On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Flower was a bit broader around the middle now; he was forty-four in the summer of 1925. Professionally, he was well established. In 1927, University College, Galway, had awarded him an honorary doctorate in Celtic literature. The year before, the first volume of his Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum finally came out, all 670 pages of it; it was to grapple more ably with this daunting project that, back in 1910, he’d first enrolled in the School of Irish Learning, met Marstrander, and come to the Blaskets. One reviewer caviled that the Catalogue was too preoccupied with medieval literature. A more recent view held that, most of a century later, it “has all the freshness reserved over time only for works of real artistic merit.” In the end, the project was of a piece with his Blasket experience. “In the Blaskets he learned Irish and legends,” Seán Ó Lúing has written; “in the Museum the literary manifestation of the same world unfolded from the pages of old writing.”

  The year Robin Flower returned—1925—a new visitor arrived on the island. Her name was Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a French woman of Swedish extraction. Save for Flower and Thomson, none among the Blasket visitors would return so often, and over so long a span, as she. She visited again in 1926; then in 1927, 1928, 1929, 1933, and for the last time in 1936. Her earliest visit came before any of the Blasket books had been published; when visitors to the island were still few enough to stand out fresh and distinct in the minds of the islanders; when the island was still an exotic, faraway enclave known but to a few. She visited for the last time when all three of the first-generation Blasket books had seen print, when the Blaskets were known beyond Kerry, beyond Ireland, beyond Europe.

  Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a French woman of Swedish descent, in a photo from a memorial volume dedicated to her after her premature death in 1940: a student of West Kerry Irish, she visited the Blasket all through the 1920s and into the 1930s.

  She was extraordinarily gifted, a sterling product of the French academic system at its best. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt was twenty-four when she first came to the Great Blasket in July 1925. Six years before, in the spring of 1919, scant months after the end of the world war, she had appeared at the Sorbonne in Paris asking to study with the eminent linguist Joseph Vendryes and embark on the next step of the academic ladder, the licence.

  She’d come out of Laon, in northeastern France, her un-French name that of her father, Erik-Valentin Sjoestedt, a diplomat with the Swedish Embassy in Paris. Her mother, from an old Corsican family, was a novelist and essayist. The family lived in an apartment on Avenue Malakoff in a fashionable district near the Arc de Triomphe that attracted artists, writers, and diplomats. Marie-Louise lapped up all that swirled around her of ideas, language, the arts and sciences; precocious she was if anyone was. When Vendryes met her for the first time, she was barely eighteen, but he came away already impressed with what he called “her solidity of thought and sureness of judgment.” She was ready to work and learn, a natural scholar, with a bent for original work, someone who ought never be allowed to sink into one of the low-level niches of intellectual work to which women were so often relegated.

  Linguistics was the discipline in which she proceeded to gather licence, agrégation, diplôme, and the other badges of the French system. “Who does not remember,” recalled a classmate who took a course with her devoted to the Greek verb, “that striking young girl, with the pretty, appealingly childlike face, in her pearl necklace, leaning wisely, almost severely, on her notebook?” She studied Latin grammar. She studied Czech; she spent the summer and early fall of 1921 in Bohemia. She studied Russian, flirted with Slavic studies, later traveled to the Soviet Union. Always it was language, in all its intricacies, that beguiled her.

  She had many choices as to what to do next—in a way, too many. Her family was well off; the immediate prospect of a job needn’t contaminate her choice. But one of her advisers, Antoine Meillet, one of France’s most esteemed linguists, perhaps determined not to see an intellect of such promise lost to dilettantism, pointed her firmly toward Celtic studies. For the academic year 1924–25, she was awarded a lectureship that left her amid the stone quadrangles of Trinity College, Dublin. There she met Osborn Bergin, T. F. O’Rahilly, and other key figures in the field. And there, too, almost certainly, she met Seán Cavanagh.

  As it appears today on a plaque on the Dún Chaoin house in which he lived for many years, a few hundred yards from the sea and across the sound from the Great Blasket, his name was Seán Ó Caomhánaigh; in English that became Seán Cavanagh. But so universally was he known by a nickname, that it, too, appears on the plaque—Seán an Chóta, Seán of the Kilt, for the garb he wore in his youth. That’s how Marie-Louise may have known him even in Dublin—that is, if she didn’t simply call him Seán Óg, young Seán, as she did later when inscribing a book to him. Born in 1885, he was actually older than she by fifteen years.

  Seán an Chóta—adventurer, novelist, linguist, raconteur, and companion of Marie-Louise Sjoestedt on her visits to Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets (Illustration Credit ill.16)

  Seán was an adventurer, a year and a half out of jail when Marie-Louse met him; he’d taken the “wrong,” anti-treaty side in the civil war, and wound up in the Curragh Military prison. Before that he’d spent six years in the States. As girls and young women in the parish remembered him, he was a roguish charmer, a lover and admirer of all womankind. In prison he’d tell of sexual jaunts in a turf rick with a Dún Chaoin woman when he was fifteen, she forty-five. He was oddly handsome, with a luxuriant head of dark hair and exotically high cheekbones—“a prize-fighter’s face,” according to one who knew him in prison, “mobile, humorous, Bohemian”—with a gold-crowned tooth and a winning smile.

  Seán is something of a Zelig to our story. It was he who, back in 1907, brought a prominent Gaelic Leaguer to the island looking for, but never finding, Carl Marstrander. Two years later, he helped row Eveleen Nichols to the island on the ill-fated visit that culminated in her drowning and that of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s boy. A year after that, he stood for the same group photo as Marstrander and Robin Flower at the garden party at Mrs. Eason’s for students and faculty of the School of Irish Learning.

  In 1915, age thirty, Seán left for America. Whether he intended to emigrate or not is unclear. What is clear is that he didn’t settle in Springfield, Massachusetts, like so many Kerrymen, or in Boston. He didn’t settle for long anywhere, in fact, but traveled round the country. He worked as a riveter in a New Jersey shipyard, in a Chicago steel mill, on ranches in the Dakotas. When he returned to Ireland in about 1922, he wrote an Irish-language novel based on his experiences. It was published in 1927 as Fanai, the wanderer. This Zane Grey–like adventure yarn, thick with ranch life and black-hatted villains, spiced with romance, takes place in a town near the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, the last stop on the line north to Canada. When a train loaded with farm workers pulls into the depot, most of them head off to the riverbank to fill their rusty pots with water and light campfires. One of them, though, lies by himself on the grass, stiff from work, before finally trudging off alone to town. A classic American Western in the making, except that the protagonist isn’t some Luke, or Jed, but Seán Ó Lonargáin, Irishman, thoughtful and bookish, who’s drifted west, by one telling, “in response to the undefined promptings of his heart.”

  Seán Ó Lonargáin’s free-spirited creator was the man Marie-Louise befriended when, after her year in Dublin, she first visited Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets. “He was from the first day I landed in the parish my kind, loyal teacher,” she wrote later of him, “a guiding light for me, with eternal patience, a co-researcher who shared with me his knowledge of the people and of the area. It fails me to describe the value of his help.” Both loved language; Seán, whose first language was West Kerry Irish, had taught Irish under the auspices of the Gaelic League, and even in prison he ran Irish-language classes for fellow inmates. Kerry Irish was his passion, as it now was hers. For long stretches, set against the area’s
rocky coves and precipitous heights, they were inseparable. Roasting mackerel on open fires. Rowing together across Smerwick Harbor, into a rising gale, the little bay’s waters rough and turbulent around them. Basking in summer-soft seascapes, he her teacher, she his brilliant French companion, tall, pretty, and fresh.

  Under the circumstances, it would have been easy for something to develop—a friendship, an abiding intimacy, a full-blown affair—and something did. Sometimes, by what we can glean from Seán’s writings, they’d head off for a rocky precipice high above the sea within sight of the Blaskets that today’s maps call Clogher Head, or Ceann Sraithe. It looked like the site of some cataclysmic eruption—great gray boulders heaped atop one another, lichen and bits of vegetation clinging to them, interspersed with soft sheltered beds of turf speckled with wildflowers. The sea breeze might roar in from the north, but here, in these nooks among the upturned rocks, they’d be protected against wind, or prying eyes. If they wanted to be alone, way out from the coast road, this was the place. Here, there were “only sea-birds around us,” Seán would recollect, “and the sound of the surf; beautiful, peaceful, without a sorrow in the world.”

  If Seán’s perhaps fevered memories are to be trusted, Marie-Louise—“Máire,” to him—was at one point ready to marry him. He procrastinated. When he realized, too late, what she meant to him, and said so, she was cool to him. One story heard in Dún Chaoin has him going to Paris to see her, her spurning him, him tossing the engagement ring he had for her into the Seine.

  Did Marie-Louise merely use Seán as an entrée to the world of Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets? Or, to resort to an equally pat and proverbial formula, was she simply too good for this West Kerry yokel? The classicist Stephen MacKenna once intimated of Seán an Chóta that he was more “an artist in life” than creative artiste himself. He possessed a gift for jest and conviviality, a wanderlust. He was an eloquent raconteur, a fine talker; he must have been great to pal around with in Dún Chaoin and on the island. But for all the encomiums Marie-Louise lavished on him in print and the good times they spent together on those rocky headlands, she may never have considered him a potential life’s companion.

  Later, when it was all over between them, Seán set to compiling a written record of Kerry Irish; the final treatise, never published, fills twenty-nine handwritten volumes in the National Library of Ireland. His way of getting at an odd word or phrase was to offer a dictionary definition, a few sample usages, then sometimes a brief scenario or vignette to express its meaning. “Above all the beautiful women in the world,” he wrote, “Máire was my sweetheart, the one I loved with all my heart”; that’s how he illustrated one West Kerry usage. In fact, when Seán’s biographer, Niall Ó Brosnacháin, counted vignettes that seemed to refer to Marie-Louise, he came up with forty-two. Most tell of a broken heart, fairly writhing with loss and longing, as in “My girl abandoned me, the woman I loved and courted.” But for the word feart, “miracle,” he wrote: “I never met anyone who understood the miracle of Irish as Máire did.”

  Celtic Gods and Heroes, published in 1940, and the work for which Sjoestedt is best known today, explores mother goddesses, chieftain gods, the Fianna myths, the Land of the Young, and countless other features of Celtic mythology and legend, all richly flavored with the fantastic. Of course, grown-ups are rightly skeptical of accounts of two-headed monsters or children who cleave dragons. And yet, Sjoestedt argues, to dismiss the bearers of such tales, the earliest Celtic mythographers themselves, poses grave risk to understanding. The authors of the oldest texts were Christians not long removed from paganism; their manuscripts went back sometimes to the eighth century, when Ireland’s conversion to Christianity, begun three centuries before, “was neither very remote nor, probably, very profound.” It was imprudent, therefore, to repudiate the ideas these authors held of the Celts’ mythical world. “There is a greater risk of error,” she writes, “in too much skepticism than in too little.”

  I find charming this seemingly artless welcome of the fantastical, and I think it suggests something of what Marie-Louise brought to the Blaskets—a willingness to give herself over to aspects of language, personality, and belief that, for a Paris sophisticate, might at first have seemed outlandish. All the weight of her education had taught her to be skeptical, reasoned, careful. But the island and its people simply won her over. Three weeks into one visit that included a visit to the island, she wrote from Dún Chaoin, in English, “I cannot help but feel regretful at going away so soon. I am greatly taken with this place, lonely and wild as it is. I don’t think I shall ever get tired of it.” She couldn’t know for certain she’d be back, but if she was, she wrote, she hoped to remain on the island for some months. “The people of the island are companionable and joyous, very fond of music and dancing and company.” She’d get on well with them, she was sure, because “I am full of roguery—just like themselves.”

  That was in 1925. In a letter she wrote from the Blasket eight years later, the island had lost none of its hold on her. “What fertile imagination,” she wrote of an old island woman she encountered, “what liveliness of language, what humor, what emotion! They are rather an extraordinary race these old fishermen of the West. It is quite exciting to work with them.”

