On an Irish Island (17 page)

The emigrant letter was the invariably sunny missive reciting the emigrant’s accomplishments and good fortune in America, passed around from person to person or read out loud by the parish priest at social gatherings, and often containing money. So predictably upbeat were they, Schrier’s folklore collectors were reminded, that ultimately they became “an object of sarcastic cant.” For example, an innocuous “How are you doing?” might get the sardonic reply, “Oh, fine, like an American letter,” any darker truths papered over. The gifts, money, and relentless good cheer from America, observes
Kerby Miller, a University of Missouri–based authority on Irish emigration, “
inspired dissatisfaction with customary
life-styles, while the steady drain of young people weakened” traditional life back home. Emigration fed on itself. The number of Irish-speakers fell. The cultural glue of traditional music and folklore weakened.

The American cheque was looked forward to eagerly come
Christmas or
Saint Patrick’s Day; it cleared debts with the village shopkeeper, paid funeral expenses, or supplied passage money for the next family member bound for America. The sum was often exaggerated, an empty letter never admitted; its value, after all, was the ultimate measure of how your Seán or Máire was doing across the sea. “Nobody was supposed to be poor or out of work in America.”

Schrier asked his respondents about the American wake, too, the traditional leave-taking ritual for the emigrant and his family. One Kerry informant described it as “a combination of joviality and sorrow. The young people sang and
danced. The older people were usually sad and silent, especially the parents of the intending emigrants.” There were rounds of tea, refreshments, and drink, on into the morning. And sad songs of emigration, which became so common that they, too, came to be seen as traditional. A young man “to his love did say”:

To which she replies:

The American wake was a sad, recurrent part of Blasket life. “
I have a great mind to go to America,” Maurice records his sister Maura (Máire)
abruptly announcing one day while she’s washing the dishes and the rest of the family sits by the fire. Next day she writes to her aunt in America for passage money, and some weeks later it arrives. In the ensuing month, the household is consumed with the specter of her departure and that of her friend Kate. The old people lament no one will be left to bury them.

The day approaches. “
A mournful look was coming over the very walls of the house. The hill above the village which sheltered the houses seemed to be changing colour like a big, stately man who would bend his head in sorrow.”

Finally, on the last night, everyone gathers at the house for the American wake, all “dancing and mirth” mixed with “a mournful look on all within. No wonder, for they were like children of the one mother, people of the Island, no more than twenty yards between any two houses, the boys and girls every moonlit night dancing on the Sandhills or sitting together and listening to the sound of the waves from Shingle Strand.” Maura collapses into Maurice’s arms. “
Oh, Mirrisheen,” she says, using an affectionate diminutive, “what will I do without you?”

“Be easy,” Maurice tells her: he’d probably be joining her before long. “Strike up a tune,” he says to a neighbor with the melodeon. “He began to play,” Maurice writes. “Four of us arose and I called my sister for the dance.”

In America, the Irish didn’t settle willy-nilly across the great land but, like most immigrants, were drawn to specific, mostly urban enclaves. Many Irish countrymen, writes
Kerby Miller, learned so much about America that they came to see it as scarcely foreign at all. “
Western peasants often knew far more about
Boston or
New York than about Dublin, Cork, or even parts of their own counties.” Blasket Islanders, as it happens, made a cluster of towns along the
Connecticut River centered on
Springfield, Massachusetts, their new home.

They, and immigrants from
Dún Chaoin,
Ventry,
Dingle, and other
West Kerry towns, settled into small houses on the north side of Springfield, took jobs at local factories, later worked their way into bigger houses on Hungry Hill, or in neighboring towns, some of them over the state border in northern Connecticut. Springfield itself, with a population of about 140,000, was the fourth-largest city in the state and a great Irish ghetto, with a bar, Irish-catering grocery, or funeral home on every corner. Sheehans, Guiheens, and Sullivans were all close by, comfortably nestled into parishes anchored by big Roman Catholic churches. In Maurice’s account of his sister’s coming emigration, she and her friend talked
“
of nothing but America. They would run across to the wall where pictures from Springfield were hanging. ‘Oh,’ Kate would say, ‘we will go into that big building the first day.’ ”

Despair mounted among those who feared being left behind.
“This place,” Maurice’s sister Eibhlín wrote in her journal the day George left the island in 1923, “is like a drowned vessel now. Everyone wants to leave when they get the chance.” Indeed, by the time of George and Maurice’s trip to the Inish in 1926, she had left for America. Sister Maura, of course, had recently left, too. And now, as George and he sat on
Inishvickillaun looking out to sea, maybe it was Maurice’s turn.

George had never been to America, through all his long life never would go, and, according to his daughter Margaret, developed no little antipathy for it. Even by 1926, America had become a symbol to him of all that was too rich, frenetic, and cruel in modern life. Nor was he alone in seeing its vaunted opportunity, its Hollywood glitter, its cars and skyscrapers, as just a cover for a place that ate up immigrants and consumed their souls, its stopwatch-clicking efficiency experts and gang bosses squeezing the life out of them. “
There’s a curse on America if this place,” the Blasket, “is any better,” says Séamas, one of Tomás’s stock characters in
Island Cross-Talk.
“You’re better off working anywhere but where you’d be under somebody’s eye day in and day out.” Yes, says Séamaísin, Séamas’s foil, “it’s a corner of hell,” the condemned forced to go “without sleep or rest in their struggle to make a living.” In America, the good, gentle virtues of rural Ireland stood no chance.

For many Irish priests, according to
Kerby Miller, America was “
a vicious, materialistic, ‘godless’ society, which corrupted the emigrants’ morals and destroyed their religious faith.” For some, America was the consummately un-Irish place, where neighborliness had been banished, where people loved only money, where, it was said, “
rosy-faced, fair young girls, so pure, so innocent, so pious,” were dragged down into corruption. One Kerryman, his carefully penned reminiscence today preserved in a green leather-bound volume at the Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore in Dublin, told how Irishmen viewed compatriots returning from America, gold watches suspended on chains from their waistcoats, as hard-hearted and callous.
“Having had the experience of life in America where it was a case of ‘every man for himself,’ they had lost the kindly good-natured ways of home.”

That was America to some Irishmen. And that, or something like it, was America to George Thomson. Just twenty-three years old—and just
twenty-three years old in the intensity of his opinions—he had plainly imbibed such values and understandings. “
Listen here,” he told Maurice now:

There was no future for Maurice on the island, George realized, but that didn’t mean he had to leave Ireland. Why not, he’d importuned him before, stay in Ireland and join the
Civil Guard—the Garda Síochána, the Irish national police formed after the establishment of the Free State. With them, he’d find good opportunities. “
There was the reluctance of the world on me to do as he said,” Maurice would write. But he had to decide one way or the other. “Both of us knew that if I did not agree with him that day I would be gathered away [to America] before the summer was come again.”

Finally, he yielded. He would forsake America. He would enlist in the Guard.

That evening, just before George’s departure the following day, Maurice took down his fiddle and headed over to George’s place, where he found him seated on a stool by the fire. They talked a while, his friend at one point replying with a local idiom.

“
’Tis the fine, rich Irish, you have now,” he told George.

“And if it is, it is you should be thanked, for isn’t it from yourself I learned all I have!” George replied.

Then it was up to the house at the top of the village, strains of music reaching them, everyone soon dancing, “George stripped to the shirt like themselves, for the night was soft.” When they took a breather outside, George reminded his friend that, once on his way to
Dublin to enlist, Maurice had but to telegraph him and he’d be there at the station to greet him.

