by Tim Robinson
It was probably at a meeting of the League that Yeats (according to his own account written in 1905) issued his momentous command: ‘Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’ Yeats had recently visited Aran with Symons, and, as the strategist of the Irish cultural revival, he realized the islands’ symbolic importance, but knew that the new recruit would be better equipped than himself for their retaking.
But before Synge could go to Aran, he had an appointment with the disease that was to kill him twelve years later. The lump on his neck for which he went under the knife in December of 1897 was recognized by his doctor and the hospital nurses as a symptom of Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymphocytes; it seemed they did not reveal this to him, and it was eight years before the growth recurred, but in the light of some very specific imaginings of death in his notebooks of the Aran years, it is difficult to believe he did not suspect the truth.
Synge returned to Paris for the first three months of 1898 and, perhaps with the Aran Islands in mind, interested himself in France’s own Celtic appendix. He read Le Braz’s Vieilles Histoires du Pays Breton, and Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande, about Breton fishermen who spend the summer seasons fishing off Iceland. It appears from a draft of his introduction to The Aran Islands that Synge intended to form his work on the model of Loti’s. How that could have been done is an intriguing question, since Loti’s novel is the story of a doomed romance, in which the sea as bride asserts its primacy over the seafarer’s village love. But Synge the romantic atheist must have responded deeply to the meaningless but awesome universe Loti draws, in which prayers are not answered, clouds take up certain shapes only because they must take up some shape, wives keep vigil by granite crosses on rocky promontories for husbands who will never return, and even the attitude of the Crucified himself is finally equated to the gesture of a drowning man.
Synge left Paris at the end of April, had a painful interview with Cherrie Matheson in Dublin, and went straight on to Aran; he must have carried with him a heavy freight of moods, ideas and expectations.13 His diary for the 10th of May reads simply: ‘Dans le batteau à Arranmore à l’Hotel.’ The grandly named Atlantic Hotel was a small two-storey building on the quayfront in Cill Rónáin. From there he explored east and west along the road, and then on the third day of his visit he crossed the ridge of the island to the tall cliffs that confront the vastness of the Atlantic. Reliving this experience later on, his notebook gropes among impossible scenarios for a simile:
I look now backwards to the morning a few weeks ago when I looked first unexpectedly over the higher cliffs of Aranmór, and stopped trembling with delight. A so sudden gust beauty is a danger. It is well arranged that for the most part we do not realize the beauty of a new wonderful experience till it has grown familiar and so safer to us. If a man could be supposed to come with a fully educated perception of music, yet quite ignorant of it and hear for the first time let us say Lamoureux’s Orchestra in a late symphony of Beethoven I doubt his brain would ever recover from the shock. If a man could come with a full power of appreciation and stand for the first time before a woman – a woman perhaps who was very beautiful – what would he suffer? If a man grew up knowing nothing of death or decay and found suddenly a corpse in his path what would he suffer? Some such emotion was in me the day I looked first on these magnificent waves towering in dazzling white and green before the cliff.
Strangely, this revelation, equivalent to an instantaneous initiation into art, love and mortality, is not reported in The Aran Islands itself. But that slow-acting shock echoes in diminuendo through the four sections of the book, and is re-echoed more distantly in his subsequent works.
In Cill Rónáin Synge got to know an old blind man, Máirtín Ó Conghaile (‘Martin Conneely’), who had been a guide to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde and others, and who he realized was therefore one of those fabulous Araners he had read of in Petrie ‘years since when I was first touched with antiquarian passion’. This living antiquity gave him some lessons in the Irish of Aran, which Synge must have found very different from the Irish he had learned at Trinity, and showed him some of the island’s Christian sites, including the mediaeval chapel ‘of the four beautiful saints’ whose holy well was to become the source of his play The Well of the Saints.
While in Árainn Synge called on the Church of Ireland minister Mr Kilbride and the Catholic parish priest Fr Farragher, and acquired a camera from a fellow visitor. After a fortnight, finding that Cill Rónáin had been dragged out of the Middle Ages by the Congested Districts Board and become as banal as any other little west-coast fishing village, he left it for Inis Meáin. There he stayed in the MacDonnchas’ cottage, and their son Máirtín (Synge calls him Michael in his book) became his guide and tutor. Synge lived for a month on this more primitive island, and also briefly visited Inis Oírr. He spent his time drowsing on the walls of the great cashel that looms over the cottages, wandering with Máirtín or alone, taking photographs14 of the islands (photographs mysteriously in tune with the moods of his prose), and picking up folktales and anecdotes, including those that were to grow into The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. Twenty-seven years old and unlucky in love, he was very aware of the beauty of the Aran girls; in his luggage was Loti’s account of one of his escapades of Cytherian imperialism, set in Tahiti, Le mariage de Loti. He read a lot; other books listed in his diary include Maeterlinck’s Le trésor des humbles, Les grands initiés by Édouard Scheuré (an admirer of Rudolf Steiner), an unspecified work of Swedenborg’s, Rossetti’s poems, the Irish mystical poet AE’s latest collection The Earth Breath, and, as if as an astringent corrective to these spiritual effusions, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and de Maupassant’s novel Une Vie,15 both of them demonstrations of the proposition that (to quote the latter) ‘l’être moral de chacun des nous reste éternellement seul par la vie’. And above all, he wrote. A frequent entry in his laconic diary is the single word ‘Écrit’. Some at least of this writing was done in little notebooks that would fit into the palm of the hand and that he could use outdoors. It is curiously moving to read, in the stillness of the manuscripts room of Trinity College Dublin, the first connected passage in these notebooks:
I am laid on the outstretched gable of a cliff and many feet below me great blue waves hurl from time to time a spray that rises in to my face … So much spray is in the air that a soft crust forms on the pages of the notebook where I write.
During this first visit Synge witnessed and photographed one of the last – if not the last – eviction raids to be made on the island.16 His description of it in The Aran Islands is a fine piece of engaged reportage; when he writes
For these people the outrage to the hearth is the supreme catastrophe; they live here in a world of grey, where there are wild rains and mists every week in the year, and their warm chimney corners, filled with children and young girls, grow into the consciousness of each family in a way it is not easy to understand in more civilized places …
he had already shared such a hearth for long enough to intuit its mysteries. But he also knew about evictions, in their legal and tactical aspects, from the other side, for his brother Edward was a professional agent to big landlords and an efficient practitioner of the art. Synge had had arguments with his mother on the subject, and when he describes an Aran mother cursing her son for acting as bailiff in this eviction, one could imagine Synge’s mother rising opposite her to berate her own son for betraying his class by siding with rent-defaulting peasants.
On his way back to Dublin, Synge stayed for a few days at Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home in south Galway, at Yeats’s suggestion. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, her neighbour at Tulira Castle, were then planning the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre, which later became the Irish Na
tional Theatre. One of the two plays with which the new venture was inaugurated in May 1899, Yeats’s symbolic drama, The Countess Cathleen, excited the anger and incomprehension of the Catholic Church as well as of the Gaelic League, and the boos with which it was greeted foretold the theatre’s turbulent future, on which Synge was to ride to his own troubled fame.
Synge visited Inis Meáin for nearly a month in September 1899, finding the island, in the rains and storms of autumn, a darker place, and the islanders dejected after a poor season’s fishing. He caught a feverish cold and had fears of dying and being buried there before anyone on the mainland could know of it. He was there again for a month in September of the following year, when he participated in the islanders’ grief over a drowning and witnessed scenes of despair and resignation out of which he was to make Riders to the Sea. Throughout his Aran seasons he advanced in island proficiencies; he talked and understood more Irish, learned to row a currach, contributed to evenings of fun and music. He went over to Inis Oírr again for a few days during this third trip, and got to know two girls there, one of whom corresponded with him later on. Whether it was she of whom in his notebook he wrote, ‘One woman has interested me in a way that binds me more than ever to the islands,’ is not known; the relationship, whatever its nature, seems to have come to nothing – but one wonders if later on this woman ever felt she had lost the only Playwright of the Western World?
