by Tim Robinson
The company went on to a great success in London with Synge’s two plays, especially Riders to the Sea. In that summer of 1904 it took over what was to become the Abbey Theatre, leased through the generosity of an English admirer of Yeats, Miss Horniman, and rehearsals of The Well of the Saints soon began. Synge visited Kerry again, and then, instead of going to Aran as planned, took his bicycle down to Belmullet in the far west of Mayo. This extraordinarily bleak and remote peninsula was to become the setting for The Playboy of the Western World, although he had picked up the germ of its plot in Inis Meáin. The Well of the Saints was performed in February 1905, and evoked the same rage in nationalist quarters as had The Shadow of the Glen. Indeed this grim and comic morality of uncaring youth and foolish age, in which even sanctity and miracle appear as tactless intrusions into hard-won if fantasizing accommodations with reality, holds little comfort for anyone. The setting is again Wicklow, but the well of the title, from which a roving saint has brought holy water to cure an old blind couple, is the one Synge visited in Árainn in company with old Martin Conneely. He could have heard tales of such cures told of any of hundreds of holy wells throughout Ireland, but perhaps in the dreamworkmanship of creativity there was a link between his plot – of old Martin Doul (dall, ‘blind’) and his wife being cured of their blindness, regretting it when they discover they are not the beautiful couple they had imagined, and slowly recovering their blindness – and the odd fact of Synge’s being shown a well reputed to cure blindness, by a blind man.
In Riders to the Sea the young curate is dismissed near the beginning of the play as powerless to avert the impending tragedy, and the comforts of official doctrine are nowhere called on in its aftermath; the miracle-worker of The Well of the Saints sees his dissatisfied clients stumble off to make their way through a dangerous world by the light of their own darkness; similarly, in The Tinker’s Wedding, which Synge was working on at this time, the wanderers of earth finally assert the irrelevance of the clergy to their life-cycles: ‘it’s little need we ever had of the like of you to get us our bit to eat, and our bit to drink, and our time of love when we were young men and women and were fine to look at.’ Synge’s tribute to the born anarchs of the Wicklow roads whom he appreciated so much was never staged in his lifetime. The rejection of religious authority implicit in most of his work was acted out in this play, in which the tinkers bundle the venal priest into a sack when he refuses to marry them without his ‘dues’ being paid in full. In his preface to the text, published in 1907, Synge hopes that the country people, from tinkers to clergy, would not mind being laughed at without malice, but at the time Yeats was not so optimistic; he felt the play would cause too much trouble for his young theatre, and Synge seems to have agreed. The first performance of it took place in London in 1909, after Synge’s death, and it was not seen in Ireland until the year of the Synge Centenary Commemoration, 1971.
In 1905, at the prompting of Masefield, the Manchester Guardian commissioned Synge to write a series of articles on the distressed state of the Congested Districts. The artist Jack Yeats, younger brother of the poet, was to illustrate the articles, and the two of them explored Connemara and Belmullet in Mayo that summer. On his return Synge wrote to MacKenna:
Unluckily my commission was to write on the ‘Distress’ so I couldn’t do anything like what I would have wished as an interpretation of the whole life … There are sides of all that western life the groggy-patriot-publican-general shop-man who is married to the priest’s half sister and is second cousin once removed of the dispensary doctor, that are horrible and awful … I sometimes wish to God I hadn’t a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn’t they hop! In a way it is all heartrending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming and in another place where things are going well one has a rampant double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of.21
This is impercipient, as personal and business relationships in the small towns of western Ireland were not more incestuous than in Synge’s own familial or artistic milieus; but then a substantial stratum of Irish life hardly found expression in the works of the Irish cultural revival, which recognized no muse between the ranks of countess and colleen. However, the imposed theme focused his eyes on the miserable obverse of the rural economics that had delighted him in Aran, and he expressed this darker matter of poverty and exploitation with moving directness. The articles were republished after his death in the 1910 edition of his works, despite Yeats’s feeling that they were inferior. Jack Yeats was later to illustrate the first (1907) edition of The Aran Islands with twelve drawings, some of them evidently based on Synge’s photographs and only one or two of them remotely adequate to the subtle and vigorous text.
