by Colm Toibin
has a force and colour that make it the only form of English that is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind, and in her intercourse with the peasants of the west Lady Gregory has learned to use this vocabulary in a new way, while she carries with her plaintive Gaelic constructions that make her language, in a true sense, a language of Ireland.
He was working on the drafts of his early plays. In The Shadow of the Glen and The Tinker’s Wedding he was, to some small extent, dramatizing the role of the artist, or the outsider, versus the role of the settled and respectable community; in other words, he made these plays as versions of his own plight at being turned down by Cherrie Matheson. Other aspects of these plays came from his own dreams and observations, especially in the summer months in Wicklow. Edward Stephens, who was fourteen at the time his uncle worked on these plays, wrote that the material
was derived from the lore of the country people, not from any direct association with the tinkers themselves. They were so dirty and in their mode of life so disreputable that it would have been impossible for John to mix with them at his ease. He warned me against dropping into conversation with them on the road.
By the beginning of October 1902 Synge had finished both Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. On his way to the Aran Islands for his final visit – his book on the islands still had not found a publisher – he stopped off at Coole to show the plays to Yeats and Lady Gregory, who described the plays as ‘both masterpieces, both perfect in their way’. Later she wrote: ‘He had gathered emotion, the driving force he needed from his life among the people, and it was the working in dialect that set free his style.’ Yeats saw the language of the Bible as another influence.
Early the following year he decided to give up his room in Paris. When he unpacked his French belongings in Dublin, Edward Stephens watched him taking out ‘the knife and fork and little frying pan that he had used in Paris, he showed them to me as if they were things he regarded with affection. I asked him whether they had ever been cleaned, he replied: “A thing that is used by me only is never dirty.” ’ Because of attacks of asthma he spent that summer in Kerry rather than in Wicklow, returning to Dublin for the rehearsals of The Shadow of the Glen, which opened in October to considerable controversy. When Synge and his mother went down to breakfast the morning after the opening night, they read in The Irish Times that the play was ‘excessively distasteful’ while the critic admitted ‘the cleverness of the dialect and the excellent acting of Nora and the tramp’.
Edward Stephens wrote about his grandmother’s response to the coverage of the play:
All she read in the Irish Times perplexed her. She had thought of John as being overpersuaded by his literary friends into praising everything Irish but, now that a play of his had been acted, the newspapers were censuring him for attacking Irish character. She disliked the kind of publicity his work was getting, she was sorry that he should have adopted a form of dramatic writing that was likely to prove no more remunerative than the Aran book, and she was sorry that any of his work should be connected with the stage.
Mrs Synge also worried about her son, now aged thirty-two, being out late. She wrote in her diary: ‘After a dreadful storm last night, I had a headache from lying awake listening to the storm and watching for Johnnie who was not home until 3.30.’
The Irish Times had nothing much good to say about Riders to the Sea either when the play opened in February 1904. The Synges disapproved of what they read about it. ‘The idea underlying the work is good enough,’ the critic said,
but the treatment of it is to our mind repulsive. Indeed the play develops into something like a wake. The long exposure of the dead body before an audience may be realistic, but is certainly not artistic. There are some things which are lifelike, and yet are quite unfit for presentation on the stage, and we think that ‘Riders to the Sea’ is one of them.
Edward Stephens remembered his father’s response: ‘If they want an Irish play, why can’t they act “The Shaughraun”?’
The plays, however, were much praised by the London critics, but this made no difference to Synge’s family, who were, Edward Stephens wrote, ‘serenely unaware of the importance of his work’. After a time in the west, Synge decided in October 1904 to find his own lodgings in Rathmines and move out of the family home for the first time in Dublin. In January 1905 The Well of the Saints went into rehearsal with a walk-on part for a young actress, Molly Allgood, whose sister Sara was a well-known actress. She was nineteen. Soon she began to play important roles in the theatre’s repertoire, including Synge’s plays. Synge fell in love with her.
Both the Synge family and Lady Gregory disapproved of his relationship with Molly, the Synges for religious and social reasons, Lady Gregory because she did not want directors of the theatre consorting too freely with its employees. While he could not keep the relationship a secret from Lady Gregory, Synge could hide it from his family. On 5 November 1906, when he had moved back into his mother’s house and given up his flat, he wrote to Molly: ‘My mother asked me again if I was alone, and I said I had “a friend” with me. I must tell her soon.’ Seventeen days later, he wrote again: ‘I showed my mother your photo the other night and told her you were a great friend of mine. That is as far as I can go until I am stronger. I am thoroughly sick of this state of affairs, we must end it, and make ourselves public.’ That day, as he was suffering from influenza, Molly came to his mother’s house. Later, Synge wrote to her: ‘My mother is too shy to say much about you, but I think she is pleased. She said you seemed very bright and she hoped I had asked you to come down on Sunday and cheer me up. I said I hadn’t but I would write. Today she has reminded me several times not to forget my note to you.’
The following month, when he told his mother he was engaged to Molly, he wrote:
I heard from my mother. She says she thought ‘the friend’ I have been walking with was a man, but that my showing her the photo and the letters that came so often when I was ill made her think there was some thing. Then she says it would be a good thing if it would make me happier, and to wind up she points out how poor we shall be with only £100 a year. Quite a nice letter for the first go off. So that is satisfying.
While Synge sent Molly only the good news about his mother’s response to his marrying a Catholic, it is easy to read between the lines of his letters. The following March, for example, he remarked that his mother ‘is much more rational about it than she was’. This suggests that she had been, in the previous months, irrational in her response. Later that month, she began to ask in some detail about her future daughter-in-law: ‘My mother was enquiring about your temper today, she says my temper is so bad, it would be a terrible thing to marry a bad-tempered wife.’
That January, as the rehearsals for The Playboy of the Western World started, Synge began to write to Molly about the possibility of finding a flat. Molly was playing Pegeen Mike. Willie Fay, who was producing, and his brother Frank realized how much indignation the play would provoke:
Frank and I begged him to make Pegeen a decent likeable country girl, which she might easily have been without injury to the play, and to take out the torture scenes in the last act, where the peasants burn Christy with lit turf … Frank and I might as well have saved our breath. We might as well have tried to move the Hill of Howth as move Synge.
In her diary, once she had read the Irish Times account of the play and the opening night, Mrs Synge recorded: ‘I was troubled about John’s play – not nice.’ Synge himself was troubled by a cough that he could not shake off. In all these years he seemed to be suffering regularly from coughs and colds and other ailments. By April, he was making plans to get married. ‘I counted up my money last night and if all goes well I think we shall have £150 for our first year, if we get married soon, that is £3 a week.’ In January 1908 he found a flat in York Road in Rathmines for thirteen shillings and sixpence a week. His mother wrote:
Johnnie is on the move; he is at home today packing
and sorting over books, clothes etc … I feel his going very much: furnishing these rooms, trying to make a little home for himself on such a very small and uncertain income. I am giving him some old furniture etc, and he must buy some … Johnnie says this move reminds him of his trips to Paris! Counting over his socks etc putting away things he does not want! However, he adds, it is not far.
Both Synge and his mother were ill that winter. Both had operations, and it must have been obvious to the doctors that both of them were doomed. In April, Mrs Synge wrote to her son Robert about Synge’s marriage, making clear that she must have been, up to recently, opposing it: ‘Johnnie came to see me on Friday last; he is seriously thinking of being soon married … [and] as he is determined … it is no use opposing him any more and we must only trust that he may get on.’ He was, however, too ill to remain in the flat he had dreamed of with Molly for so long. Once his operation was over, he came home to his mother once more: ‘We got [his] furniture all back from Rathmines yesterday,’ she wrote,
It was such a sad little flitting altogether. I remember now remarking how ill he looked when he was going away. He says those pains began in December! I think if he had been at home, I would certainly have thought there was something serious going on; but I saw him very seldom during the four months he was away, and I know he did not feed himself as he was accustomed and he used to be so very hungry for his dinners when he came. God has permitted it all to happen so I can say nothing.
In the time that remained to him, Synge travelled to London, returned to Koblenz to stay with the family who had hosted him years earlier, wrote tender letters almost daily to Molly Allgood and worked on his play Deirdre. Death was never far from his mind. On 2 November 1908 he sent Molly a draft of a new poem:
I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.
And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots pressing round that new
Oak coffin – they alive, I dead beneath
That board – you’d rave and rend them with your teeth.
His mother died while he was in Germany. On 7 November, on his return to her house where he was to stay for the remaining months of his life, he wrote to Molly: ‘I am home at last. I am inexpressibly sad in this empty house.’ In February 1909 he went into hospital in the knowledge that he was dying. In his notebooks from his time on the Aran Islands, there is a passage that he did not transcribe fully when he came to write the book. He was in a curragh on a bad sea:
I thought almost enviously what fatiguing care I would escape if the canoe turned a few inches nearer to those waves and dropped me helpless into the blue bosom of the sea. No death were so delightful. What a difference to die here with the fresh sea saltness in my hair than to struggle in soiled sheets and thick stifling blankets with a smell of my own illness in my nostrils and a half paid death tender at my side.
During his long death battle, Molly came to see him every day until she went to play Pegeen Mike in Manchester where The Playboy was warmly received. On 23 March Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:
I have just met M. [Molly] in the street and saw by her face that she had bad news. She told me that Synge is now so weak that he cannot raise himself on his arm in bed and at night he can only sleep with the help of drugs. For some days he has been too weak to read. He cannot read even his letters. They have moved him to another room that he may see the mountains from his bed.
The following day he died. He was buried in the family plot in Mount Jerome cemetery.
Before the funeral, Synge’s brother Robert wrote in his diary: ‘Received a visit from Yeats and the Sec. of Abbey Theatre with a request which I refused as impossible.’ They wanted to have a death-mask made. Edward Stephens wrote: ‘Robert would have disliked it under any conditions but he … believed John’s face to have changed so much during his last illness that no real likeness of him … could have been obtained.’ Stephens noticed that at the funeral the mourners were divided, ‘as they had always been in his lifetime’, between family and the people among whom he had worked. Molly Allgood did not attend his funeral.
Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother
In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1938, Thomas MacGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’ Beckett wrote to MacGreevy to say that he did ‘not think there is a syllable that needs touching’ in the first eighteen pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side’. He admitted his
own chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after, or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests and by the demagogues in service of the priests, or that it will ever care, if it ever knows, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats.
Like MacGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in his letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930 MacGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack Yeats:
My last year’s colleague … is still in Dublin for a little while. He’s a nice fellow, the nephew of Cissie Sinclair [who had been a painter] … It would be a charity to ask him round one afternoon and show him a few pictures and drop all the conversational bombs you have handy without pretending anything. But the luck will be all on his side, he says very little, especially at first, and you might find him not interesting, so don’t do it unless you feel like doing nothing one day. Joyce does like him however, and I’m genuinely fond of him tho’ he’s maddeningly young.
After the visit, MacGreevy wrote to Yeats again: ‘Beckett wrote me about his visit to you. I’m glad you liked him. He was completely staggered by the pictures and though he has met many people through me he dismissed them all in his letter in the remark “and to think I owe meeting Jack Yeats and Joyce to you!” ’ In February 1935 Yeats, alert to Beckett’s solitary habits, wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I tried to get Beckett on the phone one day but he was away. I wanted to arrange a day for him to come here – when there wouldn’t be other visitors as he doesn’t so much like having them about.’
Three months later, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy from Dublin:
Yesterday afternoon I had Jack Yeats all to myself … from 3 to past 6, and saw some quite new pictures. He seems to be having a freer period. The one in the Academy – ‘Low Tide’ – bought by Meredith for the Municipal is overwhelming … In the end we went out, down to Charlemont House [the Municipal Gallery] to find out about Sunday opening, & then to Jury’s for a drink. He parted as usual with an offer to buy me a Herald. I hope to see him again before I leave, but do not expect ever to have him like that again.
Early the following year Beckett saw the picture Morning in Yeats’s studio; he wanted to buy it, despite his general lack of funds. ‘It’s a long time since I saw a picture I wanted so much,’ he wrote to MacGreevy. In May 1936 he told MacGreevy that Yeats had ‘brought up the subject of the picture … I since borrowed £10 which he accepted as a first instalment, the remaining £20 to follow God knows when, & have now got the picture. Mother & Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much … It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to MacGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a
donkey show in Dublin where Beckett had taken his mother, who was, Beckett reported, ‘the picture of misery’. Yeats was making sketches for a painting.
In the early part of his essay on Yeats, which was finally published in 1945, MacGreevy touched on something that was crucial to Beckett in his twenties and thirties as he sought to get Ireland out of his system, or tried to find a way of including it in the work he would do without any reference to its mythology, its history, the amusing oddness of its people or the so-called lilt of its language. ‘Jack Yeats’s people,’ MacGreevy wrote,
are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted without condescension in Western European painting that their attitude to existence, their human significance, may easily be overlooked … the figures in his pictures are not elegant – their clothes bag about their lean bodies; they are not sensual – their faces are ascetic, thin and careworn; and their expression is thoughtful – they are bemused as much as amused.