On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  In the National Library of Ireland in Dublin reside five large account books, the red lines running down their pages originally to record pounds, shillings, and pence. Inscribed on right-hand pages is Maurice O’Sullivan’s original manuscript for the book that became known as Fiche Blian ag Fás, or Twenty Years A-Growing. The title came from a local proverb:

                 Twenty years a-growing,

                 Twenty years a-blossoming,

                 Twenty years a-fading,

                 Twenty years a-withering.

  The book celebrates childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It is full of rambunctiousness, spirit, mayhem, and fun. Maurice was just twenty-five when he started it.

  “There is no doubt but youth is a fine thing though my own is not over yet and wisdom comes with age.” That’s how it begins. The second paragraph reads:

  I am a boy who was born and bred in the Great Blasket, a small truly Gaelic island which lies north-west of the coast of Kerry, where the storms of the sky and the wild sea beat without ceasing from end to end of the year and from generation to generation against the wrinkled rocks which stand above the waves that wash in and out of the coves where the seals make their homes.

  In the third paragraph, he tells how his mother died when he was six months old, that he was removed from the island and left in the care of “a stranger woman” in Dingle. When he returns, at age seven, he knows no Irish. At dinner his first day back, his father, grandfather, and two sisters speak Irish, which he can’t follow. That night, his sister sweeps the floor and shakes sand over it, a young man comes in with a melodeon, and soon there’s dancing. The crowd encourages one of the girls to sing.

  It was delightful to listen to her in the stillness of the night, everyone silent, with their chins on their hands, not a word out of them save now and then at the end of the verse, when my grandfather would cry, “My love forever, Eileen,” and that was the first bit of Irish I picked up that night.

  And from there it’s one adventure, one fine day’s quest, or hunt, or playful excess, to the next. “My grandfather and I were lying on the Castle Summit,” he’d write. “It was a fine sunny day in July. The sun was splitting the stones with its heat and the grass burnt to the roots. I could see, far away to the south, Iveragh painted in many colours by the sun.” As many a critic has commented, the sun always shone on Maurice’s boyhood. There is little of the time-worn resilience and resignation of Tomás’s book.

  Even the Great War, when Maurice was an adolescent, gets light treatment. A ship is sunk. Its cargo washes up on the island.

  Next day the quay and the strands were a grand sight, big timbers lying here and there and not a curragh with less than a hundred planks.

  “By God,” one man would say, “war is good.”

  “Arra, man,” said another, “if it continues this Island will be the Land of the Young.”

  The war changed people greatly. Idle loiterers who used to sleep it out till milking-time were now abroad with the chirp of the sparrow gathering and ever gathering. There was good living in the Island now.… Nothing was bought. There was no need. It was to be had on the top of the water—flour, meat, lard, petrol, wax, margarine, wine in plenty, even shoes, stockings and clothes.

  Eighty book pages later, George arrives on the island. We learn of their friendship, Maurice’s journey by train to Dublin, his enlistment in the Guard. The book ends two years after that—about the time Maurice started writing, in 1929. He returns to the island on holiday: “I took a car to Dunquin and how my heart opened when I reached Slea Head and saw the Blasket, Inish-na-Bró and Inish-vick-illaun stretched out before me in the sea to the west! I was as gay as a starling.”

  The National Library volumes are written mostly in blue ink, thirty-four lines to the page, few changes or corrections, the script periodically washing out as Maurice’s pen runs dry, intensifying with each resort to the ink pot. This, then, is the original manuscript. Or that, anyway, is what George called it in notes he deposited with the library. But three years passed between the time of Maurice’s first, failed attempts and the time the manuscript went to its publisher in late 1932. “I hadn’t known Muiris long when I realised he had the makings of a writer in him,” George would write. But “makings” or not, Maurice was a novice, facing the inevitable false starts, awkward detours, dead ends.