  One of her visits came in winter. She had just spent four months on the mainland, Seán an Chóta her guide and tutor. Now, for six weeks, she was on the island, in the house where George Thomson had also stayed, with Máire Ní Ghuithín. A dance was being held at Peig Sayers’s place, the two of them were going, and Marie-Louise was determined to give her island friend a proper Parisian coiffure. She washed her hair, heated the special tongs she’d brought from Paris.… And then, of course, the door opened, Máire turned, and burned her ear. But Marie-Louise finally finished the job and offered Mademoiselle Ní Ghuithín a mirror: “Look, aren’t you beautiful.” Máire slipped into the red blouse and black skirt Marie-Louise had brought her, and the two of them went up the hill to dance. And endure. The island boys teased Máire mercilessly: Oh, and what have we here, a lady from France? Learning any Irish is she? All evening it was like that. Better that Marie-Louise had left her hair alone.

  But that was the slightest snag to a warm friendship. “Even though she was from Paris, France, you would think her an island girl,” Máire Ní Ghuithín wrote later. “She was so humble and simple in her character.” She wore a black shawl like those the women wore when they went to Mass on the mainland. In the evenings, she’d help Máire and the others with their schoolwork, teach them a little French. The rest of the time, she pursued the maddeningly elusive sounds of Irish. “ ‘Sound-info’ she used to call it,” remembered Máire. When, years later, Marie-Louise published her Description d’un parler irlandais de Kerry (description of a Kerry Irish dialect), she dedicated it to Antoine Meillet, her adviser in Paris, but also thanked her Blasket informants, including Máire.

  Marie-Louise Sjoestedt’s two most important technical treatises on West Kerry speech would appear in the 1930s. But even by 1928, after parts of three years’ close listening in the company of Seán an Chóta, she was ready to say something about English’s influence on the local dialect, the subject of a paper she wrote that year. It was here in Dún Chaoin, the Blaskets, and neighboring parishes, after all, that the two languages, English and Irish, butted up hardest against each other. Here Synge, Marstrander, and Flower, at the head of a procession of writers and scholars, had come to hear pure spoken Irish. But as Sjoestedt discovered, it was not so pure after all; English was leaving an imprint.

  Books and journals in English were no big problem, she found, but the area’s English-speaking merchants did contribute to Irish’s decline. So did the schools. So did returned émigrés from America. Ironically, even students visiting the area to acquire Irish sometimes made things worse, teaching the locals more English than they absorbed of Irish. Generally, teenage girls used more Anglicisms and loan words than did the boys, tried more ardently to learn English—no dou
bt, Marie-Louise hazarded, because they were coolheadedly looking ahead to their future in America.

  By 1928, in any case, evidence of Irish’s decline in West Kerry was inescapable. In the intimate retreats of rural life, or in nature itself, the language remained largely untouched. Everywhere else, though, English knocked at the door. Clothes were mostly English now, words near to “hat,” “apron,” “pocket,” and “gown” all making their way into Irish. The effect would grow, Marie-Louise wrote, “in proportion that these urban modes spread to the country.” The black peasant shawl called brat was now more often called … a shawl; the English term, even in Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, seemed “more elegant, more fashionable than the Irish term. The word for style, faisiún, is itself English.” Everyday foods stayed Irish, but those the least bit exotic became English; cheese figured little at peasant tables, so the Irish cáise was fading away, giving way to “cheese.” Irish had a word for what the French called confiture, “but my hosts never used it on their own; they always served the English word jam.” Insults, such as Irish near-equivalents to “drunkard” and “blackguard,” often owed to English—“epithets that a supposedly more cultivated population willingly applied to a population deemed inferior … and that they, in turn, came to adopt.” Through recourse to French, Irish, English, and Latin, Marie-Louise wove a rich scholarly tapestry of all she had heard and learned. The loan words she cited, she wrote, represented changes to these rural enclaves influenced by, and in imitation of, modern urban life.