by Tim Robinson
Thus it seems that there is a painful contradiction between the necessity and the impossibility of each of three identifications constituting wholeness, between the visitor, the islanders and the island itself – or between the individual, the community and the natural world, if we may read by the light of the question Synge asks himself in his notebook, on taking leave of the island after his first rapturous appropriation of it: ‘In this ocean, is not every symbol of the cosmos?’ And it is on the site defined by this triangle of tragic conflicts that Synge, in one sentence near its beginning, conjures the spirit of his book:
The continual passing in this island between the misery of last night and the splendour of today, seems to create an affinity between the moods of these people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent in artists, and in certain forms of alienation.
Here the island, the islanders and the writer are as one, subject to the manic-depressive regime of the Atlantic. It is the swift and transitionless alternations of emotional weather that give his book its characteristic texture, and this is no mere surface phenomenon or stylistic finish, but a structure deeper than the fourfold division of the work or of any analysis of it by themes. This structure expresses itself in miniature in the exquisite portrait of a young island girl whom he salutes across the chasms that divide them, as a kindred soul:
As we sit on stools on either side of the fire I hear her voice going backwards and forwards in the same sentence from the gaiety of a child to the plaintive intonation of an old race that is worn with sorrow. At one moment she is a simple peasant, at another she seems to be looking out at the world with a sense of prehistoric disillusion and to sum up in the expression of her grey-blue eyes the whole external despondency of the clouds and the sea.
In this passage we are surely looking into the face of Synge’s Aran herself.
NOTES
1 The largest of the three islands is called Árainn (the obsolete locative case of ára) or Árainn Mhór (mór, ‘big’); the latter name was anglicized as Aranmore or Arranmore. Nowadays the name Aranmore is reserved for the island off County Donegal. Perhaps it was to avoid confusion with the Donegal island that the Ordnance Survey in 1839 introduced the name Inishmore for the big island, in line with the anglicized forms of the neighbouring islands’ names, Inishmaan and Inisheer, and despite the fact that there was then no Irish form Inis Mór (‘big island’) to be anglicized. Sadly the dull backformation Inis Mór is now widely used even by native Irish speakers, and the euphonious Árainn is neglected. Inis Meáin, anglicized as Inishmaan, means simply ‘middle island’. The name of the third and smallest island has been rather corrupted; anciently it was Inis Oirthir, ‘island of the east’, and the form now recommended by the Ordnance Survey, Inis Oírr, anglicized as Inisheer, is an attempt to represent the current pronounciation while remembering the old meaning. Synge often refers to it as the south island, and to Árainn as the north island – the island chain runs from east-south-east to west-north-west.
2 Etienne Rynne, ‘Dun Angus: Fortress or Temple?’ in An Aran Reader, eds Breandán and Ruairí Ó hEithir (Dublin, 1991).
3 E. Hacket and M. E. Folan, ‘The ABO and RH Blood Groups of the Aran Islanders’, Irish Journal of Medical Science, June 1958.
4 The Reverend Simon Digby, Protestant archbishop of Elphin, had acquired half of Aran in 1713, and Robert Digby bought out the other half in 1744. At the time of the Great Famine of 1847 the landowner, Miss Elizabeth Francis Digby of Landenstown, Kildare, was criticized for sending only two tons of meal as relief to her hungry tenants. According to local lore, Miss Digby visited the islands once, when a dance was held in her honour on a stretch of smooth limestone near Cill Mhuirbhigh; there was a spot known as Miss Digby’s Steps by the harbour in Cill Éinne, but otherwise little was known of her by the islanders. A niece of hers had married Sir Thomas St Lawrence, third earl of Howth, in 1851, and when Miss Digby died in about 1894 the two daughters of that marriage, Henrietta Eliza Guinness (sister-in-law of Lord Ardilaun) and Geraldine Digby St Lawrence, inherited. The islands were acquired from the St Lawrences and the Guinnesses by the Land Commission in 1922.
5 Oliver J. Burke, a barrister who visited Aran for this purpose, wrote the first book on the islands, The South Isles of Aran (London, 1887).
