On an Irish Island (2 page)

I learned the rudiments of the Blasket story only in 2005, on my honeymoon
in western Ireland, where my wife and I had gone on the recommendation of friends. On our second day there, in the tiny sea-facing town of
Dún Chaoin, we visited the
Blasket Centre, established by the Irish government in the 1990s—on the mainland, just up from the sea, within sight of the island—to tell the Blasket story. And there, as it happens, Sarah and I had our new marriage’s first, um,
tiff.

We had been at the Centre for several hours, viewing a documentary, taking in images and artifacts from a vanished world, wholly absorbed. But enough is enough, and by now it was late afternoon. I was in the bookshop, irretrievably lost among the Blasket writers. But Sarah was finally ready to go—and by now a little put off by her new husband’s seeming obliviousness to all but these books. Were we to spend our
entire
honeymoon in the Blasket Centre?

We left. We returned to America. But the Blaskets had gotten under my skin. And it wasn’t alone the islanders who fascinated me, but the visitors—writers and scholars from
Oslo and
London,
Dublin and
Paris, city people all, who’d left behind their libraries and dusty archives, traveled across the breadth of
England and Ireland, and found friendship, and sometimes love, in this harsh, remote, astonishingly beautiful place.

I didn’t just then think about writing about the Blaskets myself; that came some months later. I’d been reading a book on quite a different subject, one with no trace of Irish content. It was called
Wrapped in Rainbows,
Valerie Boyd’s fine biography of the legendary African-American novelist Zora Neale
Hurston, author of
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
During the 1920s, when Hurston was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, her adviser sent her to America’s black rural South to collect folklore—songs and stories and old ways of knowing—from her own people. There, a world opened up to her, unseen, unknown, disappearing, that her city friends could scarcely have imagined.

Reading Boyd’s book, I was struck by how similar it seemed to the vanished world and culture of the Great Blasket. And on both sides of the Atlantic, in Hurston’s black South and at the edge of
West Kerry, and at almost the same time, people realized that it was only so long before the lore of the people, their old rural community life removed from the clamor of the city, was gone entirely; that in its disappearance something precious was being lost; that vanishing with these slower societies were just those sweet, simple satisfactions and deep human relationships that modern life seemed to elbow out of the way. The Blasket story, I came to realize, wasn’t only about one little corner of Ireland. In telling it, I could
get at a bigger, more urgent story, as central to this century as to the last, about how we live now, what we’ve left behind, and at what cost.

Gifted as they were, the Blasket writers would not have reached the rest of the world with their life-tales and sagas were it not for the superbly educated men and women, so different from themselves, who visited their island.
George Thomson and the others came from the great intellectual capitals of Europe, looking for something. But what they found, it turned out, meant more to them than what they had come to find. And it is this surprising, almost freakish collision between two worlds that lies at the center of my story. It is a story of friendship, fellowship, and love across a great cultural divide—between a bare speck of village and the great world of literature and learning; between peasant fishermen and scholars mostly still in their impressionable twenties who, before coming to the island, led bookish lives cloistered in seminar room and library, caught up in a twentieth century that sometimes seemed too shallow and too fast.

The word “friendship” is not entirely unproblematic, or without irony. Money sometimes changed hands between visitor and villager. Favors were traded. But whatever they exactly were, these relationships forged in work, song, and talk around the fire blossomed again and again on this enchanted isle, and often proved lasting, deep, and loving. That’s about how it was for a tall, imperious Norwegian who’d go on to become one of the world’s leading linguists,
Carl Marstrander, twenty-three when he visited the island in 1907; for a Yorkshireman more at home in the
Middle Ages than in his home in London,
Robin Flower, twenty-eight on his first visit in 1910; for a lonely Irishman with a wild heart from
Killarney,
Brian Kelly, twenty-eight; for a charming and brilliant Frenchwoman, product of
Paris’s elite academies,
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, twenty-three; for Synge, thirty-four; and, particularly, for George Thomson, twenty.

