On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Once, early in the war, they fell into what amounted to a lover’s spat. In March 1940, Lís wrote Chambers requesting a pair of shoes each for her and her husband. The shoes arrived, but, as she wrote him, “they did not bring any joy or pleasure to me … for I knew from your letter you sent them with anger to me and with no pleasure in your own heart.” Apparently, he’d read her request as a threat not to write again unless she got the shoes. No, not true, she said. “If I only thought it would give you so much displeasure as it did I would first rather walk out barefoot than tell you to send them.… You have thrown everything you ever sent me into my face.”

  All was soon made up, though. She was glad, she wrote a few weeks later, “to hear all being well again between us. Yes all cuts have been healed since and thank you and thank you for the nice letter, it was so free and gay like years ago when there was no worry or war time.”

  But there was much more worry to come.

  And no end to the war.

  • • •

  After her trip to Ireland in 1929, where in Cobh she’d seen so many emigrants bound for America, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt visited Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets twice more, in 1933 and 1936. On the first of these, she gave Seán an Chóta an inscribed copy of Maurice O’Sullivan’s newly published book. Her friendship with Seán went back a decade, but her affair with him, if that’s what it was, was long over. In July 1932, she had married Michel Jonval, a scholar of Lithuanian and Latvian language and culture, whom she accompanied on a 1935 trip to Riga, Latvia, just before his death; she would subsequently write under the name Sjoestedt-Jonval.

  Marie-Louise spent the summers of 1935 and 1936 in Wales. Her important articles on Kerry Irish appeared in the 1930s in Études celtiques. Finally, in 1940, the book for which she would be most remembered, Dieux et héros des Celtes, was published. “It did her the greatest honor,” wrote one of her mentors, Joseph Vendryes. “Her friends will never be able to open it without the deepest emotion, for it will serve as the measure for them of the loss Celtic studies have suffered.”

  The loss was that of Marie-Louise herself, who died by her own hand on December 26, 1940, in Paris, at age forty. The following year, her colleagues prepared a memorial volume with hommages to her and her work, her own last essay on contemporary Irish literature, affectionate tributes to her person and her intellect. But with the Germans then occupying Paris, not all that might have been said about her final days could be said.

  At the time of the French defeat in June 1940, Marie-Louise had what should have been a long and distinguished career before her. But she took the occupation hard, her tendency to depression much aggravated by events. “A too-late departure from Paris, a return marked by tragic incidents, a whole lamentable succession of circumstances, led to a series of nervous crises.” This, anyway, was how one of her colleagues would put it, cryptically enough, in 1941. “A kind of instability dragged her along by intervals towards death. On five occasions she came to be saved just in time.”

  But this wartime account judiciously skirts the details of just what happened at the end, which, as Seán Ó Lúing put it years later, had to be “shaded and softened.” Toward the end of 1940, she married Louis Renou, another Parisian scholar and author of a tender obituary in the memorial volume to her that appeared the following year. When the Germans arrested him, Marie-Louise abruptly took her life—by one account, throwing herself out a window. According to the sanitized version, “she submitted herself to a cruel death, which at least did not allow her time to suffer.”

  The memorial book included a photographic portrait that catches us a little off-guard. Here is not our Marie-Louise from the Blaskets, garbed in peasant shawl, but an elegant young woman fashionably coiffed, turned out in Parisian finery—gauzy, with a hint of décolletage—all her spirit alive in the directness and intelligence of her gaze.

  Brian Kelly was dead by now, too.

  On December 28, 1936, about the time George Thomson was named to his Birmingham post and just two months before the death of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Kelly died of polio at the age of forty-seven. He was laid to rest in Lovrinac Cemetery, in the city of Split, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, in what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia; he had been living on the Continent since about 1926. “I felt at the arrival of that news,” An Seabhac wrote soon afterward, “that a lonely tragedy had occurred.”

