by Colm Toibin
Synge’s family remains of great interest, either because of the apparent lack of any influence which they had on his work, or because they may or may not hold a key to his unyielding and mysterious genius. He seemed in his concerns and beliefs to have nothing in common with them – he stated that he never met a man or a woman who shared his opinions until he was twenty-three - and yet, for a great deal of his adult life, he lived with them and depended on them. Any version of his life and work has to take his family into account and understand the sense, in Edward Stephens’ words
that the context of his life … was quite different from any other writer of the literary movement. I tried to create a picture of a class or group in Irish society that has almost vanished.
If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to a very great dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us
owned not only Glanmore [in County Wicklow], with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil’s Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate of over four thousand acres.
His grandfather, however, managed to lose most of this property, a portion only of which was bought back by his uncle. Synge’s father, who became a barrister, died when Synge was one year old. He left a widow, four sons, a daughter and four hundred pounds a year. The first three sons were solid citizens, becoming a land agent, an engineer and a medical missionary to China. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed, despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would find eventually a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.
In his book Letters to my Daughter, written in 1932, Synge’s brother Samuel, the missionary, wrote:
There is little use in trying to say what if our father had lived might have happened different to what did happen. But I think two things are fairly clear. One is that as your Uncle John grew up and met questions that he did not know how to answer, a father’s word of advice and instruction would have made a very great difference to him. The other thing is that probably our father would have arranged something for your Uncle John to do besides his favourite reading, something that would not have been too much for him but would have brought in some remuneration at an earlier date than his writings did.
This was to consign Synge’s mother Kathleen to dust, to suggest a sort of powerlessness for her. She was, in fact, a very powerful person. Synge’s mother was born Kathleen Traill in 1838. Her father was a clergyman of whom Edward Stephens wrote:
He spent his life, as he put it, waging war against popery in its thousand forms of wickedness, which did not always endear him to his ecclesiastical superiors.
Finally he became rector of Schull in County Cork where he died in 1847 from a fever caught from the people among whom he worked. His widow, who had been brought up in Drumboe Castle in County Donegal, moved to the southern suburbs of Dublin. From here in 1856, her daughter married John Hatch Synge, the playwright’s father. They lived in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin in the early years of their marriage, later moving to Rathfarnam where John Millington Synge was born. Later, after her husband’s death, Kathleen Synge moved her family to Orwell Park in Rathgar.
Synge’s paternal grandfather and his uncle Francis, who had bought back some of the family estates in County Wicklow, were members of the Plymouth Brethren. Mrs Synge’s father had held strong evangelical views, which his daughter also shared. She brought up her children according to strict religious principles, and her social life, such as it was, seemed to include only people who were of a like mind and background. Edward Stephens wrote:
Mrs Synge conducted her household by a rule as strict as that of a religious order and supposed that her children would acquiesce without question. She was very well versed in the doctrine to which she adhered and she could support every tenet by citing scriptural authority. She believed the whole Bible to be inspired and its meaning to be clear to anyone who read with an open mind and faith in the Holy Ghost.
In an autobiographical essay written in his mid-twenties, Synge wrote:
I was painfully timid, and while still young the idea of Hell took a fearful hold on me. One night I thought I was irretrievably damned and cried myself to sleep in vain yet terrified efforts to form a conception of eternal pain. In the morning I renewed my lamentations and my mother was sent for. She comforted me with the assurance that the Holy Ghost was convicting me of sin and thus preparing me for ultimate salvation. This was a new idea and I rather approved.
Between the ages of four and twenty-one Synge took part in his family’s annual move to Greystones in County Wicklow, where his mother had friends and associates among the evangelical community. These ‘summer visits to the seaside,’ Synge remembered, ‘were delightful.’ His mother had the policy on holidays as well as during the rest of the year of gathering together as many members of her family as were available. When they were not available in great numbers, she invited friends, usually women of the missionary persuasion, to share the family sojourn in Wicklow, which often lasted for three months.
Nicholas Grene writes about Synge’s relationship to his family:
There is nothing very unusual about a writer or artist from a conventional middle-class background diverging from his family’s political, social and religious views. What is striking about Synge’s case is that he maintained such close relations with the family in spite of his dissidence.
However, while he spent most of his life in Ireland under his mother’s roof, sharing even her holidays, he seems to have been seldom alone with her and this might have helped to maintain close relations. Mrs Synge’s house in Orwell Park had an entrance in the dividing wall to her mother’s adjoining house, where her daughter Annie, her husband and their children, including the young Edward Stephens, lived, as did Aunt Jane, Mr Synge’s sister. On April 13 1890, after Mrs Synge’s mother’s death, when the Stephens family decided to leave Rathgar, Mrs Synge wrote to her son about her prayers to the Lord:
I am … asking Him to find us two houses together as we are here. He can do all things, so if he pleases to do that for me it is quite easy for Him.
The Lord came to her aid. He was assisted by Mr Talbot Coall, the estate agent; they combined to find two adjoining houses at Crosthwaite Park in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire. Thus the extended family remained together and Mrs Synge could continue to instruct her grandchildren in the ways of righteousness, as she had her children. While four of her five children carried her instruction faithfully into adulthood, it remained a great sadness to her that John, the youngest, did not. In her letter about the Lord assisting the estate agent, she also wrote: ‘Dear Sam [her son who became a missionary to China] is always a comfort when I see him. My poor Johnnie is not a comfort yet.’ Soon after the move she wrote:
John – poor boy. I am so sorry for him, he looks unhappy. He has not found the Saviour yet and until he does, how can he be happy?
Her son, who had not found the Saviour, had found much comfort instead in the natural sciences and in his own imagination. In his autobiographical sketch, he wrote about an awakening which changed everything for him:
When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin’s. It opened in my hands at a passage where he asks how can we explain the similarity between a man’s hand and a bird’s or a bat’s wings except by evolution. I flung the book aside and rushed out into the open air – it was summer and we were in the country – the sky seemed to have lost its blue and the grass its green. I lay down and writhed in an agony of doubt … Incest and parricide were but a consequence of the idea that possessed me … Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derision.
Synge was not naturally social. Because of ill-health he had been educated at home for much of the time. Thus, when he went to
Trinity College in Dublin, he took no great part in academic or student life. His reading had been intense and sporadic. His study of science and archaeology had been done for their own sake. His most notable attribute was his reserve. By seventeen he did not seem to have shared his doubts and derisions with his mother who wrote:
This is Johnnie’s birthday. I can hardly fancy he is seventeen. I have been looking back to the time he was born. I was so dreadfully delicate and he, poor child, was the same … I see no spiritual life in my poor Johnnie; there may be some but it is not visible to my eyes. He is very reserved and shut up on the subject and if I say anything to him he never answers me, so I don’t know in the least his state of mind – it is a trying state, very trying. I long so to be able to see behind that close reserve, but I can only wait and pray and hope …
But it was hopeless. He could not be spoken to about matters either spiritual or temporal. Within a year, she was writing again:
He does not know how to take care of his clothes and won’t take advice; he has much to learn, poor boy; he is very headstrong.
That summer she sent for a clergyman, who discussed religion with her son in private, leading her son to the view that he would have to come clean about his unbelief. The Sunday before Christmas, his mother wrote in her diary: ‘Fine, damp, mild day – church very hot – I felt overpowered. Johnnie would not come – very sad.’ And then on Christmas Day: ‘Very peaceful, happy day; went to church – my own sorrow Johnnie – he did not come.’
Later, Synge wrote:
Soon after I relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland. My patriotism went round from a vigorous and unreasoning loyalty to a temperate nationalism and everything Irish became sacred.
This was a piece of easy subsequent self-positioning, however, and it is unlikely that a shift in faith as swift and facile as he suggests actually took place. It is much more likely that his religious faith, if replaced by anything, was replaced by an interest in music. As well as attending Trinity, he attended the Academy of Music in Westland Row where he studied the violin, becoming one of the many Irish playwrights whose first love was music. His mother was impressed by his musical ability. A month before his seventeenth birthday, she wrote:
Johnnie’s ear is wonderfully good now, he hears if the piano is at all out of tune … [He] and I play together sometimes … He is greatly improved in time; at first he never kept with me and still runs away when he ought to rest, so I have to try and watch him as well as play my own part. We played some nice slow melodies last night, and it sounded wonderfully nice.
In these letters, written to her son Robert who was in Argentina, she compared her two youngest sons.
Johnnie certainly is the literary man of the family. I never saw such a love of reading as he has – he would spend any amount of money on books if he had it … I think Johnnie takes after my father.
Sam, on the other hand, ‘can’t help being slow. He is very like his dear father in that as well as other things.’ Sam followed his mother in religion ‘and his virtues make him a comfort to me’. Yet John, who his mother believed had ‘a good opinion of himself’, which she thought a pity, impressed her in ways which might have mattered to her more and which she could not take for granted. Although his lack of religion made her sad, mother and son did not fall out and he was included in all family events and outings, the silent, stubborn dissenter at the table. Nonetheless, she lamented his state of ungrace year after year, in letter after letter; she was the only keener of the eastern seaboard. ‘Oh! My dear Johnnie is a great sorrow to my heart,’ she wrote in 1896 when he was twenty-five,
his belief or mis-belief has no joy in it and his residence abroad has been no help to him – he is wonderfully separate from us. I show him all the love I can. I pity him so much and love him so deeply – and I believe God is hearing my cry to Him, but the answer is delayed long. If we are all taken up to meet the Lord and he is left behind – how sad a thought but I won’t think that – God can do all things – so I say to my doubts ‘be gone …’
Synge’s Aunt Jane, who lived in the extended household, had often dandled the young Parnell on her knee when they were neighbours in Wicklow; she now ‘piously wished she had choked him in infancy’, as W.J. McCormack put it in his biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family. The Synges were staunch defenders of the union and it is not hard to imagine their horror at the growing involvement of Synge in cultural nationalism. While his mother disapproved of his interest in archaeology, she did not object, however, to his studying Irish at Trinity College. He took Irish with Hebrew, and these were seen as part of the Divinity Course, Irish being useful to those who wished to convert the native speakers of the West of Ireland to the reformed faith. His Aunt Jane remembered how her brother Alexander, who had ministered on the Aran Islands, had also learned Irish. Like Lady Gregory who began to study Irish in these years, Synge and his fellow students used an Irish translation of the Bible to help them. Like Lady Gregory too, some magic came to Synge from the language he was learning, or some set of emotions which were part of that decade. Both he and Lady Gregory, in the same years and through the same influences, slowly began to love Ireland, as though Ireland were a person. They loved its landscape and its ancient culture; they loved the ordinary people they met in cabins or on the roads. It was as though their own dying power in Ireland, the faded glory of their class, gave their emotions about Ireland a strange glow of intensity. They were both slow to turn this new emotion into politics. As Nicholas Grene has pointed out:
Synge canvassed for an Anti-Home Rule Petition in 1893 and as late as 1895 was of the view that Home Rule would provoke sectarian conflict.
So too in 1893, Lady Gregory published anonymously a pamphlet called Home Ruin, essentially a piece of pro-unionist rhetoric. Slowly, however, they both realized that their project, if not political, was bound up with politics. Synge would later write: ‘Patriotism gratifies man’s need for adoration and has, therefore, a peculiar power upon the imaginative sceptic.’ And also:
The Irish country rains, mists, pale insular skies, the old churches, manuscripts, jewels, everything in fact that was Irish had a charm neither human nor divine, rather perhaps as if I had fallen in love with a goddess.
The goddess came in many guises; flirting with her in these years between the fall of Parnell and independence forced Lady Gregory and Synge and others to deal in vast ambiguities, to turn a blind eye to the irony of their own position. Lady Gregory collected her rents at Coole from the same people from whom she collected folklore and with some of the same zeal. When they did not pay, she threatened them. W.J. McCormack writes in his biography:
As early as 1885, Synge’s brother had been active as an agent, and in 1887 his services had been employed to dispossess tenants on the Glanmore estate in County Wicklow in an incident reported in the Freeman’s Journal. According to the dramatist’s nephew, ‘when Synge argued with his mother over the rights of tenants and the injustice of evicting them, her answer was ‘What would become of us if our tenants in Galway stopped paying their rents?’
When Synge was twenty-one his mother altered her summer routine, exchanging Greystones for the interior of County Wicklow. The fact that the house she rented was boycotted did not seem to bother her, or prevent Synge from going with her. He read Diarmuid and Grainne that first summer in the boycotted house and began to explore Wicklow with enormous enthusiasm. But, according to Edward Stephens:
they were not allowed to forget that they were staying in a boycotted house. In the evenings sometimes two constables came up the avenue and walked around the outbuildings to see that all was well.
In 1895 when that house was not available, they rented Duff House on Lough Dan, but, as Edward Stephens wrote:
It was with some misgivings that Mrs Synge brought her future daughter-in-law there, for as the house was owned by Roman Catholics, she feared it would not be free from fleas.
Synge�
�s writings about Wicklow, eight articles in all, represent in W.J. McCormack’s phrase ‘a psychopathology of County Wicklow’. He loved the idea of tramps and vagrants and saw his own class as doomed. ‘In this garden,’ he wrote,
one seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class … and of the innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away … The broken green-houses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as the only remnants of a farmhouse … Many of the descendants of these people have, of course, drifted into professional life in Dublin, or have gone abroad; yet, wherever they are, they do not equal their forefathers.
In one of the essays, as Nicholas Grene has discovered, he wrote and then omitted ‘his most telling condemnation of his own class’:
Still, this class, with its many genuine qualities, had little patriotism, in the right sense, few ideas, and no seed for future life, so it has gone to the wall.
Synge wondered what use such a decaying class could be to a playwright:
If a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of the old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive a generation or two ago.
