advice such as the one quoted above, which is applicable to just about any endeavour worth taking seriously, but for so much more.

His contribution to the cultural life of Cork through his sculpture and carvings would be enough to assure him of a place in the pantheon of Leeside greats, and that’s without even touching on the superb book he wrote in his spare time, which remains essential reading three-quarters of a century after it was first published.

He also carved the headstone for the Tailor and Ansty in Gougane Barra, and the epitaph from Frank O’Connor might have served Seamus Murphy equally well: a star danced and under that I was born.

We could do with more like him now.