On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  It is many years later, and George Thomson is being interviewed for a television documentary. He’s on the mainland, sitting on the grass as he speaks, the island rising across the sound behind him. He is an old man now, and he remembers: “There were lots of young people on the island” in the 1920s. Dances were frequent. On nights when the weather was bad, they’d gather at Peig Sayers’s house. “There was a good floor there, as it was one of the new houses”—concrete, not dirt. Or “sometimes we’d have a great night in the schoolhouse. We’d dance all night.”

  Among reminiscences delivered in George’s memory at the time of his death was one from Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, a Roman Catholic priest reared in West Kerry who’d befriended him. “I am certain that dear George is dancing steps in Paradise with the people of the Island now,” he wrote, “and that he has the sets better than he had them long ago.” He was probably not a naturally gifted dancer, though “he couldn’t have been as unmusical as he seemed,” suggested daughter Margaret years later, perhaps influenced by standards set by her mother, a musician. But on the island, raw energy trumped any natural want of ability. Sometimes George, Maurice, and one or two other men could be seen dancing on the beach, pipes hanging from their mouths all the while. One old islander, Seán Ó Guithín, remembered George with his jacket off, stripped to his shirt. Oh, he said, “he could step it out with the best.”

  Sometimes, on moonlit nights, the young people would drift from the village en masse, cut across the northeast face of the island, beside the fields above the White Strand, to Speir Chuas na Rón, Seal Cove, the brink of which fell precipitously to the surf crashing up against the rocky cove below. As he remembers those nights of dancing there now, George sits propped on one elbow, his other hand idly fingering a workman’s cap by his side, an errant wisp of hair slipping down across his forehead.… And then, from that wizened old face, a secret smile breaks free.

  “I suppose he had a few girls on the island?” one of his old friends is asked.

  “Oh, he did indeed!” says he. “There was one girl in particular.…”

  It couldn’t have been long after his arrival on the island that he met Mary Kearney, which is how he referred to her when he mentioned her in a letter written years later. Máire Pheats Tom Ó Cearnaigh was her proper island name: Mary, daughter of Tom Kearney’s son Pat. She lived in a new house at the top of the village with her parents, brothers, and sisters.

  She’d entered the world in 1908 through the ministrations of the island midwife, Méiní Dunlevy, in a house toward the middle of the village that shared a stone wall with the island school. When she was about five, her growing family—by now she had two more sisters and a younger brother along with older siblings—moved to the upper village; she may have remained there briefly in her grandparents’ coddling care before moving up the hill. Her family’s new Congested District house had a concrete floor, wooden stairs to a second level, a slate roof, and a back door (atypical for the village) facing the hill behind it. A little road—a wide path, really—passed in front, leading in a lazy arc to the north side of the island. Below, the surf billowing onto the White Strand seemed somehow close by; only a few fields stood between them and the sea. On a fair day, Beginish, the nearest of the Lesser Blaskets, small, flat, and green, punctuated by scattered rocks, could seem practically out the front door.

  Island children. Mary Kearney, George Thomson’s girl, is fourth from the left in the middle row. (Illustration Credit ill.10)

  Mary’s fisherman father, known as Peats Tom, a trim, handsome man with thick eyebrows and a big fluffy mustache, was apparently the soft touch of the family. One time at dinner, the children were horsing around, making a god-awful racket, when their mother, the sterner of the two, decreed silence. So there they sat at the table, silent, obedient, stifling their giggles … until Peats Tom stage-whispered a barely audible “tee-hee” that reduced them to hilarity all over again.

  Mary’s younger brother, Seán, remembered her as a sweet, lively young thing who delighted in the animals of the island. A day off from school and she’d be roaming the hillside to play with the sheep and lambs. As a child, she and her friends played with homemade dolls that used hair made from frayed rope. She may always have had something of a religious bent; her brother more than once found her on her knees, praying to the Virgin Mary. One day, a framed image of the Virgin fell off the wall onto her as she slept. The glass broke, but Mary came away unscathed. This, anyway, is the story Seán told much later.

  When Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow visited the island in 1920, he photographed Mary. She was twelve then, and wore the white pinafore with lacy decoration most of the girls her age wore. When von Sydow returned in 1924, he again took a picture of her, this time in a dark dress, signifying a young woman, no longer a girl. Mary had brown eyes, thick black brows set below a high forehead, and black hair. But her smile! She smiled as if she couldn’t hold it back, and wouldn’t want to, and why would you ever? In an audio recording made when she was much older, her laugh is fresh, strong, and youthful.

  She was fifteen when George arrived on the island, and his bewitchment may have come early. A photo of the two of them together survives from that first summer. They sit in the sun, their backs against a “ditch,” or embankment, lined up for the camera beside two other islanders. Mary squints, her head cocked a little to the side, her thick hair pulled back into a bow, hands set demurely on her lap. George, beside her, looks less like the young man he really isn’t yet, more the boy he still is. He wears a suit of what appears to be heavy wool, a jacket button cinching him at the waist. He looks as no Blasket boy ever looked, as if he were just off the boat from college, which is about what he was. It is the summer of 1923, and he seems perfectly delighted to be where he is.

