Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Aran was only tolerable for a few months. It was noticed that he “ducked and went to pieces” whenever a ship’s hooter sounded in the bay. Soon he was in Dublin working as a journalist, and helping to found the first Irish Communist Party. At that time a socialist revolution in Ireland did not seem an impossibility, and trade unionists were occupying mills and factories in various towns. When O’Flaherty failed to persuade his comrades in the Party that the hour was ripe, he undertook his own adventure. In January 1922, shortly after the Provisional Government had taken over from the British authorities under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he led the “Dublin Council of the Unemployed” in a peaceful but militarily disciplined occupation of the Rotunda Concert Rooms, as a protest against the high rate of unemployment in the city, and hung the Red Flag out of a window. A large and hostile crowd rallied outside and was only restrained from attacking the occupiers by detachments of the IRA and the police. After two days Commander-in-Chief O’Flaherty and his two hundred or more supporters came out quietly. O’Flaherty went to ground in Cork for a while, before briefly rallying to the IRA occupation of the Four Courts. Disbanded from that lost cause, he and a companion joined the crowds watching the Free State Army extirpating the IRA from some hotels they were still holding out in, and he overheard one old woman telling another that Liam O’Flaherty, “that tried to sell Dublin to the Bolsheviks,” had been shot dead, “thanks be to God!” His companion wanted him to join the Flying Columns the IRA would soon be setting up in the countryside, but O’Flaherty felt that he agreed with the old woman: politically and militarily he was dead. Leaving Ireland to its Civil War he went to London, bought a typewriter and began another life.

  Wandering in the fog and mud of the London streets, depressed by his initial failure to write anything of worth, he suddenly thought of Aran, and joyfully determined to make himself the spokesman of its harmonious simplicities. The novel that came out of this inspiration, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, was accepted by the publishers, Jonathan Cape, on the advice of Edward Garnett, literary godfather to a generation that included Galsworthy, D.H. Lawrence and Conrad. The background is the Aran of the 1900s, the social comedy of its emergent middle class detailed in a facetious and satirical Victorian style which is progressively over-ridden by a deeply felt account of the protagonist’s spiritual predicament. The island curate loves his neighbour’s wife, who could have been his had not a mistaken sense of vocation blinded him to his true nature at the crucial moment. Now, seeing her turn away from her evil husband to the love of a handsome, rebellious O’Flaherty figure, he takes to drink, and in an agony of doubt and despair remembers the saints of old who tested their faith by going to sea in the bare framework of a currach. He sets himself adrift from the island’s westernmost point—that inescapable locus of ultimate truths—but, out on the darkening ocean with the storm rising, he undergoes “a transformation”:

  The curate died. The intellectual died. The visionary died. The drunkard died. The lover died. The pious, shrinking conscientious priest, fearful of himself, torturing himself with doubts and temptations, they all died. There remained but Hugh McMahon the man, the human atom, the weak, trembling being, with the savage desire to live.

  The instinct of self-preservation awoken in him, he gloriously masters the waves until he is rescued. Then, in a disappointing last paragraph, he takes himself off to the foreign missions in fulfilment of a vow made to a God one had thought he had just outgrown. Nevertheless, in these concluding pages O’Flaherty’s cardinal theme has triumphantly announced itself: Life, its sacred greed for yet more life, its solidarity with Death.

  In his next novel, The Black Soul, the magnificent amorality of the island itself drums home the moral. A dark, tormented, shell-shocked Stranger comes to recuperate in the westernmost village; his hosts are a splendid specimen of womanhood called Little Mary because she is so tall—she is not quite a peasant, being the illegitimate daughter of a landlord—and Red John, her feeble, despised and rejected husband. The narrative of the Stranger’s growth towards wholeness is scanned by evocations of the successive seasons from winter to autumn, four rhapsodic passages seemingly flung together with the careless profusion of nature itself. The Stranger’s “Black Soul” is his hyperactive intellect, locked in futile debate with itself, which has to be silenced before his life can meet Little Mary’s at that summit of love which “only a god could describe.” Also, just as Red John’s miserable person has been spurned by Little Mary, so the Stranger has to disregard the passion of another woman, whose cultivated, idealistic mind exacerbates his morose self-questionings. Finally Red John runs mad (and O’Flaherty conveys the despair of the losers in life’s game just as feelingly as he does the triumph of the winners), and the Stranger, for no reason that his Black Soul can provide or counter, braves a perilous cliff-ledge on “The Hill of Fate” at the end of the island to rescue him. Red John expires at that moment, but the Stranger, having faced the reality of death, is rewarded with the will to life, and he carries Mary off to the mainland. “The most elemental thing in Irish literature,” the poet AE called it, and indeed if one can put up with the novel’s windy longeurs it is bracing to let its welter of imagery smite one’s face like sea-spray.