  Kelly, it might be argued, had done little with his life, at least as far as his career went. His modest jobs in the Irish school system never came to much. His Irish was never really strong. He wrote little. But, it was said of him, he had the gift of friendship. At the time of his death, Eoin MacNeill, cofounder of the Gaelic League, compared Kelly to, of all people, J. M. Synge. The playwright Synge, he wrote, had sipped at the fountain of the Irish language in Aran and the Blaskets, using it “to give distinction and power to his English.” Kelly, on the other hand, had given us “the well itself to drink from.” He meant, of course, Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

  The books Kelly encouraged Tomás to write were published in 1928 and 1929. He may never have seen them.

  The paths of Carl Marstrander and the Blaskets crossed, briefly, for five months in 1907. After that, he set out on a busy and distinguished scholarly career, and never came back. He did field research in Brittany, the Isle of Man, and Scotland up to 1936; in that year, he returned to Ireland to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin. He survived the war years and lived into his eighties, dying in 1965.

  “His pen was sharp,” another Norwegian scholar once said of him, “and he did not mince words.” (Marstrander’s opinion of Monte Carlo, the gambling mecca on the Riviera: “All is first class here apart from the inhabitants and the visitors.”) David Greene, a student of his during the 1930s who went on to become professor of Irish at Trinity, wrote later that, even though Marstrander sympathized with Ireland’s wish to break free culturally and economically from England, “he never really believed that the Irish people possessed the necessary determination and stamina” to do it. And he was revolted by the provincialism of Irish life. Still, he passed the torch of his enthusiasm for the Blaskets to Robin Flower and, through him, numerous other visitors. And he infected the islanders themselves, notably Tomás Ó Criomhthain, with a sense of their own significance.

  “A fervent Norwegian patriot,” Irish scholar Daniel Binchy called Marstrander. During World War II, with Norway occupied by the Germans, he played some role, at least, in the resistance. At one point—rumor has it he was stopped near Gestapo headquarters with a radio wrapped in a newspaper—he was arrested and interned in a camp outside Oslo. From there, the story goes, he smuggled out a diary to his son, also in the resistance, written in Old Irish. His son was arrested, the diary confiscated and sent to Berlin for examination by language experts there. When they couldn’t make sense of it, they returned it to the Gestapo in Norway, advising them that the only person who might be able to translate it was one Professor Carl Marstrander, of Oslo.

  Some months before the outbreak of the war, Robin Flower wrote: “I am myself thinking of retiring at the age of 60 to try and do some work”; he meant his own scholarly and literary work, not his duties at the British Museum. He was just then writing an article for the Museum’s quarterly journal and acquiring some John Donne letters. “This kind of thing goes on all the time and fritters away all my energies. I have no conviction that this is my real work in life, though of course being paid for it I must do it.” He had but so much energy. “I find it difficult nowadays to work in the evenings, tired after the distractions of the day.”

  The war, of course, halted all thought of retirement. On August 24, 1940, several Museum departments transferred manuscripts and other materials to an underground tunnel at the National Library of Wales for safekeeping; Flower was placed in charge. For the moment, his family remained back in London. “The ghastly bombing of London goes on,” he wrote from 12 South Marine Terrace in Aberystwyth, Wales, in November.
“The wife of one of our best friends was killed the other day.” One of Flower’s daughters taught in a school on the outskirts of London. Another was at Oxford. Son Patrick was about to join the Royal Air Force.

  If, among visitors to the Blaskets, Brian Kelly, Thomson, Sjoestedt, and Synge each in their own ways bore some tincture of the exotic or irregular, Robin Flower was more like the rest of us, a kind of Everyman, leading a middle-class life in every way familiar to us today. At the British Museum, where he’d worked since 1906, he rose up through the Manuscripts Department, became assistant keeper in 1922, a position renamed “deputy keeper” in 1929. He held some outside posts, too, would eventually become acting director of the Early English Text Society. But the Museum was the only place he ever actually worked, his professional home, stiff in its bureaucracy, subcommittees, and periodic reorganizations, its rules governing promotions or how long clerks and assistants had for lunch. It “was already old at the beginning of the twentieth century,” someone once said of it.

  All through these years, Flower lived in London, beset by the daily worries of home and work. He and his family moved every few years from one suburb to another, but always within easy rail commute of his job at the Museum. He kept track of his career, monitored his salary, worried about putting his kids through college. At one point, in May 1939, Patrick, then about eighteen, seemed to be gravitating toward life as an artist. “I know only too well the difficulties of the life artistic being the son of a painter whose life was one long struggle,” Flower wrote. He wanted none of that for his son, or for himself.

  He wasn’t in the slightest shy about looking ahead to his pension: “My prospects are good in the Museum,” he wrote, “and my salary will steadily rise, and there is a pension at the end. The pension is a vital matter.” He quoted from Richard II: “The setting sun and music at the close/As the last taste of sweets is sweetest last.” This he observed while still in his thirties.

  Flower was by any standard a gifted and accomplished man, a true intellectual. He held a senior position, with plenty of leave to exercise judgment. He could recognize the handwriting of scores of English authors, helped decide whether to acquire this manuscript or that, was something of an expert on forgers and their methods. And of course, as we’ve seen, he had a poetic and literary side. Still, as one obituary had it, Flower’s duties at the Museum “were heavy and confining,” and he often felt ground down by them. As another obituary said, “he was more remarkable than anything he did,” his literary and scholarly production never quite up to his formidable intellect. His life was too packed, too distracted, too busy—or maybe, like a lot of us today, he packed it in, he made himself too busy. “He could never resist the attraction of a new interest,” his boss at the Museum, Idris Bell, wrote of him. Flower took his vacations on the Blaskets just as millions of overworked city slickers take theirs today—like clockwork, every summer, packing up the family to the same mountain retreat, resort, or island camp, seizing an annual few weeks of sweet relief.

  During their visit to the island in 1931, Edward Meyerstein wrote how Flower discarded “the cares of the British Museum, and jests with everyone.” He was known to all, much liked, respected. From the beginning, Seán Ó Criomhthain recollected, Flower had fallen in easily with the islanders.

  He accepted their ways and the manner in which they put the day past them. He threw off his gentleman’s clothes and put on a jersey and old trousers and hob-nailed boots with the boys of the village and away with him into every place along with them. It’s often he was on the back of a donkey fetching turf from the hill or sea-weed from the strand or digging his share.

  Anytime he’d come, he’d bring whiskey, tobacco, old clothes and shoes for his friends. “He was big-hearted,” remembered Seán, “generous, hospitable, with no miserliness about him,” good for a hundred pounds or so every year to the villagers. Indeed, Seán’s recollections can make Flower seem something like a feudal lord: “The Islanders were very fond of him and their hearts were set on pleasing him, and if he had called them to arms they wouldn’t have failed him.”

  On the island and off, he was identified with the Blaskets. He was a fixture of the place, a bad word never heard of him. “I would confide things to Bláithín I would not reveal to the priest,” one islander said. He’d come to the island when it was virtually unknown and kept coming, all through the 1930s. He was the island’s ambassador to the larger world, giving press interviews, lecturing on it in England, Wales, and America. If any of the visitors deserved to be called Mr. Blasket, it was he.

  By the outbreak of the war, however, Flower was getting on in years; he was just short of fifty-eight, and medically speaking probably older. Even when he was young, he was dogged by health problems, physical and mental: “I have had rather a worse time than I expected. The attack declared itself, like last year’s, in migratory pain over the whole field of my body,” leaving behind “a legacy of weakness and headaches which effectively blackens the world for me.” This was in 1911, when he was thirty.

  “I have been ill of late,” he wrote ten years later; “a thing called gastric catarrh knocked me out for a fortnight and I cannot get back any power of work. I hope a holiday will soon set me straight.”

  And in 1929: “I am feeling ill with overwork and many different anxieties.”

  Long before the three score and ten years he might have hoped was his due, Flower was getting old and sick. And the Blaskets were getting old and sick with him.

