On an Irish Island (20 page)

The young people left. A trickle of visitors arrived.

Almost invariably, like George Thomson, they came for the Irish, but found much else to occupy them and enjoy. “
They had dancing and music and fresh fish and every sort of sea-
food to munch,” recalled Seán Ó Criomhthain of this period, from the early 1920s on, so “they felt they were in heaven.”

One visitor, for about two weeks in 1920, was forty-eight-year-old Swedish folklorist
Carl von Sydow, who wrote of the islanders, “
They can’t speak English, and they are renowned for the beauty of their Irish”; this was already something of a formula. Earlier, on the mainland, he’d stayed at
Willie Long’s place in
Ballyferriter, the two of them discovering a mutual interest in botany. On the island, he stayed with the brother of the king, shared a bed with a schoolteacher from Cork, heard folktales from
Peig Sayers, met her son Mícheál, became friendly with
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and took lots of pictures. In 1924, he was back, taking more pictures, including one of Tomás, bundled up in wool without his familiar porkpie hat, standing in the doorway to his house. Von Sydow was recording what would prove to be this last quiet time in the life of the island. When he left the second time,
George Thomson was on hand to snap a picture of him as he was rowed away.

At least twice before 1922,
Seoirse Mac Cluin, a young Catholic priest, visited the island. Compiling an Irish phrase book, he put islanders to work on his behalf, asking them to use odd or distinctive words and phrases in sentences. Soon, the island school
children were busily beseeching the old people for words. The biggest help, of course, came from Tomás. They worked together, morning and afternoon, for most of a month.

In 1925, after a decade away,
Robin Flower began returning to the island for vacations. The
end of the war in 1918 hadn’t itself been enough to bring him and his wife back to the island, probably because they were busy making babies—four of them between 1912 and 1921. “
Talk Irish to Barbara,” Tomás wrote to Flower in 1912, soon after her birth; Barbara was the first of the four. Nine years later, in 1921, Flower wrote Richard Best, his colleague at the British Museum, “
We have a real boy baby at last, of name Patrick and of disposition angelic. He is to go to the font next Sunday, and will you be his godfather?” Patrick was the last. In between came Síle and Jean. All had Celtic-studies masters as their godfathers; Barbara’s was
Carl Marstrander.

Beginning in the mid-1920s and on into the ’30s, the children regularly accompanied their parents on their four-week August vacations; indeed, vacations they were, as much as research trips. “
The girls,” Flower wrote Best from the Blaskets in 1929, “are having the time of their lives here, running about and dancing and picking up bits of Irish. The weather has been wonderful this last fortnight and now with sun all day and a full moon over the island
at night it is a heaven to be here.” Each year, they’d stay briefly in Dún Chaoin, Patrick would remember, then cross to the island the next day, their big clan spread between two island houses. Soon, the children would be running around barefoot as if they always had. Barbara, who picked up the language easily, sometimes went along with Síle to the island school. “
We children had the most idyllic time those summers,” Patrick would recall. One photo of him at six or seven shows him with his father and sisters, leaning against a
sheer rock precipice. Flower’s wife, Ida, befriended Cáit, daughter of the king. “
It was an incredibly primitive life compared to what she must have been used to,” Síle said of her mother, “but she loved it.” As for Flower himself, islanders sometimes spotted him sitting alone against a bank, hands cradling his knees, staring across to the mainland,
lost in reverie. His Blasket holidays, according to Celtic scholar
Seán Ó Lúing, were the
happiest times of his life.

His Irish was good by this time, though he always spoke it with an English accent; sometimes he had trouble getting his mouth around particularly stubborn Irish phrases. But in returning to the Blaskets after the war, he felt almost like an islander himself, the émigré restored to his roots. He grew into a familiar figure, like a lovable if not rich uncle. He’d come with sweets for the children. He’d read stories to them. He mixed with everyone. He was known as a great scholar, yes, but he was light and easy company. At Tomás’s, he’d eat
roasted
mackerel with his fingers, lick them contentedly, then toss the bones to the dog.

Flower was a bit broader around the middle now; he was forty-four in the summer of 1925. Professionally, he was well established. In 1927, University College, Galway, had awarded him an honorary doctorate in Celtic literature. The year before, the first volume of his
Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the
British Museum
finally came out, all 670 pages of it; it was to grapple more ably with this daunting project that, back in 1910, he’d first enrolled in the School of Irish Learning, met Marstrander, and come to the Blaskets. One reviewer caviled that the
Catalogue
was
too preoccupied with medieval literature. A more recent view held that, most of a century later, it “
has all the freshness reserved over time only for works of real artistic merit.” In the end, the project was of a piece with his Blasket experience. “
In the Blaskets he learned Irish and legends,” Seán Ó Lúing has written; “in the Museum the literary manifestation of the same world unfolded from the pages of old writing.”

The year Robin Flower returned—1925—a new visitor arrived on the island. Her name was
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a French woman of Swedish extraction. Save for Flower and Thomson, none among the Blasket visitors would return so often, and over so long a span, as she. She visited
again in 1926; then in 1927, 1928, 1929, 1933, and for the last time in 1936. Her earliest visit came before any of the Blasket books had been published; when visitors to the island were still few enough to stand out fresh and distinct in the minds of the islanders; when the island was still an exotic, faraway enclave known but to a few. She visited for the last time when all three of the first-generation Blasket books had seen print, when the Blaskets were known beyond Kerry, beyond Ireland, beyond Europe.

Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a French woman of Swedish descent, in a photo from a memorial volume dedicated to her after her premature death in 1940: a student of West Kerry Irish, she visited the Blasket all through the 1920s and into the 1930s.

She was extraordinarily gifted, a sterling product of the French academic system at its best.
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt was twenty-four when she first came to the Great Blasket in July 1925. Six years before, in the spring of 1919, scant months after the
end of the world war, she had appeared at
the Sorbonne in
Paris asking to study with the eminent linguist
Joseph Vendryes and embark on the next step of the academic ladder, the
licence.

She’d come out of Laon, in northeastern
France, her un-French name that of her father, Erik-Valentin Sjoestedt, a diplomat with the Swedish Embassy in Paris. Her mother, from an old Corsican family, was a novelist and essayist. The family lived in an apartment on Avenue Malakoff in a fashionable district near the Arc de Triomphe that attracted artists, writers, and diplomats. Marie-Louise lapped up all that swirled around her of ideas, language, the arts and sciences; precocious she was if anyone was. When Vendryes met her for the first time, she was barely eighteen, but he came away already impressed with what he called “
her solidity of thought and sureness of judgment.” She was ready to work and learn, a natural scholar, with a bent for original work, someone who ought never be allowed to sink into one of the low-level niches of intellectual work to which women were so often relegated.

Linguistics was the discipline in which she proceeded to gather
licence, agrégation, diplôme,
and the other badges of the French system. “Who does not remember,” recalled a classmate who took a course with her devoted to the Greek verb, “that striking young girl, with the pretty, appealingly childlike face, in her pearl necklace, leaning wisely, almost severely, on her notebook?” She studied
Latin grammar. She studied Czech; she spent the summer and early fall of 1921 in Bohemia. She studied Russian, flirted with Slavic studies, later traveled to the
Soviet Union. Always it was language, in all its intricacies, that beguiled her.

She had many choices as to what to do next—in a way, too many. Her family was well off; the immediate prospect of a job needn’t contaminate her choice. But one of her advisers,
Antoine Meillet, one of France’s most esteemed linguists, perhaps determined not to see an intellect of such promise lost to dilettantism, pointed her firmly toward Celtic studies. For the academic year 1924–25, she was awarded a lectureship that left her amid the stone quadrangles of
Trinity College, Dublin. There she met
Osborn Bergin,
T. F. O’Rahilly, and other key figures in the field. And there, too, almost certainly, she met Seán Cavanagh.

As it appears today on a plaque on the Dún Chaoin house in which he lived for many years, a few hundred yards from the sea and across the sound from the Great Blasket, his name was Seán Ó Caomhánaigh; in English that became Seán Cavanagh. But so universally was he known by a nickname, that it, too, appears on the plaque—
Seán an Chóta, Seán of
the Kilt, for the garb he wore in his youth. That’s how Marie-Louise may have known him even in Dublin—that is, if she didn’t simply call him Seán Óg, young Seán, as she did later when inscribing a book to him. Born in 1885, he was actually older than she by fifteen years.

Seán an Chóta—adventurer, novelist, linguist, raconteur, and companion of Marie-Louise Sjoestedt on her visits to Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets
(
Illustration Credit ill.16
)

Seán was an adventurer, a year and a half out of jail when Marie-Louse met him; he’d taken the “wrong,” anti-treaty side in the
civil war, and wound up in the Curragh Military prison. Before that he’d spent six years in the States. As girls and young women in the parish remembered him, he was a roguish charmer, a lover and admirer of all womankind. In prison he’d tell of
sexual jaunts in a turf rick with a Dún Chaoin woman when he was fifteen, she forty-five. He was oddly handsome, with a luxuriant head of dark hair and exotically high cheekbones—“
a prize-fighter’s face,” according to one who knew him in prison, “mobile, humorous, Bohemian”—with a gold-crowned tooth and a winning smile.

Seán is something of a Zelig to our story. It was he who, back in 1907, brought a prominent
Gaelic Leaguer to the island looking for, but never finding,
Carl Marstrander. Two years later, he helped row
Eveleen Nichols to the island on the ill-fated visit that culminated in her
drowning and that of
Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s boy. A year after that, he stood for the same group photo as Marstrander and
Robin Flower at the garden party at Mrs. Eason’s for students and faculty of the School of Irish Learning.

In 1915, age thirty, Seán left for America. Whether he intended to emigrate or not is unclear. What is clear is that he didn’t settle in
Springfield, Massachusetts, like so many
Kerrymen, or in
Boston. He didn’t settle for long anywhere, in fact, but traveled round the country. He worked as a riveter in a New Jersey shipyard, in a Chicago steel mill, on ranches in the Dakotas. When he returned to Ireland in about 1922, he wrote an Irish-language novel based on his experiences. It was published in 1927 as
Fanai,
the wanderer. This Zane Grey–like adventure yarn, thick with ranch life and black-hatted villains, spiced with romance, takes place in a town near the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, the last stop on the line north to
Canada. When a train loaded with farm workers pulls into the depot, most of them head off to the riverbank to fill their rusty pots with water and light campfires. One of them, though, lies by himself on the grass, stiff from work, before finally trudging off alone to town. A classic American Western in the making, except that the protagonist isn’t some Luke, or Jed, but Seán Ó Lonargáin, Irishman, thoughtful and bookish, who’s drifted west, by one telling, “
in response to the undefined promptings of his heart.”