On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Mícheál’s journal was one of at least three being kept on the island that year. Another, as we’ve seen, was that of Tomás Ó Criomhthain. The third, also likely at Brian Kelly’s behest, was that of Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, a round-faced woman just a bit older than George. “I have not seen the young Englishman since he came to the village,” she wrote on August 30. But just three days later, she and her friends were hanging out with him and another visitor, a Tipperary boy whom she described as “great fun and a joker.” Not so George. He was “very friendly altogether, but I don’t think he likes the joking at all.” At this point, he had little Irish, but she did her best to engage with him. Did he have a girlfriend? Eibhlín understood him to say that he did, one of recent vintage, that the girl was on the island, right there among them. Repeatedly, according to her diary entry, he said “he had a pain in his heart because of her.”

  How much of this flirtatious muddle owed to the language barrier, how much to nerves or youthful cluelessness? In any event, a severe toothache kept Eibhlín home for three weeks, and not until the day before his departure did George reappear in her journal. She wanted him to take a picture of her, but all morning it was foggy. That afternoon, though, the sky cleared, and George lined her up with five other young people. He snapped them all together, the low, grassy little island of Beginish just behind them, the mainland off in the distance.

  But George wanted one of just her, too. She grabbed her brother’s cap and planted it atop her head, brim backward. Don’t laugh, said George. She wore a dark sweater, gently scalloped at the neck, with tapered sleeves that stopped a few inches short of her wrist. A wisp of hair peeking out from under her cap blew in the breeze. A perfect little triangle of light settled on her cheek.

  She hoped George would send her the photo, she wrote in her journal that evening, “because I’ve never seen my own picture.”

  Eibhlín’s younger brother was named Muiris—or, in English, Maurice—and was just George’s age. His mother had died when he was just a babe. Whereas Eibhlín stayed on the island, he’d been shipped off to an orphanage on the mainland. When he was seven, in July 1911, his father brought him back. By that time, he spoke only English. But back on the island he absorbed Irish quickly and, by the time he met George, had taken his place among the other young Blasket fishermen. The two of them would become lifelong friends.

  Maurice loved teasing, pranks, and every kind of deviltry, and his joie de vivre, when it didn’t curdle over into depression, was the delight of his friends. He’d make up stories for the old women, a cousin remembers, tell them “that this girl was going to get married, that this fella had made a match. And they’d believe him.” One time, he dressed up in his dead grandmother’s old clothes, a ghost in her coat and shawl, leaving his sister and her friend to scream in terror. Another time, he loaded up George with such a weight of heather on his back that he keeled right over. “He was great fun,” said this cousin, Máire Mhic Ní Shúilleabháin, in 1993, and “great company for George.”

  A few years later, when Maurice described meeting George Thomson for the first time, he recalled encountering him on the path one bright sunny day, stopping for a smoke, and trying to talk across the language gap. Beware the laugh of an Englishman, Maurice had been brought up to think, but George was the happy exception. “George and I spent the next six weeks walking together on strand, hill, and mountain,” he wrote, “and after spending the time in my company he had fluent Irish.” If he did, of course, it was because he worked at it; that first summer, he’d endlessly repeat Maurice’s “words under my teeth before I could understand them.” On his part, Maurice saw in George a rare devotion to Irish. “If everyone in Ireland were as eager as he for the language, the people of old Ireland would be Gaels again without much delay.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Maurice offering a lightness of being that was welcome balm to George’s overheated intellectuality. Later, Maurice would have much to learn from George. Now George had everything to learn from him.

  Islanders seated on the wall are, left to right, Seán Ó Criomhthain, Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, Micheál Ó Gaothín, and, melodeon on his lap, Maurice O’Sullivan. (Illustration Credit ill.9)

  One hot day that first summer, the two young men and Maurice’s father hiked, “happy as children,” to the back side of the island to retrieve two sheep. At a gloriously situated spot along the hillside about two miles west of the village, looking south to the Skelligs, they sat down to rest. Were the Blaskets much different from London? Maurice’s father asked. They were, said George.

