On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Two years later, at a dance—she was wearing her wedding ring, but introduced herself as Moya O’Connor—a nineteen-year-old man, drinking lemonade, looked over to see a pair of “dazzling blue eyes fringed by a mane of golden hair and a face of extraordinary vitality.” This, according to Vincent MacDowell, one of his many biographers, was the young Michael Collins, who was to become one of the chief architects of Irish independence and command the pro-treaty side during the civil war, only to be gunned down in County Cork in 1922. Moya would insist they’d had an affair. In somewhat less doubt is that, during the tumultuous years of the independence struggle, Collins visited her at Furry Park. Moya, it was said, stored guns and ammunition in hat boxes scattered around the house, then delivered them across the city. Delivered them, her granddaughter Melissa Llewelyn-Davies would write, “in an open-topped car, her long hair flying in the wind. Her hair, my father told me, was brushed by a maid a hundred times a night.” In March 1921, Moya was arrested and imprisoned at Mountjoy, a Dublin prison, and was released only after the truce that July.

  Intoxicating and larger than life, she bathed herself in drama. She never installed electricity at Furry Park, said her granddaughter, “believing she looked more desirable by candlelight.” In her mid-forties at the time George first met her, she cut a striking figure to which he was in no way oblivious; why, he’d loved her almost from the time he met her, he told his wife a few years later. In 1932, he dedicated to her his translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. She, Maurice, George, and George’s novelist friend E. M. Forster, as we’ll see, would make for an unlikely four-leaf clover of a literary team.

  George lived about a mile across the sprawling Saint Annes Park from Moya’s home, in a picturesque cottage called Watermill, which looked across to a low, flat island and beyond that to Dublin Bay. He’d remember the “pools left by the low tide, with stretches of shining wet sand, Howth Head and Irelands Eye in the distance, the Dublin mountains across the Bay, and the air full of the music of curlews and oystercatchers and plovers of all sorts.” The cottage, which took its name from a mill situated on a nearby creek, was no mere “cottage,” really, but a substantial thatched-roof affair, all chimneys, gables, and greenery, that went back at least a century, approached through a gate George had himself painted bright green; his mother, who visited him there, would write of “the velvety peace of Watermill.” Later, when he moved to Galway, Forster wrote to him: “I expect I should like Galway … but we mustn’t expect to find anything like Watermill there.”

  While at Watermill in 1930, George wrote a piece for a Dublin publication called The Star, about the place of Irish among Ireland’s intelligentsia. “Every day, when I am not working at Greek, I am working at Irish,” he wrote.

  I know a number of other Irish speakers in the neighbourhood—some of them native speakers, some of them University men, and all of them engaged in working in one way or another for the language. In the evening we meet—they come to my house or I go to theirs—and we sit and talk till midnight or the small hours of the morning. We acknowledge no restriction in our topics of conversation. We talk about Irish literature, past and future; about English and French literature and about the classics; we discuss whether Tolstoy is greater than Dostoevsky; we discuss religion, philosophy and economics; we talk about Lenin, Mussolini and Gandhi; in short, “we tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky.” And of course we talk nothing but Irish.

  He wrote much in Irish during these years, too. He wrote about Irish-language education and a visit to Greece, came out against what he deemed a silly Dublin land-development scheme. He translated Shakespearean sonnets. He wrote a number of short stories, including the two cited earlier about young women with illegitimate children.

  Another story, “Barra na Trá” top of the beach, is set on the Great Blasket, above the White Strand. An old man sits alone facing the sea. His reverie is broken by “the bright, long laughter of the young girls, as is usual when they are out walking together at night and know there are boys nearby.” The boys corral them. Revelry ensues. “They’re lively enough tonight,” says a bystander. “They’d want to be,” says another, a big man with a deep voice, lying back in the heather. “They have youth, but not for long.” Working himself up, he complains that the young people of the day lack courage, generosity, dignity. He turns to the old man at the top of the beach: would they ever again see the likes of the old island worthies? “The old man doesn’t move,” George’s story winds down. The wind is strengthening from the north; it will rain. “ ‘I don’t see them,’ ” he says flatly, and “ ‘I never will.’ ”

  In Dublin, George had escaped the maw of Cambridge, was happily immersed in the Irish language, and enjoyed a fecund intellectual and creative life. His words and ideas were appearing in print. He was never far from the irrepressible Moya. He had his cottage; on the wall hung two maps—one of Greece, the other of Ireland. Here was a young man coming into his own.

  Two years earlier, after meeting George in Dublin and undergoing months of training with the Guard, Maurice O’Sullivan had been ordered to Inverin, in wild, Irish-speaking Connemara in County Galway. There he was, as he’d write on the train bound west, “I in the Guard’s uniform, going out to Connemara to enforce the law.” He arrived one fine evening at the barracks, a modest two-story building set back from the coast road. “I looked out of the window. The moon was high in the sky and the night as bright as day. Galway Bay stretched out before me and the coast of Clare over in the south-east.… Children were playing up and down the road, calling to each other in sweet, fluent Irish.”

