On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  According to Margaret, he had few practical skills. He didn’t fix things around the house. He didn’t swim. He didn’t drive a car. He wasn’t particularly graceful; when he rowed, his movements could be a little jerky—not the smooth, flowing strokes of a seasoned rower.

  With his brothers and sisters, he maintained dutiful relationships, but was not especially close.

  As for his colleagues at the university, he did not always hold them in high regard. He’d come home sometimes, Margaret says, complaining to anyone who’d listen of someone “pompous, mediocre, or both.”

  Always he held definite views. Always he expressed them doggedly. Popular culture arising from peasant roots, Margaret remembers him asserting, was good. That arising from the influence of American mass culture was bad. He did have American friends, but had no use for what he characterized as American imperialism. In 1941, he got into an extended and vituperative epistolary debate with his friend F. M. Cornford, a classical scholar and poet, in which he pictured Plato offering views of education in The Republic “indistinguishable from the theory and practice of fascism.” Just after the war, he fell into a correspondence with Marxist historian Christopher Hill, in which he described Shakespeare, later in life a landowner, as “exploiting wage labour, possibly when he wrote Hamlet, and certainly when he wrote Troilus, Othello,” and others among his plays. You might not want to slip into debate with George Thomson. Katharine didn’t. “You’ve got the words,” she’d say to him as some argument wound down, “but that’s my view on the matter.” He was relentless. He’d never back down, though he did grow mellower as he aged, says Margaret, ultimately coming to recognize some of the excesses and cruelties of Stalin and Mao.

  In 1955, he visited communist China, writing long letters home to Katharine about his trip. “Yesterday evening I went to give my third talk to the Foreign Languages Institute,” he wrote in June. “This time I told them how I became a communist, and we had a very good discussion.” A friend of the family—Jane Scott, then a child—would remember how after his return he’d sometimes wear a Chinese suit around the house, how the children liked to visit him in his study. “This was no gloomy sanctum,” she reported, “but a room full of little treasures, hung with pictures and pieces of Chinese silk, with leaded windows and an elderly gas fire hissing away in the background.”

  It may have been on the trip to China that he brought home a print of a village—men, women, and children hauling in a net thick with fish, working together as one. Years later, he sent it, or a copy of it, to a friend: “See how my vision of the Blasket is being realised in China today,” he wrote. As classicist, professor, writer, Marxist, parent, and friend, he had absorbed the Blaskets in every pore. In China, when a student sang a song from a Chinese opera, “my mind was carried back thirty years to the moonlight nights in the Blasket island, when they used to sing and dance on the edge of the cliffs.” Later, when he was old, almost blind, and near death, he worked on a new edition of his book about the Blaskets, Island Home. Margaret helped him, but mostly he typed it out himself on an old manual typewriter. Though it was slow going, she recalls, he was “energized” by doing it. Even the way he wrote owed something to the island and its oral culture: George, his friend Tim Enright reported, “would never commit anything to print without first reciting it aloud to hear how it sounded.”

  In 1976, in a trip arranged by Father Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, an impish little Irish priest from West Kerry with whom he’d collaborated on a new Irish-language edition of Maurice’s book, George returned to western Ireland after decades away. Ó Fiannachta ferried him around, arranged for him to be interviewed; people who saw his performance voiced astonishment at the old man’s ease and facility before the camera. “It was a wonderful experience,” George wrote Ó Fiannachta later,

  which has healed the breach in my life that occurred when I left Ireland. I felt a little apprehensive at first, rather like Rip van Winkle, but thanks to you, it was not like that at all. I felt rather like Oisin might have done if he had received from Padraig a special dispensation to revisit the Land of the Young.

  During this trip, Father Ó Fiannachta took George to see Cáit, Maurice O’ Sullivan’s wife. Maurice himself had been dead for many a long year.

  The Irish- and English-language editions of Maurice’s Twenty Years A-Growing both came out in 1933 and did well from the start. If not quite an overnight celebrity, Maurice surely had a new life opening up for him. To Denis Ireland, writing in 1936, Maurice’s book was nothing less than “Troy seen in the morning of the world.” Ireland told of Moya Llewelyn Davies, whom he met in Raheny, showing off the original manuscript, “written in cheap exercise books in Gaelic.” Still in the Civic Guard in Connemara at that point, Maurice sometimes had to give evidence in court and one time, in Ireland’s telling, the judge descended from the bench to shake hands with him. Soon, the two of them were strolling down the village’s main street, trading thoughts on literature, Maurice’s fellow guards “peeking from the window of the barracks.”

  Maurice did not long remain in the Guard. How could he? How could any young man with success like that thrust upon him? On July 5, 1934, he resigned. Five days later he married Cáit Ní Chatháin, whom he’d met in Carraroe, about twenty miles west of Inverin, site of his first Connemara assignment. It seems that the parish priest, attempting to direct local youths away from dancing and into more wholesome pursuits, organized baking classes for the young women. Cáit was among them. When a local boy annoyed her, in one instance making off with some rhubarb pie she’d baked, she complained. Enter the Guard, in the person of Muiris Ó Súilleabhháin, who’d been transferred to Carraroe in 1928. “Be going off, boy,” he admonished the young troublemaker. Cáit, some years younger than he, continued with her classes. Maurice took to walking her home. A romance flowered. “He was a fine block of a man,” said Cáit later.

  In May 1934, E. M. Forster wrote George, worried that Maurice might come under what seemed to him the not entirely benign influence of Cáit. And worried also that too much by way of royalties might come Maurice’s way. So far, he allowed, the money “has not done harm.” But he enjoined George to do what he could to keep Maurice levelheaded. “I do hope he’ll pull himself together.”

  Well, if pulling himself together meant steering clear of Cáit and staying in the Guard, Maurice didn’t. “Oh Cáit, I don’t like it,” she remembered his saying when she worried about his leaving a steady job. “I hate getting up at three in the morning, going into houses, moving beds and quilts and mattresses … I don’t like it. I won’t do it even if I have to beg for a living.”

  Had he confided in George about his plans? “He didn’t like the idea,” he told her, “but I don’t care.”

  After Maurice quit the Guard and married Cáit, the couple lived for most of the next year in West Kerry with Maurice’s sister Máire. One Sunday morning, they took a boat out from Dingle to visit the Blasket. As they approached, a naomhóg came out to ferry them into the island. “That’s when the chattering started,” she’d remember. “You’d think they were wild geese with everyone talking,” the islanders saluting their marriage, piling greetings high upon them. On the island, they “drowned him with tears and dried him with kisses.” But his childhood home, clinging to the slope of the hill, now stood empty, a big lock on the door. At one point, Maurice approached it, peered through a window, turned sadly away. Then “he put his head under him and started crying.”

  During their time in Kerry, Maurice tried writing a biography of a local West Kerry character, one Dónal Cháit Bhillí. “Of course, Dónal spoke as though he were reading out of a book,” Cáit noted later. “It came out like that.” The book was never published. “He sent it to some publisher and he was told there was too much of it. There was nothing to it in a way.”

  For Cáit, Kerry felt like exile. “I couldn’t understand a word of what the people were saying,” she said, so strange to her was the dialect at first. All that year
she was homesick. Finally, they moved back to Carraroe, where they built a small two-story house. A son, Eoghan, was born to them in November 1935.

  In September 1937, George visited. He and Maurice met in Galway in a pub, then to tea in a local hotel, all the while rattling on in Irish. Maurice wanted him to come back to Carraroe and stay with him and Cáit for the night. “They would have a great welcome for me and dance till morning,” George wrote Katharine next day. But it would be one in the morning before they reached Carraroe on the bus, and only then the dancing! “I would have done it once, but not now.” As for Maurice, he looked great, and “it was a delight to be with him again. But I am very worried about his future. I feel sure they will be destitute in the end. An added difficulty is that Cáit’s health is not good. And he is so improvident.”

  Of course, now Maurice was homesick, too. He was “heartbroken at leaving Kerry,” Katharine had written to her mother after their 1935 trip to the island. “There is tremendous county feeling here, and it is like being in a foreign country to be in another part of Ireland.” Still, Maurice adjusted, more or less. It wasn’t Kerry, but it was Irish-speaking, wild, and primitive, dotted with little lakes and broad swathes of bog. During these years, he tended his vegetable garden, kept a cow, cut turf, collected seaweed. On a moonlit night, he’d sometimes go down to the graveyard in the place they called Barraderry, a few miles from the house, sit listening to the sound of the sea. “An islander marooned ashore,” his son, Eoghan, once called him.

  When Seán Ó Faoláin first reviewed Fiche Blian in 1933, he voiced the conviction that Maurice O’Sullivan was not “a man of one book.” He was wrong. Around the time World War II broke out, Maurice started work on a sequel to Twenty Years A-Growing—titled Fiche Blian Faoi Bhláth, or Twenty Years in Bloom, largely about Connemara and Carraroe. Alan Titley, professor of Irish at University College Cork, got his hands on the manuscript once. It was, he concluded, “an appalling book … very badly written,” stuffed with loose chatter of the sort you’d encounter “talking in a pub late at night or around the breakfast table, just gabbling on,” littered with the Irish equivalents of “You know what I mean” and “So it goes.” To Titley, it lacked “the quirky humour and devil-may-care attitude of the first book” and was beyond saving.

  Maurice had invested a lot of time in it, of course, and sent it off to publishers. “But what good was that,” said Cáit later, “because the reply he got was that it was not like Twenty Years A-Growing,” not as good, and needed to be. Maurice went back, worked it over, but to no avail. George didn’t much care for it, either. Whatever good his editing might have done—and once Alan Titley saw the sequel, he was convinced George’s editorial contribution to the original was substantial—he didn’t see the new manuscript as worth it. It remains unpublished.

  In a 1944 essay, George recalled Maurice’s first day in uniform in 1927 in Dublin, and how he, George, had “had to take him by the arm and guide him through the traffic to the safety of the pavement.” In the years since, Maurice had “widened his experience enormously, he had learnt to enjoy books, the theatre, the cinema, and the other amenities of urban life, without losing any of his native independence.” But it never quite took, asserted George. With the success of Twenty Years A-Growing, Maurice had left the Guard, “purchased a patch of land in Connemara, built himself a house, married a Connemara girl, and now he is living very happily back where I had found him—among the peasantry.” To listen to George, Maurice had returned to his roots and “walked out of modern civilisation.”

  This does not quite ring true. Yes, Maurice lived “among the peasantry” in Connemara and identified with them. But the author of Fiche Blian ag Fás in its many editions and translations was a peasant no longer. Year in, year out, in success and in failure, he carved out a life for himself as a writer. Like Tomás Ó Criomhthain, he inhabited a corner of the literary world. He had left the Guard, yes. And he had left the peasantry as well.

  By necessity, Maurice wrote shorter, more salable pieces, about people he met in Connemara, snippets of old folklore. He’d cycle for miles into the stark countryside, talk to the old people, tell of the loneliness and isolation he saw around him. He wrote scripts for radio plays, some of which were broadcast, others performed onstage in Carraroe. He wrote a story about Jonah and a shark—not the Biblical whale, but a shark. One about the transatlantic cable, which came ashore near Ventry, just south of Dún Chaoin. He wrote about “life in the bee world,” with bees as his characters. Much of it was religious: a blind man comes to Connemara, looking for a holy well, rubs water on his eyes, and is cured. Sometimes he gave his Connemara characters Munster dialects and Kerry sayings. Occasionally, come Christmas or Easter, he’d reminisce in print about the Blaskets. But whatever his stories’ strengths and failings, he kept at it—for The Irish Press, for Irish-language publications like Feasta or An Iodh Morainn or Ar Aghaidh, for the more widely read Messenger of the Sacred Heart. “Disappointment followed on disappointment,” Blasket biographer Leslie Matson characterized Maurice’s writing life over the years. Yet not entirely so. One compilation of his work listed 132 published pieces. They were darker and sadder, though, than anything in his book, concluded Nuala Uí Aimhirgín, author of an Irish-language biography of him, the youthful exuberance of Twenty Years A-Growing by now largely extinguished.

  The book continued to earn royalties—about sixty pounds a year, George estimated in 1945. Maurice and Cáit supplemented that by letting out a room or two during the summer. Mostly, though, he just kept writing. In 1944, they had a daughter, Máire Llewelyn, named after Moya Llewelyn Davies, who’d died the year before. Máire remembers her father from when she was a little girl. As a toddler, she’d cycle everywhere with him, propped up on the handlebars. Or else she’d find him upstairs, at his desk, which faced a lake he could look out at by day. The house had neither running water nor electricity, and in the long northern nights he’d write by lamplight. She remembers the pink glow, the play of shadows on the wall, the scratching pen.

  It is September 1945, the war finally over. George returns to Ireland once more, the first leg of his trip this time by plane. “The journey from Liverpool to Dublin was wonderful,” he writes Katharine, “5000 feet up on a summer afternoon with the coast of N. Wales spread out like a map, every house and hedgerow as clear as if they were toy models.” Dublin is a joy to him. “I have never seen it so bright and gay, the streets and cafes full of crowds of people with nothing to do but stroll and talk.” Unlike in England, there is no bomb damage here.

  His mind thick with memories of Moya and Watermill and on-till-midnight talk in Irish, George is inevitably drawn to Raheny. He takes the bus there; the tram tracks have been taken up. The coast road is being widened, houses and walls razed to accommodate the project. Watermill Cottage is gone, “disappeared, except for a ragged stretch of one wall,” its gate intact, though, still the bright green he’d painted it. The garden is gone, reduced to a lumberyard for the road project, “a wilderness of timber, iron and mortar, and in the midst of them my lovely weeping ash, shorn of her tresses and obviously doomed. I stood for a moment feeling utterly desolate.”

  The next morning, he catches the train to Galway to spend a few days with Maurice and Cáit in Connemara. He presents a teddy bear to little Máire, joins them all at Mass on Sunday morning, then for a wake on a little island just off the mainland. Coming back, the little boat is crowded with more than twenty people, “hilarious on the way home.”

  He’d worried that it somehow wouldn’t be the same with Maurice, but they never stop talking. “He is just the same as he always was,” George writes. And being in the Gaeltacht is as exhilarating as ever. “My Irish has returned to me in a flash.” It is like being with Maurice back on the Blasket.

  A 1949 photo of Maurice shows him in jacket and tie, hair parted on the left, all turned white. He is still a good-looking man—not old, but no longer young, either. He’s in his mid-forties now, looks as
if he’s stepped from one of the many snapshots that come down to us of Blasket fishermen—hearty and vigorous men, their boyish youths only a memory.

  By the spring of 1950, George has lived in Birmingham for more than a decade. He is, this academic year, president of the Classical Circle, its aim being “to encourage the appreciation of Greek and Roman Literature, Art and Civilisation, both for their intrinsic value and for their bearing on modern conditions.” He is president of the Socialist Society as well. His appointment book notes a visit to Nottingham set for May 22, a garden party for Thursday, June 22, meetings with Russian émigré linguist Nicholas Bachtin and others among his friends.

  On Monday, June 26, a telegram arrives:

  Maurice Drowned in Galway Yesterday

  The day before, Máire, six years old, is out playing. It is four or five in the afternoon. A man in uniform comes to the gate.

  The house is full of chatter and music, crowded with Sunday visitors, people in the sitting room singing. When Máire sees the uniform—just like her father’s, that of a Guard—she thinks at first that it is her father. The man comes to the door, huddles with her mother. He tells her he has some bad news.

  It happened at a public beach just outside Galway, in Salthill, at a place called Lover’s Strand. A few months earlier, in February, at last giving up on trying to support his family as a writer, Maurice had re-joined the Guard, sixteen years after leaving it. It could not have seemed like much else but failure. Four days before his death, he’d been transferred from Oughterard, a pretty little village on the shores of Lough Corrib, to a station in Galway itself, twenty miles away; a strike was on, police were needed.

  Maurice’s biographer, Nuala Ní Aimhirgín, doesn’t think he killed himself. Neither does his daughter, Máire. “I think he had a heart attack while he was in the water,” she has said. He was a good swimmer, but “there was a strong undertow. It was pulling him out to sea. He managed to swim in to the shore. But he seems to have collapsed. And the tide came in. He drowned in about three or four inches of water.”