On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  But it wasn’t for the sake of the scenery that Synge had written Willie Long in the first place; he needed someplace cut off from English, thick with Kerry Irish. And, it turned out, he wasn’t getting his fill of “Paddy’s language” after all; even this far west, English was too strong. So he was setting out for a more purely Irish-speaking milieu yet. As he wrote Lady Gregory, he expected it to be “even more primitive than Aran and I am wild with joy at the prospect.”

  On August 14, he recorded in his notebook, “I came off yesterday to the Great Blasket Island.”

  That first day, a local holiday, he had gone out to the island with Long and a couple of other locals, three oarsmen powering them over the tricky swells in a naomhóg, pronounced “nay-vog,” a craft of wood lathing covered in canvas painted with black tar. The day was clear, the sea and sky blue.

  As we came nearer the island, which seemed to rise like a mountain straight out of the sea, we could make out a crowd of people in their holiday clothes standing or sitting along the brow of the cliff watching our approach, and just beyond them a patch of cottages with roofs of tarred felt. A little later we doubled into a cove among the rocks, where I landed at a boat slip, and then scrambled up a steep zig-zag pathway to the head of the cliff, where the people crowded round us.

  The lower village of the Great Blasket, the fields beyond it, the White Strand below and to the right (Illustration Credit ill.2)

  It was a reception virtually identical to those other visitors would receive over the next forty years.

  He stayed in the house of an rí, the king, who was no hereditary ruler at all but simply acknowledged for his strength and personal stature, much as tribal chieftains were in times past. His name was Pádraig Ó Catháin—Anglicized, it would be Patrick Keane—and he spoke a little English, being among the few on the island who did. Synge was given a small room just off the stone house’s main room, known simply as the kitchen. The house stood midway up the hill to which the village clung. Synge could look out his window and see the mountain before him, green with grass but barren of trees, its steep slope silhouetted against the sky.

  “I have been here for a week today,” he wrote Lady Gregory on August 20, “and in some ways I find it the most interesting place I have ever been in. I sleep in a corner of the King’s room and in the morning—on state occasions—the princess” (he meant the king’s younger daughter, Cáit; he never grew tired of such winking references to island “royalty”) “comes in when we awake and gives us each a dram of whiskey and lights our pipes and then leaves us to talk.” They talked mostly in Irish—his being better than the king’s English. In the evenings the house filled up with sometimes twenty or thirty people, talking, drinking, and dancing.

  All during his island stay, he kept up his correspondence. He wrote to Max Meyerfeld, his German translator, helping him with Irish-tinged obscurities in his stage dialogue; “reeks” were mountains, “creels” were wicker baskets for fish or turf. He wrote to Lady Gregory: eating, reading, and writing in the ever-busy kitchen, he explained, he’d not yet been able to read her latest play, but on a jaunt out on the cliffs he’d dipped into it and liked it. He wrote to Yeats, commenting on Lady Gregory’s play and other matters of the big world. And each day he spent among the islanders, hiking around the island, playing music, happy in the company of his host and hostesses.

  He kept a notebook—“Notes in Ballyferriter and the Great Blasket Island, August 1905”—but also took pictures. And both tell of a place far better off than others, like Jeremiah Curtin or Mrs. Thomson, had intimated a generation before. The villagers were poor, certainly. But the period right after the turn of the century was a relatively prosperous one, and you can see it in Synge’s photos. In one, taken in front of the king’s house, the sun streams in from high overhead. The men, in sweaters and caps, don’t look ragged. They don’t look forlorn. The king himself, head amiably cocked, a little welcome smile on his face, a picture of confidence and composure, wears a jaunty flared hat. His daughter Cáit could pass fashion muster even today. She wears a long skirt, perhaps from America, with a cinched waist, decorated with fabric strips at the hem; a belt with a metal buckle that looks like the Celtic pewter you find today in Irish handicrafts stores; a string of beads down the front of her long-sleeved blouse, with little flounces at the wrists.