Synge had been engaged in the tempestuous politics of the Irish National Theatre from its foundation, and in the autumn of 1905 he became one of its three directors, with Yeats and Lady Gregory; as he explained in a letter to MacKenna, Yeats looked after the stars while he saw to everything else. Soon afterwards a number of the more politically oriented actors seceded, and among those brought in to replace them was a nineteen-year-old girl, Molly Allgood, with whom Synge was soon in love. He had been living with his mother – for their close relationship still persisted despite her incomprehension of his work – but now he took rooms in the suburbs of Dublin, both to be nearer his theatre and to see more of Molly. She was a cheerful and comparatively uneducated girl whose frank enjoyment of such innocent treats as picnics with other members of the company came to torment the jealous and serious-minded Synge; his Dublin Albertine used to annotate his multitudinous, obsessive and insinuating letters with brisk one-word judgements: ‘idiotic’, or ‘peculiar’, or ‘frivolous’. She was also a Roman Catholic, which promised to cause consternation in his family when their affair should become known. But she inspired the love-talk of Synge’s most richly realized character, Christy Mahon of The Playboy of the Western World. Synge wrote the part of Pegeen Mike in that play with Molly in mind, and she played that role in the first performance in 1907.
The company was anxious about the wildly prodigal language of the play, and presented it to their highly reactive audience with trepidation. Yeats was in Scotland at the time, and after Act Two had been received with attention Lady Gregory sent him a telegram: ‘Play great success.’ But Act Three provoked such an uproar that she sent off another telegram: ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.’ The ‘Playboy Riots’ were to become part of theatrical legend. As Synge wrote to Molly the next morning, ‘Now we’ll be talked about. We’re an event in the history of the Irish stage. I have a splitting headache…’ Large numbers of police – the Royal Irish Constabulary, to the nationalists an arm of foreign oppression – were called upon to preserve a semblance of order for the following performances, which were largely inaudible. Yeats returned hastily from Scotland, lectured the baying crowd from the stage with courage and dignity, went into court to testify against arrested rioters, and within a few days organized a public debate, in which despite personal reservations he spoke himself hoarse for Synge’s play against a tumultuous audience. Synge himself was at home in bed suffering from exhaustion and influenza.
The story of the Playboy had been developed out of two incidents Synge had heard of in the west: one, of a Connemara man who murdered his father and was sheltered by the people of Inis Meáin for a while, supplied the theme of parricide, and the other, of a Mayo man who assaulted the lady he was employed by, repeatedly escaped from custody, taunted the police in letters and was protected by various lady-friends, added the ingredients of sexual attractiveness and verbal dexterity.22 Griffith in an editorial described the play as ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform’. While it is clear that audiences came to the play primed by such opinions to be shocked, it should be recognized that The Playboy of the Western World is genuinely shocking. We, nine shocking deca
des later, if we are not rattled to our ontologies by a play, tend to want our money back; but it is hardly surprising that those unhardened Dublin audiences, facing such a flood of bizarre talk and action bursting from depths in which tragic, including Oedipal, themes echo like laughter, found it difficult even to pinpoint the source of their disquiet. When Christy at the peak of passion cries, ‘It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?’ they thought they found the word ‘shift’ offensive as being an indelicate synonym of ‘chemise’; in fact it is the steam-hiss of an exorbitant fantasy compressed into a moment. Synge, to some degree, knew what he was at. As he wrote to MacKenna, ‘On the French stage you get sex without its balancing elements: on the Irish stage you get the other elements without the sex. I restored sex and people were so surprised they saw the sex only.’
