On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Some years later, in 1944, Thomson wrote an article for a Celtic-studies journal on the “The Irish Language Revival.” Among the impoverished peasants of the Blaskets, he reported, “the language embodied a culture and way of life which in my own country had been lost.” He was not deceived, he said, by the simplistic yet seductive ideas of the “Celtic Twilight.” He had no wish to return to the Middle Ages. He had seen enough of the Blaskets “to shed any romantic illusions they may have inspired in me at the start.” But, he declared, their rich culture was simply “a fact.”

  One had only to turn to Maurice O’Sullivan. Readers of Twenty Years A-Growing, he suspected, would “agree with me that the author possessed a remarkable imaginative gift,” one that, of course, was his own. “On the other hand,” he continued, “the eloquence of his language, which is far more striking in the original than it is in the translation, is not his own. It is traditional. I do not think there is a phrase in the whole book which is not current on the lips of the people.”

  It was the people about whom George more and more came to think and care. And while in Galway, he set out on a high-minded project on their behalf, or on what he deemed their behalf. It was all well and good to imagine restoring Irish to Ireland, but more important, he decided, to preserve it among the peasants who already used it:

  I conceived the idea of using the language as a means of giving [the people of the Gaeltacht] a modern education so that they could adapt their culture to modern conditions. I thought that, given an up-to-date education in their native language, they could be introduced to modern life without losing their culture in the process.

  Indeed, behind the move to Galway in the first place had been a scheme (apparently hatched with Ernest Blythe) to launch a series of public Irish-language lectures in that spirit.

  On Friday or Saturday nights in October and November 1931, soon after arriving in Galway, George began giving lectures on “The Beginnings of European Civilisation,” with a cast including the Egyptians and the ancient gods. He delivered them in Irish, to a packed auditorium in the university quadrangle. But they were aimed not at university students, or not just at them, but at local Irish-speakers generally. “Extension” classes, we call them today. But in Galway, in 1931, delivered by an Irish-speaking exemplar of Oxbridge scholarship, they were quite the thing. No one present for Friday’s lecture, said the local paper, would want to miss the next one.

  George’s ambitions were nothing if not grand. In an article outlining his ideas, he described how lectures in Dún Chaoin, say, might include one on Pierce Ferriter, the local poet and patriot known by name and legendary exploits but little else. Discuss his poetry, his life and times, and you had an entrée into literature and history. Or what about mackerel? Dún Chaoin men fished for it every day. So why not a lecture on how mackerel spawn, their life as marine creatures, the intricacies of their biology? Ultimately, you’d be wandering into economics, meteorology, and chemistry. All in Irish. “If we began in this way, dealing with matters that concern the lives of the people closely, there is no doubt that we would be able to arouse interest in the origins of things.” Such lectures were sure to succeed, “if only a start were made.”

  Or that, anyway, was the idea. As Séamus Mac Mathúna, today the university’s director of academic affairs, looks back on the noble experiment, Thomson started with “high hopes and ambitions” but in the end had to reckon his efforts a failure. Ireland, as Thomson would take pains to point out later, was not Greece; you couldn’t hold lectures in the open air. You needed a hall, which in most Irish villages meant a school, which normally required the say-so of a parish priest. “I had not proceeded far with my arrangements,” he would write, “when it was made plain to me that there was not a priest throughout the length and breadth of Connemara who would dream of permitting his school to be used for anything so subversive” as his lectures. Nor did he get much support from the university, or from the Ministry of Education; Ernest Blythe, his vigorous champion, had been voted out of office.

  Three years in Galway left George embittered. As he wrote later, at a time when his political views had hardened:

  The authorities did not want the peasants to be educated. It might put ideas into their heads. It might inspire them to demand an improvement in their lot. The authorities saw this more clearly even than I did.… No doubt, if the peasants had heard my extension lectures, they would have been stirred to demand an improvement in their conditions, but that precisely is why they were not permitted to hear them.

  During these years, he’d write, “I was working to save the culture of the Irish-speaking peasantry”—which betrays some slight taint, at least, of bravado or grandiloquence. George was capable and resourceful, but maybe a little overearnest, too; independent, but also stubborn. When he arrived in Galway, he was only twenty-eight, an age at which he may not yet have learned the interpersonal and political skills needed to pull off such an ambitious project.

  Despite these disappointments, George remained busy and productive. He brought out Irish translations of works of Euripides and Aeschylus. He helped translate a play by the Russian dramatist Gogol, which was performed at Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the local Irish-language theater. He translated the Book of Common Prayer.

  Altogether, he probably worked too hard. A long-standing ulcer acted up. Even by early 1933, he was apparently weighing a return to Dublin, though for the moment he hung on. “I am sorry that you are not leaving Galway,” Forster wrote him on January 31, after learning that Maurice’s book had found a publisher. It was a dead end for him there. In Dublin, on the other hand, “you would be in contact with other people’s minds, and perhaps with their affections, and in Galway I can’t see that you are.”

  In April 1934, Forster wrote George that he’d recently talked to Jack Sheppard and had news: Sheppard “would and could still take you back to Kings.” If he was interested, Forster made it sound, he’d better move fast.

