On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Flower was the consummate bibliophile, a compulsive consumer of the written word. Island photographs of him sometimes show him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, hand thrust into pants pocket, looking very much the man of the world. But one of him from around 1910 shows him as he more often was, reading, sitting back in what looks like a tufted leather high-back chair. His head was forever in a book. While still in school, his son Patrick recounted later, he’d head off for the woods on his bicycle, his cat Appleby perched in a string bag suspended from the handlebars, reading as he rode. When he was twelve, a school friend recalled, “his pockets always bulged with cheap magazines”; late to class, he’d be seen “trying to read and run at the same time,” working his way up from boys’ fiction to Swinburne, Shelley, and Keats. When sometimes a teacher would search his pockets, his classmates were left rapt in wonder at how much reading matter he’d managed to stuff into them.

  Robin Flower, about the time of his first visit to the Blasket in 1910 (Illustration Credit ill.5)

  What might better suit Robin Flower than the British Museum? Located in London’s Bloomsbury, off Great Russell Street, founded in 1753, it had grown into one of the world’s great cultural institutions, repository of all Britain could draw into its outsized imperial hands; it had the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone. Its Manuscripts Department, during the four decades Flower worked there, held ancient and medieval books and manuscripts taken from all over the world. It occupied a group of rooms, or saloons, to the southeast of the great Reading Room on the ground floor, all dark wood and coffered ceilings, tiers and tiers of ancient books, along with low glass-topped wooden cabinets for their public display.

  For most of his life, his son wrote later, the Museum was “home from home for the great reader. Thousands of lovely books and manuscripts to absorb.” Early on there, his biographer, Idris Bell, wrote of him, Flower would indulge “his practice of wandering about the Department and taking down from the shelves any manuscript which caught his attention”—Elizabethan literature, or Oliver Goldsmith, or even, as a colleague chided him, “Mexican hieroglyphics.” His intellectual interests, it would be said of him, were “inexhaustible.” Once, Flower translated an eighth-century poem written in Old Irish, “Pangur Ban,” which tells of a monk, cat by his side, and the surprising similarities of their work.

                 Oftentimes a mouse will stray

                 In the hero Pangur’s way;

                 Oftentimes my keen thought set

                 Takes a meaning in its net.

                 …

                 So in peace our tasks we ply,

                 Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;

                 In our arts we find our bliss,

                 I have mine and he has his.

  Flower had been at the Museum for four years when, in August 1910, age twenty-eight, he arrived in the Blaskets. He wrote, with characteristic lightness, from the house of the king: “I am safe here in the royal palace, which consists of a fair-sized cabin with an earthen floor and two small rooms built on it to accommodate visitors.” He briefly described the village, the houses “thrown down anywhere where they can find a bit of reasonably level ground,” the naomhógs and their curiously stunted oar-blades. He was finally learning to row them, he wrote, after earlier being unable to synchronize with the man behind him. He was happily boating, bathing, reading. “I lead the life,” he wrote, “of Tír na nÓg here.”

  The reference, one any self-respecting Celticist would know, was to perhaps the most famous legend in the whole Irish canon, part of the mental landscape of any Irishman even lightly attuned to his culture. It told of a mythical place, beyond any map, located on an island far to the west that could be reached only through an arduous voyage or by invitation of one of its fairy residents. It was a place without sickness or death, full of music, food, drink, and pleasures of every sort, of tireless strength, unending bliss, life lived to the full. It was the Land of the Young. Listen to its music, Flower exhorted his readers in a poem, “Tír na nÓg,” that appeared in a slim volume published the year he visited the island:

                 And you shall hear it chanting in one triumphant chime

                 Of the life that lives for ever and the fugitives of time

                 Beyond the green land’s border and the washing wastes of sea

                 In the world beyond the world’s end, where nothing is but glee.

