On an Irish Island (3 page)

The following year, Hyde helped establish the
Gaelic League, which for the next two decades would champion a revival of Irish culture and language. Forget politics, Hyde as much as said; the core of Irish identity lay in the Irish language. “My own ambition,” he would write later, was “
language as a neutral ground upon which all Irishmen might meet.” Through the last years of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth, the League’s influence spread. “Whatever it was ten years ago,” a
Dublin professor wrote in 1907 of Gaelic, “
it is very much alive now.… You see Gaelic inscriptions over the shops, Gaelic on the street labels, Gaelic in advertisements, a Gaelic column in newspapers.… The Gaelic League is everywhere.” Irish youth might not much care for French or German, but during these years they did for Gaelic, for Irish: “They want to learn Irish, as they want no other language on earth.” And when leaders of the language movement looked around Ireland for exemplars of all that was Irish at its purest and best, they looked fixedly
west.

Think of Ireland as two hundred miles across and three hundred miles north-to-south and you won’t be far wrong. Across this breadth, however, its population is, and was, distributed unequally. Its two largest cities,
Belfast and Dublin, both lay off inlets to the
Irish Sea and faced east, to
Scotland and
England. The weight of its bigger, stronger English neighbor
was felt unevenly across the country, too. The
English first invaded in the twelfth century, expanding and colonizing from east to west, bringing with them English place-names, English families, English castles. After the Reformation,
Protestantism made its strongest inroads in the east, encroaching but feebly in the west. The English language, meanwhile, squeezed out Irish until, by the 1850s, little of the native language could be heard outside parts of Counties
Donegal,
Mayo,
Galway, and
Kerry, all in the west.

So by the time our story begins in the early years of the twentieth century, “Ireland” meant, roughly speaking, two Irelands—split not along the familiar divide of
Northern Ireland and the south of recent political history, but along an east-west axis. The east was overwhelmingly English-speaking, included substantial Protestant minorities, and boasted big cities that looked like those of England and
Scotland, with all their coal dust, clamor, and corruption. The poor, rural, mostly Roman Catholic west, with its Irish-speaking enclaves, was typically seen as a throwback to a simpler, purer past that elsewhere in Ireland had been overrun by the noisy and the new.

Here, though, could be found the precious seed that one day might be planted in an Irish political soil more hospitable to its growth. To Irish nationalists, historian
Kevin Whelan would observe, the rural west was “
the authentic Ireland, a materialization of an unsullied primordial past,” the Irish-speaking Aran or Blasket islander its exemplar. To another scholar,
Kevin Martin, the western islands were “
part of the creation myth” of a new Ireland aborning.

And this was The West that, with its distinctive dialects, drew John Millington
Synge.

Born in 1871, Synge had come out of the
Dublin Ascendancy; that is, his family was long and deeply Irish, but Protestant—landed gentry from Wicklow on his father’s side. The son of a barrister, he’d studied languages at
Trinity College, Dublin, at the time virtually reserved for Protestants. Settling on becoming a musician, he lived in
Germany,
Italy, and
France. In
Paris, at the Sorbonne, he came under the influence of one of Europe’s foremost Celtic scholars, H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, who nurtured in him a love of Irish. Also in Paris, he met
William Butler Yeats, already a major literary figure, who recognized his talents and, in the familiar story, bestowed on him among the most famous hard nubs of literary advice ever
offered and accepted. “Go to the
Aran Islands,” he told Synge. “Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”

Playwright John Millington Synge, around the time he visited the Great Blasket in 1905
(
Illustration Credit ill.1
)

Before Synge went to the Blaskets, then, he went to Aran, three remote islands in
Galway Bay, across from the mainland wilderness of
Connemara. He made his first trip there in 1898, being rowed out the first time in a curragh. “
It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction,” he wrote later, “to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.” Between then and 1902, he returned to Aran four times, for four and a half months all told, his mastery of Irish improving with each visit.

Synge was a swarthy, thick-necked man with a great shock of dark hair and a bushy mustache, and had all the hallmarks of healthy, virile manhood to him. But in fact he was sick much of his life—with asthma in his
youth and then Hodgkin’s disease, which began to afflict him in his late twenties and would kill him before he turned forty. He was, though, an energetic walker, tramping across the hills and down the dusty roads. He’d go up and talk to anybody he happened to meet. Yet he was essentially shy, his seeming gregariousness more spur to the stories and speech of others than sign of any great need to speak himself. As every portrait of him somehow suggests, his was a silent absorbing presence. To the Aran Islanders, one critic noted, Synge was “
so strange and silent that no one actually knew him.” His gift was to listen through those deep moody eyes, and transmute the language of fisherman and peasant, weaver and tramp, into art. First, in 1903, came
In the Shadow of the Glen,
a grim one-act comedy in which an old peasant feigns death to test his wife’s fidelity. Then
Riders to the Sea,
a one-act tragedy exhibiting, by one estimation, “
an almost Aeschylean starkness and grandeur.”

Synge’s accounts of his Aran visits had not yet been published when, early in the new century, he was drawn to another
Irish-speaking enclave in the west. Separated from one another by broad ranges of English-speaking Ireland, the last remaining Irish-speaking areas, each more and more unto itself, had split into distinctive
dialects. There was Donegal Irish to the north. And Connemara Irish, which is what the Aran Islanders spoke, down the coast. And Munster Irish in the southwest, which included County
Kerry. The differences were notable. Most
spoken Irish, for example, stressed first syllables; Munster sometimes shifted emphasis to the last. Words known in Ulster were unknown elsewhere. The country’s zealous language enthusiasts exhorted Irish-learners to explore them all.