  Finally, overwhelmed and exhausted, “my mind in turmoil,” as he later wrote, George gave up, and later that year left Galway to take up once more his King’s fellowship in Cambridge.

  Perhaps while still at Watermill, or else later in Galway, George learned that Mary Kearney had immigrated to America. “I was determined to follow her,” he’d write—determined, that is, until he learned that his girl from the Blaskets with the hearty, infectious laugh had become a nun.

  It was probably around the beginning of November 1929, after about a week’s voyage, that Mary arrived in Boston. Walking down the gangplank, she heard someone call her name. Her sister Cáit, who was working as a domestic for a family with connections in the Springfield police force, couldn’t come herself, but arranged for an officer to meet her at the dock. Yes, said Mary, that’s me. She was in America, and soon on a train bound for Springfield, ninety miles west.

  Like other immigrants, she held visions of America as a land of gold and limitless opportunity. But as the train chugged west across eastern Massachusetts, she looked out on a trackside landscape of rubbish and old cars. And that, she’d remember with a laugh years later, left her oddly comfortable: America was not so daunting, after all, not so rich, not so foreign: “I felt at home.”

  Cáit, two years older and four years in the New World, was thrilled to have her sister join her in Springfield. When she had time off on Thursday afternoons, she and some friends would round up Mary and set about showing her America. One time, they went to get their portraits taken—the four of them, young women in their twenties, lined up in front of a studio backdrop of a garden trellis, wearing fresh frocks and the little head-hugging cloches fashionable at the time. In another photo, of just the two sisters, Cáit had put on a few pounds; Mary sat prettily and petitely beside her, in a pleated skirt, a string of pearls, faux or not, and a scarf tied like a scout bandanna around her neck. A month or two off the ship and Mary looked like a million other American girls.

  Mary Kearney, at right, a month or two afte
r landing in America. Her sister Cáit sits second from the left. (Illustration Credit ill.19)

  She’d landed in America at the end of the Roaring Twenties, around the time of the stock-market crash. But the Depression seeped through the country only gradually, and Mary soon got a job in an adjacent town, working for a mixed Catholic-Protestant family with five boys. At one point, she heard the parents talking about possibly placing the last of the boys, still an infant, in an orphanage. “Over my dead body he’s going to an orphanage,” Mary remembered herself saying, as she marched into the room and plucked the baby from its mother’s arms; he’d be safe in her care.

  But was there something wrong with this picture? During her first weeks and months in America, she would join her sister and friends for a dance or the movies, and “this thing would be in my head all the time, you know, that I shouldn’t be there, that there was a place for me”—a place not in the world, but in the church. Anything she did, it was the same, “going around like a record” in her head.

  She’d never met a nun on the Blasket, yet the idea had taken hold in her that she wanted to become one. Had she conceived it only in the wake of her relationship with George, in response to some inner storm of confused feeling? Or did it start earlier? Maybe even before she’d met him, quashing chances for any real romance from the outset? “I knew he was sweet on me, but I knew I had a vocation.” That, at least, is what she’d say years later, after a lifetime in the church.

  She didn’t want to take the fateful step right away, but, rather, to get a job, make money, send some of it home to her parents. But it was right away. One night, a couple of months after arriving in America, she burst into tears. When Cáit asked why, she told her she wanted to join the convent. “Who’s keeping you?” she remembered Cáit saying. “You shouldn’t be crying over that. You should be very happy.”

  It was arranged that she meet Springfield Bishop Thomas O’Leary. She wanted to become a nun, said Miss Mary Kearney, twenty-one years old, late of the Blasket Islands, and virtually just off the boat. She wanted to be a missionary. In China, maybe, or Africa.

  Well, she could be a missionary in Springfield, she recalled Bishop O’Leary telling her.

  Oh, but how could that be, with her friends and family right there in Springfield? What kind of a missionary was that?

  “But you’d still be a missionary—from Ireland. The Sisters of Providence have a lot of work for you to do.”

  Sisters of Providence went back to 1873 in America, operating a network of hospitals in the Springfield-Holyoke area. They were a relatively well-off order and heavily Irish; of foreign-born nuns joining the order over the years, one came from Poland, one from Italy, ten from England, and 172 from Ireland. Among those with whom Mary entered the novitiate in January 1930, five were Irish girls, but she alone could actually speak Irish.

  Six months later, the engraved invitations went out:

  The Sisters of Providence

  cordially invite you to attend the ceremony of

  Reception of the Holy Habit

  at Holy Family Institute,

  Brightside, Holyoke

  Saturday, July 19th, 1930

  at nine in the morning.

  In a ceremony a year and a half later, on January 6, 1932, Mary took her temporary vows and became Sister Mary Clemens.

  In the late 1960s, with the liberalization accompanying the Second Vatican Council, Mary gave up her nun’s habit. Before that, all anyone could see of her was a pinched remnant of face that included the eyes and mouth. All the rest of her face and figure were lost in a voluminous sea of cloth, a spotless oval of white around her head. So remembers her niece Kathleen Arduini, daughter of Mary’s sister Cáit. On the rare occasions when Mary was allowed to visit her family, she was delivered by limousine, escorted by another nun, who would come into the house with her, sit quietly, and wait.

