On an Irish Island (31 page)

The cover of
Dublin Opinion,
June
1936
. By this time, the Great Blasket, population
150
, had produced three important works of Irish-language literature.
(
Illustration Credit ill.21
)

Robin Flower, whose first visit to the island by now went back more than twenty years, also kept coming, as did new visitors on his recommendation or in his company. In the spring of 1931, he brought with him a
British Museum colleague, forty-two-year-old
Edward Meyerstein, novelist, poet, and confirmed curmudgeon; somebody once described him as “
throbbing with interior distress.” Meyerstein wrote of the men gathering seaweed and stuffing it into panniers. Of the islanders’ “
grave courtesy.” Of “
an old woman, with a black shawl enveloping her head, blowing up a fire with her lips, while the light from the kindled turf invests her eyes with a sort of prophetic glow.” His fortnight on the island, he wrote a friend, “
has shown me very clearly what is wrong with me”; Meyerstein makes his Blasket idyll sound like therapy.

It also gave the bilious Englishman a chance to see Flower in his element. A Dublin student and an umbrella-toting German that Meyerstein apparently loathed, both studying Irish, accompanied them. “
We feed together,” is how Meyerstein put it, “and Flower spreads the wealth of his ripe and varied knowledge on our bread and marmalade. To him this place is a dream of his youth; everybody loves him and runs up to shake his hand, and he teases the girls to his heart’s content—all is laughing and merriment.”

George Thomson and Maurice O’Sullivan came back together in the summer of 1934 to celebrate the success of
Twenty Years A-Growing,
posing for photographs in their crisp city duds beside the islanders they’d left behind. The following year, as we’ve seen, George was back with his bride, Katten. And Chambers returned in the summer of 1938 to see Lís and her new family.

But many came, too, not to solidify ties of many years’ standing but to see the island for the first time. All through the 1930s and up to the beginning of
World War II they came, in greater numbers than ever. They came because they’d read the books. They came for the love of the language—though, as
Daniel Binchy would observe, many had
more enthusiasm than they had Gaelic. They came because they
needed
to learn Irish; some jobs in the
Free State government required it. And they came to gather what by the 1930s had come to be seen as among the island’s chief resources, its stories—imbibed not from books, but from the lips of the islanders themselves.

•   •   •

A father declares he will give his daughter to whichever of her suitors can show he suffers most for her love. One young man says his suffering is like a thorn against his toe. A second, that the love he suffers is like a knife through his heart. A third, that it is like a crumb stuck in his teeth. The third suitor wins the girl.

This, told in the brisk telegraphic style anthropologists sometimes use to efficiently record their content, is a folktale. So is this:

A young priest, owing to complaints about his behavior, is to be defrocked. But he’s allowed to say one final Mass. Forbidding the clerk to light the candles, he lights them himself by simply blowing on them. In the face of this miracle, he is reinstated.

And finally this: A poor widow extracts a fish spine from the flipper of a seal. Years later, she arrives at a house whose host recognizes her: now very much human, he had once been a seal, fated to remain so until a widow should pick a fish spine from his flipper. He marries the widow’s daughter.

All these—they “tell” better than they read—are
folktales. All were recorded on the Great Blasket between the years 1932 and 1937. The word “folklore” went back only to an English coinage of 1846. Before then there was scant reason to think much about the “folk”; their stories and songs were not yet so threatened as they would be when modern life turned industrial, urban, and fast.
Irish folklore encompassed local legends, saints, miracles, supernatural beings, fairies, heroes. Some had diffused through the traditions of several countries. By the time folklorists reached the Blaskets, two scholars,
Antti Aarne and
Stith Thompson, had fashioned a taxonomy of them, breaking them down into numbered categories. Cinderella, for example, was AT 510.

Folktales were not always chaste: A married couple attends a gathering at which the wife’s former lover is present. Her husband’s suspicions are aroused when he notices that the two yawn in unison. He weighs drowning her on the way home, but she convinces him of her abiding fidelity.

Nor were folk stories always high-minded: A woman farts in public, but a young man saves her from embarrass
ment by insisting he’s the culprit. Grateful, she marries him. Then, one night, the two of them in bed, the man farts. She leaves him.

These stories were all taken down by
Kenneth Jackson, the young English scholar Lís Ní Shúilleabháin met when he first came in 1932 (and
with whom, as she assured Chambers, she
didn’t
go down to the beach to write their names in the sand). A twenty-two-year-old graduate of
Saint John’s College, Cambridge, where he’d studied archeology, anthropology, and the classics, Jackson had only just set out on the study of Celtic languages that would occupy his life.
Robin Flower had told him, “
I must get
Peig Sayers to be my teacher […,] that she had the finest repertoire of folk tales in Corca Duibhne,” the Irish name for
West Kerry. Jackson, who on the island liked to wear shorts, knee socks, and a brass-buckled belt that made him look like a Boy Scout, had never heard much spoken Irish. But he did know the international phonetic alphabet, used for recording speech in any language. He’d see Peig every day, have her tell him one of her folktales, and “as she recited, I wrote them down by ear in
phonetics, though I had no idea at first what they meant. Then I read them back to her and she corrected any mistakes, and told me what it all meant in English, which she spoke fluently and correctly.” He came away with “an abiding interest in the folktale as a literary and social phenomenon.”

The Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth century had grown in large part through a new appreciation of folklore;
Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, and Yeats were all drawn to the expiring world it represented. “Folk-lore,” wrote Yeats in 1893, “
is at once the
Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the
Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light.
Homer,
Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even
Dante, Goethe, and Keats, were little more than folk-lorists with musical tongues.” Yeats published two compilations of folklore after 1888. Lady Gregory collected stories from stone-breakers, potato-diggers, even the beggars who came to her door. And long before his seminal essay, “The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland,” Hyde had recorded stories and songs in his native County
Roscommon.

