On an Irish Island (21 page)

Seán Ó Lonargáin’s free-spirited creator was the man Marie-Louise befriended when, after her year in Dublin, she first visited Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets.
“He was from the first day I landed in the parish my kind, loyal teacher,” she wrote later of him, “a guiding light for me, with eternal patience, a co-researcher who shared with me his knowledge of the people and of the area. It fails me to describe the value of his help.” Both loved language; Seán, whose first language was
West Kerry Irish, had taught Irish under the auspices of the Gaelic League, and even in prison he ran Irish-language classes for fellow inmates. Kerry Irish was his passion, as it now was hers. For long stretches, set against the area’s rocky coves and precipitous heights, they were inseparable. Roasting mackerel on open fires. Rowing together across Smerwick Harbor, into a rising gale, the little bay’s waters rough and turbulent around them. Basking in summer-soft
seascapes, he her teacher, she his brilliant French companion, tall, pretty, and fresh.

Under the circumstances, it would have been easy for something to develop—a friendship, an abiding intimacy, a full-blown affair—and something did. Sometimes, by what we can glean from Seán’s writings, they’d head off for a rocky precipice high above the sea within sight of the Blaskets that today’s maps call
Clogher Head, or Ceann Sraithe. It looked like the site of some cataclysmic eruption—great gray boulders heaped atop one another, lichen and bits of vegetation clinging to them, interspersed with soft sheltered beds of turf speckled with wildflowers. The sea breeze might roar in from the north, but here, in these nooks among the upturned rocks, they’d be protected against wind, or prying eyes. If they wanted to be alone, way out from the coast road, this was the place. Here, there were “
only sea-birds around us,” Seán would recollect, “and the sound of the surf; beautiful, peaceful, without a sorrow in the world.”

If Seán’s perhaps fevered memories are to be trusted, Marie-Louise—“Máire,” to him—was at one point ready to marry him. He procrastinated. When he realized, too late, what she meant to him, and said so, she was cool to him. One story heard in
Dún Chaoin has him going to Paris to see her, her spurning him, him tossing the
engagement ring he had for her into the Seine.

Did Marie-Louise merely use Seán as an entrée to the world of Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets? Or, to resort to an equally pat and proverbial formula, was she simply too good for this
West Kerry yokel? The classicist
Stephen MacKenna once intimated of Seán an Chóta that he was more “
an artist in life” than creative
artiste
himself. He possessed a gift for jest and conviviality, a wanderlust. He was an eloquent raconteur, a fine talker; he must have been great to pal around with in Dún Chaoin and on the island. But for all the encomiums Marie-Louise lavished on him in print and the good times they spent together on those rocky headlands, she may never have considered him a potential life’s companion.

Later, when it was all over between them, Seán set to compiling a written
record of Kerry Irish; the final treatise, never published, fills twenty-nine handwritten volumes in the
National Library of Ireland. His way of getting at an odd word or phrase was to offer a dictionary definition, a few sample usages, then sometimes a brief scenario or vignette to express its meaning. “Above all the beautiful women in the world,” he wrote, “Máire was my sweetheart, the one I loved with all my heart”; that’s how he illustrated one West Kerry usage. In fact, when Seán’s biographer,
Niall Ó Brosnacháin,
counted vignettes that seemed to refer to Marie-Louise, he came up with forty-two. Most tell of a broken heart, fairly writhing with loss and longing, as in “My girl abandoned me, the woman I loved and courted.” But for the word
feart,
“miracle,” he wrote: “I never met anyone who understood the miracle of Irish as Máire did.”

Celtic Gods and Heroes,
published in 1940, and the work for which Sjoestedt is best known today, explores mother goddesses, chieftain gods, the
Fianna
myths, the Land of the Young, and countless other features of Celtic
mythology and legend, all richly flavored with the fantastic. Of course, grown-ups are rightly skeptical of accounts of two-headed monsters or children who cleave dragons. And yet, Sjoestedt argues, to dismiss the bearers of such tales, the earliest Celtic mythographers themselves, poses grave risk to understanding. The authors of the oldest texts were Christians not long removed from
paganism; their manuscripts went back sometimes to the eighth century, when
Ireland’s
conversion to Christianity, begun three centuries before, “
was neither very remote nor, probably, very profound.” It was imprudent, therefore, to repudiate the ideas these authors held of the Celts’ mythical world. “There is a greater risk of error,” she writes, “in too much skepticism than in too little.”

