On an Irish Island (10 page)

But then, in the middle of the war, as Europe shed the blood of its young,
Brian Kelly arrived on the island.

Brian Albert Kelly was twenty-eight at the time, from
Killarney, a mid-sized town fifty miles or so east of the Blaskets, yet worlds apart. His family was well off, had a drapery shop and a hotel in town, the Crystal Palace, their children mostly destined for careers in law, medicine, and the church. Brian attended
Dublin-area schools and went on to Trinity College, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1911, having studied the classics, modern history, English literature, and Old Irish. For at least five years, even after his graduation, he remained active in the
Dublin University Gaelic Society.

Then Kelly got caught up in a nasty bit of international intrigue. In April 1914, after a year in
Paris, he’d gone to
Germany to study history, and completed a term at the University of Marburg. But with the onset of the war, he’d been gathered up in a sweep of foreign students and landed in prison. He wrote to
Kuno Meyer, of the School of Irish Learning, whom he had known in Dublin, and who might have some pull with the authorities.
But Meyer was out of the country, so it fell to his sister Antonie to pull strings on Kelly’s behalf, get him out of prison, and connect him with
Roger Casement.

Casement: rebel, revolutionary, martyr. A memorable figure who in the years since his death has inspired a whole raft of biographies. An Irish-born diplomat, he had only a few years before, in 1911, been knighted by King George V for his work illuminating human-rights abuses in Congo and the Putumayo River region of Peru. But with the start of the war, his anti-imperialistic streak and deep sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause led him to Germany. He had a plan—to form an Irish brigade from Irish prisoners-of-war that, German-armed, would fight England from Irish soil. The plan went nowhere. Meanwhile, word got out of his apparently promiscuous homosexuality. In August 1916, despite pleas for a reprieve from
George Bernard Shaw,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and other luminaries, he was hanged for treason.

But not before he had responded to Kelly’s plea from prison and brought him to
Berlin, where the two of them met. Casement tried to enlist him in his plan to recruit Irish POWs, briefly embedded him in a prison camp in Limburg where twenty-five hundred of them were held, and finally had him released, as promised. As Kelly put it in a secret report to the British authorities early the following year, Casement seemed to him an “impulsive and excitable man,” who saw England as the destroyer of European peace, Germany the nation of the future, and Ireland its natural friend. “Unhinged” was his ultimate assessment of him.

By the time Casement went to the gallows, Kelly was back in
Killarney, probably living at home, recovering from his brush with dangerous men and tumultuous times. And it is at this point that his fifty-six-year-old mother,
Bridget Kelly, steps into our story. Was Brian, after his wartime ordeal, unable to take any firm next step for himself? Or was Mrs. Kelly simply better connected around Killarney and thus better suited to make inquiries on his behalf? In any case, it was she who, in the fall of 1916, a few months after the
Easter Rising, approached Mr. Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha—in English this was usually spelled, and pronounced, “Sugrue”—a Gaelic League teacher prominent in those parts. Might he, she asked, come to their home and, once a week, give her son lessons in spoken Irish? Brian had studied Old Irish in school, but modern Irish was the new badge of Irish republican sensibility. And he, like many with their heads in books, could not speak it.

To hear Ó Siochfhradha’s account, he and Brian got on well.
“We
understood each other,” he wrote later. “He enjoyed my friendliness and my understanding; he was gentle, shy, and, I’d imagine, inclined to be a loner. But when he’d sense the good will and friendliness in a person, he’d open up.” Over the course of half a dozen sessions, Kelly improved considerably. Yet, if he was to make further progress, they agreed, he needed to go where Irish was spoken, the
Gaeltacht.
He had no job, family, or money worries to stand in the way, so he was soon off to the Blaskets, letter of introduction in hand for Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

In April 1917, he landed on the island, remaining there for the rest of the year.

