Scholars have compared the original Irish manuscript with what later appeared in print and, with perplexity, annoyance, or alarm, noted numerous discrepancies: the sacrifice of quirky spellings that nonetheless aptly reflected the spoken word; a chapter inserted at the editor’s request; a new ending; missing scenes, seemingly arbitrary deletions, undue preoccupation with convention. In her 1930 review of An tOileánach, for example, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt thanked An Seabhac for letting her see the original manuscript, said she understood the reasons for his editorial alterations, but lamented that some episodes, “entirely innocent in their naiveté, have been … sacrificed to pedagogic requirements and to ‘respectability.’ ”
One scene no doubt on her mind was one where young Tomás and a friend, the future island king, go swimming, both of them buck naked.
When we turned around, what did we find but three big lumps of girls looking straight at us. The king became embarrassed a lot quicker than I did, and he turned towards the sea with his back to them, trying to hide from them. I remained standing exactly as I was when I entered this world and it occurred to me that there was no reason for me to take fright rather than them.
Two girls turned away, “but there was never three women who didn’t have a bold one in their number,” and he and the third girl just stood there, shamelessly provoking each other, until she at last yielded. The girl “who was giving me the cheek,” Tomás concludes the story, “saw a baptism before she ever saw a wedding. And, of course, the signs were on her with her display that day.”
For purely linguistic reasons, Sjoestedt was troubled, too. Though Tomás’s writing and spelling were “often simply arbitrary,” they nonetheless pointed up key “traits of the local dialect”—translating voice to print “with remarkable exactitude.” That was gone now from the published text, the spelling cleaned up and made more regular—precious witnesses to the spoken word, embodied in Tomás’s spelling, sacrificed to editorial convention.
In 1973, Tomás’s grandson, Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, would issue an alternative edition of An tOileánach. Yes, it “preserves the odd earthy expression and episode that An Seabhac felt ‘not fitting to be so set down,’ ” Máire Cruise O’Brien would write. But Tomás’s first editor, she went on, “shows perhaps more finish in arrangement by chapter and paragraph.” She found but a single instance—the restoration of a scene from Tomás’s wedding—where the new edition got the better of An Seabhac’s.
Actually, Ua Maoileoin’s edition had cuts and additions, too. No book is ever published just as its author originally sets it down. Few fail to profit from an editor’s ability to stand apart from it, smooth its rough edges, and steer it through sometimes dangerous shoals to publication. All this is normal and necessary. The manuscripts Tomás sent to Brian and that ultimately reached An Seabhac were those of a novice author, however gifted, who had somehow slipped the bonds of illiteracy; they needed editorial attention, and got it.
An Seabhac had his hands full with both of Tomás’s manuscripts. The Irish Texts Society in London, recall, had told Kelly that to take them on would be just too much work. As An Seabhac saw it, he made cuts, yes, but none undermining the story’s essential truth. He altered Tomás’s homegrown spelling system. He massaged Tomás’s West Kerry dialect to make it less foreign to other Irish-speakers. He edited out repeated storms, near-drownings, and other features of island life that seemed to him repetitive.
In so doing, it struck Irene Lucchitti, An Seabhac failed to “recognise that repetition inhered in Island life and that by removing the artistic rendering of this fact, he was falsifying or, at the very least, distorting Tomás’ record of Island life.” Now, nonfiction literature does not work like some meteorological instrument whose pen slavishly records every dip and rise in barometric pressure; no writer is obliged to transpose all of his subject mechanically, as if he could, onto the unwilling page. Even with An Seabhac’s cuts, some found An tOileánach repetitive: “Anyone at all would grow tired after reading some of it,” a 1931 convention of Irish schoolteachers heard Mícheál Breathnach complain, “because it is the same thing page after page, with little happening and few changes of scene.” Irish scholar James Stewart, who disapproved of some of An Seabhac’s edits, terming them “textual tampering,” nonetheless conceded that many of them—“the pruning of unwieldy phrases, unnecessary illustrations and pious untruths, and the replacement of somewhat inelegant words—would by many be regarded as an improvement in the texture of the narrative.” In the end, it seems plain, An tOileánach profited from many of An Seabhac’s editorial interventions—and from Tomás’s good sense in agreeing to them.