It would be hard to imagine a coterie of people more brilliant, more adventurous, more deeply interesting than these. Brian Kelly’s short life is shrouded in mystery. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt’s, too, ends prematurely, in tragedy, in German-occupied Paris. Each is unforgettable in his or her own way. But it would be useless to deny that Thomson holds a special place among them for me; his story touches every facet of the Blasket saga and ranges across this book from end to end.

His innocuous, overfamiliar name might suggest a white-bread sort of Englishman; he was anything but. He had enormous spirit and integrity. He was moved by the injustice he saw around him; he would become a Marxist, visit the
Soviet Union, later serve on the Central Committee
of the British Communist Party. Arriving in Ireland deficient in
modern Irish, he would come to speak a Blasket Irish the equal of any of the islanders’. He was a passionate, caring, loving man, would write to his wife that Irish had thirty-nine ways
to express “darling” and bestow on her a bountiful sampling of them.

Thomson’s fascination with all things Irish was stirred and enriched in the Blaskets, but began earlier. His father was an
Ulsterman. Both parents showed Irish republican leanings. While a student in prep school, he followed with revulsion accounts of the Black and Tan massacres, when British mercenaries, apparently picked for their brutality, laid waste to Irish homes. Come Monday afternoons, he’d tear off his school uniform and take the train into
London for classes in Irish at the
Gaelic League. And long before being rowed across to the Great Blasket that day in 1923, before even going up to King’s, he gathered
books of Irish verse and grammar and, at age seventeen, inscribed them with his name in Irish: Seoirse Mac Tomáis.

Before George Thomson, of course, others had crossed the three miles of
Blasket Sound that separated the Great Blasket from the mainland, or had explored the smaller rocky islands, mostly uninhabited, that were its neighbors, the so-called
Lesser Blaskets. They recorded bird sightings. They took geological samples. Most never said much about their visits—or, left unaccountably unmoved by the awful splendor of the islands, perhaps had nothing much to say in the first place.
Revenue agents of the English king occasionally appeared; at least once, the story goes, islanders pelted them from the overhanging cliffs with rocks, chasing them back to their boats. Protestant
missionaries visited, too, determined to turn islanders away from dark Papist ignorance.

In 1843,
Mrs. D. P. Thomson, wife of a Protestant cleric on the mainland (and unrelated to George Thomson), visited the Great Blasket. It was difficult even to get onto the island, she wrote in a book published a few years later, since one must “
take advantage of the swell of the wave and leap on the rocks” from the shifting, unsteady platform of the boat. Once on land, she “was more affected than I have the power to describe, by witnessing human nature reduced to the savage state it is among these islanders,
within almost ear-shot of religious light and civilization.” Mrs. Thomson told of local women and children crowded into the schoolroom, “chewing seaweed incessantly,” who pressed lengths of it “into their mouths with their thumbs in a most savage manner, and spat about unceremoniously at will; they touched my dress, turned me round and round to look at every separate article, laughed with admiration at my shoes and gloves, kissed and stroked my old silk gown.” After submitting to this inspection, she proceeded to speak to them of Jesus Christ.

In 1892,
Jeremiah Curtin arrived on the island. An American from Milwaukee, Harvard-trained, Curtin was a linguist visiting West
Kerry in search of folklore. New Year’s Day found him in
Tralee. He took the train to
Dingle, came around through
Ventry and the neighboring villages, visited
Ballyferriter, and finally was rowed out to the Great Blasket. There he found “perhaps 20 straw-thatched cabins, the thatch held in place by a network of straw ropes fastened down with stones.” Piles of manure stood in front of each, cattle being kept in them at night. Curtin was in search of Gaelic myths he’d been assured he’d be able to gather like flowers from a field. But the pickings were slim: “I care more about getting the price of a bottle of whiskey than about old stories,” one man told him. Curtin soon left, gleaning for his trouble only a photo or two of the thatched-roof village he had too briefly visited.