Synge felt the tug. His brother Robert had recommended a Kerry family with whom he could stay, with whom he might unearth a new bounty of Irish stories and Irish expression. During parts of four summers Synge would visit Kerry; these yielded dialogue, plot material, and idiosyncrasies of language that would inform his later work. And on one of these trips, in July 1905, he wrote to
Willie Long of
Ballyferriter, County Kerry, at the western tip of the
Dingle Peninsula, seeking a place more pristinely Irish yet.

If there was anything like a local aristocracy in this far-off, underpopulated little town, Long—well off, loquacious, a bit of bluster to him—was it. He was a forty-six-year-old father of four sons and two daughters, a well-connected merchant, innkeeper, and schoolteacher. Local ordinance apparently barred teachers from keeping inns. So, to get around it, the
low-ceilinged, two-story little place on the main street of
Ballyferriter over which he presided bore the name of his brother instead.

Three shillings sixpence per night, or twenty-four shillings a week—that’s what Synge’s stay would cost, Long wrote him on stationery bearing his name and address in a riot of different typefaces. “
Of course my place is not an out-and-out Hotel but I guarantee you quiet, clean & good accommodation.… The worth of your money you’ll have.” As to Synge’s abiding concern, Long reassured him: “
Myself & household all speak Paddy’s language still, so there is no need of any cottage for getting it.” In other words, Synge could get his fill of Irish right there in Willie Long’s parlor.

The gateway to the
Dingle Peninsula was
Tralee, a town of about ten thousand lying most of the way southwest across the country from Dublin. Forty miles of formidable mountains stood between it and Ballyferriter, but by 1891, a little
narrow-gauge steam railroad had been slipped in among the mountains. It boasted the steepest track of any line in Ireland or England. The train never scuttled along faster than about twelve miles an hour, and often broke down. But for the first time it linked Dingle and its nearby villages, including Ballyferriter,
Dún Chaoin, and the Blaskets themselves, to the rest of Ireland.

In Tralee, Synge found a boy to carry his bag across town to the depot, scene of “
a confused mass of peasants struggling on the platform with all sorts of baggage.” Synge’s narrow car was soon “filled with sacks of flour, cases of porter, chairs rolled in straw and other household goods.” Under way, he overheard a woman in a shawl tell of a son who had left for England, leaving his elderly father bereft in loneliness.
“ ‘Ah, poor fellow!’ she said. ‘I suppose he will get used to it like another; and wouldn’t he be worse off if he was beyond the seas in Saint Louis, or the towns of America.’ ”

Long had written Synge that he’d arrange to pick him up where the chugging little train dropped him off in Dingle. Sure enough, when Synge arrived he found a cart, pulled by a tall mare, to take him the ten miles or so to Ballyferriter. The driver needed a little while to hoist his bags aboard and fasten them, but finally they were on their way, over and through the hills rising behind Dingle.
“As the night fell the sea became like a piece of white silver on our right; and the mountains got black on our left, and heavy night smells began to come up out of the bogs.”

From Long’s on August 4, 1905, Synge wrote
Lady Augusta Gregory,
his aristocratic patron in Dublin. Like
Douglas Hyde and Synge himself an upper-class Protestant, Lady Gregory had grown up in a great house outside Dublin, where her playmates among the
Irish Catholic help piqued her fascination with their world. Later, she would collect folklore and write plays, most of them serviceable if not inspired. But it was in funding and nurturing the Abbey Theatre, dedicated to making a national
theater shot through with Irish sensibility, that she became best known. And Synge was one of her eternal triumphs. It was largely through her energies that his first two plays were produced, garnering much acclaim. Now, in
Ballyferriter, her protégé wrote to her. He was “
in the centre of the most Gaelic part of
Munster,” making progress with a dialect that, after Aran, seemed almost foreign. “I have realized that I must resuscitate my Irish this year or lose it altogether, so I am hard at work.” Near Ballyferriter, lined up along the northeastern flank of a wide-necked peninsula, rose the companionable little prominences known as the
Three Sisters. Jutting into the Atlantic just to the west stood spectacular
Sibyl Head. One day, Synge climbed it, arriving
“suddenly on the brow of a cliff, with a straight fall at one’s feet of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place of indescribable grandeur.” Why did anyone remain in Dublin, London, or Paris, he mused, when it would be better “to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air.”

But it wasn’t for the sake of the scenery that Synge had written Willie Long in the first place; he needed someplace cut off from
English, thick with Kerry Irish. And, it turned out, he wasn’t getting his fill of “Paddy’s language” after all; even this far west, English was too strong. So he was setting out for a more purely Irish-speaking milieu yet. As he wrote Lady Gregory, he expected it to be
“even more primitive than Aran and I am wild with joy at the prospect.”

On August 14, he recorded in his notebook, “
I came off yesterday to the Great Blasket Island.”

That first day, a local holiday, he had gone out to the island with Long and a couple of other locals, three oarsmen powering them over the tricky swells in a
naomhóg,
pronounced “nay-vog,” a craft of wood lathing covered in canvas painted with black tar. The day was clear, the sea and sky blue.