Synge

by Colm Toibin

  What Myles is saying is slightly different from what Oscar Wilde said: according to Myles, life imitates bad art; but it is noteworthy that Synge is also getting the blame for the sort of intellectual stage Irishness which undoubtedly has been the bane of much of our literature since independence. In effect, Myles says, Synge raised the tone of stage-Irishism, and made it acceptable in more or less nationalist literary circles. Nationalism, or at least the more nationalistic kind of writer, having attacked the Synge-song to begin with, ended by apparently adopting it. The appeal of the picturesque triumphed over the ideal of purity; an ideal strangeness was more important than an ideal sexlessness.

  This is perhaps why the Playboy riots now seem so far away. Synge’s brief moment (1902 to 1909) coincided with the rebirth of a kind of nationalism which was guilty of distortions in the interests of the ideal; but, if it is now a long time in fact, it is an even longer stretch in terms of fashion since Arthur Griffith attacked the Playboy as a libel on Irish womanhood and five hundred policemen were needed to keep order within and without the theatre.

  But the row was one after Yeats’s own heart; and he continued to rub it in. In the third essay in The Cutting of an Agate, ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, the poet who was to found a whole aesthetic on the idea of art as the creation of exalted, noble images for contemplation, claimed that the ‘lyric beauty’, the ‘violent laughter’ etc. of the Playboy were all taken straight out of peasant Ireland. At the time this was written he was annoying the peasants and their literary embodiers and spokesmen further, but of course, given that they were to pin their faith also to the idea of exalted, noble images, even if mostly in the somewhat degraded form of the picturesque, it would not be long until they came his way. Twenty years after that essay, Daniel Corkery, in what was long a seminal book, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, was to argue also that Synge’s importance was the depth of his knowledge of the people and to declare flatly:

  Here, by one stroke, to show how he stands apart from all his fellow writers, it is but necessary to state that he, an ascendancy man, went into the huts of the people and lived with them.

  ‘An ascendancy man.’ He takes back what he gives; but what he gives has proved fatal enough also. Soon, by a supreme historical irony, Synge’s defenders were among the lovers of the peasant-picturesque, the remnants of the old Abbey and Radio Eireann gang, the lineal descendants of the nationalists of 1907 (the only difference being that they substituted one kind of noble savage for another): his enemies among the cosmopolitans, the urbanites, the sophisticates like Myles. The charge of being an ascendancy man who distorted and condescended by reason of that fact was dropped by one side and revived by the other. It was a sentimental literary idealization which was now charged against him, not a libel or a travesty.

  Yet that he was ‘an ascendancy man’ is undeniable: the point to be made, if any point must, being that this particular ambiguity or contradiction was more important to him as a man turning his life-experiences, contradictions and ambiguities into art, than it is to us. Synge was in fact sprung from the narrowest, most bigoted, bible-thumping, proselytizing, peasant-despising while yet peasant-exploiting kind of Protestant, ascendancy, landlord stock. Yet he fell in love with the Catholic ‘natives’. He tramped the roads of Wicklow and West Kerry; he went to the Islands; he learnt the language; he listened at chinks in the floorboards. And he wrote The Tinker’s Wedding, The Well of the Saints and The Playboy of the Western World, ‘travesties’ according to the most fervent and patriotic of the natives then. Marvellous illuminations of a life undreamed-of according to urban sophisticates. The irony being, of course, that it was the urban sophisticates who accused him of ridiculous distortions and indeed idealizations; while it was the most peasant-minded and patriotic (in the literary sense anyway) who stuck by him, believing (correctly as it happens) that their own importance depended entirely on whether the poetic peasant existed and whether the contemplation of his life had marvellous illuminations to offer the rest of us.

  It is therefore Synge’s misfortune that his secondary, or what might even be called his background, subject, the life of the Gaelic West, still obscures what is perhaps his real subject, his real achievement and his claim to lasting fame. Of course there is no doubt that it was his entrancement with the people of Aran, of the Wicklow glens, and of West Kerry that set fire to his imagination and released his real theme. True creation, art as opposed to any other kind of statement, is a matter of embodiment. And there can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who reads those sad, yet celebratory and noble books, The Aran Islands and In Wicklow and West Kerry, in which a dying man contemplates with the brooding intensity of genius the remnants of an immemorial but already dying culture, that Synge found himself and found embodiments for his real theme in the poor, barren and beautiful places of Ireland. In passage after passage he reveals not only insight, but his love and his personal emotion. Thus, on Inishmaan after a night of storm, he writes:

  The continual passing in this island between the misery of last night and the splendour of today, seems to create an affinity between the moods of these people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent in artists, and in certain forms of alienation. Yet it is in the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island.

  In West Kerry, near Dunquin, he watches the people wending their way to mass on a Sunday morning,

  the men in homespun and the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this grey day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland – an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the world.

  And he had, whatever simple people may have said afterwards under pressure from Dublin enemies retailing stories of scandalous plays performed far away, the gift of friendship and sympathy; with the young, with the very old, and – perhaps this is the most significant thing of all – with the women. Over and over again he speaks of the beauty of the Island women in their red dresses against the bare rock, of their singularly beautiful faces, of their openness, frankness, and simplicity.

  As an anthropologist-naturalist, then, or whatever it may be proper to call him, Synge was, in the prose books at least, not an inconsiderable observer, though naturally he saw all that he did through the light of his own predestined imagination. But critics who have concentrated, as for extraneous political and other reasons they have, on the contradictions inherent in the spectacle of this scion of the ascendancy as the writer of peasant plays are wasting everybody’s time. Whatever Synge may have said during the stress of the Playboy riots, however sedulously critics, including Robin Skelton in The Writings of J.M. Synge, may search for the origins of his plots in his experiences in the West of Ireland and in Wicklow, these are not primarily naturalistic plays. The mob who gleefully hooted ‘Lynchehaun’ at the author in the Abbey were right. (Synge had tried to justify the probability of his play by reference to a dubiously existent murderer of that name who he said had been hidden by the people of Erris.) It illuminates matters here to remember that Synge lived in the era when the ‘problem play’ was dominant. Naturalistic drama with a social theme was the accepted mode. People expected it and they looked for it. It therefore also illuminates matters to remember the surprising fact that Synge and Chekhov were almost contemporaries. Chekhov was of course interested in what was happening to the Russian soul; he was interested in the Russian character; he was interested in social change. Synge had all these interests too, so far as the people of the West were concerned, but both were vastly more interested in primary themes of their own. Synge had really only one, and he was probably prepared to throw naturalism and social accuracy overboard to some extent at least to get it. What was it?

  When we realize what it is,
when we ‘isolate’ it from the other questions, we go far to restore Synge to his proper place among writers of any nationality; and that is a high one the present writer has no doubt.

  Unfortunately, however, when we make the attempt we come up against further contradictions and ambiguities in the relationship of the man to his work which have been and are the source of critical confusions also, for critics have touched on these too, and again mostly as if they somehow invalidate the work, when in fact they may illuminate it. At least from 1897 on, Synge was a sick, indeed, to be brutal about it, a dying man. Yet the work glorifies health, vitality, licence, vigour. Further, he was reserved, introspective, almost silent in most sorts of company. Yeats described him as being one of those sorts of artists who have little personality, as far as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but a fiery and brooding imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress or convince in any company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling.

  Yet the plays are full of talkers, spellbinders, liars, eloquent chancers of all descriptions. (Christy Mahon is by no means the only one.) Furthermore, as Skelton and before him Greene and Edward M. Stephens in the official biography made clear – Maurice Bourgeois was the first to hint at it – Synge was an unhappy lover who had had at least two serious rejections of affection before he began his final relationship with the Abbey actress Molly Allgood. The first and most serious of these, by Cherrie Matheson, was on religious grounds. Synge had declared himself an atheist, and she, the daughter of the leader of the Plymouth Brethren, regarded this, however she may have felt about him, as an insuperable obstacle. When finally, only four years before his death, he met the nineteen-year-old Molly, he had the good or ill fortune to find the sort of girl who kept a man in uncertainties of all descriptions. The portrait by John B. Yeats in the Dublin National Gallery which Skelton reproduces and the photograph which also appears in his book show her for what she was: a beautiful, high-spirited, intelligent girl, full of vitality, but wilful and stubborn to a degree. Pegeen Mike of The Playboy in fact.

  In J.M. Synge and his World Skelton quotes a passage from a draft of Synge’s first play, When the Moon has Set:

  My life has gone to ruin because I misunderstood love and because I was scrupulous when I should have been strong. I treated women as if they were gods and they treated me as if I might be damned for their amusement. If you love a woman subdue her.

  And when one reads all the plays together, one is struck by a strange fact. Synge has really only one primary theme: the ironies, and in particular the verbal ironies, of the relationships of men and women. To make this assertion is certainly not to demean him, for the theme is, to say the least, an important one. To add that, apart from Shakespeare in certain of the comedies, he is the greatest dramatist to have handled it in the English language is to do no more than give him his due.

  His first play, Riders to the Sea, is something of an aberration in the corpus of his work. Skelton praises it for its mythic elements; and it has been held up to admiration as classical tragedy in miniature. Criticism is generally pleased to have such matters to discuss, but the truth is that Riders to the Sea is a contrived solemnity by a writer who had not yet found himself. Even so there are glimmerings of his themes, albeit ‘tragic’ rather than comic ones, for the point is the relationship of women who wait and mourn with the men whose devouring mistress is the sea.

  In The Shadow of the Glen, written more or less concurrently, and The Tinker’s Wedding his primary subject is clearer to his audience, as it was perhaps to himself also, and from now until the end, even in the tragic Deirdre, he will not relinquish it. In The Shadow of the Glen Nora picks Michael to supplant her ageing husband with a degree of clear-sightedness and a degree of contempt, simply, she claims, because he is a man, passable and available; and because, like her husband, he has money. At the same time she pays the oblique compliment of a claim that her standards in men are high:

  … if it’s a power of men I’m after knowing they were fine men, for I was a hard child to please, and a hard girl to please, and it’s a hard woman I am to please this day, Michael Dara, and it’s no lie I’m telling you.

  After all of which she goes off with the tramp, leaving both and embittered husband and a bewildered Michael behind her, and advancing as her reason one worthy of a later heroine in the statement that the tramp has, after all, ‘a fine bit of talk’.

  The long-debated question, also raised by the conduct of later heroines, as to whether women or men have more regard for convention, and respect for the bonds of marriage, is the central theme of The Tinker’s Wedding. Of course Sarah wants marriage, even though, as her husband reminds her, she has been going beside him a long time and reared a lot of children. Of course Michael is, being a man, resistant to the idea. So far Synge does not differ from the consensus of male writers on the theme.

  But Sarah also wants a continued freedom to assure herself that her powers of attraction are not lost, a need which the majority of male writers have, from the dawn of time, attributed unhesitatingly to the male. And in the end it is her primal realism, not Michael’s, which prevails over the marriage idea and dismisses it and the respectability which goes with it as less important than the price to be paid.

  But neither The Shadow of the Glen nor The Tinker’s Wedding are truly more than curtain-raisers; and it is on the two great plays that followed that Synge’s reputation must finally rest. The Well of the Saints mixes so many elements – the eternal conflict of illusion and reality, wish and fulfilment; the meaninglessness of human existence compared with the human being’s capacity to feel and to suffer; the contrast between the riches of absolute poverty and the deprivations of partial possession – that it is easy to miss its central truth. Blind or otherwise, deluded about each other or not, Martin and Mary have found the love that springs from mutual need: perhaps, the play seems almost to suggest, the only love there is. But it is in the nature of the male to dream of conquest; and in that of the female to despise what she possesses on the grounds that it is less than all she might have had. Martin, restored to sight, finds only mockery and cruelty in the eyes of the girl who had seemed to encourage him. Mary in the end comforts herself with the thought that there are white-haired old women whom the young men never tire of looking at. But the last word is the Saint’s; and although it appears to be about the old couple’s choice of blindness, we are meant to feel the ironic implication, that it is about the emotional irrevocability of their choice of each other; ‘They have chosen their lot, and the lord have mercy on their souls.’

  The Well of the Saints abounds in ironies; in The Playboy of the Western World they are piled one on top of another in superb succession, and they are almost all related to what males have agreed among themselves to call the contrariness, the unpredictability, and the caprices of women. Never mind that the ultimate fraud is Christy, the greater crime, in the eyes of the ordinary male, is Pegeen’s preference for him. The plot is too well known to need discussion: suffice it to say that neither Synge’s preface, the anthropological school of criticism, the five hundred policemen, nor Yeats’s idealizations of the peasantry can conceal the fact that the play is about the effect on women – on Pegeen Mike, the Widow Quin, and the famous drift of girls standing in their infamous shifts – of a man’s fraudulent reputation for being a dangerous rogue; and that Pegeen Mike is one of the great feminine creations of dramatic literature, romantic, realist, obstinate, and tender all at once, while the Widow Quin is among the most memorable of women cynics. The fact that Christy, though a timid fraud, rises to great heights of daring and boldness while under the eyes of the girl he has beguiled is one of the ironies of the male’s role, but the final master stroke concerns the woman’s attitude, and it comes in the very last line. Pegeen has scorned and even hated him for the fraud he is discovered to be and the fool he has made of her, yet she cries out at the end: ‘Oh my grief I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of
the Western World.’ He had, after all, the fine talk.

  Deirdre of the Sorrows was written in the last year of Synge’s life, when he probably knew he was dying, but when his relationship with Molly may have been, strangely enough, at its happiest. The usual misconceptions surround it. It is in no sense a classical tragedy (unless Conchubar, not Naisi, is the tragic hero) and the syntax is certainly not anglicized Irish. It is in fact, like all the others, a play about the unbiddability of the female heart, and its two highest moments are revelations of female psychology. One is Deirdre’s reaction when she overhears her lover discussing with Fergus the possibility that they might grow tired of each other; the other is when, without hope of ever making amends, she reviles him for going off to die with his brothers and is immediately stricken by remorse for what can never be unsaid.

  There are in fact few writers to equal this somewhat unsuccessful lover as an inventor of women and an observer of the situations they contrive to create out of what seems to male eyes mere caprice and wilfulness. That this ‘ascendancy’ writer succeeded in fashioning partly out of Irish syntactical modes and stored phrases a language to fit his own vision is part of his achievement, though it is largely fruitless to argue how much he owed to either memory or Irish. That he also decided to set his stories in the habitations of simple people where the mere sophistications of society would not occlude his vision or obscure their psychology we owe partly to his love for the bare and barren places of Ireland, but even more, in all probability, to the deep interior instincts of a great artist.