On an Irish Island (16 page)

One day many years later, while visiting
China, rereading
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
a few pages at a time each evening, he felt an acute and sudden tug of awareness. He’d been reading chapter 25, in which Angel Clare reflects on his time at Talbothays Dairy in Wessex, where he’d met and fallen in love with Tess. Angel came to the dairy, Hardy wrote, sure his brief stay would be “
the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and early forgotten,” an interlude during which to reflect on the great world and its work. But, quite the contrary, it was the great world on which he soured, “
dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up elsewhere.… It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him.”

There in China, George was just two pages into the chapter when
“it
struck me suddenly,” as he wrote in a letter home, “that Angel Clare, who came to Talbothay to study farming and found something unexpected, was not unlike me, who went to the Blasket Island to study the
Irish language and found there something unexpected.

“But there, I am slipping into daydreams again, and it’s bedtime.”

It was a fine summer morning in the year 1926, three years after George’s first visit to the island.

So Maurice O’Sullivan would recall the day. He, his father, and his uncle were making for Inishvickillaun, one of the
Lesser Blaskets, a six-mile row distant. Maybe George wanted to go with them? Maurice crossed the village to the Guiheen house, where George was staying. Of course, said George, he’d love to go. Mrs. Guiheen volunteered to pack them lunch, and soon they all were off, Maurice and George rowing along the big island’s long, craggy southern flank, the sea a dead calm. When they looked toward
Slea Head, on the mainland, “there was nothing but a path of sparkling light from the sun which shone without spot in the sky.”

Seven islands counted as the Lesser Blaskets, clustered round the great island like escort vessels round a battleship. Each had its distinct shapes, proportions, and colors, its flora and fauna, its legends and peculiarities. One of them,
Inishtooskert, looked from the mainland like a reclining man.
Tiaracht, a rocky ziggurat aimed almost seven hundred feet straight up, had since 1870 been home to a lighthouse; waves buffeted it so relentlessly that
Richard M. Barrington, a naturalist visiting in 1880, concluded that
no
plants could survive in its first 150 feet above the sea. Inishnabro seemed to Barrington “a cathedral,” all towers and spires etched in rock. Most all the islands, as you drew near them from a
naomhóg
perched a few inches above the water, loomed as ominous hulking masses of granite and green,
birds skimming above them. None, by Maurice’s time, were any longer inhabited.

Inishvickillaun, the island to which Maurice, George, and the others rowed now, had perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. It stood in relation to the Great Blasket much as the Great Blasket did to the rest of Ireland—just off to the southwest. About a mile long and a half-mile wide, it had one high grassy plateau, punctuated by two distinct peaks, which over the years had sometimes been farmed for potato, cabbage, onion, and oats; it was good land.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain would write of a land agent taking men there to shear sheep kept on the island, of a three-day visit to hunt rabbits that storms stretched to a week. The island had been inhabited by one family until as recently as 1904, and Synge noted the following year that old
Maurice Daly, a Blasketer, planned to spend the coming winter there alone. The island held ruins of cottages, and of an ancient chapel. It had a small graveyard. Puffins and storm petrels called it home now.

All this, however, was only the visible Inish—as Inishvickillaun (which is spelled in dozens of different ways) was known among the Blasket Islanders. There was another Inish, one invested with magic. “
The whole island,” observed
Robin Flower, “is inhabited with the sense of loneliness; it is as though it were at the last end of things, dwelling in a silence which the ceaseless murmur of the sea round its base and the whining gulls about its summit rather accentuate than disturb.” Something in this peculiar place—“
the most pleasant and mysterious of the Blaskets,” George would one day call it—made it seem haunted by spirits, fairies, and the dead.

It was Inishvickillaun that spawned a tune much loved by the islanders, the “
Song of the Fairies.” The strains of what one scholar has termed
this “musically eccentric” air seem to come from far away, as a distant
fiddle sound, persistent, rising, unearthly. No hearing of it suggests anything but some other world, remote, cut off from our own. Robin Flower wrote how, according to local lore, a man once sat there on the Inish alone, playing his fiddle, tossing off the usual “
jigs and reels and hornpipes, the hurrying tunes” that so inspired the dancers. But then, as he sported with the familiar music of his day, a wholly different tune rose up, unbidden. He could not tamp it down, this rebellious, mournful sound. It “passed away to the cliffs and returned again, and so backwards and forwards again and again, a wandering air wailing in repeated phrases.” This fairy music, as Flower interpreted it, was “a lament for a whole world of imaginations banished irrevocably now, but still faintly visible in the afterglow of a sunken sun.”

When, in 1930, a visiting Jesuit priest came to hear it, only one young island girl could actually play or sing it; yet all knew where it had originated—on Inishvickillaun. And the Inish, drowned in magic even in the clear light of summer, was where George, Maurice, and the others were bound today, rowing resolutely along the southern precipices of the big island. They passed seals in pairs on the reefs, crying, keening, sturgeons leaping, splashing back into the sea.