In his alternative life in Paris Synge was engaged in another profitless love, with an American art student, Margaret Hardon, whom his diary often refers to as ‘La Robe Verte’; he sketched a play (later entitled When the Moon Has Set) in which a writer loves a nun, whom he persuades to renounce her vows; she exchanges her habit for a green dress and gives herself to him. Reality was not so complaisant, nor was the sketch a success, and Lady Gregory and Yeats when they read it suggested he turn to peasant themes.
By the summer of 1901 Synge had put together the first three parts of his Aran book, which he sent to Lady Gregory; she and Yeats were impressed by it, but thought it would benefit from the inclusion of more fairylore. In late September he revisited Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr for a total of nineteen days. In Inis Meáin several people were ill with typhus, and Synge was horrified at the thought of them dying without a doctor. He would have met the islands’ district nurse in Inis Oírr on one of his previous visits – she was later to write a gruesome account of her struggle against the insanitary folk-cures and the filth of those hearthsides Synge found so cherishing17 – but it seems that no medical help was available in Inis Meáin at this time. In Inis Oírr he collected folksongs with the dedication of a professional, and translated an eighteenth-century version of the ancient legend, The Children of Uisneach, which had been published recently; it was to furnish the matter of his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.
On his way to Paris that November, Synge delivered the manuscript of The Aran Islands to a London publisher Yeats had suggested, Grant Allen, who soon returned it. In January 1902 Fisher Unwin, also of London, similarly declined it. His writing career was depressingly unsuccessful; he was still living on an allowance of ‘£40 a year and a new suit when I am too shabby’. But he doggedly pursued his commitment to the Celtic by following a course in Old Irish at the Sorbonne, where he was frequently the lecturer’s sole hearer. These were his seasons of endurance, and they were at last rewarded by a creative outflow; during the next summer, which he spent with his mother in a rented house in Wicklow, he wrote The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, and began The Tinker’s Wedding. The two completed plays were very welcome to Yeats and Lady Gregory, for their Irish National Theatre was more blessed with talented actors than with plays worth acting. Synge spent twenty-five days in Inis Oírr in October but did not visit Inis Meáin; it was his last trip to the islands and was not reflected in his already completed book.
Synge gave up his Paris apartment that winter and lodged in London, where he was introduced by Lady Gregory and Yeats to the literary world. John Masefield took note of this new, but not young and rather sombre face:
Something in his air gave one the fancy that his face was dark from gravity. Gravity filled the face and haunted it, as though the man behind were forever listening to life’s case before passing judgement … The face was pale, the cheeks were rather drawn. In my memory they were rather seamed and old-looking. The eyes were at once smoky and kindling. The mouth, not well seen below the moustache, had a great play of humour on it.18
Then he returned to Ireland, and in June 1903 he heard The Shadow of the Glen read by Lady Gregory to the actors of the Irish National Theatre. That autumn he visited Kerry instead of Aran, and found there an English-speaking peasantry whose dialect he could more immediately adopt into his plays.
