Synge

by Colm Toibin

  I reckon seven of the original buildings must have been knocked to make way for this progress. The first intact exterior is number 100, the Musée Zadkine, named for a Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, who moved to Montparnasse in 1909. (‘Come to see my crazy pad on Rue d’Assas and you’ll see how a man’s life can be changed by a pigeon loft, by a tree.’) There’s a plaque remembering him and his lover, Valentine Prax, a painter. I long for a plaque, a few words to acknowledge Synge’s time in Paris. But not on this building. He deserves a better place to be remembered in a city he loved.

  April 15

  Rain again, then a clearance into sunlight and warmth. In the evening I finally locate 5 Rue Corneille, the address of the Hotel Corneille where Yeats and Synge met in 1896. I expect to find another modern block or something worse. Instead I find the building intact: no longer a hotel but intact. You’d walk by without another glance, another old Paris facade with its lives going on behind. Old rooms converted to apartments, maybe not so changed from the old hotel days. It’s directly across the street from the side of the Odéon, almost certainly the street where the homeless couple were sleeping ten years ago. In 1896 Hotel Corneille must have been a simple boarding house: it was known as a place for the relatively less well-off traveller, a long way from Arthur Griffith’s image of ‘the decadent cynicism that passes current in the Latin Quartier.’ Joyce stayed here when he first came to Paris in late 1902.

  Number 3 Rue Corneillle next door is a bookshop – an elegant literary bookshop, Éditions Honoré Champion with its own imprint. In the window a lovely edition of Villon’s Lais, Testament, Poésies Diverses with Ballades en jargon. The building that housed the famous Café Voltaire is just around the corner, across Rue Racine on the Place de l’Odéon. It was a haunt of Verlaine, Gide, Anatole France, and later the symbolist poets. They’re here, all of them. And on this street between the Place Paul Claudel and the Place de l’Odéon two of our greatest writers met.

  Here, in part, the genesis of our national theatre. This is the place for naming, for remembering, for a plaque. Some day their names must be written here, on the front of this modest building, here where all the streets are named for French dramatists.

  I remember Yeats’s funeral wreath for Synge: ‘In memory of his gentleness and courage.’ And Synge’s translation of Villon’s Prayer of the old woman:

  It’s yourself that bore Jesus, that has no end of death, and he the Lord Almighty, that took our weakness and gave himself to sorrows, a young and gentle man. It’s himself is our Lord surely, and it’s in that faith I’ll live always.

  Illustration 6: A Wicklow Tramp, possibly the old sailor described by Synge in his essay ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’. From J.M.Synge, My Wallet of Photographs

  6 Driving Mrs Synge ~ Sebastian Barry

  One of the first place names to crop up in Synge’s In Wicklow, Aughavanna, is just above me here in Moyne, a bit of a drive up a mountainy road; so when he names it, I suppose I think I know where it is. I have driven through it anyhow.

  In Synge’s time, Moyne would have been a very remote parish, but Aughavanna unimaginably so, for it is near nothing except itself. The condition of being near nowhere but where you are may confer remoteness, but it also went to make everywhere the centre of the world; which might be said to be a strong principle in Synge’s plays, where the affairs of Mayo, Wicklow or the Islands are the affairs of world centres without rival.

  The car has triumphed in erasure. It has erased Aughavanna, or at least the lost sense of victory it must have been in Synge’s heart to reach it, wandering as he liked to do over these terrains, with his duck-gun or his fishing-rod.

  Of course, for Synge the people hereabouts were peasants, not, as we would say, the people of the district, the population; but in his case the peasantry was an item to be looked at and talked with under a secret dispensation of equality, for the sake of unexpected information, and for information that could not be gleaned from his own set of people.

  There is a sense in Synge’s writing about Wicklow that not only did he by his own account learn the language of his plays through a crack in the floor of a house in Wicklow, which allowed him to overhear the servants; but that his own eyes, as he describes and itemizes, are a sort of crack between the world of the gentry and the peasant world.

