by Colm Toibin
Both girls are very lively and there is a great deal of joking and fun goes on between them and John. I have not see 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 kinder attention to other women than to her. She was not, it seems, content to play the Widow Quin to her guest’s Pegeen Mike. She wrote to her son 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, and when there were no strangers around he did not bother displaying his charm and his willingness to please. Thus 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 returning to the Aran Islands. This was his third visit. He arrived in a particular state of gloom because his neighbour 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 his brother 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 on a miserable little steamer. The engines stopped several times and went on again.
That autumn Synge bought a portable typewriter, a Blickensdorfer, 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, which he brought with him when he went to stay at Coole. Lady Gregory, when she read the play, told him, however, 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,
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 first 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 the October of 1902 Synge had finished both Riders to the Sea and 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 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 abo
ut 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 ‘serenely unaware of the importance of his work.’ After a sojourn in the West, Synge decided in October 1904 to find his own lodgings in Rathmines and move out of the family home. 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.
Both the Synge family and Lady Gregory disapproved of Synge’s 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 mother. 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 more much 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 enquire 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 which 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 clear 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 Coblenz to stay with the family who had hosted him more than a decade 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 and 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 his mother’s 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 which he did not transcribe fully when he came to write the book. He was on a curragh in 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 nostril and a half paid death tender at my side still my l
ong death battle will be fought out.
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.
Illustration 2: Marie Mullen in the DruidSynge production of The Tinker’s Wedding (2004). Photograph by Keith Pattison