On an Irish Island (5 page)

Despite its seeming warmth and sympathy, its interest in the islanders and delight in their surroundings, Synge’s published account did not exempt him from criticism. Some islanders saw some of his descriptions as
slights: Did the apron-on-the-window story suggest Máire’s care and hospitality … or a lack of proper curtains? At least one scholar,
Irene Lucchitti, would write him off as a “cultural tourist.” To her, Synge’s “
emphasis on wildness suggests a primitive simplicity that denies the social complexities of living in such a tightly structured society.” His social reticence, his tendency to
take in
rather than volubly express himself,
“shows him to be a silent observer who took what he needed yet gave little of himself.”

This, I think, is harsh. Synge’s account was probably the first to imbue with sympathy and dramatic force a place that in the past, when it had come to the attention of the world at all, had typically been treated badly. It is a commonplace, of course, to say that anything a writer writes says as much about him as it does about his subject. Synge
was
selective; he saw what he saw and not what he didn’t see, extracting from his time on the island those elements he wished, or needed, to express, and not others. He wrote much about what he had seen on the island, but, inevitably, left out much as well—including a number of insights and observations, excluded from the published account, that he recorded in his journal.

It is late August. After sixteen days, Synge is leaving the island. His host heads down to the slip to prepare the boat. Máire offers to slice some bread and wrap it in a clean handkerchief to take with him. But he might never be able to return it to her, he says. Don’t worry, he has her telling him, surely her handkerchief is “
a nicer thing to have round my bread than a piece of paper.” Finally, the king rows him across the sound and arranges with a local farmer to take him and his bags to
Ballyferriter. The king kisses his hand in farewell, he’s loaded on a cart with an old woman and a little girl, and he’s off, the island consigned to memory.

At Willie Long’s in Ballyferriter, Synge sits down to dinner in the parlor, caught up in a bout of longing. “
I am sitting within the four whitewashed walls of this little hotel,” he writes, “with a book and a lamp and paper and ink and a pen. That is my world, instead of the living world I have come from, where there is the princess, and the little queen, and the old king, and all their company.” He imagines them on his departure wandering back from the head of the cliff in twos and threes and gathering again in the kitchen of the king. “The two worlds, their world and mine, are very different.”

But then he crosses out this last sentence.
“They have an island,” he writes instead, “and I have an ink-pot.”

A few months later, in January 1906, Synge got a brief note from the island king in
awkward English, thanking him for a letter and pictures Synge had sent. The king forwarded the best wishes of Máire and her younger sister, wrote of the lovely weather, of boats coming back each day stuffed with fish. Reaching Synge at almost the same time was a letter from
Berlin, advising him of harsh business realities, of German theater managers disdainful of English plays. “Do let me have the Ms. [manuscript] soon,” he was implored.

Synge was a man of
Dublin,
Paris, and Berlin, and of the Aran Islands and the Blaskets, too. He was thirty-four when he came to the island. In his short life, he’d been raised a Protestant by a pious mother, but rejected religion. He had once seriously weighed becoming a musician. He’d led the bohemian life in Paris, with early loves there and in
Germany. He’d studied languages in the Sorbonne; written plays performed in Dublin and elsewhere in Europe; formed attachments with Yeats and Lady Gregory—but also with an Araner he gave the name Michael, and with Máire on the Blasket. He was an inveterate student of human personality, an artist of consummate genius who created a whole new language of mixed Irish and English that was entirely his own. He was a complex man,
who led a complex life in brain, body, and heart, a friend of fishermen, a creator of immortal art.

René Agostini, a scholar who wrote of Synge’s relationship to the peasants he met in the Arans and Blaskets, described him as “
aspiring to simplicity but incapable of it”—which could just as well describe most of those who would follow Synge to the Blaskets.

The islanders whom Synge met in 1905 could trace their roots on the Great Blasket not to the immemorial past, or even to the Middle Ages, but only to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the arrival from the mainland of fewer than a dozen families. To give them, for the time being, their more familiar English
names, they were Kearneys, Guiheens, Dunlevys, Crohans, Sheas, and Keanes, and a little later O’Connors, O’Sullivans, Dalys, and a few others. Island lore and archeological evidence tell of people who lived earlier on the Great Blasket and its smaller neighbors. One was poet and warrior
Pierce Ferriter, who gave the town of
Ballyferriter its name, and who reputedly stood fast against the English from a protected cove along the northern flank of the island where he could slay them with impunity; he was executed by them in 1653. The vestiges of a small fort halfway back along the ridge of the island attest to still earlier inhabitants, as do the remains of some stone huts perhaps associated with an early Christian monastic settlement. But it was only with the Kearneys, Guiheens, and the others that the first permanent community emerged on the tip of the island that faced the mainland.

Shards of island history tell of rents paid to distant landlords, of a ship from the Spanish
Armada flung on the rocks of
Blasket Sound, of other
shipwrecks and their cargoes helping islanders get through the
Famine. But Synge and subsequent visitors saw little by way of historical remnant. What struck them as they trudged up the zigzag path from the break in the rocks that served as pier was bustling life—
children,
women, and men setting out in the boats,
hunting rabbits, cooking, cutting peat, tending to
animals, talking a stream of Irish among themselves. After three miles of open water in a little boat, the visitor was abruptly
there,
in a stone village dug into the side of the hill that shot up from the sea’s edge, the mainland now seeming inconsiderable and remote.

The island itself was about three miles long and half a mile wide, shaped like an ineptly cut arrowhead aimed southwest. On its northeast flank (farthest from the point, where it might be affixed to the arrow shaft) stood the village itself, with its twenty-eight
houses. That, anyway, is the figure normally given. The roofless ruins today, plaited with outbuildings and low stone walls, don’t make for easy counting.

