On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  The following summer, George took his bride to Ireland.

  They went first to Dublin, where they stayed in Raheny as guests of Moya and Crompton Llewelyn Davies. “George had told me much about Moya and her romantic history,” Katharine would recall, including “her involvement in the 1916 rebellion and her attachment to Michael Collins.… She was very fond of George, though she probably disapproved of his marrying an Englishwoman with so little knowledge of Ireland.”

  Then it was on to Galway. They stayed at George’s old digs at Corrib Lodge, overlooking the river, “whence we could watch the leaping salmon.”

  “I appreciated the warmth and humor of the Irish, who seemed so different from Cambridge academics,” she’d write. “But it was only when we reached Kerry and spent two days on the Blasket Island” that she began to appreciate something of what Ireland really meant to her husband.

  They were rowed to the island in a naomhóg on Sunday, August 4; she was too seasick to enjoy the scenery. A few days later, back on the mainland, in Ballyferriter, she wrote to her mother about what she had seen of the Blasket, and of her new husband in its glow:

  As soon as the villagers spied a boat coming in, they all ran out of their cottages and down the hill to see who it was. And when they recognized George we had the warmest welcome I’ve ever seen given, and we were overwhelmed with cries of joy and embraces, and all the way through the village people came running out to greet us. They are the most beautiful people and [most] delightful I’ve ever met. The old women with shawls over their heads, leaning on their sticks, the men in jerseys and caps (which they never take off) and girls in bright colours, and the most enchanting, elf-like children with pointed chins. You could never get tired of looking at them.…

  And the room full of people and animals ranging from the ubiquitous cat in front of the fire, through chickens, ducklings, and all kinds of wild fowl, to a donkey or cow in the poorer houses. The language is lovely to listen to, but I wish I understood. There were endless stories and jokes, George talking just like a native and completely at home.

  The summer before, in the wake of the publication of Twenty Years A-Growing, George had made a triumphant return to the Blaskets with Maurice. Now, with his new wife, he was back. Twelve years before, on his first visit, a foreigner’s arrival still counted as an event. Now it verged on commonplace. All through the 1930s, there were times when the island seemed to swarm with visitors.

  Chapter 10

  Visitors, Strangers, Tourists, Friends

  [1937]

  At the time of his first visit to the Blasket, George Chambers lived in a house on a fine greenery-softened crescent set back from Temple Fortune Lane in London, not far from a Jewish cemetery. He was a man of commerce and industry–- he owned, or managed, a good-sized toy factory—but he had a literary streak, too; he later wrote a book of poetry showing evidence of real feeling and considerable craft. He was born in 1873, and married, with three children; one went on to become an artist, another to immigrate to Australia, marry, and become a farmer. In old age, at least, Chambers was remembered as a quiet and gentle man. He had thin, straight hair, a high forehead, and in later years a beard.

  Sometime before the summer of 1931, Chambers decided he wanted to see the lighthouse on the Tiaracht, one of the Lesser Blaskets, three miles west of the big island. He was advised that it was difficult to get to the craggy little outcropping, that he ought to make the Great Blasket his base and, as he wrote later, “get the fisherfolk to take me out to the lighthouse.”

  Having never heard of the Blaskets, he pulled out a map, found the school that served the village, and wrote to its schoolmaster. A reply soon came from Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, its schoolmistress since 1927. “Nora O’Shea,” as he’d call her in his own acount, arranged island lodgings for him in the home of Peats Tom Kearney. In late June 1931, he made the usual trip—by rail to Tralee, the narrow-gauge over the mountain to Dingle, and a car ride via Slea Head to Dún Chaoin—which he would describe as “a bleak, impoverished and scattered village lying under a bare mountain side.” The sea was too rough for them to reach the island just then, so he stayed overnight at the post office, whose proprietress—“red-headed and unmarried,” Chambers described her—put him up and fed him. The next morning, a Saturday, he was rowed to the island in a naomhóg.

