On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  That was just the beginning; once Brian Kelly got to him, Tomás’s output never flagged, his days with Brian forever bathed in a golden light of memory. Many gentlemen came to the island, he wrote to Flower after the war, but “no one of them ever looked after Tomás but one”; he didn’t mean Flower. In a letter he wrote to Brian himself, in 1921, he composed this lonely poem:

                 The nights are getting longer and the days are shortening

                 On the fields of the Great Blasket.

                 If only I could see Brian this year

                 On the fields of the Great Blasket.

                 It is very true that life is troubled

                 Every year since we parted from one another

                 But we will be reunited one day

                 On the fields of the Great Blasket.

  What breed of magic did Brian work on Tomás? What imagination, what urgent caring and love, did he lavish on Tomás that led to a succession of sustained creative acts culminating in two accomplished works of literature? How did he pull it out of him? How did he overcome whatever grip of assumption and expectation might otherwise have bound Tomás to the past and limited his aspirations? What did he bring to his friendship with Tomás that, for example, Robin Flower did not?

  Oddly, Brian’s own stunted career may have left him more receptive to Tomás’s potential as a writer, more approachable; compared with Flower—who, his biographer could write, was “exacting in his standards and not without his prejudices”—he was probably easier to please. When he came to the island in early 1917, he was twenty-seven. He had time on his hands. He had no job; he had apparently never held a proper job, was still rooting around for what to do with his life. Some accounts suggest he was unsettled, and lonely. He had, though, a degree of literary discernment. That was the verdict, anyway, of Irish nationalist leader and scholar Eoin MacNeill, cofounder of the Gaelic League, after Kelly’s death: “He had an instinct for the values of language,” MacNeill wrote of him, and “true literary taste.” Moreover, Kelly had only just awakened from his dark, values-challenging night of war, imprisonment, and treason, and may have come away with looser, less received notions of how the world was supposed to work. It took imagination, and a certain distaste for hierarchy and prejudice, to see Tomás as someone who, despite his want of education, could create written language that was beautiful, heartfelt, worthy.

  Before he left the island and returned to the mainland at the very end of 1917, Brian supplied Tomás with a stock of ink and paper, the oversized kind known as foolscap, and asked him to write bits and pieces of his experience and post them to him. Not once in a while, but regularly, so many pages at a clip. And, to seal the bargain, he bestowed on Tomás a gift, his own Waterman fountain pen.

  Tomás cherished that pen, according to his son Seán, a teenager when Kelly left the island. After dinner, around eight in the evening, Tomás would pull up to the table beside the fireplace. A lamp high on the wall, with two thick wicks and a mirror behind it, shed plenty of light. Tomás would draw up to the fire, light his pipe, “smoke a fine blast” of it, lay out his paper, and set to work in the quiet of the house, till maybe ten o’clock, or half past. And when he was finished, Seán recalled, “he’d dry it with a piece of cloth and a bit of paper and put it away. If a butterfly or a cricket in the corner as much as touched it he’d nearly kill them. Not a hand was to be laid on the pen in case it might be damaged.”

  Part of a letter, in Irish, from Tomás Ó Criomhthain to Brian Kelly, who more than anyone else encouraged him as a writer. (Illustration Credit ill.8)

  At first, Tomás wondered if maybe Brian wanted his scribblings merely to assure himself a steady stream of Irish, to keep up his language skills—or so he said later, out of who knows what false modesty. But he came to understand that Brian wanted the best for him. “He said it would be a pity if I were idle.”

  Tomás had told Brian about one day in his youth, on a turf-gathering expedition to the other side of the island, when he’d been waylaid by Seán Ó Duinnshlé, or Seán Dunlevy, an island poet who died in 1889. “Well, isn’t it a pity for you to be cutting turf on such a hot day,” said the poet. “Sit down a bit, the day is long, and it’ll be cool in the afternoon.” As the two of them lay out in the sun, Dunlevy recited a long, angry poem about a sheep killed by neighbors:

                 Aréir is mé go haoiblhinn

                 Is mé sínte ar mo thaoibh deas

                 ‘Sea tháinig aisling taoibh liom

                 Do sprioguigh mé thar meón …

  At the end, according to Tomás, Dunlevy asked if he had something to write it down with: “The poem will be lost if somebody doesn’t pick it up.” Tomás fished out paper and pencil and, in some crude English-based phonetic script, recorded it. Now, these many years later, Brian was making a similar plea. “I thought it a pity that [the life of the island] would die, unrecorded, and I felt that Tomás could make it live on paper for future generations.” He needed to write about the ordinary and everyday in island life.

  And so Tomás did, for five years the flow never abating. Sharply observed little stories, rarely more than a few paragraphs, a few hundred words at a pop; short gathered dialogues; moral lessons; bits of light comedy. The first to make it into Allagar na hInise (which represented only about a third of Tomás’s output), was dated April 1919. “Seamus and His Cravings,” it was called in the book’s English translation, Island Cross-Talk, and it describes men working in the fields who stop for a smoking break. Another tells of an island character, Tadhg the Joker, who hears a cuckoo but fears no one else has. A third pictures as many women gathered at the village well “as there are in Killarney.… They drowned the noise of the King and the noise of the ocean too.” We learn the price of sugar, flour, and tobacco, island blessings, ornate curses. Some stories carry a bitter tang, reflect the harshness of island life. Others are warm and wise. Still others express moments of idyllic beauty. And inevitably, right in the middle of things, stands Tomás.

  “The mountains were aglow with every hue,” he writes in the spring of 1920.

  A fire was burning here and there, tokens that people were cutting turf in various parts of the bog. The sea was calm with currachs coming and going. Seán Léan was rowing a currach, all by himself, as proud as the Prince of Wales in his stately yacht. The fish were lifting their heads out of the water, the birds singing their music and on land the people were stripped to their shirts, re-earthing the potatoes. Groups were coming down both sides of the hill with bundles of furze, and children raced east along the slope after morning school. Smoke was rising from every house at this time—dinner on the way surely.

  A vignette recorded a few months earlier suggests how the island’s “simple life” could be anything but. A neighbor walks by Tomás’s house and the two stop to chat. “I have the seven cares of the mountain on my shoulders,” Seán Shéamais tells him. “I need turf. I have sheep to dip. I need flour. I have a wall to repair. I have a shed to rebuild. I have a trawl-line to see to and a net to prepare.” He can’t decide what to do first and in frustration has “left the house now to have a day away from it all.” Tomás is not sympathetic.

  For all the iconic status granted Ó Criomhthain’s later work, The Islandman, some hold Island Cross-Talk to be more interesting. “I had forgotten that it contained such fine things,” observed George Thomson after reading it again in Irish many years after its first publication. “Yes, indeed, it does recall Irish nature poetry, and Shakespeare’s sonnets as well.” Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Tomás’s grandson, called
it “the great pearl of Tomás’s writing,” praising it for “nice little scenes beautifully assembled and polished,” like stones on the shore worked and polished by the waves.

  “A long-distance conversation with his friend Brian”—that’s how Blasket scholar Muiris Mac Conghail described it. But, although encouraged by Brian, Tomás probably never felt wholly free to express all that he saw and felt. His family, friends, and neighbors were crowded one on top of another in a tiny village at one end of an island. Everyone was a cousin of everyone else, the families entwined by marriage. He had gumption to write about them as honestly as he did, but there were limits. Tomás changed names. He held back. He didn’t always “manage to describe what was in his heart,” said Pádraig Ua Maoileoin. “There was no way that poor man could do that and live within that community. They lived [there] in each other’s shadow.”

  But what he did he did. “He was a mason as well as a fisherman,” Brian said of him, “accustomed to put up a house stone by stone. ‘Do the same with words as you would with stones,’ I used to say to him.” The pages of foolscap in Brian’s care piled up, 189 of them before Tomás was finished. An entry for April 1922 tells of a Clare man seeking an islander to improve his Irish, leading Tomás to mention Brian Kelly by name: “I don’t know whether anyone else in the country has as much written Irish in front of him as he has to hand.” And then he adds: “Wouldn’t it delight my heart to be able to read a book of my own before I died.”

  We enjoy here the hindsight of history, sure that Tomás’s efforts will bear fruit, that his work ultimately will get bound between covers and set before the world. But Tomás wished for this in 1922, and it would be many a long year of uncertainty and doubt, demanding more than anything Brian Kelly could give it, before he’d be able to pose for a photograph, leaning against the low stone wall in front of his house, with his own book in his own hands.

  Tomás’s stories were almost all rooted in the life of the island itself—acts of kindness, foolishness, or bravery, clever repartee, chatter at the village well, accidents and injuries, and always the changing weather. But news of the big world did sometimes make its way across Blasket Sound. Twice a week in good weather, the king brought mail by naomhóg. And the islanders were always much attuned to prices in the mainland markets, on whose whim their livelihoods depended. In June 1919, mackerel went for four shillings a hundredweight in Dingle, lobsters for a shilling a piece. In September, in the wake of a carters’ strike in Dún Chaoin that kept their catch from market, villagers groused that an ounce of tobacco cost almost a shilling, a new net four pounds. The island stood apart from the rest of Ireland—but not entirely so.

  In November 1919, the islanders learned that Éamon de Valera, a leader of the 1916 Rising, was in California, raising money for the nationalist cause. What would freedom mean? asked Séamaisín, in one of Tomás’s vignettes. “One crowned King of England and another crowned King of Ireland—that,” said Tomás, “is something you’ll never see, Diarmaid, so long as the sun is in the sky. If there is a crown on a King in Ireland it will be England’s crown he will have to wear.”

  “I hope you’re proved wrong!” said Diarmaid Bán.

  In the spring of 1920, Tomás noted the death of the Mayor of Cork, shot by British soldiers.

  Then, a little later: “A currach has come in with the news that every train in Ireland was halted.” Food was scarce. Men were dying in a hunger strike. Serious fighting was expected.

  July 1921 brought talk of home rule, following a truce in the Anglo-Irish War. Negotiations were to follow in London.

  In fact, the years of Brian’s visits and Tomás’s Island Cross-Talk stories corresponded to the most tumultuous time in Ireland’s recent history. The 1916 Rising, today an iconic moment in Ireland’s struggle to become itself, began when a few Irish republicans took over Dublin’s General Post Office and declared a provisional government. “Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”

  It was lofty talk, and most Irish didn’t at first pay it heed. But then the leaders of the rebellion were summarily executed by the British; martyrs all, they became. Public opinion shifted. A general election two years later brought loud calls for independence from the Crown. Elected Members of Parliament representing Ireland convened an Irish Parliament, or Dáil, and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The British refused to accept its legitimacy, touching off the War of Independence that ground on from January 1919 to July 1921. Among the British ranks were seven thousand soldiers, recruited by advertisements in Britain as willing to take on a “rough and dangerous task.” They were furnished with dark-green and khaki uniforms that led them to be called the Black and Tans. They proved notorious for their brutality.

  The truce in July 1921 was followed by a treaty in December. It called for the British to leave Ireland; Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom; members of a new Irish parliament to swear allegiance to the British Crown. Irish opinion split. Brother divided against brother. The resulting civil war between pro- and anti-treaty forces was as terrible as the War of Independence, took more lives, and in the scale of its atrocities was just as cruel.

  On the first day of January 1923, Tomás concluded Island Cross-Talk. “I am writing this at the start of the New Year in God’s name, and if we spent the Old Year well, may we spend the New Year seven times better.… Since our people throughout Ireland cannot understand each other, may God grant the grace of understanding to them before the year is long gone.”

  In May, a cease-fire ended the civil war.

  In August, the first elections of the Irish Free State were held.

  Late that month, George Thomson, straight from King’s College, Cambridge, and bound for the Blaskets, arrived in Dingle while elections were in progress, arousing the suspicions of Irish police.