  “It is a pity I am not in the city of London now,” said Maurice, “for it is a fine view I would have.”

  George, his unlined young face scrunched up into a frown at the idea, looked at Maurice sharply. “Indeed, you would not,” said he, as Maurice told it later, “but the heat killing you and your health failing for want of air. And as for the view, you would be looking at the same thing always—people walking the streets with nothing in them but only the breath, and believe me if one of them could see this view out before me now, he would give his riches for it.”

  That first summer, George came under the spell of Maurice’s grandfather, Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin—Eugene O’Sullivan, or “Daideo,” as George came to know him. He was a heavily built man of about seventy-five with a good singing voice, a bent for argument, and a head full of traditional lore. Maurice delighted in his company, as did George. Years later, while visiting China, George met a frail old professor who chanted a Chinese poem for him, head thrown back, eyes shut, the same deep feeling in his voice, and that was all it took to transport him back to the Blaskets. “If I had been listening with eyes closed, having forgotten where and when it was,” he’d write, “I should have imagined that I was listening to Maurice’s grandfather.” Just before he returned to England, it was Daideo who said to him, “Casta na daoine ar a cheile ach ni chasta na croic ar na sleibhte”: “Men meet but not the hills or mountains,” a nod to the tenacity of human connection. “I never took much notice of it,” George would write in a letter to a friend many years later, “beyond thinking it was rather an odd idea, not more odd however than other Irish proverbs.” But then he encountered Daideo’s parting remark in other languages, countries, and contexts, its layers of ambiguity never for him quite resolved.

  “George left us today,” Eibhlín wrote in her journal on September 30, “and we are rather lonesome after him.… Few people have ever left this place without feeling lonesome and George was near to tears.”

  Late one afternoon two weeks later, she went down the hill for the mail, which hadn’t reached the island in a week, hoping for a book she was expecting. It hadn’t come, but what had come was a letter for her in Irish, in an unfamiliar hand. When she tore it open, a picture slipped out. She looked at it and laughed. It was the one George had taken of her, cap turned backward, sent to her from England.

  Back in Cambridge, George had spacious new rooms at King’s. He was in Bodley’s Court now, a range of four-story stone buildings at the far end of the college from the great chapel frequented by the tourists—up a winding stone staircase, leaded windows at each landing, to the top floor. From a bank of windows in the big front room he could look down over the Backs, the great green expanse between the university colleges and the river Cam, spanned by little King’s Bridge. It was the iconic Cambridge scene. He was back in this cradle of scholarship, of privileged people with time to read, write, and think. It was the world for which he had been groomed and where he excelled. He might have been pardoned for thinking those six weeks on the island had never happened.

  But they had happened. They had changed him. He was different now. “I went to the Blasket Island in order to learn the language,” he would write, “but when I got there I found something even more significant and attractive—the people that spoke it.”

  After that first visit, he would go back again and again, once a year, for ten or eleven years running. At
summer’s end, he would return to his life as student and scholar. At Christmas, he’d send the islanders gifts, such as chess sets—he’d taught several of his friends to play. Or a toy railroad for the Maidhc Léan children that was soon monopolized by their father. And then, each summer (and one Christmas, too, perhaps in 1925), he was back. Year by year, his ties to the island strengthened. His friendships with the islanders deepened. His Irish ripened. In the end, Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán had to notice: “George had better Irish than Muiris himself,” meaning Maurice O’ Sullivan, “indeed than all the rest of us.”

  Over the years, his head brimmed over with memories.

  Rowing in to the island and out in a canvas canoe, the waves lapping at its sides, the rhythmic slap of the narrow-bladed oars.

  Pulling the table up to the fire at Maurice’s house, a book between them.

  Children lined up on the beach for a photograph, the girls in their dark pinafores, demurely kneeling in the sand, the older ones hamming it up for the camera.

  The boy who cut himself while digging and tried to staunch the blood with a fistful of dirt.

