On an Irish Island (30 page)

Late that first afternoon, hiking up the hill behind the village, he met two girls coming down the other way with a pannier-laden donkey bearing turf. They “
wore neither shoes nor stockings and were clothed in little more than rags, but two more beautiful girls I have seldom seen and they were as merry and unaffected with me as though I had been an elder brother.” One of them was named Lís. Based on the totality of later events, it seems hard to credit any conclusion but that, however unlikely or outlandish it might seem, George Chambers, at the age of fifty-eight, fell in love with her on the spot or in the days that followed. “
Was it chance or divinely planned,” he’d write in a poem to her published years later, “that my bleak heart should flower once more?”

The object of his fascination, Lís, pronounced “Leesh,” was
Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin, second cousin of
Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, recently emigrated to America, and her brother Maurice, just then writing
Twenty Years A-Growing.
She was twenty years old, dark-featured, with a ravishing smile and thick black hair. In one photo Chambers took of her, he aims the camera from up close and below, her eyes and head turned hard to the side, her dark locks flung round her head in careless abandon. It is intimate and intense. It is no routine tourist snapshot.

On the cold, wet, and windy day after his arrival on the big island, Chambers went out to the
Tiaracht with Lís and Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, who were friends. They were rowed the six or seven miles along the back face of the Great Blasket, then across open water to the Tiaracht, by Seán Tom Kearney, whom Lís later recalled to Chambers’s mind as “the one with the jutting jaw.” They had tea there, perhaps at the lightkeeper’s station, then went on to Inishvickillaun, where Nóra, Lís, and other islanders—they all wore shoes now—lined up on the stony porch outside the old
Daly house for a picture.

Back on the Great Blasket, Chambers stayed on the second floor of the Kearney place, which he remembered as crowded, dirty, and “
verminous, with no comfort of any kind.” But he really didn’t seem to mind.
The island was like nothing he’d ever experienced, a place where most of the
children had never seen a tree, or a wheeled vehicle, or an electric light. Now and in a subsequent visit, Chambers took pictures wherever he went. Of an island man, the mainland rising behind him across the sound, caught at an idle moment beside the bare latticework of an unfinished
naomhóg.
Of Nóra and her wide-smiling pupils lined up by age in front of the village
school. Of sheep-
shearing on the
Gravel Strand. Of a dozen island men, garbed identically in caps and jerseys, maneuvering an enormous cow into a
naomhóg.

Lís Ní Shúilleabháin with her husband Seán and daughter Niamh in about
1938
, some seven years after she’d met Londoner George Chambers on the island and begun a correspondence with him that would endure for more than a quarter century.
(
Illustration Credit ill.20
)

Sometime after his return to England, he and the young woman he would call “Eilísh of the Island” began to correspond. “
I love to read your letters,” she wrote to him in November. “I have everyone [sic] of them yet and a couple of days ago I read them all through again. Have you got mine? … I never had such a passion for writing to anyone as I feel in writing to you.”

Her letters were written
at great cost, in a sometimes awkward English that was, after all, her second language; excerpts here appear just as she wrote them, with no cosmetic alteration. She sometimes labored over
them for hours. Occasionally, she apologized for their deficiencies. She needn’t have: her letters were spirited and heartfelt, never smothered or tight, and, especially in those first months after he left, maybe more than that. On January 12, 1932, two weeks after receiving a Saint Theresa medal she’d asked him to send her, she wrote:

“I suppose it was a pity,” she added, “that I was not twenty when you were thirty.”

Each post day, she went down to the slip in expectation and hope. One day the following month, when she feared not hearing from him, she stayed up at the house instead, only to see her sister coming up the path, blue envelope in hand. “
My heart came to my mouth with joy, oh dear what would I do if you would not write again.… I love your letters and yourself and your family and everything you send me makes me as happy as the day is long.”

He did write again, and so did she, often with a fresh, appealing frankness:

In the same letter, she resorts to doggerel: “My ink is bad and my pen is old but my love for you will never grow cold.”

She added, “We are together now.….…I mean that the two of us are together. We are nearly by our letters.” “S.W.A.L.K.” on a letter, she explained to him, meant “sealed with a loving kiss,” then added:
“I must say Good night now dearest because it is getting late with best love and regards to George from Eilish,” followed by a dozen or more kisses—though “I suppose that they’ll be cold before they reach you.”

From time to time, without shame or artifice, she asked him for something, like the Saint Theresa medal, or “cards” for combing wool, or his wife’s cast-off clothes. And he would oblige, or send something on his own—boxing gloves for Lís’s brother Seán, or a dictionary. Thank you for the books, she wrote to him early in their correspondence. “It is yourself that knows the best of books. An English song book wouldn’t it be nice, I could sing you know.”