  Spring Sowing, a collection of short stories, followed The Black Soul in the same year, 1924. The title-piece is as well formed an expression of the beauty and sadness of O’Flaherty’s Gort na gCapall as one could hope for. Martin and Mary rise very early one February morning:

  They ate in silence, sleepy and bad-humoured and yet on fire with excitement, for it was the first day of their first spring sowing as man and wife. And each felt the glamour of that day on which they were to open the earth together and plant seeds in it…. Mary, with her shrewd woman’s mind, munched her bread and butter and thought of… Oh, what didn’t she think of? Of as many things as there are in life does a woman think of in the first joy and anxiety of her mating. But Martin’s mind was fixed on one thought. Would he be able to prove himself a man worthy of being the head of a family by doing his spring sowing well?…

  Still, as they walked silently in their rawhide shoes through the little hamlet, there was not a soul about. Lights were glimmering in the windows of a few cabins. The sky had a big grey crack in it in the east, as if it were going to burst in order to give birth to the sun. Birds were singing somewhere at a distance. Martin and Mary rested their baskets of seeds on a fence outside the village and Martin whispered to Mary proudly: “We are the first, Mary.” And they both looked back at the little cluster of cabins that was the centre of their world, with throbbing hearts. For the joy of spring had now taken complete hold of them.

  Martin sets to work on their first potato-ridge “as if some primeval impulse were burning within his brain and driving out every other desire but that of asserting his manhood and of subjugating the earth,” and Mary has a moment of terror in the face of “that pitiless, cruel earth, the peasant’s slave master, that would keep her chained to hard work and poverty all her life until she would sink again into its bosom.” For the moment her love is gone; “Henceforth she was only her husband’s helper to till the earth.” But at the end of the long day they are rejoiced by the five ridges they have created:

  All her dissatisfaction and weariness vanished from Mary’s mind with the delicious feeling of comfort that overcame her at the thought of having done this work with her husband. They had done it together. They had planted seed in the earth. The next day and the next, and all their lives, when spring came they would have to bend their backs and do it until their hands and bones got twisted with rheumatism. But night would bring its forgetfulness.

  As they walked home slowly Martin walked in front with another peasant talking about the sowing, and Mary walked behind, with her eyes on the ground, thinking.

  Despite the “thundering good review” O’Flaherty boasted he had got out of AE for The Black Soul, the book was not a success in England, and Garnett told him the critics had killed it for ten
years. According to O’Flaherty’s highly self-dramatizing memoirs, Shame the Devil, this rejection made him vow to return to Aran and never leave it again. But when he arrived, the mute fear he detected in the islanders told him that they thought he had been infected with the madness of prophecy, “the greatest sin in the eyes of the herd.” (In fact Aran merely regarded him as a writer of dirty books. Fr. Killeen’s manuscript history of Aran states that the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall took the side of the “saucepans” in the famous dispute over the Hill Farm lands, and “as a result developed a bitterly anticlerical attitude. Liam’s filthy novels illustrate the fact.”) His mother had died soon after his notorious escapade in the Rotunda—and because of it, he half-believed—and now he found that his father was in his dotage. He realized for the first time how his sister, now a teacher and lodging in Cill Rónáin, must have suffered, coming to look after the old man each evening after school:

  With horror I saw the house where I was born, falling rapidly into ruins…. Even more desolate than the house and its surroundings was my father himself, that doddering old man who shook hands with me and mumbled half-articulate words without knowing me…. Could this shapeless man be the handsome young love about whom I had heard at my mother’s knee in childhood?…When he tried to bow, he curtsied like a woman.