In a few instances, An Seabhac wanted not cuts but additions, and went back to Tomás for them. “I may as well give some brief account of the way we managed things in this Island when I was young,” chapter 3 leads off, going on to describe village houses by size, design, and furnishings. The house he’d built with his own hands, Tomás notes, wasn’t large, but “if King George were to spend a month’s holiday in it, it isn’t from the ugliness of the house that he would take his death.” None of this was part of the original manuscript; An Seabhac had asked him to supply it, and he did. Seán Ó Coileáin has suggested that therefore it was not what Tomás truly meant to write, and thus in some degree inauthentic. But more justly, I think, An Seabhac can be seen as a sagacious editor, alive to his readers’ needs, helping his author better satisfy them. By no means dismissive of Tomás, he was taking him seriously, grooming him, helping to “professionalize” a novice author.
The final chapter of the published book, not included in what Kelly had amassed from Tomás and delivered to An Seabhac, serves as valedictory. He writes of cold nights struggling against the sea, driven by the waves. “The swell would be rising to the green grass, the storm blowing out of the north-west, and the great waves breaking.… You may understand from this that we are not to be put in comparison with the people of the great cities or of the soft and level lands.” Evenings spent with friends and a drop of drink leavened sea-borne troubles. But all that, he continues, is “gone by now, and the high heart and fun are passing from the world. Then we’d take the homeward way together, easy and friendly after all our revelry, like the children of one mother, none doing hurt or harm to his fellow.” Tomás wrote this, and wrote it with heart. And he did so at the urging of An Seabhac.
The manuscript An Seabhac got from Brian probably lacked some of the structural connective tissue of the final book, which remains a little episodic. For what became Allagar na hInise, Tomás had penned self-contained little stories, a book page or two long; crop out the weaker ones, string along the remainder in chronological order, and you had a book. As he posted the pages of his autobiography to Brian, Tomás may have seen little reason to alter this approach, which made for good stories, but not necessarily a book bound tightly into a coherent whole. In a paper given at a conference in Sardinia in 1994, Joan Fitz Gerald went so far as to picture Tomás as “untrained in the craft of writing continuous narrative,” so that “the weaving of the separate anecdotes or tales which make up each chapter into a narrative whole is left to a writer [An Seabhac] who knows how to construct texts.” An Seabhac’s nephew (who is also named Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha) reports seeing some seventy or eighty pieces of editorial correspondence between the two men; his uncle, he says, repeatedly asked Tomás, “What do you mean by this?”—paring away ambiguity, building coherency over the long line of the emerging book. “He had tremendous stickability,” he says, smiling at his own coinage. “He saw it through.”
An Seabhac was no hack. He had a long history with the Irish language and was himself an author of some repute; he’d written a volume of humorous sketches, a picaresque novel, and, in 1922, a much-loved children’s story, Jimín Mháire Thaidhg, which led one pundit to refer to him as “the greatest humourous writer the language movement has produced.” He had become involved in the nascent Folklore of Ireland Society and, in January 1927, wo
uld be elected its first president. He was a versatile and experienced professional who would become principal editor of An Gúm, the government publishing agency. Just now, in his early forties, he was in his prime. In 1957, Ireland issued a pair of postage stamps to honor Tomás Ó Criomhthain. In 1983, it issued one in honor of An Seabhac, picturing him with black beret perched atop his bald pate, arms clasped in front of him, all intellectual bravado. Every writer needs an editor, and Tomás got one worthy of him.
Indeed, An Seabhac’s most lasting contribution on behalf of Tomás’s books may be that they were published at all. The Irish Free State in the late 1920s was gripped by puritanical sensibilities growing out of the influence of the church. State censorship was a fact of life. Priestly complaint was enough to get Seán an Chóta’s novel of the American West, Fanai, withdrawn from circulation and cleaned up before being reissued with offensive material—tame scenes of courtship and kissing—removed. Tomás’s tale of himself, naked before the island girls, would likely have compelled the censor’s hand, too. If any one principle dominated An Seabhac’s approach to An tOileánach, it may simply have been the avoidance of trouble.
In English, he was Patrick Sugrue; in Irish, Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha. But more often than either, in print and by reputation this distinguished author, editor, and champion of the Irish language was known by his pseudonym, “An Seabhac,” the hawk. He helped shepherd Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s books into print. (Illustration Credit ill.17)
His nephew pictures him as religious, sensitive to anything that might do harm or cause embarrassment; so he may have needed no outside goad to avoid controversy. Many cuts he made, James Stewart has observed, “were made to save face rather than space, because, mistakenly, they were believed to show the Islanders as either too punchy, too sexy, too sly or too slanderous.” But they did achieve their goal. Ó Coileáin, certainly among those to rue some of An Seabhac’s editorial changes, concedes that An tOileánach would not have been published without them. “He said he never regretted doing what he did,” Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha says of his uncle. “He said it had to get into print.”
Irene Lucchitti insists that the similarity of the Loti, Gorky, and Hamsun stories offered to Tomás as models “made clear that he was being asked to write a particular kind of story,” one exemplifying “an authentically Irish hero.” Ultimately, though, Tomás’s books were his own. The Islandman, wrote Robin Flower in the foreword to his English translation, tells his tale “with perfect frankness, serving no theory, and aiming at no literary effect” (though the highest literary effect can be the one not aimed for). Kelly and An Seabhac, each in his own way, influenced Tomás; as products of their times and of their own temperaments, they could hardly have helped it. They were not a malignant influence on Tomás’s work, but on the whole a happy and productive one, culminating in two Irish-language classics. “I would not have left two books behind me, were it not for the man who got me working,” Tomás once said of Brian. He could well have said something similar, if probably not so warm and heartfelt, of An Seabhac. Tomás’s books, like those of most authors, emerged with a little help from his friends.
In introducing his English translation of Allagar na hInise, Tim Enright aptly described its reception in Irish: “It was a wonder to the Gaelic world for it had been written from within the oral tradition, capturing the moment of transition from speech to writing.” It is hard to do justice to this transition today. We readers must imagine every bit of news or information originating outside our familiar world of print; every fact, urgent or trifling, every opinion, every poem, every insult or blandishment coming to us “live,” on the wings of the human voice. A visitor to the island in the early 1930s said of Tomás’s own voice, it “still lingers in my ear, clear and musical like a silver bell.”
It cannot be surprising that a world alive only in evanescent sound, cut off from the written word, can be hard to write about—for bookish sorts, hard even to think about. “The effects of oral states of consciousness are bizarre to the literate mind,” Walter Ong wrote in Orality and Literacy. More difficult yet may be to imagine a culture of sound and gesture not as primitive precursor to a higher and better kingdom of Print but rich in its own right. Robin Flower would write, in The Irish Tradition, how, while walking one day along a Blasket path, he met an old man brimming over with “the strength and happy spirit of his youth.” Together they sat down in a field, and the old man, without “preamble or explanation … fell to reciting Ossianic lays,” ancient ballads that sang of the heroic exploits of the legendary Fionn Mac Cumhail, a kind of Irish counterpart to King Arthur and his knights:
At times the voice would alter and quicken, the eyes would brighten, as with a speed with which you would have thought beyond the compass of human breath he delivered those highly artificial passages describing a fight or putting to sea, full of strange words and alliterating rhetorical phrases which, from the traditional hurried manner of narration, are known as “runs.” At the end of these he would check a moment with triumph in his eye, draw a deep breath, and embark once more on the level course of his recitation.
I listened spellbound and, as I listened, it came to me suddenly that there on the last inhabited piece of European land, looking out to the Atlantic horizon, I was hearing the oldest living tradition in the British isles. So far as the record goes this matter in one form or another is older than the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and yet it lives still upon the lips of the peasantry.