I find charming this seemingly artless welcome of the fantastical, and I think it suggests something of what Marie-Louise brought to the Blaskets—a willingness to give herself over to aspects of language, personality, and belief that, for a Paris sophisticate, might at first have seemed outlandish. All the weight of her education had taught her to be skeptical, reasoned, careful. But the island and its people simply won her over. Three weeks into one visit that included a visit to the island, she wrote from Dún Chaoin, in English, “
I cannot help but feel regretful at going away so soon. I am greatly taken with this place, lonely and wild as it is. I don’t think I shall ever get tired of it.” She couldn’t know for certain she’d be back, but if she was, she wrote, she hoped to remain on the island for some months. “The people of the island are companionable and joyous, very fond of
music and dancing and company.” She’d get on well with them, she was sure, because “I am full of roguery—just like themselves.”

That was in 1925. In a letter she wrote from the Blasket eight years later, the island had lost none of its hold on her. “What fertile imagination,” she wrote of an old island woman she encountered, “what liveliness of language, what humor, what emotion! They are rather an extraordinary
race these old fishermen of the West. It is quite exciting to work with them.”

One of her visits came in winter. She had just spent four months on the mainland, Seán an Chóta her guide and tutor. Now, for six weeks, she was on the island, in the house where
George Thomson had also stayed, with Máire Ní Ghuithín. A
dance was being held at
Peig Sayers’s place, the two of them were going, and Marie-Louise was determined to give her island friend a proper
Parisian coiffure. She washed her hair, heated the special tongs she’d brought from Paris.… And then, of course, the door opened, Máire turned, and burned her ear. But Marie-Louise finally finished the job and offered Mademoiselle Ní Ghuithín a mirror: “Look, aren’t you beautiful.” Máire slipped into the red blouse and black skirt Marie-Louise had brought her, and the two of them went up the hill to dance. And endure. The island boys teased Máire mercilessly: Oh, and what have we here, a lady from France? Learning any Irish is she? All evening it was like that. Better that Marie-Louise had left her hair alone.

But that was the slightest snag to a warm friendship. “Even though she was from Paris, France, you would think her an island girl,” Máire Ní Ghuithín wrote later. “She was so humble and simple in her character.” She wore a black shawl like those the women wore when they went to Mass on the mainland. In the evenings, she’d help Máire and the others with their schoolwork, teach them a little French. The rest of the time, she pursued the maddeningly elusive sounds of Irish. “ ‘
Sound-info’ she used to call it,” remembered Máire. When, years later, Marie-Louise published her
Description d’un parler irlandais de Kerry
(description of a Kerry Irish dialect), she dedicated it to
Antoine Meillet, her adviser in Paris, but also thanked her Blasket informants, including Máire.

Marie-Louise Sjoestedt’s two most important technical treatises on West Kerry speech would appear in the 1930s. But even by 1928, after parts of three years’ close listening in the company of Seán an Chóta, she was ready to say something about
English’s influence on the local dialect, the subject of a paper she wrote that year. It was here in
Dún Chaoin, the Blaskets, and neighboring parishes, after all, that the two languages, English and Irish, butted up hardest against each other. Here Synge, Marstrander, and Flower, at the head of a procession of writers and scholars, had come to hear pure
spoken Irish. But as Sjoestedt discovered, it was
not
so pure after all; English was leaving an imprint.

Books and journals in English were no big problem, she found, but the area’s English-speaking merchants did contribute to Irish’s decline. So
did the schools. So did
returned émigrés from America. Ironically, even students visiting the area to acquire Irish sometimes made things worse, teaching the locals more English than they absorbed of Irish. Generally, teenage girls used more Anglicisms and loan words than did the boys, tried more ardently to learn English—no doubt, Marie-Louise hazarded, because they were coolheadedly looking ahead to their future in America.

