On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

Several times before, his impatience with it had driven him away—to the Blaskets, to Dublin, to Galway. This time, though, it was for keeps. He and Katharine would remain there for the rest of their lives. They’d raise their children there. George would run classes for workers at a local automobile factory. He’d befriend a group of surrealist painters, help launch Katharine’s folksinging group, the Clarion Singers.

  At first, George went ahead to Birmingham while Katharine stayed back in Cambridge, where she had just given birth to their first child, Elizabeth. George wrote her on January 11, 1937: “Here I am in my room. It is quite a nice one, rather like a business-man in his office, but I don’t object to that. I have just seen the lecturers and conferred with them about the time-table.” He was teaching Homer on Mondays and Thursdays that first term, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon on Wednesdays and Fridays. He had lunches to go to, meetings of the Graduates Club, Classical Association teas on Friday afternoons—the familiar round of classes and academic functions that were the lot of any young scholar in his first real professorial job.

  But inwardly, George was settling into territory familiar to him for years now, of memories, impressions, ideas, and preoccupations dating back to his days on the Blasket. The Blasket of Maurice and Tomás simmered in his mind together with the Greece of Homer and Aeschylus to create an intellectual stew satisfying to countless readers and thinkers in the years ahead.

  When he left Galway in 1934, George left behind him at Corrib Lodge a bound notebook with faux-marble endpapers that over the years would absorb the random scribbles, word games, and impromptu artworks of the children in his landlady’s family. Its cover was inscribed:

  The Oresteia of Aeschylus

  translated into English verse

  by

  George Thomson

  Aeschylus was George’s deepest love, in particular the fifth-century b.c.e. trilogy known as the Oresteia, which, after Homer, critic D. W. Lucas would say was “the most valuable of the legacies of antiquity.”

  The Oresteia, the story of Orestes, is a story of murder, revenge, justice, and compassion. It begins with Agamemnon, first of the trilogy, when a watchman at last spies in the distance lit beacons heralding the fall of Troy, and with it King Agamemnon’s return.

                 I’ve prayed the Gods’ deliverance from this labour

                 A full year’s length of watching, couched dog-wise

                 On the roof of the Atreidae where I scan

                 The congregations of the stars of night.

  That’s George’s translation of it, dating from about 1934.

  In 1938, Cambridge University Press issued his two-volume edition of the Oresteia, dedicated to Maurice O’Sullivan, complete with an English verse translation that one reviewer lauded as “direct, fluent, and dignified.” Now the Watchman’s monologue reads:

                 I’ve prayed God to release me from sentry duty

                 All through this long year’s vigil, like a dog

                 Couched on the roof of Atreus, where I study

                 Night after night the pageantry of this vast

                 Concourse of stars.…

  George had been working at it. He was a professor, and a Marxist—and yet a laborer of sorts, too. Aeschylus, the poetry of the Oresteia, Agamemnon’s murder, Orestes’ revenge, the goddess Athena’s inspired intervention—all this was the object of his most devoted attentions, as it had been since he’d first witnessed Sheppard’s 1921 production of it in school. But now, almost two decades later, colored over by life experience in the Blaskets and elsewhere, and by his developing ideologies, it held new meaning to him.

  In September 1940, in a rudely bound edition rushed into print after the outbreak of the war with Germany, George came out with Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama, which would be translated into at least seven languages. In it, he used evidence from ethnographic and anthropological sources to suggest, as British historian Joseph Needham summed up his argument a few years later, that Greek tragedy owed something to “the primitive collectivism of the Greek people.” Before the glory of fifth-century Athens, in other words, came millennia of clans and tribes like the one George had lived among on the Blasket.

  You sense something of George’s wonder in these pre-modern worlds in notebooks he began to keep in the years before publication of Aeschylus and Athens. There are about twenty of them today in the University of Birmingham Special Collections, with cloth or faux-leather covers, stuffed with handwritten citations in English, German, French, and Greek.

  “Every native can sing, and most natives have from time to time composed their own songs,” George copied out from John Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula.

  From Robert Briffault’s The Mothers: “The moon is more important to the savage than the sun because it, and not the sun, is the marker and therefore the cause, of time and change, and in particular, of the changes in women’s reproductive life.”

  Or from H. H. Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States: “Work is equally divided between the sexes.” Women prepared food, made baskets and matting. “They are nearly as skillful as the men with the canoe and are consulted on all important matters.”

  It is page after page like this—insights and accounts bearing on primitive, peasant, and tribal cultures, drawn from rural life in Syria and Lebanon, from Eskimo culture, that of Costa Rican Indians, those of African tribes. Notes on the Nature of Man, it could have been called, were it bound and published. Through this anthropological compendium, George seems determined to capture just what men and women were like before cities and states, when they still lived together in tribes. It is hard not to see a specifically Blasket influence in it: beginning with his first visit, the island had shocked him with its example of a complex pre-industrial world that granted pleasure, interest, and rich human relationships for which nothing in his earlier life had prepared him.

