On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  That was America to some Irishmen. And that, or something like it, was America to George Thomson. Just twenty-three years old—and just twenty-three years old in the intensity of his opinions—he had plainly imbibed such values and understandings. “Listen here,” he told Maurice now:

  If you want the history of America look at the Yank who comes home; think of his appearance. Not a drop of blood in his body but he has left it beyond. Look at the girl who goes over with her fine comely face! When she comes home she is pale and the skin is furrowed on her brow. If you noticed that, Maurice, you would never go to that place.

  There was no future for Maurice on the island, George realized, but that didn’t mean he had to leave Ireland. Why not, he’d importuned him before, stay in Ireland and join the Civil Guard—the Garda Síochána, the Irish national police formed after the establishment of the Free State. With them, he’d find good opportunities. “There was the reluctance of the world on me to do as he said,” Maurice would write. But he had to decide one way or the other. “Both of us knew that if I did not agree with him that day I would be gathered away [to America] before the summer was come again.”

  Finally, he yielded. He would forsake America. He would enlist in the Guard.

  That evening, just before George’s departure the following day, Maurice took down his fiddle and headed over to George’s place, where he found him seated on a stool by the fire. They talked a while, his friend at one point replying with a local idiom.

  “’Tis the fine, rich Irish, you have now,” he told George.

  “And if it is, it is you should be thanked, for isn’t it from yourself I learned all I have!” George replied.

  Then it was up to the house at the top of the village, strains of music reaching them, everyone soon dancing, “George stripped to the shirt like themselves, for the night was soft.” When they took a breather outside, George reminded his friend that, once on his way to Dublin to enlist, Maurice had but to telegraph him and he’d be there at the station to greet him.

  It took him six months or more to build up to it; George, who by now had graduated from King’s and was living in Dublin, encouraged him by mail all the while. But finally, on March 14, 1927, as his father sat by the fire reading a letter from America, Maurice delivered the news: he was leaving the island, joining the Guard, heading off for Dublin the next day: “I give you my blessing,” his father said, “for so far as this place is concerned there is no doubt but it is gone to ruin.”

  Maurice’s journey to Dublin proved exhilarating, sad, confusing, and even, at least to us today, comic. There was nothing routine to any of it. It was all firsts. He was starting out on a new life—going where he had never gone, seeing what he had never seen. Each obstacle encountered, person met, or mistake made propelled him to some new height or depth of feeling.

  The king, on his regular mail hop, rows him over to Dún Chaoin, “my back to the Island of my birth and my face to the mainland.” He hears his dog, Rose, back on the island, “howling as she saw me departing from her. I crushed down the distress that was putting a cloud on my heart.”

  All is unfamiliar. On the mainland he must pick up a certificate from the parish priest, in whose Ballyferriter rectory he encounters a young woman who understands nothing he says. “Well, thought I, isn’t it a strange thing to meet already a girl without Irish!”

  Tramping to Dingle, he follows the line of telegraph poles. At the house of a family friend, where he’s to stay, he’s at first not recognized. He reveals himself as if by riddle: he’s no Irishman, he says, though he has Irish blood, and has arrived in Ireland this very day.

  How, then, has he picked up his fine Irish?

  “Arra, my dear sir, isn’t it we who have the best Irish?”

  But if not an Irishman, what, then, is he?

  “I am a Blasket man, my boy.”

  That night, his sleep is blighted by visions of railway tracks running this way and that, people like ants, all confusion. “Three nights I lived in that night.” After breakfast, he makes his way to the station, tortured by the sense that everyone is staring at him. The train pulls out. Green fields and unfamiliarly abundant trees sweep by him, “houses in every glen and ravine, the Blasket Island and the wild sea far out of sight. They were gone now and I a lonely wanderer, and as the old saying goes, ‘Bare is the companionless shoulder.’ ”

  The train stops. People start to get out. Is this Tralee, where he must get out? No, it’s Annascaul; he’s mistaken a town of a scant few hundred for one of ten thousand. Yet he’s relieved now, counts himself lucky not to face a trek back to Dingle.

  Another stop. He grabs his bag. No, he learns, not this, either. He’s thrilled by one simple, irrefutable fact: so far, he’s not lost. He draws out his pipe, puffs at it with satisfaction.

  Finally, it’s Tralee. In the station, with four hours to kill, he stashes his bag against a wall, careful not to let it out of sight. But when he spies other waiting passengers hand over their luggage for red tickets, he does the same. “I was well pleased with myself now, and why wouldn’t I be, and every knowledge coming to me.”

  He steps into the telegraph office to wire George in Dublin. The girl behind the desk is reading a book, and it’s all he can do to get the telegraph form from her; they exchange scarcely a word. “ ‘There is no fear, my girl, but you are a stiff one,’ said I in Irish, knowing she would not understand me.”

  “ ‘Good day to you, sir,’ ” says she in English, finally. And that “sir” gladdens him! Has he now the look of a gentleman? “My heart was now rising continually the way I was getting knowledge of everything.”

  Small triumphs of understanding follow one another. On the platform he sees “boxes thrown out of the train without pity or tenderness, big cans, full of milk as I heard, hurled out on to hard cement.” Then, back on board, he looks out the window as his own train makes a long, sweeping turn; he can see its whole length yet can’t see what drives it. Confusions and uncertainties. Irish gone, all is English.

  In Mallow, he gets off. “Change for Dublin! Change for Cork!” he hears. He follows a savvy-looking woman he has met to the Dublin train, settles into his seat, and falls asleep—until the conductor comes to punch his ticket. “I think you have made a mistake,” he’s told. “You are halfway to Cork.” Doubts overtake him. It’s not the Dublin train at all. He glares at the woman. “I was unable to crush down the ill will I felt towards her.”

  But in Cork all is resolved, and he’s directed to the next train for Dublin, at no extra fare. “ ‘A thousand thanks to you,’ said I …, as pleased as any other mother’s son from here to Halifax, as an Islander would say.” He telegraphs George with the change of plans.

  At nine that night, the train for Dublin pulls out of the station. Maurice sleeps until a cold shiver wakes him.

  The night had a lonesome look. It was sharp and cold, nothing to be heard only the duga-ga-dug, duga-ga-dug of the train and now and again the fairy music of the wind as it ran against the windowpanes. It is far away my thoughts were at that moment—far west in the Blasket. I see the curraghs back beyond Carrig Vlach and hear the glug-glag of the ripples on their sides. I see others off the strand of Yellow Island and yet others down to the west of the Tail, the nets stretched back out of the sterns and phosphorescence around them. I see again the old crew—Shaun Liam, Tigue O’Shea, and Tomás O’Carna down at the Tail, their nets in the sea and they talking. Look how they strike their arms together to keep themselves warm!

  The train pushes through the night until they reach the edge of Dublin. It is three in the morning. At this unholy hour, will George really be there?

  The train was entering the station, my heart beating. It stretched alongside the platform. There was no one alive to be seen, only a big fat policeman, covered well up under his chin. I took my bag and stepped out, and I tell you I hated the thought of that city.

  As I leapt out who was before me but George!

  The young man who
welcomed Maurice to Dublin in March 1927 already had close ties of the heart to Ireland, the Irish people, and the Irish language. But professionally and intellectually, it bears repeating, he was a student of the classics. For at least ten years, since he enrolled in the Classics side at Dulwich College, the world of Homer and Aeschylus had been his intellectual home. Most of the books he’d write over the years pertained to ancient Greece, not modern Ireland. In the months between his visit to the Inish with Maurice and their reunion now, he had been finishing a thesis that would become the first of them, Greek Lyric Metre, upon which his scholarly reputation rests in part even today.

  His thesis was titled “The Prometheus Trilogy of Aeschylus, with an Appendix on Greek Lyric Metre”—two sharp divisions, his acknowledgments section sounding two chimes of thanks. First to Jack Sheppard, his mentor at King’s; his own work, George wrote with a twenty-three-year-old’s overwrought deference,

  is merely a corollary of Mr. Sheppard’s work on Greek tragedy. I am digging with the tools he has put into my hands in a corner of the field which he has not had time to explore so thoroughly as the rest, and, if I have succeeded in striking water at any point, it is because the genius of the diviner first showed me where it lay.