But the houses were mere backdrop for the animal strivings of 150 humans, as well as the
donkeys, chickens, and sheep that were as much a part of village life. Typically of one or two rooms, the houses were tied together by interlaced paths gradually worn into, or cut into, the sloping ground. From their chimneys issued smoke from fires built from peat gathered on the back side of the island, dried in little stone structures there, then borne across the island on the backs of donkeys laden with wicker panniers. There were no trees, none. There was plenty of living green, but it was all pasturage, over wide stretches of the island, and bog, and a few low bushes.

It was a place of sheer rock faces, eroding gullies, sharp projections into the sea, sea
birds in flight hundreds of feet below, a place of stark contrasts and extraordinary beauty. Vistas could change within a few steps; there was no disguise, no shelter, no privacy granted by copse or wood, only by the spatial irregularities of the island, where the curve of a hill or the descent into a crevasse might abruptly lose you to another’s sight. Several peaks shot up from the landmass. The one to which the village clung rose to more than seven hundred feet. Along the back of the island, you’d encounter two more, reaching higher yet, to almost a thousand feet. A few paths, more or less level, emerged from the village and wrapped around the hill. Depart from these thin ribbons of horizontality and you could imagine rolling or sliding down the sheer slope.

Yet, however steep, it was a plump pillow of green compared with the cliffs by which the island finally dropped away to the sea. Abruptly, the
earth was gone, and there were only the rocks and crashing surf a hundred or two hundred feet below—everywhere along the island’s circumference, mouthfuls of land chomped out by some great sea monster, each its own gnarled universe of rock, softened just a bit with growths of sea pink or other vegetation. Each was alive in the minds of the islanders with its own name:
Cuas Fhaill Beag, little cliff cove, on the long north face of the island; or
Cladach an Chapair, copper beach, a little to the west, where a wrecked ship had once deposited a load of copper bolts; or
Rinn na Croise, point of the cross, on the south. There were scores of them, no hundred yards of shoreline failing to get its own name and coloration in the island’s collective mind.

In this rhythm of cove and point, there was one exception. Not the village itself, which dropped to the sea much as the rest of the island did, to the wave-lapped inlet where the
naomhóg
s were brought ashore. Rather, it was north of the village and visible from its heights: a cove where the cliffs fell not into the sea but into a soft swathe of fine white sand three hundred yards across.
An Traigh Bhan, the islanders called it, the White Strand. It was close to the village, but not quite of it, just below the gentler slope of land where most of the island’s few crops were grown. A stretch of shore that was sweeter, more forgiving, where you didn’t need to watch your footing, as you did everywhere else on the island. Here driftwood washed ashore, seals beached, children ran barefoot in the wet sand.

In 1907, two years after Synge came and went, the island received a new visitor, a tall Norwegian,
Carl Marstrander. “
All the bridges to the outside world were … broken,” he would recall of his time on the island. “On this St. Helena I lived for five months in voluntary jail, in a world so different from the one I up to then had been living in.” Young Marstrander had been identified by his professors in
Oslo as an unusually gifted student of
linguistics. But, visiting the Great Blasket at the age of twenty-three, he’d been thrust into an alien world that, when he came to write about it two years later, still left him befuddled, unsure of what to make of its maddening contradictions.

“
Children of nature,” he termed his island friends, or neighbors, or hosts, or objects of study, or teachers, or whatever they really were. “They are rather unstable in their mind, like a lot of
Celts, and one doesn’t have to do much to make them happy.” Sadness never lingered with them,
but passed “like the short summer showers in Kerry that come and go. They do not seem to think of a day after today. They do not know,” he wrote, “the slow patient work which will bear fruit in years to come. But whatever will give them profits at the mo
ment gives them enormous energy.”

The young
Carl Marstrander was an athlete. On the Blasket he’d use a
naomhóg
mast to demonstrate pole vaulting to the islanders.
(
Illustration Credit ill.3
)

Marstrander pictured the islanders as forever joking, prone to exaggeration, inexorably drawn to “the strange and horrible.” They were “
superstitious and blinded by many prejudices,” prey to demanding priests, yet quick to disregard their pastoral injunctions. One priest, angry at being ignored, cursed them, according to Marstrander, going so far as to offer prayers “
that the Almighty might lead your boats into destruction on the sea.” For a few days, at least, the islanders, white with fear, forsook whiskey, gave up dancing and song. Impossible for one priest’s intemperate reproof to exact such a price? No, wrote Marstrander, “the West of Ireland still lives in the dark middle ages.”

The islanders, he was convinced, were all but incapable of introspection. They were preternaturally social creatures, unable to be at once happy and alone. Evenings brought them together for singing, dancing, and storytelling. “
It’s from these evening gatherings,” he wrote, “that I have my most wonderful memories and my most lasting impressions from the Blaskets.” Everyone would climb the path to the house of the king, boys in blue sweaters and heavy boots, girls barefoot and wrapped in shawls. “I
have never seen such beautiful and stylish dance as in the Great Blasket. The
men are champions. Every beat, every little change in the music, even the smallest, is mirrored in their dance, whether it is by a movement of their foot or a bend of their wrist or knee.”

He marveled at how, when
weatherbound for weeks at a time and unable to fish, they rarely put the time to productive good use, as with handicrafts. They didn’t often cross the sound for Mass, yet their morale was “
healthy and high. Particularly is this true of the sex life, which is told boys and girls from childhood.” While their elders looked on benignly, everyone joked about sex, “the boys caressing the girls even in the presence of older people.” Yet they managed to stay pretty much out of trouble.