6 George Petrie (1790–1866) represents the transformation of Celtic antiquarianism, with its armchair speculations about the Druids and the Lost Tribes of Israel, into a recognizably modern archaeology based on investigation of sites. He was also President of the Royal Hibernian Academy and published an important collection of Irish traditional music. He visited Aran and made the first study of its monuments in 1822, and again in 1857 with the British Association expedition, when he collected many folksongs and painted an almost expressionistically contorted view of Dún Aonghasa on its precipice, now in the National Gallery of Ireland. From 1835 to 1842 he directed the Topographical Department of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, for which the great scholar John O’Donovan (1806–1861) travelled the country recording ancient monuments, placenames and traditions.
Dr William Wilde (1815–76), Dublin’s leading eye and ear surgeon, was President of the Royal Irish Academy and catalogued its collections. He conducted the British Association’s visit to Aran in 1857, and was knighted in 1864 for his services to the Irish census. His wife Lady Jane Wilde wrote patriotic poems and books on folklore, and their son was the famous and infamous Oscar.
7 Kuno Meyer (1858–1919) studied at Leipzig. While lecturing on German and Celtic at Liverpool, 1884–1906, he travelled widely in Scotland, Wales and Ireland and founded the School of Irish Studies in Dublin in 1903. He succeeded Zimmer in the chair of Celtic Philology at Berlin in 1911. Heinrich Zimmer (1851–1910) was in Aran in 1880 and supported the Land Leaguers at a public meeting; he published a paper on St Enda in 1889.
The eminent Danish linguist Holger Pedersen (1867–1953), professor at Copenhagen, published his Comparative Grammer of the Celtic Languages in 1903–13. The folktales he took down in his own phonetic script from the old man who was later to be Synge’s guide in Árainn, have recently been deciphered and published (Scéalta Mháirtin Neile: Bailiúchán Scéalta ó Árainn, Holger Pedersen a thóg sios sa bhliain 1895, ed. Ole Munch-Pedersen, Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, Dublin 1994).
Pedersen’s disciple Franz Nikolaus Finck spent four months in Aran in 1894–5 researching his thesis, which was published as part of his two-volume Die Araner Mundart (Marburg 1899). An Aran-born writer, the late Breandán Ó hEithir, has disintered from this work a saying, ‘Ní bhéarfainn broim dreóilín ar dhuilleog cuilinn agus is beag an puth gaoithe é sin!’ (‘I wouldn’t give the fart of a wren on a hollyleaf, and it’s the small puff of wind that is!’) – which the linguistic anarchs of Synge’s plays would be hard pressed to emulate.
The American linguist and antiquarian Jeremia Curtin (?1840–1906) was reputed to know seventy languages. As Secretary of the US Legation in St Petersburg he studied and translated from Slavonic languages. In 1883–91, with the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institute, he worked on North American Indian languages. His Myths and Folklore of Ireland appeared in 1890.
8 Fr Eugene O’Growney (1863–99) first visited Inis Meáin in 1885 as a student at the Catholic seminary of Maynooth; he became Professor of Irish at Maynooth in 1891 and began to publish his famous Simple Lessons in Irish in 1893.
The Gaelic League was founded in Dublin in 1893 by ‘half a dozen nonentities’, as Douglas Hyde, its first President, put it. Its policy was to foster an ‘Irish-speaking Ireland’, and the inspirational dedication of these early cultural revolutionaries can be judged by the contrast between the late nineteenth century, when Irish-speaking parents in collaboration with the National Schools were actively beating Irish out of their children, and the early decades of the twentieth century, when up to 75,000 people were trying to learn the language and participating in Irish dancing and folklore classes, festivals ce
lebrating Irish culture, and Irish games. The League was progressively politicized by such members as Patrick Pearse, and Hyde retired in 1915 when it declared, against his wishes, that it stood for a free Ireland. He was replaced the next year by Eoin MacNeill, then in prison for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. Writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1923, Hyde summarized the influence of the League as follows:
The Gaelic League grew up and became the spiritual father of Sinn Féin, and Sinn Féin’s progeny were the Volunteers, who forced the British to make the Treaty. The Dáil is the child of the Volunteers, and thus it descends directly from the Gaelic League.
The young Patrick Pearse visited Inis Meáin in 1898 and set up an Aran branch of the Gaelic League; the attendance of seven hundred people at its inaugural meeting in Cill Rónáin included a large delegation from Inis Meáin. (See The Gaelic League Idea, ed. Seán Ó Tuama, Dublin 1972, and for the Aran branch, the League’s own organ, Fáinne an Lae, 20 August 1898.) Pearse, who proclaimed the Republic of Ireland in 1916, and his teacher colleague Thomas MacDonagh were among the leaders of the Easter Rising executed by the British.
9 The factual framework of my account of Synge and his family is drawn from the standard biography by David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge 1871–1909 (revised edition, New York and London, 1989).
10 Quoted in Dr William Stokes, Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie (London, 1885).
11 Synge’s substantial attainments in the knowledge of the Irish language and its literature, together with his changing attitudes to the policies of the Gaelic League, are discussed in detail in Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (London, 1979).
12 George Steiner (After Babel, New York and London, 1975) writes, ‘MacKenna gave his uncertain physical and mental health to the translation of Plotinus’ Enniades. The five tall volumes appeared between 1917 and 1930. This solitary, prodigious, grimly unremunerative labour constitutes one of the masterpieces of modern English prose and formal sensibility.’
13 This account of his visits to Aran is based on Synge’s diaries and notebooks in the manuscripts department of Trinity College Dublin. The fullest of the notebooks (4385), used on his first visit and corresponding to the first and longest section of The Aran Islands, has been usefully transcribed by Marek van der Kamp (‘An Authentic Aran Journal’), M. Phil, thesis, TCD, 1988). On Synge’s second visit he used some pages from a notebook (4384) started years earlier in Paris. I have referred to 4385 and 4384 as the first and second notebooks respectively. A third notebook (4387) contains mainly folklore material used in Part IV of his book, and a fourth (4397) also has some notes from his fourth visit.
14 The twenty-three surviving photographs of Aran have been published in My Wallet of Photographs: The Photographs of J.M. Synge, arranged and introduced by Lilo Stephens (Dublin, 1971).
15 Not The Life of Guy de Maupassant, as the standard biography has it!
16 The 1800s were a period of extreme want in the islands because of the potato crop failures and a fall in kelp and pig prices; many tenants owed six to nine years’ rent. There were repeated attempts to collect this money together with a collective fine of £452 that had been imposed on the tenantry for damages to stock and property during the Land War of 1880/81. In January 1898 a rent-collector with an escort of fifteen constables was driven off the big island by a crowd of 300 islanders. In May a rent-collecting expedition to Inis Meáin was thwarted by a sudden storm, but in June the forces of justice returned, with the results Synge witnessed. These seem to have been the last evictions on the island. (See Antoine Powell [an island author], Oileáin Árann, stair na n-oileán anuas go dtí 1922, Dublin, n.d., but c.1983.)
17 B.N. Hedderman, Glimpses of My Life in Aran, Part I (Bristol, 1917).
18 J. Masefield, ‘John M. Synge’, The Contemporary Review, April 1911.
19 Marie Bourke, Painting in Focus: ‘The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child’ by Frederick William Burton (Dublin, 1987).
20 The Hon. Emily Lawless (1845–1913), daughter of Lord Cloncurry, published her best-known novel Grania: The Story of an Island, set in Inis Meáin, in 1892; her other works include poetry, historical studies and biography. Synge read Grania during his first visit to Aran, and in his notebook criticized the superficiality of her knowledge of the islands.