                 The magic waters gird it, and skies of laughing blue

                 Keep always faith with summer, and summer still is true;

                 There is no end of dancing and sweet unceasing song,

                 And eyes to eyes make answer and love with love grows strong.

  Especially pleasant, he wrote near the end of his stay, was “talking with Cáit Ní Catháin, the Princess, who’s teaching me Irish at a great rate.” Cáit, then about twenty-four, was the younger daughter of the king and sister of Máire, Synge’s little hostess. In one of Flower’s sessions with her, a boat approached the island, and while it was yet distant, Cáit identified who was aboard. “I tried to say,” Flower wrote, “ ‘You’ve got good eyes,’ but what I said was, ‘You’ve got pretty eyes’ (which by the way is quite true). Cáit’s answer was ‘So have you.’ ” Abruptly, he realized his error, and they both burst out laughing, agreeing it was “a pardonable mistake.”

  Flattered by the islanders that his still-fumbling Irish at least boasted “the proper island blas,” or accent, he was plainly making progress. He would be leaving on Saturday, he concluded his letter, and back at work the Monday after that. “Remember me to everybody and tell them I am working hard, learning Irish from the prettiest girl on the island.”

  When he returned the following summer, Flower brought with him his new wife, Ida Mary Streeter, the youngest sister of a friend from Oxford. They had met and fallen in love while he was still a student there and she attended an art school in Hertfordshire of which Flower’s father was director. They went on to meet at London’s Royal Academy, or the National Gallery, where art students needn’t have chaperones. While enjoying his island lessons with Cáit, Flower may already have been engaged to her. He’d been back in London just a few months, living near Leicester Square with his friend Vivian Locke Ellis, a poet, when, in January 1911, the Museum granted him a special two-week leave to be married. The ceremony took place on February 4. The couple went to live in a Chelsea flat, and that summer he brought her to the island.

  Later, Flower wrote Richard Best in Dublin of their “glorious time there. The weather was too hot, and I was too tired for any serious work, but I got to be able to speak and understand pretty well.… My wife enjoyed herself thoroughly,” he added, “and did some rather nice sketches of the island.”

  They were better than nice; our feeling for the village in that summer of 1911 owes as much to her as to him. While he worked on his Irish, Ida, who was pregnant at the time, roamed the island with pencil, sketchbook, and drawing board, making finely detailed renderings of the village and its cozy interiors. Together, they bathe the village in a balmier, more settled light than that by which it’s more often seen. Maps and surviving photographs don’t suggest a place that could have leapt intact from a Hollywood soundstage. Ida Flower’s drawings do.

  A pen-and-ink she made of the interior of the king’s house suggests all the comforts of home, rudimentary though they were. In the middle, the c
roch, or fireplace crane—the sturdy, trusslike structure from which pots were suspended over the hearth. The settle, a bare wood bench, off to the side. A beam reaching across the breadth of the room, supporting a loft, a kind of rude attic, bearing household gear. All modeled by soft window light. Three years earlier, Marstrander judged the house to represent “as good lodgings as I found in Ballyferriter,” meaning Willie Long’s place, a commercial inn. It still was.

  Island houses were truly homes, some imperfectly maintained, others neat, warm, and snug. Floors were of beaten clay, the area around the fireplace stone-flagged; sand brought up from the White Strand would be scattered on the floor and, with any animal waste, swept out daily. The largest houses were about twelve by twenty-five feet on the inside; most were smaller. With a few exceptions, they were oriented the same way, their front doors facing south, one of the short sides dug into the hillside, offering the smallest target for prevailing westerly winds and rain. Cluthair, meaning cozy or snug, was the ideal. On the sheltered side of the house it was as if you were “in another country,” poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who spent the summers of her youth across the sound, in Dún Chaoin, has noted of similar houses on the mainland. “The old houses had their own charm and they were very comfortable. Mind you, when you got out of one of those westerly gales … into the warm kitchen it really was the height of luxury.”

