WILLIAM M MURPHY:A DISTINGUISHED American scholar who won prominence for his chronicles of the Yeats family, William M Murphy has died in Schenectady, New York aged 92.
He was professor emeritus at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and active in politics and civic organizations.
Born in New York City in 1916, Murphy earned three degrees from Harvard University: a BA magna cum laude (1938), MA (1940), and PhD (1947).
At Harvard, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest undergraduate honours organisation in the US which is dedicated to principles of freedom of inquiry and liberty of thought and expression. He taught at Harvard for three years, then spent another three years as secretary of Harvard's committee on educational relations.
He served three years as a naval officer in the second World War before joining Union College in 1946.
In 1978, having condensed a 1,450 page manuscript to a mere 600 pages of well-chosen words, Murphy published the classic biography, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats. It was one of five biographies short-listed for the National Book Award in the USA.
Much in the book was new - even to the best informed. It was based on the letters of Lily, Lolly, WB, and John Butler Yeats, their various scrawls painstakingly transcribed by Murphy and his wife Harriet, into a rank of typescript volumes eight feet long.
Murphy painted the portrait of a vibrant and irresistibly charming, if feckless, father: "Wise, tolerant, liking and likable, witty, intelligent, full of shifting but always exciting ideas, a delight to those around him."
In 1995, at the age of 79, Murphy published Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and his Relatives. Prodigal Father had made it clear that its author liked the father but not the son. In Family Secrets, Murphy again wrote about the Yeatses as if they were present and alive to him, some charming, others not so.
William Butler Yeats and his sister Lolly were alike in their arrogance and irascibility: when the two had to talk business, WB scheduled a meeting at the Shelbourne Hotel so he would not be allowed to shout.
Of Lily and Lolly, Murphy wrote: "One was affable, pleasant, companionable; the other troubled, quarrelsome, unpleasant, jealous, talkative, paranoid. It was the tragedy of each that she had to live with the other."
A few younger scholars accused Murphy of being a sexist, who did not like Lolly simply because Lolly was a feminist, but Murphy had declared in advance that he refused to "give comfort to the Wardens of Political Correctness". Scholars of 79 have some privileges.
Two other principal interests of Murphy's scholarly life were American religious freedom and church-state separation - which he considered two sides of the same coin - and the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. He published articles demonstrating clearly that the plays of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon and rigorously demolishing claims that they were written by others such as Sir Francis Bacon or the 17th Earl of Oxford. Murphy made unsuccessful runs for the US Congress in 1948, for the New York State Senate in 1956, and for the New York State Assembly in 1959.
He served as member and chairman of the Schenectady Municipal Housing Authority in 1951 and 1952, implementing desegregation in the city's public housing. He also served from 1961 to 1968 as a member of the New York State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
In general, Murphy's point of view was thoroughly American: in era, New Deal; in politics, Democrat. Individualism, common sense and scepticism about theory were his key values. His guides were the three Thomases: Jefferson, Paine, and Doubting.
He is survived by Harriet Doane Murphy, his wife of 69 years; by their three children, Christopher Ten Broeck Murphy, Deborah Chase Murphy, and Susan Doane Murphy Thompson; and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
William M Murphy: born August 6th, 1916; died September 26th, 2008