On an Irish Island (28 page)

And yet he never did. “The novel,” George observed much later, “is a story of a new type,” caught up in the intimately personal, with scant
room for what he called “the oral and collective.” Private preoccupations like that “
lay beyond Muiris’s experience,” submerged as it was in the communal.

Of all George’s experience of the island, its communitarian ways may have left the deepest mark. The sound of Irish on the lips of his friends? Yes, certainly, a distinct pleasure. But it was not just as individuals that he thought of them. He was alive to the uniqueness of the men and women he met, like the quirky islanders Tomás had sketched in
Island Cross-Talk.
But he’d found on the Great Blasket something more, something originally quite new to him—a sense of its collective spirit.

George took numerous photos on his visits, most of them of islanders in groups. One was of Seán Ó Criomhthain, Eibhlín Ní Shuilleabháin,
Mícheál O’Guiheen, and Maurice O’Sullivan, lined up together, sitting along a low stone wall. Another was of villagers climbing up the path from the slip. Another of
children cavorting on the White Strand. Another of islanders gathered at the well. Did this people-together pattern reveal some deep unmet need in George? Maybe so, but just as likely it was simply what he saw most. The islanders did almost everything together. Visitors invariably reported them collecting above the slip to greet a
naomhóg,
or sweeping down onto the White Strand to gather wreckage, or crowding into the “parliament” house near the well at the top of the village. Synge described using a bit of broken mirror to shave:
“As I stood with my back to the people I could catch a score of eyes in the glass, watching me intently.”
Carl Marstrander depicted islanders as scarcely able to endure solitude at all. It required no special soft spot, then, for George to see what he saw in the village; he was immersed in a living community.

And he loved it. For all its privations, the communal life of the island gave him something he found missing from London and Cambridge. Odysseus, we may recall George writing, called Ithaca “ ‘a rough place, but a fine nurse of men.’ One might say the same of the Blasket Island.” Not a nurse only of individuals, however, but of men, women, and children, living humanely and well, together.

The islanders, he observed, “
were bound to one another by close ties of blood and
marriage, all residing within a stone’s throw of each other, all engaged in the same occupations and faced with the same dangers at sea.” On the island, over the course of many summers, he’d seen that up close.
But now in
Galway, as before in Dublin, he had time and leisure to make sense of it, to trace the new gullies in his brain the Blaskets had worn. Full and alive in him now was a communitarian streak that would lead him to see the world and its workings through new eyes.

Now everything looked different. As a schoolboy, he’d been puzzled by some of his earliest exposure to the
Homeric poems, including one particular line from the
Odyssey,
which tells of Achilles lying “
full length in the dust, his horsemanship forgotten.” George appreciated the cadence of it in the original Greek. “It struck me as magnificent, inspired.” And yet he would later encounter the same phrase, exactly, in the
Iliad.
How could this be? “If it was really inspired,” he’d write, “how did it bear repetition?”

Then, he’d write, “
I went to Ireland. The conversation of those ragged peasants, as I learnt to follow it, astonished me. It was as though Homer had come alive. Its vitality was inexhaustible, yet it was rhythmical, alliterative, formal, artificial.” He told of a Blasket woman who’d just given
birth, the story reaching him in language both poetic and vigorous. Yet, within the day, he’d heard it the same way from three or four other islanders. “It was common property,” as were other verbal niceties he’d gathered, some of them generations old. Here, it struck him, was his Homeric quandary resolved: Homer’s was “the language of the people, raised to a higher power”—eloquence not rising up from the rare, fevered brain of genius, but billowing up from the collective intelligence and spirit of the people. “It’s in the Blasket,” he would unequivocally declare, “that I found the key to the Homeric Question.”

Certainly, the times he lived in influenced George Thomson as well. Europe and America had sunk into an economic
depression so desperate, cruel, and lingering that some of the most basic tenets of industrial capitalism, with its insistent individualism, were being challenged. The injury and hurt experienced by so many made people look anew at socialism in its many flavors. The cultural and aesthetic fashions of the day—in books by
John Steinbeck, in the
Socialist Realism of communist Russia, in the art of
Diego Rivera, in triumphant visions of men and women joined together, building dams and harvesting wheat—all reflected new interest in the common man and woman. There was a nobility, it seemed, in ordinary people working together.

Some years later, in 1944, Thomson wrote an article for a Celtic-studies journal on the “The Irish Language Revival.” Among the impoverished peasants of the Blaskets, he reported, “
the language embodied a culture and way of life which in my own country had been lost.” He was not
deceived, he said, by the simplistic yet seductive ideas of the “Celtic Twilight.” He had no wish to return to the Middle Ages. He had seen enough of the Blaskets “to shed any romantic illusions they may have inspired in me at the start.” But, he declared, their rich culture was simply “a fact.”

One had only to turn to Maurice O’Sullivan. Readers of
Twenty Years A-Growing,
he suspected, would “agree with me that the author possessed a remarkable imaginative gift,” one that, of course, was his own. “
On the other hand,” he continued, “the eloquence of his language, which is far more striking in the original than it is in the translation, is not his own. It is traditional. I do not think there is a phrase in the whole book which is not current on the lips of the people.”

