by Colm Toibin
His problem, as these ideas began to formulate in his mind, was his lack of worldly ambition. He wanted to be a musician. When his brother-in-law advised against it, his advice had not ‘the least effect’. Robert, his brother, returned from Argentina and now a land agent, offered to take Synge into his office and train him to become a land agent too. This did not meet with any enthusiasm. His cousin Mary Synge, who was a professional musician, came to stay and advised him to go to Germany to study music. His mother agreed to pay. At the end of July 1893 he left for Coblenz, where he lodged with a family of four sisters whose company he loved, as he loved the company of most women. He stayed in Germany for almost a year, coming home in time to join his mother and the rest of their family for their annual sojourn in County Wicklow.
That summer he renewed an acquaintance with Cherrie Matheson, a neighbour in Kingstown who came to stay with the Synges in Wicklow. His falling in love with her served to emphasize his own marginal position in his class. He had no prospects, just as he had no religion. Nonetheless, he wanted to marry her as he returned to Germany in October and from there, in January 1895, he went to live in Paris where he remained until the end of June, teaching English, attending lectures in the Sorbonne and idling with others of his kind in the city. That summer and winter in Dublin were filled with his obsession with Cherrie, whom he saw a great deal. At the beginning of 1896 he returned to Paris. ‘He had left the woman he idealized,’ Edward Stephens wrote,
and had refused to engage in any money-making occupation which might have enabled him to offer her a home. He was going to Paris and to Rome with a general plan for studying languages and literature, inspired by the hope of developing his own productive powers in a way which, as yet, he could picture but dimly.
After three months in Rome, he returned to Paris from where he wrote to Cherrie proposing marriage. When she refused, he wrote to his mother. Her diary entry reads: ‘I got a sad sad letter from my poor Johnnie in Paris.’ He returned to Ireland, and soon began to see Cherrie once more. She remembered:
Sometimes we went to the National Gallery or some picture exhibition, sometimes to sit for an hour in St Patrick’s Cathedral and just drink in the beauty of the dear old place … He liked that part of Dublin more than the modern part and especially Patrick’s Street, which runs between the two Cathedrals, and was then more like some queer continental street with little booths all down the centre of it.
Synge did not live long enough to reposition himself in a set of memoirs. It was clear, however, from his preface to The Playboy of the Western World, that he would, had he lived, have easily joined Yeats, Lady Gregory, Sean O’Casey and many others in doing so. He wrote:
When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me, from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.
This suggested that the girls were native Irish rural girls, proto-Pegeen Mikes. As Nicholas Grene has pointed out,
they were Ellen the cook and Florence Massey the maid, both of whom had been brought up in a Protestant orphanage and did not necessarily come from Wicklow at all.
Yeats outlived Synge by thirty years; Lady Gregory outlived him by twenty-three, and they both created versions of him which suited them. In the years when the three of them worked together, there was a strange hostility lurking in the shadows while centre stage stood solidarity, mutual support and kindness. It was as though both Yeats and Lady Gregory harboured the view that Synge was on the verge of finding them out as they shifted ground and reinvented themselves in the early years of the twentieth century.
There was also the small issue of class. In his essay ‘Good Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette’, Roy Foster pondered the relationship between Yeats and Synge when they first met in Paris in 1896, when Yeats was thirty-one and Synge twenty-five. ‘Yeats’s background was an important notch or two down that carefully defined ladder,’ Foster wrote.
Synge’s ancestors were bishops, while Yeats’s were rectors; Synge’s had established huge estates and mock castles, while Yeats’s drew the rent from small farms and lived in the Dublin suburbs. Yeats had no money, while Synge had a small private income. Yeats had no university education, whereas Synge had been to Trinity … Another important difference between them, which reflects upon background and education, is that Synge, for all his unpretentiousness, was really cosmopolitan; whereas Yeats when they met, was desperately trying to be.
Yeats had had bohemianism foisted upon him by his feckless father; Synge had done it all alone as a new way of killing his mother. Yeats later described their first meeting:
He told me that he had been living in France and Germany, reading French and German literature, and that he wished to become a writer. He had, however, nothing to show but one or two poems and impressionistic essays, full of that morbidity that has its root in too much brooding over methods of expression, and ways of looking at life, which come, not out of life, but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror … life had cast no light upon his writings. He had learned Irish years ago, but had begun to forget it, for the only literature that interested him was that conventional language of modern poetry which had begun to make us all weary … I said ‘Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’
Yeats wrote this account of their conversations in Paris in 1905, claiming that they had taken place six years earlier, whereas they had taken place nine years before, shortly after Yeats’s own first visit to the Aran Islands. Declan Kiberd in Synge and the Irish Language and Roy Foster, however, have pointed out more essential inaccuracies in what became, for many years, the standard account of Synge’s impulse to go to the Islands. Synge, through his study of the Breton language and his meeting with the Celtic scholar Richard Best, had been taking an intense interest in Celtic Studies in Paris in any case, as Declan Kiberd has emphasized. He knew about the Islands because his uncle had been a minister there. ‘Doubtless,’ Kiberd has written,
the advice from Yeats was an important factor in Synge’s decision; but the passionate studies in Breton culture must have awakened his enthusiasm for the Gaelic lore of his own country, to which he already held the key in his knowledge of the Irish language. It would be naïve to follow Greene and Stephens [Synge’s biographers] in asserting that he went to Aran at Yeats’s suggestion. He was heading in that direction from the very beginning.
He wrote to his mother in Dublin about his new friends in Paris who included Yeats and Maud Gonne. (One of his friends later reported that ‘Synge gently hated Miss Gonne.’) He explained that he had become interested in socialism, which his mother thought ‘utter folly’. He became a member of the committee of Maud Gonne’s Irish League, but politics did not interest him as much as culture, and he resigned after a few months. In the summer of 1897, despite his cosmopolitanism and his new friends, he returned to Ireland so he could go to Wicklow on holidays with his mother. That summer, as he became ill, his hair falling out and a lump developing on his neck, some of his family put it down to unrequited love. But it was the beginning of the Hodgkin’s disease that would kill him twelve years later. His mother wrote:
Johnnie is at home still. He has to get those large glands taken out of his neck, poor fellow. It is very unpleasant … Since his hair fell out he got cold in the glands, and they became so large they were, or rather are, quite disfiguring to him. He has been very anxious to go away to Paris. He has been advised by his friend Yeats, the Irish poet, to go in for reviewing French literature so John is working away with that end in view. His general health is very good and he is strong and able to walk, so I trust he may get over this time well, please God, and Oh I do ask Him to reveal Himself to my dea
r boy.
It is interesting that there is no mention here of the Aran Islands. The operation took place in December 1897. The doctors must have known that the symptoms could recur, but they told Synge and his mother, who both seemed to have believed them, that it was a success. His mother watched over him. On 3 January 1898 she noted in her diary: ‘John not well – made me anxious.’ Two days later she wrote to her son Robert:
Johnnie looks much better, but he is not strong, and I am anxious lest he should go to Paris too soon and be laid up again in some way, as the Hotel life is anything but comfortable or healthy. He is very silent, poor fellow, and spends all his time over his books except when he goes out for a walk.
When he went back to Paris, writing fragmentary beginnings to a novel and attending lectures by a French professor on the connections between Irish and Greek literature, his mother wrote: ‘I heard from Johnnie; troubled by bugs.’
On 23 April 1898 he came home. The difference between his life in Paris, where he spoke fluent French, lived alone and was deeply respected by his many associates, and his life in his mother’s house, must have made him wonder. At least three times a day for meals in Ireland he had to listen to Mrs Synge and her friends and other members of the family on the subject of religion and domestic life and their narrow political prejudices. She was teaching her grandchildren the Bible as she had taught her children, seeing it as part of her duty, according to Edward Stephens, to emphasize the horror of eternal damnation. ‘Sometimes,’ Stephens wrote,
our lessons were interrupted by his [Synge’s] entering the room. I remember particularly his coming in once when we were having a Bible reading. He was twirling his pocket scissors on his finger chanting softly to himself, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Moses.’ We greeted him and he sat in the window for a few minutes and then, feeling that he had caused an interruption, went quietly out again. Our grandmother said: ‘Don’t put down your Bibles when Uncle John comes in,’ and resumed her reading.
In Paris, he was the earnest playboy of the western world; in Kingstown he was his mother’s youngest son.
Just before Synge’s first visit to the Aran Islands, he had two final meetings with Cherrie Matheson, who told him that their differences were irreconcilable. Two days later, he called to her house and had what must have been a deeply dispiriting conversation with Cherrie and her mother. Mrs Matheson, according to Edward Stephens,
with Cherrie’s approval, rated him soundly for pressing a rejected proposal of marriage when he was not earning enough money to support himself. He left in despair … His mind was still distraught with anguish when, on the morning of Monday 9 May 1898, he left by the morning train for Galway.
He wrote of his visits to the Islands over the next few years with beauty and reverence and restraint. It must have been a relief that first morning watching the sailors casting off in a fog from Galway pier and arriving in Aranmore after a three-hour journey, no one there knowing anything about Cherrie Matheson and her hectoring mother, or Mrs Synge’s worries about her poor Johnnie. He was now in the land of his dreams. Lady Gregory saw him on the island in 1898; she was in search, too, of nourishment from a primitive world which contained an astonishing life force and an ancient culture. She wrote:
I first saw him in the North Island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and the seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.
Later, she wrote about his work once he had arrived on the Islands:
He had done no good work until he came back to his own country. It was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style ... bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion of a whole countryside.
Soon, he was invited to Coole and quickly became part of the movement which resulted in the Abbey Theatre. He became, eventually, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, one of the three directors. He wrote five plays for them – The Shadow of the Glen (1903); Riders to the Sea (1904); The Well of the Saints (1905) The Tinker’s Wedding (1907); The Playboy of the Western World (1907). He left one play unfinished, Deirdre of the Sorrows, which was first produced, in a completed version, in 1910. His imagination was powerfully autonomous; his plays combined the knowledge he had amassed through his study and his wanderings in Europe with a real openness and freedom and an immense natural talent. He delighted in language and character, in wild talk and massive abandon, as though he were concerned to dramatize and most portray what he himself in his own life kept in abeyance.
In these eleven years he took part in all the rows which ran at the theatre, seeming much of the time calmer, more focused, less vindictive and, on some matters, more determined than his colleagues. He believed that Yeats was too impetuous to deal with the actors. In some of the correspondence, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘he sounds both older and wiser than Yeats; he appears more at ease in dealing with people.’ In 1908, when the Fays had left the theatre Synge remarked: ‘Since then Yeats and I have been running the show, i.e. Yeats looks after the stars and I do the rest.’ The actors and workers in the theatre liked him. He appeared more natural, more in possession of himself than either of his colleagues. An Australian visitor in 1904 described him:
He was full of race and good breeding, courteous, sensitive, sincere … a simple man; but there was something strange and alluring about him, an indescribable charm expressed in his voice and manner and, above all, in his curious smile that was at the same time ironic and sympathetic.
With the Abbey, as with his family, Synge was skilled at withdrawing. ‘I have often envied him his absorption,’ Yeats wrote, ‘as I have envied Verlaine his vice.’
Lady Gregory disliked The Playboy of the Western World, although she defended it in public. She made sure that Yeats’s play The Pot of Broth was not used as a curtain-raiser, which would be, she wrote to Yeats, foreseeing the riots, like ‘Synge setting fire to your house to roast his own pig.’ After Synge’s death, she wrote a passage in her journal which she did not publish:
One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments, they were to his own.’
Yeats in his journal wrote: ‘I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.’
The truth was that he understood the value of his own plays and did not rate very highly the work of Yeats or Lady Gregory for the theatre, although he admired other aspects of their work, such as Lady Gregory’s translations. He made no secret of this, and of his profound irritation at Lady Gregory’s tireless and fearless promotion of Yeats’s work and her constant production of her own work. In December 1906 she told Synge that Yeats’s dramatic work ‘was more important than any other (you must not be offended at this) as I think it our chief distinction.’ In March 1907, when The Playboy of the Western World has already been produced and Charles Frohman, an American producer, came to the Abbey looking for new work to tour in the U.S., Synge wrote to Molly Allgood:
I hear that they are showing Frohman one play of mine, ‘Riders’, five or six of L.G.’s [Lady Gregory’s] and several of Yeats. I am raging about it, though of course you must not breathe a word about it. I suppose after the P.B. [Playboy] fuss they are afraid of stirring up the Irish Americans if they take me. However I am going to find out what is at the bottom of it and if I am not getting fair play I’ll withdraw my plays from both tours English and American altogether. It is getting past a joke the way they are treating me.
They, on the other hand, became increasingly sure that they had
invented him. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:
You did more than anyone for him, you gave him a means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you and the theatre … I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets.
As soon as Synge arrived on the Aran Islands, he wrote to his mother, who wrote to his brother Sam:
I had a very interesting letter from Johnnie last week … The islanders of Aran found out that he was related to Uncle Aleck [who had been a missionary on the Islands] and came to see him and were quite pleased. He is now on Inishmaan Island – went there in a curragh and is much pleased with his new abode, a room in a cottage inside the kitchen of a house … and he lives on mackerel and eggs and learns Irish; how wonderfully he accommodates himself to his various surroundings.
When he returned to Dublin he accommodated himself to his mother’s surroundings once more, joining her on holiday in County Wicklow. He would return to the family from his daily outings by foot or bicycle with stories of tramps he had met, including one who claimed to have known his grandmother and who had told him: ‘I never went there but Mrs Synge offered me a glass of whisky.’ Later, when the young Edward Stephens mentioned the tramp to Synge’s mother, she remarked:
I wish Uncle Johnnie would not encourage tramps; I don’t know why he wants to talk to queer people. I’m sure that Mrs Synge never offered a tramp whisky.
Once the summer was over, Synge followed his usual routine. He returned to Paris for the winter, visiting Brittany in the spring and returning to Ireland for the annual long holiday with his mother in County Wicklow. This year his mother had two young women, both interested in evangelical Protestantism, staying. Synge became close to them. His mother wrote:
