by Tim Robinson
It is very difficult to persuade an Aran hand-knitter to calculate or even guess what her hourly rate is at the price she gets for her output; M in 1986 thought it was about 50p for a fast worker. The mistress of an Aran household does not think of knitting in these terms, or evades the question by saying, “It passes the time; I might as well be doing something while I’m waiting for the potatoes to boil.” Pride in craft, mental and manual activity however limited, solace the long hours, especially in winter. But when I was making my map and lodging in cottages throughout the three islands, I sometimes heard the sigh with which the “woman of the house” took up her knitting having served my breakfast, and I smelt exploitation, resignation to an ancient wrong, something indeed passed down from mother to daughter. Nowadays fewer and fewer women are finding it worth their while to knit for sale. M found that among the mothers of younger schoolchildren few could knit with the speed and skill of their elders, and most preferred to earn proper wages of £60 or £100 a week in the little factory in Eoghanacht. The only young wife who knitted professionally was our neighbour Máire Uí Fhlatharta in Fearann an Choirce, whose husband was away on the South Aran Light for half the time and who had a toddler to care for; she could knit a sweater in one long day, and she relished the independence of her income, small though it was compared with the factory wages, but she had failed to persuade her friends to join her and felt isolated in her craft. Sadly, at all age levels, nobody actually enjoyed knitting. Only the rudiments of the skill were taught in the primary schools, and one never saw a young girl take up the needles.
So it seems that as the myth of Aran hand-knitting spreads world-wide, at its origin the reality is fading. What radiated from those knitting-courts where M gloried and drank tea, was a comfortable sense of the pastness of the past, a mutual congratulation of retired heroines. All were happy to reminisce and to show M their stitches, all were happy not to have to bend their fingers to it for hour after hour. The click of needles was no longer as close to them through the waking hours as the pulse; they had time for their own hearts. True, one of Bridgie’s sons had laid it down, in a school essay he showed me on the theme “Woman’s Place,” that “A woman’s place is in the home, because when a man comes in he wants his tea.” But even men and their irrefutable arguments could be accommodated in these women’s lives. For whole afternoons at a time, Gort na gCapall, like Cranford, was “in the hands of the Amazons.”
Meanwhile, talking to “himself” in the outhouse, I was learning that history, even in Gort na gCapall, is a matter of men….
STORM-DRIVEN MALE
Maidhc Mhicil Phádraic Bheartlaiméid Bhriain Bheartlaiméid was the name by which Liam O’Flaherty’s father thought of himself, when he wanted to rehearse his descent from Beartlaiméad Ó Flaithbheartaigh, the first inhabitant of Gort na gCapall. According to Liam’s elder brother Tom, this Beartlaiméad or Bartholomew “built his house upon a rock, not for reasons of security or because he considered the rock symbolical of continuity, but because he did not want to waste a piece of good pasture or tillage land under a house.” Four generations later, when such communal undertakings as the basking-shark hunt were being planned, it was an O’Flaherty that convened assemblies on the carcair, the rise leading into the village. An old man recalled the scene for Tom:
Your grandfather took the lead of all the men in the village, since it was his great, great grandfather who first settled in the village and everybody was related to him…. [He] told the men to get the full of their mouths of food and return to the carcair. Indeed they were not long eating for they were as excited as if they were going to a wedding, and the young girls of the village put on their brightest shawls and came to the carcair to watch the young men who were putting airs on themselves in front of the girls….Your grandfather was a hard stern man, and my skin to the Devil if he could get three words out of him without one of them being a curse, and that day he cursed plenty because he was excited….
In the next generation it was Maidhc Mhicil (Mike son of Michael) who led the village. He had run off with Maggie Ganly from Mainistir, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Thomas Ganly the lighthouse-builder. Liam’s earliest memory of his mother was the romantic story of her marriage, told while she was combing his hair:
She told it as one tells a fairy-tale to amuse a child, how her handsome young lover came by night on horseback to her father’s house and abducted her, at the very moment when another suitor from the mainland was there asking for her hand; how she was married at dawn in the chapel and went to live in an old deserted house in our village, penniless and unforgiven by her parents. Her fairy-tale ended with her marriage. After that, her life was a tale of hardship and misery, an endless struggle to find food for her many children.
It was the time of the Land League, of the cliffing of the Kilmurvey House cattle, the shooting of the bailiff; Maidhc was imprisoned a couple of times on suspicion of his part in these crimes. The household narrowly escaped eviction when her first son, Tom, was just old enough to remember the event:
She stood at the window which gave a view of the road that led to our village. She held me in her arms and she moaned unceasingly. I cried out loud. We were going to be evicted. Presently we saw helmeted policemen coming around the bend. “Tá na cneamhairi a’ tíocht—the villains are coming, little white son,” my mother said. “Soon we will have no house to shelter us.” There they came, up out of the hollow, a great muster of them, led by a sergeant. They were accompanied by three disreputable fellows from the mainland, whose business it was to throw out our furniture, lock and nail the doors after the tenants were evicted. I was still weeping when the sergeant entered. I do not recollect what he said. I know he was a kindly man. I suppose he told my mother that he was sorry to perform this painful duty. Maybe he was too. I remember the “rogees” with hammer and nails fastening the door that opened to the north. Then they quenched the fire on the hearth and when this was being done my mother moaned as if her heart was being torn out. It had a searing effect on my infant mind. I never got over it. The bitterness born within me by the act only grew stronger with the passing of the years. Gently the police sergeant told my mother she would have to go out into the yard. Before she left she whispered a few words in my ear that made me cry for all my lungs were worth. The sergeant turned away his head for a moment. Then he placed a coin in my hand.
I had not noticed my father at all until then. He had lived a rather eventful life and an eviction was only another incident. He was a Fenian and a Land Leaguer, and most of the time he forgot he was the father of a large young family. He was used to police attentions and accustomed to jails. I don’t know how it happened and I never enquired in later years, the subject was too painful, but suddenly the “rogees” were drawing the nails out of the door. We entered our home. Soon the kettle was singing merrily on the fire.
My mother always expressed the belief that if my father thought of his own affairs a little more and about those of the community a little less, the world would be a much better place to live in. She did not understand that she had fallen in love with and married an incurable rebel, and not an ordinary husband. And rebels are easier to fall in love with than to live with.
Both Tom and Liam attended Oatquarter National School under David O’Callaghan, the Sinn Féiner and Gaelic Leaguer, who taught them to read and write their native tongue. When Sir Roger Casement visited the school and asked if any pupil could “grind his way through” an Irish column from a newspaper, O’Callaghan proudly called forth Tom, who performed so well that Sir Roger gave him half a crown, and later sent him books, including Fr. O’Leary’s Séadna, which, though little read nowadays, was then regarded as the foundation-stone of modern literature in Irish. Although Casement planned to send him to college, “fate intervened” (as Tom’s unrevealing account has it), and he emigrated to Boston in 1912, where he became active in social-revolutionary circles. He began his journalistic career by writing for the Daily Worker and the Labor
Defender, and after he had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 as a Trotskyist, for the Militant. A sick man, he returned to Ireland in 1934, and helped to found a remarkably radical (and remarkably forgotten) Irish-language weekly called An t-Éireannach. Written for the working classes and for the Gaeltacht in particular, anti-fascist, internationalist, out of sympathy with the self-absorbed and religiose tone of the language movement of that time, the newspaper lasted just three years. Some pieces Thomas wrote for it later appeared in English versions in his two books, Aranmen All (1934) and Cliffmen of the West (1935). These collections of Aran stories and reminiscences are full of tenderness and irony—but in the world of writing it is his brother who is O’Flaherty. Thomas died in 1936.
Liam O’Flaherty was born in 1896. He too attracted attention at school. His earliest literary composition horrified O’Callaghan, he tells us, and he was thrashed for it. This was a story of a murder in an Aran potato-garden: a woman brings his tea out to her man working in the garden, and because the tea is cold he kills her with his spade and buries her between two potato-ridges. “The point of the story,” according to O’Flaherty, “was the man’s difficulty in getting the woman, who was very large, to fit into the fosse.” O’Callaghan may well have been shocked by this melodramatic assault on the Gaelic League’s idealization of the Irish peasant, but he recognized his pupil’s abilities and drew him to the attention of a visiting priest, who arranged for him to train for the priesthood. When Liam, aged thirteen, left the island for Rockwell College in Tipperary, it was the first step in a career that zigzagged wildly away from Gort na gCapall and would eventually lurch across the stage of fame. He went on to study at Black-rock (where he organized a corps of Republican Volunteers) and then at Clonliffe seminary in Dublin, although he later claimed that he never felt any vocation and indeed “despised the priesthood and thought it was more noble to do the ordinary chores of our society as a lusty male, to till the earth, to be strong and brave at sea, to marry and beget children, to raise one’s voice with authority in the council of one’s fellows,”—nor did he want “to suffer the humiliation of wearing a priest’s womanly rig.” However after only a few weeks at Clonliffe, “I danced on my soutane, kicked my silk hat to pieces, spat on my religious books, made a fig at the whole rigmarole of Christianity and left that crazy den of superstition.” A brief period at University College Dublin gave him Catullus, Connolly and Marx instead, but then in 1915 he flung himself into the nightmare of history by joining the Irish Guards, and underwent an experience which, he says, saved him from becoming just another narrow-minded Irish patriot. For this step, which, even more than his baulking at the priesthood, was responsible for the outcast position he later rejoiced in, he adopted his mother’s family name of Ganly, probably because of its Ulster Protestant resonance.
One night in 1917 a lost and bewildered Private Ganly and two others were hiding in a hole near Langemarck in Belgium, drinking whiskey from the broken neck of a bottle and watching shells bursting among a platoon of advancing guardsmen, when there was an annihilating flash and roar. He awoke to blood and hysteria; he was dragged to a dressing-station where someone picked a scrap of mangled flesh off his tunic saying, “What’s the matter with you, mate? This part of you?” It became impossible for him to speak, although he felt he had something important to communicate. Later he attacked a doctor who seemed inimical, and was held and doused with cold water, and his voice came back to him. “Melancholia acuta” was the citation with which the war rewarded him. He felt he would go through life with that shell bursting in his head.
Liam’s wanderings after his discharge, recounted with the immediacy and terror of hallucination in a fragment of autobiography called Two Years, read as if he were searching for bits of his psyche splattered world-wide. Deciding, as he says, to cut himself adrift from everyone he knew, he goes off to London on his winnings at a race-meeting, and spends the lot in a forty-eight-hour debauch in that city whose “majestic size satisfies the human craving for something that is eternal because it is too vast for comprehension.” After being thrown off various jobs for his insubordinate attitudes, he ships as a stoker on a tramp-steamer, across the sea which is for him the masculine half of beauty, “the more beautiful because it was more strong,” and feeling himself “young, carefree, plunging towards a romantic and tropic land.” He approaches Rio with the same sense of awe and romance as he did Galway on his first trip with his mother on the steamer Duras, but his experiences of the brothel-quarter and the beach where he lives rough with hobos leave him with the knowledge that “each country is as dull and commonplace as the next, each person intrinsically as disappointing as the previous one I have met.” He sees a headline about the declaration of the Irish Republic, and ships for Liverpool; “So ended my first expedition to the Tropics, in disillusion and without any credit to myself, unless I could count among my gains the renewal of my faith in the superiority of European man.”
By the time he reaches Europe, though, he has lost interest in Irish revolution, and signs on for a Mediterranean voyage. The inhabitants of the Balkans, he finds, are “a bad smell,” and as barbarous today as the Romans found them two thousand years ago. But an epic drinking-bout in Smyrna culminates in his being lugged off by two blacks to the divan of a Circassian woman, who justifies everything he has heard of her breed (“How can a woman of your beauty and refinement be content to live in a house like this?” “C’est la guerre.”). He sails on, he is cured of delirium tremens by a storm at sea, he arrives at Montreal. Despairing of living up to his concept of man’s destiny, which is “to struggle towards the perfection of his species to a state of godliness,” he walks off into the night and the waste places. He takes odd jobs on farms, but “it is almost impossible to believe how uncivilized these French-Canadian peasants are,” and it is in a condensed-milk factory that he finds a god he can worship, “this god of machinery, more powerful than any god man has yet created.” After a wall of piled-up boxes of condensed-milk tins collapses on him, he wanders off, and after some months finds himself in the lumber-woods of Northern Ontario. There he meets an agitator from the International Workers of the World, “the type of a new aristocracy that was to spring from the machine.” Expelled from the lumber-camp as Wobblies, the two of them have to walk fifty-five miles and flee a forest fire; then they jump trains to Port Arthur on Lake Superior. In a labour-camp near there he falls in love for the first time, with an Irish settler’s daughter, and realizes “the tragedy of my sex, which lies in the impossibility ever to completely conquer that shadowy phantom which is the soul of woman.” Leaving her, he sneaks across the American border, and goes to join his brother in Boston. In the James Connolly Club there his sceptical spirit is aroused, by opposites, to comprehension of the power and beauty of American capitalism. His wild two-year excursus peters out in unsuccessful attempts to write, and a succession of lost jobs. He feels a growing inner madness “forcing me to retire within the walls of my mind.—Where? What place could be more remote than the rock of my nativity?” And so, by debauch from port to port, he makes his way home, and arrives “like a ghoul, speechless, gloomy, a companion of the rough winds and of the breakers.”