  “The only help I gave the author,” George claimed, “was to guide him towards adapting for publication the craft he had learnt from his grandfather as a child by the fire.” But even this modest claim suggests he played a substantial role in the book’s making, just as Brian Kelly and An Seabhac had in Tomás’s. With George in Galway and Maurice just twenty-five miles down the coast road, in Carraroe, the two of them had “the opportunity to edit it and advise each other,” as George put it in an Irish-language publication later. Sometimes he’d go out to Connemara, but more often they met on Saturdays, the manuscript in front of them, at Corrib Lodge.

  As one critic, Eibhlín Nic Gráinne, noted when the book came out, “evidence of mentorship” appears throughout,

  in the selection of incidents, the use of proverbs or snatches of Gaelic poetry which come into his narrative without much relevance but for effect, like the too frequent description of scenery. These topographical pieces are the “purple patches” that are more characteristic of English prose style than of Gaelic writing.

  George wrote that he did no more than “select and condense,” before submitting each new draft to Maurice. Select? Choice of word, incident, and order are fundamental to all writing. George may even have helped position paragraph breaks, which so markedly shape the reading experience: the original Irish-language manuscript is written out line by line, page after page, with virtually no such breaks. Condense? The published version, in English and Irish alike, is shorter than the original, whole chapters and parts of chapters omitted. Shorter even with the new material Thomson urged Maurice to add; in the words of his friend Tim Enright, George sometimes “reminded the author of incidents he had forgotten.” And he prevailed on Maurice to add two new chapters, the final one and one called “American Wake.” George himself was proud of his efforts on Maurice’s behalf. “I didn’t add to it,” he wrote, “but I did remove from it a word or two here and a line or half a page there, just as someone would card wool or clean the oats from the chaff.”

  Whatever help he gave, George was not preoccupied with ruthless fealty to fact. Twenty Years A-Growing is classed as memoir, or autobiography, but most critics agree it bears a flavor of fiction and gains much from Maurice’s imagination. Some passages, Irish critic Declan Kiberd has asserted categorically, “are not credible if you read them as autobiography.”

  One instance concerns the author’s first meeting with George, which I briefly described earlier, in the prologue. Maurice is “looking after a sheep on the hill-side, the sun yellowing in the west and a lark singing above.” He hears lambs clattering on the slopes beneath him, while down at the sea’s edge a shoal of mackerel rustle the water. Then he spies a man he doesn’t know. “Where had he come from and he approaching me now from the top of the hill in the darkening of the day?” They say hello. They sit down for a smoke. They try to talk.…

  Only trouble is, George didn’t remember it this way. He would tell quite a different story, of his coming up the path from the slip that first day, Maurice descending with a donkey, a wholly different conversation, nothing like Maurice’s version at all.

  If any did, this discrepancy invited editorial tinkering; after all, he’d been there. But he let it pass; it is Maurice’s telling that survives in print. George—no scientist, no literal-minded historian, his scholarly life brimming over with Greek gods and heroes and their improbable feats—was later asked about such seeming contradictions. No worries, he as much as said; poetic truth was not the same as narr
ative truth. Tomás Ó Criomhthain clung closer to the raw facts, he allowed, whereas Maurice freely took artistic license:

  What he gives us is not primarily a factual account at all but an artist’s impression of certain selected episodes. This does not mean that he misrepresents the facts; on the contrary, he is a keen and accurate observer, even of the smallest details; but he has recast his material in retrospect so as to present the essentials of each situation in a concrete and concentrated form. This method may convey more than a factual record, just as an artist’s portrait may reveal more than a photograph.

  George, in Muiris Mac Conghail’s happy phrasing, offered here “an original approach to Muiris’s originality.”

  Thus, a genial coterie of like-minded souls—Maurice, the Irish dreamer and storyteller; George, at home in poetry and myth; and finally, as we’ll see, George’s cotranslator, Moya Llewelyn Davies, romantic to the core—all sign off on an account rejecting servitude to literal truth.

  And whatever its departures from fact, George was surely right that Fiche Blian ag Fás did ably represent Blasket life. Declan Kiberd, for example, has cited the book’s fidelity to the island’s social life. “It’s full of people doing things together.… In some ways, it’s a better rendition of the communal nature of that community than was produced either by Synge or O’Crohan, both of whom admired that element but don’t seem to have captured it as fully as O’Sullivan did.”

  In November 1932, George, serving as Maurice’s agent, signed a contract with the book’s Irish-language publisher, Talbot Press, putting up a hundred pounds of his own money, several months’ salary, to subsidize its publication. His editor at Talbot? Three years after working on An tOileánach, An Seabhac was back in the picture. George corresponded with him regularly in the months before publication. Predictably, they had their editorial squabbles, George fighting for Maurice’s homegrown Blasket Irish against An Seabhac’s preference for language more elevated and refined.

  George helped see Maurice’s book into print in English as well, through Chatto & Windus in Britain. E. M. Forster wrote the introductory note for it: Readers of the Irish edition, he said, “cannot possibly be as much surprised as we,” readers of the translation, “for here is the egg of a sea-bird—lovely, perfect, and laid this very morning.” At one point, he, Maurice, and George met at Corrib Lodge, sat out on the bench by the waters of the Corrib, took snapshots memorializing their work together.

  Missing from the little party was Moya, with whom George had collaborated on the English translation. Chapter by chapter, he’d do a rough draft, then send it on to her. She’d rework it and return it to him for comments. Maurice got the last word. The translation, wrote George, “was done in some haste in order that it might be available as the Book Club choice for May, and also in order to bring pressure to bear on the Talbot Press, who were making difficulties over the Irish version.” It was a hectic, unsettled time.

  The bench where Maurice O’Sullivan, at right, and novelist E. M. Forster sit in this 1932 photo stood just across a narrow street from George Thomson’s digs, Corrib Lodge, in Galway city. (Illustration Credit ill.18)

  The book came out in April 1933 in Irish, and by August had sold sixteen hundred copies. In May, it appeared in English. Both editions were widely reviewed, critical response splitting sharply. Ireland’s Catholic Bulletin complained that Fiche Blian stirred “intervals of nausea.” The reviewer faulted its Irish, and was horrified to see it “punctuated with offensive expectoration and repeated invocations of the Prince of Darkness.” In the United States, where it was a Book-of-the-Month selection, a reviewer for The Nation, Ernest Boyd, observed that the author had not seen fit to mention that he inhabited “a part of the world where rain, dampness, and depression are more than ordinarily the portion of the native.” O’Sullivan’s Blasket, wrote Boyd, was pure Hollywood. Ireland was once more being saddled with a myth—“the charm of life without sanitation, adequate food, and decent housing.”

  More often, though, reviewers gave themselves over to Maurice’s exuberance. One thought of it not so much as a book as a kind of talisman: “The scream of a gull, the wash of a wave, the slow laugh of a peasant, a voice from the pre-historic past, all these sounded in Mr. O’Sullivan’s pages, and spirited me away.” Another termed it poetry: “For those to whom the rare poetic prose of Synge was a joy and a delight, Maurice O’Sullivan’s simple, lilting pages will hold a similar pleasure.”

  Irish short-story writer Seán Ó Faoláin described Maurice’s Blasket as lying three miles from the mainland—and five hundred years away, deep in the Middle Ages. “The life is hard and dangerous but perpetually gay,” he said, buying into Maurice’s sensibility; “in that respect it is almost a Land of the Ever Young.” Never before had he been able to praise a book without reservation, but now he had to: “Whatever this book may be for English readers, it is for Irishmen the most exciting thing that has happened within a hundred years. It is the first piece of literature in Irish since the scattering of the poets in the eighteenth century.”

  It seemed to George that Maurice’s book masterfully integrated its opposing themes, “the gaiety of youth and the magic of the old Gaelic world, the one blooming, the other in decay”; each gathered momentum across the span of the book. “The story moves like a piece of music, revealing a sustained sense of artistic unity.” To him, Maurice was a genuine artist who, it could seem, had only to give up the first person to write a full-blown novel.

  And yet he never did. “The novel,” George observed much later, “is a story of a new type,” caught up in the intimately personal, with scant room for what he called “the oral and collective.” Private preoccupations like that “lay beyond Muiris’s experience,” submerged as it was in the communal.

  Of all George’s experience of the island, its communitarian ways may have left the deepest mark. The sound of Irish on the lips of his friends? Yes, certainly, a distinct pleasure. But it was not just as individuals that he thought of them. He was alive to the uniqueness of the men and women he met, like the quirky islanders Tomás had sketched in Island Cross-Talk. But he’d found on the Great Blasket something more, something originally quite new to him—a sense of its collective spirit.

  George took numerous photos on his visits, most of them of islanders in groups. One was of Seán Ó Criomhthain, Eibhlín Ní Shuilleabháin, Mícheál O’Guiheen, and Maurice O’Sullivan, lined up together, sitting along a low stone wall. Another was of villagers climbing up the path from the slip. Another of children cavorting on the White Strand. Another of islanders gathered at the well. Did this people-together pattern reveal some deep unmet need in George? Maybe so, but just as likely it was simply what he saw most. The islanders did almost everything together. Visitors invariably reported them collecting above the slip to greet a naomhóg, or sweeping down onto the White Strand to gather wreckage, or crowding into the “parliament” house near the well at the top of the village. Synge described using a bit of broken mirror to shave: “As I stood with my back to the people I could catch a score of eyes in the glass, watching me intently.” Carl Marstrander depicted islanders as scarcely able to endure solitude at all. It required no special soft spot, then, for George to see what he saw in the village; he was immersed in a living community.

  And he loved it. For all its privations, the communal life of the island gave him something he found missing from London and Cambridge. Odysseus, we may recall George writing, called Ithaca “ ‘a rough place, but a fine nurse of men.’ One might say the same of the Blasket Island.” Not a nurse only of individuals, however, but of men, women, and children, living humanely and well, together.

  The islanders, he observed, “were bound to one another by close ties of blood and marriage, all residing within a stone’s throw of each other, all engaged in the same occupations and faced with the same dangers at sea.” On the island, over the course of many summers, he’d seen that up close. But now in Galway, as before in Dublin, he had time an
d leisure to make sense of it, to trace the new gullies in his brain the Blaskets had worn. Full and alive in him now was a communitarian streak that would lead him to see the world and its workings through new eyes.

  Now everything looked different. As a schoolboy, he’d been puzzled by some of his earliest exposure to the Homeric poems, including one particular line from the Odyssey, which tells of Achilles lying “full length in the dust, his horsemanship forgotten.” George appreciated the cadence of it in the original Greek. “It struck me as magnificent, inspired.” And yet he would later encounter the same phrase, exactly, in the Iliad. How could this be? “If it was really inspired,” he’d write, “how did it bear repetition?”

  Then, he’d write, “I went to Ireland. The conversation of those ragged peasants, as I learnt to follow it, astonished me. It was as though Homer had come alive. Its vitality was inexhaustible, yet it was rhythmical, alliterative, formal, artificial.” He told of a Blasket woman who’d just given birth, the story reaching him in language both poetic and vigorous. Yet, within the day, he’d heard it the same way from three or four other islanders. “It was common property,” as were other verbal niceties he’d gathered, some of them generations old. Here, it struck him, was his Homeric quandary resolved: Homer’s was “the language of the people, raised to a higher power”—eloquence not rising up from the rare, fevered brain of genius, but billowing up from the collective intelligence and spirit of the people. “It’s in the Blasket,” he would unequivocally declare, “that I found the key to the Homeric Question.”

  Certainly, the times he lived in influenced George Thomson as well. Europe and America had sunk into an economic depression so desperate, cruel, and lingering that some of the most basic tenets of industrial capitalism, with its insistent individualism, were being challenged. The injury and hurt experienced by so many made people look anew at socialism in its many flavors. The cultural and aesthetic fashions of the day—in books by John Steinbeck, in the Socialist Realism of communist Russia, in the art of Diego Rivera, in triumphant visions of men and women joined together, building dams and harvesting wheat—all reflected new interest in the common man and woman. There was a nobility, it seemed, in ordinary people working together.