On an Irish Island (24 page)

On the Blasket, Flower’s old man was no aberration. The standards for speech were high there. The islanders
spoke well.
Tomás’s life,
Declan Kiberd would observe, was “
built around admiration for people who used words and used them well. It was a life structured between morning songs, morning prayers, work songs, evening recitations, formal storytelling. It was in many ways a much more artistic life than the kind that is lived now by the citizens of Dublin in their suburbs.” Talk and turn-of-phrase as art: what was
Allagar na hInise (
which one scholar prefers to translate as
Island Repartee)
but a succession of scenes showing off the wit and genius of the islanders as jokers, performers, quibblists, rhetoricians. The island’s rich oral culture, someone once said, ranks as “the chief surviving element of Gaelic civilization”; from it stepped Tomás, with what Flower called his
“
inborn genius for speech.” The irony of it, of course, was that the oral culture of the Blaskets should make its most lasting impact through print.

In 1962, the curmudgeonly Irish writer
Myles na Gopaleen described the original Irish-language edition of Tomás’s memoir as

And
Daniel Binchy, who visited the island and met Tomás in 1928 or 1929, for his part admitted that, until the appearance of
An tOileánach,
he had been “
profoundly skeptical of the value of
modern Irish as a literary medium.” He wasn’t any longer, not when it was in the hands of a writer like Tomás. “But,” he wondered, “where shall we find such another?”

It is the fall of 1929, a few months after publication of
An tOileánach.
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt is back in
West Kerry. The automobile that’s brought her from
Dingle stops, amid a patchwork of open fields, at a familiar
thatched-roof house. “A woman comes out to kiss me. ‘Welcome, Marie,’ ” she says, her voice stressing the “a” of Marie-Louise’s name, giving it a “caressing” inflection. “The older people of the house rise with a familiar dignity to greet me: ‘God protect you in this house.’ ” She’s being welcomed once more to this “secret world of an old culture … poor by the standards of the world, but rich with inner treasures.”

Marie-Louise’s visit here is part of a research trip, the basis for two long articles to appear the following year, together titled “L’Irlande d’aujourd’hui,” Ireland today. They will offer a look, new to most of her French readers, of the Ireland that’s emerged from seven years of strife, and now a few of peace. One article draws on interviews she has conducted in Dublin with political and cultural leaders like
Maud Gonne, the English-born Irish revolutionary, muse of Yeats, and widow of
John MacBride, martyr of the Easter Rising; and
Éamon de Valera, the George Washington–like Irish national father figure. She talks with them of the Irish language, of Catholic-Protestant relations, of the economy, of Ireland’s
future. It is garden-variety journalism, stocked with facts, figures, and quotes.

The other article is more personal and impressionistic. It takes her to
The West, into Gaelic Ireland, to the Irish-speaking parts of the country that exert such a hold on her. Of the
Free State’s twenty-six counties, she informs her readers, nineteen are wholly English-speaking, and seven have Irish-speaking pockets.
“It is towards one of them, one of those rare
parishes where English has not yet penetrated, that the
Tralee train carries me.” Tralee itself she finds lifeless and dispirited. But soon she’s headed farther west yet, to Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, by the same narrow-gauge train Synge took across the mountains in 1905.

She is not shy about linking the dramatic countryside to visions of rebellion and romance; here are
“hills as supportive of guerrilla war as the Spanish Sierras, as hospitable to outlaws as the Corsican maquis.” She tells of “the nobility of a naked land … of its supreme harmony of proportion.” She is moved by the beauty of it all. Finally, when she reaches the coast, the Blaskets come into view, a “
magnificent chorus” of island topography that reminds her of the Greek islands.

On the Great Blasket, she learns that the king is dead:
“I see him, as I often did in winter when, alone in his canoe, rowing with powerful strokes, he took the island’s mail to the mainland.” There’s much more like this. She is reliving all that the island means to her. She remarks on the extraordinary courtesy she finds. She reports that horses are unknown, that the old men remember when there weren’t even donkeys. She tells how the women gather peat, their panniers overflowing, babes in arms all the while. “
Deprived of all material comfort,” she writes of the islanders, they enjoy “a social life more intense in this restricted community than in all the scattered parishes of the coast.…” Practically all are “singers, poets, and musicians, without thinking of it,” instinctively drawn “
to all that is powerful or strange.”

Her account is warm and evocative, but no mere travelogue. She sees the beauty and oddity of this outpost of civilization on the far fringes of Ireland. But she sees, too, and with icy clarity, its troubles, in particular the
emigration of its young.

To reach western Ireland from Paris, she tells you, you can take the usual route—twenty hours, across two national borders through
London to Dublin, and thence across the country. But there is another way, the one she makes her own: from Cherbourg, on the French coast, board one of the great transatlantic steamers that will stop at Queenstown, on Ireland’s
southwest coast, chief point of embarkation for immigrants to the United States and Canada; of six million who left Ireland in the century after 1848, almost half left from Queenstown. Able reporter that her essay reveals her to be, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt has placed herself at just the spot where Ireland most copiously bleeds its healthy, young, and strong.

She is deeply moved by the sight of them, the lines of emigrants—some thirty thousand a year during this period—waiting to board the little tenders that will ferry them to the steamers anchored in the great harbor. “
They appear suddenly from the night outside in interminable procession. The clothes they’ve bought in the little town, commonplace and ugly, make them look as if they are in costume.” The scene stuns her.

As they step forward, she sees past them to the world they’ve left behind, to “the hills swept by the wind, the slender canoe in the froth of the sea, the humble cottages full of wild children, and the savage, epic destitution of this Atlantic coast—all that I will see tomorrow and that they will never see again.”

It is September 1929, and Marie-Louise is in Queenstown. Around the same time, a few months either way, so is
Mary Kearney, George Thomson’s island sweetheart, boarding a steamer for the New World.

Back in 1926, before their trip to Inishvickillaun, Maurice dropped by the house where George was staying to find him seated on a stool, chin in hands, staring into the fire.
“You are in love, my boy,” Maurice declared with a clap of his palm to George’s shoulder. And indeed he was.

Whatever it was to her, George’s relationship with Mary Kearney was to him no brief summer’s fancy; she occupied a place in his hopes and affections for seven years. In the end, he didn’t win her; one might worry for them both if he had. But it was not for want of trying. Convinced Mary felt herself inadequately educated, he at one point
offered to pay her way through school, or so it’s said in Mary’s family today. At another
juncture, as we’ve seen, he talked to Father
Paddy Browne in Dún Chaoin about converting to
Catholicism. What must have been a third fraught moment occurred across the breadth of Ireland from the Blaskets, outside
Dublin, but again within the orbit of Father Browne, and perhaps indirectly through his doing.

In flat countryside about fifteen miles west of Dublin lies the town of
Maynooth—from the Irish “Má Nuad,” meaning “Plain of Nuadha”—built up around a cozy eighteenth-century streetscape of little houses clustered along a modest tree-lined main street. But if from the center of town you proceeded two or three blocks west, beyond a little stream and the ruins of an ancient castle, you’d pass through a gate and into a world of cloisters, grandly scaled quadrangles, and light-filled chapels. Maynooth’s Saint Patrick’s College, fed by smaller diocesan schools and seminaries, was Ireland’s richest vein of Roman Catholic clergy, the town’s two whispered syllables enough to conjure up visions of the Irish priesthood at its most aristocratic.

For five years beginning in 1917, the college’s resident medical officer was a Dr.
Patrick J. Grogan. In 1922, Grogan resigned his position there, but remained in town, presiding over its Maynooth Dispensary until at least the summer of 1927, when he became medical officer in a nearby county. During these years, he, his wife, Margaret, and perhaps her sister Lily as well, lived in a house on the north side of Main Street, near Courthouse Square, virtually at the center of town. Their maid was a girl from the Great Blasket, Miss Mary Kearney.

Dr. Grogan had come out of west Clare, a farmer’s son, the only one of seven boys to get an education, earning a medical degree from the National University of Ireland in 1908. In college, he was active in the Gaelic Athletic Association. He embraced republican ideals; during the Rising, he reputedly harbored a future president of Ireland,
Seán T. O’Kelly. “He was very much into the 1916 crowd,” reports his nephew, also named Patrick Grogan, inclined to mix more with political friends than with fellow physicians. He was an Irish-language enthusiast, too, a member of the
Gaelic League, and for a time in the 1920s went professionally
as Pádraig Séamus Ó Gruagain. He was “very keen on the
Irish language,” his nephew recalls, yet never actually spoke it much himself. “Tea, please” or “Sugar, please” was about the beginning and end of his Irish.

When Mary Kearney’s elder sister Cáit returned to the Blaskets after a period in Dublin as a domestic, their father looked at her hands
rubbed red and raw by work and burst into tears; he’d never let her go back to that,
he vowed. Mary, though, probably had it better; her brother Seán said
Dr. Grogan and his wife were good to her. The doctor’s nephew, from when he lived with them in the 1930s, remembers another maid from the Blaskets: up early, tending the house; Sundays to early Mass, back in time to tidy up before the Grogans were back from church; meals in the kitchen; little time off, a half-day or two a week; unobtrusive, a background presence, forever scrubbing, serving, fussing. Something like this must have been Mary Kearney’s lot, too.

A
studio portrait from around this time shows her, in a dark, ornately belted dress, papers on her lap, competent-looking and attractive; the photo is credited to a studio on Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin, not many minutes on the train from Maynooth. But just how had she gotten to Maynooth in the first place, two hundred miles across Ireland from the Blaskets? How
could
she have wound up there, this girl whose command of English was at first probably limited to whatever little she had learned in the island school or from George? She leaves her island home and, at sixteen or seventeen, suddenly winds up outside Dublin?

From the summer of 1924 and for most of the next five years, Mary largely vanishes from island memory, only Dr. Grogan a link to her whereabouts, information about her otherwise blurred and uncertain. This seeming disappearance, the persistence of George’s feelings, and the notorious secrecy surrounding sexual matters in Catholic Ireland make it hard to dismiss entirely the possibility that she’d become pregnant. George later wrote an Irish-language short story,
“The
Illegitimate Child,” that described a young woman cradling her baby beside a church door, her father offering her passage money to America if she’d give the child over to an orphanage. He wrote another, “Getting On in the World,” about a girl with an illegitimate child who can’t get a job and leaves town, only to find work later as a servant girl with a Dublin doctor. Plainly, not all Irish women and their men friends were pure and chaste. One report from before the turn of the century tells of pregnant young women routinely “sent away” from their homes in the country, arriving
on Dublin’s doorstep to have their babies. Now, during the 1920s,
between 2 and 3 percent of recorded births in Ireland—close to two thousand per year—were illegitimate. The figure had climbed
almost 30 percent in recent years, stoking much alarm in the new Ireland.

Of course, as far as Mary goes, none of this constitutes evidence. It was common for country girls with no prospects in the economically bereft west to seek jobs that could help them send money to their parents
back home, or earn passage money to America—which, with few expenses, they often managed to do. The
ten to fifteen pounds a Dublin servant earned annually in cash, together with room and board, tips, and Christmas presents like fabric or books,
compared favorably with what she could make elsewhere in Ireland. As servants to merchants, well-off farmers, or, as in Mary’s case, professional men in town, such girls were said to be
in aimsir,
“in service”; they numbered
a hundred thousand in Ireland during this period. Their circumstances were mostly above reproach, their motivations straightforward, their stories unexceptional.
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt would later write, of another West Kerry woman, that her life first stirred one’s interest not, as with a young man, in tales of adventure, but on that “
day when a little girl was sent into service far from her parents and the home of her childhood.”