The play was taken to England in the summer, and although Yeats decided that it was too risky to put it on in Birmingham where what he called ‘the slum Irish’ might have been organized by the nationalists to demonstrate against it, performances in Oxford and London were very successful. Synge was in London and in good health for the occasion, and was lionized. Also The Aran Islands had at last been published (by Elkin Mathews in London and Maunsel in Dublin), and so 1907 gave him his brief summer of glory. July he spent in the Wicklow hills; Molly and her sister came to spend a fortnight at a cottage near his, and they rambled and rejoiced together.
Over the next autumn he worked on a play very different from his four savage comedies. The plot of his tragedy Deirdre of the Sorrows is adapted from the ancient Irish tale, a version of which he had translated in Inis Oírr five years before: the lovely girl being brought up in seclusion as bride for the old king who rules at Emain persuades the young huntsman she has seen in the woods to run away with her, but eventually, as if compelled by the beauty of her own legend, returns to Emain and the fate foretold at her birth. Although Synge’s setting is of woods and hillsides, references to the clouds coming from the west and south, and the rain since the night of Samhain, soon take us back to the meteorological determinism of Riders to the Sea. Deirdre appears at first as the child of nature itself, unpossessable by all the knowledge and power of civilization, and ends in suicide over a grave dug in the earth, mourned by nature: ‘if the oaks and stars could die for sorrow, it’s a dark sky and a hard and naked earth we’d have this night in Emain’. Perhaps this is the echo of that thunderous revelation, transcending art, love and death, on the cliffs of Árainn; long-delayed, almost too long-delayed …
For Synge’s period of incipient glory was also that of his dying, and Deirdre of the Sorrows was never to be quite finished. His neck glands had been troublesome for some time, and in September he had been operated on for their removal. Although he still discussed marriage plans with Molly, and revisited Kerry, his periods of health and good spirits were sporadic now, and there were endless quarrels and schisms within the theatre company to depress him further. His family no longer opposed his marriage, but it had to be postponed when he went into hospital in April 1908 for investigation of a painful lump in his side, and was found to have an inoperable tumour. He was not told of the fatal implications, and for a time felt much better, but the pain returned. The household he was preparing for Molly had to be broken up, and he returned to live with his mother, who was failing too. Writing to Molly, he said, ‘She seems quite a little old woman with an old woman’s voice. It makes me sad. It is sad also to see all our little furniture stored away in these rooms. It is a sad queer time for us all, dear Heart, I sometimes feel inclined to sit down and wail.’ Then, rallying, he went off to Oberwerth to see the Von Eiken sisters once again, and bought works by the mediaeval German poets von der Vogelweide and Hans Sachs with the intention of translating them. His mother died while he was still in Germany, and he did not feel well enough to face the journey home for her funeral. On his return he lived alone in his mother’s house, and worked intermittently on his Deirdre. He looked through his earlier work and wrote,
I read about the Blaskets and Dunquin,
The Wicklow towns and fair days I’ve been in.
I read of Galway, Mayo, Aranmore,
And men with kelp along a wintry shore.
Then I remembered that that ‘I’ was I,
And I’d a filthy job – to waste and die.
By the spring the filthy job was done. He entered Elpis Hospital again on the 2nd of February 1909 and died there on 24 March. At the funeral, his family and his artistic colleagues formed two immiscible groups, and the fisherfolk, tramps and playboys of Ireland of course knew nothing of it.
THE BOOK
Kilronan … has been so much changed by the fishing industry, developed there by the Congested Districts Board, that it now has very little to distinguish it from any fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The other islands are more primitive, but even on them many changes are being made, that it was not worth while to deal with in the text.
