On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Over the years she visited Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, Marie-Louise had become protective, passionately so, of the Irish language. But she was clear-eyed about its prospects. If Irish was to take its place as the language of cultivated Ireland, she wrote two years later in Revue celtique, no task was more urgent than the encouragement of Irish-language books. Not textbooks stocked with vocabulary, though. Needed was “a literature in Irish that one could read for love of Irish.” For too many, the “Gaelic baggage” they picked up in school would “join the piles of knowledge one acquired in college only to forget as soon as you’d left.” Meanwhile, all the best intentions of the state to support Irish-language authorship risked encouraging writers “with no other talent than to write Irish more or less correctly,” and no other calling than to get published and paid; and risked, besides, imposing moral and intellectual standards on serious readers more appropriate to high-schoolers.

  When the day came, however, that all the literary dross was pared away, she declared, sure to be counted among true Irish-language classics was “the work of the peasant, fisherman, and storyteller Tomás Ó Criomhthain.”

  Chapter 7

  Gorky’s Peasants

  [1929]

  In The Islandman—or An tOileánach, as it is called in Irish—Tomás Ó Criomhthain tells of his life from childhood in the 1860s to old age in the 1920s. It’s an autobiography, then, or a memoir—except that some critics value it more as anthropology, seeing its scenes, incidents, and personalities as bearing more on Tomás’s faraway island community than on him. He fishes, hunts, marries, endures the death of children. QED: island life personified. To me, though, even rendered into what its translator termed a “plain, straightforward” English and thus deprived of the flavor of the original Irish, Tomás’s book satisfies most reliably through its vibrancy and bite, the incisive, sometimes caustic eye with which Tomás views himself and his fellow islanders.

  I was born on St. Thomas’s day in the year 1856. I can recall being at my mother’s breast, for I was four years old before I was weaned. I am “the scrapings of the pot,” the last of the litter. That’s why I was left so long at the breasts. I was a spoilt child, too.

  So it begins. Tomás had four elder sisters and one older brother. “They were all well grown when I was a baby, so that it was little wonder that I was spoilt among them all. Nobody expected me at all when I came their way.”

  Whereas his earlier writings for Brian Kelly were self-contained snippets of stories, The Islandman was a single more or less continuous narrative, wrought from memory, bearing a sense of transition and flow. Always, and even in English, his personality percolates up from the page as he describes his fellow islanders. Like the woman across the yard, who was “in and out of our house all day long.… She was a little, undersized, untidy-haired babbler with a sallow face, not much to look at—a gossip, always hither and thither.”

  Or one of his early teachers, who didn’t last long on the island: “A great mug he had on him, hollow eyes, and a sleek swarthy complexion. He had prominent teeth, and a bush dripping from his nose like a goat’s beard. But the bush wasn’t the worst part of him, for it was fair in colour and hid his ugliest feature.”

  Or his sister’s husband, who “couldn’t keep a glass of whisky or a pint of porter long between his hands without pouring them down him, and he never enjoyed the taste of anything he paid for with his own money, but liked it well when another man jogged him in the back to have one with him.”

  The book’s chapters bear prosaic names like “My Schooldays,” “Gathering Seaweed,” and “The Little Canoe.” But the author’s voice counts for more than any structural features. On young Tomás’s first visit to Dingle, his father buys him his first pair of boots. His sister Eileen doesn’t recognize him when he returns to the island, Tomás writes, so distracted is she by “the shining glory about my feet.”

  A tiny island-of-an-island stood off the shore of the Great Blasket that could sometimes be reached at low tide in order to collect limpets and winkles. One day there, Tomás sees his mother “gathering her skirts together and bringing them forward between her legs. I didn’t mind a bit that the world should see my mother’s legs and calves, for there was nothing stunted or lumpy about her: she was a fine well-grown woman, fair-skinned and bright from crown to heel.”

