by Colm Toibin
Yeats’s background was an important notch or two down that carefully defined ladder. Synge’s ancestors were bishops, while Yeats’s were rectors; Synge’s had established huge estates and mock castles, while Yeats’s drew the rent from small farms and lived in the Dublin suburbs. Yeats had no money, while Synge had a small private income. Yeats had no university education, whereas Synge had been to Trinity … Another important difference between them, which reflects upon background and education, is that Synge, for all his unpretentiousness, was really cosmopolitan; whereas Yeats when they met was desperately trying to be.
Yeats had had bohemianism foisted upon him by his feckless father; Synge had done it all alone as a new way of killing his mother. Yeats later described their first meeting:
He told me that he had been living in France and Germany, reading French and German literature, and that he wished to become a writer. He had, however, nothing to show but one or two poems and impressionistic essays, full of that morbidity that has its root in too much brooding over methods of expression, and ways of looking at life, which come, not out of life, but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror … life had cast no light upon his writings. He had learned Irish years ago, but had begun to forget it, for the only literature that interested him was that conventional language of modern poetry which had begun to make us all weary … I said ‘Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’
Yeats wrote this account of their Paris conversations in 1905, claiming that they had taken place six years earlier, whereas they had taken place nine years before, shortly after Yeats’s own first visit to the Aran Islands. Declan Kiberd in Synge and the Irish Language and Roy Foster, however, have pointed out more essential inaccuracies in what became, for many years, the standard account of Synge’s impulse to go to the islands. Synge, through his study of the Breton language and his meeting with the Celtic scholar Richard Best, had been taking an intense interest in Celtic Studies in Paris in any case, as Declan Kiberd has emphasized. He knew about the islands because his uncle had been a minister there. ‘Doubtless,’ Kiberd has written,
the advice from Yeats was an important factor in Synge’s decision; but the passionate studies in Breton culture must have awakened his enthusiasm for the Gaelic lore of his own country, to which he already held the key in his knowledge of the Irish language. It would be naïve to follow Greene and Stephens [David Greene and Edward Stephens, Synge’s biographers] in asserting that he went to Aran at Yeats’s suggestion. He was heading in that direction from the very beginning.
He wrote to his mother in Dublin about his new friends in Paris where he had returned, who included Yeats and Maud Gonne. (One of his friends later reported that ‘Synge gently hated Miss Gonne.’) He explained that he had become interested in socialism, which his mother thought ‘utter folly’. He became a member of the committee of Maud Gonne’s Irish League, but politics did not interest him as much as culture, and he resigned after a few months. In the summer of 1897, despite his cosmopolitanism and his new friends, he came back to Ireland so he could go to Wicklow on holiday with his mother.
That summer, as he became ill, his hair falling out and a lump developing on his neck, some of his family put it down to unrequited love. But it was the beginning of the Hodgkin’s disease that would kill him twelve years later. His mother wrote:
Johnnie is at home still. He has to get those large glands taken out of his neck, poor fellow. It is very unpleasant … Since his hair fell out he got cold in the glands, and they became so large they were, or rather are, quite disfiguring to him. He has been very anxious to go away to Paris. He has been advised by his friend Yeats, the Irish poet, to go in for reviewing French literature so John is working away with that end in view. His general health is very good and he is strong and able to walk, so I trust he may get over this time well, please God, and Oh I do ask Him to reveal Himself to my dear boy.
It is interesting that there is no mention here of the Aran Islands. The operation took place in December 1897. The doctors must have known that the symptoms could recur, but they told Synge and his mother, who both seemed to have believed them, that it was a success. His mother watched over him. On 3 January 1898 she noted in her diary: ‘John not well – made me anxious.’ Two days later she wrote to Robert: ‘Johnnie looks much better, but he is not strong, and I am anxious lest he should go to Paris too soon and be laid up again in some way, as the Hotel life is anything but comfortable or healthy. He is very silent, poor fellow, and spends all his time over his books except when he goes out for a walk.’ When he went back to Paris, writing fragmentary beginnings to a novel and attending lectures by a French professor on the connections between Irish and Greek literature, his mother wrote: ‘I heard from Johnnie; troubled by bugs.’
On 23 April 1898 he came home. The difference between his life in Paris, where he spoke fluent French, lived alone and was deeply respected by his many associates, and his life in his mother’s house, must have made him wonder. At least three times a day for meals in Ireland he had to listen to Mrs Synge and her friends and other members of the family on the subject of religion and domestic life and their narrow political prejudices. She was teaching her grandchildren the Bible as she had taught her children, seeing it as part of her duty, according to Edward Stephens, to emphasize the horror of eternal damnation. ‘Sometimes,’ Stephens wrote,
our lessons were interrupted by his [Synge’s] entering the room. I remember particularly his coming in once when we were having a Bible reading. He was twirling his pocket scissors on his finger chanting softly to himself, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Moses.’ We greeted him and he sat in the window for a few minutes and then, feeling that he had caused an interruption, went quietly out again. Our grandmother said: ‘Don’t put down your Bibles when Uncle John comes in,’ and resumed her reading.
