Synge (18 page)

while family ties were strained by immigration, the Irish brought with them and maintained enduring family patterns and ways of life.

So Ms. Groneman might know it, but there are certainly many in the history game who are completely ignorant of the fact that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world. It seems that Arthur Griffith may have had very strong reasons for defending Irishwomen’s honour: the poor and the displaced are often driven to prostitution; the ‘racially inferior’ are often considered to be sexually base. I want schoolchildren to be taught this, now, that the lovely Irish girl came from an Irish girl so poor she did not even own her body, and that is why we didn’t allow contraception, abortion or divorce, or at least not on our native soil – because Irish women have always done bad things abroad, but
when they are at home
all of us know that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world.

In
A Portrait of the Artist
, Stephen Dedalus loses his virginity to a prostitute in a scene that is set around the turn of the century. When he first wanders into the red light district he wonders, in a disturbing echo of Griffith’s anti-semitism, whether he has strayed into ‘the quarter of the Jews’. It seems that, even for a writer as international and open as Joyce, there was something about all that sexual activity that was not strictly ‘Irish.’

It is hard to say what Irish women were really like in 1903 – levels of prostitution may not be the best indicator; besides business was concentrated in urban areas (except for the Curragh) and the mythically pure Irishwoman was a country girl. Mind you, that other mythical Irishwoman, Griffith’s fellow committee member on the Irish National Theatre Society, Maud Gonne, was not in the slightest bit virtuous. She conceived her second illegitimate child on the grave of her first, though Griffith was not to know that, or not that precisely, and besides the rules are always different for people like Maud Gonne, who was not, in the first instance, actually Irish.

It seems true to say that there was an increase in national virtuousness in the last years of the nineteenth century: there was, at any rate, a decline in the numbers of prostitutes. In her essay, ‘Abandoned Women and Bad Characters: prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Maria Luddy reports that the number of women arrested for offences other than soliciting in 1870 included 11,864 women thought to be prostitutes. That figure had declined to 2,970 by 1900. This she ascribes to the purity movement of the 1880s and also to the rise of a middle class morality among the survivors of the famine.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the women admitted to the Magdalen homes were the ‘seduced’ daughters of the middle classes, rather than working prostitutes. After the withdrawal of British troops in 1922, business got even slower, and by 1925 the main brothels of Monto had been closed down. This was effected, in part, by the reforming zeal of the Legion of Mary, whose founder Frank Duff, estimated that there were 200 girls working there in 1922, and that, by 1925 this was reduced to 40. Underpinning his account of the fall of Monto,
Miracles on Tap
, is the sense that women themselves knew that they were out of joint with the times.

In July 1922, Duff took the first group of 23 ‘girls’ off in a charabanc for a weekend retreat in Baldoyle, stopping briefly to pick up a Franciscan at Adam and Eve’s church on the quays. He writes:

As we go, we are brushing by history ... I bound creditably from my perch and run across the road to the door. If I had thought to look across the Liffey – as all those I left behind me were now doing, I would have witnessed a pitiful sight. Portions of the former proud walls of the Four Courts, the central law courts of Ireland, were being pulled down by great gangs of men with ropes. Civil War had just been raging, and these dangerously tottering walls were part of its grim heritage. And even during the short time I was away, our great adventure was in peril: the result of that striking scene playing upon supercharged nerves and galvanizing into life that old terror to which reference has already been made, that a government plot was in operation against them. What were those soldiers stalking about with rifles for and looking – many of them – in the direction of the vivid-coloured charabanc? Did they not look as if they were going to shoot at it?

Fatefully, by Frank Duff’s account, the charabanc did not contain Honour Bright, who changed her mind at the last minute because she ‘did not want to leave her baby’, and was subsequently killed, while working, in 1926. Testimony at her murder trial shows that although Monto was quiet, business was still brisk outside the Shelbourne, where girls and jarveys provided a ‘once around the Green’ service for gentlemen at the end of their evening. Accounts of the trial, as well as interviews with former residents of Monto, make it clear that the Dublin poor had a great sympathy for the ‘unfortunate girls’ working in their midst, and that many of the better-off were equally slow to judge. When Arthur Griffith talked about ‘all of us’ he was conjuring a middle class that did not yet exist; this was the same ‘nearly’ middle class that Synge abhorred, perhaps because he was looking at it from the other side.

The groggy-patriot-publican-general-shop-man who is married to the priest’s half-sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor ... are horrible and awful.

Synge wishes he could put these people on stage. ‘God, wouldn’t they hop!’ In his letter to a friend about his travels in the West, he is distressed to find,

in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming, and in another place where things are going well, one has a rampant, double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of.

Arthur Griffith may be a prime example of this ‘rampant double-chinned vulgarity’, but perhaps he had a stronger idea than Synge of what it was to be poor (but wonderfully attractive), and on the boat, and on your back. Besides, how was he to know that polemic always fades, while art survives?

On the opening night of
The Shadow of the Glen
, Yeats, in what an onlooker described as ‘his usual thumpty thigh, monotonous, preachy style’, stood up in the Molesworth Hall and ‘defended the artist’s right to show life, instead of the desire which every political party would substitute for life.’ His spat with Griffith rose to a pitch with the
Playboy
in 1907, which Griffith described as

a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform ... the production of a moral degenerate, who has dishonoured the women of Ireland before all Europe.

In the characters of Nora Burke, Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin, Synge was drawing on a pre-famine tradition of women who are strong, and likeable, and free enough. The lovely Irish girl had too much mischief in her ever to be really good, and all through the twentieth century Synge’s characters gave the lie to the legislative piety of Griffith’s inheritors. You could say that the war goes on, though the most convincing battles were fought in the referendums of the 1980s.

Now, from a tired distance of twenty years, it seems to me that this second Irish Civil War, the one we fought about contraception, abortion and divorce, wasn’t actually about virtue – or only incidentally so – it was about breeding. It was about maintaining stock. The country faced a demographic shift towards the young. We could not believe that, for the first time since the famine, the population of Ireland did not have to overproduce just to keep still.

I grew up during the 1980s. For very good reasons, I am bad at history. Much better, like Synge, to stick to art.

One last thing: through all the hard years of the twentieth century, Pegeen Mike ran around in her shift on stages all over Ireland, both amateur and professional. She has a lot to answer for. There hasn’t been an Irish production since without a woman in her shift, or ‘slip’, as they are now known. Forget the pan of rashers, it is the woman standing in her slip with a regretful look on her face that marks the Abbey production out for me. ‘Run out there to Guiney’s and get me another twenty mixed slips,’ says the Wardrobe Mistress to the Assistant Wardrobe Mistress, ‘These ones are getting a bit yellow under the arms.’

A woman in her slip, I think it is fair to say, is someone who has just had sex with the main character. She is not married, because a married woman on an Irish stage would always wear a dressing gown. The woman in the slip reads as ‘naked’, though this is complicated by the fact that the actress wearing the slip also wears various other undergarments, even when sitting up, post-coitally, in bed. This is in case her nipples might show.

Pegeen, in her Ur-slip, had a better time than any of them, and this I take as a sign that Synge was a better writer of women than those who came after him. The first are often the best. In
Riders to the Sea
he instituted another great trope of the Irish Theatre – the dead child. This is a child that the audience has never seen, heard, or met, who dies offstage to leave its mother grieving for the duration. Maurya, the mother in the play, has six of them, which makes her a hard act to follow. Synge may have thought he was being Greek about this, but subsequent playwrights just think they are being Irish. They seem to think that if a woman says, ‘I had a child and it died’ we will always believe them, in a way that we do not believe a dead body on stage: in the way, indeed, in which we do not believe a child onstage.

I only mention this because off-stage dead children always make me cry, and after many years of crying in precisely the same way for different dead children I realize that it is always the same child that is on my mind, and he (it is always a boy) is always blonde and curly-haired and about six years old. I don’t know why, it is just that when a woman, often in her slip, touches her belly and talks about the child she had that died, or the child she nearly had, that died, I feel a caption should scroll across the top of the proscenium arch saying,
Women have their sadness too.
Though it is possible that these male playwrights are saying that a woman’s sadness is the only sadness; there is no other kind, and all the rest is noise.

Illustration 10:
Molly Allgood

There is a part of the garden, by the cluster of sycamores, near the bend in the drive where the gravel is wearing thin. If he stands there, quietly, on a still Sunday morning, when none of the servants is around to annoy him, and when Mother is up in her room at her scriptures, he can hear the distant approach of the train from Dublin: the windborne shush-and-chug that means she might be coming to him again. He is thirty-six now, already very ill. Painful years have passed since he stopped believing he could be loved. The power of what is happening terrifies him.

He leaves his mother’s garden, makes hurriedly for Glenageary station: up the willow-lined avenue, towards St Paul’s Church of Ireland. Past the entrance to the quarry-lanes known locally as ‘The Metals’, through which the granites were hefted long ago for the stanchions of Kingstown Pier. There are days when he feels hammered; his breathing sometimes knifes him. But punctuality is important, a sign of respect.

The walk from his mother’s house takes about seven minutes. Often, he arrives as the locomotive is chuntering to its screechy standstill and belching grimy spumes of cinders and mizzle. He skulks in the station portico, not daring to hope, lowering his eyes quickly if a neighbour happens past. It would not do to be seen: not yet, not here. There is the age-difference between them. There are other differences, too.

And then – where can she be? – she materializes through the smoke. There she is, beckoning circumspectly from a Second-Class window. It is like a small moment out of Tolstoy, perhaps, one of those seemingly simple but reverberating images he values in the novels of Russia. He pictures her stepping down through the vapour, the soot, and then hurrying along the platform to him, parasol in hand. She comes to him through the filth, her face hopeful and kind, the steam moistening a strand of hair to her forehead. But this can not happen. People might see. There would be talk around Glenageary.

Instead he boards the train, takes the bench opposite her in the carriage. They are like a couple of collaborators plotting a treason. Outside, the conductor is slamming the doors. A whistle is blown. A green flag is flourished. As the engine gives a shriek and they judder away from Glenageary, he begins to feel something like relief.