  And so the story goes, earthy and wry. One critic, John McGahern, has pointed out that Tomás doesn’t actually depict the island itself much, its exquisite scenery only a frame through which to view richly lived lives: “A field is only described as it is reclaimed and cultivated. A strand is there to be crossed, a sea to be fished, a town to be reached, a shore to be gained, walked upon, lived upon. These are all near and concrete realities but so stripped down to their essence … as to be set free of all local characteristics.” “Set free,” like a balloon, from the restraining tether of the little village, bigger and more than the island, bigger and more than Tomás himself.

  An tOileánach “has a flavour, a quality of goodness you can almost taste,” Máire Mhac an tSaoi, writing as Máire Cruise O’Brien, once put it, “like the goodness of fresh bread or of a sound apple.” The book has been frankly adored by its readers, set up on an Irish-language pedestal, admirers forever finding new superlatives with which to laud it. Author and literary theorist Declan Kiberd discerns a “Hemingwayesque quality to the writing, of grace under pressure.” For Seán Ó Coileáin, professor of modern Irish at the National University of Ireland, Cork, “there’s an authenticity in that book that I don’t find anywhere else in modern Irish”; here was “the real thing, the bare rock, the foundation.” Ó Coileáin says this having edited a later edition of An tOileánach, published in 2002, which he deemed closer to Tomás’s original intention. Yet he admits that that first, imperfectly “authentic” edition, which he reports reading every year since he was fifteen, “will always remain The Islandman.”

  An tOileánach was first published in the summer of 1929 in a printing of three thousand. But its origins went back seven years, to 1922, when Tomás was still sending Brian Kelly the diary entries that would become Allagar na hInise, or Island Cross-Talk. Kelly, muse and mentor, ever confident of his friend’s ability, wondered whether the spark might be in him for a grander, more ambitious work. At some point, probably while living in Dublin, Kelly broached the idea to his Irish teacher from early Killarney days, the man who’d encouraged him to visit the Blaskets in the first place, Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha.

  Ó Siochfhradha had grown up on a little peninsula beside Dingle Bay, in an atypically tree-shaded area that included the estate of Lord Ventry, whose forebears had planted widely, and for whom his father worked as groundskeeper. He grew up speaking both Irish and English. But one day when he was an impressionable eighteen, which would have made it about 1901, he heard a fiery Gaelic Leaguer in Dingle proclaim that, were Ireland ever to throw off the English yoke, Irishmen needed to speak Irish. After that, as a relative told the story, “I don’t believe he ever spoke a word of English,” at least publicly; once, years later, when he had to sign his name in English in order to be nominated to a high position with University College, Dublin, it was enough of an event to make the newspapers.

  Soon he learned to read the language he’d grown up speaking. He equipped himself with dictionaries, began teaching local youngsters the rudiments of the language, became one of the Gaelic League’s muinteoirí táistil. These itinerant teachers typically got around their districts by bicycle, “backs bent, eyes gleaming, hands asweat or frozen on the handlebars, their feet going round endlessly on a glorious treadmill,” as one writer immortalized them. Working in Cahircaveen, on the peninsula just across the bay from Dingle, Ó Siochfhradha might teach a class at five in the afternoon in one town, then another at seven that evening in a town miles away. Like a hawk, all fierce, single-minded energy, he’d swoop down by bicycle on each town to bestow a little Irish learning. “An Seabhac,” “The Hawk,” pronounced roughly “a
hn showk,” became his nom de plume. And nom de guerre as well. He would go on to lead a battalion of the West Kerry brigade of the Irish Volunteers, run arms, and several times be jailed. He would work in the language movement all his life, becoming a powerful force for Irish culture and literature.

  An Seabhac had been teaching in Killarney, and active there in nationalist recruiting, for several years when, in late 1916, as we’ve seen, he heard from Mrs. Kelly, took on Brian as his pupil, and sent him to the Blaskets. During the years since, the two of them had maintained contact, and now they conferred once more. Tomás was still churning out his short journal entries, but now Brian wanted him to tackle something more avowedly literary. Might Tomás be induced to compose, purely out of his imagination, a fresh story? Brian and An Seabhac didn’t think so. What they cooked up instead, the way An Seabhac told it later, were the bare bones of a story to which Tomás would presumably add the meat, namely this: A beautiful girl arrives on the island on a sailboat with her wealthy father. She becomes interested in the island, stays to learn Irish, falls in love with an island lad. At first he can’t admit that he loves her as well, but finally he does, and they marry. The end.

  Um, no. On a trip to the island, Brian laid their skeleton of a story before Tomás. He wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing like that had ever happened on the Blasket, An Seabhac pictured him saying, “and it shouldn’t be associated with the island. It was a lie!” Readers shouldn’t be asked to believe what wasn’t so.

  Brian got another idea. Maybe he could get Tomás to write his autobiography—not little vignettes this time, but a serious, connected life story. Tomás wasn’t interested.

  Brian persisted. Tomás made as if to acquiesce by filling a scant few pages of foolscap: There you go.

  Well, Brian replied, that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.

  Why, asked Tomás, by now maybe a little annoyed, would anyone want to hear the story of his life? He was a fisherman. His snippets of island lore were one thing. But his life? Who’d care?

  Brian found a way to answer him.

  Just a few years out of Trinity College, he was well educated, well read, and well versed in the literary currents of his time. And one such current was the rediscovery, through literature, of peasant cultures. All across Europe, slow-paced rural life was being routed by the relentless forces of modern civilization and high-strutting technology. But as village life was swept away, some writers were making it the subject of their work.

  Late in the previous century, as we’ve seen, in novels like Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, a stonemason’s son, brought England’s vanishing rural world vividly to life. Around the same time, in France, appeared Pierre Loti’s An Iceland Fisherman, about the harsh lives of Breton fishermen who plied the waters around Iceland. A little later, in Russia, in an autobiographical trilogy the first two volumes of which had appeared by 1916, Maxim Gorky wrote of growing up in a hardscrabble Russian village. All were writing about working people, fishermen and peasants, in natural settings largely untouched by the modern world. On at least one visit to the Great Blasket, An Seabhac reported, Kelly brought with him books by Loti and Gorky and took to reading from them to Tomás.

  “Time after time the codfish let themselves be hooked in a rapid and unceasing silent series. [One man] ripped them open with his long knife, spread them flat, salted and counted them—which upon their return would constitute their fortune—and piled up the lot behind them, all still redly streaming and still sweet and fresh.” That’s from An Iceland Fisherman; Pierre Loti, the pen name of Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud, was a French naval officer who took scant interest in sophisticated Paris, much in the lives of ordinary men and women. In My Childhood, Maxim Gorky told of growing up in his grandfather’s house, with its “endemic plague of hostility.… All the adults were fevered with it and even the children were infected.” His aim, he wrote in an early chapter, was to “disown” the grim story he had to tell: “Such dull savagery on the part of one’s own tribe is too wounding to acknowledge. But truth outweighs pity.”

  No countesses or kings here, no great high-minded truths, only the eternal struggle for existence on the high seas or in a muddy village, of people not so very different from Tomás himself. To anyone inclined to reckon the life of an island rustic as not worth telling, they must have seemed a revelation. Loti’s fictional Yann was a fisherman. Gorky’s autobiography was that of a peddler, scullery boy, gardener, dock hand, and tramp. Yet apparently they mattered enough to wind up within a book. Loti’s book (which had accompanied Synge on his first trip to the Aran Islands) didn’t touch Tomás that deeply. Gorky’s, though, did. “I declare to the devil,” his son Seán has him saying, “he’s a fellow just like myself.”

  That, of course, was just the idea.

  Making even more of an impression on him, Seán would report, was a novel appearing in Norwegian in 1917, and in English soon thereafter—a great, sprawling tableau of a book, Growth of the Soil. Its author was Knut Hamsun, awarded one of the first Nobel Prizes, in 1920. In it, a burly, laconic peasant ekes out a living from the Norwegian wilds. Isak is an Everyman, a reminder, at a time when industrialization strode unimpeded across Europe and America, of how dearly civilization depended on faceless men and women still close to the elemental earth.

  As different as these books were, they told a similar story of poor people, in difficult circumstances, making a go of it—a theme much alive in the Ireland of the day. Through them, writes Australian scholar Irene Lucchitti in a 2005 doctoral thesis that became a book, The Islandman: The Hidden Life of Tomás O’Crohan, “Tomás was offered one story after another of hard and primitive ways of life in places of extreme and dangerous beauty.” Together they suggested that he wouldn’t be the first who made his living from the earth and sea with a story to tell, that others like him had told theirs, that he could do it, too.

  By mid-1922, Tomás had set to work, apparently clear that he’d begun a wholly new project. Brian sometimes turned to masonry metaphors with him, and one that stuck with Tomás, as he told it later, was that “the cornerstone should be established before my work could begin.” That’s what he did now, casting aside any mental cornerstones representing Island Cross-Talk, so “there would be no connection between the work I had completed and the work I had yet to complete.” In short, a fresh start, a new literary design.

  Soon, he was sending Kelly batches of pages, and by late 1924 or early 1925, he had more or less finished the book. I say “more or less” because the book wouldn’t be published until midsummer 1929, and in the intervening years it would change—change under influences literary, personal, and political, in ways both trifling and significant, that have intrigued scholars since. During these years, the manuscript would pass out of the hands of Tomás and into those of outsiders to the island, first Brian Kelly, then An Seabhac.

  Back in 1918, Kelly had become a “junior inspector of National Schools,” as his title dignified him, a position for which he apparently had little interest and less aptitude, and which he abandoned after a year. For a while he lived with his older brother, a Dublin priest. The next few years were ones of drift and, probably, severe personal distress. “Brian did not have an easy life,” An Seabhac summed it up. He and Brian met from time to time over the years, in Dingle and, beginning in 1922, in Dublin. “Anybody who understood Brian would have to be fond of him, but it’s few people who really understood him. He was gentle, quiet, a loner.” When they could sit by the fire, just the two of them, “all the shyness and quietness would disappear, and he’d be bright, good company, and full of stories.” But that school inspector’s job, it seemed to An Seabhac, had “upset his gentle kind mind, and this left him unhappy with himself and with many other things also.” If this seems mysterious, it has remained so. Finally, Kelly left the country, taking Tomás’s mostly finished manuscript with him.

  In London, he took it, and perhaps Allagar na hInise (Island Cross-Talk) as w
ell, to the Irish Texts Society. They could do nothing with it, he was told; it needed too much work, even just to sort out its unorthodox spellings and idiosyncratic script.

  He took it with him to Paris; nothing there for it, either.

  Returning briefly to Ireland, he approached the minister of education. But this early in the new state’s history, the government wasn’t publishing much of anything; An Gúm, its new publishing agency, wasn’t established until 1926.

  What to do? How to get Tomás’s work published? By the end of 1925, according to An Seabhac, Kelly was “disappointed and discouraged.” All through those months together on the island, and those years in correspondence, he had prodded Tomás: Go to your pen and paper each day. Write your story. Brook all discouragement. This Tomás had done. Kelly felt a responsibility to him, yet now seemed unable to discharge it.

  It was around this time that he approached An Seabhac with the manuscript. Kelly was again leaving Ireland, for the Continent, where he would spend the remainder of his life. Perhaps he knew he was lost in some down-spinning personal crisis, opaque to us now; one Irish scholar, Seán Ó Coileáin, thinks Kelly may have been homosexual, no easy burden in Catholic Ireland. Desperate, he approached An Seabhac: would he accept responsibility for doing all he could on behalf of Tomás’s manuscripts? Of course, his old teacher assured him, provided “I could use them, or part of them, in whatever way I saw fit,” and as long as he had Tomás’s blessing.

  Here things get complicated. An Seabhac did secure Tomás’s blessing, and was not shy about using the editorial prerogatives granted him. Some decisions he made did not please everyone; indeed, they entirely pleased no one. Both Allagar na hInise and An tOileánach were, as we’ve seen, later translated into English, stirring some controversy among scholars and critics. But no less controversy surrounds how An tOileánach was prepared for publication in Irish—a translation, too, after all, from the spoken language to the written.