  Her aunt was not overly demonstrative when she came to visit, Arduini remembers, never one for hugging and kissing. She had a “great, great smile,” but sometimes seemed too holy to touch.

  In the spring of 1934, just before George left Galway, a twenty-eight-year-old musician named Katharine Stewart was visiting Greece with her mother. Six years before, while in her final year at Girton, one of Cambridge University’s three women’s colleges, she’d been urged to sit in on a lecture by George Thomson devoted to Greek lyric meter. She found the subject, with all its links to music, fascinating, the lecturer no less so. That, however, was that. But now, while she was visiting Greece, a Scottish couple with whom she and her mother were traveling recommended to her a recently published book, written by a peasant fisherman from the far west of Ireland, and translated into English by this same George Thomson.

  Later that summer, Katharine had just returned to Cambridge when she learned that Thomson was back, too; by her own account, she sought the chance to see him again. “The opportunity came in July,” she remembered. She was playing a Beethoven piano concerto at King’s, and during the intermission George approached her. They talked. Soon after, on July 23—the invitation came less than three weeks after Maurice O’Sullivan was married in Connemara—he sent her a note: “Could you come to tea on Friday (4:15), so that we may continue the conversation which was interrupted—very sweetly, I admit—by Handel?”

  “That,” she wrote later, “was the beginning of our short courtship.”

  In the months that followed, George told her of his efforts to nurture the Irish language and teach classics in Galway. “George spoke eloquently and passionately,” Katharine recalled. Both of them were interested in the classics, both in music. She’d play for him on her new harpsichord, captivating him with her reading of “Callino Casturame,” a lilting little Elizabethan air. Sometimes they’d meet in his rooms. Or he’d come to tea at her parents’ house, Girton Gate.

  Katharine Stewart—“Katten” to her friends, and soon to George—came from a large family prominent in the academic and musical life of the old university town. Her father, Hugh Stewart, dean of Trinity College and a lecturer in French, was an ardent Francophile; the family often spoke French at the dinner table. Her mother, Jessie Stewart, was a first-generation woman classics scholar at Newnham College; she and George liked to talk about Walter Headlam, the King’s classicist who’d inspired George’s earliest work on Greek lyric meter. Katharine, who would herself contribute to Mozart scholarship and maintain a lifetime’s devotion to the keyboard, had three sisters and a brother. All cared for music. All were caught up in the surging political currents of the day; Katharine’s sister Frida would drive an ambulance in Spain during the civil war there. They enjoyed their privileges, yet, as Katharine recounted in notes intended to form the basis for a biography of her husband, they all found ways to escape what they experienced as Cambridge’s elitist grip. As for Katten and George, it is hard to see them as anything but superbly matched. “We did feel this instant sympathy,” she’d say.

  By mid-August, three weeks after Katharine’s piano recital at King’s, they were engaged. “What thrilling, wonderful, lovely news!” Frida, closest to Katharine among her siblings, wrote her. George, it seemed to her, “hits you in the eye as a person of beauty and sincerity and sensitiveness, and I thought him charming but,” she went on, “didn’t know he was so wise!”

  George took Katharine to Dulwich to meet his mother, who welcomed her warmly. She met his brothers and sisters, too, all but one of whom still lived at home on Lovelace Road. Lorlie, the musician of the family, played the cello; she and Katharine tried some sonatas together. The elder sister, Maisie, who’d lost her fiancé in the war, had taken over the family accountancy business when their father died; it had been George’s for the asking, had he wanted it. Brother Hugh had served in the merchant marine but was just then unemployed, and discouraged. George’s much younger brother, Oscar, just sixteen, was at school.

  On October 4, 1934, George and Katharine were married in Girton Church; they might have preferred a civil weddin
g, Katharine would later explain, but dispensed with it in deference to her father and his mother, who had grown increasingly religious. They honeymooned in Ringstead Mill, north of Cambridge, in Norfolk, where they stayed in the house of a family friend. They walked by the sea, read Shakespeare in the evenings.

  Their marriage lasted more than half a century, until George’s death in 1987, and was marked by tenderness, honesty, and a profound communion of values. They shared much, felt for each other great respect and love. “I am thinking of you constantly, but after 8 p.m. even more so,” he wrote to her from Cambridge one day about a year after their marriage, when she had to leave town for the day. “Outwardly I shall be listening to the high-table chatter, but inwardly I shall be trying to catch strains of your music, and I am saving up for you a kiss for every note. Good night, my sweet love, take care of yourself, and goodbye, my darling, till tomorrow.”

  Four years later, as addendum to an otherwise chatty note, George wrote her that he’d learned there were thirty-nine ways of saying “darling” in Irish: “So far, I’m ashamed to say, I have only been able to think of about 12, but here they are, all for you: My heart, my bright heart, [illegible], [illegible], my love, my bright love, my thousand loves, love of my heart, my darling, child of my heart, vein of my heart, my heart’s secret.”

  After their honeymoon, the young couple returned to Cambridge and moved into the house her parents had given them as a wedding present. It was called Lavender Cottage.