On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  George Thomson’s time wasn’t so idyllic, though he seems not to have been acutely miserable, either. He had little use, it is true, for school sports; one time, his wife would remember him confiding, he’d forged a letter saying he was to be excused from some intolerable game or match. He bristled at school discipline, too, sometimes slipping out of homework. But on the whole, he was not being stuffed into academic garb that didn’t suit him. The first of his family to attend university, he truly liked to learn.

  George was enrolled in what at Dulwich was called the Classical side—as distinguished from the Modern side, for boys intent on business and civil-service positions; the Science side; or the Engineering side. The Classical side aimed expressly for admission to Oxford and Cambridge, and was loaded up with Latin and Greek, mathematics and modern languages. In his first year, George was introduced to Greek grammar, and in time was reading Thucydides, Euripides, and Homer, along with Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil. Each year in June, on Founder’s Day, students put on a classical Greek play in translation. One year they did Aristophanes’ Clouds. Playing one of Plato’s disciples was George, photographed for the occasion with the other boys, sprawled on the grass in chiton and sandals.

  Sometime in 1921, just eighteen and still at Dulwich, George saw a production of the Oresteia, Aeschylus’ classic trilogy of murder and revenge. It was directed by J. T. Sheppard, an Alleynian from the previous generation. Sheppard had gone to King’s, where he’d become a fellow, and then to renown as a classical scholar. “A missionary for the Classics,” someone once called him, known for a “dynamic personality and his histrionic gifts as a lecturer.” For thirty-five years, he would direct productions of his own translations of Greek plays, and it was one of these George saw in 1921. “At the risk of appearing sentimental or gushing,” he wrote to Sheppard a few years later, “I feel I must write and tell you how much I owe to you in the study of Classics.” That production of the Oresteia had fixed him on learning Greek, he said. During his three years as a King’s undergraduate, George saw much of Jack Sheppard, whom he would esteem as mentor and credit with influencing his whole approach to the field. “Ever since I have been at college the chief enjoyment I have had from reading has been due to you.”

  Still, his daughter Margaret Alexiou insisted later, “Classics was second best” for George Thomson. At King’s, where he held a scholarship (thus ensuring his name would be permanently enshrined on the Honours Board in Dulwich’s Great Hall), he might have preferred to study Gaelic. But there was no Gaelic Studies at King’s in those days. George would go on to earn a permanent and distinguished name in the classics; in doing so, he endured no serious deprivation. Still, this other, seemingly discordant thread, Gaelic and all things Irish, would wend through his mental universe always.

  It must have happened early, while he was still at Dulwich. During his first years there, until he was past fifteen, the Great War raged. Notices of Alleynians killed in action, five hundred of them by war’s end, darkened the life of the school. One Alleynian was killed leading an infantry charge, in October 1916, about the time George first enrolled. Another’s plane crashed on return from a raid, killing him, in George’s third year. Yet, as close to home as it must have seemed, the European war apparently did not afflict him as much as other events partly coincident with it but cresting later. By these I mean the seven years of trauma in Ireland, from the Easter Rising in 1916 through the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923.

  “During the last years of my high school studies,” Thomson wrote later, “the Irish rebellion against the English colonial occupation began and the hard struggle of the Irish people for their liberation moved me deeply.” He asserted, and it was repeated later in the family, that his mother’s ardent Irish nationalism—she was of Northern Irish descent on her father’s side—accounted for Ireland’s hold on him. That doubtless figured in. But just as important was that these struggling Irish represented an oppressed peasantry, chafing under the boot of a great monolith of an industrial power. In George’s adolescent imagination, it was not abstract Ireland with a claim on him, but its suffering people.

  The home library George catalogued when he was twelve or thirteen included no works of Thomas Hardy, in particular not his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which George read later, when he was sixteen. It was the formative literary experience of his life. Tess tells the story of a peasant girl, daughter of a farm laborer, in Wessex, the fictional rural landscape Hardy created for his novels. She is seduced by a local squire, then “rescued”—this was George’s word when he wrote about it later—by a parson’s son, Angel Clare, who has decided to educate himself about the realities of rural life. Living there among the peasants, he falls in love with Tess. For a time it seems they will marry. But the story darkens. He forsakes her. She kills her original seducer, a D’Urberville, and goes to the gallows. The book’s last paragraph tolls an ironic bell: “ ‘Justice’ was done.…” George would recall “the burning anger with which I read that last paragraph,” his hatred for a society whose cruelties led to Tess’s tragedy “and contempt for those who tried to justify it.” When he read Tess again, in the 1950s, while visiting China, he needed to ingest it only a little at a time, he wrote, because it “evokes so many forgotten memories.” It was just too intense. “Again and again I find myself recalling my feelings at the very first reading.” It, and indeed Hardy’s whole oeuvre, with its grand narrative of a peasantry laid waste by the modern world, would resonate through George’s life.