  At a few points in Aeschylus and Athens—which is, of course, a volume rooted in the origins of Greek civilization, not Irish, and cut off from the Blaskets by the full breadth of continental Europe—George’s Ireland years surface directly. Delving into how earlier civilizations defined particular social relationships, he offers a dozen Irish words for “grandfather,” “cousin,” and the like; his list, he notes, was based on “my own knowledge of the West Kerry dialect, of which I am a fluent speaker.” At another point he wonders how Athenian audiences might have responded to performances of their tragedies. Londoners, he writes, were apt to tamp down their responses, whereas those in the west of Ireland were more expressive; at critical plot moments, “almost every face wears a terrified look and continuous sobbing may be heard.” An Athenian, he concludes, would feel more at home there than in London’s West End.

  Richard Seaford at the University of Exeter would point out how George Thomson understood key elements of the Aeschylean world, such as the revenge-minded Furies, through insights into pre-modern culture he’d gleaned “from the inside,” meaning the Blaskets. Indeed, in his preface to Aeschylus and Athens, George alluded to the “special debt” he owed to his peasant-fishermen friends on the island,

  who taught me, among many other things that could not have been learnt from books, what it is like to live in a pre-capitalist society. It is true that nominally they fall within the orbit of the capitalist system, because they are liable for rent, but most of them refuse to pay it; and in general their traditions, especially their poetry, date from a time when social relations were profoundly different from those in which I have been brought up.

  The house on Lovelace Road. The towering Anglican church across the street. The train that took him along ribbons of track into Lo
ndon. The great libraries of Cambridge: George Thomson never wholly rejected all that, the world in which he had been brought up. But on the Blasket, and the Greek islands of three millennia before in which he saw such parallels to it, he found much of value lost from the modern world, ill-appreciated, forgotten, ignored.

  The Blaskets, we’ve seen, had helped George formulate his solution to the Homeric problem: The compositional mastery of the Homeric epics, he noted, was so great that most could see in them evidence only of individual genius. He saw them, though, as bubbling up from the collective energy of the people—just as “artistically perfect” sagas and folktales, for example, were “progressively shaped and polished by a sort of natural erosion, which has worked away excrescences and fashioned by slow degrees a final unity.” Not single authorship, in other words, but work of the highest order that profited from the shaping influences of many. George was wise enough to realize, and candid enough to admit, that aesthetic judgments invariably turn on personal experience. His own judgment of Homer, he asserted in a 1949 book, went back to the Blaskets and the genius of the “ragged peasants” he’d met there. For him, there, on the island, “it was as though Homer had come alive.”

  Of course, his earliest major work of classical scholarship, Greek Lyric Metre, owed much to the Blaskets, too—to its dance, its song, its stories. His daughter Margaret, herself a distinguished classicist, would write that her father had in that book transformed a field belonging to “the driest philologists of the German school … into a quest for the lyre strings and dance beats that lie behind Greek lyric poetry.” It had emerged “indirectly but profoundly” from his time in the Blaskets, where he found life and art intimately entwined. “I shall never forget,” George would write, “the first time I heard some of the Irish poems I had long known in print sung by an accomplished peasant singer in the traditional style.” Neither as poetry nor music had he ever heard anything like them.

  In a 1976 talk for the Irish-language radio network, Raidió na Gaeltachta, George addressed similarities he discerned between Homer and the Blasket autobiographies, especially those of Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin. What they’d done, he said,

  was something new in Irish literature. And yet there had been no break with the past. What these writers did was to weave their autobiographical tales, told many times at the fireside, into a continuous narrative in book form. In this way, they succeeded, especially Tomás and Muiris, in carrying over into print the art of the spoken word. It was as if the old Gaelic world had become articulate just as it was about to expire. These books are the literature of a preliterate community.

  “As one listens to the voice of the passionate scholar speaking his perfect Kerry Irish,” Richard Martin observed warmly of the performance, it was not hard to imagine this Englishman, George Thomson, as “the true bard of the Blaskets.”

  Chapter 12

  No Herb or Remedy

  [1946]

  It took up almost the whole façade, a banner two stories high, plastered above the marquee of the News Theatre, on Birmingham’s High Street, not far from where George Thomson taught at the university. “All this week,” it announced in capital letters two feet high, they were showing

  CHAMBERLAIN

  THE

  PEACEMAKER

  a fifteen-minute newsreel commemorating the historic events in Munich. “SCREEN STORY OF B’HAM’S GREATEST LIVING CITIZEN WHO BY HIS COURAGE & STEADFASTNESS AVERTED A WORLD CATASTROPHE!”

  Three years had passed since the Thomsons’ trips to the Blaskets and to Russia. All across Europe, war threatened. In Spain, the elected Republican government was fighting a losing civil war against Franco, who was backed by Mussolini and Hitler. Katharine’s family helped settle Jewish refugees from Germany. In March 1938, George’s old tutor J. T. Sheppard announced to a Cambridge crowd gathered for a theatrical performance that Hitler’s goose-stepping legions had just marched into Austria. Then, in September, came the Munich Agreement. Today the signature of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a son of Birmingham) on an agreement with Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia is cavalierly dismissed as “appeasement.” But, with the carnage of the Western Front still fresh in mind, and Europe on the brink of another descent into war, Chamberlain’s assurances of “peace in our time” made him, just then, a hero.

  War did come, of course, with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Six dark, frightening years followed, years bleak for the Blaskets as well. Though Ireland was officially neutral—“The Emergency,” the war was called there—the island’s flow of visitors was staunched, its friends, such as Flower and Thomson, kept away, its living conditions made more difficult yet.

  In Birmingham, the authorities issued gas masks by the thousands. George and a friend started digging an air-raid shelter in the garden, though, as Katharine would recall, “I don’t think they got very far.” In November, they received a letter from Maurice O’Sullivan, “showering blessings on us,” as George wrote, “for the duration of the war.” Thirty-six at the time, the father of two small children, George had been advised that, “unless I provide convincing arguments to the contrary,” the university would tell the Ministry of Labour, who oversaw the British draft, “that my services are indispensable to the university.” He spent the war years mostly in Birmingham.

  The Thomsons accepted an invitation to stay with family on Katharine’s side in Scotland but returned after a few weeks, because the war had so far amounted to little; the “Phony War” is what historians today call those seven uncertain months before May 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium and France. After that, things happened fast. France fell within six weeks. An attack on Britain seemed imminent. The Thomson children, now one and four, were evacuated to a cottage owned by Katharine’s sister-in-law, looked after by a trusted nurse, visited once a month. “They seemed well and happy,” Katharine remembered, “safe from the bombs which were soon to fall on Birmingham.”

  “We have had it pretty hot here the last few nights,” George wrote his mother-in-law in October 1940. “They come in relays at intervals of a quarter of an hour, from seven-thirty till about eleven, starting fires in the centre of the city, and then hurling bombs into the blaze, which lights up the whole town.” This wasn’t Achilles on the plains of Troy, but war literally in their backyard. At one point, they and their neighbors were told to scour their gardens for a delayed-action bomb thought to have fallen nearby. After a while, they wrote off the search as fruitless, but suddenly “there was a terrific bang, we all flopped into the grass, and guessed that was it.”

  They slept downstairs “and cowered in the scullery,” Katharine would write. She’d never forget the sight of a seemingly endless procession of German bombers passing overhead bound for nearby Coventry. “We’ve had some disturbed nights—Tuesday was awful, with a 4-hour raid,” she wrote her mother. “A lot of anti-aircraft firing, and good few bombs, all on the other side of the town, but we heard quite enough.”

  At one point, she came down with diphtheria and wound up in the hospital for several months. The children were moved to Cambridge, where her mother tended them. “George remained at Oakfield Road, where he was very lonely,” surviving on a dry egg mixture, sometimes visiting the children in Cambridge, about a two-hour train ride away, or else peppering them with picture postcards from Birmingham.

  In the days before Christmas 1939, during the “Phony War,” George Chambers took up a collection at the factory for Lís Ní Shúilleabháin and her family. The parcel they sent “was a wonderful one full of everything that was wanting,” she wrote back gratefully. “Tell my factory friends that they were very kind and generous.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before the war reached Chambers himself. “I was shocked at hearing of what befel or nearly fell so near your house,” Lís wrote to him on October 30, 1940. It was the Blitz, London under siege from the air. “Thank God you were safe and also your dear home which I hope you’ll never see i
n ruins.”

  Wartime travel was restricted, certainly to the Blaskets, which were all but sealed off from the world. Lís’s letters were a succession of grim tidings. That first wartime winter was particularly awful, bleak with snow and frost. “We are not able to do anything but sit around the fire warming ourselves,” she wrote on January 19, 1940. There was no work, certainly none decently paid. They were on the dole, at five shillings a week, and it took two shillings just to fill Seán’s pipe. “Its not worth while to be living on 5/- a week,” she added. A house off the island and an ordinary laboring job for Seán “would be heaven to us.”

  “You would be surprised to hear the real history and hardship of Islanders these days,” she wrote in February, “that every family is quite tired of the wind and rain and would prefer to be in any other place in the world than here. Meat and food and flour are all gone up in prices and they with other hardships of Islands together leave no hope atall for Islanders.” The rest of the letter verged on unintelligible, but its overall tone was clear enough—glumness, foreboding, and despair. “This Island will be none atall but rabbits some fine evening.”

  Chambers and Lís both survived the war. So did their correspondence, which continued into the 1950s. “What would you tell me if I would tell you that I would write my own life story from the beginning until getting married?” Lís had wondered back in 1935, the island’s early publishing successes fresh in mind. “If my dreams ever come true,” she added, “a friend from London will be mentioned no doubt.” That book never materialized. But in 1950, Chambers came out with The Lovely Line and Other Verses, which immortalized Lís by name in at least two poems. And years after his death—as well as hers, in 1971—a sample of her letters were published as Letters from the Great Blasket, which is still in print. Lís’s daughter Niamh visited Chambers in London after the war, but following his visit to the island in 1938 he and Lís probably never saw each other again.