  The old woman at the village well who’d filled her buckets and now stood looking out to sea, lamenting the loss of seven sons to America.

  Sitting by the fire in Peig Sayers’s house, Peig lapsing into a poetic lament that for all the world could have been a Shakespearean sonnet.

  Always, stories rising up, unbidden, at the scantiest excuse, from everyone on the island, Fenian tales drawn from Irish tradition, prose that verged on poetry, poetry prose.

  And then, of course, there were the moonlit nights, and the music, and the dancing, high on the cliffs above the pounding surf.…

  Especially after it was abandoned and reduced to ruins, it would be easy to imagine that the Blasket community had been around since antiquity, or at least since the Middle Ages, or at any rate was steeped in ageless tradition. But the settlement of the Blaskets was recent enough, the generations going back to the early settlers few enough that creation myths of a sort around this or that aspect of village life sometimes took hold. One of these concerned its music.

  The way Seán Ó Criomhthain liked to tell the story later, an islander, Mike, one day crossed the sound, hoodwinked a Dingle man into letting him take a fiddle he didn’t pay for, brought it back to the island, and learned to play it. “That was the first fiddle of their own which the islanders had.” They called it a sliver, for its shape. Ultimately, Mike left for America, but not before two other islanders learned to play his fiddle and saved up to buy their own. Soon, “all the lads on the Island were becoming interested in the fiddle and some of them set about making one.” For strings, they used fishing-net cord; if the instrument showed special promise, they’d contrive to get proper strings for it. “Within a few years there was a sliver in every house in the village … [and not] a boy or girl on the Island who couldn’t knock some smattering of music out of it.”

  Following the fiddle onto the island was the melodeon, or “box,” a small accordion introduced early in the twentieth century and catching on quickly. At the height of the melodeon craze, nightly dances sometimes kept the young people up almost till morning. “They had little else to do during the day,” Seán seemed to grumble, “except to bring a couple of loads of turf from the hill and dress themselves up for the night.” Some fine evenings, they’d bring a visiting box-player over to the Spur at Seal Cove, near the northern tip of the island. Out of sight of the village itself, it was large enough and level enough to accommodate two dance sets at once and, said Seán, “many other activities if you so wished!”

  In the village itself, it was often Peig Sayers’s house where the furniture would be cleared for the evening’s dance. “The room would be lit by a turf fire, and an oil lamp, and a tiny red lamp before the holy picture,” remembered Robin Flower’s daughter Síle, a teenager at the time, who visited the island during some of the same years George did. The room was full to bursting, the boys “crouching on their haunches,” ready to jump up and ask a girl to dance before the music started. “And then it was very, very lively dancing, reels and sets.” At evening’s end, in the blackness of the night, they’d wend their way home. “The boys were dying to get a kiss from us. We thought this was terrific at the age of fourteen or fifteen,” she remembered. “Finally we arrived home, and this howling mob of boys would be outside the window, waving through the window and blowing kisses at us.”

  It was impossible not to be moved by weeks or months spent in a setting so alive, in the shelter of the darkness, to the lilt of song, the whine of the fiddle, the drone of the melodeon, the play of dancing feet, the abandoned pulse of young bodies. No visitor was immune to it. “The sharp sounds of their heel irons are still ringing in my ears,” wrote Marstrander of the dancers. Synge wrote of four Blasket couples dancing a polka:

  The women, as usual, were in their naked feet, and whenever there was a figure for women only there was a curious hush and patter of bare feet, till the heavy pounding and shuffling of the men’s boots broke in again. The whirl of music and dancing in this little kitchen stirred me with an extraordinary effect. The kindliness and merry-making of these islanders, who, one knows, are full of riot and severity and daring, has a quality and attractiveness that is absent altogether from the life of towns.

