New Ways to Kill Your Mother (14 page)

She seemed to appreciate Johnnie’s thoughtfulness and kindness very much! It is a pity he does not show it to me and not only to strangers. He was most attentive to both in little matters I could see, and he was always at their beck and call to walk or ride or escort them anywhere! So no wonder they like him, but it was rather aggravating to me; he wanted to put me aside entirely. But I told Rosie and then she did not fall in with his plans, though she loved to be out walking with him I know.

The idea of Mrs Synge telling her guest that she was jealous of her son’s attention to the guest is intriguing. It is hard to imagine what terms she used to make herself clear. It is also possible that the guest was forced to explain to Synge what the problem was, that the older woman was aggravated by his sudden success with strangers, his charm. Thus it is possible a central part of the action of
The Playboy of the Western World
was being played out in a rented house in Wicklow in the summer of 1900.

That September Synge set out again to charm strangers by returning to the Aran Islands. This was his third visit. He arrived in a particular state of gloom because Cherrie Matheson had been receiving a gentleman whom she would later marry. They had met on the street and Cherrie had introduced her new boyfriend to Synge. The following month when he returned, this visit having sown the seeds that would become
Riders to the Sea
, his mother wrote to Sam:

Johnnie came home last night from the Aran Islands. He has one very large gland on his neck just above his collar; he looks very well and the time on the islands agreed with him. I was glad to have him safe back. The sea has been very rough and great gales lately and it was hard for him to get away. He had a very rough passage to Galway and a miserable little steamer. The engines stopped several times and went on again.

That autumn Synge bought a portable typewriter, a Blickensderfer, which Richard Best chose for him. It came in a varnished
wooden case. When he brought it home, he said that it spelt worse than he did. When he went back to Paris, his mother missed him. She wrote to Sam:

My poor Johnnie went off this morning; it is very calm, I am thankful to say, but raining and thick at sea … I miss Johnnie. As usual I have been very busy stitching and mending his clothes and getting him some new ones. The gland on his neck is very large, but back pretty far. He is getting rather anxious about it. I think he is improved; he has been more pleasant and chatty than usual of late, and I think his queer time in Paris always injures him, and he is so queer when he comes home and so out of all our ways, and then it wears off by degrees. I am trying to persuade him to give up his room in Paris and make a fresh start nearer home.

The gland in his neck was still swollen when he returned at the beginning of the summer; when he saw the doctor in Dublin he was given an ointment and a different medicine. His mother invited Rosie Calthrop to stay with them once more and wrote to Sam about the amount of money Synge and Rosie had spent on an outing. ‘John does not mind at all,’ she wrote, ‘of course it is my money and he has no scruples about that. However, I don’t mind now and then, but I would not like it often.’ Synge had his typewriter with him and was working on the first draft of a play
When the Moon Has Set
, which dealt with his own class and was thinly disguised autobiography. He brought it with him when he went to stay at Coole but Lady Gregory told him that it was not good and of no literary interest. From Coole he went west to the islands and then back to Paris. That May of 1902 he was asked to review Lady Gregory’s
Cuchulain of Muirthemne
, in which a version of the dialect spoken around Coole was used. Synge found this dialect close to the living speech he knew from rural Wicklow. In his review he described the language as ‘wonderfully simple and powerful … almost Elizabethan’. The
Elizabethan vocabulary, he wrote,

has a force and colour that make it the only form of English that is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind, and in her intercourse with the peasants of the west Lady Gregory has learned to use this vocabulary in a new way, while she carries with her plaintive Gaelic constructions that make her language, in a true sense, a language of Ireland.

He was working on the drafts of his early plays. In
The Shadow of the Glen
and
The Tinker’s Wedding
he was, to some small extent, dramatizing the role of the artist, or the outsider, versus the role of the settled and respectable community; in other words, he made these plays as versions of his own plight at being turned down by Cherrie Matheson. Other aspects of these plays came from his own dreams and observations, especially in the summer months in Wicklow. Edward Stephens, who was fourteen at the time his uncle worked on these plays, wrote that the material

was derived from the lore of the country people, not from any direct association with the tinkers themselves. They were so dirty and in their mode of life so disreputable that it would have been impossible for John to mix with them at his ease. He warned me against dropping into conversation with them on the road.