21 The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983).
22 Synge mentions the story of the Connemara man hidden by the islanders in Part I of The Aran Islands, and in a draft of this passage he adds, ‘Another story is told here of a highway robber who escaped from his prison and hid himself away among the people in the Connaught hills … At last two girls were arrested on a charge of harbouring him, and he gave himself up to clear them. This happened recently.’ The Connemara man was the son of a poor farmer called Ó Máille and was born about 1838 in Callow, west of Roundstone, where his story is not quite forgotten. According to local lore collected early in this century (Tomas Ó Máille, An Ghaoth Aniar, Dublin, 1920), he was a handsome athletic man, the pride of the neighbourhood, but his father was a quarrelsome drunkard. When the son wanted to plant some potatoes, the father tried to stop him by grabbing his ‘loy’, or spade, and in the struggle had an attack and seemed about to die, and young Ó Máille took to the hills. (A very circumstantial account of the quarrel and of Ó Máille’s wanderings in Connemara is preserved in the manuscripts collection of the Department of Irish Folklore, University College, Dublin, among material collected through local schools in 1937–8.) After eluding the police for several months, he crossed to Cill Rónáin, where he was sheltered by a woman relative (who, it is still remembered in the island, was living next door to the Atlantic Hotel at the time of Synge’s visit). Because he was so distressed by what he had done, and was talking to nobody, the islanders tried to cheer him up with parties, dances and cardgames – hence, it is said in Aran, his reputation as a ‘playboy’. Word of his presence reached the authorities, so the islanders took him to Inis Meáin, and when the police surrounded the cottage in which he was sheltering there the man of the house let himself be captured in his place. After living rough for a time, Ó Máille got away to Tralee in a boat carrying potatoes from Árainn, and signed on as a sailor in a ship for America. He revisited Galway as a ship’s captain two years later.
The other case was that of James Lynchehaun (c. 1858–c.1937), a wild and unpredictable school-teacher who had already been arrested for a minor assault and jumped bail before the period of the crime that made him famous. In 1894 he was facing eviction by Mrs Agnes MacDonnell of Achill Island, County Mayo, who had been his employer. Her stables burned down one night and during the confusion she was assaulted and left dreadfully battered, with her nose nearly bitten off. Later that night her house burned down as well. She accused Lynchehaun of the assault (and he was probably behind the burnings too). He was arrested, escaped from the police, was hidden by distant relatives, including a young female cousin, in a hole in their floor under a dresser, was discovered and rearrested, tried and condemned to life imprisonment. He became celebrated in ballads and in newspaper reports as ‘the Achill troglodyte’. In 1902 he made a most ingenious and daring escape from Maryborough Gaol and got away to America. When arrested there he claimed his crime was political, and with the support of the Irish nationalist community avoided deportation. He revisited Achill in disguise in 1907 and returned safely to America, despite having been briefly detained by the local police over a break-in. Later he returned to Achill again, was arrested and released after a few months. It seems he died in Girvan, Scotland. In The Playboy of the Western World he is mentioned as ‘the man that bit the yellow lady’s nostril’. ‘Yellow’ here means English, as in the derogatory name for an Englishman, Seán Buí, ‘yellow John’; Mrs MacDonnell had English connections. (See James Carney, The Playboy and the Yellow Lady, Swords, County Dublin, 1986.)
23 The typescript, together with an earlier draft, is n
o. 4344 of the Synge manuscripts in TCD Library.
24 Mary C. King, The Drama of John Millington Synge (London, 1985).
25 I wronged Synge here. The maidenhair fern is the dúchosach (black-footed) in Aran. But I will let the error stand, as I have subsequently written it into the structure of my Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (Dublin, 1995).
26 Synge has been criticized by the anthropologist John C. Messenger not only for ‘primitivism’ and ‘nativism’ but for projecting a tragic world vision on island life (Inis Beag, Isle of Ireland, New York, 1969; Inis Beag Revisited, Salem, Wisconsin, 1989; ‘Islanders Who Read’, Anthropology Today, April 1988). Messenger, in the course of his researches in Inis Oírr in 1959–60, reckoned up that there had been only four sea accidents, with the loss of but twelve lives, in that island since 1850, and states that Synge’s claim that every family has lost men to the sea ‘reflects not only his masochism but the broadness of kinship reckoning’. Amazingly, the world of Synge scholarship seems meekly to have accepted this rebuke. Quite apart from any too subtle considerations of the exact reality-status of Synge’s verbal creation, it should be pointed out that Inis Oírr is another island, and that his remark on drownings are closely linked to specific incidents – two due to drunkenness in which four lives were lost, a drowning of three men of one family ‘a few years ago’, the destruction of fishing boats in Killeany Bay, and another loss of a young man whose funeral he attended. Synge also reports the realism of an islander’s view of the use of fear: ‘A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.’ And when that ‘now and again’ comes, which is the more adequate response – the anthropologist’s statistics or Synge’s prose, as resonant as the keening of the grief-stricken relatives?
