On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Late in 1936, the first of two books, Peig, was published. “Still another remarkable book from the Blaskets,” an early review led off, “this one flung warm to the world from the heart of an old woman of the West Kerry fior-Ghaeltacht!” Her story, said another, in The Dublin Magazine, “is told in fine idiomatic Irish, in a plain vigorous and direct style; the narrative is easy, flowing.” By July, a “What Dublin Is Reading” column in the capital listed Peig’s book right alongside those of Aldous Huxley and John Gunther. The following year, Peig received a prize for Irish-language literature.

  And it was literature, or had become literature. “Because this inherited store of literary tradition is transmitted orally,” one critic said of Peig and her storytelling kind, “it is not less literature than the written word turned into the more lasting mould of manuscript or of print. It is the nucleus of the literature of modern Irish.”

  On August 15, 1937, people from around Ireland descended on the island to pay homage to Peig Sayers. “The day was beautiful, the sea like milk,” Seán Kearney recalled. “The island was black with people.” A stage set up outside the island school, according to one visitor, was made up of school desks and “some driftwood planks dripping with dead barnacles.” Speeches ensued. Peig “took her honours with a warm-hearted smile, clapping with the others.” Men and women, boys and girls, got up to sing Irish songs. Soon the fiddles and melodeons were hauled out and people were dancing.

  During this day full of ebullience and cheer, one moment of sobriety intruded, when Peig’s son Mícheál read a poem lamenting the death, earlier that year, of Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

  On March 9, Lís wrote George Chambers from Dingle, where she’d been preparing for the birth of her second child. Two days before, she told him, her husband and her brother had brought with them news:

  And oh Mr. Chambers, they just stayed ten minutes with me for they were in a great hurry for I must tell and write it down for you in deepest regret that my dearest father-in-law died peacefully and passed away to his reward at seven o’clock that Sunday morning, oh may he rest in peace, Amen, and how I missed being from my home and from his funeral yesterday God only knows.

  For two years, Tomás had mostly been confined to bed, in Lís’s care. Toward the end, hand and leg paralyzed, he couldn’t write, couldn’t so much as sign a document, “couldn’t even raise his hand above his head,” son Seán recalled. And now, with the island at the height of its attention from the world, he was gone.

  “On landing on the island,” Nóra Ní Shéaghdha wrote in an Irish-language obituary, “the first question a stranger always asked was, ‘Where is the house of the Ó Criomhthain?’ ” He had become a tourist attraction; was there any other way to say it? Everybody wanted a photo of him. “Even when his health began to fail him he would often be led like a child to his seat in the yard, just to please the visitor who was anxiously waiting to secure the ‘Islandman’s’ picture.”

  One day, it was Nóra herself who wanted one. At first he demurred. “But, Tomás,” she implored, “you must remember that men like you will not inhabit the island anymore.” That, of course, was a reference—was it ironic or sly? it’s hard to tell from her account—to the line in An tOileánach he had immortalized: “Ní bheidh ár leithéidí arís ann,” the like of us will never be again. And now, with this nod to Tomás’s book, “his countenance changed, his face brightened, a smile came on his lips,” and he agreed.

  Among those counting themselves champions of Tomás and his work was the writer Myles na Gopaleen. Some champion, or so it might seem from his bizarre Irish-language novel, inspired by An tOileánach, which recurrently parodied “Our likes will not be seen again.” An Béal Bocht, published in 1941, is supposedly the autobiography of a hapless Gael from a mythical Gaeltacht area known as Corkadoragha. More even than Tomás or Peig, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in awful poverty in a cabin shared with chickens and pigs, suffers deprivations unimaginable. His mother, Myles na Gopaleen’s protagonist declares,

  took a bucket full of muck, mud and ashes and hen’s droppings from the roadside, and spread it around the hearth gladly in front of me. When everything was arranged, I moved over near the fire and for five hours I became a child in the ashes—a raw youngster rising up according to the old Gaelic tradition. Later at midnight I was taken and put into bed but the foul stench of the fireplace stayed with me for a week; it was a stale, putrid smell and I do not think that the like will ever be there again.

  So it goes, all the book through, one calamity after another, as befits a wretched Gael from the west of Ireland. And always Tomás’s catchphrase, intoned as the last word: “Their like would not be seen again.”

  An Béal Bocht might seem to resist translation, yet translated into English it was, in 1973, as The Poor Mouth. Edgy, manic illustrations by the American artist Ralph Steadman memorably captured the dark, sardonic tone of the book. Its author, this Myles na Gopaleen, was actually a pub-roving Dublin civil servant and newspaper columnist, Brian O’Nolan, who also wrote under the name Flann O’Brien. For years he was Ireland’s most mercilessly, deliciously, unrepentantly satiric voice. He called An Béal Bocht, which others acclaimed a comedic masterpiece, one “prolonged sneer”; he’d polished it off in a week, he boasted. And yet, he’d explain, it was his abiding respect for Tomás’s “majestic” book that had led him to write it in the first place.

  The impact on him of An tOileánach had been “explosive.” Here was a book “not to be seen or thought about and certainly not to be discussed with strangers”—like an intimate episode in the life of a couple so intense, for love or grief, it could never be mentioned aloud. It was something so fresh and authentic that, na Gopaleen made it seem, he feared for it. And the island life it depicted? Tomás’s book was a “noble salute from them about to go away.”

  And of course it was going away.

  The sun might yet shine on the Blaskets in those days of the 1930s. You might still find a hint of Maurice O’Sullivan’s high heart and spirit there. And Peig was queen that fine August day in 1937. But even if its outward celebrity still mostly masked its economic and social decline, the Blasket could now sometimes seem a withered caricature of itself.

  It is a day late in the 1930s, three decades after Synge, Marstrander, and Flower first ventured onto the island. Two islanders and two visitors line up in front of a camera, alternating, like men and women at a dinner party. Conceivably the picture emerged spontaneously, capping a day of hearty geniality. But I don’t think so; hearty geniality is nowhere evident. We know the names of the islanders: they are brothers, Mícheál and Seánín Mhicil Ó Súilleabháin, second cousins of the author Maurice, both in their twenties, both fishermen. Mícheál is the older. Seánín is an accomplished fiddler who played at Peig’s “crowning.”

  Visitors and islanders, lined up for the camera. Can you tell who’s who? (Illustration Credit ill.23)

  As for the visitors, we know nothing of them, except that they are beautiful. Beautiful, that is, in the outward way a prince is beautiful—regardless of his looks, simply owing to the finery in which he’s adorned, the ease and self-confidence with which he carries himself. Here are two princes from the mainland, both wearing sport coats, their wide-lapel shirts pulled out over their coat collars—it must be the fashion of the day—standing erect and assured. One holds a cigarette, has a wide, geeky grin. The other, hand in pants pocket, the stripes of his sweater peeking out from his open jacket, is turned three-quarters toward the camera, seems more practiced at this sort of thing, cool and comfortable in his own skin.

  And the Ó Súilleabháin brothers? They look like twins in their close-fitting fisherman’s sweaters and caps. They are both dark, with black brows, stand slouched, a smile on neither of them, their faces set, resolute. They look a little menacing, actually, or would if the scene were less ceremonial. They don’t look gay, or at their ease; it’s not hard to imagine them dragooned before the camera, just for the shot: Here we are on
the Great Blasket, with real peasant fishermen. That may be seeing more in the image than is there. But certainly the comfort that Flower, Thomson, and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt found in the island world, as friends of Tomás, Maurice, and the others, born of days and nights in and out of one another’s houses, is absent, any bond between visitor and islander reduced to the duration of a twenty-fifth-of-a-second snapshot.

  February 27, 1939. Lís Ní Shúilleabháin writes to George Chambers:

  Tonight is very fine and the moon is shining bright and I feel a promising of summer in the air and sky. I feel very light hearted about that but such a night in the Island ten years ago when I was just young is very different from this night. There is no stir or sound in this Island tonight, no children laughing or shouting in the moonlight nor later on by this hour when children would be off in their dreams you could hear miles away with the echoes of the strand rows of fair young colleens in four and five in rows after each other singing lovely Irish songs of love and joy and the older folk with their heads out in the open doors gladly listening to them. The Island is just dead I may say but just for old times sake I sang a few verses myself of the old school songs we used to have. Pity you were not listening.

  Chapter 11

  A Green Irish Thread

  [1940]

  By the time of Lís’s letter to Chambers in 1939, George Thomson was married, with one child and another on the way, but no longer living in Cambridge; he was a professor now, at the University of Birmingham, far removed alike from the great academic centers of England and from the Blasket. By now, though, the Blasket was irreparably part of him.

  All his life, the island would billow up through his intellectual and scholarly work, projecting into the thoughts he thought, the books he wrote, the values he held most dear. In what he called “the village I know best,” he had met spirited men and women, living amid the seas and cliffs, distant from the dubious comforts and contrivances of the cities. What he had learned from them influenced his social and political views as well as colored his ideas about the ancient Greeks, whose civilization lay at the center of his intellectual life. “From his earliest book, on Greek Lyric Metre, through his Aeschylus and Athens, to his Studies in Ancient Greek Society,” Stanford University classicist Richard Martin has asserted, “runs a green Irish thread.”

  • • •

  When the Thomsons were married in 1934, Katharine’s parents had presented them with a house in Cambridge, Lavender Cottage, where they would live for most of the next three years. In the small studio upstairs, George, still a fellow at King’s, worked on his new edition of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Downstairs, Katharine gave piano lessons. “He must have become immune to the noise of the piano, which he endured stoically for the rest of his life,” Katharine would write. Radio chatter drifting upstairs sometimes brought him down to “politely request me to reduce the volume.” But live music never did.

  An artfully composed photo of George survives from around this time. It shows him in profile, sitting back, puffing on his pipe, absorbed in a newspaper, the folds of its pages mimicking the soft curves of his jacket. He is a young man at the height of his powers, at home in the cocoon he and Katharine happily share.

  Outside, though, the world was changing, awash in historical tides that risked drowning out the voices of Aeschylus and Beethoven and embroiling the Thomsons in irresistibly more urgent concerns. Just now, Europe was still at peace, if on the crumbling foundations of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. But all across the Continent, ideas wrangled, reaching for the extremes. Fervency was all.

  George Thomson at his ease, mid-1930s (Illustration Credit ill.24)

  In the year just before she’d become reacquainted with George, while studying piano in Frankfurt during the summer of 1933, Katharine had seen the emergent Nazi Germany up close. Kristallnacht was then still five years away, and Hitler’s threats to the Jews and his European neighbors were still mostly talk. But Katharine had seen Nazi rallies, once heard Hitler, who’d become chancellor that January, inflame his audience with anti-Jewish ravings. Many of her teachers at the conservatory had been Jewish; all would lose their jobs. Yet some of her friends in Cambridge, she’d write, “saw some good in the new regime, feeling that the wrongs suffered by Germany through the Versailles treaty were being righted.” To some, and not just in Germany, Hitler was a bulwark against Bolshevism, a return to sturdy national roots after the cataclysm of the Western Front.

  For most in their circle, however, Soviet communism tugged at them more sympathetically. Stalinist totalitarianism and terror were not then so commonly understood for what they were. Many saw the new Soviet state, and the high-flown Marxist ideas on which it claimed to be based, as answer to the economic hardships besetting Europe. To some, the Soviet Union recently birthed from the ashes of czarist Russia was symbol of a new and better world to come. George was among them.

  One of his friends during this period was Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he’d met in 1929. “He was nearly always tense,” George would remember, “even in his light-hearted moods.” They’d dine at high table at Trinity or at a tea shop, later settle in Wittgenstein’s rooms to talk. And what they talked about was often Marxism, which, as George put it later, had become “an intellectual force” in Cambridge. Wittgenstein, fourteen years his senior, hadn’t much immersed himself in the Marxist classics. But several of Wittgenstein’s friends were Marxists; he was “alive to the evils of unemployment and fascism”; he was drawn to Soviet ways and visited Russia in the fall of 1935. Of just such intellectual and political peregrinations Cambridge saw many specimens during these years.

  Another of the Thomsons’ left-leaning friends, about George’s own age, was Roy Pascal, a lecturer in German at one of the Cambridge colleges, and a member of the Communist Party. Pascal gave George Russian lessons. George and Katharine read Trotsky, became intrigued by all things Russian. England suffered from horrendous joblessness, whereas in the Soviet Union, George heard it said, unemployment had been abolished. “We were moving more and more to the left,” said Katharine later. Soon, like Wittgenstein, the Thomsons decided to visit the Soviet Union, and after their memorable trip to Ireland in the summer of 1935, they did so.

  Joining a tour organized by a theatrical exchange group, they left from Greenwich with Katharine’s sister Frida. They toured art galleries in Leningrad, saw a Jewish Theater production of King Lear in Moscow, visited factories and day-care centers. They were charmed by friendly Russian soldiers who took to the chessboard at any leisured moment. At one point, George would recount, their car was “held up by throngs of children in festive costume, who greeted us with songs and pelted the car with flowers. When we got to Red Square we found ourselves in a vast sea of colour,” children by the thousands dancing and singing.

  From what George saw in Russia—and from what he had been told, and what he wanted to believe—the new Soviet state encouraged its minority national cultures, didn’t trample them as Britain had Ireland’s. National theaters thrived from the Polish border to the Bering Straits, Shakespeare was more vibrant in the Soviet republics than in England: “Not only will these cultures survive,” George wrote in a 1944 essay reflecting his early infatuation with the Soviet experiment, “but the modern industrial civilisation into which they have been transplanted will itself be enriched.” At least as seen through rose-colored-enough glasses, the Soviet system seemed to work. “This is what might have been, and may yet be, in Connemara,” he concluded, referring to his early-1930s efforts in Galway. “Where I had failed with 300,000, they have succeeded with a 100 million.”

  The Thomsons were won over. English socialist economists Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written a popular book about the Soviet Union with the subtitle A New Civilization? To Katharine, “there seemed no need for the question-mark.” Back home, they became active in the burgeoning anti-fascist movement and in a Russian-English friendship club. That year, 1935, George Thomson joined the Communist Party.
He was thirty-two.

  His loyalties would shift over the years to a degree, but he would remain a Marxist all his life. He would write scholarly and interpretive studies, in areas of his scholarly expertise, from a Marxist perspective. In 1947, he would become a member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee. A photograph from this period shows George at a meeting of party comrades in jacket and tie, his formidable swathe of dark hair swept across his forehead, mouth set, gaze straight ahead—more so even than the others, looking very serious indeed.

  It is not true that everybody was doing it, joining the party, but among politically minded young British intellectuals, certainly, enough were; party membership swelled to fifty-six thousand by 1942. In 1937, George visited Moya in Dublin and wrote Katharine about it: “I had a rather unsatisfactory discussion with Moya about the state of the world. She does not altogether approve of my present opinions, while I feel that her individualism is untenable.” To George, of course, communism bore the lingering sweetness of social and communitarian ideals he had tasted in the Blaskets.

  In December 1936, George was appointed to a chair in Greek studies at the University of Birmingham, and by January of the following year, he was settled there. His tutor at King’s, J. T. Sheppard, was appalled at the news he was going off to “teach the barbarians in Birmingham.” Here was a self-consciously working-class city, “city of a thousand trades,” where they made chocolate, airplanes, and electrical equipment, not transcendent ideas. Its residents, “Brummies,” jabbered in a distinctive accent not pleasing to every English ear. Still, as Katharine wrote, “We were both glad to get away” from Cambridge elitism. Wittgenstein and he had been drawn together, George would say, not by philosophy or politics but by their “common distaste for the intellectual life of Cambridge.”