The Books: The Aran Islands, by J.M. Synge

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Aran Islands, by J.M. Synge

“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.” — W.B. Yeats to J.M. Synge

John Millington Synge, like a lot of Irish writers in his day, was drawn to Europe and its influence on art. Ireland was nowheresville, a place to escape. He was a musician first (he was a multitalented man) and studied in Germany. Stage fright and self-doubt caused him to give up music. He proposed to a girl back in Ireland and she turned him down (repeatedly) because they were different religions. Yet another reason to turn his back on Ireland. He then moved to Paris to study literature at the Sorbonne, and there began his first blossoming as a writer. This was the 1890s, an incredible time to be in Paris. All of this happened to coincide with the burgeoning Irish Renaissance, but he wasn’t a part of it at all – not at this time, anyway. The Irish, at that time, suffered from an inferiority complex, from their years under English rule. If your language is stomped out of existence, then how can one adequately express himself? This was one of James Joyce’s main themes. Joyce said, “I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.” A tradition imposed on his country. He wrestled with this. J.M. Synge had no interest in wrestling with it, until he ran into W.B. Yeats. Yeats took on a role as a sort of Elder Statesman to young Irish writers, and he gave Synge the advice in the blockquote above. By rejecting Ireland, Synge was rejecting the true wellspring of his art. So Synge took Yeats’ advice and over the next couple of years spent a lot of time out on the Aran Islands, the three wild islands off the west coast of Ireland. At that time, the Aran Islands were still relatively untouched, and many Irish writers at that time thought the people on Aran held the key to their whole history. Yes, the people on Aran too had suffered under British oppression but due to their distance from the mainland, there was a freedom and independence in them that had not been altered. The Gaelic they spoke was wild, free, and different from other versions. They lived in isolation. It was a place untouched by time. Synge spent five consecutive summers out on the Aran Islands, collecting stories that he would eventually utilize in his plays – especially Playboy of the Western World, the play that made his name.

During this time, he had a change of heart about the opportunities in Ireland, and he joined up with Yeats and Lady Gregory to form the Abbey Theatre. The first plays he wrote for them were rejected, but he kept at it. He also wrote book reviews and poetry. He worked on a book about The Aran Islands, which would eventually become the book I am excerpting today. He wanted to show the Aran Islands as he had encountered them. It is not a scholarly work, more of a meditation on the people and the landscape, with all of his impressions intact. A popular feeling at the time was that the Catholicism that was so omnipresent was just a light covering over the pagan past – something Yeats explored in much of his poetry (but of course he wasn’t Catholic, so he may have had ulterior motives: “I’m Irish too even though I’m not Catholic!!” and etc.) – and you can actually still feel today in some of the commentary about Ireland. It’s something Sinead O’Connor is obsessed by, for example (one of her song lyrics: “We used to worship God as a mother. Now look what we’re doing to each other.”) And if you go to a place like Newgrange (which I have – here is my impression of what a Newgrange tour is like), it is hard to shake the feeling that something very deep, mysterious, and huge is going on there. Something primordial. Certainly pre-Catholic. But that was something Synge sensed very powerfully out on the Aran Islands where Catholicism dominated, of course, but it was more of a rural expression of it, with myths, legends, and old tales woven in – things that had just as much reality to the people as the Catechism. He felt that the people on Aran totally believed in the supernatural: there was no divide between the real and the unreal.

Synge kept working on plays, and finally wrote two that met with Lady Gregory’s approval: the wonderful Riders to the Sea (I have a gorgeous first edition of that play), and The Shadow of the Glen, which the Abbey decided to produce. Both of these plays were based on the stories he had heard around the peat fire out on the Aran Islands. Synge had totally taken Yeats’ advice to heart (much credit to him for that). From the beginning, his plays got him into a bit of trouble, in the highly censored and prudish time, but nothing could prepare anyone for what happened when his new play, Playboy of the Western World premiered at the Abbey on January 26, 1907. Riots broke out. (That link explains it all.)

While Synge certainly had an interesting (albeit short – he died at 38) life – without Playboy of the Western World, he would just have been a footnote. That play put him in the history books forever, and the riots (which kept breaking out at every performance). He had expressed something about Ireland (and Irish women) that people did not like. It was an insult, a sacrilege – people were rioting who hadn’t even seen the damn play, they had just heard that they were insulted by some chap, and were pissed. Playboy is a fun play, and deceptively simple to put on. The language is steeped in Irish colloquial vernacular, and makes it a challenge for modern-day actors, especially those who take Frosted Lucky Charms as their main basis for Irish dialect. But the play holds up. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, but it is a total crowd-pleaser. Great characters.

But this is not a post about Playboy of the Western World! It is about the book Synge published about his summers on Aran.

A languid and slow-moving book, it requires that you slow yourself down to its pace, one of its greatest charms. Synge is undeniably a great writer: his descriptions of the rain, the rocks, the ocean, are all superb, and really captures the wildness of what it feels like out there. At times he takes an anthropologists’ tone, commenting on social interactions, and the dress of the women, and the thatching of the roofs: He was an outsider. This was all new to him, he who had spent most of his life carousing in Germany and Paris. He was a Dublin boy, too. The divide between the “civilized” east of Ireland and the wild west was huge. It could also be patronizing. Much of his love for Aran had to do with how “primitive” it was, and how credulous and simple the people were. Nobody wore watches, for example. Everything was dictated by the sunrise and sunset. A rural people, a people whose lives were dictated by the moods of the sea. One of the joys of the book is his recounting of all the stories he was told by the people he met out there. These are fantastical sometimes, variations on well-known fairy tales, somehow filtered through the Aran experience. Synge was amazed that German fairy tales would be known out here – because certainly no one had read them in a book. It was as though he was encountering a type of universal knowledge, when he heard these Aran Islanders tell a fairy story, with their own Irish spin on it. In his retelling of the tales, you get the cadences of the people. He lets them tell their own stories. While he was out there, he took Irish language lessons from a guy named Michael (a great character), and did his best to converse in Irish with the locals. English was already common, although families pretty much spoke only in Irish to one another.

I was out on the Aran Islands in the late 90s, and it is still common to hear groups of teenagers and little kids chattering in Irish to one another. Everyone speaks English, too, of course – but there is still a sense of a small closed society. And here’s an amusing random story, a propos of nothing. Just tells you how small a world it is. My sister Jean and I had a total adventure even getting to the damn ferry, but we made it, boarded, and sailed out over rough seas to the main island, Inishmore. It was November, not tourist season, so the only other people on that boat were locals. We got off at the dock on the other end, and a friendly dude asked us if we wanted to have a tour of the island. We said sure. We got into his car and he drove us around, showing us the sights. He was tremendously amusing and we had a great time with him. Everything was hilarious. Of course he wanted to know where we were from. “Rhode Island,” we said. Because the Irish have so many relatives on the east coast of America, they usually know where Rhode Island is (although one Irish guy on Achill Island did ask my father once, “Is that near Houston?”). But we were not prepared for our new friend’s response. He knew exactly where Rhode Island was, and said, “I got two cousins who work as lobster fishermen in Point Judith.” Point Judith is a 10 minute drive from where I grew up, and Jean is still highly connected with the fishing trade in Rhode Island (well, everyone in Rhode Island is – it’s unavoidable). She knows everyone in Point Judith – friends on the lobster boats, friends in the fish market business, and she thought for a second and said, “Are your cousins named Jimmy and Frankie?” The guy looked at us in the rear view mirror, shocked at the coincidence – and explained, “Oh, sure no, you’re not tellin’ me you KNOW them.” Jean said, “I know them very well!”

I mean, seriously, what are the odds. Jean told me later that “Jimmy and Frankie” were lunatics, and everyone knew about the “crazy Irish cousins” who worked on the lobster boats and wreaked absolute havoc on their days off. Hilarious. So weird. So then for the rest of our time with our Aran Island friend, we talked about Point Judith’s fishing business, and how it works, compared to the fishing business on the Aran Islands, and blah blah blah, we were best friends with the guy by the end. We all hugged when we said goodbye, and he told us to say hi to Jimmy and Frankie.

One other random Aran Islands story. Jean and I struggled through the wind and rain (it was a hellatious day when we were out there) to Dun Aengus, one of the crumbling Iron Age forts facing the wild Atlantic that dot the islands. Dun Aengus is the biggest. To get there you have to walk through stony fields, and dirt roads, and obviously – it was freezing November – we were the only people out there. We could easily have been swept away into the ocean. Dun Aengus has to be seen to be believed. It was perfect that we were there on such a wild isolated day, and that it was only us, because you really could get the sense of … these Iron Age people hiding in their fort and … doing Iron Age things with each other. A pre-Christian crazy environment, with the constant crash of the giant surf at the bottom of the cliff. But to put a light note on all of it, as we scrambled over the fields to get to the fort, in the driving rain, we kept having to dodge the cow shit and sheep shit, so Jean said, “I guess we’re on the way to DUNG Aengus.” The O’Malley humor is eternal.

I had read Synge’s book when I went out to the Aran Islands and while the book can seem rather quaint to modern eyes, I certainly recommend that anyone who goes out to the Aran Islands reads it. Synge was a good listener. The people on these pages leap to life, you can hear their voices, you can see the glint in the eyes. You can also feel Synge, to some extent, seeing what he wanted to see. He was already starting to get the ideas for the plays he would write, and the Aran Islanders were his inspiration. He felt their simplicity and humor and independence were indestructible, something he put on stage in his plays. (Synge’s photographs of the Aran Islands are incredible as well.)

It is not good to romanticize the past, something that Irish-Americans certainly do in spades in regards to Ireland, but Synge’s book is a classic: a portrait of a time and place seen through his eyes.

Here is an excerpt that gives a good feel for the structure of the book: Synge’s narrative mixed with the stories told by the people he meets. Mixed with a little political and social commentary about the Irish language, which was a hot hot topic in those days.

Excerpt from The Aran Islands

It was quite dark on the pier, and a terrible gale was blowing. There was no one in the little office where I expected to find him, so I groped my way further on towards a figure I saw moving with a lantern.

It was the old man, and he remembered me at once when I hailed him and told him who I was. He spent some time arranging one of his lanterns, and then he took me back to his office – a mere shed of planks and corrugated iron, put up for the contractor of some work which is in progress on the pier.

When we reached the light I saw that his head was rolled up in an extraordinary collection of mufflers to keep him from the cold, and that his face was much older than when I saw him before, though still full of intelligence.

He began to tell how he had gone to see a relative of mine in Dublin when he first left the island as a cabin-boy, between forty and fifty years ago.

He told the story with the usual detail:

We saw a man walking about on the quay in Dublin, and looking at us without saying a word. Then he came down to the yacht.

‘Are you the men from Aran?’ said he.

‘We are,’ said we.

‘You’re to come with me so,’ said he.

‘Why?’ said we.

Then he told us it was Mr Synge had sent him and we went with him. Mr Synge brought us into his kitchen and gave the men a glass of whisky all round, and a half-glass to me because I was a boy – though at that time and to this day I can drink as much as two men and not be the worse of it. We were some time in the kitchen, then one of the men said we should be going. I said it would not be right to go without saying a word to Mr Synge. Then the servant-girl went up and brought him down, and he gave us another glass of whisky, and he gave me a book in Irish because I was going to sea, and I was able to read in the Irish.

I owe it to Mr Synge and that book that when I came back here, after not hearing a word of Irish for thirty years, I had as good Irish, or maybe better Irish, than any person on the island.