  Not present in the photo is Cáit’s elder sister, the king’s other daughter. Synge would refer to her in his notebook as “the little queen,” and in the published account of his visit as “the little hostess.” Her proper name was Máire Ní Chatháin, or Mary Keane. On the island she was Máire Pheats Mhicí—Mary, daughter of Pádraig, granddaughter of Mike. Born in 1882, she’d lost her mother when she was about eight, soon after the birth of her youngest brother, Seán. When Synge arrived on the island that August, she had been married since the previous February to an island man, Mícheál, but was still tending her father’s house, where Synge was staying. “She is a small, beautifully-formed woman,” Synge wrote, “with brown hair and eyes—instead of the black hair and blue eyes that are usually found with this type in Ireland—and delicate feet and ankles that are not common in these parts.”

  It is this beautiful woman of twenty-three who, it’s been said, was Synge’s inspiration for one of the immortal figures of stage history, a character named Pegeen Mike.

  On his first visit to the Aran Islands, in 1899, Synge wrote, he’d “heard a story of a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives with whom he was said to be related.” The story lingered with him because, in September 1904, about a year before his visit to the Blaskets, he began work on a new play built on such a premise, The Playboy of the Western World. The words of the title carry different currency to modern readers; Synge’s “playboy” was a kind of trickster or rogue.

  Into a “country public house or shebeen, very rough and untidy,” according to Synge’s stage directions, stumbles Christy Mahon, ragged, dirty, and frightened. Pub denizens crowd around him. What has he done? An ordinary thief, is he? No, nothing so small, he says; he’s killed his father. With each new horrific detail, admiration for Christy unaccountably grows, which spurs him to ever more articulate, even poetic descriptions of his crime. Soon, there he is, fairly standing taller on the page, rogue and hero, recruited for organized sport on the beach, and winning, sought by all the women and girls.

  A play that makes its protagonist the killer of his father, and shows the local peasantry as sympathetic to him and the women among them fawning over him, might be expected to encounter a hostile notice here and there. And, indeed, when, in early 1907, it was produced at the Abbey, The Playboy of the Western World raised a fury. Many in the audience hooted it down. Police had to be called in to contain the crowd. Night after night the protests went on. Editorials lambasted the play for unpatriotic heresies and as an affront to Irish womanhood. The Playboy Riots, they’ve been called since.

  But The Playboy is no trifling asterisk of theatrical history. It is unforgettable, wondrous, and strange, clothed in exotically heightened language far removed from any English we recognize, its dialogue stocked with peculiar constructions, unfamiliar turns of phrase. Sometimes its words are not English at all but borrowed from Irish—like streeleen for “idle conversation”—that Synge took down from Blasket Islanders and recorded in his notebook.

  When his boasts of a wicked crime are first doubted, Christy replies, “That’s an unkindly thing to be saying to a poor orphaned traveller, has a prison behind him, and hanging before, and hell’s gap gaping below.” But while some of the best lines go to Christy, many others go to the daughter of the pub owner, Margaret Flaherty, or Pegeen Mike—roughly, “Little Peg, daughter of Michael.” She’s “a wild-looking girl,” as Synge describes her, about twenty. As the play opens, she’s supposed to be marrying an oafish, inconsiderable local boy, Shawn Keogh, toward whom her a
ttitude veers between teasing and contempt.

  Enter Christy. When Pegeen Mike first hears his father-killing story, she believes not a word of it. “You’re only saying it,” she says. “You did nothing at all. A soft lad the like of you wouldn’t slit the wind pipe of a screeching sow.” But soon she’s won over by an eloquence that, stirred by his strangely welcoming reception from the others, fairly leaps up from him. Pretty soon she’s addressing Christy with what Synge describes as “a honeyed voice.” She falls for him, hard. “And to think it’s me is talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue. Well, the heart’s a wonder.”

  An early critic, Percival Presland Howe, called Pegeen “one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama.” Who in Synge’s life might have inspired her? Maybe, from a literary imagination as fertile as Synge’s, we have no business asking for any such too-easy correspondence between life and art. And yet the question beckons. Distinguished Synge scholar Ann Saddlemyer, an editor of Synge’s plays and correspondence, favors actress Molly Allgood, Synge’s love during the final years of his life; Allgood would herself play Pegeen when The Playboy premiered in Dublin. Synge’s biographers David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, on the other hand, assert without qualification that the “prototype” for Pegeen Mike was his “little hostess” on the Blasket.

  But if Máire Ní Chatháin somehow inspired the immortal Pegeen, one wonders just how. Did she make a physical impression on Synge? Something in her personality? In how she spoke? Certainly Synge’s seemingly domestic Blasket “hostess” does not at first blush suggest fiery Pegeen.

  Just as certainly, though, she is the most memorable figure in Synge’s Blasket account—just as Pegeen is in The Playboy. Synge devotes to her a closely observed poem, “On an Island,” warmly appreciative of their time together:

                 You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched my sheet,

                 And filled the pan to wash your feet,

                 You’ve cooped the pullets, wound the clock,

                 And rinsed the young men’s drinking crock;

                 And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,

                 Nailed boots chasing girls’ naked heels.…

  The real Máire and the fictional Pegeen are about the same age. Both tend to their father’s affairs, presiding over the place where most of the action takes place. Both do so ably; all their actions suggest competence and lively intelligence; Máire, like Pegeen, is a “big” figure, no mere drudge supplying a servant’s labor in exchange for the ten pence a week Synge paid for room and board. And just as Pegeen showers Christy with attention once she falls under his spell, so Máire does Synge.

  On several occasions, they are alone together. On his first night on the island she actually puts him to bed, just as Pegeen Mike does Christy at a gentle moment in the play—chastely, to be sure, yet with a warming intimacy. She lights a candle, carries it into his room beyond the kitchen, removes her apron, fastens it to the window in lieu of a blind, only then leaves him to himself.

  Once, when returning in the evening from a walk along the island ridge, Synge is joined by two young women, with whom he walks back to the village. An old woman laughs at the sight of them. “ ‘Well, aren’t you in good fortune this night, stranger,’ ” she says, in Synge’s telling, “ ‘to be walking up and down in the company of women?’ ” “ ‘I am, surely,’ I answered. ‘Isn’t that the best thing to be doing in the whole world?’ ”

  Indeed, Synge was always more at ease with women than with men. “He was shy and inclined to silence with men,” his biographers write of him, “but all too willing to lay bare his troubles and his dreams to a sympathetic and sensitive woman.” Women drew him out, much as Pegeen and the other island women do Christy. He’d observed of Aran that “the direct sexual instincts are not weak on the island,” the women apparently less troubled by Victorian fastidiousness than in Dublin or London; as he put it, they were “before conventionality.” Something similarly free applied to the Blaskets; both in his notebooks and his published account, Synge pictures an unexpectedly easy and porous border country between the sexes.

  So it is, certainly, between him and Máire, the little hostess. She seems so interested in him, so frankly curious about all he does and says. After a hike around the island, he returns to the house to write letters. She finishes up the breakfast chores, comes over, sits by him on the floor, pulls out her hairpins, and begins combing her hair, idly questioning him about his correspondents: Who is this that you’re writing to? Where do they live? Are they married or single? How many children have they? Later, Synge takes out some photos from his travels, which Máire, and some other women, examine closely. She is especially taken with those showing babies or children. “As she put her hands on my shoulders, and leaned over to look at them, with the confidence that is so usual in these places, I could see that she had her full share of the passion for children which is powerful in all women who are permanently and profoundly attractive.”

  Máire may or may not have directly inspired Pegeen. But something in Synge’s island flirtation with her—for that, surely, is what it was—recalls Christy and Pegeen; the situation, I think, as much as the person, left the lasting imprint. Like Christy Mahon in the glow of Pegeen’s attentions, we can almost see Synge puff up with masculine pride in the warmth of Máire’s closeness and the fullness of her attentions.

  When an editor asked him for a series of articles devoted to the Blaskets like those he had done about the Arans, Synge wrote back to say he hadn’t enough material. But his trip to the Great Blasket had touched him deeply, in some ways more even than his Aran visits; in his introduction to a collection of Synge’s travel essays, Nicholas Grene calls it “the most intimate experience Synge had of the lives of the people.” And of course he did write about it. Much of what the world first learned of the Blaskets owes to Synge’s account of his West Kerry travels, first published in 1907 in the journal The Shanachie and later appearing in book form along with some of his other travel writings.

  His West Kerry account, spanning some seventy pages, was studded with song lyrics and conversations with men and women he met along the way. He told of a man lamenting the death of the Irish language, of the circus in Dingle, of hikes among the sea-facing cliffs, of Kerry’s “wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.” He wrote of the Great Blasket’s cottages, its rabbit-riddled mounds, its children, its dancing, his tramps across the island. One time, he

  walked through a boreen towards the north-west, between a few plots of potatoes and little fields of weeds that seem to have gone out of cultivation not long ago. Beyond these I turned up a sharp, green hill, and came out suddenly on the broken edge of a cliff. The effect was wonderful. The Atlantic was right underneath; then I could see the sharp rocks of several uninhabited islands, a mile or two off … the lesser Blaskets. The whole sight of wild islands and sea was as clear and cold and brilliant as what one sees in a dream, and alive with the singularly severe glory that is in the character of this place.

  Despite its seeming warmth and sympathy, its interest in the islanders and delight in their surroundings, Synge’s published account did not exempt him from criticism. Some islanders saw some of his descriptions as slights: Did the apron-on-the-window story suggest Máire’s care and hospitality … or a lack of proper curtains? At least one scholar, Irene Lucchitti, would write him off as a “cultural tourist.” To her, Synge’s “emphasis on wildness suggests a primitive simplicity that denies the social complexities of living in such a tightly structured society.” His social reticence, his tendency to take in rather than volubly express himself, “shows him to be a silent observer who took what he needed yet gave little of himself.”

  This, I think, is har
sh. Synge’s account was probably the first to imbue with sympathy and dramatic force a place that in the past, when it had come to the attention of the world at all, had typically been treated badly. It is a commonplace, of course, to say that anything a writer writes says as much about him as it does about his subject. Synge was selective; he saw what he saw and not what he didn’t see, extracting from his time on the island those elements he wished, or needed, to express, and not others. He wrote much about what he had seen on the island, but, inevitably, left out much as well—including a number of insights and observations, excluded from the published account, that he recorded in his journal.

  It is late August. After sixteen days, Synge is leaving the island. His host heads down to the slip to prepare the boat. Máire offers to slice some bread and wrap it in a clean handkerchief to take with him. But he might never be able to return it to her, he says. Don’t worry, he has her telling him, surely her handkerchief is “a nicer thing to have round my bread than a piece of paper.” Finally, the king rows him across the sound and arranges with a local farmer to take him and his bags to Ballyferriter. The king kisses his hand in farewell, he’s loaded on a cart with an old woman and a little girl, and he’s off, the island consigned to memory.

  At Willie Long’s in Ballyferriter, Synge sits down to dinner in the parlor, caught up in a bout of longing. “I am sitting within the four whitewashed walls of this little hotel,” he writes, “with a book and a lamp and paper and ink and a pen. That is my world, instead of the living world I have come from, where there is the princess, and the little queen, and the old king, and all their company.” He imagines them on his departure wandering back from the head of the cliff in twos and threes and gathering again in the kitchen of the king. “The two worlds, their world and mine, are very different.”