The Best American Essays 2013 (40 page)

The playwright and (less-well-remembered) essayist John Millington Synge writes of walking to see these beehive huts (
clochans
in Gaelic) in
The Aran Islands
, his classic account of living here for several months in the 1890s, when he gathered the material for his greatest plays. No writer is more closely associated with this place and its people than Synge, although in many ways he makes an unlikely representative. He was Anglo-Irish, Protestant in his upbringing, fairly well-to-do, scientifically minded—there could have been, at the time, few Irish people possessing less in common with the peasantry he wound up making his subject and taking for his inspiration. Even in his famed descriptions, and despite their vividness, you sense a remoteness. It was the artist in him, the very thing that made him a great writer. He never loved his own people too much, so as to be unable to see what was grotesque and silly and consequently most human in them. On his walk to the beehive huts, he’s following an old blind man named Mourteen, a local storyteller who gave him all sorts of material. The man knows the islands so well that Synge cuts his feet trying to keep up, despite the fact that his guide can’t see—“so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy,” is Synge’s phrase. The old man at one point indulges “a freak of earthly humour” and starts talking sex, saying what he would do if he could bring a girl into the hut with him. They pass a house where a schoolteacher lives alone. “Ah, master,” the old man says, “wouldn’t it be fine to be in there and to be kissing her?” It’s just the kind of scene that Synge’s detractors hated him for. The heroism of his characters tends to arise from a helpless urge to be themselves, against all better judgment.

Poor Synge. He spent half his adult life thinking he had tuberculosis, then found out he had Hodgkin’s disease. He died when he was not even thirty-eight—I was the age at which he died, on this trip, which fact made the weight of his achievement suddenly palpable. He didn’t write his first play until he was thirty-two. Before that he wrote mediocre poems and reviews. It was Yeats who told him to go to the Aran Islands, a place whose people gave him his voice. All of those masterpieces—
Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World, The Well of the Saints, The Aran Islands
itself—all written in the span of only seven or eight years. It must be reckoned a true out-flashing of genius in the literature of the twentieth century.

The hike to the beehive huts should have been an easy one, but I had contrived to have with me on the island only one almost-new pair of dress-walking shoes, bought at the airport and nowhere near done chafing; also I radically underestimated the distance to the farm where the
clochans
are (it was miles). After an excessive-seeming time spent walking without finding the heritage-board sign I’d been told to watch for, I figured I must have done something wrong and stopped at a house overlooking the ocean. A man and his son were at work repairing a stone wall. The boy was about eighteen. They dropped their tools and walked over and looked at my map with me. “Well, you’re a strange sort of tourist,” the man said when I laid out my agenda. I wasn’t sure what he meant—that not many people wanted to see the beehive huts anymore, or that not many people would be stupid enough to try it on foot in black leather shoes—but he assured me I hadn’t gone too far and that, in reality, I hadn’t gone nearly far enough.

Back on the road I passed a water well, one of the “sacred wells” that Synge mentions in his account. It was a little pool that lay under the shadow of a limestone outcropping. Brilliant white heads of Queen Anne’s lace swayed in the sunshine that struck the water, and blue-gray butterflies flitted around. I didn’t see the butterflies anywhere else on the island, only at this well.

You were walking along the coast, with the ocean on your right and the central stony ridge of the island running along high on your left. Up there were thatched-roof houses and long stone walls, joined tightly enough to last for hundreds of years but not enough to prevent sunlight from showing through the gaps and chinks. It gave them a curious filigreed appearance, when you saw them standing against the sky.

Eventually I found the farm, and a carbuncular teenage boy who worked there—who was at that moment preparing to bring some cattle in, for the end of the day—showed me which narrow little path to take. You walk down a long sloping plain toward the ocean. A stark place to live, even for early Christian Irish monks.

I found the
clochans
where the kid said they would be. There wasn’t much to think about them beyond their existence, beyond the fact that they were still standing in the open like this after weathering countless wild storms. I crawled inside for a second and squatted. Even the floor was bone-dry.

The city of Cork—the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are—is actually an island, a river island. The River Lee splits at a certain place, as it flows toward the sea, and “encloseth Corke with his deuided flood,” as Spenser says in
The Faerie Queene
. You can’t really sense it if you’re there—you just keep feeling like you’re running into the river too many times, must be confused, too many bridges, or maybe there are two rivers.

Ben and I worked pretty much every night—it was the price we paid for being allowed to have jobs at all on the cheesy, nonenforceable visas we’d bought from a company in the States. After the restaurants closed we would meet up late and walk home together, stopping at pubs along the way, putting a little punctuation mark on the night, before it was time to head into the hills. Cork city is surrounded by them. From up high you can see that it’s nestled at the bottom of a green bowl. Our apartment was on one of the highest hills, a mile’s walk up a steepening incline. Once home, there came the final climb, up three flights of stairs. Our rooms were on the top floor. It was literally as high as one could get in Cork. There was a big picture window, where we would stand and watch the cargo ships coming up the Lee. The window offered fantastically little resistance to the wind. When the weather turned cold, the flat was like a place where Poe could have lived. In the middle of the night we would sit there in our sleeping bags, tending a coal fire that had almost zero perceptible influence on the temperature of the room. Our money kept running out—after rent and food, we’d be at zero every month, and neither of us had family checks coming. When it got worst, we had a system, undignified but effective: I would stroll at an appointed moment down the alley beneath the window of the kitchen where Ben worked, so he could drop two baked potatoes down to me. One I’d save for him, the other I’d eat on the spot.

I did the first disciplined writing I’d ever done in that apartment—in a little sitting room with a picture of some long-dead pope on the wall, on a plastic typewriter that my father shipped over to me. Everything I wrote was a tremendously bad imitation of James Joyce, but what was different now was when I looked at it, I saw how bad it was and didn’t despair but wondered how it might be less bad, and kept going.

My father visited in the fall. It was the first time he’d ever been to the auld sod, and the last time he and I ever went on a trip together or anything like that. His body was already failing. The few little hikes we attempted, he had to keep stopping over and over. But sit in a pub and drink and smoke and talk about books? That was a miniature heaven, and we spent most of our few days there. We drove down to Bantry, the family omphalos—he proudly demonstrating amazing lefty gear-shifting skills—and found some old family graves. At one point, when we had introduced ourselves to a man in a shop—the sign said Michael Sullivan, my father’s name—my father remarked to the man that we were “looking for our ancestors.” The man thrust out his hand and said, “I’m your ancestors!”

This trip, on my second day back in the city, I walked down to the neighborhood around University College Cork. In a coffee shop on the campus there, I had a long conversation with four young men just finishing their studies. Brian Burke was thin, with a trim red beard and fiercely skeptical eyes. He had just finished a dissertation on “Mechanisms for Fixing Pay and Conditions in Ireland.” There was also a trio of dark-headed guys: Colm, Peter, and Cathal. All had known one another, with different degrees of closeness, during their university schooling. Colm was a big, tall man with a shaved head and glasses, who wanted to do something with an international aid agency, an NGO; Peter was a journalist, doing a kind of temporary gig—something between an internship and a job—at a paper in Waterford; and Cathal hoped to go into business. He already had made plans to leave for London. “But his parents don’t know yet,” Peter said. The implication was that his parents wouldn’t be happy about it. The other three were thinking about emigrating too. Not necessarily in the sense of planning to do it, but thinking about it. For an Irish person, the question is always there, the way it is for, say, a Cuban. To be Irish is to make up your mind about whether or not to leave Ireland.

In some respects, it was like sitting anywhere in the world with young people who are just out of college. Their brains are oiled, they know what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. But in this case, their talk had a kind of baffled stoicism to it, because they were part of a generation that had been bred for a new kind of success. A unique generation in Irish history. They grew up hearing “It’ll be different for you.” And now they were leaving school, and it wasn’t different. It was like before. Among their group of friends—equally well educated—it was considered lucky to have jobs at the local customer-service call center. (Ireland is famously good at doing these centers, like India, something I hadn’t known, and the lads had received some training there in how to deal with people’s anger and outrage when you told them their phone was being cut off or whatever.)

They asked me if I had heard of the Elysian tower, the “ghost tower.” I had seen it there in town, without knowing its story or its name. Built since I lived there, it was now the tallest building in Cork—indeed the only tall building in Cork. Luxury apartments. The rumor in town (details of which turned out to be exaggerated, but only slightly) was that only the penthouse had ever been occupied. And it cost the management company so much to maintain services to the old woman who lived up there, they finally had to move her out. They bought her a house. But for a few months she stayed up there, they said, looking out over the city.

Ben’s father was very sick while I was in Ireland this recent time. The thought occurred of inscribing to him an old copy of Synge’s collected works I’d brought with me and leaving it at the little library on Aran. The librarian wasn’t there—she only works certain days of the week—but a very pleasant lady, when I told her what I wanted to do, opened the door for me and loaned me a pen and let me sit there in a sunny corner.

I felt regret at parting with the book, which made it seem right to leave it there.
The Complete Works of John M. Synge
, 1935 Random House edition, the only one-volume edition I’ve seen that has all of his stuff. It’s worth finding, not just for the sake of having all the plays in one place, but because it reveals a lesser-known Synge, Synge the writer of powerful nonfiction pieces, essays like “The Vagrants of Wicklow” and “In the Congested Districts.” He wrote some of the best Irish walking journals ever, and that’s not a narrow genre; perhaps only Heinrich Böll’s are as good. Before handing over the book, I reread a favorite paragraph from
The Aran Islands
, where Synge describes men bringing horses ashore in their small sailing craft: “The storm of Gaelic that rises the moment a horse is shoved from the pier, till it is safely in its place, is indescribable.”

The other good thing about a collected Synge is that you can read the rest of his plays, the ones that didn’t become as famous but all of which have moments that are on a level with his best writing. The night before, after Chris had excused himself to do some work—it turned out he did have some duties as night manager, it wasn’t all sleeping and pint-pulling—I read
The Shadow of the Glen
, the plot of which came from yet another tale Synge heard on the Aran Islands. A husband decides to fake his own death in order to test the loyalty of his wife—he’ll spy on her from his slab, see how she behaves with the men who come to pay their respects. A tramp shows up by chance, and the woman takes a liking to him. During a brief, magical, cursed night, she sits talking to her new friend while the falsely dead husband lies there listening (multiple vectors of betrayal converging: take note, budding playwrights). The woman allows herself to dream about the life she’ll have with the money her old man has left her in a sock—not a grand life, but less boring and awful than the one she’d been living with him. When at last he sits up, revealing his ghastly trick, she’s so horrified that she doesn’t know what to do except prepare herself for death. But the tramp won’t let her think that way. “You’ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house,” he says,

and I knowing all the ways a man can put food in his mouth . . . We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in the place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be saying one time, “It’s a grand evening, by the grace of God,” and another time, “It’s a wild night, God help us, but it’ll pass surely.”

The speech was reminiscent of Christy’s equally great one from the ending of
Playboy
, and of countless other passages in Synge. They are versions of the single great discovery he made in his study of the Irish character—the notion of survival as an act of imagination. Against the unacceptability of the void he pits the howl of irrational humor and the keen. He was too dignified to apologize much for his work to hostile critics, but he might have said, in response to the charge that he was aloof from the true rural Irish, that he shared their unforgotten paganism.