On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  But larger family interests intervened. Cáit’s family lived a hard naomhóg row away, not right at hand when help was needed. A better match, Tomás’s older sister insisted, would be a young Blasket woman, Máire Mhici, sister of the future island king. Weeks later, in February 1878, the two were married. Some controversy lingers as to whether a sad, lonely song Tomás sang at the wedding in Ballyferriter was just a pretty song or amounted to a public lament for his lost love. “I well knew how to deliver it,” Tomás recalled. “You would think that there was no other voice in the house, loud or soft, until I had finished it.”

  The loss of Cáit was hardly his last. All told, he had ten children with Máire Mhici; she died in childbirth with the last of them, in about 1902. One child, aged seven, fell to his death from a cliff. Two died of measles. One immigrated to America. Tomás would one day record this sad litany under the heading of “The Troubles of Life,” describing them in language so spare and unadorned as to seem coldhearted. “I was told he was very hard and tough in his youth,” his grandson, Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, would assert. That’s just how the Ó Criomhthains were, “like iron in body and soul. It was difficult to make them cry, or shed a tear. It was difficult to imagine them mourning someone’s death.”

  But at least once, Tomás did. In the early summer of 1909, Eveleen Nichols, a student at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin, and already, at twenty-four, a rising figure in the language movement, visited the island; the Gaelic League was by then encouraging people to visit West Kerry to better learn the language. She took to the island right away, making friends with Tomás’s daughter Cáit. “One day they would be on the hill,” Tomás would remember, “another about the strand and the sea; and when the weather was soft and warm they used to go swimming.” One August afternoon, the sea was breaking hard on the beach and they got caught in the tide. They tired. They called for help. Tomás’s eighteen-year-old son, Domhnall, was digging potatoes in a field above the beach—accounts differ on this and other details of the tragedy—when he heard the commotion and realized they were in trouble. He threw down his spade, bolted to the beach, and, still in clothes and shoes, ran into the surf. When he found his sister safe, he swam out to save Nichols. Both of them drowned. Tomás and brother Pats were returning from the day’s fishing and spied boats bringing to shore two lifeless bodies. When he reached the confused scene, he saw first the boy’s shoes—or, rather, their soles, with a nail pattern he recognized at once; he’d repaired them himself. “He let out a scream,” someone said later, “that could be heard on the two sides of the village.”

  Tomás would tell of brothers and sisters dying; of islanders hurt or killed in accidents and drownings; of casting a crab-baited line for rockfish and getting the hook stuck in his finger. But he told of wakes and Christmases and weddings, too, of dripping lobster pots, of hiking up the hill to cut turf. He played hurling on the beach in his bare feet. He made windows from driftwood washed up onto the shore. He made panniers for the donkeys. He built himself a house. He hunted seals and rabbits. He fished.

  But he was never an ordinary fisherman. At the island school, Tomás had learned to read and write—read and write English, that is—better than most other islanders. At least once, when the teacher was laid up, he and another older boy were delegated to fill in for him. Tomás was a natural pick: “Dónall’s Scholar,” they sometimes called this son of Dónall Ó Criomhthain. By 1907, certainly, he had a reputation as a man of studious temperament, interested in books, reading, and learning; small wonder that Marstrander and other Irish-language devotees were sent his way. And for all the push for English in those days, the Irishness rose up in him. In the 1901 census, he gave his name as Thomas Crohan; in 1911, he was Tomás Ó Criomhthain, the only island name recorded that year in Irish. He’d early grown interested in the work of the Gaelic League, which even in tiny neighboring Dún Chaoin had a presence, and at some point began sending brief stories to Irish-language publications.

  Later, when books bearing his name appeared in print, reviews were apt to picture them as the work of an Authentic Blasket Islander, unmediated by art, a peasant incarnate, profoundly of his island home; indeed, that was made to seem the rare wonder of them, that they’d come from so unpromising a source, from so ordinary a peasant fisherman. But Tomás Ó Criomhthain, it stands repeating, was no ordinary anything, much less fisherman. By any standard, whether of his time or our own, he was “gifted.” And all the visitors knew it. Marstrander did. So did Robin Flower.

  Thinking back to his early days with him, Flower described Tomás as “a small, lively man, with a sharp, intelligent face, weathered and wrinkled by the sun and rain and the flying salt of the sea, out of which two bright, observant eyes looked critically upon the world.” Together they’d sit in Tomás’s house, or in the king’s kitchen, or under the lee of a turf rick, Tomás disgorging “tales and poetry and proverbs,” together with “precise explanations of difficult words” and lively observations of the island world around him.

  The two of them, said Flower’s daughter Síle, who saw them together a lot on the island in the 1920s, became “tremendously close friends. I think he must have been one of his best friends in life.… They loved each other,” and had a great deal in common. After Flower’s first visit, in 1910, the two of them kept in frequent touch. Tomás wrote him about the island roads and houses they’d worked on together, congratulated him on his marriage. Flower sent him tobacco, and money, too. One time, Tomás wrote back about the hit he’d made with some money Flower had sent, distributing it among the islanders in the form of beer. Typically, he’d write to Flower in Irish, often appending a letter in English to Mrs. Flower as well, thanking her for the calendar she’d send him each Christmas. Once the war was over, he told her in a 1915 letter, he would “cross the Irish Sea out to him. Then the children might have Irish out there. He might laugh when he will hear this.…” Tomás concluded with a few words in Irish to her husband, then added: “May the Almighty God protect and save ye from all danger’s that’s going about.”

  His face “is dark and thin, and there look out of it two quick and living eyes, the vivid witness of a fine and self-sufficing intelligence”: Tomás Ó Criomhthain, as Robin Flower described him, shown here about 1925. (Illustration Credit ill.7)

  But by 1916, the world war had been on for two years, and it had been that long since the two men had seen each other. Flower was in London, but just then relieved of his regular job at the Museum and assigned to translating foreign newspapers, sometimes more than a hundred a week. “At present I am in despair under the weight of the Dutch and Belgian press,” he wrote late that year. “It is horrid work.”

  By this time, Tomás stood off to the side of his island brethren—or in some ways, it’s difficult to deny, above them. He couldn’t have been immune to the attention and respect he’d gained. It had to have been exhilarating to be singled out, introduced to the Norwegian linguist, to work with him, teach him, be sought after for knowledge. And likewise to engage in far-ranging conversations with the scholar from the great museum in London. Tomás might reasonably have concluded, and with some satisfaction, that he had transcended by far what might otherwise have been his lot. Or else, in a darker, elegiac mood—he was now about sixty, wizened, past his physical prime—he might have concluded that he had done all of noble note he would ever do.

  But then, in the middle of the war, as Europe shed the blood of its young, Brian Kelly arrived on the island.

  Brian Albert Kelly was twenty-eight at the time, from Killarney, a mid-sized town fifty miles or so east of the Blaskets, yet worlds apart. His family was well off, had a drapery shop and a hotel in town, the Crystal Palace, their children mostly destined for careers in law, medicine, and the church. Brian attended Dublin-area schools and went on to Trinity College, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1911, having studied the classics, modern history, English literature, and Old Irish. For at least five years, even after hi
s graduation, he remained active in the Dublin University Gaelic Society.

  Then Kelly got caught up in a nasty bit of international intrigue. In April 1914, after a year in Paris, he’d gone to Germany to study history, and completed a term at the University of Marburg. But with the onset of the war, he’d been gathered up in a sweep of foreign students and landed in prison. He wrote to Kuno Meyer, of the School of Irish Learning, whom he had known in Dublin, and who might have some pull with the authorities. But Meyer was out of the country, so it fell to his sister Antonie to pull strings on Kelly’s behalf, get him out of prison, and connect him with Roger Casement.