It was
the people
about whom George more and more came to think and care. And while in Galway, he set out on a high-minded project on their behalf, or on what he deemed their behalf. It was all well and good to imagine restoring Irish to Ireland, but more important, he decided, to preserve it among the peasants who already used it:

Indeed, behind the move to Galway in the first place had been a scheme (apparently hatched with
Ernest Blythe) to launch a series of public Irish-language lectures in that spirit.

On Friday or Saturday nights in October and November 1931, soon after arriving in Galway, George began giving lectures on “The Beginnings of European Civilisation,” with a cast including the Egyptians and the ancient gods. He delivered them in Irish, to a packed auditorium in the university quadrangle. But they were aimed not at university students, or not just at them, but at local Irish-speakers generally. “Extension” classes, we call them today. But in Galway, in 1931, delivered by an Irish-speaking exemplar of Oxbridge scholarship, they were quite the thing. No one present for Friday’s lecture, said the local paper, would want to miss the next one.

George’s ambitions were nothing if not grand. In an article outlining his ideas, he described how lectures in
Dún Chaoin, say, might include one on
Pierce Ferriter, the local poet and patriot known by name and legendary exploits but little else. Discuss his poetry, his life and times, and you had an entrée into literature and history. Or what about
mackerel? Dún Chaoin men fished for it every day. So why not a lecture on how mackerel spawn, their life as marine creatures, the intricacies of their biology? Ultimately, you’d be wandering into economics, meteorology, and chemistry. All in Irish. “
If we began in this way, dealing with matters that concern the lives of the people closely, there is no doubt that we would be able to arouse interest in the origins of things.” Such lectures were sure to succeed, “if only a start were made.”

Or that, anyway, was the idea. As
Séamus Mac Mathúna, today the university’s director of academic affairs, looks back on the noble experiment, Thomson started with “
high hopes and ambitions” but in the end had to reckon his efforts a failure. Ireland, as Thomson would take pains to point out later, was not Greece; you couldn’t hold lectures in the open air. You needed a hall, which in most Irish villages meant a school, which normally required the say-so of a parish priest. “
I had not proceeded far with my arrangements,” he would write, “when it was made plain to me that there was not a priest throughout the length and breadth of Connemara who would dream of permitting his school to be used for anything so subversive” as his lectures. Nor did he get much support from the university, or from the Ministry of Education;
Ernest Blythe, his vigorous champion, had been voted out of office.

Three years in Galway left George embittered. As he wrote later, at a time when his political views had hardened:

During these years, he’d write, “
I was working to save the culture of the Irish-speaking peasantry”—which betrays some slight taint, at least, of bravado or grandiloquence. George was capable and resourceful, but
maybe a little overearnest, too; independent, but also stubborn. When he arrived in Galway, he was only twenty-eight, an age at which he may not yet have learned the interpersonal and political skills needed to pull off such an ambitious project.

Despite these disappointments, George remained busy and productive. He brought out Irish
translations of works of
Euripides and
Aeschylus. He helped translate a play by the
Russian dramatist Gogol, which was performed at
Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the local
Irish-language theater. He translated the
Book of Common Prayer.

Altogether, he probably worked too hard. A long-standing
ulcer acted up. Even by early 1933, he was apparently weighing a return to
Dublin, though for the moment he hung on. “
I am sorry that you are not leaving Galway,” Forster wrote him on January 31, after learning that Maurice’s book had found a publisher. It was a dead end for him there.
In Dublin, on the other hand, “you would be in contact with other people’s minds, and perhaps with their affections, and in Galway I can’t see that you are.”

In April 1934, Forster wrote George that he’d recently talked to Jack Sheppard and had news: Sheppard “
would and could still take you back to Kings.” If he was interested, Forster made it sound, he’d better move fast.

Finally, overwhelmed and exhausted, “
my mind in turmoil,” as he later wrote, George gave up, and later that year left Galway to take up once more his King’s fellowship in Cambridge.

Perhaps while still at Watermill, or else later in Galway, George learned that
Mary Kearney had immigrated to America. “
I was determined to follow her,” he’d write—determined, that is, until he learned that his girl from the Blaskets with the hearty, infectious laugh had become a nun.

It was probably around the beginning of November 1929, after about a week’s voyage, that
Mary arrived in
Boston. Walking down the gangplank, she heard someone call her name. Her sister Cáit, who was working as a domestic for a family with connections in the Springfield police force, couldn’t come herself, but arranged for an officer to meet her at the dock. Yes, said Mary, that’s me. She was in America, and soon on a train bound for Springfield, ninety miles west.

Like other immigrants, she held visions of America as a land of gold and limitless opportunity. But as the train chugged west across eastern
Massachusetts, she looked out on a trackside landscape of rubbish and old cars. And
that,
she’d remember with a laugh years later, left her oddly comfortable: America was not so daunting, after all, not so rich, not so foreign: “I felt at home.”

Cáit, two years older and four years in the New World, was thrilled to have her sister join her in Springfield. When she had time off on Thursday afternoons, she and some friends would round up Mary and set about showing her America. One time, they went to get their portraits taken—the four of them, young women in their twenties, lined up in front of a studio backdrop of a garden trellis, wearing fresh frocks and the little head-hugging cloches fashionable at the time. In another photo, of just the two sisters, Cáit had put on a few pounds; Mary sat prettily and petitely beside her, in a pleated skirt, a string of pearls, faux or not, and a
scarf tied like a scout bandanna around her neck. A month or two off the ship and Mary looked like a million other American girls.