In Paris, he was the earnest playboy of the western world; in Kingstown he was his mother’s youngest son.
Just before Synge’s first visit to the Aran Islands, he had a meeting with Cherrie Matheson, who told him that their differences were irreconcilable. Two days later, he called to her house and had what must have been a deeply dispiriting conversation with Cherrie and her mother. Mrs Matheson, according to Edward Stephens, ‘with Cherrie’s approval, rated him soundly for pressing a rejected proposal of marriage when he was not earning enough money to support himself. He left in despair … His mind was still distraught with anguish when, on the morning of Monday 9 May 1898, he left by the morning train for Galway.’
He wrote of his visits to the islands over the next few years with beauty and reverence and restraint. It must have been a relief that first morning watching the sailors casting off in a fog from Galway pier and arriving in Aranmore after a three-hour journey, no one there knowing anything about Cherrie Matheson and her hectoring mother, or Mrs Synge’s worries about her poor Johnnie. He was now in the land of his dreams. Lady Gregory saw him on the island in 1898; she was in search, too, of nourishment from a primitive world that contained an astonishing life force and an ancient culture. She wrote:
I first saw him in the North Island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and the seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.
Later, she wrote about his work once he had arrived on the islands. He had, she wrote, ‘done no good work until he came back to his own country. It was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style … bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion
of a whole countryside.’
Soon, he was invited to Coole and quickly joined the movement that resulted in the Abbey Theatre. He became, eventually, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, one of the three directors. He wrote five plays for them – The Shadow of the Glen (1903); Riders to the Sea (1904); The Well of the Saints (1905); The Tinker’s Wedding (1907); The Playboy of the Western World (1907). He left one play unfinished, Deirdre of the Sorrows, which was first produced, in a completed version, in 1910. His imagination was powerfully autonomous; his plays combined the knowledge he had amassed through his study and his wanderings in Europe with a real openness and freedom and an immense natural talent. He delighted in language and character, in wild talk and massive abandon, as though he were concerned to dramatize and most portray what he himself in his own life kept in abeyance.
In these eleven years he took part in all the rows that ran at the theatre, seeming much of the time calmer, more focused, less vindictive and, on some matters, more determined than his colleagues. He believed that Yeats was too impetuous to deal with the actors. In some of the correspondence, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘he sounds both older and wiser than Yeats; he appears more at ease in dealing with people.’ In 1908, when the Fays had left the theatre, Synge remarked: ‘Since then Yeats and I have been running the show, i.e. Yeats looks after the stars and I do the rest.’ The actors and workers in the theatre liked him. He appeared more natural, more in possession of himself than either of his colleagues. An Australian visitor in 1904 described him: ‘He was full of race and good breeding, courteous, sensitive, sincere … a simple man; but there was something strange and alluring about him, an indescribable charm expressed in his voice and manner and, above all, in his curious smile that was at the same time ironic and sympathetic.’ With the Abbey, as with his family, Synge was skilled at withdrawing. ‘I have often envied him his absorption,’ Yeats wrote, ‘as I have envied Verlaine his vice.’
Lady Gregory disliked The Playboy of the Western World, although she defended it in public. She made sure that Yeats’s play The Pot of Broth was not used as a curtain-raiser, which would be, she wrote to Yeats, foreseeing the riots, like ‘Synge setting fire to your house to roast his own pig’. After Synge’s death, she wrote a passage in her journal that she did not publish: ‘One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments, they were to his own.’ Yeats in his journal wrote: ‘I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.’
The truth was that he understood the value of his own plays and did not rate very highly the work of Yeats or Lady Gregory for the theatre, although he admired other aspects of their work, such as Lady Gregory’s translations. He made no secret of this, and of his profound irritation at Lady Gregory’s tireless and fearless promotion of Yeats’s work and her constant production of her own work. In December 1906 she told Synge that Yeats’s dramatic work ‘was more important than any other (you must not be offended at this) as I think it our chief distinction’. In March 1907, when The Playboy of the Western World had already been produced and Charles Frohman, an American producer, came to the Abbey looking for new work to tour in the US, Synge wrote to Molly Allgood:
I hear that they are showing Frohman one play of mine, ‘Riders’, five or six of L.G.’s [Lady Gregory’s] and several of Yeats. I am raging about it, though of course you must not breathe a word about it. I suppose after the P. B. [Playboy] fuss they are afraid of stirring up the Irish Americans if they take me. However I am going to find out what is at the bottom of it and if I am not getting fair play I’ll withdraw my plays from both tours English and American altogether. It is getting past a joke the way they are treating me.
They, on the other hand, became increasingly sure that they had invented him. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:
You did more than anyone for him, you gave him a means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you and the theatre … I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets [which Synge also visited].
Synge’s relationship to the islands of the west, however, came to him via his family as much as it did from Yeats’s inspiration. As soon as he arrived on the Aran Islands in 1898, for example, he wrote to his mother, who wrote to his brother Sam:
I had a very interesting letter from Johnnie last week … The islanders of Aran found out that he was related to Uncle Aleck and came to see him and were quite pleased. He is now on Inishmaan island – went there in a curragh and is much pleased with his new abode, a room in a cottage inside the kitchen of a house … and he lives on mackerel and eggs and learns Irish; how wonderfully he accommodates himself to his various surroundings.
And parts of his vitality came to him from his mother as much as anyone else. When he returned to Dublin from the Aran Islands he accommodated himself to his mother’s surroundings once more, joining her on holiday in County Wicklow. He would return to the family from his daily outings by foot or bicycle with stories of tramps he had met, including one who claimed to have known his grandmother and who had told him: ‘I never went there but Mrs Synge offered me a glass of whisky.’ Later, when the young Edward Stephens mentioned the tramp to Synge’s mother, she remarked: ‘I wish Uncle Johnnie would not encourage tramps; I don’t know why he wants to talk to queer people. I’m sure that Mrs Synge never offered a tramp whisky.’
Once the summer was over, Synge followed his usual routine, returning to Paris for the winter. The following year, when he returned to Ireland for the annual long holiday with his mother in Wicklow, his mother had two young women, both interested in evangelical Protestantism, staying. Synge became close to them. His mother wrote: ‘Both girls are very lively and there is a great deal of joking and fun goes on between them and John. I have not seen him laugh so much for years.’ Edward Stephens remembered: ‘John had learned to enjoy their company so much that he never withdrew to read in his room when he had an opportunity of sitting with them on the steps looking at the view or, on wet days, on camp stools in the porch looking into the mist that hid everything but the tops of the trees below the house.’
In September Synge returned to the islands and then in November to Paris, where he began to write his book about the Aran Islands. In May 1900 he returned once more not to miss his three months in Wicklow with his mother, who once more had invited young women, including one Rosie Calthrop, to stay and keep her son company, much to his delight. His mother, however, became jealous that summer of her son paying more attention to another woman than to her. She was not, it seems, content to play the Widow Quin to her guest’s Pegeen Mike. She wrote to Sam:
She seemed to appreciate Johnnie’s thoughtfulness and kindness very much! It is a pity he does not show it to me and not only to strangers. He was most attentive to both in little matters I could see, and he was always at their beck and call to walk or ride or escort them anywhere! So no wonder they like him, but it was rather aggravating to me; he wanted to put me aside entirely. But I told Rosie and then she did not fall in with his plans, though she loved to be out walking with him I know.
The idea of Mrs Synge telling her guest that she was jealous of her son’s attention to the guest is intriguing. It is hard to imagine what terms she used to make herself clear. It is also possible that the guest was forced to explain to Synge what the problem was, that the older woman was aggravated by his sudden success with strangers, his charm. Thus it is possible a central part of the action of The Playboy of the Western World was being played out in a rented house in Wicklow in the summer of 1900.
That September Synge set out again to charm strangers by retu
rning to the Aran Islands. This was his third visit. He arrived in a particular state of gloom because Cherrie Matheson had been receiving a gentleman whom she would later marry. They had met on the street and Cherrie had introduced her new boyfriend to Synge. The following month when he returned, this visit having sown the seeds that would become Riders to the Sea, his mother wrote to Sam:
Johnnie came home last night from the Aran Islands. He has one very large gland on his neck just above his collar; he looks very well and the time on the islands agreed with him. I was glad to have him safe back. The sea has been very rough and great gales lately and it was hard for him to get away. He had a very rough passage to Galway and a miserable little steamer. The engines stopped several times and went on again.
That autumn Synge bought a portable typewriter, a Blickensderfer, which Richard Best chose for him. It came in a varnished wooden case. When he brought it home, he said that it spelt worse than he did. When he went back to Paris, his mother missed him. She wrote to Sam:
My poor Johnnie went off this morning; it is very calm, I am thankful to say, but raining and thick at sea … I miss Johnnie. As usual I have been very busy stitching and mending his clothes and getting him some new ones. The gland on his neck is very large, but back pretty far. He is getting rather anxious about it. I think he is improved; he has been more pleasant and chatty than usual of late, and I think his queer time in Paris always injures him, and he is so queer when he comes home and so out of all our ways, and then it wears off by degrees. I am trying to persuade him to give up his room in Paris and make a fresh start nearer home.
The gland in his neck was still swollen when he returned at the beginning of the summer; when he saw the doctor in Dublin he was given an ointment and a different medicine. His mother invited Rosie Calthrop to stay with them once more and wrote to Sam about the amount of money Synge and Rosie had spent on an outing. ‘John does not mind at all,’ she wrote, ‘of course it is my money and he has no scruples about that. However, I don’t mind now and then, but I would not like it often.’ Synge had his typewriter with him and was working on the first draft of a play When the Moon Has Set, which dealt with his own class and was thinly disguised autobiography. He brought it with him when he went to stay at Coole but Lady Gregory told him that it was not good and of no literary interest. From Coole he went west to the islands and then back to Paris. That May of 1902 he was asked to review Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, in which a version of the dialect spoken around Coole was used. Synge found this dialect close to the living speech he knew from rural Wicklow. In his review he described the language as ‘wonderfully simple and powerful … almost Elizabethan’. The Elizabethan vocabulary, he wrote,