  During Flower’s earliest visits to the island, big changes were in the works, altering the village more than anything in the last century. Like much of West Kerry, the island had in 1907 been declared a “congested district.” In fact, such districts were in no way congested the way Dublin and Belfast were, with crowds of urban dwellers, but distinctly rural. They were “congested” only in the particular sense of being so poor, so barren of industry, jobs, or opportunity for life at anything but bare subsistence, that they were thought to hold more humanity than they could support.

  The Congested District Board bought up Blasket croplands owned for ages by the Earl of Cork and reorganized the system of land tenure. It repaired and improved village paths, put islanders to paying work. It condemned some houses as unfit, and built five new ones, in the upper village, in three structures. To this day, even from across the sound in Dún Chaoin, they stand out from the rest of the village. They sit higher on the hill, farther west, a little apart from the other houses. They have two stories, not one, with interior staircases leading up to an additional room. Built of concrete, not stone, they have staircases and floors made of timber brought across the sound to the treeless isle.

  Another project was to improve the slip where the naomhógs docked. Among those who worked on it—on his first visit to the island, in the summer of 1910—was Flower. A photo shows the work crew posed beside the slipway with their spades and pails, rubble and stone. They are a serious-looking bunch, wearing hats, vests, sweaters, and heavy boots. But Flower stands hatless, shoeless, and sockless, his head swung up toward the camera in a broad smile. At the British Museum, of course, he was hardly used to physical labor, so the work took its toll in blistered hands. “My high-spirited friend,” an islander with whom he’d worked, began a letter to him later, in Irish, thanking him for gifts he’d sent from Dingle. And then: “Are the pickaxe marks still there?”

  As we’ve seen, Flower returned to the island in 1911; then he came again every year through 1914. In 1913, he wrote Kuno Meyer that he’d had a productive time, transcribing island stories for three hours a day, hunting rabbits with the king’s son, Seán. In 1914, he was on the island when word reached them that the Austrian archduke had been assassinated, setting off the Great War. It was 1925 before Flower returned, this time with his children, as he would many times more over the rest of his life.

  At least from 1912 if not before, he was called “Bláithín” on the island, Irish for “Little Flower.” Of all the distinctions and honors awarded him over the years, it was noted in a radio talk a few days after his death, this “honour from the little island kingdom was that which Robin Flower appreciated most of all.”

  On his first visit to the island, Flower became aware of changes the Congested District Board was making in how fields were allotted for cultivation. In the old “rundale” system, which went back to the Middle Ages, each family owned strips of land scattered widely over the island. In the new system, each family got land concentrated in a few areas. “You may imagine,” he would write, “the process of ingenious and complicated judging by which this metamorphosis was effected.” Most of these intricate debates, however, went right by him. “It is one of the great regrets of my life that this happened at a time when my knowledge of Irish was so rudimentary that I could not follow the arguments that went on round me.” He remembered “foaming crests of rhetoric.” But just then, in August 1910, he could understand little of it.

  Hatless, shoeless, and, it seems, callous-less: Robin Flower on a crew helping to build the village’s new pier—work from which the London scholar’s hands came away well blistered. Tomás Ó Criomhthain stands to Flower’s left. (Illustration Credit ill.6)

  Given how adept he became in Irish, it may be hard to imagine a time when he wasn’t. But at first, Flower struggled with it like everyone else. Indeed, although the pickax letter cited previously was written in Irish, its author appended a few sentences in schoolbook English. “Dear young gentleman. I don’t like to finish this letter in Irish for fear that you couldn’t understand the whole of it.” It was signed Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

  Ó Criomhthain, of course, was Marstrander’s teacher. He had become Robin Flower’s. And it is perhaps time we addressed him as Flower would all his life, and as he was generally known by the visitors who revered him: Tomás—just the one name, confused with no one else on the island. Flower would write of returning to the island, being greeted by the villagers, doling out sweets to the children, watching them run out the door and onto the hill with their prizes. And then:

  A sudden feeling comes upon you of a new presence in the room. You look up and see, leaning against the wall almost with the air of a being magically materialized out of nothing, a slight but confident figure. The face takes your attention at once and holds it. This face is dark and thin, and there look out of it two quick and living eyes, the vivid witnesses of a fine and self-sufficing intelligence. He comes towards you and, with a grave and courteous intonation, and a picked and running phrase, bids you welcome.