I could see all through his talk that the sense of superiority which his scholarship in this little-known language gave him above the ordinary seaman, had influenced his whole personality and been the central interest of his life.

On one voyage he had a fellow-sailor who often boasted that he had been at school and learned Greek, and this incident took place:

One night we had a quarrel, and I asked him could he read a Greek book with all his talk of it.

‘I can so,’ said he.

‘We’ll see that,’ said I.

Then I got the Irish book out of my chest, and I gave it into his hand.

‘Read that to me,’ said I, ‘if you know Greek.’

He took it, and he look at it this way, and that way, and not a bit of him could make it out.

‘Bedad, I’ve forgotten my Greek,’ said he.

‘You’re telling a lie,’ said I.

‘I’m not,’ said he; ‘it’s the divil a bit I can read it.’

Then I took the book back into my hand, and said to him –

‘It’s the sorra a word of Greek you ever knew in your life, for there’s not a word of Greek in that book, and not a bit of you knew.’

He told me another story of the only time he had heard Irish spoken during his voyages:

One night when I was in New York, walking in the streets with some other men, and we came upon two women quarreling in Irish at the door of a public-house.

‘What’s that jargon?’ said one of the men.

‘It’s no jargon,’ said I.

‘What is it?’ said he.

‘It’s Irish,’ said I.

Then I went up to them, and you know, sir, there is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting. The moment I spoke to them they stopped scratching and swearing and stood there as quiet as two lambs.

Then they asked me in Irish if I wouldn’t come in and have a drink, and I said I couldn’t leave my mates.

‘Bring them too,’ said they.

Then we all had a drop together.

While we were talking another man had slipped in and sat down in the corner with his pipe, and the rain had become so heavy we could hardly hear our voices over the noise on the iron roof.

The old man went on telling of his experiences at sea and the places he had been to.

‘If I had my life to live over again,’ he said, ‘there’s no other way I’d spend it. I went in and out everywhere and saw everything. I was never afraid to take my glass, though I was never drunk in my life, and I was a great player of cards though I never played for money.’

‘There’s no diversion at all in cards if you don’t play for money,’ said the man in the corner.

‘There was no use in my playing for money,’ said the old man, ‘for I’d always lose, and what’s the use in playing if you always lose?’

Then our conversation branched off to the Irish language and the books written in it.

He began to criticize Archbishop MacHale’s version of Moore’s Irish Melodies with great severity and acuteness, citing whole poems both in the English and Irish, and then giving versions that he had made himself.

‘A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it. In my translation you won’t find a foot or a syllable that’s not in the English, yet I’ve put down all his words mean, and nothing but it. Archbishop MacHale’s work is a most miserable production.’

From the verses he cited his judgement seemed perfectly justified, and even if he was wrong, it is interesting to note that this poor sailor and night-watchman was ready to rise up and criticize an eminent dignitary and scholar on rather delicate points of versification and the finer distinctions between old words of Gaelic.

In spite of his singular intelligence and minute observation his reasoning was medieval.

I asked him what he thought about the future of the language on these islands.

‘It can never die out,’ said he, ‘because there’s no family in the place can live without a bit of a field for potatoes, and they have only the Irish words for all that they do in the fields. They sail their new boats – their hookers – in English, but they sail a curagh oftener in Irish, and in the fields they have the Irish alone. It can never die out, and when the people begin to see it fallen very low, it will rise up again like the phoenix from its own ashes.’

‘And the Gaelic League?’ I asked him.

‘The Gaelic League! Didn’t they come down here with their organizers and their secretaries, and their meetings and their speechifyings, and start a branch of it, and teach a power of Irish for five weeks and a half!’

‘What do we want here with their teaching Irish?’ said the man in the corner; ‘haven’t we Irish enough?’

‘You have not,’ said the old man; ‘there’s not a soul in Aran can count up to nine hundred and ninety-nine without using an English word but myself.’

It was getting late, and the rain had lessened for a moment, so I groped my way back to the inn through the intense darkness of a late autumn night.