by Colm Toibin
As a young child I picked carrageen and picked spuds and salted fish. All these activities were carried out in the cold lash of April, or the bitter wind of November, so the body’s memory insists. I know the salting was actually done in summer, the minute the fish were gutted and washed. This task I also carried out, when I was old enough to be trusted with a knife. My fingers were thin and they reddened and froze more quickly than anybody else’s, I was nervous and lacked dexterity so I did all of these things badly, but as the eldest I had to show some sort of example.
While we were not as dependent on the sea as an island would be, we depended on it for sustenance, for beauty and for escape to America. The sea was capricious. The ability to predict weather had to be matched by the ability to know where and when the fish were to be found, as well as how to catch them. The sea could be miserly, ensuring a winter of want and poverty, or it could, without warning, be lavish.
As in fishing villages the world over, the men were either ‘out on sea’ or the currachs were in. When I was nine or ten the family moved to a house with a view of the quay and my father got a bigger boat, a twenty eight footer, the ‘Grainne Mhaol’. The dominance of the sea was then complete; I depended on it for dreams.
The season was short, the winters long and life often brutal. In summer, the boats went out and money came in. If weather threatened or the boat was late, one of us children would be sent down to the pier head to look over the stormwall and scan the grey for a sight of the boat. If there was further cause for concern, a fast child was sent to see if anything could be spotted from further along the shore and finally – and I only remember this happening half a dozen times – someone was dispatched to see if the men had landed in the next village, and if not, whether anyone else was in. The fears were never voiced, but even the youngest child felt the tension – we learned it with our prayers.
Aillbebrack in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties was far closer to the world of Synge’s Aran Islands than it was to Dublin or to the Galway of today. This small village at the edge of the Atlantic in the area was known to outsiders as Connemara, but to people from other parts of the region, and to us, it was known as Errismor.
Such knowledge, or lack of it, was one of the many small signifiers that told us whether someone was a stranger or not. Another was how they spoke. Not alone the accent, but more importantly the use of the telltale phrase. Even the children in every locality in Ireland could, before television, tell who came from within its borders and who from without after a few minutes of conversation.
The history of a people works on their language; the language limits what they can express of their world. When a language is lost in the place to which it is native, the effects are by definition more extreme than when this happens because of migration or immigration. This part of Connemara spoke an English not alone wedded to its deeper Irish grammatical structure, but moulded into a shape that could to some extent express the place and history of those who lived, and lost, in it. ‘The limits of our language are the limits of our world’, Wittgenstein says. For ourselves, or for others? This is, in some ways central to how I read Synge, and to the critical essays and commentaries that I have read about him.
My grandmother and parents, my uncles and the neighbours spoke an English that was far from standard. ‘We’re going out after the pots’ or ‘He’s over after the cattle’ or ‘Think will herself be looking for more flour?’ ‘I hear there was great gaisce altogether at Taimin over in Keogh’s.’ ‘By the cross of Christ, I’ll lay that fella out with a kick’ would not be out of the question. Such language is easy to exaggerate and it is no surprise that Synge lost the run of himself in The Playboy.
There is a very clear line between parody and poetry, but the ear has to be finely tuned to the idiom and every nuance to achieve one and avoid the other. Daniel Corkery has described this linguistic minefield more than adequately in his Synge and Anglo Irish Literature, and I think that in essence he is right. He also says, to paraphrase wildly, that as a Protestant in love with the notion of the wild natural man, Synge didn’t understand the nature and place of Catholicism, and this lack of understanding led him astray in The Playboy. Corkery is referring to the use of profanity, certain aspects of the overtly sexual talk and behaviour in the play that cause it to be read as parody, if not insult.
In other words, when Synge wanted pagan, he saw only pagan. He intended not to insult but to express what he saw as the great sport and heroics of the unfettered peasant. But the peasant world was guided by one god with two sets of saints and two kinds of knowledge, the old and the Roman. There was little direct conflict between the two.