  Late that first afternoon, hiking up the hill behind the village, he met two girls coming down the other way with a pannier-laden donkey bearing turf. They “wore neither shoes nor stockings and were clothed in little more than rags, but two more beautiful girls I have seldom seen and they were as merry and unaffected with me as though I had been an elder brother.” One of them was named Lís. Based on the totality of later events, it seems hard to credit any conclusion but that, however unlikely or outlandish it might seem, George Chambers, at the age of fifty-eight, fell in love with her on the spot or in the days that followed. “Was it chance or divinely planned,” he’d write in a poem to her published years later, “that my bleak heart should flower once more?”

  The object of his fascination, Lís, pronounced “Leesh,” was Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin, second cousin of Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, recently emigrated to America, and her brother Maurice, just then writing Twenty Years A-Growing. She was twenty years old, dark-featured, with a ravishing smile and thick black hair. In one photo Chambers took of her, he aims the camera from up close and below, her eyes and head turned hard to the side, her dark locks flung round her head in careless abandon. It is intimate and intense. It is no routine tourist snapshot.

  On the cold, wet, and windy day after his arrival on the big island, Chambers went out to the Tiaracht with Lís and Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, who were friends. They were rowed the six or seven miles along the back face of the Great Blasket, then across open water to the Tiaracht, by Seán Tom Kearney, whom Lís later recalled to Chambers’s mind as “the one with the jutting jaw.” They had tea there, perhaps at the lightkeeper’s station, then went on to Inishvickillaun, where Nóra, Lís, and other islanders—they all wore shoes now—lined up on the stony porch outside the old Daly house for a picture.

  Back on the Great Blasket, Chambers stayed on the second floor of the Kearney place, which he remembered as crowded, dirty, and “verminous, with no comfort of any kind.” But he really didn’t seem to mind. The island was like nothing he’d ever experienced, a place where most of the children had never seen a tree, or a wheeled vehicle, or an electric light. Now and in a subsequent visit, Chambers took pictures wherever he went. Of an island man, the mainland rising behind him across the sound, caught at an idle moment beside the bare latticework of an unfinished naomhóg. Of Nóra and her wide-smiling pupils lined up by age in front of the village school. Of sheep-shearing on the Gravel Strand. Of a dozen island men, garbed identically in caps and jerseys, maneuvering an enormous cow into a naomhóg.

  Lís Ní Shúilleabháin with her husband Seán and daughter Niamh in about 1938, some seven years after she’d met Londoner George Chambers on the island and begun a correspondence with him that would endure for more than a quarter century. (Illustration Credit ill.20)

  Sometime after his return to England, he and the young woman he would call “Eilísh of the Island” began to correspond. “I love to read your letters,” she wrote to him in November. “I have everyone [sic] of them yet and a couple of days ago I read them all through again. Have you got mine? … I never had such a passion for writing to anyone as I feel in writing to you.”

  Her letters were written at great cost, in a sometimes awkward English that was, after all, her second language; excerpts here appear just as she wrote them, with no cosmetic alteration. She sometimes labored over them for hours. Occasionally, she apologized for their deficiencies. She needn’t have: her letters were spirited and heartfelt, never smothered or tight, and, especially in those first months after he left, maybe more than that. On January 12, 1932, two weeks after receiving a Saint Theresa medal she’d asked him to send her, she
wrote:

  Today again is a rather bad day. The sea is rough and risen up, also a good breeze is there. No postman, no cable, no wireless, nothing atall from the mainland, but as you wrote yourself: “The scent of sea-wrack and keen salt spray,” and from that my heart goes o’er to G.C. on your London shore. On my neck wearing every day, all the time is my dearest thing on earth. Death won’t part me from it. Your letters and things has given me a new life, hope and happiness

  “I suppose it was a pity,” she added, “that I was not twenty when you were thirty.”

  Each post day, she went down to the slip in expectation and hope. One day the following month, when she feared not hearing from him, she stayed up at the house instead, only to see her sister coming up the path, blue envelope in hand. “My heart came to my mouth with joy, oh dear what would I do if you would not write again.… I love your letters and yourself and your family and everything you send me makes me as happy as the day is long.”