  He describes in an essay ‘The People of the Glens’ meeting a man on the road. ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ says the man, ‘I think you aren’t Irish.’ Synge tells him he is mistaken. But the man’s point is that ‘you don’t speak the same as we do’; so that obviously for that man how you speak is your nationality, a thing that has vexed me also betimes. An old man in County Monaghan, as I quizzed him about the use of crushed whin-roots for ploughing horses (as you may do in Monaghan), said, ‘I can talk to you because you are not Irish.’ Well, that maybe is the opposite thing; or maybe not. In fact Synge’s seeming otherness allows his vagrants and his old women to speak to him in a candid way – perhaps also with the freedom of invention not always given them in other exchanges with their own kin and kind. Or the freedom of elaborate linguistic expression itself – but always as a sort of courtly exchange, though which court would be hard to say. But definitely a high court. Because even if it is the ‘poorest, lonesomest, wildest, dreariest bit of a hill’, of course it is better to be there than anywhere else – unless it is New York. Kilpeddar for instance would be a dear place for scythes, so no good at all for habitation.

  But I was thinking of my recent car journey with Mrs Margaret Synge to some of the places in Synge’s plays and essays when I started this – this ramble. Though I carry no goosegun or fly rod. It was probably Synge that Yeats was thinking of when he was imagining a man, maybe twelve months since, going up a hillside for the fly-fishing. But I was thinking of Mrs Synge.

  Margaret Synge came to Ireland first in the forties. She married a John Synge, who was not a playwright but played rugby for Ireland instead. John Synge sounds like he was a marvellous man. When he was at school in Bray, he was not good at the spelling; because he carried his famous uncle’s name, he was mocked and beaten. Why could he not spell when his uncle was a great writer? Of course they didn’t know Yeats himself was a terrible speller. So John Synge vowed he would call none of his sons John, to protect them, though John is a note sounding again and again along the long line, the long sentence of the Synges.

  But anyway, his health was badly altered by malaria during his time in Nigeria – another version of Ireland and just as full of national briars. At the time of the Second World War he lay in a hospital in London and Margaret Synge was his nurse and against the rules – she tells me fearlessly – they fell in love. They used to sneak out of the hospital by separate doors in the wartime evenings. They might go into Piccadilly on the bus, John Synge’s malaria still raging in him.

  One night he spotted The Ritz open against the odds and they went in and had a drink. Margaret Synge still remembers sitting up at the bar in her fashionable coat – something like the inner tube of a tyre she says – and watching the crowd. It was her own crowd, but was it John Synge’s own crowd? Maybe, maybe not. Fly-fishing at the Ritz possibly, engaging the natives – literally, in Margaret’s case.

  So then they came back to Ireland and settled in an old farmhouse in Ballinglen, in 1955 (the year of my birth, so I remember the detail). They had no money, and farmed strenuously, and raised three excellent sons. John Synge was the son of John Millington Synge’s adored elder brother, Sam.

  What I mean is, driving with Mrs Synge means of course that the Synges are still in Wicklow. She knows Wicklow better than many a Wicklow person (she is a Wicklow person of course). She will be showing me Lough Nahanagan for instance, which I had thought I didn’t know, but will find I do after all; I just didn’t know its name (a different matter). And Glanmore Castle above the Devil’s Glen, the last great house the Synges inhabited, which was gutted and later rebuilt by an American. Or a German, I forget (this was only last week).
She tells me that years after the place was sold, John learned that the penultimate owner, his uncle I think, asked John’s father if he might like to take over Glanmore. His father, never mentioning it to John, thought not. And though John loved Glanmore, Margaret says she thinks his father was right, he would have worried himself to death over the place. Worry is a great destroyer of people and houses certainly, and artists for that matter. Synge had a lot of worry conferred on him by the pundits of Dublin, respectable and not respectable.

  The fortunes of Glanmore in the matter of Synges were already in trouble during the time of Pestalozzi John (this may be the wrong spelling, but we are in an aural world in my ancient Saab), who died in 1846 (so says his stone in the Synge church). When the pride of the Synges, a young captain, was killed in the First World War, something went out of the song of the Synges, and Glanmore fell away eventually. The last owner, the daughter of John’s uncle, had a fear that one of the towers of the house was going to fall into the Devil’s Glen; the fear grew like an illness and she sold the house to rid herself of the fear.

  We drive to the gates of Castle Kevin, another old Synge-associated property, because Synge’s mother used to rent it in the summer, bringing all her goods and chattels in a cart along the road from Greystones or Glenageary. Synge himself as a young man would have knocked about its avenues. It is owned now by Daniel Day-Lewis and his wife Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur.

  It seemed a strange place, deep in drips of rain, in drapes of nameless weeds. We didn’t dare go up the inner avenue, but turned back down to the gates when we saw a fierce man staring at us. He didn’t seem to know a Synge when he saw one. He probably knew the Barrys were low types from the hills, Kelshabeg, or even Aughavanna. But there was a wintry sadness hanging in that avenue, very netherworldly and stark. It was the next day I read in the newspaper that Arthur Miller, the last great playwright of that other western world, had died that very day in Connecticut, with his family around him.

  I used to worry that Synge may have died without ever kissing his girl, but I was relieved to have that quietly contradicted by Mrs Synge. Of course it was a foolish thought. I asked her how his mother felt about her son going out with an actress, and an Irish Catholic actress to boot. I can’t remember what she said.

  When Synge is mentioned, I always hear Tom Murphy, one of the greatest living Irish playwrights, saying that Synge was the master, Synge ‘the finest of us all’. And yet it is easy to forget how long long ago Synge flourished, how long long ago he died. Margaret talks about Pestalozzi John as if he had died maybe in the forties, the nineteen forties; so maybe it is a Synge characteristic that they, each of them, seem present and correct in all ages.

  Well, they all live there in the heaven of Margaret Synge’s memory. I have to confess here I think Margaret Synge a heavenly person. Her decorum is musical. Her composure is inspiring. Her friendship is to be hoarded. Maybe old/young/eternal John Millington Synge was like that. I suspect so. His brother Sam loved him, always a good sign. Although he preferred to ignore the fact that his brother had connections with the dubious world of the theatre.

  It may be strange now to think Synge was fallen upon by the commentators of his day for the use of the word ‘shift’ in a play. What he actually wrote was (Christy speaking):

  It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world.

  The ‘maybe’ is good.

  Of course, the whole play is perfect and brilliant. It is language (the language he didn’t speak, the language he heard with his eyes) gone to heaven, and emerged as the Elizabethan tongue of elaborate angels. There is no limit to the elaboration of the speeches, the nuts in them, or the joy, the thing he emphasized that plays must have (I feel bad about my own plays when I read that. I suppose he is right). The exuberance of Christy’s words is of a brain that has ten thousand dancers in his head, and all of them in their shifts, and no ‘maybe’ about it.

  Well, at last Margaret brings me – directs me – to Lough Nahanagan. (Before I forget, Rathvanna, mentioned in The Tinker’s Wedding and elsewhere, is an invented name, she says, quite a rare thing, if not singular, for Synge). Lough Nahanagan is one of the places, Synge says (in his book), where a language is spoken ‘more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught’. The other places he mentions in this respect are Aughavanna (just up the hill, as I said, I must go there some day and stop and see if they still do speak that English. I doubt it), Glenmalure, where my own people, Dunnes and Cullens, were peasants over seven generations at least, and whose language I certainly learned as a child, and sits deep in my tongue to this day (I hope and pray).

  But Lough Nahanagan is not so far from The Seven Churches as it happens. It is a region of mortarless walls, deserted lead mines and the like, and a river, and a fine, well a wonderful, waterfall, down which Margaret Synge tells me a lady fell to her death. I ask her if she committed suicide, but Margaret says she didn’t think so, though she might have pulled her chair too close to the falls with something vague in mind. Otherwise, apart from thoughts of that lady, there is no one about except a few very cold tourists, who might even be Irish, but everyone is a tourist up here, except Margaret. (Her old map across her lap has pencil markings on it that turn out to have been written there by her father years ago. It is a wonderful rare map, with all sorts of secret information on it that the world will never know. Such maps are extinct.) Even Lough Nahanagan is not quite ‘at home’, at least it is invisible from the road. It is said there are good trout up there, if crazy in the head, and I can believe it. But they must be lonely. It is fearsomely lonely. There are no people going about speaking a language ‘more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught’. There is no one at all to call Synge, or Mrs Synge, or even myself, a foreigner.

  Synges themselves are few on the ground, although we do stand later on sacred ground, ‘the Synge paddock’ as Margaret calls it, a little Victorian enclosure where Synges lie in the Synge churchyard, including her marvellous John. ‘I’ll be lying in there,’ she says, pointing to some unpromising dockleaves, and I ask her of her kindness to stay alive at least another twenty years, if only for my sake (I am selfish in my friendships and care nothing for anyone else). She says she will, and she will likely keep her word.

  It is the word of a Synge. Fifteen thousand words of a Synge made the greatest play in the Irish canon, The Playboy of the Western World. It is a very nice thing that the Western world he refers to is actually Mayo, where once I lived myself. I always think of Mayo as a little Northern (not Connemara, not Galway, the traditional West). It could have been The Playboy of the North Western World. His other plays, apart from Riders to the Sea, are set in Wicklow, in the ‘eastern world’ of Christy’s speech. And I think it is true that they all speak the same, the characters, so it is a very democratic language, and he has bestowed his discoveries in language on the entire nation, as if that English he heard through the floor in Wicklow were really an Irish – a National tongue. Even the ancient grandees in Deirdre of the Sorrows speak the same language. It is a measure of Synge’s elegant love, that he could fish such a language up from a Wicklow kitchen and spread it all over the country.

  We go into the church and Mrs Synge shows me the stone that remembers the death of young Captain Synge. The Fall of the House of Synge, she calls it, but it is one of her singing pleasantries. The house of Synge is quite eternally alive. The people are gone from Lough Nahanagan, and the tinkers from Ballinaclash, and even Rathvanna, that never existed; The Beauty of Ballinacree is gone, Sarah Casey herself, they are gone from the lonely glens and the back roads of Rathdangan, where Synge saw the Tinkers gathered every year to choose a yearly wife. The descendants of those Travellers used to come up our own farmyard and rattle the latch on Sarah Cullen and Annie Dunne, and frighten the life out of us children. That’s how it was in those times, and I have written about it without ever t
hinking till this moment that I lived as a little boy of four in the land and the language of Synge. I write this little rambling essay here under those very mountains, of Kiltegan, Ninevah and Kelsha. All those people are gone, my own included, but the house of Synge will never be gone. For it is a house made of such words that no wind can touch it, government disdain it, or mortal life leave it empty.

  Illustration 7: Riders to the Sea, 1906, with Maire O’Neill, Sara Allgood and Brigit O’Dempsey. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin

  7 Locus Pocus: Synge’s Peasants ~ Mary O’Malley

  Synge’s Aran, I read. Synge’s peasants. Picasso’s women. Lorca’s Andalucia.

  This is a reader’s response to one playwright and two plays, without a reader’s distance. If I am a writer whose imagination is now weaned, as Seamus Heaney so aptly puts it, from my origins, those origins are important to me not alone as the locus of so much of my work and my self, but because they are the site of the peasant idiom so famously employed by John Millington Synge, whose ear was very finely tuned and who often got it technically as well as dramatically right. And while the writer’s imagination is weaned from her origins, the writer never is.

  I grew up in a welter of lobster pots and nets and currachs being tarred. I played in the upside down cathedral of one half – the stem – of a cut-in-two pucan. This had been put in a field out of sight of the sea. The other half was for the hens, and covered in bird droppings as thickly as Alcatraz, though no magenta flowers grew on our unyielding climate. I was taken out in a currach very young and I loved the green swell of it, the massive oxen of a deep current, Lorca’s ‘buey de agua’ sensed beneath the surface. I learned how to sit still and not ask questions while the men talked. I felt safe. I knew the sea could turn.