As a child, I never gave any thought to the fact that our three main saints, Brigid, Cailin and Mac Dara were never on the calendar. I knew St Patrick wasn’t either and if I thought about it at all, I put it down to them being somehow native because St Patrick, wherever he was from, is legitimized by the same type of half heroic story as the other three, and all gave their names to known places.
Synge wrote The Playboy in a ferment of sexual frustration, and it shows. When he arrived in Inis Meain at the age of twenty-seven with a sack of books and a broken heart, he had an eye for the beauty of the girls, and they must have had great sport with him on an island well out in the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth century.
When I first read The Playboy sometime in my teens I thought it was ridiculous. I was mildly offended, not at anything in the play, but that educated people thought it had something to say about the kind of life lived by my ancestors and their like. A few girls in my class immediately adopted several phrases from the play’s rich store and used them at every opportunity, as young girls will. Everything that girls could be doing in the long evenings after Samhain they would be accusing one another of doing, from ‘eating a bit in one house and drinking a sup in another, like an old braying jackass’ to ‘squeezing kisses on the puckered lips’ of whoever was that week’s object of desire.
We loved Shaneen Keogh, he was such a slieveen, and a boy was instantly, and unanimously, nicknamed in his honour. We thought Pegeen Mike was alright, if a bit rough. We didn’t know what to make of the Widow Quin, but none of that mattered, because no woman in her right mind would be so desperate for a man that she would have the Playboy, ‘even if he was served up on a plate with sauce’, much less take him seriously. Then it got more ridiculous – the great deed that made a hero out of him was killing his father? And as for two women fighting over him … seafóid. We couldn’t see why grown women and a number of men had to take Christy Mahon making an eejit out of himself seriously, or why we had to do it over three acts.
We had learned about the willing suspension of disbelief, but this was a step too far. We knew, though there would have been no need to articulate it, that killing a father could be a sin and a tragedy, but it could never be taken as the basis for comedy. It seemed insulting, that such a man could be presented as serious, what kind of fools did people take us for? Noble fools, in Synge’s case.
We couldn’t see what the rioting was about, though we supposed that Dublin people must be easily shocked. Maybe they were Protestants and of a higher sensibility? Not even the nuns were shocked by the drift of chosen females in their shifts. That image only struck us because it was versatile. Nuns still wore habits then and were just about to uncover their hair. Since rumour was rife about whether they had any at all, the picture of a drift of them in slips or nightdresses was too good to resist. As for the hero, even someone as desperate as we supposed young nuns to be wouldn’t think much of the Playboy, and even nuns knew Shaneen Keogh was more of a failed priest than a man.
Young girls, as the agony aunt Angela McNamara remarked once in a radio interview, can be very bold. Synge was taken with such boldness, but I don’t believe he understood that boldness was legislated for by a mixture of religious rules and marriage prospects that brooked no disobedience if a girl wanted to retain her good name. Good name, like virginity, c
ould never be recovered and soiled goods were not wanted. The rules of behaviour might be different from those in his Protestant Dublin world, but there were rules and they were clear to the locals if not to him.
There is no evidence in any of the plays that Synge knew or cared about the quick slip that could lead to disgrace, nor the consequences of it. But the girls knew, and this kind of gap can lead to mistakes in interpretation. No father hoping to marry a daughter to the likes of Shaneen Keogh would leave her in the presence of a strange man at night, much less one whose seed, breed and generation were unfamiliar. All this we girls took in at a glance during the late sixties, when our lives and our society were balanced on the cusp of change. Things of a sexual nature were never mentioned directly; it was all hint, allegation and giggling embarrassment. But girls are bold at that age.
The close connection between the black ram, the Widow Quin’s breast and the bishop disgusted as much as it mystified. Not even the explicit passages where Diarmuid lay with Grainne in the Toraiocht, and there is no getting away from it in middle Irish, were passed over as swiftly by the nuns as some of the more outlandish speeches in The Playboy. Anything in literature that causes a nun major embarrassment sticks in the mind forever, but I have no memory of this passage from my schoolgirl reading. It bothers me now, because there is an authentic spite in the accusation, as the exact register of Christy’s ‘God save you kindly’ prevents me enjoying the play as a gaudy romp with purple interludes and awakens, in Corkery’s words, ancestral disturbances. My disturbances are neither nationalistic nor religious. They have to do with language and cultural appropriation.
Certain places exercise such a powerful force on the creative imagination that they become territorially attractive to artists. I grew up in such a place. It became clear to me at a young age that the outside world had little interest in what locals thought, and that by and large the increasing numbers of visitors had no interest in us beyond the provision of local colour.
As I read more widely, and began to read literary criticism at University, I was disappointed to see that this lack of curiosity applied also to academics, though that was not really surprising. After all, better to work out your theories on the blank canvas of a real landscape inhabited, if at all, by idealized stereotypes than to risk the awkward answer, the dissenting word of the actual people themselves.
The people themselves were not represented in English. I found wonder and joy in literature in English, but I only encountered my own world in the stories of Ó Flatharta and Ó Direáin, Ó Cadhain. The poetry worked on another level, and it gave me some small permission, but the prose legitimized the world I came from, though all I knew then, or needed to know, was the right sort of ease and unease. ‘They gave me permission’, as Seamus Heaney so accurately put it, referring to his early reading of Kavanagh, ‘ to dwell without anxiety among the cultural landmarks of my life.’ In literature, I only glimpsed the world I knew second-hand in the English in which I was raised.
Some years ago, when I read Tim Robinson’s brilliant and cogent introduction to The Aran Islands (and why – since he himself so clearly states the obvious: that all introductions reduce ‘the dimensionality’ of what they introduce – was this not published as an afterword?) I gleaned a great deal about the intellectual concerns of the author and several sharp insights into Synge’s overheated passion for the actress Molly Allgood. My schoolgirl reading would have been well served by the clear chronological detail, and the geographical information, but the cultural contextualization in this or any other critical work would have done me no good at all.
The questions we pose about a society we are outside of can be useful or they can be irrelevant. The answers, should we be so brave as to offer them, will always tell more about their author than about that society. The world Synge wrote about in both The Playboy and Riders to the Sea is essentially the world I grew up in, defined by the two great signifiers of that world: speech and the sea. This was the peasant idiom that Synge, perhaps uniquely, has mastered and it is therefore impossible for me to read him with the disinterested attention of the critic or academic. I will always see or read Synge’s plays and, by definition, critical commentary on them, through the particular lens of my place and background.
Riders to the Sea plays equally well in English and in Irish. It would, I have little doubt, play as well in a good translation of Greek, Italian or Spanish and it would certainly play well in Portuguese. This is a near perfect play, ‘a tiny epiphany’ as an Aran man told me. It is Synge the poet at his magnificent best. The play is short. Its theatrical brilliance lies in making the realism of the set serve as an altar for the ritual objects and actions surrounding death by sea, the purgatorial vigil while the mother waits for her son’s body to be found, then the relief of a funeral, a grave to go to. Maurya is Everymother. This is real life pared down, simple objects invested with their full symbolic power. It has the measure and comfort of a Latin rite, a rare event when poetry and drama are one, the rhythm of the speech underpinning the action and driving the momentum towards its perfect – and inevitable – conclusion.
When Maurya says of the young priest : ‘Tis little the like of him knows of the sea … Bartley will be lost now … ’, she speaks with the perfectly pitched authority of dream. The priest, saying God would not leave her ‘ destitute, with no son living’, speaks with the distant authority of Rome and she pays him no heed. Here is a perfect rendering of the balance struck between faith and fatalism, a balance absent from most of the other plays. ‘If it’s meant for you, it’ll follow you.’ This is still said of death by drowning.