  Were it not for George’s influence, Maurice would doubtless have wound up in America; sooner that, Daniel Binchy once suggested, than suffer “the unknown world of English-speaking Ireland.” So he was fortunate to be assigned to the Gaeltacht. A photograph from those days shows him in uniform, looking square into the camera, a little jaunty, hands in pockets, big metal buckle at his waist, jacket closely fitting his trim body. He is twenty-three years old and off to a good start.

  But two years later, he was an unhappy man. What was there for him to do? Resolve domestic rows? Settle neighborly disputes over seaweed? He carried no weapon except for a brown billy club of turned and polished wood. Sometimes, in pursuit of evidence, he’d be called upon to barge into people’s homes and overturn their mattresses. Or disrupt some lovingly maintained still. “Poteen,” the Irish word for its illegal product, helped keep people warm over the winter; what was the harm in that? Altogether, the Guard was an easy life, but boring and dispiriting. In October 1928, Maurice was transferred to Carraroe, a bit farther west into Connemara, but that changed nothing. “His whole nature,” George Thomson would write, “rebelled against the idea of using the law against these destitute peasants.”

  It was probably in 1929 that Maurice wrote him to complain, as George remembered it, that “he didn’t have enough to do in the winter.” Well, replied his friend, why not write about his youth? Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, recently published, was a sensation among Irish-speakers; maybe Maurice could do something like it. He had imagination, it was plain to George, a sharp eye, a broad generosity of spirit. “Nothing would go unnoticed by him, and he was very fond of people.” Like his grandfather Daideo, to whose stories George had listened raptly on the island, he was a great storyteller, able “to make a good story out of trivial, everyday things. However long you spent in his company, you’d never feel the time passing.” Surely he could bring these qualities to his writing.

  Well, he couldn’t—not at first, anyway. Telling a story was one thing, writing it another. After reaching Dublin in 1927, Maurice had regaled George, and probably Moya, too, with his riotous tale of getting lost on the train from Tralee. Now George urged him to set it down, “with a view to publication in some form.” But it came out flat, a good story that wasn’t: “He made the attempt, and failed, and we discarded it.” He suspected Maurice was worrying about some grea
t faceless Public out there. Pay no heed to the big world, George counseled. Write for your friends on the island.

  Maurice, he all but ordered him, was to “keep writing as the spirit moved him, and to observe everything.”

  By the time Maurice got much further with the project, George had left Dublin and was living in Galway, beneficiary of a peculiar, once-in-a-lifetime turn of Irish history.

  Since the end of the civil war in 1923, Ireland had been in flux, its social and political institutions emerging in new forms, drawing on the pent-up energy of new nationhood. Its universities were no exception, and during the 1920s the question arose of just what was to become of one of the smallest of them, variously known as University College Galway or, since 1908, the National University of Ireland, Galway. Its counterparts in Dublin and Cork were bigger and better established; Galway could seem too small and insignificant to sustain itself. Located on the largely rural west coast a few peninsulas up from Dingle, far from any metropolitan centers, it sat right in the middle of the country’s largest Irish-speaking region; Galway City was 40 percent Irish-speaking, areas around it as much as 80 percent.

  This last, of course, determined the college’s fate; it was to fulfill “the functions of an Irish-speaking University College,” it was decided, “through the conducting of University teaching of general subjects through the medium of Irish.” Not teaching Irish, mind you; that was not the point. But, rather, teaching mathematics, and science, and the classics through Irish, to students who spoke it as their native tongue.

  In 2007, Irish writer and scholar Muiris Mac Conghail, looking into George Thomson’s years in Ireland, told a university seminar in Dublin how he’d long supposed University College Galway’s teach-through-Irish talk was, to use an Irish phrase he found apt, just so much gui i gcéill, or making a pretense. But his research led him to conclude that, quite to the contrary, it was the product of serious study, firm conviction. A 1926 report devoted to Galway’s institutional fate noted that Irish had been “declared to be the National language of the Irish Free State.” An across-the-board “Irishising” of all the nation’s universities was impractical. “But a beginning should be made and can be made now. The University College at Galway is a small though fairly complete institution and it can be made Irish through and through in a comparatively short time and at comparatively little expense.”

  All this idealism couldn’t last, of course. But it was enough by 1931 to get George Thomson—or Seoirse Mac Tomáis, in Irish—a position at Galway reflecting the university’s new mission.

  In February of the previous year, two University College emissaries had gone to Dublin to meet with Ernest Blythe. Blythe was successor to Michael Collins as the Free State’s minister of finance and, it would be said, an ardent champion of “an Irish culture based on high aesthetic principles”; when Marie-Louise Sjoestedt interviewed him in Dublin in 1929, she pictured him as the language’s staunchest—“I would say almost the most fanatic”—patron in government. One of the college men was Liam Ó Briain, professor of romance languages and founder of a local Irish-language theater. Mac Tomáis was “with me here last night on his way to Connemara and we had a long talk with him,” Ó Briain had written Blythe. “He is very keen on getting to do language work here, would like to come here, believes in the great possibilities of the scheme, and is full of ideas.” He had just finished translating the Odyssey into Irish and had gone to Connemara to read it to a member of the Guard there—Maurice O’Sullivan, of course. He could teach Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, all in Irish, and serve as inspiration to the people of the Gaeltacht.

