On an Irish Island (18 page)

But in Cork all is resolved, and he’s directed to the next train for Dublin, at no extra fare. “ ‘A thousand thanks to you,’ said I …, as pleased as any other mother’s son from here to Halifax, as an Islander would say.” He telegraphs George with the change of plans.

At nine that night, the train for Dublin pulls out of the station. Maurice sleeps until a cold shiver wakes him.

The train pushes through the night until they reach the edge of Dublin. It is three in the morning. At this unholy hour, will George really be there?

The young man who welcomed Maurice to Dublin in March 1927 already had close ties of the heart to Ireland, the Irish people, and the Irish language. But professionally and intellectually, it bears repeating, he was a student of the classics. For at least ten years, since he enrolled in the Classics side at
Dulwich College, the world of
Homer and
Aeschylus had been his intellectual home. Most of the books he’d write over the years pertained to ancient Greece, not modern Ireland. In the months between his visit to the Inish with Maurice and their reunion now, he had been finishing a thesis that would become the first of them,
Greek Lyric Metre,
upon which his scholarly reputation rests in part even today.

His thesis was titled “
The Prometheus Trilogy of Aeschylus, with an Appendix on Greek Lyric Metre”—two sharp divisions, his acknowledgments section sounding two chimes of thanks. First to Jack Sheppard, his mentor at King’s; his own work, George wrote with a twenty-three-year-old’s overwrought deference,

As to the second part of his thesis, it represented “the first results of an attempt to apply the metrical principles laid down by the late
Walter Headlam in 1902.” This other King’s classicist had died young, at forty-two, but not before contributing what George termed “a brief but brilliant” article in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies
on meter in Greek lyric poetry. In it, Headlam had asserted that due appreciation of Greek poetry meant bringing to it an insistently musical ear: “The principles of Form in modern music are the very principles then followed in Greek lyric metre.” Headlam’s paper had attracted scant attention in
England and
Germany, but, George wrote,

If Sheppard was his literary father, he wrote now, Headlam was his literary grandfather. “I am an unworthy descendant,” he concluded, “but not, I hope, lacking in filial piety.” He signed his name and dated it, “Dublin, Dec. 9th, 1926.”

Dublin.
The city had been George’s home since fall, as it would be for most of the next five years, ending in 1931. Summers, he was off to the Blaskets; at least once he went to Greece; and for the year spanning 1928 he was back in Cambridge. But mostly during this period Dublin was the center of his life, a place more congenial to him than Cambridge or
London would ever be, furnishing him a store of fond memories. What helped, too, of course, was the delicious freedom he enjoyed thanks to his success at King’s.

Students at
Cambridge University took a formidable university-wide examination known as the
Tripos, in two parts, separated by a year or more. George scored “firsts,” or first-class honors, in both. In 1926, the same year he earned his B.A., he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship called the
Craven Studentship, for “advanced study or research away
from Cambridge in the Languages, Literature, History, Archaeology or Art of ancient Greece or Rome.” It was a good gig: at a time when many a whole family scraped by on a hundred pounds a year or less, the Craven assured its fortunate young recipient two hundred; the assistant librarian at King’s made
only 235. With Craven in hand, George was off to
Dublin for the academic year 1926–27, nominally enrolled at Trinity College. Especially once he’d put the finishing touches on his dissertation, at the end of 1926, he was free to throw himself into the life of his vibrant new urban home.

Dublin was Ireland’s capital and largest city,
population about 400,000, storied in recent revolutionary history. The façade of the General Post Office, off O’Connell Street, still bore bullet holes from the Rising of April 1916. The imposing legal complex known as Four Courts, which
Michael Collins’s men shelled in the early days of the Irish
Civil War, was still largely in ruins. The Abbey Theatre, on Lower Abbey Street, with its gabled wrought-iron canopy, was the site of the
Playboy Riots.
James Joyce had made the Dublin of a single day—June 16, 1904—the stage set for his epochal
Ulysses,
published in 1922. Dublin’s streets were crowded with automobiles, motor-driven trucks, horse-drawn cars, and bicycles. Double-decker trams barreled through College Green, between Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland building across the street, bearing ads for Savoy Chocolate and O’Mara’s Bacon and Hams. Dublin was in its heyday, busy, crowded, and culturally vibrant.

Just now, George was living in books-and-papers-crowded rooms on
Leeson Street, near Saint Stephen’s Green. But he was frequently in Raheny, a well-off enclave in the northern outskirts of the city, home to
Moya Llewelyn Davies, a local grande dame, beautiful and rich, who lived in a fine old mansion there known as Furry Park. Maurice didn’t know it when he stepped off the train in Dublin early that morning in March 1927, but Furry Park was their destination, he and George being guests for the week of Mrs. Davies.

From the station, at three-thirty in the morning, George and Maurice are driven off in a car, courtesy no doubt of their hostess. “
I was blinded by the hundred thousand lights,” Maurice wrote later, “lights on every side of me, lights before me, and lights above my head on the tops of poles.” A car slices toward them along the other side of the road, “and yet another,
our own making rings around the corners and blowing the horn without ceasing. I don’t know if I am in a dream. If not, it is the Land of the Young without a lie.”

