Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (15 page)

While thus badgered and solicited by sectarian and secular
politics
, the Aran Islanders also found themselves elected to a literary and even a metaphysical status by the romantic nationalism which was transforming Ireland’s image of itself. Successive generations of Irish thinkers – many of them members of the Protestant
ascendancy
– were founding their separatist claims on the rediscovery of the Celtic soul, essentially at odds with the mundane progressivism of the Anglo-Saxon. And this ancient, mysterious, spirit guide of the nation was to be called forth from the humble cottages of the last living representatives of Celtic purity, the Irish-speaking
farm-and
fisherfolk, and pre-eminently those of the western seaboard. Aran, that forlorn outcrop of want, was to become one of the chief shrines of this Ireland of the mind.

The rediscovery of Aran’s Celtic and monastic magnificence had been begun by George Petrie, ‘the father of Irish archaeology’, in 1821; it was consolidated by the excited reports of John O’Donovan in 1839 when he was employed by the Ordnance
Survey
to record Ireland’s ancient monuments, and crowned in 1857 by the visit of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, who, accompanied by many Irish scholars and led by Dr William Wilde, feasted within the walls of Dún Aonghasa.
6
The enlistment of the contemporary islander in the reconstruction of Irishness
followed
closely. Here all that was most pungently characteristic of this relict state of being had been hoarded, like treasure buried in troubled times, now to be disinterred. Petrie had also collected folksongs, and O’Donovan placenames, from the Irish-speaking natives; the poet Samuel Ferguson and the painter Frederick Burton made the life of the Aran fisherfolk their subjects. The living culture of Aran, it was realized, was a repository of
venerable
antiquities. The Celticist Kuno Meyer visited Inis Meáin. Foreign scholars – the linguists Pedersen of Copenhagen and Finck of Marburg, the mediaevalist Zimmer of Berlin, the
folklorist
Jeremia Curtin of America – made the pilgrimage and paid
their respects in learned treatises.
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The islands’ ancient monuments were re-examined by an excursion of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1895, and in the same year the Irish Field Club Union, led by the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, came to marvel at their fauna and flora. The revival of the Irish language, in retreat for centuries, was the dream of such founder members of the Gaelic League as Eoin MacNeill and Fr Eugene O’Growney, who sought out the living language in Aran in the 1880s.
8
W.B. Yeats came in 1896, looking for a setting for his
proposed
novel,
The Speckled Bird
, which was to oscillate between mystical Paris and peasant Ireland. In the year of Synge’s first visit, 1898, the young Patrick Pearse was there and founded an Aran branch of the Gaelic League, and Lady Augusta Gregory collected fairylore. Thomas MacDonagh, later to be Pearse’s
colleague
at his school, St Enda’s in Dublin, and to join him in the sacrificial Easter Rising of 1916, also spent time in Inis Meáin, where he organized rifle practice on the crags. Thus by Synge’s time Aran, and Inis Meáin in particular, had been widely
identified
as the uncorrupted heart of Ireland. (This attribution of a
particular
degree of Gaelic purity to the middle island was first made by Petrie, who thought that the morals of the big island had been contaminated by people introduced to build the lighthouse in 1818, and those of Inis Oírr by its proximity to the Clare coast.) The cottage of Páidín and Máire MacDonncha, in which Synge also stayed, was sometimes so full that the overflow had to sleep within the cashel walls of Dún Chonchúir nearby, and it was very reasonable of the islanders to conclude, as one of them told Synge, that ‘there are few rich men now in the world who are not
studying
the Gaelic’.

Nowadays each of the islands has its airstrip, its small
industries
and its electricity generators. But the increasing implication of Aran with the outside world since Synge’s day has scarcely dulled its alluring legend. The American director Robert Flaherty’s famous 1932 ‘documentary’,
Man
of
Aran,
situated his hero in a timeless world of rock and wave, and the many subsequent
treatments
in words and images have threatened to bury the little islands Pompeii-deep in interpretations. If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the
power of two. Whether the grain of wonderful truth in this can survive the trampling of the hundred thousand tourists who now visit the islands each year, remains to be seen.

The Synges came to Ireland in the seventeenth century from England, produced a succession of bishops for the Protestant Church of Ireland, and married land. J.M. Synge’s father, John Hatch Synge, was a younger brother of the owner of Glanmore Castle in County Wicklow; he inherited a small estate in County Galway, became a barrister in Dublin, and married the daughter of an Ulster-born rector of intemperate evangelical zeal. As
landowners
and clerics of the Established Church, standing on the
apparently
natural and divinely sanctioned economic and cultural rights of the Anglo-Irish community in Ireland, families like the Synges were loftily remote from such aboriginals as the Catholic,
Irish-speaking
and illiterate peasantry of the Aran Islands. At the same time the tiès between the two classes were close and necessary (at least to the well-being of the former). The Synges’ income derived in part from the rents paid by the small tenants of their Galway estates (as J.M. Synge’s mother sharply reminded him once, when his social conscience was troublesome), while for his proselytizing forebears the rural Irish were a field of souls for the harvesting; in fact Synge’s uncle had been the Church of Ireland minister in the Aran Islands in the 1850s.

But by J.M. Synge’s generation the attitudes of the Anglo-Irish to the peasantry had become more complex and problematic, as the Protestant hegemony cracked before the rise of the Catholic middle classes. Among the Synges’ peers were some of the
intellectual
leaders of the new version of Irish nationalism which found its inspiration in the hitherto despised folk of the countryside – but the Synge family itself had no truck with such an abdication of the duties of civilization.

John Millington Synge
9
was born in 1871 in Rathfarnham, then a village, now absorbed into the suburbs of south Dublin. His father died in the following year, and Mrs Synge, left with five children and a reduced income, moved to a house next door to her
mother in nearby Rathgar. John was a sickly, asthmatic child, and laboured under the burden of his mother’s vivid belief in hell-fire. An early love of the countryside and wildlife afforded some relief from the fond oppressions of home, but his reading of Darwin (when he was fourteen) introduced the new pain of religious doubt. Within a few years he no longer regarded himself as a Christian but as a worshipper of a new goddess, Ireland. His
disbeliefs
and beliefs formed rift-valleys of incomprehension between himself and his relatives, though he always preserved his status as a member of the family household. He gulped the patriotic
balladry
published in a nationalist newspaper,
The
Nation,
and
scoured
the countryside in search of the Irish antiquities he read about in the writings of George Petrie. And in Petrie he would have read:

Synge’s enthusiasm for Irish matters did not close his mind to a wider cultural heritage. He took up the violin, and, while
scraping
through a second-class degree at Trinity College, which
introduced
him to the Irish language
11
and to Hebrew, he worked for and won a scholarship in counterpoint from the Royal Irish Academy of Music. It seemed that music was going to be his life. In 1893 a distant relative, Mary Synge, a concert pianist, arranged for him to stay with friends of hers, the Von Eiken sisters, in Oberwerth on the Rhine. After two months of studying music there, he moved to Würzburg. But he came to feel he would never be sufficiently confident to perform in public, and that his
compositional
talents were of little worth. He moved to Paris, and in 1895 he commenced courses in modern French literature,
mediaeval
literature and comparative phonetics at the Sorbonne, with the
idea of becoming a critic of French literature. He lived the student’s life of cold attics and introspective scribbling; he read such subtle adversaries of his mother’s simple words of God as Mallarmé, Huysmans and Baudelaire. Holidays with his family in Wicklow alternated with a visit to Rome and further eclectic studies in Paris: the anarchist Sébastian Faure, Marx, Morris, Petrarch, St Thomas à Kempis’s
The
Imitation
of
Christ
(a
discipline
of meditative practice he seems to have tried to adapt to
aesthetic
contemplation). In Ireland he was pursuing an unpromising attachment to a girl called Cherrie Matheson, the daughter of a Unionist barrister prominent among the Plymouth Brethren; she would not have him because of his atheism. On the Continent he got to know a number of young women with whom he
corresponded
– all too often, some of them felt, on the subject of Cherrie – and with whom he obviously found it easier to form close
friendships
than with the men of his aquaintance.

In 1896 W.B. Yeats, who was a member of the secret Irish
Republican
Brotherhood, and his even more revolutionary muse Maud Gonne were in Paris, founding
L’Association
Irlandaise
(‘the Irish League’) as a focus for Irish nationalists in France. Synge met Yeats in December of that year and joined the League, but soon resigned: ‘I wish to work in my own way for the cause of Ireland and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement.’ But other sides of the multifaceted Yeats probably influenced him, through such works as
The
Celtic
Twilight,
which enlists the fairies and ghosts of the Irish countryside into the shadowy battalions of European
mysticism
. Like so many others at that period he ‘dabbled’, as they say, in psychical research, in company with a new friend, Stephen MacKenna. MacKenna, then an impecunious journalist, had already translated
The
Imitation
of
Christ
and was soon to begin his life’s great work, the translation of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus.
12
But whatever degree of objective existence Synge might have allowed to the manifestations of the séances, he was always too much the realist to have shared Yeats’s prodigal credences as expressed in
The
Celtic
Twilight
: ‘Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.’

It was probably at a meeting of the League that Yeats (
according
to his own account written in 1905) issued his momentous
command: ‘Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’ Yeats had recently visited Aran with Symons, and, as the strategist of the Irish cultural revival, he realized the islands’ symbolic importance, but knew that the new recruit would be better equipped than himself for their retaking.

But before Synge could go to Aran, he had an appointment with the disease that was to kill him twelve years later. The lump on his neck for which he went under the knife in December of 1897 was recognized by his doctor and the hospital nurses as a symptom of Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymphocytes; it seemed they did not reveal this to him, and it was eight years before the growth recurred, but in the light of some very specific imaginings of death in his notebooks of the Aran years, it is
difficult
to believe he did not suspect the truth.

Synge returned to Paris for the first three months of 1898 and, perhaps with the Aran Islands in mind, interested himself in France’s own Celtic appendix. He read Le Braz’s
Vieilles
Histoires
du
Pays
Breton,
and Pierre Loti’s
Pêcheur
d’Islande,
about Breton fishermen who spend the summer seasons fishing off Iceland. It appears from a draft of his introduction to
The
Aran
Islands
that Synge intended to form his work on the model of Loti’s. How that could have been done is an intriguing question, since Loti’s novel is the story of a doomed romance, in which the sea as bride asserts its primacy over the seafarer’s village love. But Synge the romantic atheist must have responded deeply to the meaningless but
awesome
universe Loti draws, in which prayers are not answered, clouds take up certain shapes only because they must take up some shape, wives keep vigil by granite crosses on rocky promontories for husbands who will never return, and even the attitude of the Crucified himself is finally equated to the gesture of a drowning man.