On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Before George Thomson, of course, others had crossed the three miles of Blasket Sound that separated the Great Blasket from the mainland, or had explored the smaller rocky islands, mostly uninhabited, that were its neighbors, the so-called Lesser Blaskets. They recorded bird sightings. They took geological samples. Most never said much about their visits—or, left unaccountably unmoved by the awful splendor of the islands, perhaps had nothing much to say in the first place. Revenue agents of the English king occasionally appeared; at least once, the story goes, islanders pelted them from the overhanging cliffs with rocks, chasing them back to their boats. Protestant missionaries visited, too, determined to turn islanders away from dark Papist ignorance.

  In 1843, Mrs. D. P. Thomson, wife of a Protestant cleric on the mainland (and unrelated to George Thomson), visited the Great Blasket. It was difficult even to get onto the island, she wrote in a book published a few years later, since one must “take advantage of the swell of the wave and leap on the rocks” from the shifting, unsteady platform of the boat. Once on land, she “was more affected than I have the power to describe, by witnessing human nature reduced to the savage state it is among these islanders, within almost ear-shot of religious light and civilization.” Mrs. Thomson told of local women and children crowded into the schoolroom, “chewing seaweed incessantly,” who pressed lengths of it “into their mouths with their thumbs in a most savage manner, and spat about unceremoniously at will; they touched my dress, turned me round and round to look at every separate article, laughed with admiration at my shoes and gloves, kissed and stroked my old silk gown.” After submitting to this inspection, she proceeded to speak to them of Jesus Christ.

  In 1892, Jeremiah Curtin arrived on the island. An American from Milwaukee, Harvard-trained, Curtin was a linguist visiting West Kerry in search of folklore. New Year’s Day found him in Tralee. He took the train to Dingle, came around through Ventry and the neighboring villages, visited Ballyferriter, and finally was rowed out to the Great Blasket. There he found “perhaps 20 straw-thatched cabins, the thatch held in place by a network of straw ropes fastened down with stones.” Piles of manure stood in front of each, cattle being kept in them at night. Curtin was in search of Gaelic myths he’d been assured he’d be able to gather like flowers from a field. But the pickings were slim: “I care more about getting the price of a bottle of whiskey than about old stories,” one man told him. Curtin soon left, gleaning for his trouble only a photo or two of the thatched-roof village he had too briefly visited.

  The first to see the island with new eyes and tell the world about it was John Millington Synge. This preternaturally gifted playwright, this quiet brooding literary force, discovered on the island in 1905 something of the luminous spirit later visitors would find as well. He was thirty-four at the time and had less than four years to live. But in his short life, he’d already gained stature as a notable figure of the literary revival then washing over Ireland. Three of his plays had been produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin or its predecessor companies. In the time he had left he would write another, The Playboy of the Western World, swollen with such luscious language that, by one estimation, it added up to “the most fertile and vigorous poetic dialogue written for the stage since Shakespeare.” Its incidents, characters, and speech were rooted in the spoken Irish Synge heard on his visits to Ireland’s west, including the Blasket. Gone, from his rendering of the island, was the ugly primitivism marking earlier accounts. He found instead among the peasants there an abiding grace and dignity.

  Those earlier visitors had come to the island lugging heavy loads of cultural baggage … and so did Synge. For, by the time of his visit in 1905, the Blaskets weren’t just islands in the farthest western reaches of Ireland. They were The West, which had come to stand for the deepest, purest wells of Irish nationhood.

  In those days Ireland, or Eire, didn’t exist as an independent state; Ireland was British. To any self-respecting Irishman of republican sympathies, of course, Ireland was never British, merely occupied by them. Still, for seven hundred years Ireland had been variously invaded, conquered, and colonized by England, and for centuries England’s reigning monarch reigned over Ireland as well. Since the capitulation following the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim in 1690 and 1691, feeling against the English ran deep. The Catholic-Protestant divide that had split Europe since the Reformation played out in Ireland, too. Catholics were barred from voting, serving in the Irish parliament, or sometimes even practicing their religion. Protestant landlords owned most of the land, evicting impoverished Catholic tenants at their whim. The murderous Famine of the 1840s, though set off by crop failure, had been exacerbated by English indifference. Periodically, resistance to British rule took violent form, but more often it was purely political, as in the nineteenth-century struggle for “home rule,” Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, and various republican brotherhoods and kindred nationalist groups.

  In the closing years of the nineteenth century, fresh interest in the Irish language further confounded Ireland’s tortured relationship with England. Late in the same year as Jeremiah Curtin’s visit to the Blaskets, on November 25, 1892, Douglas Hyde went before the newly formed Irish National Literary Society in Dublin and delivered a lecture that one critic, Declan Kiberd, would call “Ireland’s declaration of cultural independence.” It bore the title “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.”

  A thirty-two-year-old linguist, son of a Church of Ireland rector, Hyde had grown up hearing old people in his native County Roscommon speaking Irish, and through them glimpsed a rich Gaelic culture he’d never encountered among his own family and their friends. That Ireland, he declared now, was dying. Ireland’s problems lay in its rejection of all things Gaelic, and its embrace—sometimes willing, sometimes forced—of everything English. In Anglicizing themselves, he declared, the Irish “have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.” It was, he asserted, “our Gaelic past which, though the Irish race does not recognize it just at present, is really at the bottom of the Irish heart.”

  The Ireland of the seventh century, he reminded his listeners, was “then the school of Europe and the torch of learning”; the Dark Ages had been brightened by the wit and intellect of Irish monks, bards, and scholars. But over the past century, Ireland had become cut off from its roots. Irish had fallen into disuse. O’Mulligans had taken English names like Baldwin, O’Hennesys were now Harringtons, Eibhlins were Ellens. Pipers and fiddlers were disappearing. The harp, long a symbol of Ireland, was becoming extinct. Irish jerseys had given way to shoddy cast-off clothes from Manchester and London.

  Needed was, for example, to “set our faces against this aping of English dress, and encourage our women to spin and our men to wear comfortable frieze suits of their own wool, free from shoddy and humbug.” Irish autonomy demanded sweeping de-Anglicization. “We must strive to cultivate,” declared Hyde, “everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because … this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core.”

  The following year, Hyde helped establish the Gaelic League, which for the next two decades would champion a revival of Irish culture and language. Forget politics, Hyde as much as said; the core of Irish identity lay in the Irish language. “My own ambition,” he would write later, was “language as a neutral ground upon which all Irishmen might meet.” Through the last years of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth, the League’s influence spread. “Whatever it was ten years ago,” a Dublin professor wrote in 1907 of Gaelic, “it is very much alive now.… You see Gaelic inscriptions over the shops, Gaelic on the street labels, Gaelic in advertisements, a Gaelic column in newspapers.… The Gaelic League is everywhere.” Irish youth might not much care for French or German, but during these years they did for Gaelic, for Irish: “They want to learn Irish, as they want no other language on earth.” And when leaders
of the language movement looked around Ireland for exemplars of all that was Irish at its purest and best, they looked fixedly west.

  Think of Ireland as two hundred miles across and three hundred miles north-to-south and you won’t be far wrong. Across this breadth, however, its population is, and was, distributed unequally. Its two largest cities, Belfast and Dublin, both lay off inlets to the Irish Sea and faced east, to Scotland and England. The weight of its bigger, stronger English neighbor was felt unevenly across the country, too. The English first invaded in the twelfth century, expanding and colonizing from east to west, bringing with them English place-names, English families, English castles. After the Reformation, Protestantism made its strongest inroads in the east, encroaching but feebly in the west. The English language, meanwhile, squeezed out Irish until, by the 1850s, little of the native language could be heard outside parts of Counties Donegal, Mayo, Galway, and Kerry, all in the west.

