On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Inishvickillaun, the island to which Maurice, George, and the others rowed now, had perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. It stood in relation to the Great Blasket much as the Great Blasket did to the rest of Ireland—just off to the southwest. About a mile long and a half-mile wide, it had one high grassy plateau, punctuated by two distinct peaks, which over the years had sometimes been farmed for potato, cabbage, onion, and oats; it was good land. Tomás Ó Criomhthain would write of a land agent taking men there to shear sheep kept on the island, of a three-day visit to hunt rabbits that storms stretched to a week. The island had been inhabited by one family until as recently as 1904, and Synge noted the following year that old Maurice Daly, a Blasketer, planned to spend the coming winter there alone. The island held ruins of cottages, and of an ancient chapel. It had a small graveyard. Puffins and storm petrels called it home now.

  All this, however, was only the visible Inish—as Inishvickillaun (which is spelled in dozens of different ways) was known among the Blasket Islanders. There was another Inish, one invested with magic. “The whole island,” observed Robin Flower, “is inhabited with the sense of loneliness; it is as though it were at the last end of things, dwelling in a silence which the ceaseless murmur of the sea round its base and the whining gulls about its summit rather accentuate than disturb.” Something in this peculiar place—“the most pleasant and mysterious of the Blaskets,” George would one day call it—made it seem haunted by spirits, fairies, and the dead.

  It was Inishvickillaun that spawned a tune much loved by the islanders, the “Song of the Fairies.” The strains of what one scholar has termed this “musically eccentric” air seem to come from far away, as a distant fiddle sound, persistent, rising, unearthly. No hearing of it suggests anything but some other world, remote, cut off from our own. Robin Flower wrote how, according to local lore, a man once sat there on the Inish alone, playing his fiddle, tossing off the usual “jigs and reels and hornpipes, the hurrying tunes” that so inspired the dancers. But then, as he sported with the familiar music of his day, a wholly different tune rose up, unbidden. He could not tamp it down, this rebellious, mournful sound. It “passed away to the cliffs and returned again, and so backwards and forwards again and again, a wandering air wailing in repeated phrases.” This fairy music, as Flower interpreted it, was “a lament for a whole world of imaginations banished irrevocably now, but still faintly visible in the afterglow of a sunken sun.”

  When, in 1930, a visiting Jesuit priest came to hear it, only one young island girl could actually play or sing it; yet all knew where it had originated—on Inishvickillaun. And the Inish, drowned in magic even in the clear light of summer, was where George, Maurice, and the others were bound today, rowing resolutely along the southern precipices of the big island. They passed seals in pairs on the reefs, crying, keening, sturgeons leaping, splashing back into the sea.

  “Before long,” Maurice wrote of their trip later,

  we reached the strand of the Inish and the two of us turned our faces up into the island. The sky was cloudless, the sea calm, sea-birds and land-birds singing sweetly. The sight of my eyes set me thinking. I looked west to the edge of the sky and I seemed to see clearly the Land of the Young—many-coloured flowers in the gardens; bright houses sparkling in the sunshine; stately, comely-faced, fair-haired maidens walking through the meadows gathering flowers.

  Here again was Tir na nOg, which Flower had written of to a fellow Celticist on first coming to the Blaskets in 1910. That same year, he’d published a book of poems, one of which bore the same name:

                 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.

  Like most visions of paradise, of course, Tir na nOg’s was darker and more ambivalent. The Land of the Young was one of perfect happiness, yes, but always beyond one’s reach, impossible to attain lastingly. In one version of the story drawn from Irish myth, the poet Oisin, from Fionn Mac Cumhail’s band of legendary heroes, is chosen by a beautiful maiden, Niamh of the Golden Hair, to join her there. For three hundred enchanted years they enjoy bliss, never growing older. But Oisin cannot forget the world he’s left behind. Niamh understands, gives him a magical horse to bear him back for a visit, but warns he must never actually set foot on the mortal earth. Of course he does, is forever denied Tir na nOg, and instantly becomes old and blind.

  Now, though, at least in Maurice’s fertile imagination, it could seem they were almost there, fairly imbibing its fragrance. “What do you see in the west?” asks George, who has thrown off his jacket and sits on a rock looking down at him. “Upon my word, George, it is at the Land of the Young I was looking.”

  In a moment, though, his vision shape-shifts into something else entirely. “I looked west at the edge of the sky where America should be lying,” he wrote,

  George Thomson, on a northern slope of the island (Illustration Credit ill.13)

  and I slipped back on the paths of thought. It seemed to me now that the New Island [America] was before me with its fine streets and great high houses, some of them so tall that they scratched the sky; gold and silver out on the ditches and nothing to do but to gather it. I see the boys and girls who were once my companions walking the street, laughing brightly and well contented.

  America, land of the young, of opportunity, of gold and riches, was beckoning to Maurice, as it did every islander.

  George, who was returning to England the next day, “looked at me between the two eyes,” Maurice recounted. “ ‘There is no one but the two of us on this lonely island,’ ” he said by way of preamble, “ ‘and so I hope you will put courage in my heart.…’ ”

  “I knew well what was the question he had to put to me,” Maurice wrote, for his friend had asked it many times before.

  “ ‘The question is,’ said George, ‘have you cast America out of your head?’ ” He wanted to know, in other words, was Maurice staying in Ireland or immigrating to the New World?

  Numbers matter. It’s not enough to coolly report that many Irish immigrated to Australia, Canada, and America. It may be truer to say that, from before the Famine to the time of George and Maurice’s visit to the Inish, most Irish emigrated. In the early nineteenth century, Ireland’s population was eight million; by 1926, fewer than four million; its rural west, especially, was decimated. A letter to the editor of The Irish Statesman in 1927 asked readers inexplicably left unmoved by emigration whether they had “ever travelled through the empty lands, empty now of even the bullocks? To any sane person a perusal of the last census is terrifying; the evidence afforded to the eye of a deserted countryside and a swelling group of dingy, decaying towns filled with beggars is overwhelming.”

  When, later, he’d come to compare Ireland to the ancient world of the Greeks, George Thomson would liken the Blaskets to Ithaca, which Odysseus endorsed as “a rough place, but a fine nurse of men.” A Kerryman from near Dingle would, in the 1950s, use a similar image in a sadder way: Ireland, he said, had become “a nursery for raising human beings for export.” First, aboard wooden sailing vessels, the famine ships, that bore emigrants to America; then, in Maurice’s day, in the great six-hundred-foot steamers. Many Irish immigrants made good lives for themselves in America, and their children still better ones. They built America’s railroads. They tended the sculleries and nurseries of brownstones in Boston’s Back Bay. They filled the ranks of the police and fire departments of American cities and later commanded them. Today forty million or more Americans trace their roots to Ireland. Yet, if the loss of so many of its youngest and most spirited counts as Ireland’s tragedy, maybe the greater tragedy lies in the conditions that drove the
m to emigrate in the first place.

  The Congested District Boards, like the one that, around 1910, built the new houses on the Great Blasket? Such districts were “congested,” recall, because their populations were too great to support at any level above bare subsistence; “excess” Irish men and women clambered aboard ships, especially for America. The Famine was horrific, but conditions in Ireland all through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth were never much better; poverty took deep and persistent hold. Steel factories? Great textile manufacturers? Save for Belfast, in the North, there was nothing like that in Ireland. Rural Ireland was cut off from a rapidly industrializing world that had left it economically almost irrelevant. Synge found Aran and the Great Blasket irresistible; but he realized as clearly as anybody that “nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury.”

  Emigration was so ingrained in the national culture that it came to be seen as routine and expected, as a first job, or marriage, or bearing children was elsewhere. Custom and tradition built up around it; there was Irish music, Irish Catholicism … and Irish emigration. In the 1950s, an American scholar, Arnold Schrier, drew up a questionnaire on emigration that, under the aegis of the Irish Folklore Commission, went out to thirty specially selected folklore collectors. In it, he pointedly asked about such icons of emigration as the “emigrant letter” and the “American cheque.”

  The emigrant letter was the invariably sunny missive reciting the emigrant’s accomplishments and good fortune in America, passed around from person to person or read out loud by the parish priest at social gatherings, and often containing money. So predictably upbeat were they, Schrier’s folklore collectors were reminded, that ultimately they became “an object of sarcastic cant.” For example, an innocuous “How are you doing?” might get the sardonic reply, “Oh, fine, like an American letter,” any darker truths papered over. The gifts, money, and relentless good cheer from America, observes Kerby Miller, a University of Missouri–based authority on Irish emigration, “inspired dissatisfaction with customary life-styles, while the steady drain of young people weakened” traditional life back home. Emigration fed on itself. The number of Irish-speakers fell. The cultural glue of traditional music and folklore weakened.

  The American cheque was looked forward to eagerly come Christmas or Saint Patrick’s Day; it cleared debts with the village shopkeeper, paid funeral expenses, or supplied passage money for the next family member bound for America. The sum was often exaggerated, an empty letter never admitted; its value, after all, was the ultimate measure of how your Seán or Máire was doing across the sea. “Nobody was supposed to be poor or out of work in America.”

  Schrier asked his respondents about the American wake, too, the traditional leave-taking ritual for the emigrant and his family. One Kerry informant described it as “a combination of joviality and sorrow. The young people sang and danced. The older people were usually sad and silent, especially the parents of the intending emigrants.” There were rounds of tea, refreshments, and drink, on into the morning. And sad songs of emigration, which became so common that they, too, came to be seen as traditional. A young man “to his love did say”:

                 Oh Molly, lovely Molly

                 No longer can I stay,

                 For the ship is waiting at Queenstown

                 And her anchor now is weighed

                 But where I be I’ll think of thee

                 My lovely Irish maid.

  To which she replies:

                 When you go o’er to the Yankee shore

                 Some Yankee girls you’ll see

                 They will all look very handsome

                 And you’ll think no more of me.

                 You’ll forget the vows and promises

                 That you to me have made,

                 You’ll forget them all you left behind

                 And your lovely Irish maid.

  The American wake was a sad, recurrent part of Blasket life. “I have a great mind to go to America,” Maurice records his sister Maura (Máire) abruptly announcing one day while she’s washing the dishes and the rest of the family sits by the fire. Next day she writes to her aunt in America for passage money, and some weeks later it arrives. In the ensuing month, the household is consumed with the specter of her departure and that of her friend Kate. The old people lament no one will be left to bury them.

  The day approaches. “A mournful look was coming over the very walls of the house. The hill above the village which sheltered the houses seemed to be changing colour like a big, stately man who would bend his head in sorrow.”

  Finally, on the last night, everyone gathers at the house for the American wake, all “dancing and mirth” mixed with “a mournful look on all within. No wonder, for they were like children of the one mother, people of the Island, no more than twenty yards between any two houses, the boys and girls every moonlit night dancing on the Sandhills or sitting together and listening to the sound of the waves from Shingle Strand.” Maura collapses into Maurice’s arms. “Oh, Mirrisheen,” she says, using an affectionate diminutive, “what will I do without you?”

  “Be easy,” Maurice tells her: he’d probably be joining her before long. “Strike up a tune,” he says to a neighbor with the melodeon. “He began to play,” Maurice writes. “Four of us arose and I called my sister for the dance.”

  In America, the Irish didn’t settle willy-nilly across the great land but, like most immigrants, were drawn to specific, mostly urban enclaves. Many Irish countrymen, writes Kerby Miller, learned so much about America that they came to see it as scarcely foreign at all. “Western peasants often knew far more about Boston or New York than about Dublin, Cork, or even parts of their own counties.” Blasket Islanders, as it happens, made a cluster of towns along the Connecticut River centered on Springfield, Massachusetts, their new home.

  They, and immigrants from Dún Chaoin, Ventry, Dingle, and other West Kerry towns, settled into small houses on the north side of Springfield, took jobs at local factories, later worked their way into bigger houses on Hungry Hill, or in neighboring towns, some of them over the state border in northern Connecticut. Springfield itself, with a population of about 140,000, was the fourth-largest city in the state and a great Irish ghetto, with a bar, Irish-catering grocery, or funeral home on every corner. Sheehans, Guiheens, and Sullivans were all close by, comfortably nestled into parishes anchored by big Roman Catholic churches. In Maurice’s account of his sister’s coming emigration, she and her friend talked “of nothing but America. They would run across to the wall where pictures from Springfield were hanging. ‘Oh,’ Kate would say, ‘we will go into that big building the first day.’ ”

  Despair mounted among those who feared being left behind. “This place,” Maurice’s sister Eibhlín wrote in her journal the day George left the island in 1923, “is like a drowned vessel now. Everyone wants to leave when they get the chance.” Indeed, by the time of George and Maurice’s trip to the Inish in 1926, she had left for America. Sister Maura, of course, had recently left, too. And now, as George and he sat on Inishvickillaun looking out to sea, maybe it was Maurice’s turn.

  George had never been to America, through all his long life never would go, and, according to his daughter Margaret, developed no little antipathy for it. Even by 1926, America had become a symbol to him of all that was too rich, frenetic, and cruel in modern life. Nor was he alone in seei
ng its vaunted opportunity, its Hollywood glitter, its cars and skyscrapers, as just a cover for a place that ate up immigrants and consumed their souls, its stopwatch-clicking efficiency experts and gang bosses squeezing the life out of them. “There’s a curse on America if this place,” the Blasket, “is any better,” says Séamas, one of Tomás’s stock characters in Island Cross-Talk. “You’re better off working anywhere but where you’d be under somebody’s eye day in and day out.” Yes, says Séamaísin, Séamas’s foil, “it’s a corner of hell,” the condemned forced to go “without sleep or rest in their struggle to make a living.” In America, the good, gentle virtues of rural Ireland stood no chance.

  For many Irish priests, according to Kerby Miller, America was “a vicious, materialistic, ‘godless’ society, which corrupted the emigrants’ morals and destroyed their religious faith.” For some, America was the consummately un-Irish place, where neighborliness had been banished, where people loved only money, where, it was said, “rosy-faced, fair young girls, so pure, so innocent, so pious,” were dragged down into corruption. One Kerryman, his carefully penned reminiscence today preserved in a green leather-bound volume at the Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore in Dublin, told how Irishmen viewed compatriots returning from America, gold watches suspended on chains from their waistcoats, as hard-hearted and callous. “Having had the experience of life in America where it was a case of ‘every man for himself,’ they had lost the kindly good-natured ways of home.”