  Robin Flower captured the dancing in verse:

                 “Rise up now, Shane,” said a voice, and another:

                 “Kate, stand out on the floor”; the girls to the men

                 Cried challenge on challenge; a lilt in the corner rose

                 And climbed and wavered and fell, and springing again

                 Called to the heavy feet of the men; the girls wild-eyed,

                 Their bare feet beating the measure, their loose hair flying.…

  Now, the island, one needs reminding about now, was not some easy-living tropical paradise. It was a hard and unforgiving place, difficult to wrest a living from. Clinging to its precipitous cliffs, rowing and sailing over its roiling waters, you couldn’t long forget the essential seriousness of life. Marriage mattered; so did birth, so did death, and not much else. The islanders, many said, possessed dignity and poise, heroic grace. Many of them tapped a deep religiosity. Given the pleas to Jesus and Mary marking everyday Blasket speech, it would be possible to imagine the island as pious or prudish. And many islanders did hold firmly to the tenets of their faith and conform to every standard of decorum between the sexes.

  All this was true.

  But also true was that the Great Blasket was an island. And islands are famously places of freedom and abandon, of rules relaxed, of stricture and release held in balance. Synge’s Playboy idea—a man kills his father and is hailed for his manly daring—was hatched on an island, in Aran. The Blaskets inspired in him another idea, for a play set on an “island with a population of wreckers, smugglers, poteen makers … startled by the arrival of a stranger.” No priest inhabited the island; one was rowed in for the Stations, to take confessions and say Mass at the school, but that was just once a year. Otherwise, the church, its institutions and representatives, could seem far distant indeed. “While life was reasonably good there was little talk of priests or ministers,” recalled Seán Ó Criomhthain. “The ordinary person doesn’t spend his life talking about religion.” The great litanies of the ought-and-should could seem remote, mainland verities not so much rejected as forgotten or ignored.

  Sometime before George came to the island, an English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, his collection of lubricious tales of love and sensuality set in medieval Florence, found its way to the island; George once saw a tattered copy of an English edition of it in Maurice’s house. Using Irish names and place names, Mícheál O’Guiheen would trans
late several of Boccaccio’s stories into Irish, leaving scholars to debate just how much, or how little, he’d cleaned them up. Delving into the story, folklorist Bo Almqvist concluded that O’Guiheen, very simply, was no prude, that the appeal of the Boccaccio stories for him and other islanders lay in their similarity to Irish folktales that could be “every bit as earthy and bawdy as any Boccaccian tale.”

  “On our way back to the village,” wrote Synge of what he observed following an evening’s dancing,

  the young girls ran wild in the twilight, flying and shrieking over the grass, or rushing up behind the young men and throwing them over, if they were able, by a sudden jerk or trip. The men in return caught them by one hand, and spun them round and round four or five times, and then let them go, when they whirled down the grassy slope for many yards.

  Marstrander, likewise, recounted the flirtatious horseplay that sometimes accompanied these evening dances.

  The girls are shouting at the men. Earg, earg, stand up, and dance, but they are standing seriously and careless, as if they didn’t hear anything. Then the girls shower them with jokes and sarcasms, threats and rude stories. They shall be teased to dance, just as the heroes of old are geared for battle with abuse from his friend. No method is forbidden. No secret is taboo. “Get up Seán, or will I tell them who put her white arms around your neck yesterday, get up Seán.” Seán got up very fast, blushing.…

  It was a small island, but it wasn’t as if you couldn’t slip away—you could. The village itself might seem claustrophobic, a few minutes’ walk from one end to the other. But its few houses were really just a speck of urban adornment to an otherwise wild countryside of pasturage, mountain, bog, and cliff; it could be two hours over the back of the island to Ceann Dubh, or Black Head, at the island’s far southwestern tip. To any red-blooded island boy or girl, there were plenty of less traveled areas to get away to. Close by was the White Strand, with rock-sheltered corners lying behind the cliffs, invisible to the prying eyes of the village. Or else a couple “might hop in over a fence or up the hill a bit,” remembered Seán Ó Criomhthain of his youth. “They’d go some place where people didn’t usually go.” The island was too small, making it hard to find such a spot? “Not at all. It was easy to find a place there if you wanted to.” Young men he termed “the real experts … brought the girls up the hill.”