  Casement: rebel, revolutionary, martyr. A memorable figure who in the years since his death has inspired a whole raft of biographies. An Irish-born diplomat, he had only a few years before, in 1911, been knighted by King George V for his work illuminating human-rights abuses in Congo and the Putumayo River region of Peru. But with the start of the war, his anti-imperialistic streak and deep sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause led him to Germany. He had a plan—to form an Irish brigade from Irish prisoners-of-war that, German-armed, would fight England from Irish soil. The plan went nowhere. Meanwhile, word got out of his apparently promiscuous homosexuality. In August 1916, despite pleas for a reprieve from George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and other luminaries, he was hanged for treason.

  But not before he had responded to Kelly’s plea from prison and brought him to Berlin, where the two of them met. Casement tried to enlist him in his plan to recruit Irish POWs, briefly embedded him in a prison camp in Limburg where twenty-five hundred of them were held, and finally had him released, as promised. As Kelly put it in a secret report to the British authorities early the following year, Casement seemed to him an “impulsive and excitable man,” who saw England as the destroyer of European peace, Germany the nation of the future, and Ireland its natural friend. “Unhinged” was his ultimate assessment of him.

  By the time Casement went to the gallows, Kelly was back in Killarney, probably living at home, recovering from his brush with dangerous men and tumultuous times. And it is at this point that his fifty-six-year-old mother, Bridget Kelly, steps into our story. Was Brian, after his wartime ordeal, unable to take any firm next step for himself? Or was Mrs. Kelly simply better connected around Killarney and thus better suited to make inquiries on his behalf? In any case, it was she who, in the fall of 1916, a few months after the Easter Rising, approached Mr. Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha—in English this was usually spelled, and pronounced, “Sugrue”—a Gaelic League teacher prominent in those parts. Might he, she asked, come to their home and, once a week, give her son lessons in spoken Irish? Brian had studied Old Irish in school, but modern Irish was the new badge of Irish republican sensibility. And he, like many with their heads in books, could not speak it.

  To hear Ó Siochfhradha’s account, he and Brian got on well. “We understood each other,” he wrote later. “He enjoyed my friendliness and my understanding; he was gentle, shy, and, I’d imagine, inclined to be a loner. But when he’d sense the good will and friendliness in a person, he’d open up.” Over the course of half a dozen sessions, Kelly improved considerably. Yet, if he was to make further progress, they agreed, he needed to go where Irish was spoken, the Gaeltacht. He had no job, family, or money worries to stand in the way, so he was soon off to the Blaskets, letter of introduction in hand for Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

  In April 1917, he landed on the island, remaining there for the rest of the year.

  It is a calm day on the Great Blasket. Tomás is gathering mussels at the water’s edge when he looks up to see two young women. “Are there limpets here, Tomás?” There are, he replies. But how, he asks, do they propose to scrape off the tenacious little mollusks? All they have between them is a broken pair of scissors and an iron bolt. Maybe they should send their mothers instead: “Wouldn’t they have more skill and craft for the work?”

  But if their mothers did it, one of them says, how would they learn to do it themselves? Besides, “isn’t it grand to be here by the sea’s edge at low tide? The lovely smell that’s there when everything that was under the sea before is under the sun now and its mouth gaping.”

  We say Tomás Ó Criomhthain “told” this story because it appears in a book listing him as author. In Irish it was called Allagar na hInise, published in 1928 by Government Publications, Dublin, later translated into English as Island Cross-Talk, published in 1986 by Oxford University Press, and still in print. An extraordinary transformation had taken place. Blasket stories, for generations told around peat fires or at the village well, had been catapulted into the world beyond the island, given fixed and permanent form on paper, bound between the covers of books. A man who had grown up on a treeless island and made his living from fishing and farming, who had never seen Dublin, or even Tralee, or ventured beyond the next peninsula across Dingle Bay, who was largely illiterate for at least the first forty years of his life, was now an author. It was like the First Books all over again: however they’d first come into the world, books had somehow been reborn on this little island where almost no one knew how to read. How was this possible? How could this be?

  In fact, even before Brian’s coming in 1917, the printed word was not quite so alien to the Great Blasket as it once had been, or as it might have seemed, say, from Dublin. The Gaelic League issued two Irish-language publications—An Claidheamh Soluis, sword of light, and Fáinne an Lae, dawn of day—and Tomás, who’d by now been reading and writing Irish for fifteen or twenty years, had contributed to both of them. He had served as Marstrander’s research assistant—research assistant? what else would you call him?—compiling lists of local flora and fauna and sending them to Oslo. In 1915, he had written a founding member of the Gaelic League, Seosamh Laoide, about a book he had recently read, Tonn Tóime (the great wave, said to have borne the legendary Oisin to the Land of the Young). In both English and Irish, he observed, small words, the pebbles of language, mattered more than did the big, imposing ones.

  Tomás, then, was already linked to a larger world of language and ideas. After Robin Flower’s second Blasket visit, Tomás felt qualified to congratulate him on his improved Irish. A few years later, after the birth of Flower’s daughter Síle, he appended a note to Mrs. Flower, saying, “I am going to help Mr. Flower to be an Irish Professor, the same as Mr. Marstrander.” Tomás Ó Criomhthain, then, had become the island’s resident intellectual. He was mentor to his young scholarly friends. He was master of Irish, and knew he was. If he had something to say as a writer, he would probably be able to say it.

  But when Brian Kelly—or Brian Ó Ceallaigh, as he was known in Irish—came to the island, he found Tomás jotting down folktales and song lyrics. How long, one wonders, and under what circumstances of trust and friendship, did it take him to get Tomás to write about his life on the island, about himself?

  Oh, but “everyone knows what life is like here,” Kelly reported Tomás as replying when he finally did ask. And it was true: most everyone Tomás knew lived on the island, knew its life intimately; they’d all probably by now heard many of his stories, nuggets of personal wisdom, choice bits of folklore. But Kelly was thinking bigger, of a different, larger audience, off the island. He said so later—that he’d tried to make Tomás realize how interesting the life of the island could be “for people who were accustomed to a more comfortable and uncomplicated existence.” He wanted more from Tomás. He had ambitions for him! Set against Tomás’s limited experience, that might be seen as unreasonable or unrealistic. But Kelly persisted. He pushed. He prodded Tomás to write. He practically dragged it out of him.

  One evening, while walking along an island path, Brian suggested to him that he write something about emigration—or started to suggest it, anyway, because just then they came upon some island women, walking in pairs, singing. No, said Brian, all but amending his advice in mid-stride, “Write about what you see at this moment.” Tomás did. It was called “An Guth ar Neoi
n,” or “The Voice in the Afternoon,” and it managed to link the women they’d met with Brian’s original suggestion. The women were singing “in lively, eloquent Irish,” Tomás wrote. That made for a lovely and memorable sight, sure to leave a bystander feeling right with the world. But the words of their song, carried by that “voice in the afternoon,” were bleak: if only they had the passage money, the girls sang, they’d be on a boat for America. Later that year, Tomás’s story was published in An Lóchrann, the lantern, an Irish-language monthly.

  Tomás often gathered turf along the hillside, or fished from a rock as the sun set, reveling in the sheer beauty of God’s creation. Write about it, Brian urged. “You can’t live on scenery,” Tomás shot back. Yet, spurred by his Killarney friend, he wrote just such a piece, which was published the following year. It was about a field at the edge of the White Strand where the two of them would sit and talk. Brian would plunk himself down on a particular rock that Tomás called “Brian’s Chair.” And from that anointed spot, late one afternoon, Tomás described the vista, the sun spreading above him to the north, the cliffs on the mainland, no two the same color. “I don’t think, and I wouldn’t think, that there could be any other colours in the world than these.” To the editor who published the essay, Brian reported, “it proved that a feeling for nature, akin to that of Wordsworth, existed among the Gaelic-speaking people.”