In
England, Hyde wrote in 1890, the folktale was a victim of “materialism and civilization”; Kenneth Jackson went so far as to argue that “
what we mean by
folk culture is almost entirely a thing of the past” there. Ireland, though, was another story. Cut off from the social and economic forces that buffeted England, something of its folk culture hung on. Its bards of old, who’d once served an Irish nobility that no longer existed, had diffused into peasant life. The result, wrote Jackson, was that “
learning became popularised.… If poets had to become labourers, yet labourers often became poets.” Hence, the
seánchaidhthe,
folk historians—preservers, as Jackson wrote, “of every kind of tradition and superstition and belief, of charms and prayers, riddles and rhymes; singers of folksongs
and above all tellers of folktales.” A vestige of them yet remained in the Irish-speaking west.

It risked dying out there, too, now, especially among the young. “Yet while the older generation lasts we have still a living folk tradition,” Jackson wrote, “probably the richest in the world.” To him, Ireland’s village storytellers were “
the cinemas and wirelesses” of their day. He remembered “Peig sitting by the fire in the dim lamplight and the room crowded with half-seen faces, grown-ups as well as children, listening to the stories they often had heard before but never tired of hearing.”

By 1935, a new
Irish Folklore Commission had begun an ambitious project, bent, as Jackson put it, on rescuing “such of this lore as is left to us.” The Blaskets and the neighboring mainland were of special interest. But long before the Commission’s collectors arrived, Robin Flower appreciated what he had around him. On April 12, 1930, a
British Museum committee authorized “
special leave up to 10 days, if found necessary … to Mr. R. Flower, Deputy Keeper, to enable him to complete a collection of gramophone records of the folk-lore tales of the Great Blasket Island, Co. Kerry.”

“
My visit is an extraordinary success,” Flower wrote
Idris Bell, his boss at the Museum, probably toward the end of May. “I am collecting folktales and folksongs and lilting tunes at a great rate,” though it was

Flower was using the
Ediphone, an early recording device that bore an enamel plate on the back referring to the
Thomas Edison patents that protected it. You wound it up the way you might an old-fashioned mechanical alarm clock. Its spring motor turned a heavy wax cylinder about the size and shape of a modern beer can; these were the “gramophone records,” which embodied sound much as flat “vinyl” discs did later in the century. As the informant spoke or sang into a hornlike speaker, the ups and downs in air pressure passed through a gooseneck pipe to the stylus, which cut wavelike grooves in the revolving wax cylinder. No electronic amplifier,
no electronic anything; it all worked mechanically. With a box of a dozen cylinders, the equipment was bulky and heavy.
Mary Kearney’s younger brother Seán would remember how he and other boys were recruited to carry it, their
payment in cigarettes dispensed by Flower, who smoked nonstop.

Five or six minutes per cylinder, or about as many typed pages—that’s all you got from each one. Storytellers learned to hol-l-d their thought while the collector extracted the old cylinder, replaced it with the new, and set it to turn once more. The result wasn’t exactly high-fidelity; on playback, you could hear the contrivance’s internal whirrings along with something like what had been said or sung; the far-off magic of its sound could never be confused with the original.

Flower was himself transfixed by the results. Hearing one story reminiscent of a French fable, from an island woman who insisted it had happened just like that in her grandfather’s day, he wrote Bell at the Museum:

Soon, Flower wrote, he had “
folksongs enough to make a book,” and folktales, too, and had to put in for more wax cylinders from Dublin. “
I give concerts in the evenings with the records of the day,” he wrote Bell,

Flower’s most inspired informant, as she was for Jackson and others, was Peig Sayers. When later, in the 1940s, Peig moved to the mainland, folklore collectors converged on her house in Vicarstown. During one three-year span, one of them filled six thousand pages of manuscript, a million words
or more, with stories she’d grown up hearing from her father or had accumulated in the decades since.

Peig Sayers was no islander by
birth but had married into the island in 1892, when, at eighteen, she became the wife of
Pádraig “Flint” Ó Gaoithín; like many island
women, she went by her
maiden name. By 1911, she had given birth to ten
children, of whom seven survived into adulthood. One of the seven later fell to his
death from an island cliff. Five immigrated to America. A smile came readily to Peig’s face, it was said, but a
hearty laugh only rarely.

It was not anything in her personal history, however, that led to her enduring fame—or, as we’ll see, her peculiar notoriety. What did was the wealth of stories she’d absorbed and the flair and finesse with which she told them. “
Her changes of mood and face were like the changes of running water,” it was said of her. “As she talked, her hands would be moving too; a little clap of the palms to cap a phrase, a flash of the thumb over the shoulder to mark a mystery, a hand hushed to mouth for mischief or whispered secrecy.”

Another folklore collector, a Dún Chaoin native named
Joe Daly, recalled Peig’s

Peig’s hard life story was, as published in Irish, later made a high-school
graduation requirement; in the
Free State, she was seen as the personification of enduring womanhood, rural, poor, and pious. But to many an Irish man or woman of a certain age who grew up having to read her in Irish as a teenager, she seemed the personification, too, of all things old and woeful. She’d look out from the covers of her books—the second of them fittingly titled
An Old Woman’s Reflections
—and all you’d see was that wizened oval face, lost in bulky fabric, all shawl, sweater, and apron, and those crinkly eyes. Other photos captured her when she was in the hospital, and blind, and looked more deathly yet. These, and her tales of hardship, pain, anguish, and death, left most Irish students feeling that, once out of school, they wanted nothing ever again to do with Old Peig.