Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (18 page)

The play was taken to England in the summer, and although Yeats decided that it was too risky to put it on in Birmingham where what he called ‘the slum Irish’ might have been organized by the nationalists to demonstrate against it, performances in Oxford and London were very successful. Synge was in London and in good health for the occasion, and was lionized. Also
The
Aran
Islands
had at last been published (by Elkin Mathews in London and Maunsel in Dublin), and so 1907 gave him his brief summer of glory. July he spent in the Wicklow hills; Molly and her sister came to spend a fortnight at a cottage near his, and they rambled and rejoiced together.

Over the next autumn he worked on a play very different from his four savage comedies. The plot of his tragedy
Deirdre
of
the
Sorrows
is adapted from the ancient Irish tale, a version of which he had translated in Inis Oírr five years before: the lovely girl being brought up in seclusion as bride for the old king who rules at Emain persuades the young huntsman she has seen in the woods to run away with her, but eventually, as if compelled by the beauty of her own legend, returns to Emain and the fate foretold at her birth. Although Synge’s setting is of woods and hillsides, references to the clouds coming from the west and south, and the rain since the night of Samhain, soon take us back to the
meteorological
determinism of
Riders
to
the
Sea.
Deirdre appears at first as the child of nature itself, unpossessable by all the knowledge and power of civilization, and ends in suicide over a grave dug in the earth, mourned by nature: ‘if the oaks and stars could die for sorrow, it’s a dark sky and a hard and naked earth we’d have this night in Emain’. Perhaps this is the echo of that thunderous
revelation
, transcending art, love and death, on the cliffs of Árainn; long-delayed, almost too long-delayed …

For Synge’s period of incipient glory was also that of his dying, and
Deirdre
of
the
Sorrows
was never to be quite finished. His neck glands had been troublesome for some time, and in September he had been operated on for their removal. Although he still
discussed
marriage plans with Molly, and revisited Kerry, his periods
of health and good spirits were sporadic now, and there were endless quarrels and schisms within the theatre company to depress him further. His family no longer opposed his marriage, but it had to be postponed when he went into hospital in April 1908 for investigation of a painful lump in his side, and was found to have an inoperable tumour. He was not told of the fatal
implications
, and for a time felt much better, but the pain returned. The household he was preparing for Molly had to be broken up, and he returned to live with his mother, who was failing too. Writing to Molly, he said, ‘She seems quite a little old woman with an old woman’s voice. It makes me sad. It is sad also to see all our little furniture stored away in these rooms. It is a sad queer time for us all, dear Heart, I sometimes feel inclined to sit down and wail.’ Then, rallying, he went off to Oberwerth to see the Von Eiken sisters once again, and bought works by the mediaeval German poets von der Vogelweide and Hans Sachs with the
intention
of translating them. His mother died while he was still in Germany, and he did not feel well enough to face the journey home for her funeral. On his return he lived alone in his mother’s house, and worked intermittently on his
Deirdre.
He looked through his earlier work and wrote,

By the spring the filthy job was done. He entered Elpis Hospital again on the 2nd of February 1909 and died there on 24 March. At the funeral, his family and his artistic colleagues formed two immiscible groups, and the fisherfolk, tramps and playboys of
Ireland
of course knew nothing of it.

Thus Synge in his brief introduction divides Aran into the
primitive
and the not worth writing about. His text, though, overflows his programme. In fact on his typescript
23
Synge scribbled, ‘
Note
If the early chapters explain themselves I would prefer m.s.
without
any Introduction. J.M.S.’ Obviously the publishers’ worldly wisdom prevailed, but in ideality Synge was right: all introductions (and introductory essays by third persons) by indicating a
perspective
reduce the dimensionality of what they introduce, and so should be read only after the work itself – but by the time one realizes this, it is too late. Synge lent his European mind to Aran for a while on generously indefinite terms, and
The
Aran
Islands
can be read in many ways. A sentence in Synge’s second notebook insists on one: ‘I cannot say it too often, the supreme interest of the island lies in the strange concord that exists between the people and the impersonal limited but powerful impulses of the nature that is round them’ – and so the essential matter of the book is an ecology of moods. Later on he took a more distanced view (and one can trace this growing detachment in the book itself, as the divergences of the islanders from his prescription of them become their most interesting and theatrically engaging aspect, and a relish for the actual quarrels in him with his thirst for the ideal); in 1907 he wrote to a friend, ‘I look on
The
Aran
Islands
as my first serious piece of work … In writing out the talk of the people and their stories in this book, and in a certain number of articles on the Wicklow peasantry which I have not yet collected, I learned to write the peasant dialect and dialogue which I use in my plays.’ So the book is a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. It has also been read in a sociolinguistic mode as ‘fictionalized confessional autobiography’
24
and can be seen as a set of symptoms of the dilemmas of the late
nineteenth-century
Anglo-Irish mind. Books shed meanings as trees their leaves, year after year, in their slow growth and maturation. Nearly a century has passed since Synge first walked the bare wet rocks of Aran and his old blind guide put the riddle of the Sphinx to him.
That double-natured and sphinx-like creature, Synge-on-Aran, still proposes its riddle, which is that of our own mortal stance on the earth. Now that our planet has shrunk to an island in space (if not to a Congested District, and with no fatherly Board set over it!), all past efforts to unriddle our being-on-the-earth have to be reread; perhaps Synge’s book will reach another maturity in this age of secular eschatologies.

The
Aran
Islands
is in four parts, corresponding to the first four of his five visits. At the start he materializes, as it were, out of rain and fog on to the big island, Árainn, and meets a
satisfactorily
mediaeval mentor who talks of women carried off by fairies and gives him scraps of lore in which the Celtic hero Diarmaid and Samson from the Bible cohere with classical motifs, as in the detrital culture of the hedge-schools. But he is surprised at the fluency and abundance of ‘the foreign tongue’,
i.e.
his own
language
, in Cill Rónáin, and only a few pages after his arrival he removes to Inis Meáin, having come to the conclusion that life there ‘is perhaps the most primitive in Europe’. The first sentence of the Inis Meáin pages echoes the first sentence of the book so closely as to give the impression that the latter merely represented a false start and that it is only now that we are really beginning:

We acquire two meagre hints about Synge’s non-Aran existence in these preliminary pages. An old islander tells him that he
recognized
his likeness to his relative who was in Aran forty-three years earlier – and so we learn of the Synge connection with the islands from the lips of an Aran man, not from the author’s. The fact that Synge’s uncle was the Protestant incumbent is not stated. And on the trip across to Inis Meáin, his crew call out to some comrades that they ‘had a man with them who had been in France a month from this day’. Again, we learn a fact about Synge through its reflection (as a wonder) in the minds of the islanders. Thus one of the book’s principles of exclusion is early established, and is only underlined by the very occasional subsequent reference to Paris, standing for all that is not Aran. Another of these principles may be induced from the fact that most of the folktales he records are
dropped into the text without comment, as they would have cropped up in Aran life, in the course of a conversational walk or an evening’s entertainment. Only in the case of the first tale he heard in Inis Meáin, about the man who bets on his wife’s
faithfulness
during his absence, does he permit himself a belletristic excursus on its European antecedents: ‘the gay company who went out from Florence to tell narratives of love’, ‘the
Pecorone
of Ser Giovanni, a Florentine notary’, and so on. The passage has been praised for its skilful condensation of an extensive body of literary lore, but it does not convince one that it was written out of Synge’s memory in Inis Meáin, and as a flaw in the appearance of immediacy that controls the rest of the book, it is the one false note in the whole. (The fourth and last section of the book is perhaps even overloaded with this folk-material, which, though interesting in itself, is not fully thought into the texture of the work.) Thus, by opposites as it were, a specification of the book’s content is implied; it is the content of the mind of a visitor on the island, not of someone writing about the island from a study on the mainland.

There are other principles of exclusion at work too. A
comparison
of the contents of his notebooks and the finished work tells much about the rigour of Synge’s processes of composition. For instance, a much revised version of the passage about the spray on the leaves of the notebook itself, quoted above (p. 121), is found in a draft of
The
Aran
Islands,
but it does not occur in the finished work. As it in fact relates to the cliffs on the big island, this, like other omissions, seems to indicate that Synge wanted to truncate his account of the big island and hasten his definitive settling in Inis Meáin. This same passage in the draft is conflated with some inept nature-notes from the first notebook:

Since dandelions and buttercups are glorious in the islands, the fern called in Irish the ‘black foot’ is not the maidenhair,
25
etc.,
Synge’s final decision not to treat of the flora is wise; even his
very general comment on it, ‘On these rocks, where there is no growth of animal or vegetable life, all the seasons are the same’, is depressingly unobservant – but then it is wafted into a magical and melancholy subjectivity by its conclusion: ‘and this June day is so full of autumn that I listen unconsciously for the rustle of dead leaves.’ Another entry in the first notebook not reflected in the final work is on Dún Aonghasa:

In one of the later drafts this train of thought is continued:

But the attempt at recuperating the emotions of hairy prehistory by means of the dubious metaphysics of their inherence in the rocks is abandoned, together with the description of the site. In fact Dún Aonghasa is one of the most striking absences in the book, and even the huge cashel lowering over Synge’s cottage in Inis Meáin is left undescribed except as ‘a corona of stone’.

Most visitors to the islands are as impressed by the great cashels as they are by the luxuriance of the summer flowers; but even before these perceptions they are overawed by the presence of stone everywhere. Synge certainly gives one the picture of a bare and stony island, but his account nowhere conveys the extreme stoniness of Inis Meáin, which is remarkable even in the context of the Aran Islands. Two aspects of this feature have been noted above: the sheets of smooth naked rock that extend for hundreds of yards in terraces below the line of villages, and the mighty
stormbeach around the exposed southern shoreline and on top of the western cliffs. Synge does not mention these two astounding formations, which insistently raise the question of geological origins, of the processes of time; it is as if he wanted to generalize his island into elemental simplicity and atemporality. Similarly the striking out of Dún Aonghasa from his record amounts to the
suppression
of the islands’ history. Neither the rich corpus of legends and traditions associated with Aran’s saints and monasteries, nor the dramas of the Cromwellian conquest, nor the piteous
hungerlore
of the Famine century, figure in his account. The great
echo-chambers
of the past, from the geological birth through the
prehistory
and history of the islands, are closed off, almost down to the immediately relevant inheritance of landlordism. On the eve of the threatened evictions Synge asks, as if the question had just come into his head, who owns Inis Meáin; and the islanders’ answer places the matter in the perspectives of the picturesque: ‘Bedad, we always heard it belonged to Miss —, and she is dead.’ The islands, then, exist only in the shallow, cyclic time of sunsets and tides and seasons, the rippling weather-like time so accurately metered by Synge’s prose style itself. The pathos of this situation, its vulnerability, is expressed in the first of the notebooks, which so often spell out what is left implicit in the book itself: