On an Irish Island (38 page)

It may have been on the trip to China that he brought home a print of a village—men, women, and children hauling in a net thick with fish, working together as one. Years later, he sent it, or a copy of it, to a friend: “
See how my vision of the Blasket is being realised in China today,” he wrote. As classicist, professor, writer, Marxist, parent, and friend, he had absorbed the Blaskets in every pore. In China, when a student sang a song from a Chinese opera, “
my mind was carried back thirty years to the moonlight nights in the Blasket island, when they used to sing and dance on the edge of the cliffs.” Later, when he was old, almost blind, and near death, he worked on a new edition of his book about the Blaskets,
Island Home.
Margaret helped him, but mostly he typed it out himself on an old manual typewriter. Though it was slow going, she recalls, he was “energized” by doing it. Even the
way
he wrote owed something to the island and its oral culture: George, his friend Tim Enright reported, “
would never commit anything to print without first reciting it aloud to hear how it sounded.”

In 1976, in a trip arranged by Father
Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, an impish
little Irish priest from West Kerry with whom he’d collaborated on a new Irish-language edition of Maurice’s book, George returned to western Ireland after decades away. Ó Fiannachta ferried him around, arranged for him to be interviewed; people who saw his performance voiced astonishment at the old man’s ease and facility before the camera. “It was a wonderful experience,” George wrote Ó Fiannachta later,

During this trip, Father Ó Fiannachta took George to see Cáit, Maurice O’ Sullivan’s wife. Maurice himself had been dead for many a long year.

The Irish- and English-language editions of Maurice’s
Twenty Years A-Growing
both came out in 1933 and did well from the start. If not quite an overnight celebrity, Maurice surely had a new life opening up for him. To
Denis Ireland, writing in 1936, Maurice’s book was nothing less than “
Troy seen in the morning of the world.” Ireland told of
Moya Llewelyn Davies, whom he met in
Raheny, showing off the original manuscript, “written in cheap exercise books in Gaelic.” Still in the Civic Guard in
Connemara at that point, Maurice sometimes had to give evidence in court and one time, in Ireland’s telling, the judge descended from the bench to shake hands with him. Soon, the two of them were strolling down the village’s main street, trading thoughts on literature, Maurice’s fellow guards “peeking from the window of the barracks.”

Maurice did not long remain in the Guard. How could he? How could any young man with success like that thrust upon him? On July 5, 1934, he resigned. Five days later he married Cáit Ní Chatháin, whom he’d met in
Carraroe, about twenty miles west of Inverin, site of his first Connemara assignment. It seems that the parish priest, attempting to direct local youths away from dancing and into more wholesome pursuits, organized
baking classes for the young women. Cáit was among them. When a local boy annoyed her, in one instance making off with some rhubarb pie she’d
baked, she complained. Enter the Guard, in the person of Muiris Ó Súilleabhháin, who’d been transferred to
Carraroe in 1928. “Be going off, boy,” he admonished the young troublemaker. Cáit, some years younger than he, continued with her classes. Maurice took to walking her home. A romance flowered. “He was a
fine block of a man,” said Cáit later.

In May 1934,
E. M. Forster wrote George, worried that Maurice might come under what seemed to him the not entirely benign influence of Cáit. And worried also that too much by way of royalties might come Maurice’s way. So far, he allowed, the money “
has not done harm.” But he enjoined George to do what he could to keep Maurice levelheaded. “I do hope he’ll pull himself together.”

Well, if pulling himself together meant steering clear of Cáit and staying in the Guard, Maurice didn’t. “Oh Cáit, I don’t like it,” she remembered his saying when she worried about his leaving a steady job. “I hate getting up at three in the morning, going into houses, moving beds and quilts and mattresses … I don’t like it. I won’t do it even if I have to beg for a living.”

Had he confided in George about his plans? “He didn’t like the idea,” he told her, “but I don’t care.”

After Maurice quit the Guard and married Cáit, the couple lived for most of the next year in
West Kerry with Maurice’s sister Máire. One Sunday morning, they took a boat out from Dingle to visit the Blasket. As they approached, a
naomhóg
came out to ferry them into the island. “That’s when
the chattering started,” she’d remember. “You’d think they were wild geese with everyone talking,” the islanders saluting their marriage, piling greetings high upon them. On the island, they “drowned him with tears and dried him with kisses.” But his childhood home, clinging to the slope of the hill, now stood empty, a big lock on the door. At one point, Maurice approached it, peered through a window, turned sadly away. Then “he put his head under him and started crying.”

During their time in Kerry, Maurice tried writing a biography of a local West Kerry character, one Dónal Cháit Bhillí. “
Of course, Dónal spoke as though he were reading out of a book,” Cáit noted later. “It came out like that.” The book was never published. “He sent it to some publisher and he was told there was too much of it. There was nothing to it in a way.”

For Cáit, Kerry felt like exile. “I
couldn’t understand a word of what the people were saying,” she said, so strange to her was the dialect at first.
All that year she was homesick. Finally, they moved back to
Carraroe, where they built a small two-story house. A son, Eoghan, was born to them in November 1935.

In September 1937, George visited. He and Maurice met in Galway in a pub, then to tea in a local hotel, all the while rattling on in Irish. Maurice wanted him to come back to Carraroe and stay with him and Cáit for the night. “
They would have a great welcome for me and dance till morning,” George wrote Katharine next day. But it would be one in the morning before they reached Carraroe on the bus, and only then the dancing! “I would have done it once, but not now.” As for Maurice, he looked great, and “it was a delight to be with him again. But I am very worried about his future. I feel sure they will be destitute in the end. An added difficulty is that Cáit’s health is not good. And he is so improvident.”

Of course, now Maurice was homesick, too. He was “
heartbroken at leaving Kerry,” Katharine had written to her mother after their 1935 trip to the island. “There is tremendous county feeling here, and it is like being in a foreign country to be in another part of Ireland.” Still, Maurice adjusted, more or less. It wasn’t Kerry, but it was Irish-speaking, wild, and primitive, dotted with little lakes and broad swathes of bog. During these years, he tended his vegetable garden, kept a cow,
cut turf, collected seaweed. On a moonlit night, he’d sometimes go down to the graveyard in the
place they called Barraderry, a few miles from the house, sit listening to the sound of the sea. “
An islander marooned ashore,” his son, Eoghan, once called him.

When Seán Ó Faoláin first reviewed
Fiche Blian
in 1933, he voiced the conviction that Maurice O’Sullivan was not “
a man of one book.” He was wrong. Around the time World War II broke out, Maurice started work on a sequel to
Twenty Years A-Growing—
titled
Fiche Blian Faoi Bhláth,
or
Twenty Years in Bloom,
largely about
Connemara and Carraroe.
Alan Titley, professor of Irish at University College Cork, got his hands on the manuscript once. It was, he concluded, “
an appalling book … very badly written,” stuffed with loose chatter of the sort you’d encounter “talking in a pub late at night or around the breakfast table, just gabbling on,” littered with the Irish equivalents of “You know what I mean” and “So it goes.” To Titley, it lacked “
the quirky humour and devil-may-care attitude of the first book” and was beyond saving.

Maurice had invested a lot of time in it, of course, and sent it off to publishers. “
But what good was that,” said Cáit later, “because the reply he got was that it was not like Twenty Years A-Growing,” not as good, and
needed to be. Maurice went back, worked it over, but to no avail. George didn’t much care for it, either. Whatever good his editing might have done—and once
Alan Titley saw the sequel, he was convinced George’s editorial
contribution to the original was substantial—he didn’t see the new manuscript as worth it. It remains unpublished.

In a 1944 essay, George recalled Maurice’s first day in uniform in 1927 in Dublin, and how he, George, had “
had to take him by the arm and guide him through the traffic to the safety of the pavement.” In the years since, Maurice had “widened his experience enormously, he had learnt to enjoy books, the theatre, the cinema, and the other amenities of urban life, without losing any of his native independence.” But it never quite took, asserted George. With the success of
Twenty Years A-Growing,
Maurice had left the Guard, “purchased a patch of land in
Connemara, built himself a house, married a Connemara girl, and now he is living very happily back where I had found him—among the peasantry.” To listen to George, Maurice had returned to his roots and “walked out of modern civilisation.”

This does not quite ring true. Yes, Maurice lived “among the peasantry” in Connemara and identified with them. But the author of
Fiche Blian ag Fás
in its many editions and translations was a peasant no longer. Year in, year out, in success and in failure, he carved out a life for himself as a writer. Like
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, he inhabited a corner of the literary world. He had left the Guard, yes. And he had left the peasantry as well.

By necessity, Maurice wrote shorter, more salable pieces, about people he met in Connemara, snippets of old folklore.
He’d cycle for miles into the stark countryside, talk to the old people, tell of the loneliness and isolation he saw around him. He wrote scripts for radio plays, some of which were broadcast, others performed onstage in Carraroe. He wrote a story about Jonah and a shark—not the Biblical whale, but a shark. One about the transatlantic cable, which came ashore near
Ventry, just south of Dún Chaoin. He wrote about “
life in the bee world,” with bees as his characters. Much of it was religious: a blind man comes to Connemara, looking for a holy well, rubs water on his eyes, and is cured. Sometimes he gave his Connemara characters Munster
dialects and Kerry sayings. Occasionally, come Christmas or Easter, he’d reminisce in print about the Blaskets. But whatever his stories’ strengths and failings, he kept at it—for
The
Irish Press,
for Irish-language publications like
Feasta
or
An Iodh Morainn
or
Ar Aghaidh,
for the more widely read
Messenger of the Sacred Heart.
“
Disappointment followed on disappointment,” Blasket biographer
Leslie Matson characterized Maurice’s writing life over the years. Yet not entirely so. One compilation of his work listed 132 published pieces. They were darker and sadder, though, than anything in his book, concluded
Nuala Uí Aimhirgín, author of an Irish-language biography of him, the youthful exuberance of
Twenty Years A-Growing
by now largely extinguished.

The book continued to earn royalties—about
sixty pounds a year, George estimated in 1945. Maurice and Cáit supplemented that by letting out a room or two during the summer. Mostly, though, he just kept writing. In 1944, they had a daughter, Máire Llewelyn, named after
Moya Llewelyn Davies, who’d died the year before. Máire remembers her father from when she was a little girl. As a toddler, she’d cycle everywhere with him, propped up on the handlebars. Or else she’d find him upstairs, at his desk, which faced a lake he could look out at by day. The house had neither running water nor electricity, and in the long northern nights he’d write by lamplight. She remembers the
pink glow, the play of shadows on the wall, the scratching pen.

It is September 1945, the war finally over. George returns to Ireland once more, the first leg of his trip this time by plane. “
The journey from Liverpool to
Dublin was wonderful,” he writes Katharine, “5000 feet up on a summer afternoon with the coast of N. Wales spread out like a map, every house and hedgerow as clear as if they were toy models.” Dublin is a joy to him. “I have never seen it so bright and gay, the streets and cafes full of crowds of people with nothing to do but stroll and talk.” Unlike in England, there is no bomb damage here.

His mind thick with memories of Moya and
Watermill and on-till-midnight talk in Irish, George is inevitably drawn to
Raheny. He takes the bus there; the tram tracks have been taken up. The coast road is being widened, houses and walls razed to accommodate the project. Watermill Cottage is gone, “disappeared, except for a ragged stretch of one wall,” its gate intact, though, still the bright green he’d painted it. The garden is gone, reduced to a lumberyard for the road project, “a wilderness of timber, iron and mortar, and in the midst of them my lovely weeping ash, shorn of her tresses and obviously doomed. I stood for a moment feeling utterly desolate.”

The next morning, he catches the train to Galway to spend a few days
with Maurice and Cáit in
Connemara. He presents a teddy bear to little Máire, joins them all at Mass on Sunday morning, then for a wake on a little island just off the mainland. Coming back, the little boat is crowded with more than twenty people, “hilarious on the way home.”

He’d worried that it somehow wouldn’t be the same with Maurice, but they never stop talking. “He is just the same as he always was,” George writes. And being in the Gaeltacht is as exhilarating as ever. “My Irish has returned to me in a flash.” It is like being with Maurice back on the Blasket.