The first to see the island with new eyes and tell the world about it was John Millington Synge. This preternaturally gifted playwright, this quiet brooding literary force, discovered on the island in 1905 something of the luminous spirit later visitors would find as well. He was thirty-four at the time and had less than four years to live. But in his short life, he’d already gained stature as a notable figure of the literary revival then washing over Ireland. Three of his plays had been produced by the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin or its predecessor companies. In the time he had left he would write another,
The Playboy of the Western World,
swollen with such luscious language that, by one estimation, it added up to “
the most fertile and vigorous poetic dialogue written for the stage since Shakespeare.” Its incidents, characters, and speech were rooted in the
spoken Irish Synge heard on his visits to Ireland’s west, including the Blasket. Gone, from his rendering of the island, was the ugly primitivism marking earlier accounts. He found instead among the peasants there an abiding grace and dignity.

Those earlier visitors had come to the island lugging heavy loads of cultural baggage … and so did Synge. For, by the time of his visit in 1905,
the Blaskets weren’t just islands in the farthest western reaches of Ireland. They were The West, which had come to stand for the deepest, purest wells of Irish nationhood.

In those days Ireland, or Eire, didn’t exist as an independent state; Ireland was British. To any self-respecting Irishman of republican sympathies, of course, Ireland was
never
British, merely occupied by them. Still, for seven hundred years Ireland had been variously invaded, conquered, and colonized by England, and for centuries England’s reigning monarch reigned over Ireland as well. Since the capitulation following the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim in 1690 and 1691, feeling against the English ran deep. The Catholic-Protestant divide that had split Europe since the
Reformation played out in Ireland, too. Catholics were barred from voting, serving in the Irish
parliament, or sometimes even practicing their religion. Protestant landlords owned most of the land, evicting impoverished Catholic tenants at their whim. The murderous
Famine of the 1840s, though set off by crop failure, had been exacerbated by English indifference. Periodically, resistance to
British rule took violent form, but more often it was purely political, as in the nineteenth-century struggle for “
home rule,”
Charles Stewart Parnell’s
Irish Parliamentary Party, and various republican brotherhoods and kindred nationalist groups.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, fresh interest in the
Irish language further confounded Ireland’s tortured relationship with England. Late in the same year as
Jeremiah Curtin’s visit to the Blaskets, on November 25, 1892,
Douglas Hyde went before the newly formed
Irish National Literary Society in
Dublin and delivered a lecture that one critic,
Declan Kiberd, would call “Ireland’s declaration of cultural independence.” It bore the title
“The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.”

A thirty-two-year-old linguist, son of a Church of Ireland rector, Hyde had grown up hearing old people in his native County
Roscommon speaking Irish, and through them glimpsed a rich Gaelic culture he’d never encountered among his own family and their friends.
That
Ireland, he declared now, was dying. Ireland’s problems lay in its rejection of all things Gaelic, and its embrace—sometimes willing, sometimes forced—of everything English. In Anglicizing themselves, he declared, the Irish “have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.” It was, he asserted,
“our Gaelic past which, though the Irish race does not recognize it just at present, is really at the bottom of the Irish heart.”

The Ireland of the seventh century, he reminded his listeners, was “then the school of Europe and the torch of learning”; the Dark Ages had been brightened by the wit and intellect of Irish monks, bards, and scholars. But over the past century, Ireland had become cut off from its roots. Irish had fallen into disuse. O’Mulligans had taken English
names like Baldwin, O’Hennesys were now Harringtons, Eibhlins were Ellens. Pipers and fiddlers were disappearing. The harp, long a symbol of Ireland, was becoming extinct. Irish jerseys had given way to shoddy cast-off clothes from Manchester and
London.

Needed was, for example, to “set our faces against this aping of English dress, and encourage our women to spin and our men to wear comfortable frieze suits of their own wool, free from shoddy and humbug.” Irish autonomy demanded sweeping de-Anglicization. “We must strive to cultivate,” declared Hyde, “everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because … this island
is
and will
ever
remain Celtic at the core.”