Thus Synge in his brief introduction divides Aran into the primitive and the not worth writing about. His text, though, overflows his programme. In fact on his typescript23 Synge scribbled, ‘Note If the early chapters explain themselves I would prefer m.s. without any Introduction. J.M.S.’ Obviously the publishers’ worldly wisdom prevailed, but in ideality Synge was right: all introductions (and introductory essays by third persons) by indicating a perspective reduce the dimensionality of what they introduce, and so should be read only after the work itself – but by the time one realizes this, it is too late. Synge lent his European mind to Aran for a while on generously indefinite terms, and The Aran Islands can be read in many ways. A sentence in Synge’s second notebook insists on one: ‘I cannot say it too often, the supreme interest of the island lies in the strange concord that exists between the people and the impersonal limited but powerful impulses of the nature that is round them’ – and so the essential matter of the book is an ecology of moods. Later on he took a more distanced view (and one can trace this growing detachment in the book itself, as the divergences of the islanders from his prescription of them become their most interesting and theatrically engaging aspect, and a relish for the actual quarrels in him with his thirst for the ideal); in 1907 he wrote to a friend, ‘I look on The Aran Islands as my first serious piece of work … In writing out the talk of the people and their stories in this book, and in a certain number of articles on the Wicklow peasantry which I have not yet collected, I learned to write the peasant dialect and dialogue which I use in my plays.’ So the book is a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. It has also been read in a sociolinguistic mode as ‘fictionalized confessional autobiography’24 and can be seen as a set of symptoms of the dilemmas of the late nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish mind. Books shed meanings as trees their leaves, year after year, in their slow growth and maturation. Nearly a century has passed since Synge first walked the bare wet rocks of Aran and his old blind guide put the riddle of the Sphinx to him. That double-natured and sphinx-like creature, Synge-on-Aran, still proposes its riddle, which is that of our own mortal stance on the earth. Now that our planet has shrunk to an island in space (if not to a Congested District, and with no fatherly Board set over it!), all past efforts to unriddle our being-on-the-earth have to be reread; perhaps Synge’s book will reach another maturity in this age of secular eschatologies.
The Aran Islands is in four parts, corresponding to the first four of his five visits. At the start he materializes, as it were, out of rain and fog on to the big island, Árainn, and meets a satisfactorily mediaeval mentor who talks of women carried off by fairies and gives him scraps of lore in which the Celtic hero Diarmaid and Samson from the Bible cohere with classical motifs, as in the detrital culture of the hedge-schools. But he is surprised at the fluency and abundance of ‘the foreign tongue’, i.e. his own language, in Cill Rónáin, and only a few pages after his arrival
he removes to Inis Meáin, having come to the conclusion that life there ‘is perhaps the most primitive in Europe’. The first sentence of the Inis Meáin pages echoes the first sentence of the book so closely as to give the impression that the latter merely represented a false start and that it is only now that we are really beginning:
I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a continual drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my room.
We acquire two meagre hints about Synge’s non-Aran existence in these preliminary pages. An old islander tells him that he recognized his likeness to his relative who was in Aran forty-three years earlier – and so we learn of the Synge connection with the islands from the lips of an Aran man, not from the author’s. The fact that Synge’s uncle was the Protestant incumbent is not stated. And on the trip across to Inis Meáin, his crew call out to some comrades that they ‘had a man with them who had been in France a month from this day’. Again, we learn a fact about Synge through its reflection (as a wonder) in the minds of the islanders. Thus one of the book’s principles of exclusion is early established, and is only underlined by the very occasional subsequent reference to Paris, standing for all that is not Aran. Another of these principles may be induced from the fact that most of the folktales he records are dropped into the text without comment, as they would have cropped up in Aran life, in the course of a conversational walk or an evening’s entertainment. Only in the case of the first tale he heard in Inis Meáin, about the man who bets on his wife’s faithfulness during his absence, does he permit himself a belletristic excursus on its European antecedents: ‘the gay company who went out from Florence to tell narratives of love’, ‘the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, a Florentine notary’, and so on. The passage has been praised for its skilful condensation of an extensive body of literary lore, but it does not convince one that it was written out of Synge’s memory in Inis Meáin, and as a flaw in the appearance of immediacy that controls the rest of the book, it is the one false note in the whole. (The fourth and last section of the book is perhaps even overloaded with this folk-material, which, though interesting in itself, is not fully thought into the texture of the work.) Thus, by opposites as it were, a specification of the book’s content is implied; it is the content of the mind of a visitor on the island, not of someone writing about the island from a study on the mainland.