  “Great hardship has been on islanders with the last 3 and 4 months,” Lís wrote Chambers on October 2, 1941. “No flour comes to Dunquin for them as it used to.” And for any that was available, “islanders must pay more and more.”

  The island’s economic future, anyone could see, was bleak. In the 1920s, the United States had placed a tariff on salt mackerel, crippling the local market. The best turf on the island’s back spine had been cut and burned, leaving its only ready fuel in short supply; islanders had increasingly to rely on driftwood washing up on shore. The 1930s were bad, the war years no better. In 1937, an Irish government agency, the Gaeltacht Services Division, brought in a few hand-operated sock-knitting machines and supplies of yarn and set up shop in one of the houses; two women from Donegal were brought in to train the villagers. By the early 1940s, however, it had been discontinued.

  Meanwhile, the islanders continued to leave. In 1911, the Irish census recorded 160 people on the island. The census of 1926 showed 143.

  In 1936, there were 110.

  The women, especially, left. “The young women weren’t willing to settle down anyplace there,” author Críostóir Ó Floinn told an Irish radio audience later. “They were going off to London as nurses, or going off to the civil service in Dublin, or anywhere. They wanted to go to the cities, go to America, if they could. You wouldn’t blame them, you know.”

  Back in 1936, Lís had written Chambers, “I am the only girl that got married since you were here” in 1931. “At present nobody thinks of marrying.” Four years later, the war on, she responded in this way to Chambers’s news that he’d be alone that winter, his wife presumably withdrawing to safer ground: it was a pity, of course, but she knew “of men who are more lonely and have to live alone through all their lives, who never had the joy of sharing one day of family life and has never now any chance of tasting that joy.” She meant the island’s men, of course, left behind by emigrating women.

  Day is done: an islander returns to the village after cutting turf. (Illustration Credit ill.25)

  During the 1930s, the first stirrings of a tourist industry propped up the island economy a bit. But with the war, that was gone, too. A “black cloud” hung over the island, Lís wrote in 1940. “It is terrible this summer season, and it is no happiness atall.” Only one naomhóg had gone out fishing. There was a lobster blight. “Shillings are far and scarce at present.” And hardly a visitor to be seen. “Only the one visitor has come to the Island yet,” she wrote Chambers two weeks
later, on June 29. “It’s a hopeless, fruitless year, everyone thinks so.”

  In August, she told of another house being shut down, the old woman who’d lived there having left for the mainland. “So picture our Island home sinking from day to day.”

  The following February, the island schoolteacher was ordered to close the school. She “bid the Islanders adieu after about seven easy years teaching,” Lís wrote to Chambers, “and left the three poor scholars to run wild with the rabbits—which,” she added, “is their delight indeed.”

  One stormy night the following winter, she and Seán were sitting by the fire. Outside, the wind blew, lashing rain. She had recently visited the mainland, she declared to her husband. Life was better there, easier and more peaceful, with “no swell or surge of the sea washing over their rock,” as Seán reported the conversation later. She wanted out. That was it. That was all of it. “This is the last winter here for me,” she told her husband, “even if I have to shoulder my own pack!”

  “That was the sermon she gave me,” Seán recalled, “and it wasn’t in Latin either, with every word of it sinking home.”

  On February 23, 1942, she wrote Chambers: “We have determined at last to leave this lovely Island.… Next time you will come to this Island there will not be no Eibhlís but the ruins of the house.” She wanted a new life, the sort of life she knew they were missing where they were. Visitors on holiday, from comfortable homes on the mainland, seemingly without care, “would never believe the misfortune on this Island no school nor comfort, no road to success … everything so dear and so far away.” The fishing was down to nothing. People couldn’t live “on air and sunshine.”

  In July, they left. By the time she wrote Chambers in November, they were well established in Muirríoch, about ten miles away. Daughter Niamh was doing fine at school. By the following February, in the middle of what she ranked as “the severest winter that came with ages,” she had to say, “I don’t miss my lovely Island so much.”