  So by the time our story begins in the early years of the twentieth century, “Ireland” meant, roughly speaking, two Irelands—split not along the familiar divide of Northern Ireland and the south of recent political history, but along an east-west axis. The east was overwhelmingly English-speaking, included substantial Protestant minorities, and boasted big cities that looked like those of England and Scotland, with all their coal dust, clamor, and corruption. The poor, rural, mostly Roman Catholic west, with its Irish-speaking enclaves, was typically seen as a throwback to a simpler, purer past that elsewhere in Ireland had been overrun by the noisy and the new.

  Here, though, could be found the precious seed that one day might be planted in an Irish political soil more hospitable to its growth. To Irish nationalists, historian Kevin Whelan would observe, the rural west was “the authentic Ireland, a materialization of an unsullied primordial past,” the Irish-speaking Aran or Blasket islander its exemplar. To another scholar, Kevin Martin, the western islands were “part of the creation myth” of a new Ireland aborning.

  And this was The West that, with its distinctive dialects, drew John Millington Synge.

  Born in 1871, Synge had come out of the Dublin Ascendancy; that is, his family was long and deeply Irish, but Protestant—landed gentry from Wicklow on his father’s side. The son of a barrister, he’d studied languages at Trinity College, Dublin, at the time virtually reserved for Protestants. Settling on becoming a musician, he lived in Germany, Italy, and France. In Paris, at the Sorbonne, he came under the influence of one of Europe’s foremost Celtic scholars, H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, who nurtured in him a love of Irish. Also in Paris, he met William Butler Yeats, already a major literary figure, who recognized his talents and, in the familiar story, bestowed on him among the most famous hard nubs of literary advice ever offered and accepted. “Go to the Aran Islands,” he told Synge. “Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”

  Playwright John Millington Synge, around the time he visited the Great Blasket in 1905 (Illustration Credit ill.1)

  Before Synge went to the Blaskets, then, he went to Aran, three remote islands in Galway Bay, across from the mainland wilderness of Connemara. He made his first trip there in 1898, being rowed out the first time in a curragh. “It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction,” he wrote later, “to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.” Between then and 1902, he returned to Aran four times, for four and a half months all told, his mastery of Irish improving with each visit.

  Synge was a swarthy, thick-necked man with a great shock of dark hair and a bushy mustache, and had all the hallmarks of healthy, virile manhood to him. But in fact he was sick much of his life—with asthma in his youth and then Hodgkin’s disease, which began to afflict him in his late twenties and would kill him before he turned forty. He was, though, an energetic walker, tramping across the hills and down the dusty roads. He’d go up and talk to anybody he happened to meet. Yet he was essentially shy, his seeming gregariousness more spur to the stories and speech of others than sign of any great need to speak himself. As every portrait of him somehow suggests, his was a silent absorbing presence. To the Aran Islanders, one critic noted, Synge was “so strange and silent that no one actually knew him.” His gift was to listen through those deep moody eyes, and transmute the language of fisherman and peasant, weaver and tramp, into art. First, in 1903, came In the Shadow of the Glen, a grim one-act comedy in which an old peasant feigns death to test his wife’s fidelity. Then Riders to the Sea, a one-act tragedy exhibiting, by one estimation, “an almost Aeschylean starkness and grandeur.”

  Synge’s accounts of his Aran visits had not yet been published when, early in the new century, he was drawn to another Irish-speaking enclave in the west. Separated from one another by broad ranges of English-speaking Ireland, the last remaining Irish-speaking areas, each more and more unto itself, had split into distinctive dialects. There was Donegal Irish to the north. And Connemara Irish, which is what the Aran Islanders spoke, down the coast. And Munster Irish in the southwest, which included County Kerry. The differences were notable. Most spoken Irish, for example, stressed first syllables; Munster sometimes shifted emphasis to the last. Words known in Ulster were unknown elsewhere. The country’s zealous language enthusiasts exhorted Irish-learners to explore them all.

  Synge felt the tug. His brother Robert had recommended a Kerry family with whom he could stay, with whom he might unearth a new bounty of Irish stories and Irish expression. During parts of four summers Synge would visit Kerry; these yielded dialogue, plot material, and idiosyncrasies of language that would inform his later work. And on one of these trips, in July 1905, he wrote to Willie Long of Ballyferriter, County Kerry, at the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, seeking a place more pristinely Irish yet.

  If there was anything like a local aristocracy in this far-off, underpopulated little town, Long—well off, loquacious, a bit of bluster to him—was it. He was a forty-six-year-old father of four sons and two daughters, a well-connected merchant, innkeeper, and schoolteacher. Local ordinance apparently barred teachers from keeping inns. So, to get around it, the low-ceilinged, two-story little place on the main street of Ballyferriter over which he presided bore the name of his brother instead.

  Three shillings sixpence per night, or twenty-four shillings a week—that’s what Synge’s stay would cost, Long wrote him on stationery bearing his name and address in a riot of different typefaces. “Of course my place is not an out-and-out Hotel but I guarantee you quiet, clean & good accommodation.… The worth of your money you’ll have.” As to Synge’s abiding concern, Long reassured him: “Myself & household all speak Paddy’s language still, so there is no need of any cottage for getting it.” In other words, Synge could get his fill of Irish right there in Willie Long’s parlor.

  The gateway to the Dingle Peninsula was Tralee, a town of about ten thousand lying most of the way southwest across the country from Dublin. Forty miles of formidable mountains stood between it and Ballyferriter, but by 1891, a little narrow-gauge steam railroad had been slipped in among the mountains. It boasted the steepest track of any line in Ireland or England. The train never scuttled along faster than about twelve miles an hour, and often broke down. But for the first time it linked Dingle and its nearby villages, including Ballyferriter, Dún Chaoin, and the Blaskets themselves, to the rest of Ireland.

  In Tralee, Synge found a boy to carry his bag across town to the depot, scene of “a confused mass of peasants struggling on the platform with all sorts of baggage.” Synge’s narrow car was soon “filled with sacks of flour, cases of porter, chairs rolled in straw and other household goods.” Under way, he overheard a woman in a shawl tell of a son who had left for England, leaving his elderly father bereft in loneliness. “ ‘Ah, poor fellow!’ she said. ‘I suppose he will get used to it like another; and wouldn’t he be worse off if he was beyond the seas in Saint Louis, or the tow
ns of America.’ ”

  Long had written Synge that he’d arrange to pick him up where the chugging little train dropped him off in Dingle. Sure enough, when Synge arrived he found a cart, pulled by a tall mare, to take him the ten miles or so to Ballyferriter. The driver needed a little while to hoist his bags aboard and fasten them, but finally they were on their way, over and through the hills rising behind Dingle. “As the night fell the sea became like a piece of white silver on our right; and the mountains got black on our left, and heavy night smells began to come up out of the bogs.”

  From Long’s on August 4, 1905, Synge wrote Lady Augusta Gregory, his aristocratic patron in Dublin. Like Douglas Hyde and Synge himself an upper-class Protestant, Lady Gregory had grown up in a great house outside Dublin, where her playmates among the Irish Catholic help piqued her fascination with their world. Later, she would collect folklore and write plays, most of them serviceable if not inspired. But it was in funding and nurturing the Abbey Theatre, dedicated to making a national theater shot through with Irish sensibility, that she became best known. And Synge was one of her eternal triumphs. It was largely through her energies that his first two plays were produced, garnering much acclaim. Now, in Ballyferriter, her protégé wrote to her. He was “in the centre of the most Gaelic part of Munster,” making progress with a dialect that, after Aran, seemed almost foreign. “I have realized that I must resuscitate my Irish this year or lose it altogether, so I am hard at work.” Near Ballyferriter, lined up along the northeastern flank of a wide-necked peninsula, rose the companionable little prominences known as the Three Sisters. Jutting into the Atlantic just to the west stood spectacular Sibyl Head. One day, Synge climbed it, arriving “suddenly on the brow of a cliff, with a straight fall at one’s feet of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place of indescribable grandeur.” Why did anyone remain in Dublin, London, or Paris, he mused, when it would be better “to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air.”