  He did write again, and so did she, often with a fresh, appealing frankness:

  I would love to answer all your questions but it is a task but its for you and indeed no matter how hard I’ll try to do everything for you … but I am afraid and it is troubling me that I have not as much knowledge in life as to know what to tell you rightly. An Island girl without much education what would she know up to you oh dear me.

  In the same letter, she resorts to doggerel: “My ink is bad and my pen is old but my love for you will never grow cold.”

  She added, “We are together now.….…I mean that the two of us are together. We are nearly by our letters.” “S.W.A.L.K.” on a letter, she explained to him, meant “sealed with a loving kiss,” then added: “I must say Good night now dearest because it is getting late with best love and regards to George from Eilish,” followed by a dozen or more kisses—though “I suppose that they’ll be cold before they reach you.”

  From time to time, without shame or artifice, she asked him for something, like the Saint Theresa medal, or “cards” for combing wool, or his wife’s cast-off clothes. And he would oblige, or send something on his own—boxing gloves for Lís’s brother Seán, or a dictionary. Thank you for the books, she wrote to him early in their correspondence. “It is yourself that knows the best of books. An English song book wouldn’t it be nice, I could sing you know.”

  On June 7, 1932, she reported that Robin Flower—whom Chambers may have known even before his visit—had brought to the island with him a young Cambridge scholar. “I met Kenneth Jackson and had a little talk with him,” she wrote to Chambers, but assured him, “I don’t ever go down to the strand with him nor either write his name in the sand, oh no indeed. If George was here we would go down to the strand these lovely evening and write in the sand.” She realized it was almost a year since they’d spent that day on the Tiaracht. “The very best day in my life I ever enjoyed. Will a day like it never come again?”

  In early 1933, Lís’s letters took a new turn. Shrove, just before Lent, was the usual time to conclude marriages, but this year, she wrote, there’d been none. That was March 3. But on April 27 she wrote Chambers in these words:

  My best friend, I have every thought of getting married. I hope you will love to hear it and your dear Eilish of the Island, staying always in her dear Island home. I hope we will be the best of friends as always. Would married life be so cruel to change such friends. I am very sure in the next letter I will be able to tell you everything about it but at present I can’t tell you anymore.

  Nine days later, on May 6, in a little ceremony in Ballyferriter sparsely attended because of bad weather, she married Seán Ó Criomhthain, son of Tomás, the Islandman. It was the day before her twenty-second birthday. “I love my husband and my home,” she wrote Chambers a few days later, “all the world has changed to me, everything for the better. Let us all praise God in Heaven.”

  Accompanying Lís’s letter to Chambers came one from her new husband: “Just a Line to Let you know that I was the lucky one to fall in touch with your Island girl. It was not today or yesterday I was in her company But with the Last Seven years and see now what I have gained by it. To have my whole Heart’s desire.”

  I don’t know how Chambers felt on reading this, though I can guess. I do know that their correspondence endured, each occasionally ruffling the other’s feathers, but mostly with great affection, and never flagging for too long, for at least the next twenty-five years.

  “There are many visitors on the Island already but they are all strangers to us,” Lís wrote Chambers early that summer of 1933. “They all have my father-in-law’s book.” Since its publication in 1929, Tomás’s books, especially An tOileánach, had put the Blasket on the map, made of it an object of curiosity and interest. In 1931, Tomás wrote to his son Thomas in the States: “Manny the strangers that come heare this summer visiting the Island all of them took my picture, I had to write my name on the book for the whole of them, Professor’s Priests, Monks, Brothers, Sisters, every sort off people.” By 1933, there was talk of an English translation. But then Flower, who was preparing it, was injured in a fall from a horse; it finally appeared in 1934.

  By then Maurice, Moya, and George had beaten Tomás to the English-language punch, with the appearance, in May 1933, of their translation of Fiche Blian ag Fás. “It was a great Loss for us for O’Sullivan’s book Twenty Years A-Growing took the market from us,” Lís’s husband wrote Chambers in October.

  It was, of course, the two together, first Tomás’s gritty account and then Maurice’s in all its wonderment, in Irish and English both, that did it: “Within the space of four years,” Daniel Binchy wrote in 1934, “one small island, with a population of less than 150 souls, has contributed to the scanty stock of original literature in modern Irish the only two works which, in my opinion at least, are worth reading for their own sake.” And they, in turn, forever altered the Blaskets in the popular imagination, making them into a literary destination. “There is a time and it is not so very long ago,” Nóra Ní Shéaghdha would look back from 1940 in an Irish-language memoir published that year, “when a person would prefer to scrape a finger on a rock than think of spending a short time holidaying on the Great Blasket.” Now all that had changed.

  “Of all years this year was the best,” Lís wrote Chambers on August 21, 1933; “never before was the Island so full and taken with visitors.” A group of male teachers had come and actually set up a tent, she told him. The islanders furnished them with potatoes and fish. The Kearney place was fairly full to bursting with visitors. Now that they’d finally left, “the Blasket people will have a rest.”

  This moment in the island’s transformation was captured in a cover illustration for the June 1933 issue of Dublin Opinion, a literary magazine. It shows a craggy, Blasket-like isle to which cartoonish writers cling, pecking away at cartoonish typewriters, manuscript piling up around them. An old island woman is accompanied by a boy lugging her typewriter. A publisher is being rowed away from the island in a boat sinking under the weight of manuscripts bound for Dublin and London. The caption: “The Literary Wave Hits the Islands.”

  Predictably, one staple of the new attention was the overwrought recounting of exotic island perils. One writer, Donal O’Cahill, lovingly described the risks of being rowed to the island, picturing “ridge after ridge of hissing water that each moment threatened to overwhelm us.” What chance had they in their flimsy boat?

  Boat! It was a slip of a thing of light trellised laths and tarred canvas—a “cockle-shell,” incredible, everything, anything, but my conception of what at that instant should be a boat. Feverishly I poked the side with my finger and might have poked it through. I felt the water pulsing, surging, crashing against it.… Was this all that was between us and how many fathoms of treacherous sea?

  You get the idea.

  Seán Ó Faoláin, who made his island stay part of a memoir, An Irish Journey, bragged of sitting by the hearth with Tomás Ó Criomhthain—“a pompous old m
an” whose favorite proverbs he proceeded to challenge or dismiss. “I enjoyed tussling with old Tomás,” he allowed, “and he enjoyed tussling with me.” On the island at the time were “three professional Gaels,” along with a young Englishman from London. At first Ó Faoláin made light of how they skipped across the island in “innocent elation.” But then, abruptly, he seemed to correct himself, as he recalled his own first exposure to the Gaeltacht years before. He’d felt just

  the same sense of release. It was like taking off one’s clothes for a swim naked in some mountain-pool. Nobody who has not had this sensation of suddenly “belonging” somewhere—of finding the lap of the lost mother—can understand what a release the discovery of the Gaelic world meant to modern Ireland.

  The cover of Dublin Opinion, June 1936. By this time, the Great Blasket, population 150, had produced three important works of Irish-language literature. (Illustration Credit ill.21)

  Robin Flower, whose first visit to the island by now went back more than twenty years, also kept coming, as did new visitors on his recommendation or in his company. In the spring of 1931, he brought with him a British Museum colleague, forty-two-year-old Edward Meyerstein, novelist, poet, and confirmed curmudgeon; somebody once described him as “throbbing with interior distress.” Meyerstein wrote of the men gathering seaweed and stuffing it into panniers. Of the islanders’ “grave courtesy.” Of “an old woman, with a black shawl enveloping her head, blowing up a fire with her lips, while the light from the kindled turf invests her eyes with a sort of prophetic glow.” His fortnight on the island, he wrote a friend, “has shown me very clearly what is wrong with me”; Meyerstein makes his Blasket idyll sound like therapy.