On an Irish Island (32 page)

Peig Sayers
(
Illustration Credit ill.22
)

The dirty little secret, of course, is that Peig was not always old. Nor is the evidence for this heretical assertion simply that, as mother of ten, she was once, after all, a young mother. Look at an old snapshot that captures her high cheekbones just so and you realize she had the facial structure of a fashion model. That, and unforgettable eyes. When Robin Flower first met her,
Peig Sayers wasn’t blind, old, sick, and confined to bed, but still in her thirties. And what comes down to us from Flower, Jackson, and others is that it wasn’t just her fund of folklore that won them over, but some deep power of personality, or even something like sex appeal.

“She was a rather tall woman, with the most beautiful eyes, violet in color and triangular in shape,” said
Kenneth Jackson, who met her when she was in her late fifties.

In fact, she seemed to exert a hold on most who met her, especially men. When folklorist
Brid Mahon met her some years later, she was in her seventies, “
with a face scarcely lined, dark expressive eyes and hands, and a wonderful voice,” all the makings of an inspired actress. “
It was clear to me from the start that she was a man’s woman,” Mahon wrote. Among women, it was gossip, visitors, the weather. “But let a man cross the door and her face changed, her eyes lit up. The male visitor was given a beaming smile, urged to stir up the fire, offered a drop of whiskey or a fill of tobacco. Thus fortified, she flirted with each man as he arrived until the room was filled.”

It was this Peig, then, not the withered old lady looking out from a book cover at generations of hapless Irish teenagers who was Robin Flower’s leading informant. Peig’s son Mícheál remembered how one evening he came back from fishing to find his mother together with Flower. “
He had a big box at the head of the table and anyone would declare from all the fuss that there was something good inside it.” The
Ediphone, of course. “Now, Peig,” said Flower, “I suppose you never before saw the likes of this talking machine.” Would she “mind at all putting one of the fine stories you have onto it?” She would not. “All that’s in me is a poor tormented woman,” Mícheál records his mother saying, “but I wouldn’t mind if I thought the boys and girls of my own country would profit from my labours.”

And soon, what had become precedent and pattern played itself out in one more variation yet: Tomás’s book was out. Maurice’s came out in 1933. The once-formidable gap between
STORYTELLER
and
WRITER
had shrunk.
Peig Sayers a writer? She couldn’t read Irish, much less write it. But then Máire Ní Chinnéide came to the island, and soon, sure it was, Peig was an author, too.

Born in
Dublin in 1878, the daughter of shop owners,
Mary Kennedy, as she was known in English, had attended a school in Dublin run by the Dominican Sisters, graduated in 1900, won a scholarship to Queen’s University, taken an academic post in 1903, grown interested in the
Gaelic League. Early in the summer of 1932, Kennedy’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Niamh, visited the island to improve her Irish, came away bewitched by the place, and cast a spell in turn on her mother, who then visited the Blaskets and met Peig. The two became friends. Kennedy
came back with her husband several times more, in time suggesting to Peig that she dictate her life story to her son Mícheál, recently back from a brief, abortive immigration to the United States. At first Peig resisted. But Kennedy, Mícheál recalled, “
would never be satisfied at all until we started to write a book.” And so they did.

Peig Sayers, Robin Flower would write, had

And now, when the words left her lips, Mícheál did indeed write them down. Later, according to Mary Kearney’s brother Seán, their younger sister Eibhlín, adept at Irish, went through the spelling. When the manuscript reached Mary Kennedy, she lightly edited it and, the following summer, brought it back to the island to read to Peig. She would disappear into Peig’s house, an island girl remembered. “
We used to peep in through the window. Máire would be writing and Peig talking away.”

Late in 1936, the first of two books,
Peig,
was published. “Still another remarkable book from the Blaskets,” an early review led off, “
this one flung warm to the world from the heart of an old woman of the West Kerry fior-Ghaeltacht!” Her story, said another, in
The Dublin Magazine,
“
is told in fine idiomatic Irish, in a plain vigorous and direct style; the narrative is easy, flowing.” By July, a “
What Dublin Is Reading” column in the capital listed Peig’s book right alongside those of
Aldous Huxley and
John Gunther. The following year,
Peig
received a prize for Irish-language literature.

And it
was
literature, or had become literature. “
Because this inherited store of literary tradition is transmitted orally,” one critic said of Peig and her storytelling kind, “it is not less literature than the written word turned into the more lasting mould of manuscript or of print. It is the nucleus of the literature of modern Irish.”

On August 15, 1937, people from around Ireland descended on the island to pay homage to Peig Sayers. “
The day was beautiful, the sea like milk,”
Seán Kearney recalled. “The island was black with people.” A stage
set up outside the island
school, according to one visitor, was made up of school desks and “
some driftwood planks dripping with dead barnacles.” Speeches ensued. Peig “took her honours with a warm-hearted smile, clapping with the others.” Men and women, boys and girls, got up to sing Irish songs. Soon the
fiddles and
melodeons were hauled out and people were dancing.

During this day full of ebullience and cheer, one moment of sobriety intruded, when Peig’s son Mícheál read a poem lamenting the death, earlier that year,
of
Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

On March 9, Lís wrote
George Chambers from Dingle, where she’d been preparing for the birth of her second child. Two days before, she told him, her husband and her brother had brought with them news:

For two years, Tomás had mostly been confined to bed, in Lís’s care. Toward the end, hand and leg paralyzed, he couldn’t write, couldn’t so much as sign a document, “
couldn’t even raise his hand above his head,” son Seán recalled. And now, with the island at the height of its attention from the world, he was gone.

“
On landing on the island,” Nóra Ní Shéaghdha wrote in an Irish-language obituary, “the first question a stranger always asked was, ‘Where is the house of the Ó Criomhthain?’ ” He had become a tourist attraction; was there any other way to say it? Everybody wanted a photo of him. “Even when his health began to fail him he would often be led like a child to his seat in the yard, just to please the visitor who was anxiously waiting to secure the ‘Islandman’s’ picture.”

One day, it was Nóra herself who wanted one. At first he demurred. “But, Tomás,” she implored, “you must remember that men like you will not inhabit the island anymore.” That, of course, was a reference—was it ironic or sly? it’s hard to tell from her account—to the line in
An tOileánach
he had immortalized:
“Ní bheidh ár leithéidí arís ann,”
the like of us
will never be again. And now, with this nod to Tomás’s book, “his countenance changed, his face brightened, a smile came on his lips,” and he agreed.

Among those counting themselves champions of Tomás and his work was the writer
Myles na Gopaleen.
Some champion,
or so it might seem from his bizarre Irish-language novel, inspired by
An tOileánach,
which recurrently parodied “Our likes will not be seen again.”
An Béal Bocht,
published in 1941, is supposedly the autobiography of a hapless Gael from a mythical Gaeltacht area known as Corkadoragha. More even than Tomás or Peig, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in awful poverty in a cabin shared with chickens and pigs, suffers deprivations unimaginable. His mother,
Myles na Gopaleen’s protagonist declares,

So it goes, all the book through, one calamity after another, as befits a wretched Gael from the west of Ireland. And always Tomás’s catchphrase, intoned as the last word: “Their like would not be seen again.”

An Béal Bocht
might seem to resist
translation, yet translated into
English it was, in 1973, as
The Poor Mouth.
Edgy, manic illustrations by the American artist
Ralph Steadman memorably captured the dark, sardonic tone of the book. Its author, this Myles na Gopaleen, was actually a pub-roving Dublin civil servant and newspaper columnist,
Brian O’Nolan, who also wrote under the name Flann O’Brien. For years he was Ireland’s most mercilessly, deliciously, unrepentantly satiric voice. He called
An Béal Bocht,
which others acclaimed a comedic masterpiece, one “
prolonged sneer”; he’d polished it off in a week, he boasted. And yet, he’d explain, it was his abiding respect for Tomás’s “majestic” book that had led him to write it in the first place.

The impact on him of
An tOileánach
had been “explosive.” Here was a book “not to be seen or thought about and certainly not to be discussed with strangers”—like an intimate episode in the life of a couple so intense,
for love or grief, it could never be mentioned aloud. It was something so fresh and authentic that, na Gopaleen made it seem, he
feared
for it. And the island life it depicted? Tomás’s book was a “noble salute from them about to go away.”

And of course it
was
going away.

The sun might yet shine on the Blaskets in those days of the 1930s. You might still find a hint of
Maurice O’Sullivan’s high heart and spirit there. And Peig was queen that fine August day in 1937. But even if its outward celebrity still mostly masked its economic and social decline, the Blasket could now sometimes seem a withered caricature of itself.

It is a day late in the 1930s, three decades after Synge, Marstrander, and Flower first ventured onto the island.
Two islanders and two visitors line up in front of a camera, alternating, like men and women at a
dinner party. Conceivably the picture emerged spontaneously, capping a day of hearty geniality. But I don’t think so; hearty geniality is nowhere evident. We know the names of the islanders: they are brothers, Mícheál and Seánín Mhicil Ó Súilleabháin, second cousins of the author Maurice, both in their twenties, both fishermen. Mícheál is the older. Seánín is an accomplished fiddler who played at Peig’s “crowning.”