  Three days later O’Flaherty fled back to Dublin.

  O’Flaherty claims that he wrote his next and most successful novel, The Informer, with a cynical determination to make money and with an eye on Hollywood. Indeed John Ford made a famous film out of it, but O’Flaherty’s work in itself, a nightmarish condensation of his experience of revolutionary intrigue and the Dublin slums, is so convincingly visualized that it unreels like a black-and-white film in the skull. There followed a wide variety of writings: other novels with a background in Dublin and revolution, more short stories, a disabused account of a trip to Stalin’s Russia, a remarkably (for him) even-toned satire on this island of “priests, politians and prostitutes’ called A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland, the historical novel Famine, and a projection of his highly sexualized vitalist philosophy onto the Celtic otherworld called The Ecstasy of Angus.

  The best of his Aran novels, Skerrett, appeared in 1932. It opens with the energy of a wave rushing ashore: the arrival of the new schoolmaster, his meeting with the parish priest who is at first his ally in a civilizing mission, and later his rival for dominion, his seizing control of the undisciplined school by indiscriminate beatings, the death of his adored son and the lapsing of his pitiful wife into alcoholism and insanity—but then it falters and fidgets as a wave does at the top of its reach, too many events are included for the quite insufficient reason that they really happened, and the narrative only partially recovers itself for the mournful backwash, Skerrett’s defeat, his withdrawal to the book’s equivalent of Gort na gCapall, his final humiliation, and his posthumous triumph in the island’s memory. Skerrett is O’Flaherty’s old schoolmaster O’Callaghan, and the priest Moclair (an opulent psychological portrait, with the subtlety and sensuality of one of Titian’s cardinals) is Fr. Farragher, whom the young Liam would have had opportunity to study from below, as it were, while serving him at Mass. The topography of Aran is reproduced with an exile’s passionate fidelity, almost every step taken can be located in reality, every exclamation, groan and sigh uttered in the five little rooms of that “paltry cottage, one story and a half in height” still echoes through the Residence in Oatquarter.

  During this highly creative decade O’Flaherty suffered recurrent bouts of depression and nervous collapse. He had “married and reproduced his kind,” as he puts it, but in 1932, unable to write more, he left his wife and baby daughter and undertook the journey into himself described in Shame the Devil (1934). This is a troubling and perplexing document, a vividly dramatized account of a period of mental anguish, in which his former personalities split away and stand before him in accusation. These sub-selves and the various interlocutors met in his wanderings furiously debate civilization and barbarism, communism and fascism, nihilism and transcendence, Ghenghis Khan and Pythagoras, suicide and drink; they have in common only the absolutism of their convictions. It is difficult to attribute any particular opinion in the book to O’Flaherty “himself” precisely because of this proliferation of fragmentary selves, and sometimes one is glad of this; for instance when he is well embarked on something very unpleasant about the Jewish refugees he sees in Paris, he meets someone who praises the Hitlerites for driving them out of Germany, and he leaps to the defence of the Jewish race on the grounds that it produced Marx. The book resounds with Zarathustrian chest-thumping, and ends with the trumpet-call of “overcoming”: Man, through his intellect and creativity, is clawing his way up a wall or cliff towards the achievement of Godhead. As to Woman, the following “strange thought,” as he calls it, is at least left uncontradicted:

  But then, what is that creative urge other than a form of insanity, an over-balancing of the physical organism; more likely due to some “lack” in the organism than to the presence of some quality not possessed by the ordinary male. To females I deny this creative urge, except in so far as they feel the urge to create children. And that urge in itself is the outcome of a “lack” in their construction.

  Some homespun pre-Freudian version of this must have been what was occupying Mary’s mind on that walk home from her spring sowing. Woman is, by biological predestination, cyclical, subordinate, earthbound, a metaphysical peasant.