  From the moment he stepped onto the island, George had been a hit, falling in easily with his age-mates. If at age twenty he showed even a dash of the sincerity and intelligence his friends unfailingly remarked on, he could hardly have failed to excite interest. He was handsome and, in his way, exotic, certainly in those years before the island saw so many visitors from beyond Ireland. It’s not surprising that Mary Kearney would be drawn to him.

  What happened between her and George in whispered conversation on the White Strand, or on paths along the back of the island, or while dancing at Peig’s or above the Gravel Strand, or in chance looks or tender moments amid the crowded company of the others, is lost to us. “I remember the times on the Blasket Islands very well” was all Mary would say years later, on a tape she knew he’d hear. “We had a great time, George.”

  Certainly they spent plenty of time together. He met her family, her sisters and brothers, sometimes played chess with them. He must have learned early on that Mary’s father, in his early forties at the time, was something of a celebrity. Back in 1909, he’d jumped into the water and helped save Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s daughter Cáit at the time of the Eveleen Nichols drowning. He had a bronze medal to show for it, from the Royal Home Society, patronized by the King of England himself, “for having saved life from drowning.” He wasn’t shy about wearing it. Mary’s father must have seemed to George no idle, clever talker, like some of the effete boys and men he knew at King’s, but an authentic Irish hero.

  Mary Kearney and George Thomson are at the right. (Illustration Credit ill.11)

  For George, a new world was opening up, and an extraordinarily happy time. He was not by nature carefree. His sister-in-law would later recall him as a formidable presence, with scant time for idle chatter and “no patience with the frivolous or mediocre.” His idea of a good time at age twelve, remember, was setting up a lending library. And in later years, as we’ll see, he took nothing so seriously as, by his lights, setting the world aright. “Deeply serious, dedicated and preferring silence to small-talk and frivolity”—that’s how one respectful obituary judged him. In family photographs, he always looks about the same—placid, earnest, his even features rarely corrupted into a s
mile, his great thatch of straight hair flopping down over his forehead. In one photo from about three years before he went to the Blaskets, younger brother Hugh has a winsome look to him, whereas George is all sharp, straight lines; as well as you can tell from an old studio portrait, he seems closed. He is certainly good-looking, but in a way more befitting an older man than the seventeen-year-old schoolboy he was at the time.

  It is unlikely, then, that, before reaching the Great Blasket, George was ever much the life of the party; or that the mischievousness, the sheer antic frivolity, of young Maurice O’Sullivan could have seemed to him anything but welcome counterpoint to the stresses of school; or that the convulsive, spirited laugh of Mary Kearney—his “black-haired Deirdre laughing in the breeze”?—could have seemed to him anything but captivating,

  “I’d say he was in love with her,” said one of the old islanders. “He was very fond of her. He’d’ve married her if she would have had him.”

  Would he? Would he really?

  George from London, fresh from Cambridge University, his academic career primed to take off, was giving serious thought to marrying this barely schooled young girl from the island? She was Roman Catholic and he was not. How could they marry? Through some mysterious alchemy of love, a summer flirtation had bubbled up into a full-blown crisis—for George, certainly, and perhaps for Mary as well.

  At one point, Mary’s brother Seán reported, George approached their father, who did nothing to scuttle the match. “Well,” Seán has his father saying, “it’s not me that will marry you.… If you like her, and if she likes you, you can’t be kept apart, and I suppose it’s a mortal sin to keep two people who are in love apart.”

  But even if George was smitten, and her father willing, Mary herself may never have given herself over to the idea. The island was the only world she’d ever known. He was from a faraway world she could scarcely imagine—perhaps not someone, ironically, to take seriously. Her faith, meanwhile, she took very seriously, and George’s religion, or lack of it, erected a formidable bar. At some point, or perhaps several—the chronology is muddled—George told her just how he felt. Either she rebuffed him altogether, or simply explained to him she could never marry a non-Catholic. Probably on one of his visits to the island—1926 is as good a guess as any—George, lost and lovestruck, looked into converting.

  “I remember him coming to our house in An Cill. He wanted advice from my uncle Pádraig as to whether he should convert to Catholicism. The girl wouldn’t marry him unless he became a Catholic.”

  The speaker was Máire Mhac an tSaoi—Mary McEntee—one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets and writers. An Cill was the house her uncle had had built in Dún Chaoin—on the mainland, within sight of the Blaskets—in 1925. Her uncle was one of the leading intellectual lights of Ireland, Monsignor Pádraig de Brún, otherwise known as Paddy Browne.

  A Roman Catholic priest and holder of a doctorate from the Sorbonne, de Brún had in 1913 taken a position teaching mathematics at Saint Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland’s premier seminary. He was brilliant, the proverbially smartest person in the room, a true polymath, his mind ranging freely over an intellectual landscape encompassing mathematics, the classics, poetry, and the Irish language. He would long serve as president of one of Ireland’s national universities, and near the end of his life was named chairman of the council of Dublin’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

  He had built An Cill, his niece explained, as refuge, balm for the grief he’d experienced in Dublin with the 1916 Rising and the execution of a friend, Seán MacDermott, one of its leaders. The house was of modest size but glorious prospect. Made of creosoted wood, virtually unknown in those parts, its front door green, its pyramidal roof bright-red felt, it stood on a hill near the ruins of an old church, overlooking the Atlantic. Its rear windows faced the Blaskets. From the front door you could look out at the hills rising above Dún Chaoin, and, from anywhere else, hear the seas crashing below. And here it was, Máire Mhac an tSaoi remembered, that George Thomson came to talk to her uncle.

  In the doorway of his house in Dún Chaoin, mathematician-scholar-priest Father Paddy Browne about the time George Thomson approached him for advice about his relationship with Mary Kearney (Illustration Credit ill.12)

  In Dún Chaoin, with its few score houses scattered across the landscape, everyone knew everyone; George would certainly have known of Father de Brún. With his dark hair, deep hooded eyes, and rich baritone voice, the irrepressible de Brún would come to be seen as a “maverick … altogether uninhibited and irreverent, caring not a fig for theological caution … impish and mischievous in his humour,” fond even of off-color limericks. But that was later. More recently, he had been reproved for his open support of the republican cause by his superiors at the seminary.

  He was no average country priest, yet he was a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Just what did young George expect of him? How did he frame his request? With what hesitancy or conviction did he, at twenty-two or twenty-three, assert his love for the island girl and seek an opinion, a ruling, a morsel of advice, that might leave her his?

  Máire Mhac an tSaoi was only a girl at the time—her memory of George Thomson, she reports, extends only “from the knees down”—and her recollection may have been enriched by later accounts of the story from her uncle, who died when she was in her late thirties, and with whom she was close. In any case, here is how she told it in her old age:

  My uncle Pádraig advised him not to convert simply in order to marry her. He was an atheist. If he couldn’t say with honesty that he was no longer an atheist it would only be a cause of sorrow for both of them. The marriage would be based on a lie and nothing good would come of it.

  George did not convert.

  At some point, Mary left the island, to take a position as servant to a doctor outside Dublin.

  Later, George went to see her there.

  At first, George’s times on the island with Mary, Maurice, and the others must have been just so much raw, undigested experience; he, barely in his twenties, was still raw, awash in the alien sounds of a new language, trying to make sense of so much else that seemed exciting, novel, and strange. In the end, though, his Blasket summers changed his mental makeup. They influenced his scholarship. They tinted his writing; they gave him a stock of raw material that would find its way into his stories, poems, and translations. They would shape his values and help make him the man he was to become.

  One day many years later, while visiting China, rereading Tess of the D’Urbervilles a few pages at a time each evening, he felt an acute and sudden tug of awareness. He’d been reading chapter 25, in which Angel Clare reflects on his time at Talbothays Dairy in Wessex, where he’d met and fallen in love with Tess. Angel came to the dairy, Hardy wrote, sure his brief stay would be “the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and early forgotten,” an interlude during which to reflect on the great world and its work. But, quite the contrary, it was the great world on which he soured, “dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up elsewhere.… It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him.”

  There in China, George was just two pages into the chapter when “it struck me suddenly,” as he wrote in a letter home, “that Angel Clare, who came to Talbothay to study farming and found something unexpected, was not unlike me, who went to the Blasket Island to study the Irish language and found there something unexpected.

  “But there, I am slipping into daydreams again, and it’s bedtime.”

  Chapter 5

  Inishvickillaun

  [1926]

  It was a fine summer morning in the year 1926, three years after George’s first visit to the island.

  White streaks of foam were passing up through the Sound to the north and they nicely gathered together on the surface of the sea
. They would turn in on each other till not a trace of them was to be seen. There was a wonderful stillness. The mountains were clear before me, nodding their heads above in the sky. Isn’t it they that are proud to have power to be higher than the rest, thought I.

  So Maurice O’Sullivan would recall the day. He, his father, and his uncle were making for Inishvickillaun, one of the Lesser Blaskets, a six-mile row distant. Maybe George wanted to go with them? Maurice crossed the village to the Guiheen house, where George was staying. Of course, said George, he’d love to go. Mrs. Guiheen volunteered to pack them lunch, and soon they all were off, Maurice and George rowing along the big island’s long, craggy southern flank, the sea a dead calm. When they looked toward Slea Head, on the mainland, “there was nothing but a path of sparkling light from the sun which shone without spot in the sky.”

  Seven islands counted as the Lesser Blaskets, clustered round the great island like escort vessels round a battleship. Each had its distinct shapes, proportions, and colors, its flora and fauna, its legends and peculiarities. One of them, Inishtooskert, looked from the mainland like a reclining man. Tiaracht, a rocky ziggurat aimed almost seven hundred feet straight up, had since 1870 been home to a lighthouse; waves buffeted it so relentlessly that Richard M. Barrington, a naturalist visiting in 1880, concluded that no plants could survive in its first 150 feet above the sea. Inishnabro seemed to Barrington “a cathedral,” all towers and spires etched in rock. Most all the islands, as you drew near them from a naomhóg perched a few inches above the water, loomed as ominous hulking masses of granite and green, birds skimming above them. None, by Maurice’s time, were any longer inhabited.