On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  But the Blasket story matters not alone for the sake of the island itself, or the people who once lived there, or the literature it produced, but for how it reflects back at us our lives today. Almost from the moment Tomás’s book first appeared, it’s been like that—life on the Blasket seen in stark contrast to modern lives that, in the right light or the wrong mood, can seem too fevered, insubstantial, or inauthentic. The Blaskets speak to us not only of what they once were, but of how we, the rest of us, are today. “It was a simple culture,” Thomson wrote of the island, “but free from the rapacity and vulgarity that is destroying our own.” True or not, the assertion, like others over the years from critics and scholars, makes the Blaskets into a kind of half-silvered mirror that, even as we look back through it to the past, shows us ourselves and something of how we live today.

  No one anytime soon is returning to live on the Blaskets; the hundreds of islanders who over the years left it behind for America and Canada might scratch their heads, incredulous, at the thought. But this truth doesn’t deny another truth, that the island has something for us yet to learn. George Thomson once lamented that he’d “failed in the work I had set out to do—that is, bring the people of the Gaeltacht into modern civilisation while retaining their own culture.” But there is other work to do—to confront modern civilization with the story, the example, the contrast, of places like the Blasket: As counterweight to a “progress” that sometimes seems too headlong, or not progress at all; as repository of those old ways of pre-modern life worth reclaiming today, or at least revisiting; as testimony that life’s satisfactions lie amid people, individually or together, undistracted by the ceaseless swell of clatter and activity, goods, gadgets, and pixels that constitutes our lives today.

  “We were poor people who knew nothing of the prosperity or the vanity of the world,” said Peig Sayers. She and the other islanders lived hard lives, buffeted by the extremes of nature, isolated and narrow. Still, most of the time, it was enough. Whereas today—doesn’t it seem?—nothing is ever enough.

  Or, seen another way, it’s too much, leaving us to yearn for just a little less of everything. Today, right beside Facebook Nation and the rest of the twenty-first-century digital world, coexists a twenty-first-century counterculture in sometimes uneasy tension with it: Slow food, locally grown. An intimate urbanism built around compact, walking-scaled city neighborhoods. Vacations offering respite from the hammer and thrum of modern life—camping, long-distance bicycle touring, folk-dancing camps, trekking in Nepal, hiking along the Appalachian Trail. Each offers at least a hesitant, momentary step into a slower, less technology-tangled life; one of less choice, less convenience, closer to nature, maybe some taste of real community. A little, in short, like the Blasket in its prime. The Blaskets “may be a broken-down culture,” wrote Thomas Barrington in 1937. “It may be a culture run to seed. But seeds scattered over a field prepared for them will produce a new crop.”

  Should it surprise us that our visitors loved the Blasket? They were products of a society by now almost a century past, yet much like ours, with many of the urban, technology-bound pleasures and social pathologies we experience today; we need scant imagination to recognize their worries, problems, and preoccupations as our own, their lives like ours. One man a frustrated, bureaucratized intellectual, forever coming down sick, behind in his work, worried about his bills. Another a great playwright, denizen of Paris and Dublin when he wasn’t on the road, a sometimes reluctant player in the literary and theatrical world of his day. A Left Bank intellectual, prone to depression. The troubled Brian Kelly, struggling with obscure psychic wounds, finally retreating to an insular little world on the Continent. And of course Thomson, who worked for much of his life against what he deemed the evils of industrial capitalism. All, in the Blaskets, had found a balm, a peace, a happiness.

  Thomson, who would insist that he came to see beyond the romantic haze through which he’d first seen the island, nonetheless did view it through a scrim of longing. So did the other visitors. Yeats said of his friend Synge, “It was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls ‘the nullity of the rich’ nor ‘the squalor of the poor,’ that his writing lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace.” There, according to Yeats, Synge found men and women who had “refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary, had dignity and good manners where manners mattered.” Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote in 1925: “I am greatly taken with this place, lonely and wild as it is.… I don’t think I shall ever get tired of it.”

  Are we required to judge as distorted or naïve all that these superbly educated men and women experienced on those windy heights above the sea? Must we dismiss it on the simple if undeniable grounds that their place in the island world was temporary and artificial, their immersion incomplete, their insight skewed?

  Today they would all be termed “privileged.” Each was spared the island’s grimmest truths, was buffered from the village’s social pressures, could come and go as he or she pleased. What George and Marie-Louise and Marstrander lived was not what the islanders lived. Australian scholar Irene Lucchitti says Synge’s sympathetic picture of the Blaskets “recognises neither the realities of poverty nor the ordinary complications of Island life.” Synge and the others may have hauled nets, collected turf on the hills behind the village, rowed until their muscles burned. But, unlike the islanders, they weren’t consigned forever to labor and hardship. Their livelihoods didn’t depend on it. Their prospects ranged beyond the sea-ruffled edge of the island. They were on vacation, or they were on leave, or they were doing research, or they were working on their Irish. Usually it was summer, and the sun shone; come winter, they were back in the city. With no matter what clarity Synge, Thomson, and the others could see the harshness of island life, they nonetheless enjoyed the mental leisure, the freedom from exigency, to see it warmed by softer light.…

  Or so, voicing this objection, speaks Maturity, the grown-up part of us that insists on being hardheadedly realistic. But of course that was not the part of them the Blaskets claimed. Because for them the Blaskets were their youths, their Land of the Young.

  Synge, twenty-seven when he first visited Aran, was older at the time of his visit to the Blaskets, thirty-four. George was twenty. Marstrander was twenty-three. Sjoestedt was twenty-four. Brian Kelly was twenty-eight, as was Robin Flower. “To him,” his bilious friend Edward Meyerstein wrote of Flower on a trip to the island, “this place is a dream of his youth.” And it was something like that for most of them.

  “Dream” suggests unreality, fantasy, nothing to be taken quite seriously, what the crimped adult in us is quick to smack down as ephemeral or silly. But—like Utopia, with its paradoxical intimations of impossible and ideal; or for that matter, the Irish Tír na nOg, Land of the Young, itself—“Dream” also suggests something rare and good, on a higher, if elusive, plane, a vision of a happier time or a better world. And it’s this we see again and again among the Blasket visitors—their idyllic days on the island transmuted into a personal vision, into sensibilities that reached across their lives and into old age.

  Around the time of George Thomson’s eightieth birthday, he was visited by Irish scholar Seán Ó Lúing, a native of West Kerry who’d been intrigued by Thomson ever since reading Fiche Blian ag Fás. It was a memorable day for Ó Lúing in Birmingham, he and George talking of prospects for the Irish language in Ireland, of links between Greek and Irish. “As he was speaking,” Ó Lúing wrote, Thomson “got up and paced the room, a light came into his eyes, his voice which at first has been weak, grew stronger, the years fell away, and I found myself listening to a man who spoke with the animation and fire of youth.”

  For Thomson, the Blaskets seem to have defined a personal state of grace, a time when he was tied to his fellows in a way he perhaps never was again.

                 By the old wooden stove where our hats was
hung,

                 Our words were told, our songs were sung,

                 Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied

                 Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside.

  These are lyrics from a song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from one of his early albums. Dylan wrote it when he was just twenty-one. Even then, it seems, he cherished the memory of a yet earlier, magical time, full of easy fellowship:

                 I wish, I wish, I wish in vain

                 That we could sit simply in that room again.

                 Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,

                 I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

  For Dylan in his dream, at least from the other side of the confounding gates of memory, younger was simpler, and simpler was happy. When we yearn for simplicity, for lives less saddled with stuff, for time less crowded and closed down, it’s usually our youthful selves we want back—for the early years when, just out of school, not making much money, as young officers, assistant professors, or junior engineers, we sat “simply in that room again,” in pub, bar, or coffee shop, with friends. For the times when, typically, we had less, yet more. “They haven’t much worry about material things, really,” said the upper-caste Englishwoman in The Village. “They prefer to have the extra time to sit around and talk.” Insufferable as she could seem, she was on to something, seizing on what, among her friends back in England, she didn’t have, or didn’t have enough, and what maybe these Irish villagers did.

  Some of the islanders’ own memories retain this same sense of youth at its delighted ease. Maurice O’Sullivan’s book is one long paean to an exuberant youth from which he’d not wholly emerged, full of adventure, games, drinking, and horseplay, steeped in friendship. Mícheál O’Guiheen calls his book A Pity Youth Does Not Last. Lís Ní Shúilleabháin “spent the most wholesome part of my childhood and young womanhood” on the island, she wrote George Chambers, “and not a single night passes without me in my happy dreams on the white sand shore.” Honeysuckle-sweet nostalgia? A little. But if we ache for the past, maybe it holds something for us.

  “The long years have vanished and all I can see today are the old ruined houses where people used to live,” Mícheál O’Guiheen recalled in old age. He and one island girl, he remembered, “would walk and walk until we reached the top of the hill. The height wouldn’t bother us. We were like a little brother and sister together. I would pick every bright flower growing on the mountain and tie them in a button-hole in front of her dress to please her. We were young and everything looked good to us.”

  • • •

  So much, on that beautiful island off the farthest shore of Ireland, looked good to young George and the others. Yet, in the end, the Blasket community perished. That is the verdict of history, brutal in its finality. Modernity won out. Today, in the big cities of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, traffic roars and restaurants glitter. Suburbs leap across the countryside. Music pounds from the bars of Boston and the boîtes of Paris. Online sites herald conferences and conventions. Technologies advance. New companies start up. Food is shipped across the nation and the world. “Social networking” takes some new fashionable form, it seems, every few months. Our world crackles and hums.

  The Blasket visitors we’ve met in these pages had seen vestiges of their own slower, horse-drawn past recede from view, too. They felt some of the ambivalence many today feel at the disappearance of the front porch, the corner market, and the local pub. “It is sad to think,” George wrote Katharine in 1937, on a visit with Moya Llewelyn Davies at her new home in Raheny, “that in a year or two the village of Raheny will be swallowed up in the Dublin suburbs”—as indeed it is today. All in our day who chafe at the insistent demands of lives that move too fast, too divorced alike from nature and human community, are a little like Flower, Thomson, Sjoestedt, and the others who found, among their fisherman friends, something they missed in London, Cambridge, or Paris.

  The islanders, too, were racked with ambivalence as they left their homes. “Whatever happens on the Island,” Lís Ní Shúilleabháin wrote Chambers on February 23, 1942, reporting their decision to leave the Blasket, “I have one gifted thing to tell you of it, I was always happy there. I was happy among sorrows on this island.” Another islander, Seán Ó Guithín, when asked about emigrating, said, “The Island will be in my head as long as I live.… The coming of each season brought its own charm for us especially when we were young lads. There was the time for making lobster-pots and time for fishing with the pots,” which sounds straight out of Ecclesiastes. In the end, there can be no surprise—nor surely is there any contradiction—that people can embrace the blessings of modern life, even reach hungrily for more of them, yet know they’ve lost something in the bargain, and grieve for it.

  It is not entirely mysterious, really, what this something-lost was. We have only to turn to the visitors themselves to see what captured their imaginations; persistent themes run through their writings. They tell of the peculiar dignity and grace of the island people, of their abiding hospitality. They tell of their bravery and strength and capacity to endure. They tell of how, with reading, writing, and pre-packaged distraction such a small part of their lives, vitality shot through their everyday human interactions. They tell of the islanders as creators of joyful music, exuberant dance, and artful language, not mere consumers of them. They tell of time taken to enjoy moments of extraordinary natural beauty. They tell of men and women measured not by one narrow yardstick of performance, doing one thing capably, but of an adaptability that left room for doing much well, living life well.

  Such qualities can’t easily be figured in to the social and economic equations comparing one society or culture with another. They are hard to stack up against food prices, miles-per-gallon, music downloads, life expectancy, stock options; they don’t compute. What, then, should we do with these “losing” graces? As we think of the Blaskets, how they touched the visitors, and what we might draw from them today, how are we to retrieve them, ensure they don’t slip irredeemably from sight? How are we to treat virtues too amorphous, soft, and tentative to count, too sweet and admirable for any place but our dreams?

  The Blasket books ensure they won’t be forgotten; this much, at least, is certain. “It was often,” island poet Mícheál O’Guiheen wrote in one of them, that “I spent a while taking my ease spread out on the brown heather, listening to the murmuring of the wind and the moaning of the waves in the coves.” Sometimes he’d feel the urge to compose a piece of poetry, yet wouldn’t. “It wasn’t from laziness I didn’t do it, but because those pictures most pleasant to my heart were too much for me to describe.”

  It would be silly and misguided to imagine the Blaskets as some straightforward model for a richer, better way of life, or from which to draw too-easy lessons of sociology or culture. The visitors themselves, certainly, were not deceived. They were all seasoned intellects. They visited the island. They were seduced by it. But they were clear-eyed and self-possessed enough not to hold it up as an exemplar to be transported bodily somewhere else. They’d been lucky, and they knew it: they’d landed on the island when they were young and had the wisdom to let it change their lives.

  “I have been reading the Irish version of Maurice’s book,” George wrote in 1937 to Katharine while briefly away in Ireland. “It is as fresh as ever, and as beautiful—much more beautiful in Irish than in English, but it leaves me rather sad thinking over the past. Not that I want it back again. What I want is to be back with you. This is a lovely place, but I could not live here because it is too remote from the ugly world, which is less forbidding when one lives in the thick of it.”

  During the years when our story plays out, then
, just as in the years since, and in the years to come, the eternal oppositions remain: To live challenging lives that don’t grind us down with their pace and pressure. To sample the best of the “simple” things while enjoying the benefits of a complex and sophisticated society. To exult in the beauty of wild places yet not destroy them through use. To embrace the wisdom of our parents and grandparents while adapting to new situations and passing on new wisdom to our children.