It took him six months or more to build up to it; George, who by now had graduated from King’s and was living in Dublin, encouraged him by mail all the while. But finally, on March 14, 1927, as his father sat by the fire reading a letter from America, Maurice delivered the news: he was leaving the island, joining the Guard, heading off for Dublin the next
day: “
I give you my blessing,” his father said, “for so far as this place is concerned there is no doubt but it is gone to ruin.”

Maurice’s
journey to
Dublin proved exhilarating, sad, confusing, and even, at least to us today, comic. There was nothing routine to any of it. It was all firsts. He was starting out on a new life—going where he had never gone, seeing what he had never seen. Each obstacle encountered, person met, or mistake made propelled him to some new height or depth of feeling.

The king, on his regular mail hop, rows him over to
Dún Chaoin, “my back to the Island of my birth and my face to the mainland.” He hears his dog, Rose, back on the island, “howling as she saw me departing from her. I crushed down the distress that was putting a cloud on my heart.”

All is unfamiliar. On the mainland he must pick up a certificate from the parish priest, in whose Ballyferriter rectory he encounters a young woman who understands nothing he says. “Well, thought I, isn’t it a strange thing to meet already a girl without Irish!”

Tramping to
Dingle, he follows the line of telegraph poles. At the house of a family friend, where he’s to stay, he’s at first not recognized. He reveals himself as if by riddle: he’s no Irishman, he says, though he has Irish blood, and has arrived in Ireland this very day.

How, then, has he picked up his fine Irish?

“Arra, my dear sir, isn’t it we who have the best Irish?”

But if not an Irishman, what, then, is he?

“I am a Blasket man, my boy.”

That night, his sleep is blighted by visions of railway tracks running this way and that, people like ants, all confusion. “Three nights I lived in that night.” After breakfast, he makes his way to the station, tortured by the sense that everyone is staring at him. The train pulls out. Green fields and unfamiliarly abundant trees sweep by him, “houses in every glen and ravine, the Blasket Island and the wild sea far out of sight. They were gone now and I a lonely wanderer, and as the old saying goes, ‘Bare is the companionless shoulder.’ ”

The train stops. People start to get out. Is this Tralee, where he must get out? No, it’s Annascaul; he’s mistaken a town of a scant few hundred for one of ten thousand. Yet he’s relieved now, counts himself lucky not to face a trek back to Dingle.

Another stop. He grabs his bag. No, he learns, not this, either. He’s
thrilled by one simple, irrefutable fact: so far, he’s not lost. He draws out his pipe, puffs at it with satisfaction.

Finally, it’s
Tralee. In the station, with four hours to kill, he stashes his bag against a wall, careful not to let it out of sight. But when he spies other waiting passengers hand over their luggage for red tickets, he does the same. “I was well pleased with myself now, and why wouldn’t I be, and every knowledge coming to me.”

He steps into the
telegraph office to wire George in Dublin. The girl behind the desk is reading a book, and it’s all he can do to get the telegraph form from her; they exchange scarcely a word. “ ‘There is no fear, my girl, but you are a stiff one,’ said I in Irish, knowing she would not understand me.”

“ ‘Good day to you, sir,’ ” says she in
English, finally. And that “sir” gladdens him! Has he now the look of a gentleman? “My heart was now rising continually the way I was getting knowledge of everything.”

Small triumphs of understanding follow one another. On the platform he sees “boxes thrown out of the train without pity or tenderness, big cans, full of milk as I heard, hurled out on to hard cement.” Then, back on board, he looks out the window as his own train makes a long, sweeping turn; he can see its whole length yet can’t see what drives it. Confusions and uncertainties. Irish gone, all is English.

In Mallow, he gets off. “Change for Dublin! Change for
Cork!” he hears. He follows a savvy-looking woman he has met to the Dublin train, settles into his seat, and falls asleep—until the conductor comes to punch his ticket. “I think you have made a mistake,” he’s told. “You are halfway to Cork.” Doubts overtake him. It’s not the Dublin train at all. He glares at the woman. “I was unable to crush down the ill will I felt towards her.”