By 1928, in any case, evidence of Irish’s decline in
West Kerry was inescapable. In the intimate retreats of rural life, or in nature itself, the language remained largely untouched. Everywhere else, though, English knocked at the door. Clothes were mostly English now, words near to “hat,” “apron,” “pocket,” and “gown” all making their way into Irish. The effect would grow, Marie-Louise wrote, “in proportion that these urban modes spread to the country.” The black peasant shawl called
brat
was now more often called … a shawl; the English term, even in Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, seemed “more elegant, more fashionable than the Irish term. The word for style,
faisiún,
is itself English.” Everyday foods stayed Irish, but those the least bit exotic became English; cheese figured little at peasant tables, so the Irish
cáise
was fading away, giving way to “cheese.” Irish had a word for what the
French called
confiture,
“but my hosts never used it on their own; they always served the English word
jam.
” Insults, such as Irish near-equivalents to “drunkard” and “blackguard,” often owed to English—“epithets that a supposedly more cultivated population willingly applied to a population deemed inferior … and that they, in turn, came to adopt.” Through recourse to French, Irish, English, and
Latin, Marie-Louise wove a rich scholarly tapestry of all she had heard and learned. The loan words she cited, she wrote, represented changes to these rural enclaves influenced by, and in imitation of, modern urban life.

Over the years she visited Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, Marie-Louise had become protective, passionately so, of the Irish language. But she was clear-eyed about its prospects. If Irish was to take its place as the language of cultivated Ireland, she wrote two years later in
Revue celtique,
no task was more urgent than the encouragement of Irish-language books. Not textbooks stocked with vocabulary, though. Needed was
“a literature in Irish that one could read for love of Irish.” For too many, the “Gaelic baggage” they picked up in school would “join the piles of knowledge one acquired in college only to forget as soon as you’d left.” Meanwhile, all the best intentions of the state to support Irish-language authorship risked encouraging writers “with no other talent than to write Irish more
or less correctly,” and no other calling than to get published and paid; and risked, besides, imposing moral and intellectual standards on serious readers more appropriate to high-schoolers.

When the day came, however, that all the literary dross was pared away, she declared, sure to be counted among true Irish-language classics was “the work of the peasant, fisherman, and storyteller
Tomás Ó Criomhthain.”

In
The Islandman—
or
An tOileánach,
as it is called in Irish—Tomás Ó Criomhthain tells of his life from childhood in the 1860s to old age in the 1920s. It’s an autobiography, then, or a memoir—except that some critics value it more as anthropology, seeing its scenes, incidents, and personalities as bearing more on Tomás’s faraway island community than on him. He fishes, hunts, marries, endures the death of children. QED: island life personified. To me, though, even rendered into what its translator termed a “
plain, straightforward” English and thus deprived of the flavor of the original Irish, Tomás’s book satisfies most reliably through its vibrancy and bite, the incisive, sometimes caustic eye with which Tomás views himself and his fellow islanders.

So it begins. Tomás had four elder sisters and one older brother. “They were all well grown when I was a baby, so that it was little wonder that
I was spoilt among them all. Nobody expected me at all when I came their way.”

Whereas his earlier writings for Brian Kelly were self-contained snippets of stories,
The Islandman
was a single more or less continuous narrative, wrought from memory, bearing a sense of transition and flow. Always, and even in English, his personality percolates up from the page as he describes his fellow islanders. Like the woman across the yard, who was
“in and out of our house all day long.… She was a little, undersized, untidy-haired babbler with a sallow face, not much to look at—a gossip, always hither and thither.”

Or one of his early teachers, who didn’t last long on the island: “
A great mug he had on him, hollow eyes, and a sleek swarthy complexion. He had prominent teeth, and a bush dripping from his nose like a goat’s beard. But the bush wasn’t the worst part of him, for it was fair in colour and hid his ugliest feature.”

Or his sister’s husband, who “
couldn’t keep a glass of whisky or a pint of porter long between his hands without pouring them down him, and he never enjoyed the taste of anything he paid for with his own money, but liked it well when another man jogged him in the back to have one with him.”