A musician I know says every human being can survive a specific number of renditions of the song ‘The Fields of Athenry’. It is important to know your decreed number, because one too many will kill you. He has forty, so he takes great care to limit his exposure. I feel like that about The Playboy.
Garry Hynes’s famous first production of it and the gleeful savagery of Maeliosa Stafford’s Christy and Marie Mullen’s Widow Quin did something to convert me. The relish with which the words were spoken, down to even the most cringingly embarrassing of the love talk, drew me in. The best conversations I have had about the play are with actors. In their world, the language has become the main character and while I have come to enjoy its extravagance it will forever be a language adrift from its moorings. Riders to the Sea is language raised to a higher power. In The Playboy, ‘they’ are using ‘our’ language. Riders to the Sea is written in everyone’s language, and wherever it places itself, its poetry cannot be divorced from its origins.
Illustration 8: Synge with his mother, Rosie Calthrop (centre), and Annie Harmar, in the summer of 1900. From Edward Stephens, My Uncle John
8 Apart from Anthropology ~ Anthony Cronin
The creative process thrives on ambiguities and indeed apparent contradictions. Criticism is often surprisingly less happy with them afterwards. In the case of John Millington Synge certain ambiguities which were at the mainspring of his creative urge have had an unsettling effect on criticism; and made him the victim of confusions about the relationship of his life to his art – and of Irish life to his art – which still prevent us from assessing his achievement dispassionately and perhaps celebrating it as we should.
He has not on the whole been well served by his critics, and perhaps even less so by his partisans. He had the misfortune first of all to have a man of supreme genius as an ally and indeed as an impresario, making as is usual an impresario’s inaccurate claims. Yeats was a great theorist of art and artistry but he wrote criticism only in snatches and as an addendum to theory. Of the three essays included in The Cutting of an Agate, the first, the preface to The Well of the Saints, reminds us of the famous exhortation to ‘Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression’ – and we are back with Synge as the anthropologist-naturalist and all the dreary quarrels, from the Playboy row down to the p
resent day, about his accuracy in the plays as a describer of folk-life and Irish peasant character, the endless arguments about whether he was, on the one hand, traducer, or, on the other, idealizer. In the same essay Yeats goes on to say:
He went to Aran and became a part of its life, living upon salt fish and eggs, talking Irish for the most part, but listening also to the beautiful English which has grown up in the Irish speaking districts, and takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of the translators of the bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor from Irish. When Mr. Synge began to write in this language, Lady Gregory had already used it finely in her translations of Dr. Hyde’s lyrics and plays, or of old Irish literature, but she had listened with different ears.
This too perpetuates argument and, worse, confusion. ‘Kiltartan’ is still, quite properly, a dirty word in certain circles; and although Yeats, with his usual percipience, almost cuts out the confusions he has already raised when he adds, ‘He made his own selection of word and phrase, choosing what would express his own personality’, he has still said enough to invite, in the course of time, retorts such as that of the strictly urban-minded Myles na Gopaleen who declared:
A lifetime of cogitation has convinced me that in this Anglo-Irish literature of ours (which for the most part is neither Anglo, Irish, nor literature) nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is comparable with Synge … The trouble probably began with Lever and Lover. But I always think that in Synge we have the virus isolated and recognizable … It is not that Synge made people less worthy or nastier, or even better than they are, but he brought forward amusing clowns talking a sub-language of their own and bade us take them very seriously. There was no harm done there, because we have long had the name of having heads on us. But when the counterfeit bauble began to be admired outside of Ireland by reason of its oddity and ‘charm’, it soon became part of the literary credo here that Synge was a poet … a bit of a genius indeed … And now the curse has come upon us, because I personally have met in the streets of Ireland persons who are clearly out of Synge’s plays. They talk and dress like that and damn the drink they’ll swally but the mug of porter in the long nights after Samhain.