On the Blasket, Flower’s old man was no aberration. The standards for speech were high there. The islanders spoke well. Tomás’s life, Declan Kiberd would observe, was “built around admiration for people who used words and used them well. It was a life structured between morning songs, morning prayers, work songs, evening recitations, formal storytelling. It was in many ways a much more artistic life than the kind that is lived now by the citizens of Dublin in their suburbs.” Talk and turn-of-phrase as art: what was Allagar na hInise (which one scholar prefers to translate as Island Repartee) but a succession of scenes showing off the wit and genius of the islanders as jokers, performers, quibblists, rhetoricians. The island’s rich oral culture, someone once said, ranks as “the chief surviving element of Gaelic civilization”; from it stepped Tomás, with what Flower called his “inborn genius for speech.” The irony of it, of course, was that the oral culture of the Blaskets should make its most lasting impact through print.
In 1962, the curmudgeonly Irish writer Myles na Gopaleen described the original Irish-language edition of Tomás’s memoir as
among the most important life-stories of this century, mainly for its account of custom, isolation, the savagery of island life, the gallantry of the islanders but, above all, for the astonishing precision and beauty of the Irish itself, immense in its profusion of vocabulary and idiom and having a style that is quite out of another age.
And Daniel Binchy, who visited the island and met Tomás in 1928 or 1929, for his part admitted that, until the appearance of An tOileánach, he had been “profoundly skeptical of the value of modern Irish as a literary medium.” He wasn’t any longer, not when it was in the hands of a writer like Tomás. “But,” he wondered, “where shall we find such another?”
Chapter 8
Interminable Procession
[1929]
It is the fall of 1929, a few months after publication of An tOileánach. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt is back in West Kerry. The automobile that’s brought her from Dingle stops, amid a patchwork of open fields, at a familiar thatched-roof house. “A woman comes out to kiss me. ‘Welcome, Marie,’ ” she says, her voice stressing the “a” of Marie-Louise’s name, giving it a “caressing” inflection. “The older people of the house rise with a familiar dignity to greet me: ‘God protect you in this house.’ ” She’s being welcomed once more to this “secret world of an old culture … poor by the standards of the world, but rich with inner treasures.”
Marie-Louise’s visit here is part of a research trip, the
basis for two long articles to appear the following year, together titled “L’Irlande d’aujourd’hui,” Ireland today. They will offer a look, new to most of her French readers, of the Ireland that’s emerged from seven years of strife, and now a few of peace. One article draws on interviews she has conducted in Dublin with political and cultural leaders like Maud Gonne, the English-born Irish revolutionary, muse of Yeats, and widow of John MacBride, martyr of the Easter Rising; and Éamon de Valera, the George Washington–like Irish national father figure. She talks with them of the Irish language, of Catholic-Protestant relations, of the economy, of Ireland’s future. It is garden-variety journalism, stocked with facts, figures, and quotes.
The other article is more personal and impressionistic. It takes her to The West, into Gaelic Ireland, to the Irish-speaking parts of the country that exert such a hold on her. Of the Free State’s twenty-six counties, she informs her readers, nineteen are wholly English-speaking, and seven have Irish-speaking pockets. “It is towards one of them, one of those rare parishes where English has not yet penetrated, that the Tralee train carries me.” Tralee itself she finds lifeless and dispirited. But soon she’s headed farther west yet, to Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, by the same narrow-gauge train Synge took across the mountains in 1905.
She is not shy about linking the dramatic countryside to visions of rebellion and romance; here are “hills as supportive of guerrilla war as the Spanish Sierras, as hospitable to outlaws as the Corsican maquis.” She tells of “the nobility of a naked land … of its supreme harmony of proportion.” She is moved by the beauty of it all. Finally, when she reaches the coast, the Blaskets come into view, a “magnificent chorus” of island topography that reminds her of the Greek islands.
On an Irish Island Page 17