By the beginning of October 1902 Synge had finished both
Riders to the Sea
and
In the Shadow of the Glen
. On his way to the Aran Islands for his final visit – his book on the islands still had not found a publisher – he stopped off at Coole to show the plays to Yeats and Lady Gregory, who described the plays as ‘both masterpieces, both perfect in their way’. Later she wrote: ‘He had gathered emotion, the driving force he needed from his life among the people, and it was the working in dialect that set free his style.’ Yeats saw the language of the Bible as another influence.

Early the following year he decided to give up his room in Paris. When he unpacked his French belongings in Dublin, Edward Stephens watched him taking out ‘the knife and fork and little frying pan that he had used in Paris, he showed them to me as if they were things he regarded with affection. I asked him whether they had ever been cleaned, he replied: “A thing that is used by me only is never dirty.” ’ Because of attacks of asthma he spent that summer in Kerry rather than in Wicklow, returning to Dublin for the rehearsals of
The Shadow of the Glen
, which opened in October to considerable controversy. When Synge and his mother went down to breakfast the morning after the opening night, they read in
The Irish Times
that the play was ‘excessively distasteful’ while the critic admitted ‘the cleverness of the dialect and the excellent acting of Nora and the tramp’.

Edward Stephens wrote about his grandmother’s response to the coverage of the play:

All she read in the Irish Times perplexed her. She had thought of John as being overpersuaded by his literary friends into praising everything Irish but, now that a play of his had been acted, the newspapers were censuring him for attacking Irish character. She disliked the kind of publicity his work was getting, she was sorry that he should have adopted a form of dramatic writing that was likely to prove no more remunerative than the Aran book, and she was sorry that any of his work should be connected with the stage.

Mrs Synge also worried about her son, now aged thirty-two, being out late. She wrote in her diary: ‘After a dreadful storm last night, I had a headache from lying awake listening to the storm and watching for Johnnie who was not home until 3.30.’

The Irish Times
had nothing much good to say about
Riders to the Sea
either when the play opened in February 1904. The Synges disapproved of what they read about it. ‘The idea underlying
the work is good enough,’ the critic said,

but the treatment of it is to our mind repulsive. Indeed the play develops into something like a wake. The long exposure of the dead body before an audience may be realistic, but is certainly not artistic. There are some things which are lifelike, and yet are quite unfit for presentation on the stage, and we think that ‘Riders to the Sea’ is one of them.

Edward Stephens remembered his father’s response: ‘If they want an Irish play, why can’t they act “The Shaughraun”?’

The plays, however, were much praised by the London critics, but this made no difference to Synge’s family, who were, Edward Stephens wrote, ‘serenely unaware of the importance of his work’. After a time in the west, Synge decided in October 1904 to find his own lodgings in Rathmines and move out of the family home for the first time in Dublin. In January 1905
The Well of the Saints
went into rehearsal with a walk-on part for a young actress, Molly Allgood, whose sister Sara was a well-known actress. She was nineteen. Soon she began to play important roles in the theatre’s repertoire, including Synge’s plays. Synge fell in love with her.

Both the Synge family and Lady Gregory disapproved of his relationship with Molly, the Synges for religious and social reasons, Lady Gregory because she did not want directors of the theatre consorting too freely with its employees. While he could not keep the relationship a secret from Lady Gregory, Synge could hide it from his family. On 5 November 1906, when he had moved back into his mother’s house and given up his flat, he wrote to Molly: ‘My mother asked me again if I was alone, and I said I had “a friend” with me. I must tell her soon.’ Seventeen days later, he wrote again: ‘I showed my mother your photo the other night and told her you were a great friend of mine. That is as far as I can go until I am stronger. I am thoroughly sick of this
state of affairs, we must end it, and make ourselves public.’ That day, as he was suffering from influenza, Molly came to his mother’s house. Later, Synge wrote to her: ‘My mother is too shy to say much about you, but I think she is pleased. She said you seemed very bright and she hoped I had asked you to come down on Sunday and cheer me up. I said I hadn’t but I would write. Today she has reminded me several times not to forget my note to you.’

