Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (19 page)

All that has happened to our world impends upon his island; the islanders are soon to be evicted from stasis and sent wandering on the roads of history.

Thus some of Synge’s omissions merely result from a decision not to be didactic or to waste time in acquiring the low grade omniscience other topographical writers aspire to, while certain themes broached in the notebooks lead him too far into the
personal
for exposure in the published work. But the grand exclusions mentioned above are definitive of the work itself, and to note them is not to criticize his creation but to situate it, to discover its
co-ordinates
,
the negative ones as well as the positive, and to measure the richness of its austerity by the stringency of its rejections, the magnitude of the sacrifice of material (self-sacrifice, Synge being so at one with much of this material) necessary to carve it into the form it aspires to, which is island-like, extramundane. But what sort of truth does this drastic paring-away of reality leave to his claim in the introduction that he has written ‘a direct account of [his] life on the islands … changing nothing that is essential’? The life-currents that bring him repeatedly to the islands and carry him off again are virtually unrepresented in the book, which suggests that progressive, autobiographical time is as irrelevant as history to the truths he is conveying. And in listening for these truths, one has to be aware of variable distances between his islands and the Aran of our geographies, as well as between the visitor he projects on the islands and the Synge of the biographies. Synge the writer, for instance, had to put down thousands of words on that
spray-encrusted
paper while in Aran; the visitor’s mind retains the most complex sensations and intuitions in their pristine perfection.

The boat-trip to Inis Meáin from Cill Rónáin, that awkward compromise of Aran with the mainland, had given that visitor the ‘exquisite satisfaction’ of moving away from civilization in a canoe of a model that had ‘served primitive races since men first went on the sea’. The middle island is the real Aran, and its indubitable rock soon wears out his boots, so the islanders make him a pair of rawhide moccasins like their own in which he learns the ‘natural walk of man’. These initiations into the archaic, this casting off of modern life like a worn-out pair of boots, suggest that for Synge our civilization itself is merely something interposed, for the sake of false decency and craven comfort, between us and the harsh and beautiful truths of our world.

The visitor’s description of the interior of the cottage he is to lodge in is aglow with the colours of homecoming. He feels that the handmade articles of local materials not only ‘give this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of mediaeval life’, but seem to be ‘a natural link between the people and the world that is about them’. The islanders’ way of life, he notes, ‘has never been acted on by anything much more artificial than the nests and burrows of the creatures that live round them’. This action on them of the natural, though, is of a Darwinian
ruthlessness; great dexterity is needed to bring a currach into land on a rocky shore through the breakers, and ‘this continual danger … has had considerable influence on the local character, as the waves have made it impossible for clumsy, foolhardy, or timid men to live on these islands.’ It is particularly in Part 1 that Synge builds up this picture of a life lived hand in hand with nature, as, for instance, in his accurate observation of how the appearance of the village street changes with the wind’s direction, either all the south doors being open, or all the north doors, and so of how his hostess’s ability to judge the time depends on whether or not the sun is casting the shadow of the south door’s jamb on the kitchen floor. (How strange it is, that Synge’s first gift to his hosts on this island of elemental timekeeping was to be an alarm-clock!) And this sympathy between man and nature works both ways, the visitor is forced to believe, after witnessing a burial at which the thunder seems to join in the keening for the dead.

The visitor is not just an observer of the islands’ enviable
naturalness
, but a novitiate; he learns some of their sea-skills, their language. On his second visit he shows the islanders some
photographs
he took the previous year, and

Synge’s second notebook goes further: ‘Another visit is over … One woman also has interested me in a way that binds me more than ever to the islands. The women are before convention and share many things with the women of Paris and London.’ During his first visit he had been reading Pierre Loti, arch-exponent of the temporary marriage both as a form of life and as a literary genre, and had noted for himself, apropos of
Le
mariage
de
Loti,
‘The wanderer has many pains that are known to wanderers only; in a score of places I also have longed to linger for my life and marry me with the woman that has mostly appeared to personify
as a central life each new system of sensation.’ The personification of the island as a woman comes no doubt from the promptings of a young man’s blood as well as from the august precedents of Celtic myths in which the king marries the tutelary goddess of his realm. The notebook is more visceral than anything in the
published
text: ‘With this limestone Inishmaan … I am in love, and hear with galling jealousy of the various priests and scholars who have lived here before me. They have grown to me as former lovers of one’s mistress, horrible existences haunting with dreamed kisses the lips she presses to your own.’ By the end of his third season in Aran the visitor is telling the islanders that he is going back to Paris to sell his books and his bed (the elementary
furnishings
of his life), and then coming back to grow as strong and simple as they among the islands of the west. The next year, in self-ironizing counterpoint to his own romanticism, he also records the advice of the young men to him, that he should marry a fine, fat island girl who would have plenty of children and not be wasting his money on him.

But it is when alone, as he is for long hours, that the visitor enters into his own ecology of Being, finding his introspective way to that oneness with the natural world he divines in the island culture. He begins to understand the island nights and the
distinction
they lend to those who work by dark; he spends time by himself near the shore in darkness so absolute he cannot see or realize his own body and exists only in his hearing waves and smelling seaweed. He lies on the cliff-edge and experiences
something
of the revelation of inanimate vastitude Synge tried to express in his first notebook; he seems ‘to enter into the wild
pastimes
of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows’. (A draft for the Aran cliff episode goes further than this Wordsworthian empathy: ‘I fulfil a function like the litchen and the grass, and my thoughts are older than the stones about me’ – but this illumination is not developed.) And if he were to become part of this island universe, it would at the last treat him with dignity and accept him into its own element: ‘This death, with fresh sea salt in one’s teeth, would be better than most deaths one is likely to meet’ – a thought the first notebook elaborates into a painfully realistic prevision of the death that would face Synge himself: ‘to struggle in soiled sheets and thick stifling blankets
with the smell of my own illness in my nostrils and a half paid death tender at my side till my long death battle will be fought out’.

Thus three identifications are being asserted: of the islanders with the island, of the visitor with the islanders, and of the island with the visitor. But none of these is without its painful
contradictions
, and Synge is true to those as well. Sometimes it is the Aran people who do not live up to the vision he has of them. The claim that the waves forbid the existence of clumsy or foolhardy men on the islands is undermined by the anecdote in Part 1 of a
half-drunken
crew rowing the visitor ‘at an absurd pace’ in a currach slowly filling with water from a leak which they had ‘with their usual carelessness’ neglected to mend. Often the Araners are
distracted
by the outside world from their island natures: ‘Yet it is only in the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in general the men sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and fish, and of the price of kelp in Connemara.’ Synge could imagine better Aran men than these, and eventually he had to create his Araners of the mind, in
Riders
to
the
Sea.
At the same time the visitor, in common humanity, cannot but listen sympathetically to the islanders’ economic problems. ‘The price of kelp in
Connemara
’, in particular, was to be a question of heart-rending
importance
for the Aran Islanders Synge depicted in his 1905 articles on ‘the distress’ in the Congested Districts, but for the visitor in Aran in 1898 such a question was only an interruption, part of the deplorable but inevitable intrusion of the mainland which was coercing and seducing the islands away from their essence. The most aggressive instance of this coercion is the eviction party of sweaty policemen who contrast so horribly with islanders as cool as seagulls; the most beguiling of the seductions is the shrill handbell calling the womenfolk to a meeting of the Gaelic League. The absurdity of applying mainland law to the seagull-islanders and of charging them rent for the rock they perch on is manifest; the teaching of written Irish is ominous, for it heralds the death of their oral culture and the clogging of their language with the dross of modern life.

But even if the outside world leaves them alone and
uncorrupted
, can the islanders really be at home in ‘a universe that wars
on them with winds and seas’? In the last two sections of the book Synge describes repeated scenes of anguish over deaths by
drowning
, which evidently affected him deeply.
26
The account in Part IV of the woman dying of typhus, while her menfolk row off into mist and wind in a vain quest for help, ends with the visitor talking with the old folk around the fireside about the sorrows of the people until late in the night. Coming from a funeral, he watches fishermen at work with a dragnet on the shore, and feels that they are all under a judgment of death on sea or land, and will all be battered naked on the rocks or buried with another such fearful scene in the graveyard as he has just witnessed. The islanders’ symbiotic pact with nature, then, leaves them helpless when it is broken, in the absence of civilization’s support.

The visitor’s own aspiration to oneness with the island
community
is problematic too. During his second stay he realizes how far away from him these people are: ‘They like me sometimes, and laugh at me sometimes, yet never know what I am doing.’ The cultural spaces between him and the islanders seem impassable: ‘They have the same emotions that I have, and the animals have, yet I cannot talk to them when there is much to say … On some days I feel this island as a perfect home and resting place; on other days I feel that I am a waif among the people.’ And (in Part IV) it is not just he himself with his insufficient Irish who is excluded, but the whole civilization that he was born into: ‘I became
indescribably
mournful, for I felt this little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut for ever.’ Similarly his attempts at direct communion with the island itself can lead him into dark moods:

Here is the bad death, grim alternative to the heroic sea-change he had proposed for himself as an Aran currach-man, during his first rhapsodic immersion in island life. From his early days in Inis
Meáin the visitor records a striking dream, in which he is seduced into an ecstatic dance by music tuned to a forgotten scale, that becomes a vortex annihilating all outside itself and changes
suddenly
to shrieking agony. The dream hardly bears the theory it is burdened with: ‘Some dreams I have had in this cottage seem to give strength to the opinion that there is a psychic memory attached to certain places’ – which reads like a perfunctory nod to Yeats.
27
Synge’s mind was too positivistic to entertain the
mysticism
of AE’s
The
Earth
Breath
either (and he confesses in the first notebook that he is too profane and sophisticated to see ‘the small gentry’ with which the islanders’ island is swarming at night). If this dream represents the blissful and deadly dance of union with nature, it also enacts the rebellion of the individual intelligence against such pantheistic self-obliteration.

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: