On an Irish Island (35 page)

In the days before Christmas 1939, during the “Phony War,”
George Chambers took up a collection at the factory for Lís Ní Shúilleabháin and her family. The parcel they sent “was a wonderful one full of everything that was wanting,” she wrote back gratefully. “
Tell my factory friends that they were very kind and generous.”

It wasn’t long, though, before the war reached Chambers himself. “
I was shocked at hearing of what befel or nearly fell so near your house,” Lís wrote to him on October 30, 1940. It was the
Blitz, London under siege from the air. “Thank God you were safe and also your dear home which I hope you’ll never see in ruins.”

Wartime travel was restricted, certainly to the Blaskets, which were all but sealed off from the world. Lís’s letters were a succession of grim tidings. That first wartime winter was particularly awful, bleak with snow and frost. “
We are not able to do anything but sit around the fire warming ourselves,” she wrote on January 19, 1940. There was no work, certainly none decently paid. They were on the dole, at five shillings a week, and it took two shillings just to fill Seán’s pipe. “Its not worth while to be living on 5/- a week,” she added. A house off the island and an ordinary laboring job for Seán “would be heaven to us.”

“
You would be surprised to hear the real history and hardship of Islanders these days,” she wrote in February, “that every family is quite tired of the wind and rain and would prefer to be in any other place in the world than here. Meat and
food and flour are all gone up in prices and they with other hardships of Islands together leave no hope atall for Islanders.” The rest of the letter verged on unintelligible, but its overall tone was clear enough—glumness, foreboding, and despair. “This Island will be none atall but rabbits some fine evening.”

Chambers and Lís both survived the war. So did their correspondence, which
continued into the 1950s. “What would you tell me if I would tell you that I would write my own life story from the beginning until getting married?” Lís had wondered back in 1935, the island’s early publishing successes fresh in mind. “
If my dreams ever come true,” she added, “a friend from London will be mentioned no doubt.” That book never materialized. But in 1950, Chambers came out with
The Lovely Line and Other Verses,
which immortalized Lís by name in at least two poems. And years after his death—as well as hers, in 1971—a sample of her letters were published as
Letters from the Great Blasket,
which is still in print. Lís’s daughter Niamh visited Chambers in London after the war, but following his visit to the island in 1938 he and Lís probably never saw each other again.

Once, early in the war, they fell into what amounted to a lover’s spat. In March 1940, Lís wrote Chambers requesting a pair of shoes each for her and her husband. The shoes arrived, but, as she wrote him, “
they did not bring any joy or pleasure to me … for I knew from your letter you sent them with anger to me and with no pleasure in your own heart.” Apparently, he’d read her request as a threat not to write again unless she got the shoes. No, not true, she said. “If I only thought it would give you so much displeasure as it did I would first rather walk out barefoot than tell you to send them.… You have thrown everything you ever sent me into my face.”

All was soon made up, though. She was glad, she wrote a few weeks later, “
to hear all being well again between us. Yes all cuts have been healed since and thank you and thank you for the nice letter, it was so free and gay like years ago when there was no worry or war time.”

But there was much more worry to come.

And no end to the war.

•   •   •

After her trip to Ireland in 1929, where in Cobh she’d seen so many emigrants bound for America,
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt visited
Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets twice more, in 1933 and 1936. On the first of these, she gave Seán an Chóta an
inscribed copy of
Maurice O’Sullivan’s newly published book. Her friendship with Seán went back a decade, but her affair with him, if that’s what it was, was long over. In July 1932, she had married
Michel Jonval, a scholar of Lithuanian and Latvian language and culture, whom she accompanied on a 1935 trip to Riga, Latvia, just before his death; she would subsequently write under the name Sjoestedt-Jonval.

Marie-Louise spent the summers of 1935 and 1936 in Wales. Her important articles on Kerry
Irish appeared in the 1930s in
Études celtiques.
Finally, in 1940, the book for which she would be most remembered,
Dieux et héros des Celtes,
was published. “
It did her the greatest honor,” wrote one of her mentors,
Joseph Vendryes. “Her friends will never be able to open it without the deepest emotion, for it will serve as the measure for them of the loss Celtic studies have suffered.”

The loss was that of Marie-Louise herself, who died by her own hand on December 26, 1940, in Paris, at age forty. The following year, her colleagues prepared a memorial volume with
hommages
to her and her work, her own last essay on contemporary Irish literature, affectionate tributes to her person and her intellect. But with the Germans then occupying Paris, not all that might have been said about her final days could be said.

At the time of the French defeat in June 1940, Marie-Louise had what should have been a long and distinguished career before her. But she took the occupation hard, her tendency to depression much aggravated by events. “
A too-late departure from Paris, a return marked by tragic incidents, a whole lamentable succession of circumstances, led to a series of nervous crises.” This, anyway, was how one of her colleagues would put it, cryptically enough, in 1941. “A kind of instability dragged her along by intervals towards death. On five occasions she came to be saved just in time.”

But this wartime account judiciously skirts the details of just what happened at the end, which, as
Seán Ó Lúing put it years later, had to be “
shaded and softened.” Toward the end of 1940,
she married
Louis Renou, another Parisian scholar and author of a tender obituary in the memorial volume to her that appeared the following year. When the Germans arrested him, Marie-Louise abruptly took her life—by one account, throwing herself
out a window. According to the sanitized version, “
she submitted herself to a cruel death, which at least did not allow her time to suffer.”

The memorial book included a photographic portrait that catches us a little off-guard. Here is not our Marie-Louise from the Blaskets, garbed in peasant shawl, but an elegant young woman fashionably coiffed, turned out in Parisian finery—gauzy, with a hint of décolletage—all her spirit alive in the directness and intelligence of her gaze.

Brian Kelly was dead by now, too.

On December 28, 1936, about the time George Thomson was named to his Birmingham post and just two months before the
death of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Kelly died of polio at the age of forty-seven. He was laid to rest in Lovrinac Cemetery, in the city of Split, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, in what was then
Yugoslavia, now
Croatia; he had been living on the Continent since about 1926.
“I felt at the arrival of that news,” An Seabhac wrote soon afterward, “that a lonely tragedy had occurred.”

Kelly, it might be argued, had done little with his life, at least as far as his career went. His modest jobs in the Irish school system never came to much. His Irish was never really strong. He wrote little. But, it was said of him, he had the gift of friendship. At the time of his death,
Eoin MacNeill, cofounder of the
Gaelic League, compared Kelly to, of all people, J. M. Synge. The playwright Synge, he wrote, had sipped at the fountain of the Irish language in Aran and the Blaskets, using it “to give distinction and power to his English.” Kelly, on the other hand, had given us “
the well itself to drink from.” He meant, of course, Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

The books Kelly encouraged Tomás to write were published in 1928 and 1929. He may never have seen them.

The paths of
Carl Marstrander and the Blaskets crossed, briefly, for five months in 1907. After that, he set out on a busy and distinguished scholarly career, and never came back. He did field research in Brittany, the Isle of Man, and Scotland up to 1936; in that year, he returned to Ireland to receive an honorary degree from
Trinity College, Dublin. He survived the war years and lived into his eighties, dying in 1965.

“His pen was sharp,” another Norwegian scholar once said of him, “and he did not mince words.” (Marstrander’s opinion of Monte Carlo, the gambling mecca on the Riviera: “
All is first class here apart from the inhabitants and the visitors.”) David Greene, a student of his during the 1930s who went on to become professor of Irish at Trinity, wrote later that,
even though Marstrander sympathized with Ireland’s wish to break free culturally and economically from England, “
he never really believed that the Irish people possessed the necessary determination and stamina” to do it. And he was revolted by the provincialism of Irish life. Still, he passed the torch of his enthusiasm for the Blaskets to
Robin Flower and, through him, numerous other visitors. And he infected the islanders themselves, notably
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, with a sense of their own significance.

“
A fervent Norwegian patriot,” Irish scholar
Daniel Binchy called Marstrander. During
World War II, with
Norway occupied by the Germans, he played some role, at least, in the resistance. At one point—rumor has it he was
stopped near
Gestapo headquarters with a radio wrapped in a newspaper—he was arrested and interned in a camp outside
Oslo. From there, the story goes, he smuggled out a diary to his son, also in the resistance, written in Old Irish. His son was arrested, the diary confiscated and sent to Berlin for examination by language experts there. When they couldn’t make sense of it, they returned it to the Gestapo in Norway, advising them that the only person who might be able to translate it was one Professor Carl Marstrander, of Oslo.

Some months before the outbreak of the war, Robin Flower wrote: “
I am myself thinking of retiring at the age of 60 to try and do some work”; he meant his own scholarly and literary work, not his duties at the
British Museum. He was just then writing an article for the Museum’s quarterly journal and acquiring some
John Donne letters. “This kind of thing goes on all the time and fritters away all my energies. I have no conviction that this is my real work in life, though of course being paid for it I must do it.” He had but so much energy. “I find it difficult nowadays to work in the evenings, tired after the distractions of the day.”

The war, of course, halted all thought of retirement. On August 24, 1940, several Museum departments transferred manuscripts and other materials to an underground tunnel at the
National Library of Wales for safekeeping; Flower was placed in charge. For the moment, his family remained back in London. “
The ghastly bombing of London goes on,” he wrote from 12 South Marine Terrace in Aberystwyth, Wales, in November. “The wife of one of our best friends was killed the other day.” One of Flower’s daughters taught in a school on the outskirts of London. Another was at Oxford. Son Patrick was about to join the Royal Air Force.

If, among visitors to the Blaskets,
Brian Kelly, Thomson, Sjoestedt, and Synge each in their own ways bore some tincture of the exotic or irregular, Robin Flower was more like the rest of us, a kind of Everyman, leading a middle-class life in every way familiar to us today. At the
British Museum, where he’d worked since 1906, he rose up through the Manuscripts Department, became assistant keeper in 1922, a position renamed “deputy keeper” in 1929. He held some outside posts, too, would eventually become acting director of the
Early English Text Society. But the Museum was the only place he ever actually worked, his professional home, stiff in its bureaucracy, subcommittees, and periodic reorganizations, its rules governing promotions or how long clerks and assistants had for lunch. It “was already old at the beginning of the twentieth century,” someone once said of it.

All through these years, Flower lived in
London, beset by the daily worries of home and work. He and his family moved every few years from one suburb to another, but always within easy rail commute of his job at the Museum.
He kept track of his career, monitored his salary, worried about putting his kids through college. At one point, in May 1939, Patrick, then about eighteen, seemed to be gravitating toward life as an artist.
“I know only too well the difficulties of the life artistic being the son of a painter whose life was one long struggle,” Flower wrote. He wanted none of that for his son, or for himself.

He wasn’t in the slightest shy about looking ahead to his pension: “
My prospects are good in the Museum,” he wrote, “and my salary will steadily rise, and there is a pension at the end. The pension is a vital matter.” He quoted from
Richard II:
“The setting sun and music at the close/As the last taste of sweets is sweetest last.” This he observed while still in his thirties.

Flower was by any standard a gifted and accomplished man, a true intellectual. He held a senior position, with plenty of leave to exercise judgment. He could recognize the handwriting of scores of English authors, helped decide whether to acquire this manuscript or that, was something of an expert on forgers and their methods. And of course, as we’ve seen, he had a poetic and literary side. Still, as one obituary had it, Flower’s duties at the Museum “
were heavy and confining,” and he often felt ground down by them. As another obituary said, “
he was more remarkable than anything he did,” his literary and scholarly production never quite up to his formidable intellect. His life was too packed, too distracted, too
busy—or maybe, like a lot of us today,
he
packed it in, he
made
himself too busy. “
He could never resist the attraction of a new interest,” his boss at the Museum,
Idris Bell, wrote of him. Flower took his vacations on the Blaskets just as millions of overworked city slickers take theirs today—like clockwork, every summer, packing up the family to the same mountain retreat, resort, or island camp, seizing an annual few weeks of sweet relief.