  Hardy’s fictional Wessex was a thinly veiled version of his ancestral home, Dorset, a largely rural and agricultural county on England’s south coast. “As a schoolboy,” George would write, “I spent my holidays in Dorset, cycling around and staying with the poorest cottagers I could find”—descendants, very likely, of those who had inspired Hardy a half-century before. Later, he adds, “I came to know the Irish peasantry as well as anyone could who was not one of them.” There is perhaps a boastful tincture to this claim to hard-won knowledge of plain folks. But more significant is the close mental link it suggests between the Hardy-like figures from Dorset he met as a boy and the Blasket Islanders he’d befriend later.

  The Irish tragedy playing out in the newspapers while he was in high school and in his first year at King’s consumed him. Later, he’d cite particularly “the Black-and-Tan terror in Ireland,” which he connected in his mind to the injustices visited on Tess. He became “an ardent Sinn Feiner,” referring to the militant nationalist movement that, beginning late in 1917, came under the dominion of a new chief, Éamon de Valera. When George was about seventeen, he joined the Gaelic League and began attending Irish-language classes at its London branch. “As soon as he’d get home he’d throw off his cadet uniform” and head off, his wife recounted later. The West Dulwich train station was a short walk away. Fifteen minutes later, he’d be in central London’s Victoria Station.

  Meanwhile, he amassed texts and literature in Irish. Like The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, which joined his library around Christmas 1921. George’s edition of this ancient Irish tale of three-cornered love was published by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, in Irish and English, with a notes section and glossary to help new students. Invariably, George would write his name in these volumes, often with rather a flourish. Much as teenagers often try out different signatures, George tried out different names. Sometimes it was just “G. Derwent Thomson.” But often it was one or another version of his name in Irish.

  Into the front cover of his Concise Irish Grammar, George recorded this poem:

                 Idly I scan the unillumined page

                 And slowly con the grave grammarian’s vale

                 Of “fear” and “ban” and “rann,” and “cwail le cwail” …

                 I read the strange script of a vanished age


                 And follow threads which this with that word bind

                 In close-wrought vocal tapestries entwined.

                 Then the print fades, the book slips from my hands.

                 My eyes are clouded and my spirit sees

                 Long dances in the fairy forest-lands

                 And black-haired Deirdre laughing in the breeze.

  He wrote the poem in March 1922, while still in Dulwich.

  One day probably early the following year, his first at King’s, George was in Jack Sheppard’s rooms in Wilkins Hall when he met another Kingsman, Arthur Waley. George said he was thinking of heading off to the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of Ireland, to learn the language. Waley, thirty-three, was no Celticist, having trained in the classics at King’s and then gone on to teach himself Chinese and Japanese. But just then he was at the British Museum, as its assistant keeper of Oriental prints and manuscripts. If George wanted to sample the Gaeltacht, Waley suggested, he’d probably want to meet a colleague of his at the Museum, a Mr. Robin Flower.

  When the two men met, Flower urged George to go to the Great Blasket. The term at King’s was over in May, so George doubtless went home to Dulwich first. But late that summer, on a wet day in late August, a little after his twentieth birthday, he arrived in Dingle. It was the day of the general election marking the first real peace after seven years of war. George asked directions, in English. Who was this Englishman who spoke a little Irish, worried the police, and what was he doing there? He was stopped, questioned, perhaps arrested, though if so not for long. The issue was soon settled; apparently he was no spy or provocateur.

  The next day—Sunday, August 26, 1923—George reached Dún Chaoin. At some point, he made his way down the steep snaking path carved into the side of the cliff that led to the slip. From there he was rowed across Blasket Sound to the island.

  Máire Maidhc Léan, aged fourteen and “just a slip of a school girl,” as she remembered herself, saw a boat approaching the island that day and went down the hill to greet it. “Out of the currach,” she recalled, “stepped a courteous, slightly built young man with dark hair and a pleasant smile.” George wore a raincoat, something she’d never seen. She “gave him a thousand welcomes and was delighted that he understood me, that he had some Irish.”

  That evening, at her family’s whitewashed stone house midway up the hill, across a path from the king’s house, George was shown to the room where he was to stay. They sat him down at the table, served him tea, invited him to sit by the fire. Soon, Máire recalled, he was “pointing to the pot rack and asking what it was called in Irish. I told him. He continued asking me the name for this and that.” Her father sat on the long wooden bench nearby, the settle, and soon was likewise being pelted with questions.

  The children had a school assignment, to memorize Tennyson’s “The Brook”: “For men may come and men may go,/But I go on forever.” At the end of that long day, George was exhausted, but couldn’t sleep, was too tired to sleep, didn’t want to sleep, charmed as he was “by listening to them reciting it by heart.”

  • • •

  So, George was staying with the Maidhc Léans. Or that, at least, is what the family was called on the island. In fact, no census recorded any such name. In English, their family name was Guiheen. In Irish, by one spelling, it was Ó Guithín. (The prefix “Ó” or “Mac,” literally “son” or “grandson,” means “descendant of”; “Ní,” “daughter,” does the same for women.) Máire was formally Máire Ní Ghuithín, the interpolated “h” altering her surname’s pronunciation from the familiar hard “g” to something like a French rolled “r” and, grammatically, representing the genitive case, making Máire of that family. On the island, though, she would more often have been called Máire Maidhc Léan.

  For an Englishman from London like George, a thicket of confusion obscured the names of his new acquaintances. This was no trifle on a par with whether Edward goes by “Ed,” “Teddy,” or “Ted.” Nor was spelling really the problem; the island’s was an oral culture, most islanders being illiterate in Irish, so spelling needn’t have much troubled him. Rather, the confusion stemmed in part from the fact that most of the island population, about 150 at the time, derived from only a handful of families. There were lots of Guiheens on the island, just as there were lots of Keanes, Kearneys, and O’Sullivans, to momentarily cede them the Anglicized forms of their names. Refer to “that Guiheen girl” and you might leave the listener hopelessly unenlightened: which Guiheen girl? Nor was “Máire Guiheen” much better; there were only so many families, but also only so many given names, like Máire, Eibhlín, and Nóra, or Seán, Pádraig, and Tomás among the men and boys. During one period, the village was home to six Seán Ó Cearnaighs.

  How to distinguish the many Guiheens one from another? This particular Mary Guiheen—Máire Maidhc Léan Ní Ghuithín—was the daughter of Maidhc and the granddaughter of Léan. Her mother, Maidhc’s wife, was Máire Ní Chatháin, Synge’s little hostess, now about forty; island women often retained their maiden names. But because there might well be other Máire Ní Chatháins—as indeed there were—the little hostess was also known as Máire Pheats Mhici—or Máire, daughter of Pádraig, granddaughter of Mícheal.

  But we are not done yet. The islanders often bore distinguishing nicknames unrelated to genealogy. Pádraig Ó Catháin was, as we’ve seen, an rí, the king. One particular Tomás Ó Cearnaigh, who had immigrated to the States only to return, was known as An Poncan, the Yank. Eibhlín Ní Shé was known as Nelly Jerry. In one of his books, Tomás Ó Criomhthain dubbed a villager Tadhg the Joker. Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, when a bit older, was usually just An File, the poet. His mother, island storyteller Peig Sayers, was almost never known as Máiread Sayers Uí Ghaoithaín, her proper name; she was simply Peig, or sometimes Peig Mhór, Big Peig.

  This way of names had emerged naturally enough in use. But to anyone new to the island, and certainly for an Englishman encountering it for the first time, it posed problems—as it does for us here, in print, lost among Irish names thick with seemingly familiar English consonants and vowels that nonetheless don’t add up to familiar English sounds. In Irish, “Siobhán” is pronounced “Shivanne.” “Ó Laoghaire” is “Ó Leary.” To vex us the more, Irish spelling changed during the years our story spans; for instance, the name for Ireland’s Irish-speaking area went from “Gaedhealtacht” to “Gaeltacht.” Names changed, too. Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, an island schoolteacher who later wrote a book under that name, might have been known a few years later, or had she immigrated to America, as Nora O’Shea.

  But Nóra Ní Shéaghdha didn’t immigrate to America and would not have been known by an Anglicized version of her name—except, perhaps, to English-speaking merchants in Dingle or tourists who didn’t know any better. In this book, islanders most often retain their Irish names. So do Irish scholars and writers, such as Muiris Mac Conghail or Pádraig Ó Fiannachta.

  Leslie Matson, an Irish schoolteacher who in the late 1950s took an interest in Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, later prepared a compendium of brief island biographies, “Blasket Lives,” for which, as helpful resource, he prepared lengthy lists and cross-lists of each islander’s Irish name, Anglicized name, maiden name, nickname, or pet name; that was one good answer to a problem with no perfect solution. George Thomson himself, in a note to one of his translations from the Irish, would write, “With regard to the spelling of proper names I have sought rather to help the English reader than to be consistent. Some Irish names have an English form, others have not; and we have used one or the other, whichever seemed the more convenient.” In these pages, I steer close to Thomson and adhere to no one fixed method or system. Rather, I have tried to let the story itself, as it develops, suggest which name to u
se when, and so, just possibly, keep things straight.

  George Thomson, we’ve said, would become an eminent classical scholar. But just then, it needs saying, he was a kid—a university student just turned twenty. He was handsome, amiable, and deeply interested in everything around him, so it wasn’t long before he fell in among villagers his own age. One was Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, or O’Guiheen in English (who, about George’s age, looked something like the young John Lennon). “We became close friends,” George recalled. “He was different from the other boys—studious and introspective.” And compulsively superstitious: once, when a boy he didn’t see threw pebbles at him, he was sure the fairies were attacking him. He was imaginative, smart, and one of only a few islanders who could read and write in Irish; when just fifteen, he had a poem published in a national Irish-language publication. “There never were children with cleverer heads for books,” his mother once told Robin Flower. On September 7, 1923, Mícheál noted in his journal that he and Seoirse—George’s name on the island—went down to the slip. “He’s a nice boy. He has a camera.” And he was snapping pictures with it like the tourist he still was.