  This is Tomás. It should be plain by now that he was no simple fisherman.

  Chapter 3

  Brian’s Chair

  [1917]

  On an island where hardly anyone knew how to read and write Irish, Tomás learned to do both. The wonder is, how?

  By one strand of evidence from 1936, a Gaelic League teacher came to the island in 1905, when Tomás was about forty-nine. From him, Tomás learned to read his native language, then taught himself to write by imitating what he found in books.

  That’s one possibility. Another is that Tomás may have learned to read a little Irish in the Protestant school that, back in the 1860s, when he was of school age, still had a place on the island. Around the time of the Famine, Irish Protestants set up schools throughout the country that dispensed soup and other needed nourishment, along with liberal doses of theology, and instruction through the Irish language. “Soupers,” Catholics called these proselytizing Protestants. On the Great Blasket, the Scoil an tSúip was located down the hill, near the approach to the village. Tomás may for a time have attended.

  If so, when he got the chance to tell his story later, by which time the Protestant presence on the island was gone, he’d hardly have wanted to bruit it about. His own account, certainly, makes no mention of it, but credits his introduction to written Irish to the very end of the nineteenth century. It seems that, when bad weather left him stuck on the mainland with his boat, he’d often stay in the Dún Chaoin house of a cousin, whose children were by now being introduced to Irish in school. They read to him, the way Tomás tells it, “u
ntil I got a taste for the business and made them give me the book.” He caught on quickly, his stock of spoken Irish alchemically transmuting the ink squiggles of the books into order and sense. “My head was full of it, and, if I came across a limping sentence, all I had to do was to hunt for it in my own brain.” In time, he gathered a few books himself and took to reading them to other islanders. It gave him pleasure. He never wearied of it, “for I was red-hot to go ahead.” By the time Carl Marstrander showed up on the island, Tomás was a decade into working with the language, and the villager best equipped by far to help the visitor with it.

  Tomás was a proud man, especially of his abilities in written Irish. Among a group of letters he wrote in the early 1920s, some, treated purely as objects of calligraphic art, must be reckoned minor gems. Written in the old style, where pronunciation changes of consonants are marked by little dots rather than the auxiliary “h”s they get now, they rarely show so much as a smudge or cross-out. The “fadas,” accent marks, are spare, graceful slashes, like the fine lines of an etching. When signing his name, Tomás does so sometimes with a flourish that hints at the outsized sense of self behind it.

  He was born in 1855 or 1856, grew up in “a cramped little house, roofed with rushes from the hill.” Hens nested in the thatch and laid eggs in it. He lived there with his parents and older siblings, together with their cow, ass, and chickens. His father’s family had come from Dún Chaoin and married into the island. “My father was a marvellous fisherman and a great man for work”—a stonemason, a boat’s captain, and altogether “handy at every trade.” So was Tomás. He was probably in his teens when he began his life as a fisherman.

  As part of a boat crew, young Tomás would sometimes visit Inishvickillaun, one of the Lesser Blaskets, a few miles away. A single family lived there, the Dalys, with their five sons and five daughters. To young Tomás, it has been written, Inishvickillaun “was Tir na nOg, with sport and fun and company, and fine, lively, beautiful girls with big hearts.” He fell in love with one of them, Cáit. On one visit, Tomás would write, Cáit “went out the door and, as she went out, waved me out too that I might follow her.” Follow her out he did, “not pretending anything.” It was a fine November day in 1877. It seemed possible they would marry.