On June 7, 1932, she reported that
Robin Flower—whom Chambers may have known even before his visit—had brought to the island with him a young Cambridge scholar. “
I met
Kenneth Jackson and had a little talk with him,” she wrote to Chambers, but assured him, “I don’t ever go down to the strand with him nor either write his name in the sand, oh no indeed. If George was here we would go down to the strand these lovely evening and write in the sand.” She realized it was almost a year since they’d spent that day on the
Tiaracht. “The very best day in my life I ever enjoyed. Will a day like it never come again?”

In early 1933, Lís’s letters took a new turn.
Shrove, just before Lent, was the usual time to conclude
marriages, but this year, she wrote, there’d been none. That was March 3. But on April 27 she wrote Chambers in these words:

Nine days later, on May 6, in a little ceremony in Ballyferriter sparsely attended because of bad weather, she married Seán Ó Criomhthain, son of Tomás, the Islandman. It was the day before her twenty-second birthday. “
I love my husband and my home,” she wrote Chambers a few days later, “all the world has changed to me, everything for the better. Let us all praise God in Heaven.”

Accompanying Lís’s letter to Chambers came one from her new husband:
“Just a Line to Let you know that I was the lucky one to fall in touch
with your Island girl. It was not today or yesterday I was in her company But with the Last Seven years and see now what I have gained by it. To have my whole Heart’s desire.”

I don’t know how Chambers felt on reading this, though I can guess. I do know that their correspondence endured, each occasionally ruffling the other’s feathers, but mostly with great affection, and never flagging for too long, for at least the next twenty-five years.

“
There are many visitors on the Island already but they are all strangers to us,” Lís wrote Chambers early that summer of 1933. “They all have my father-in-law’s book.” Since its publication in 1929, Tomás’s books, especially
An tOileánach,
had put the Blasket on the map, made of it an object of curiosity and interest. In 1931, Tomás wrote to his son Thomas in the States: “
Manny the strangers that come heare this summer visiting the Island all of them took my picture, I had to write my name on the book for the whole of them, Professor’s Priests, Monks, Brothers, Sisters, every sort off people.” By 1933, there was talk of an English
translation. But then Flower, who was preparing it, was injured in a
fall from a horse; it finally appeared in 1934.

By then Maurice, Moya, and George had beaten Tomás to the English-language punch, with the appearance, in May 1933, of their
translation of
Fiche Blian ag Fás.
“
It was a great Loss for us for O’Sullivan’s book
Twenty Years A-Growing
took the market from us,” Lís’s husband wrote Chambers in October.

It was, of course, the two together, first Tomás’s gritty account and then Maurice’s in all its wonderment, in Irish and English both, that did it: “
Within the space of four years,”
Daniel Binchy wrote in 1934, “one small island, with a population of less than 150 souls, has contributed to the scanty stock of original literature in
modern Irish the only two works which, in my opinion at least, are worth reading for their own sake.” And
they,
in turn, forever altered the Blaskets in the popular imagination, making them into a literary destination.
“There is a time and it is not so very long ago,” Nóra Ní Shéaghdha would look back from 1940 in an Irish-language memoir published that year, “when a person would prefer to scrape a finger on a rock than think of spending a short time holidaying on the Great Blasket.” Now all that had changed.

“
Of all years this year was the best,” Lís wrote Chambers on August 21, 1933; “never before was the Island so full and taken with visitors.” A
group of male teachers had come and actually set up a tent, she told him. The islanders furnished them with potatoes and fish. The Kearney place was fairly full to bursting with visitors. Now that they’d finally left, “the Blasket people will have a rest.”

This moment in the island’s transformation was captured in a cover illustration for the June 1933 issue of
Dublin Opinion,
a literary magazine. It shows a craggy, Blasket-like isle to which cartoonish writers cling, pecking away at cartoonish typewriters, manuscript piling up around them. An old island woman is accompanied by a boy lugging her typewriter. A publisher is being rowed away from the island in a boat sinking under the weight of manuscripts bound for Dublin and London. The caption: “The Literary Wave Hits the Islands.”

Predictably, one staple of the new attention was the overwrought recounting of exotic island perils. One writer,
Donal O’Cahill, lovingly described the risks of being rowed to the island, picturing “
ridge after ridge of hissing water that each moment threatened to overwhelm us.” What chance had they in their flimsy boat?

You get the idea.

Seán Ó Faoláin, who made his island stay part of a memoir,
An Irish Journey,
bragged of sitting by the hearth with
Tomás Ó Criomhthain—“
a pompous old man” whose favorite proverbs he proceeded to challenge or dismiss. “I enjoyed tussling with old Tomás,” he allowed, “and he enjoyed tussling with me.” On the island at the time were “three professional Gaels,” along with a young Englishman from London. At first Ó Faoláin made light of how they skipped across the island in “
innocent elation.” But then, abruptly, he seemed to correct himself, as he recalled his own first exposure to the
Gaeltacht years before. He’d felt just