“Sixty I may be,” wrote Máire—grown, a wife, a mother—in a poem, “but my soul remains at six/Just as it was on the Sunday you slipped into silence, into serenity/On to another Island, out of sight.”
When George got the telegram he was at home. The house he and Katharine had lived in for ten years, one of four such houses built in a closely spaced row around 1930, was from the street an unprepossessing affair. From the back, though, it was memorable for a great sweep of garden that dropped down to a stream. Bourne Brook it was called, and that’s where George, in shock, went now. He was “barely able to speak,” Katharine recalled.
Today, the banks of the stream are fettered in concrete. In those days, though, George’s young daughter Margaret liked to play there, scampering beside the brook, ducking in and out of neighboring properties. A heavy rain could turn the stream into a torrent, rising up enough over root-entangled banks to flood part of the garden. In summer, it was most likely just a trickle; the Thomsons sometimes kept hens and rabbits there. “The bottom of the garden” Meg called the spot, and it was somehow the bottom—more, through its particular play of topography than it was the garden’s end, or edge, or boundary. A world apart, a leafy enclave far from the eyes of others, far enough from the house that you had to go there, a journey. George made his way down the whole length of the garden, two hundred feet from the house, past the apple tree, the little redbrick outbuilding, the vegetable patch at the bottom.
Margaret watched. From the drawing room, looking out the back window, she saw “Dad, walking up and down, up and down, tears in his eyes. Then he went to the very bottom of the long garden and stood and watched the stream.”
What’s the matter with Daddy? she asked her mother. “It was the first time I’d seen my father so unhappy. I’d seen him worried, but I’d never seen him express such grief. And I don’t think he ever felt any person’s death so deeply ever again.”
Chapter 14
A Dream of Youth
There will never again be on the Great Blasket a village of fishermen and subsistence farmers who live in rude stone houses, fish the surrounding waters in canvas-clad boats, do without electricity, and speak only Irish. Perhaps, as scholars say, human history traces no simple straight line of progress, but this is probably one prediction as safe as any.
Likely, too, is that, around the world, places like the Blasket will grow fewer. “Maybe it will come that all the little islands, all the little places where men do make a livelihood together out of the gathering of the strand and the hunt of the hill and the fish of the sea will be empty and forgotten.” These are the words Dylan Thomas gives Maurice O’Sullivan’s grandfather in a screenplay, never finished, based on Twenty Years A-Growing. And that surely is the pattern of the past century and more, countless versions of the Blasket abandonment being played out in Italy, India, Mexico, and Korea, one village after another vanishing altogether or stepping into the modern age.
The Blaskets lost. London and Los Angeles, Dublin and New York won. Here and there, as with the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish or other religious communities, a few try, and may partially succeed, in squirming free of modernity’s grasp. But mostly, the movement goes the other way, toward ease and security, plumbing and packaged goods, cell phones and flat screens, or whatever else constitute the marvels of a time and place.
The visitors to the Great Blasket we’ve met here likewise valued modern life; they didn’t forsake it, anyway. Carl Marstrander did fieldwork in out-of-the-way places like the Blaskets, but spent most of his professional life in the capitals of Europe. Robin Flower? For all the many years he visited the Blaskets, he and his family lived, for eleven-twelfths or more of each year, in comfortable houses in the inner suburbs of London, always near a train to get him to work. George Thomson turned his back on Oxbridge, but chose an alternative that, for all its nuanced points of difference, left him for most of his life in England’s second city, imbibing eagerly of politics and ideas. They and the other visitors could, in principle, have rejected big-city life and embraced the Blasket, moving there, living among their island friends not for the summer but throughout the year and for the rest of their lives. But they didn’t, all of them acquiescing to one or another version of the modern metropolitan lives for which they’d been groomed.
Of course, one visitor, it could be said, did throw in his lot with the Blaskets. This would be Neal O’Moore—or that, anyway, is the name a scriptwriter gave his character. On May 28, 1937, Lís Ní Shúilleabháin wrote George Chambers that some “film stars” were on the island. And I suppose they were, if the likes of Cecil Ford, the unknown actor who played Neal, qualifies. He and a coterie of other unknowns were there to film a movie about the island inspired by Robert Flaherty’s instant classic, Men of Aran, a dramatized documentary of Aran life that had appeared to much acclaim in 1934. (Robin Flower visited Flaherty on Aran in 1932 and saw some of the early footage. Flaherty seemed to him “a great man … [with] a great anger against civilisation and the machine age.”)