  From the start, George had impressed the people at Galway whom he needed to impress. “He has already done three books of Plato into Irish,” Ó Briain wrote to Blythe, “so he would be no fake appointment. Dillon and I are both convinced he is a man worth going a long way to secure.” And Blythe knew George already; Moya Llewelyn Davies had introduced them back in 1926, during George’s earlier Dublin stay. So it seemed like a lock.

  But George had one more bar to clear. In a television interview in 1998, Muiris Mac Conghail told this version of how he did it: The president of the college, though otherwise satisfied with Thomson’s credentials, preferred someone else for the job. A Cambridge man for Gaelic Galway? So, he said to George when they met, “you must be able to give some small contribution in Irish to the lectures in Greek. Could you give us an example of your capacity in this regard?” Whereupon Thomson, in Mac Conghail’s telling, “went to the blackboard, took out his notes, and delivered a long lecture on Plato in Blasket Irish.” The nice thing about the story is that, as Mac Conghail himself verified later, it was substantially true: when Thomson presented himself in Irish before the eleven members of the Board of Examinations, he made “a tremendous impression” on them. They “all want to have him here now.”

  Ever since going up to Cambridge in 1922, George could be seen as split between his Irish and Greek sides. But now the stars had aligned to make it possible for him to say yes to both passions, no to neither. He seized the opportunity: He would teach the classics. He’d do it in Irish. He’d do it at Galway. His tutor at King’s, J. T. Sheppard, did his best to dissuade him, but George was determined.

  On August 1, 1931, long after the job had become all but his, Thomson applied for it, and early that fall moved to Galway. His mother was proud: “Will you humour me by letting me have a press cutting of your appointment when it is published?” she wrote him. But as a career move, it was not brilliant; he was giving up Cambridge for an academic backwater, presumably to bring the light of scholarship to benighted Irish-speakers barely out of places like the Blaskets themselves. Or, as one colleague summed it up, he was leaving Cambridge “to bury his talents in Galway as a lecturer at a small and remote university college.”

  Galway did have its yearbooks, catalogues, student clubs, and other trappings of college life. Inevitably, it had its rules: “Students shall not walk on the grass or cycle in the Quadrangle.” It had professors of chemistry and physics, German and philology. Its library of sixty thousand volumes included a few rare manuscripts. Its minaret-topped, Gothic-style quadrangle, which dated to its opening as Queens College in 1849, was said to have been inspired by one of the oldest Oxford colleges. Yet small and remote Galway surely was—inhabiting the second, or maybe the third, tier of European universities—far down from the glittering heights of King’s. With about seven hundred students enrolled when Thomson arrived, it awarded a hundred or so B.A.’s each year and a handful of advanced degrees. Its unique character lay squarely in its Irishness—in scholarships reserved for Irish-speakers from around the country; courses in mathematics, geography, history, economics, and the like taught in Irish; in Irish-conversation courses made available to everyone.

  It was still early in the great experiment, however, and George sometimes had but two or three students in his class. Typically, he taught in a little second-floor gallery adjacent to the college’s most stately space, the Aula Maxima. Remembered as a devoted Socrates-like figure with ready command of Irish and a love for obscure phrases heard in the Blaskets, he spoke only Irish on campus. In class, it was Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Homer; he’d supply a Greek passage, his students would render it in Irish. (Once, probably in 1933, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt visited his class, spoke briefly with him in Irish, then took up the day’s text with everyone else.) A former student remembered him from early in his time there as soft-spoken, fairly caressing words into sweetness; the class met in George’s own flat by the river, the few students sitting on the floor.

  George lived in a Galway neighborhood known as Wood Quay, in a three-story house with thick stone walls, some hundreds of years old by family reckoning, that sat across the street from a boat club. Corrib Lodge, it was called. It was a ten-minute walk from the university, less by bicycle. He’d ride past the old jail and across bridges spanning five distinct bodies of water; the brawny river Corrib split off through town and mad
e for a multitude of dikes, canals, and other waterways. From his second-floor bedroom window, George could look out over placid waters literally across the street; or else, to the west, the churning rapids of Salmon Weir; or beyond them both to the railroad-truss bridge on its great stone pillars, and the copper-clad minarets of the university on the far shore.

  His lodgings were presided over by a Mrs. Naughten, a tall, fiftyish woman who’d taken to letting out a room of the house after her husband died. George was served meals opposite the kitchen. Then he could retreat to a little nook for coffee or port or to read the paper. It was a place of Irish-linen tablecloths, windows with shutters and blinds—and of spirited talk. Mrs. Naughten was a formidable figure; well read, she knew her history and Shakespeare. Out behind the house stood a big lilac tree. In front, a few steps across the narrow street, right beside the waters of the Corrib, was a bench where on fine days George and his friends could sit out and talk.

  It was here that George spent most of the next three years. And it was here, often of a Saturday, that he’d meet with Maurice to talk about his writing. “Dear Maurice, my friend,” he’d write in a postcard, “you’ll be very welcome if you come to Galway tomorrow morning. Bring the manuscript with you.”