The following month, when he told his mother he was engaged to Molly, he wrote:

I heard from my mother. She says she thought ‘the friend’ I have been walking with was a man, but that my showing her the photo and the letters that came so often when I was ill made her think there was some thing. Then she says it would be a good thing if it would make me happier, and to wind up she points out how poor we shall be with only £100 a year. Quite a nice letter for the first go off. So that is satisfying.

While Synge sent Molly only the good news about his mother’s response to his marrying a Catholic, it is easy to read between the lines of his letters. The following March, for example, he remarked that his mother ‘is much more rational about it than she was’. This suggests that she had been, in the previous months, irrational in her response. Later that month, she began to ask in some detail about her future daughter-in-law: ‘My mother was enquiring about your temper today, she says my temper is so bad, it would be a terrible thing to marry a bad-tempered wife.’

That January, as the rehearsals for
The Playboy of the Western World
started, Synge began to write to Molly about the possibility of finding a flat. Molly was playing Pegeen Mike. Willie Fay, who was producing, and his brother Frank realized how much indignation the play would provoke:

Frank and I begged him to make Pegeen a decent likeable country girl, which she might easily have been without injury to the play, and to take out the torture scenes in the last act, where the peasants burn Christy with lit turf … Frank and I might as well have saved our breath. We might as well have tried to move the Hill of Howth as move Synge.

In her diary, once she had read the
Irish Times
account of the play and the opening night, Mrs Synge recorded: ‘I was troubled about John’s play – not nice.’ Synge himself was troubled by a cough that he could not shake off. In all these years he seemed to be suffering regularly from coughs and colds and other ailments. By April, he was making plans to get married. ‘I counted up my money last night and if all goes well I think we shall have £150 for our first year, if we get married soon, that is £3 a week.’ In January 1908 he found a flat in York Road in Rathmines for thirteen shillings and sixpence a week. His mother wrote:

Johnnie is on the move; he is at home today packing and sorting over books, clothes etc … I feel his going
very
much: furnishing these rooms, trying to make a little home for himself on such a very small and uncertain income. I am giving him some old furniture etc, and he must buy some … Johnnie says this move reminds him of his trips to Paris! Counting over his socks etc putting away things he does not want! However, he adds, it is not far.

Both Synge and his mother were ill that winter. Both had operations, and it must have been obvious to the doctors that both of them were doomed. In April, Mrs Synge wrote to her son Robert about Synge’s marriage, making clear that she must have been, up to recently, opposing it: ‘Johnnie came to see me on Friday last; he is seriously thinking of being soon married … [and] as he is determined … it is no use opposing him any more and we
must only trust that he may get on.’ He was, however, too ill to remain in the flat he had dreamed of with Molly for so long. Once his operation was over, he came home to his mother once more: ‘We got [his] furniture all back from Rathmines yesterday,’ she wrote,

It was such a sad little flitting altogether. I remember now remarking how ill he looked when he was going away. He says those pains began in December! I think if he had been at home, I would certainly have thought there was something serious going on; but I saw him very seldom during the four months he was away, and I know he did not feed himself as he was accustomed and he used to be so very hungry for his dinners when he came. God has permitted it all to happen so I can say nothing.

In the time that remained to him, Synge travelled to London, returned to Koblenz to stay with the family who had hosted him years earlier, wrote tender letters almost daily to Molly Allgood and worked on his play
Deirdre
. Death was never far from his mind. On 2 November 1908 he sent Molly a draft of a new poem: