On an Irish Island (33 page)

Visitors and islanders, lined up for the camera. Can you tell who’s who?
(
Illustration Credit ill.23
)

As for the visitors, we know nothing of them, except that they are beautiful. Beautiful, that is, in the outward way a prince is beautiful—regardless of his looks, simply owing to the finery in which he’s adorned, the ease and self-confidence with which he carries himself. Here are two princes from the mainland, both wearing sport coats, their wide-lapel shirts pulled out over their coat collars—it must be the fashion of the day—standing erect and assured. One holds a cigarette, has a wide, geeky grin. The other, hand in pants pocket, the stripes of his sweater peeking out from his open jacket, is turned three-quarters toward the camera, seems more practiced at this sort of thing, cool and comfortable in his own skin.

And the Ó Súilleabháin brothers? They look like twins in their close-fitting fisherman’s sweaters and caps. They are both dark, with black brows, stand slouched, a smile on neither of them, their faces set, resolute. They look a little menacing, actually, or would if the scene were less ceremonial. They don’t look gay, or at their ease; it’s not hard to imagine them dragooned before the camera, just for the shot:
Here we are on the Great Blasket, with real peasant fishermen.
That may be seeing more in the image than is there. But certainly the comfort that Flower, Thomson, and
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt found in the island world, as friends of Tomás, Maurice, and the others, born of days and nights in and out of one another’s houses, is absent, any bond between visitor and islander reduced to the duration of a twenty-fifth-of-a-second snapshot.

February 27, 1939. Lís Ní Shúilleabháin writes to
George Chambers:

By the time of Lís’s letter to Chambers in 1939,
George Thomson was married, with one child and another on the way, but no longer living in Cambridge; he was a professor now, at the University of
Birmingham, far removed alike from the great academic centers of England and from the Blasket. By now, though, the Blasket was irreparably part of him.

All his life, the island would billow up through his intellectual and scholarly work, projecting into the thoughts he thought, the books he wrote, the values he held most dear. In what he called “
the village I know best,” he had met spirited men and women, living amid the seas and cliffs, distant from the dubious comforts and contrivances of the cities. What he had learned from them influenced his social and political views as well as colored his ideas about the
ancient Greeks, whose civilization lay at the center of his intellectual life. “From his earliest book, on
Greek Lyric Metre,
through his
Aeschylus and Athens,
to his
Studies in Ancient Greek Society,
” Stanford University classicist
Richard Martin has asserted, “
runs a green Irish thread.”

•   •   •

When the Thomsons were married in 1934, Katharine’s parents had presented them with a house in Cambridge,
Lavender Cottage, where they would live for most of the next three years. In the small studio upstairs, George, still a fellow at King’s, worked on his new edition of Aeschylus’
Oresteia.
Downstairs, Katharine gave piano lessons. “
He must have become immune to the noise of the piano, which he endured stoically for the rest of his life,” Katharine would write. Radio chatter drifting upstairs sometimes brought him down to “politely request me to reduce the volume.” But live music never did.

An artfully composed photo of George survives from around this time.
It shows him in profile, sitting back, puffing on his pipe, absorbed in a newspaper, the folds of its pages mimicking the soft curves of his jacket. He is a young man at the height of his powers, at home in the cocoon he and Katharine happily share.

Outside, though, the world was changing, awash in historical tides that risked drowning out the voices of Aeschylus and Beethoven and embroiling the Thomsons in irresistibly more urgent concerns. Just now, Europe was still at peace, if on the crumbling foundations of the 1919
Versailles Treaty. But all across the Continent, ideas wrangled, reaching for the extremes. Fervency was all.

George Thomson at his ease, mid-
1930
s
(
Illustration Credit ill.24
)

In the year just before she’d become reacquainted with George, while studying piano in Frankfurt during the summer of 1933,
Katharine had seen the emergent
Nazi Germany up close.
Kristallnacht was then still five years away, and Hitler’s threats to the Jews and his European neighbors were still mostly talk. But Katharine had seen Nazi rallies, once heard Hitler, who’d become chancellor that January, inflame his audience with anti-Jewish ravings. Many of her teachers at the conservatory had been Jewish; all would lose their jobs. Yet some of her friends in Cambridge, she’d write, “
saw some good in the new regime, feeling that the wrongs suffered by Germany through the
Versailles treaty were being righted.” To some, and not just in Germany, Hitler was a bulwark against
Bolshevism, a return to sturdy national roots after the cataclysm of the Western Front.

For most in their circle, however,
Soviet
communism tugged at them more sympathetically. Stalinist totalitarianism and terror were not then so commonly understood for what they were. Many saw the new Soviet state, and the high-flown Marxist ideas on which it claimed to be based, as answer to the economic hardships besetting Europe. To some, the Soviet Union recently birthed from the ashes of
czarist Russia was symbol of a new and better world to come. George was among them.

One of his friends during this period was Austrian-born philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he’d met in 1929. “
He was nearly always tense,” George would remember, “even in his light-hearted moods.” They’d dine at high table at Trinity or at a tea shop, later settle in Wittgenstein’s rooms to talk. And what they talked about was often
Marxism, which, as George put it later, had become “an intellectual force” in Cambridge. Wittgenstein, fourteen years his senior, hadn’t much immersed himself in the Marxist classics. But several of Wittgenstein’s friends were Marxists; he was “alive to the evils of unemployment and fascism”; he was drawn to Soviet ways and visited Russia in the fall of 1935. Of just such intellectual and political peregrinations Cambridge saw many specimens during these years.

Another of the Thomsons’ left-leaning friends, about George’s own age, was Roy Pascal, a lecturer in German at one of the Cambridge colleges, and a member of the Communist Party. Pascal gave George Russian lessons. George and Katharine read Trotsky, became intrigued by all things Russian. England suffered from horrendous joblessness, whereas in the Soviet Union, George heard it said, unemployment had been abolished.
“We were moving more and more to the left,” said Katharine later. Soon,
like Wittgenstein, the Thomsons decided to visit the
Soviet Union, and after their memorable trip to Ireland in the summer of 1935, they did so.

Joining a tour organized by a theatrical exchange group, they left from Greenwich with Katharine’s sister Frida. They toured art galleries in Leningrad, saw a Jewish Theater production of
King Lear
in
Moscow, visited factories and day-care centers. They were charmed by friendly Russian soldiers who
took to the chessboard at any leisured moment. At one point, George would recount, their car was “
held up by throngs of children in festive costume, who greeted us with songs and pelted the car with flowers. When we got to Red Square we found ourselves in a vast sea of colour,” children by the thousands dancing and singing.

From what George saw in Russia—and from what he had been told, and what he wanted to believe—the new Soviet state encouraged its minority national cultures, didn’t trample them as Britain had Ireland’s. National theaters thrived from the Polish border to the Bering Straits, Shakespeare was more vibrant in the Soviet republics than in England: “
Not only will these cultures survive,” George wrote in a 1944 essay reflecting his early infatuation with the Soviet experiment, “but the modern industrial civilisation into which they have been transplanted will itself be enriched.” At least as seen through rose-colored-enough glasses, the Soviet system seemed to work. “This is what might have been, and may yet be, in
Connemara,” he concluded, referring to his early-1930s efforts in Galway. “Where I had failed with 300,000, they have succeeded with a 100 million.”

The Thomsons were won over. English socialist economists Sidney and
Beatrice Webb had written a popular book about the Soviet Union with the subtitle
A New Civilization?
To Katharine, “
there seemed no need for the question-mark.” Back home, they became active in the burgeoning anti-fascist movement and in a Russian-English friendship club. That year, 1935, George Thomson joined the Communist Party. He was thirty-two.

His loyalties would shift over the years to a degree, but he would remain a Marxist all his life. He would write scholarly and interpretive studies, in areas of his scholarly expertise, from a Marxist perspective. In 1947, he would become a member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee.
A photograph from this period shows George at a meeting of party comrades in jacket and tie, his formidable swathe of dark hair swept across his forehead, mouth set, gaze straight ahead—more so even than the others, looking very serious indeed.

It is not true that
everybody was doing it,
joining the party, but among
politically minded young British intellectuals, certainly, enough were; party membership swelled to fifty-six thousand by 1942. In 1937, George visited Moya in Dublin and wrote Katharine about it:
“I had a rather unsatisfactory discussion with Moya about the state of the world. She does not altogether approve of my present opinions, while I feel that her individualism is untenable.” To George, of course, communism bore the lingering sweetness of social and communitarian ideals he had tasted in the Blaskets.

In December 1936, George was appointed to a chair in Greek studies at the University of
Birmingham, and by January of the following year, he was settled there. His tutor at King’s,
J. T. Sheppard, was appalled at the news he was going off to “
teach the barbarians in Birmingham.” Here was a self-consciously working-class city, “city of a thousand trades,” where they made chocolate, airplanes, and electrical equipment, not transcendent ideas. Its residents, “Brummies,” jabbered in a distinctive accent not pleasing to every English ear. Still, as Katharine wrote, “
We were both glad to get away” from Cambridge elitism. Wittgenstein and he had been drawn together, George would say, not by philosophy or politics but by their “
common distaste for the intellectual life of Cambridge.”

Several times before, his impatience with it had driven him away—to the Blaskets, to Dublin, to Galway. This time, though, it was for keeps. He and Katharine would remain there for the rest of their lives. They’d raise their children there. George would run classes for workers at a local automobile factory. He’d befriend a group of
surrealist painters, help launch Katharine’s folksinging group, the Clarion Singers.

At first, George went ahead to Birmingham while Katharine stayed back in Cambridge, where she had just given birth to their first child, Elizabeth. George wrote her on January 11, 1937: “
Here I am in my room. It is quite a nice one, rather like a business-man in his office, but I don’t object to that. I have just seen the lecturers and conferred with them about the time-table.” He was teaching
Homer on Mondays and Thursdays that first term,
Aeschylus’
Agamemnon
on Wednesdays and Fridays. He had lunches to go to, meetings of the Graduates Club, Classical Association teas on Friday afternoons—the familiar round of classes and academic functions that were the lot of any young scholar in his first real professorial job.

But inwardly, George was settling into territory familiar to him for
years now, of memories, impressions, ideas, and preoccupations dating back to his days on the Blasket. The Blasket of Maurice and Tomás simmered in his mind together with the Greece of
Homer and Aeschylus to create an intellectual stew satisfying to countless readers and thinkers in the years ahead.