Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (16 page)

Synge left Paris at the end of April, had a painful interview with Cherrie Matheson in Dublin, and went straight on to Aran; he must have carried with him a heavy freight of moods, ideas and expectations.
13
His diary for the 10th of May reads simply: ‘Dans le batteau à Arranmore à l’Hotel.’ The grandly named Atlantic
Hotel was a small two-storey building on the quayfront in Cill Rónáin. From there he explored east and west along the road, and then on the third day of his visit he crossed the ridge of the island to the tall cliffs that confront the vastness of the Atlantic. Reliving this experience later on, his notebook gropes among impossible scenarios for a simile:

Strangely, this revelation, equivalent to an instantaneous initiation into art, love and mortality, is not reported in
The
Aran
Islands
itself. But that slow-acting shock echoes in diminuendo through the four sections of the book, and is re-echoed more distantly in his subsequent works.

In Cill Rónáin Synge got to know an old blind man, Máirtín Ó Conghaile (‘Martin Conneely’), who had been a guide to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde and others, and who he realized was therefore one of those fabulous Araners he had read of in Petrie ‘years since when I was first touched with antiquarian passion’. This living antiquity gave him some lessons in the Irish of Aran, which Synge must have found very different from the Irish he had learned at Trinity, and showed him some of the island’s Christian sites, including the mediaeval chapel ‘of the four beautiful saints’ whose holy well was to become the source of his play
The
Well
of
the
Saints.

While in Árainn Synge called on the Church of Ireland
minister
Mr Kilbride and the Catholic parish priest Fr Farragher, and acquired a camera from a fellow visitor. After a fortnight, finding that Cill Rónáin had been dragged out of the Middle Ages by the Congested Districts Board and become as banal as any other little west-coast fishing village, he left it for Inis Meáin. There he stayed in the MacDonnchas’ cottage, and their son Máirtín (Synge calls him Michael in his book) became his guide and tutor. Synge lived for a month on this more primitive island, and also briefly visited Inis Oírr. He spent his time drowsing on the walls of the great cashel that looms over the cottages, wandering with Máirtín or alone, taking photographs
14
of the islands (photographs
mysteriously
in tune with the moods of his prose), and picking up
folktales
and anecdotes, including those that were to grow into
The
Shadow
of
the
Glen
and
The
Playboy
of
the
Western
World.
Twenty-seven
years old and unlucky in love, he was very aware of the beauty of the Aran girls; in his luggage was Loti’s account of one of his escapades of Cytherian imperialism, set in Tahiti,
Le
mariage
de
Loti.
He read a lot; other books listed in his diary include Maeterlinck’s
Le
trésor
des
humbles,
Les
grands
initiés
by Édouard Scheuré (an admirer of Rudolf Steiner), an unspecified work of Swedenborg’s, Rossetti’s poems, the Irish mystical poet AE’s latest collection
The
Earth
Breath,
and, as if as an astringent corrective to these spiritual effusions, Flaubert’s
Madame
Bovary
and de Maupassant’s novel
Une
Vie,
15
both of them
demonstrations
of the proposition that (to quote the latter)
‘l’être
moral
de
chacun
des
nous
reste
éternellement
seul
par
la
vie’.
And above all, he wrote. A frequent entry in his laconic diary is the single word ‘Écrit’. Some at least of this writing was done in little notebooks that would fit into the palm of the hand and that he could use outdoors. It is curiously moving to read, in the stillness of the manuscripts room of Trinity College Dublin, the first connected passage in these notebooks:

During this first visit Synge witnessed and photographed one of the last – if not the last – eviction raids to be made on the island.
16
His description of it in
The
Ar
an
Islands
is a fine piece of engaged reportage; when he writes

he had already shared such a hearth for long enough to intuit its mysteries. But he also knew about evictions, in their legal and
tactical
aspects, from the other side, for his brother Edward was a professional agent to big landlords and an efficient practitioner of the art. Synge had had arguments with his mother on the subject, and when he describes an Aran mother cursing her son for acting as bailiff in this eviction, one could imagine Synge’s mother rising opposite her to berate her own son for betraying his class by siding with rent-defaulting peasants.

On his way back to Dublin, Synge stayed for a few days at Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home in south Galway, at Yeats’s suggestion. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, her
neighbour
at Tulira Castle, were then planning the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre, which later became the Irish National Theatre. One of the two plays with which the new venture was inaugurated in May 1899, Yeats’s symbolic drama,
The
Countess
Cathleen,
excited the anger and incomprehension of the Catholic Church as well as of the Gaelic League, and the boos with which it was greeted foretold the theatre’s turbulent future, on which Synge was to ride to his own troubled fame.

Synge visited Inis Meáin for nearly a month in September 1899, finding the island, in the rains and storms of autumn, a darker place, and the islanders dejected after a poor season’s fishing. He caught a feverish cold and had fears of dying and being buried there before anyone on the mainland could know of it. He was there again for a month in September of the following year, when he participated in the islanders’ grief over a drowning and witnessed scenes of despair and resignation out of which he
was to make
Riders
to
the
Sea.
Throughout his Aran seasons he advanced in island proficiencies; he talked and understood more Irish, learned to row a currach, contributed to evenings of fun and music. He went over to Inis Oírr again for a few days during this third trip, and got to know two girls there, one of whom
corresponded
with him later on. Whether it was she of whom in his notebook he wrote, ‘One woman has interested me in a way that binds me more than ever to the islands,’ is not known; the
relationship
, whatever its nature, seems to have come to nothing – but one wonders if later on this woman ever felt she had lost the only Playwright of the Western World?

In his alternative life in Paris Synge was engaged in another profitless love, with an American art student, Margaret Hardon, whom his diary often refers to as ‘La Robe Verte’; he sketched a play (later entitled
When
the
Moon
Has
Set
) in which a writer loves a nun, whom he persuades to renounce her vows; she exchanges her habit for a green dress and gives herself to him. Reality was not so complaisant, nor was the sketch a success, and Lady Gregory and Yeats when they read it suggested he turn to peasant themes.

By the summer of 1901 Synge had put together the first three parts of his Aran book, which he sent to Lady Gregory; she and Yeats were impressed by it, but thought it would benefit from the inclusion of more fairylore. In late September he revisited Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr for a total of nineteen days. In Inis Meáin several people were ill with typhus, and Synge was horrified at the thought of them dying without a doctor. He would have met the islands’ district nurse in Inis Oírr on one of his previous visits – she was later to write a gruesome account of her struggle against the insanitary folk-cures and the filth of those hearthsides Synge found so cherishing
17
– but it seems that no medical help was available in Inis Meáin at this time. In Inis Oírr he collected
folksongs
with the dedication of a professional, and translated an
eighteenth-century
version of the ancient legend,
The
Children
of
Uisneach,
which had been published recently; it was to furnish the matter of his last play,
Deirdre
of
the
Sorrows.

On his way to Paris that November, Synge delivered the
manuscript
of
The
Aran
Islands
to a London publisher Yeats had
suggested
, Grant Allen, who soon returned it. In January 1902 Fisher
Unwin, also of London, similarly declined it. His writing career was depressingly unsuccessful; he was still living on an allowance of ‘
£
40 a year and a new suit when I am too shabby’. But he doggedly pursued his commitment to the Celtic by following a course in Old Irish at the Sorbonne, where he was frequently the lecturer’s sole hearer. These were his seasons of endurance, and they were at last rewarded by a creative outflow; during the next summer, which he spent with his mother in a rented house in Wicklow, he wrote
The
Shadow
of
the
Glen
and
Riders
to
the
Sea
,
and began
The
Tinker’s
Wedding.
The two completed plays were very welcome to Yeats and Lady Gregory, for their Irish National Theatre was more blessed with talented actors than with plays worth acting. Synge spent twenty-five days in Inis Oírr in October but did not visit Inis Meáin; it was his last trip to the islands and was not reflected in his already completed book.

Synge gave up his Paris apartment that winter and lodged in London, where he was introduced by Lady Gregory and Yeats to the literary world. John Masefield took note of this new, but not young and rather sombre face:

Then he returned to Ireland, and in June 1903 he heard
The
Shad
ow
of
the
Glen
read by Lady Gregory to the actors of the Irish National Theatre. That autumn he visited Kerry instead of Aran, and found there an English-speaking peasantry whose dialect he could more immediately adopt into his plays.

The first performance, in October of that year, of
The
Shadow
of
the
Glen
was hissed by an audience which pronounced its theme an offence to Irish womanhood. Arthur Griffith, founder of the nationalist organization Sinn Féin and editor of the
United
Irish
man
newspaper, was particularly violent in his attacks on Synge and the National Theatre. Synge’s fantastic realism was at odds with that cast of mind which, tensed in repudiation of the
600-year-long
slurs that had accompanied colonization, would admit no defect in the life of Catholic rural Ireland and held that an Irish National Theatre should be the vehicle of patriotic propaganda. His plot had been suggested by a folktale he had heard in Inis Meáin in 1898, concerning a husband who pretends to be dead in order to catch his young wife with her lover; he added to it the wife’s abandonment by the pusillanimous lover and her going off with a tramp who has by chance been witness of these events. The setting he chose was one of the great sheep-glens of Wicklow he knew so well. In fact, there are sheep everywhere in the dialogue of the play: the productive and individually recognizable sheep of the skilful shepherd who had befriended the lonely wife and then gone mad and died before the action begins, unmanageable sheep escaping in all directions from his incompetent successor the lover, sheep jumping through gaps, leaving their wool on thornbushes, coughing in the fog, stretched out dead with spiders’ webs on them, and perhaps even covertly, aimlessly astray in the famously depressing view from the wife’s door, of ‘the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again and they rolling up the bog …’. Indeed, to accept the nationalists’ own simplistic account of why they were disturbed by such a weird drift of disorderly feelings as Synge let loose through this play, is to close one’s eyes to the
psychological
wastes he explores in it.