“
Before long,” Maurice wrote of their trip later,

Here again was Tir na nOg, which Flower had written of to a fellow Celticist on first coming to the Blaskets in 1910. That same year, he’d published a book of poems, one of which bore the same name:

Like most visions of paradise, of course, Tir na nOg’s was darker and more ambivalent. The Land of the Young was one of perfect happiness, yes, but always beyond one’s reach, impossible to attain lastingly. In one version of the story drawn from Irish
myth, the poet
Oisin, from
Fionn Mac Cumhail’s band of legendary heroes, is chosen by a beautiful maiden, Niamh of the Golden Hair, to join her there. For three hundred enchanted years they enjoy bliss, never growing older. But Oisin cannot forget the world he’s left behind. Niamh understands, gives him a magical horse to bear him back for a visit, but warns he must never actually set foot on the mortal earth. Of course he does, is forever denied Tir na nOg, and instantly becomes old and blind.

Now, though, at least in Maurice’s fertile imagination, it could seem they were almost there, fairly imbibing its fragrance.
“What do you see in the west?” asks George, who has thrown off his jacket and sits on a rock looking down at him. “Upon my word, George, it is at the Land of the Young I was looking.”

In a moment, though, his vision shape-shifts into something else entirely. “
I looked west at the edge of the sky where America should be lying,” he wrote,

George Thomson, on a northern slope of the island
(
Illustration Credit ill.13
)

America, land of the young, of opportunity, of gold and riches, was beckoning to Maurice, as it did every islander.

George, who was returning to England the next day, “looked at me between the two eyes,” Maurice recounted. “ ‘There is no one but the two of us on this lonely island,’ ” he said by way of preamble, “ ‘and so I hope you will put courage in my heart.…’ ”

“I knew well what was the question he had to put to me,” Maurice wrote, for his friend had asked it many times before.

“ ‘The question is,’ said George, ‘have you cast America out of your head?’ ” He wanted to know, in other words, was Maurice staying in Ireland or immigrating to the New World?

Numbers matter. It’s not enough to coolly report that many Irish immigrated to
Australia,
Canada, and America. It may be truer to say that, from before the
Famine to the time of George and Maurice’s visit to the Inish,
most
Irish emigrated. In the early nineteenth century, Ireland’s population was eight million; by 1926, fewer than four million; its rural west, especially, was decimated. A letter to the editor of
The Irish Statesman
in 1927 asked readers inexplicably left unmoved by
emigration whether they had “
ever travelled through the empty lands, empty now of even the bullocks? To any sane person a perusal of the last census is terrifying; the evidence afforded to the eye of a deserted countryside and a swelling group of dingy, decaying towns filled with beggars is overwhelming.”

When, later, he’d come to compare Ireland to the ancient world of the Greeks, George Thomson would liken the Blaskets to Ithaca, which Odysseus endorsed as “
a rough place, but a fine nurse of men.” A Kerryman from near Dingle would, in the 1950s, use a similar image in a sadder way: Ireland, he said, had become “
a nursery for raising human beings for export.” First, aboard wooden sailing vessels, the
famine ships, that bore emigrants to America; then, in Maurice’s day, in the great six-hundred-foot steamers. Many
Irish immigrants made good lives for themselves in America,
and their
children still better ones. They built America’s
railroads. They tended the sculleries and nurseries of brownstones in
Boston’s Back Bay. They filled the ranks of the police and fire departments of American cities and later commanded them. Today forty million or more Americans trace their roots to Ireland. Yet, if the loss of so many of its youngest and most spirited counts as Ireland’s tragedy, maybe the greater tragedy lies in the conditions that drove them to emigrate in the first place.

The
Congested District Boards, like the one that, around 1910, built the new houses on the Great Blasket? Such districts were “congested,” recall, because their populations were too great to support at any level above bare subsistence; “excess” Irish men and women clambered aboard ships, especially for America. The
Famine was horrific, but conditions in Ireland all through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth were never much better;
poverty took deep and persistent hold. Steel factories? Great textile manufacturers? Save for
Belfast, in the North, there was nothing like that in Ireland. Rural Ireland was cut off from a rapidly industrializing world that had left it economically almost irrelevant. Synge found Aran and the Great Blasket irresistible; but he realized as clearly as anybody that “
nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury.”

Emigration was so ingrained in the national culture that it came to be seen as routine and expected, as a first job, or
marriage, or bearing children was elsewhere. Custom and tradition built up around it; there was Irish music, Irish
Catholicism … and Irish emigration. In the 1950s, an American scholar,
Arnold Schrier, drew up a questionnaire on emigration that, under the aegis of the
Irish Folklore Commission, went out to thirty specially selected folklore collectors. In it, he pointedly asked about such icons of emigration as the “emigrant letter” and the “American cheque.”