  As to the second part of his thesis, it represented “the first results of an attempt to apply the metrical principles laid down by the late Walter Headlam in 1902.” This other King’s classicist had died young, at forty-two, but not before contributing what George termed “a brief but brilliant” article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies on meter in Greek lyric poetry. In it, Headlam had asserted that due appreciation of Greek poetry meant bringing to it an insistently musical ear: “The principles of Form in modern music are the very principles then followed in Greek lyric metre.” Headlam’s paper had attracted scant attention in England and Germany, but, George wrote,

  as soon as I read it, I felt that he had touched the heart of the matter. Not only did the principles he enunciated seem to my ear completely satisfactory, but the examples he gave of their application did more than carry conviction—they revealed beauties in the poems concerned which had hitherto passed unnoticed.

  If Sheppard was his literary father, he wrote now, Headlam was his literary grandfather. “I am an unworthy descendant,” he concluded, “but not, I hope, lacking in filial piety.” He signed his name and dated it, “Dublin, Dec. 9th, 1926.”

  Dublin. The city had been George’s home since fall, as it would be for most of the next five years, ending in 1931. Summers, he was off to the Blaskets; at least once he went to Greece; and for the year spanning 1928 he was back in Cambridge. But mostly during this period Dublin was the center of his life, a place more congenial to him than Cambridge or London would ever be, furnishing him a store of fond memories. What helped, too, of course, was the delicious freedom he enjoyed thanks to his success at King’s.

  Students at Cambridge University took a formidable university-wide examination known as the Tripos, in two parts, separated by a year or more. George scored “firsts,” or first-class honors, in both. In 1926, the same year he earned his B.A., he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship called the Craven Studentship, for “advanced study or research away from Cambridge in the Languages, Literature, History, Archaeology or Art of ancient Greece or Rome.” It was a good gig: at a time when many a whole family scraped by on a hundred pounds a year or less, the Craven assured its fortunate young recipient two hundred; the assistant librarian at King’s made only 235. With Craven in hand, George was off to Dublin for the academic year 1926–27, nominally enrolled at Trinity College. Especially once he’d put the finishing touches on his dissertation, at the end of 1926, he was free to throw himself into the life of his vibrant new urban home.

  Dublin was Ireland’s capital and largest city, population about 400,000, storied in recent revolutionary history. The façade of the General Post Office, off O’Connell Street, still bore bullet holes from the Rising of April 1916. The imposing legal complex known as Four Courts, which Michael Collins’s men shelled in the early days of the Irish Civil War, was still largely in ruins. The Abbey Theatre, on Lower Abbey Street, with its gabled wrought-iron canopy, was the site of the Playboy Riots. James Joyce had made the Dublin of a single day—June 16, 1904—the stage set for his epochal Ulysses, published in 1922. Dublin’s streets were crowded with automobiles, motor-driven trucks, horse-drawn cars, and bicycles. Double-decker trams barreled through College Green, between Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland building across the street, bearing ads for Savoy Chocolate and O’Mara’s Bacon and Hams. Dublin was in its heyday, busy, crowded, and culturally vibrant.

  Just now, George was living in books-and-papers-crowded rooms on Leeson Street, near Saint Stephen’s Green. But he was frequently in Raheny, a well-off enclave in the northern outskirts of the city, home to Moya Llewelyn Davies, a local grande dame, beautiful and rich, who lived in a fine old mansion there known as Furry Park. Maurice didn’t know it when he stepped off the train in Dublin early that morning in March 1927, but Furry Park was their destination, he and George being guests for the week of Mrs. Davies.

  From the station, at three-thirty in the morning, George and Maurice are driven off in a car, courtesy no doubt of their hostess. “I was blinded by the hundred thousand lights,” Maurice wrote later, “lights on every side of me, lights before me, and lights above my head on the tops of poles.” A car slices toward them along the other side of the road, “and yet another, our own making rings around the corners and blowing the horn without ceasing. I don’t know if I am in a dream. If not, it is the Land of the Young without a lie.”

  Eventually, they stop outside what Maurice remembers as “a big castle, magnificent lamp alight above the door, the walls covered in ivy, up to twenty windows in it, big and broad.” Silently, like robbers, waking no one, George lets them in. They enter a large room, elaborately furnished, with “pictures of noblemen long dead hanging on the walls,” fine furniture, lush curtains.

  Late next morning, “the sunbeams were pouring in through the curtains and the two of us awake, talking and conversing of the affairs of the island.” A week before, Maurice was sleeping in a stone cottage. Now he enjoys the comforts of Furry Park. There’s a knock on the door. In comes Moya, “young, handsome, brightly laughing … the flower of nobility.” She serves them tea.

  George Thomson with Maurice O’Sullivan in his new Civic Guard uniform, a few years before Maurice began work on the book that became Twenty Years A-Growing (Illustration Credit ill.14)

  “Isn’t that a handsome girl?” says Maurice, once she’s left.

  At one point he steps out among the trees sheltering the grounds. Leaves flutter. Birds sing. A scene to glory in. “Isn’t it a fine life is given to some rather than to others!” he muses. “I don’t know what in the world could trouble the man who lives there, though I have often heard it is they who are the worst for discontent.” Not for a minute does he buy that one; a “great lie,” he calls it. A man “would need only to sit outside his castle listening to the music of the birds for all sorrow to be lifted from his heart.”

  That evening, George takes him into town for a movie. Maurice sees clean streets, happy couples with apparently nothing else to do. “Isn’t it a great pity entirely for the poor lads back in the Island,” he ruminates, “with nothing for them to see or hear but the big rollers coming up through the Sound and the howl of the wind blowing from the north-west across the hills, and often for four weeks without news from the mainland!”

  They reach O’Connell Bridge, which spans the Liffey at the heart of the city, with “trams and motors roaring and grating, newspaper-sellers at every corner shouting in the height of their heads, hundreds of people passing this way and that without stopping, and every one of them, men and women, handsomely got up.” The traffic is so heavy he and George can’t at first get across the street. It’s worse “than to be back off the quay of the Blasket waiting for a calm moment to run in.”
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br />   They continue, probably straight up O’Connell Street in all its imperial width, finally turning in to Prince Street. There, facing them, a hundred yards back from O’Connell, where the street narrows, is the Capitol Theatre. Its blinking marquee lights—capitol—seem to Maurice as if on fire. He exclaims at the sheer spectacle of it. George acts astonished, too, but Maurice suspects he’s being kind. “Well, well, said I to myself, I must change and not show my wonder at anything else.”

  The Capitol, where Fianna Fail, the new republican party, had held its inaugural meeting a few months before, lies practically in the shadow of the bullet-riddled General Post Office. Built originally as an opera house, it now presents movies as well as live shows. It is grandly overdone, with cafés, lounges, and ballrooms, seats for fourteen hundred people, three tiers of private boxes and cantilevered galleries—just the thing to impress a boy from the country.

  It does. “It took my senses from me,” Maurice would write. “Stars came before my eyes with the sight—the cleanliness and the splendour of the place within. It was impossible to comprehend it. Wonderful is the power of man. We went up a staircase as twisty as a corkscrew and my delight was so great that I thought of heaven.”

  They take their seats. The great curtains part. The Blaskets are far, far away.

  Chapter 6

  The Last Quiet Time

  [1929]

  George Thomson’s first time on the Blaskets came in 1923; his trip to Inishvickillaun with Maurice in 1926; Maurice’s journey to Dublin in 1927. The first of the books that would begin to draw interest to the Blaskets were published in Irish in 1928 and 1929. The 1930s would bring to the island journalists, curiosity seekers, language enthusiasts, and film crews enough, it could seem, to crowd out the islanders themselves; this flood of attention and publicity, coupled with the worldwide economic depression, the gathering toll of emigration, and other factors, would change the face of the island forever. The mid-to-late 1920s, then, was the last time when the island was still something like what it long had been, before it became something else.