Eventually, they stop outside what Maurice remembers as “a big castle, magnificent lamp alight above the door, the walls covered in ivy, up to twenty windows in it, big and broad.” Silently, like robbers, waking no one, George lets them in. They enter a large room, elaborately furnished, with “pictures of noblemen long dead hanging on the walls,” fine furniture, lush curtains.

Late next morning, “the sunbeams were pouring in through the curtains and the two of us awake, talking and conversing of the affairs of the island.” A week before, Maurice was sleeping in a stone cottage. Now he enjoys the comforts of Furry Park. There’s a knock on the door. In comes
Moya, “young, handsome, brightly laughing … the flower of nobility.” She serves them tea.

George Thomson with Maurice O’Sullivan in his new Civic Guard uniform, a few years before Maurice began work on the book that became
Twenty Years A-Growing (
Illustration Credit ill.14
)

“Isn’t that a handsome girl?” says Maurice, once she’s left.

At one point he steps out among the trees sheltering the grounds. Leaves flutter. Birds sing. A scene to glory in. “Isn’t it a fine life is given to some rather than to others!” he muses. “I don’t know what in the world could trouble the man who lives there, though I have often heard it is they who are the worst for discontent.” Not for a minute does he buy
that
one; a “great lie,” he calls it. A man “would need only to sit outside his castle listening to the music of the birds for all sorrow to be lifted from his heart.”

That evening, George takes him into town for a movie. Maurice sees clean streets, happy couples with apparently nothing else to do. “Isn’t it a great pity entirely for the poor lads back in the Island,” he ruminates, “with nothing for them to see or hear but the big rollers coming up through the Sound and the howl of the wind blowing from the north-west across the hills, and often for four weeks without news from the mainland!”

They reach O’Connell Bridge, which spans the Liffey at the heart of the city, with “trams and motors roaring and grating, newspaper-sellers at every corner shouting in the height of their heads, hundreds of people passing this way and that without stopping, and every one of them, men and women, handsomely got up.” The traffic is so heavy he and George can’t at first get across the street. It’s worse “than to be back off the quay of the Blasket waiting for a calm moment to run in.”

They continue, probably straight up O’Connell Street in all its imperial width, finally turning in to Prince Street. There, facing them, a hundred yards back from O’Connell, where the street narrows, is the
Capitol Theatre. Its blinking marquee lights—capitol—seem to Maurice as if on fire. He exclaims at the sheer spectacle of it. George acts astonished, too, but Maurice suspects he’s being kind. “Well, well, said I to myself, I must change and not show my wonder at anything else.”

The Capitol, where
Fianna Fail, the new republican party, had held its inaugural meeting a few months before, lies practically in the shadow of the bullet-riddled General Post Office. Built originally as an opera house, it now presents movies as well as live shows. It is grandly overdone, with cafés, lounges, and ballrooms, seats for fourteen hundred people, three tiers of private boxes and cantilevered galleries—just the thing to impress a boy from the country.

It does. “It took my senses from me,” Maurice would write. “Stars came before my eyes with the sight—the cleanliness and the splendour
of the place within. It was impossible to comprehend it. Wonderful is the power of man. We went up a staircase as twisty as a corkscrew and my delight was so great that I thought of heaven.”

They take their seats. The great curtains part. The Blaskets are far, far away.

George Thomson’s first time on the Blaskets came in 1923; his trip to
Inishvickillaun with Maurice in 1926; Maurice’s journey to Dublin in 1927. The first of the books that would begin to draw interest to the Blaskets were published in Irish in 1928 and 1929. The 1930s would bring to the island journalists, curiosity seekers, language enthusiasts, and film crews enough, it could seem, to crowd out the islanders themselves; this flood of attention and publicity, coupled with the worldwide economic depression, the gathering toll of
emigration, and other factors, would change the face of the island forever. The mid-to-late 1920s, then, was the last time when the island was still something like what it long had been, before it became something else.

Day by day, season by season, the familiar rhythms of island life played out. Smoke curled up from the hearths of the village’s felt-roofed stone
houses. Young girls gathered turf.
Boys played football with old socks stuffed with hay or straw; or they’d steal out from school for a swim, charging down to the slip, throwing off their clothes, and hurling themselves into the sea. Wo
men met around the well at the top of the village, bantering, exchanging news, their jugs slowly filling. Men in threes and fours hoisted atop their heads the black beetlelike
naomhóg
s, carried them
down to the slip, and headed out to sea to fish. The island king rowed to the mainland twice a week to pick up letters and parcels; the villagers gathered round him on his return. Once a year, the priest would be rowed into the island to take confessions and say Mass. There’d be dancing at
An Dáil, the village’s “parliament” of a house, or at
Peig Sayers’s. There was no doctor on the island, no proper nurse; a Massachusetts-born woman reared in her grandparents’ house in
Dún Chaoin and married into the island in the 1890s,
Méiní Dunlevy, served as midwife. There was no
plumbing; when you felt “
the pressure,” you went outside by a fence to relieve yourself, men and women alike. From time to time, the islanders made forays to the mainland and into
Dingle to pick up provisions.