It is a calm day on the Great Blasket. Tomás is gathering mussels at the water’s edge when he looks up to see two young women. “
Are there limpets here, Tomás?” There are, he replies. But how, he asks, do they propose to scrape off the tenacious little mollusks? All they have between them is a broken pair of scissors and an iron bolt. Maybe they should send their mothers instead: “Wouldn’t they have more skill and craft for the work?”

But if their mothers did it, one of them says, how would they learn to do it themselves? Besides, “isn’t it grand to be here by the sea’s edge at low tide? The lovely smell that’s there when everything that was under the sea before is under the sun now and its mouth gaping.”

We say Tomás Ó Criomhthain “told” this story because it appears in a book listing him as author. In Irish it was called
Allagar na hInise,
published in 1928 by Government Publications, Dublin, later translated into English as
Island Cross-Talk,
published in 1986 by Oxford University Press, and still in print. An extraordinary transformation had taken place. Blasket stories, for generations told around peat fires or at the village well, had been catapulted into the world beyond the island, given fixed and permanent form on paper, bound between the covers of books. A man who had grown up on a treeless island and made his living from
fishing and farming, who had never seen Dublin, or even
Tralee, or ventured beyond the next peninsula across
Dingle Bay, who was largely illiterate for at least the first forty years of his life, was now an author. It was like the First Books all over again: however they’d first come into the world, books had somehow been reborn on this little island where almost no one knew how to read.
How was this possible? How could this be?

In fact, even before Brian’s coming in 1917, the
printed word was not quite so alien to the Great Blasket as it once had been, or as it might have
seemed, say, from
Dublin. The
Gaelic League issued two Irish-language publications
—An Claidheamh Soluis,
sword of light, and
Fáinne an Lae,
dawn of day—and Tomás, who’d by now been reading and writing Irish for fifteen or twenty years, had contributed to both of them. He had served as Marstrander’s research assistant
—research assistant?
what else would you call him?—compiling lists of local flora and fauna and sending them to
Oslo. In 1915, he had written a founding member of the Gaelic League,
Seosamh Laoide, about a book he had recently read,
Tonn Tóime
(the great wave, said to have borne the legendary Oisin to the Land of the Young). In both English and Irish, he observed, small words, the
pebbles of language, mattered more than did the big, imposing ones.

Tomás, then, was already linked to a larger world of language and ideas. After Robin Flower’s second Blasket visit, Tomás felt
qualified to congratulate him on his improved Irish. A few years later, after the birth of Flower’s daughter Síle, he appended a note to Mrs. Flower, saying, “I am going to help Mr. Flower to be an
Irish Professor, the same as Mr. Marstrander.” Tomás Ó Criomhthain, then, had become the island’s resident intellectual. He was mentor to his young scholarly friends. He was master of Irish, and knew he was. If he had something to say as a writer, he would probably be able to say it.

But when Brian Kelly—or Brian Ó Ceallaigh, as he was known in Irish—came to the island, he found Tomás jotting down folktales and song lyrics. How long, one wonders, and under what circumstances of trust and friendship, did it take him to get Tomás to write about his life on the island, about
himself
?

Oh, but “
everyone knows what life is like here,” Kelly reported Tomás as replying when he finally did ask. And it was true: most everyone Tomás knew lived on the island, knew its life intimately; they’d all probably by now heard many of his stories, nuggets of personal wisdom, choice bits of folklore. But Kelly was thinking bigger, of a different, larger audience,
off
the island. He said so later—that he’d tried to make Tomás realize how interesting the life of the island could be
“for people who were accustomed to a more comfortable and uncomplicated existence.” He wanted more from Tomás. He had
ambitions
for him! Set against Tomás’s limited experience, that might be seen as unreasonable or unrealistic. But Kelly persisted. He pushed. He prodded Tomás to write. He practically dragged it out of him.

One evening, while walking along an island path, Brian suggested to him that he write something about
emigration—or started to suggest it,
anyway, because just then they came upon some island
women, walking in pairs, singing.
No,
said Brian, all but amending his advice in mid-stride, “
Write about what you see at this moment.” Tomás did. It was called “An Guth ar Neoin,” or “
The Voice in the Afternoon,” and it managed to link the women they’d met with Brian’s original suggestion. The women were singing “in lively, eloquent Irish,” Tomás wrote. That made for a lovely and memorable sight, sure to leave a bystander feeling right with the world. But the
words
of their song, carried by that “voice in the afternoon,” were bleak: if only they had the passage money, the girls sang, they’d be on a boat for America. Later that year, Tomás’s story was published in
An Lóchrann,
the lantern, an Irish-language monthly.

Tomás often gathered turf along the hillside, or fished from a rock as the sun set, reveling in the sheer beauty of God’s creation. Write about it, Brian urged. “
You can’t live on scenery,” Tomás shot back. Yet, spurred by his Killarney friend, he wrote just such a piece, which was published the following year. It was about a field at the edge of the White Strand where the two of them would sit and talk. Brian would plunk himself down on a particular rock that Tomás called “Brian’s Chair.” And from that anointed spot, late one afternoon, Tomás described the vista, the sun spreading above him to the north, the cliffs on the mainland, no two the same color. “
I don’t think, and I wouldn’t think, that there could be any other colours in the world than these.” To the editor who published the essay, Brian reported, “it proved that a feeling for nature, akin to that of Wordsworth, existed among the Gaelic-speaking people.”

That was just the beginning; once Brian Kelly got to him, Tomás’s output never flagged, his days with Brian forever bathed in a golden light of memory. Many gentlemen came to the island, he wrote to Flower after the war, but “no one of them ever looked after Tomás but one”; he
didn’t
mean Flower. In a letter he wrote to Brian himself, in 1921, he composed this lonely poem:

What breed of magic did Brian work on Tomás? What imagination, what urgent caring and love, did he lavish on Tomás that led to a succession of sustained creative acts culminating in two accomplished works of literature? How did he pull it out of him? How did he overcome whatever grip of assumption and expectation might otherwise have bound Tomás to the past and limited his aspirations? What did he bring to his friendship with Tomás that, for example, Robin Flower did not?

Oddly, Brian’s own stunted career may have left him more receptive to Tomás’s potential as a writer, more approachable; compared with Flower—who, his biographer could write, was “
exacting in his standards and not without his prejudices”—he was probably easier to please. When he came to the island in early 1917, he was twenty-seven. He had time on his hands. He had no job; he had apparently never held a proper job, was still rooting around for what to do with his life. Some accounts suggest he was unsettled, and lonely. He had, though, a degree of literary discernment. That was the verdict, anyway, of Irish nationalist leader and scholar
Eoin MacNeill, cofounder of the Gaelic League, after Kelly’s death: “
He had an instinct for the values of language,” MacNeill wrote of him, and “true literary taste.” Moreover, Kelly had only just awakened from his dark, values-challenging night of war, imprisonment, and treason, and may have come away with looser, less received notions of how the world was supposed to work. It took imagination, and a certain distaste for hierarchy and prejudice, to see Tomás as someone who, despite his want of education, could create
written language that was beautiful, heartfelt, worthy.

Before he left the island and returned to the mainland at the very end of 1917, Brian supplied Tomás with a stock of ink and paper, the oversized kind known as foolscap, and asked him to write bits and pieces of his experience and post them to him. Not once in a while, but regularly, so many pages at a clip. And, to seal the bargain, he bestowed on Tomás a gift, his own Waterman fountain pen.

Tomás
cherished that pen, according to his son Seán, a teenager when Kelly left the island. After dinner, around eight in the evening, Tomás would pull up to the table beside the fireplace. A lamp high on the wall, with two thick wicks and a mirror behind it, shed plenty of light. Tomás would draw up to the fire, light his pipe, “smoke a fine blast” of it, lay out his paper, and set to work in the quiet of the house, till maybe ten o’clock, or half past. And when he was finished, Seán recalled, “he’d dry it with a piece of cloth and a bit of paper and put it away. If a butterfly or a cricket
in the corner as much as touched it he’d nearly kill them. Not a hand was to be laid on the pen in case it might be damaged.”