So our Neal O’Moore, Dublin medical student, comes to the Blasket and falls in love with an island girl, Eileen, who is pledged to another. They draw closer, but she holds back. “I can never mean anything to you,” she says, “I will marry Liam,” the sturdy island lad she’s known all her life, whom Neal befriends as well. Near the end of his stay, they climb up to a rocky outcropping, the sea beneath them. “If I come back again, I’ll stay for good and all,” says earnest Neal. “I’ll become an island man.”
He returns to Dublin, but then, one day, hears Eileen on the radio in his college rooms, singing a song she’d sung on the Blasket, captured with the fledgling electronic technology of the day and broadcast across the country. He’s smitten all over again, of course, and returns to the island—this time, he declares, to stay. “I’m not returning to the mainland,” he tells Eileen and Liam. “I’ll become an island man, cultivating, turf cutting, cattle breeding. Yes, and if you will help me, Liam, I’ll become a curragh man.” That is, he’ll become strong enough—man enough, really—to row an island naomhóg.
As you may have decided from these bits of dialogue, the film is not very good. Its American distributor called it Men of Ireland, shamelessly exploiting its Aran forebear. In Ireland and England it was known as The Islandman. But “that Film is not about my father-in-law—may God rest his soul,” Lís wrote Chambers. Rank melodrama it was, down to a worthy Catholic priest issuing homilies to his “children,” wooden acting, and a nascent ménage à trois of a story that managed to remain not just chaste but bloodless. The film was redeemed only by some nice dancing and singing—filmed in a Dublin studio—a naomhóg race, glorious island vistas, and the two pounds a day villagers got for hauling cameras up the cliffs.
But if you can pull away from the story long enough—and, believe me, it will come as a relief—the film raises a serious question: could Neal, or anyone like him, forsake the intellectual and professional rewards of medical school, along with Dublin’s comforts, stimulations, and seductions, to live permanently among the islanders? Could Neal ever truly become “an island man”?
Back in Aran, J. M. Synge apparently once did flirt with going native. One day, rowing to Inishmaan with some islanders and caught up in a “dreamy voluptuous gaiety,” he finds his friends “so full of divine simplicity that I would have liked to turn the prow to the west and row with them for ever.” He’d return soon to Paris, he tells them, to sell his books and his bed, and then he’d be “coming back to grow as strong and simple as they were among the islands of the west.”
He did not do it.
Among visitors to the Blaskets, none seems to have gone even so far as Synge did. Did Flower, Thomson, or Sjoestedt—of a perfect island night, the peat fire glowing, the west wind outside not too cold or too wet—never think of settling on the island for good? If so, I haven’t heard or read of it. Flower came so regularly on holiday and was so generally liked that he was all but an honorary Blasketer. But he, lik
e the others, knew full well he was a visitor, not an islander, and always would be. And all of them were clearheaded enough to see that the island culture so precious to them was becoming extinct.
In Aran, Declan Kiberd has written, Synge fed “off the death of the old Gaelic culture, as do all coroners and morticians”; and was aware, too, that the beauty of the dialect he used in his plays was “the beauty that inheres in all precarious or dying things.” Might some similarly dark thought apply to the Blasket visitors? Did their coming accelerate the island’s decline? After all, Brian Kelly brought books to the island; these helped inspire Tomás to write his own books, weakening the oral culture; Tomás’s celebrity brought tourists, diluting authentic island life; George Thomson induced Maurice to leave the island for the Guard.… Still, weighed against the overwhelming economic and social currents lashing at the Blaskets, these must be reckoned secondary influences at best. The “tangled world of to-day” had been reaching out to the Blaskets and its mainland neighbors all through the early twentieth century—and, really, long before.
That phrase owes to Robin Flower. In his book The Western Island, he writes of being rowed out to the island, which from a naomhóg’s perch seemed to recede “behind the dancing company of the waves. ‘Say your farewell to Ireland,’ cries one of the rowers, and I turn and bid farewell, not only to Ireland, but to England and Europe, and all the tangled world of to-day.” In a 1937 talk he gave in Germany, folklorist Séamus Delargy worried that in Europe there were “only a few remaining corners where the old world can find a free place. The storm and violence of modern life, the hustle and bustle of the big cities, the wail of the factory horn, the whirring of machines”—these could be escaped only “in the far west of our remote island,” in Irish-speaking places like the Blaskets. But long before the Blaskets were abandoned, they and Flower’s tangled world, distinct and apart for so long, had been drawing irredeemably closer.
We’ve seen how English encroached on West Kerry Irish; Synge and Marstrander lamented as much in the first decade of the century, and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt supplied evidence and detail for it in her 1928 paper. Literacy itself helped pull the island out of its insular past and into the European future. “Having acquired the doubtful blessing of being able to read the newspapers,” Daniel Binchy wrote in 1934 of Ireland generally,
the new generation has turned its back upon the rich storehouse from which the language of the old people drew its savour and its strength, the folk-tales handed down from generation to generation around the kitchen fire. Nowadays let one of the seniors begin a “story,” and in a flash the kitchen is emptied of the entire youthful population.
Blasket storyteller Seán Eoin O’Donlevy told Robin Flower once, “It was only the other day that I had all the old tales in my mind.” Now, he’d forgotten them, and it was Tomás Ó Criomhthain to blame, he said, “for he has books and newspapers, and he reads them to me; and the little tales, one after another, day after day, in the books and newspapers, have driven the old stories out of my head.” Of the islanders George Thomson would observe, “Within the space of a single generation, their whole outlook on life had been transformed by literacy,” which had “opened up a new world of commercialised mass entertainment.”
In the early 1900s, books began to appear on the island. So did photography. Synge took a few pictures in 1905. In 1920 and then again in 1924, Carl von Sydow took numerous islander portraits. In 1923, from London, George mailed to Maurice’s sister Eibhlín the first photographic image of herself she’d ever seen, one he’d taken just before leaving the island that first time.
In 1931, an article in The Irish Times reported, Robin Flower attributed the decay of folk culture in part to gramophones, which offered Blasket youth “more popular entertainment than the telling of tales around the fireside. It is strangely ironical that the instrument which does most to preserve Ireland’s folklore should be an agent of its decline.” Peig Sayers told countless stories into Flower’s Ediphone; you can hear her gravelly whisper of a voice today online, or at the Blasket Centre in Dún Chaoin, where hundreds of photos taken on the island, as well as sound recordings and film images, are now digitally enshrined.
By the 1930s, certainly, islanders were well aware of amusements and conveniences they lacked. Lís threw out a suggestion to Chambers in a November 1938 letter:
What about giving friends a bit of enjoyment and a bit of the world outside which you have and enjoy each day and night and keeping the spirit up for Christmas by collecting the price of a Radio in your own factory and to buy it yourself for me if you like in Dublin and sending it on for Christmas Eve.
A penny from each of the factory’s four hundred workers, she figured, would do it. Chambers did not oblige.
Technology had figured all along, of course, in the island’s transformation from an isolated, more or less self-sufficient community to the creaking social and economic ruin it was on the eve of its abandonment. The big motorized French fishing trawlers handled larger catches at lower cost than the little naomhógs ever could. The narrow-gauge railroad that, beginning in 1891, snaked round and through the hills of West Kerry from Tralee to Dingle delivered Synge and other visitors to West Kerry—but also Mary Kearney and countless other emigrants away. Once they reached Cobh, twenty pounds would get them to Boston or New York in a week or two, courtesy of great ocean steamers in all their relentless cost-per-mile efficiency.
Meanwhile, all across the first third of the century, Tomás Ó Criomhthain was slipping out of a fisherman’s life and into that of writer and intellectual; at the time of his death in 1937, he may have had more in common with Robin Flower than with Tadhg and Séamus and the other fishermen he’d immortalized in Island Cross-Talk and The Islandman. Sometime before 1922, he’d tell the story, he’d helped Seoirse Mac Cluin, a Catholic priest visiting the island, compile an Irish phrase book. “We used to be sitting at it eight hours a day in two sessions—four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon—for all that month. That’s the most painful work I ever did, on land or sea.” Tomás was talking like “knowledge workers” the world over, lamenting the brain-scrunching burdens of sustained intellectual effort. “It is a book that couldn’t be found written in any language,” he’d brag in English to his son of An tOileánach in 1931; “3000 of them is sold now.”
In the 1930s, the Great Blasket could be mistaken for a tourist town, with outsiders, drawn by its literary reputation, no longer so rare a sight. “Lá Breágh”s, the islanders called them, from the Irish for “a fine day,” which was about the only Irish most visitors could manage. Peats Tom Kearney’s place, next door to Peig Sayers’s, was sometimes called Kearney’s Hotel, or Pats’ Inn. For now, sheer physical inaccessibility saved the island from a precipitous descent into touristic gimcrackery. Still, it was enough to remind you of a Nice, France, say, in its first flush of tourist development 150 years before.
In the 1960s, a black-and-white documentary called The Village showed Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets sprinkled with tourists. One well-dressed Englishwoman with an upper-class accent can be heard—with what an anthropologist reviewing the film termed “Protestant incomprehension”—coming near to dismissing local poverty altogether: “I suppose it’s their Faith; they know that material things don’t matter very much.…” This fine lady exulted in “the complete absence of all the modern machinery” in the village. “I think that’s what I like best. Not men with tractors, but a man in a field cutting down the oats by hand. And a donkey cart instead of a car. A sort of fairy tale … All the nasty, modern things aren’t here.”
More and more, of course, they were.
The area would soon even feel a breath of celebrity culture. Men of Ireland and its shabby little black-and-white excuse for a story was one thing. David Lean’s 1970 Hollywood epic Ryan’s Daughter, filmed in living color on the mainland within sight of the Blaskets, was quite another. Today the locals can direct you to where star Robert Mitchum liked to down his G
uinness, or show you the remains of the schoolhouse built for the film. To Séamus Delargy, folklore was an oral “literature of escape” through which spellbound listeners “could leave the grinding poverty of their surroundings, and in imagination rub shoulders with the great, and sup with kings and queens.” Film, Delargy would also say, had become “the modern folktale.”
The wandering scholars of old were gone, Robin Flower wrote in The Western Island,
and the fashion of life they knew has gone with them. The people read newspapers, and in the police barracks at Ballyferriter … a wireless set strikes wonder into the country people. “Yes,” said one of the islanders to me the other day, “I sat in the barracks and I saw a man dancing a hornpipe, and a fiddler in London was playing the music for that dance. It is the greatest marvel I ever saw.”
There was no escaping modernity’s grip.
In August 1969, Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán, by now seventy and living on the mainland, near Smerwick Harbor, dropped by to see his eighty-six-year-old neighbor. “It is a strange world to him today,” he would write of the old gentleman, “with the mad rush there is on everybody,” and people having so much of everything. “ ‘This is the modern way of life,’ says I to him, ‘and if peace lasts and no war breaks out, ’tis only better it will be getting for us, if God spares us to see it. Did you hear,’ I went on, ‘that men landed on the moon last night?’ ”
In the inexorable tension between the simple ways of the Blaskets and the push and shove of modern life, the influences, however, don’t go just one way. The little village is gone, but its story has a way of sticking. “Their collective narrative,” writes Fintan O’Toole of the autobiographies by Tomás, Maurice, and Peig, “haunted, and to a degree still haunts, the Irish imagination.” “Haunts” is just the right word, but it’s not only the Irish imagination. An tOileánach has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Danish; Fiche Blian ag Fás into at least four languages. The three original Blasket books are all still in print and have been joined by several dozen others—books by Seán Ó Criomhthain, Mícheál O’Guiheen, Máire Guiheen, Lís Ní Shúilleabháin, and others among the islanders, as well as by Thomson and Flower. Each year, close to fifty thousand visitors make their way across the Dingle Peninsula to Dún Chaoin’s Blasket interpretive center, a handsome museum, archive, and conference center dedicated to the legacy of the island community, its great picture windows looking out at the island from across the sound. Each year scholars from Ireland, England, America, and elsewhere descend on it for a conference, conducted mostly in Irish, devoted to Tomás Ó Criomhthain, say, or George Thomson, to the island’s music or its religious faith. Meanwhile, the Blasket books continue to shoot tendrils out into the worldwide community of scholars, captivating students of literature; and also of history, geography, anthropology, and folklore; and, because they stand astride at least two sets of paired languages—Irish and English, oral and written—of translation itself as subject of study.
On an Irish Island Page 29