The first performance, in October of that year, of The Shadow of the Glen was hissed by an audience which pronounced its theme an offence to Irish womanhood. Arthur Griffith, founder of the nationalist organization Sinn Féin and editor of the United Irishman newspaper, was particularly violent in his attacks on Synge and the National Theatre. Synge’s fantastic realism was at odds with that cast of mind which, tensed in repudiation of the 600-year-long slurs that had accompanied colonization, would admit no defect in the life of Catholic rural Ireland and held that an Irish National Theatre should be the vehicle of patriotic propaganda. His plot had been suggested by a folktale he had heard in Inis Meáin in 1898, concerning a husband who pretends to be dead in order to catch his young wife with her lover; he added to it the wife’s abandonment by the pusillanimous lover and her going off with a tramp who has by chance been witness of these events. The setting he chose was one of the great sheep-glens of Wicklow he knew so well. In fact, there are sheep everywhere in the dialogue of the play: the productive and individually recognizable sheep of the skilful shepherd who had befriended the lonely wife and then gone mad and died before the action begins, unmanageable sheep escaping in all directions from his incompetent successor the lover, sheep jumping through gaps, leaving their wool on thornbushes, coughing in the fog, stretched out dead with spiders’ webs on them, and perhaps even covertly, aimlessly astray in the famously depressing view from the wife’s door, of ‘the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again and they rolling up the bog …’. Indeed, to accept the nationalists’ own simplistic account of why they were disturbed by such a weird drift of disorderly feelings as Synge let loose through this play, is to close one’s eyes to the psychological wastes he explores in it.
When Riders to the Sea, a sombre presentation of the anguish and resignation of Aran wives and sisters successively robbed by the sea of all their menfolk, was given a first performance in February 1904, it was well received by a small audience, and even Griffith’s paper had to admit its tragic beauty. Aran must have long been associated in the public mind with death by drowning; Petrie’s account of an old Aran woman still grieving for her son lost to the sea, Burton’s painting The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1841, and circulated widely as an engraving19), the heroine’s drowning in Emily Lawless’s Grania: The Story of an Island,20 are some earlier treatments of the theme, and Synge’s play, the action of which is always on the point of condensing into ritual, was the definitive celebration of the cult. Folk beliefs of hearth and threshold weigh so heavily if obscurely on speech and gesture in this play that the air its protagonists displace seems thickened with symbol and significance. North, south, east and west are so compulsively evoked as every change of tide and wind brings in new anxiety or despair, that the island itself seethes in a doomful infusion of the compass rose. The elegiac rhythms of Synge’s dialogue are those inherent in the English of native Irish speakers, an English the grammar of which has been metamorphosed by the pressure of Irish, and the words of which have therefore been galvanized into new life by syntactic shock. As (necessarily simplified) examples: Irish has two verbal forms that both have to be translated by parts of the verb ‘to be’ in English; is,
used in identifying two things, and tá, used in attributing quality to something; thus ‘Is é Beartla atá ann’ translates literally as ‘It is Bartley that is in it (i.e. there)’. Again, there is no word for ‘yes’ in Irish; instead one repeats the verb of the question: ‘Is it Bartley that is there?’ ‘It is.’ Both these features involve repetition, and thus the possibility of rhythm, when imitated in English. Also, Irish is rich in little tags and pieties that prolong a sentence soothingly. Synge calls on all these effects for the simple, death-hushed syllables of this exchange, when the body of one of the drowned sons is brought in:
Is it Bartley it is?
It is, surely, God rest his soul.
Here he has avoided the form ‘Is it Bartley that’s in it?’ which in a lighter context he would have exploited. But where there is poetic advantage in it, he will translate word for word, ignoring dictionary equivalents: in ‘… no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying on the sea’, those ominous and mysterious ‘black hags’ come literally from the Irish name of the shag or green cormorant, cailleach dhubh. And where poetry would be irrecuperably lost, he does not translate at all: in ‘the dark nights after Samhain’, the Irish word for November is so much more expressive of wind and rain (the pronunciation being approximately ‘sawain’) and the reminder of the ghosts of Hallowe’en, Oiche Shamhna, so much more immediate, that Synge chooses to rely on an Irish audience’s familiarity with the word and its associations, and on an English audience’s intuition of mystery. Douglas Hyde, in his translations of folksongs, and Lady Gregory in her versions of legends, had preceded Synge in the literary exploration of the borderzone between Irish and English inhabited by the folk-people of Ireland, but Synge is the only playboy of this western world of words, in which he grew to his full freedom and power. Synge’s language is the translation into English not of an Irish text but of the Irish language itself.