  Incorporated at the end of Shame the Devil is the short story with which he burst out of this spell of introspective sterility, “The Caress.” A party of Aran men mockingly accompany a dried-up bachelor in a drunken match-making expedition, breaking off to amuse themselves by galloping a mare up and down the beach. (The equation of a desirable woman with a mare, explicit in several of O’Flaherty’s works, is diffused into the structure of this one.) In the chaotic upshot, lusty youth and beauty find their way to each other in the purity of desire, the old snatch what ignominious pleasures they can, the ridiculous bachelor is dragged home like a sack.

  After the ’fifties O’Flaherty published nothing more and disappeared from the Dublin literary scene. Several of his novels had been banned by the so-called Free State’s Censorship Board on publication and were hard to obtain, and it was not until 1976 that Wolfhound Press began to republish them, a slow process which is still not complete. Nowadays however there is a tatty and much underlined copy of Dúil, his collection of short stories in Irish, in every school satchel, and the Aran clergy smile a sophisticated smile over The Tourist’s Guide.

  O’Flaherty’s returns to Aran were rare, but in 1980 he was persuaded to take a day-trip attended by an RTÉ film crew and an Irish Times photographer. At Gort na gCapall he was presented with an indefinite number of little relatives, all female as it happened, until he protested, “Show me the boys! I’m not interested in the girls!” Outside the house he was born in, he stopped to apostrophize a rock: “Bail ó Dhia ort, a chloch mhór; tá aithne agam ortsa!” (“The blessings of God on you, big stone; you I know!”). Portraits of O’Flaherty from all periods of his life show a virile, sombre and romantic personage; now the photographer had him pose against the grey waters of Port Mhuirbhigh, a craggy pyramid of accumulated experience. Long before this, he had written:

  I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked land where there is no frost in men’s bones. Swift thought and the swift flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of terror of hunted animals are to me reality. I have seen the sated buck horn his mate, and the wanderer leave his wife, in search of fresh bosoms, with the fire of joy in his eye.

  When the cameras had had their fill, he turned to the companion of his latter years and said “Come on, Kitty, let’s get the hell out of here!” It was his last time in Aran. He died four years later, at the age of eighty-eight.

  THE SHINING WAYS

  I have mentioned three ways of getting from Fearann an Choi
rce to Gort na gCapall; a passage in O’Flaherty’s Skerrett points out another. A villager called Ferris is walking home from the chapel with the schoolmaster:

  He left Skerrett a little to the east of the school and turned up towards his village of Cappatagle along a footpath over the crags. In his rawhide shoes he hardly made any sound moving over the flat rocks, that had been polished as smooth as glass by the impress of human feet for hundreds upon hundreds of years. He moved rapidly tall, lean, erect, with sudden jerks of his shoulders as he lengthened his stride now and again to cross a fissure between the rocks. His walk was like a dance, a movement perfect in rhythm and significant of some mystic bond between this beautiful human energy and the wild earth over which it passed.

  Skerret, so heavy and solid compared to this lithe and deer-like islander, struck the road with repeated thuds as he went west.

  Note the echo of Synge’s celebration of the sacrament of walking, in The Aran Islands, after the shoes he arrived in have been cut to pieces by the sharp fossils in the rock, and the natives make him a pair of rawhide shoes:

  At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island…. The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal …

  Two markers of Skerrett’s progressive alienation from the forces of modernity emanating from the island capital are his adoption of rawhide shoes and his building himself a cottage in Cappatagle as a potential retreat from the national school and the teacher’s residence. Cappatagle is Gort na gCapall (and Ferris, the islander still in communion with the wild earth and the hundreds upon hundreds of years, is Liam O’Flaherty’s father). Thus Gort na gCapall is represented as the home of natural good feeling in contradistinction from Cill Rónáin, while Fearann an Choirce is the field of conflict between the rival value-systems. When I first read the novel I was happy with this ideological situating of Gort na gCapall, which agreed what I myself felt about the place, but the geographical relationship between the villages puzzled me, for I thought I knew that there is no such footpath across the crags as O’Flaherty describes.