  Chapter 4

  Nice Boy with a Camera

  [1923]

  A few months before he left for Ireland, George Thomson had finished up his first year at King’s College, among the oldest and most storied of Cambridge University’s two dozen or so colleges, founded in 1441. A scholarship student in classics, he occupied rooms looking out onto Chetwynd Court, adjacent to a classroom whose leaded-glass windows whispered church as much as college. Above him lived another classicist, below a budding mathematician admitted to King’s the same year he was. Both had gone to distinguished English public schools dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—one to Saint Dunstan’s, the other to Christ’s Hospital School, which counted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb among its “Old Blues.” Thomson himself was a product of the similarly venerable Dulwich College.

  George’s father, William, was a chartered public accountant, not especially wealthy, but hardworking. Family lore and correspondence establish him as the illegitimate son of a British judge long stationed in India, Sir William Markby, and a French peasant girl he’d met in his mid-thirties on a trip back to England before his marriage. William was taken in by a Scottish carpenter and his family in the north of England; Markby contributed to his care and, later, his education.

  Early in the new century, on June 6, 1900, thirty-seven-year-old William Thomson married Minnie Clements, twenty-three, daughter of a civil servant. On hearing of the impending wedding, Markby wrote William, signaling his approval—he knew the bride’s father—and sending him a check as a wedding present. George Derwent Thomson had two older sisters, but was the oldest of their three boys, born August 19, 1903; his middle name owed to the picturesque Derwentwater area of the Lake District, which his parents liked to visit. When the family sat for a photograph in the summer of 1920—all of them clustered around the dark-complexioned paterfamilias with his big drooping mustache, the women in their long summer dresses and high collars or chokers—the five children made for a fresh-faced, singularly handsome brood.


  In 1916, when he was about twelve, George set up a lending library out of his home, stocked with Macaulay and Ruskin, Dickens and Scott, Austen and Thackeray. The holdings of what he variously called his “Select Library,” or “ ‘Den’ Library of Famous Literature,” were listed in a hand-inked catalogue, broken down into biography, fiction, and poetry, peppered with charming little graphic devices, and setting out a formidably starched list of rules worthy of libraries anywhere. Books needed to be returned within fourteen days, though exceptions, George allowed, were permitted. His library, he advised readers, comprised “nearly one hundred & fifty volumes of all that is best in English and Foreign Literature and is always increasing in numbers.” Whether slavishly following the grown-ups or poking fun at them, young George was surely adept at verbal mimicry.

  West Dulwich, where George lived at the time he went up to King’s, was one of a cluster of towns bearing the name “Dulwich” spread across the far southern limits of London. He and his family lived in a two-story semi-detached house on Lovelace Road, one among a gentle sweep of similar houses with bay windows and stained-glass detailing built soon after the war; it was new, comfortable, and amply scaled, though hardly palatial. From the front windows, or anywhere in the house, really, you could look across the street to All Saints Church, a towering Victorian Gothic extravaganza in red brick with stone accents that, when going up in the 1890s, had for a while been envisioned as the Anglican cathedral for all south London. Though ultimately scaled back, it was hard to miss, for its arches, its flying buttresses, the sheer mass of it.

  Before moving to Lovelace Road, the family had lived nearer to Dulwich College, the old public school around which the Dulwich communities had grown up. It had been founded in 1619 by a well-known actor of his day, Edward Alleyn, a regular in Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and possibly Shakespeare’s, who made a big success of it as part-owner and manager of the Fortune Theatre, rival of the more famous Globe; Dulwich College graduates were called Alleynians. By George’s time, the school was housed in a cluster of buildings that had gone up during the Victorian era, all cloisters and spires. If it was not first among English public schools, like Eton or Harrow, Dulwich had a distinguished enough pedigree of its own. Along with the usual admirals, archbishops, and cricketers, author Raymond Chandler had gone there. So had Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. So had that quintessential observer of English manners, P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves novels, whom college records show in cricket flannels in 1900. Instead of the adolescent angst more characteristically suffered by writers in school, George Orwell once said of Wodehouse, Dulwich was for him “six years of unbroken bliss.”