On an Irish Island (39 page)

A 1949 photo of Maurice shows him in jacket and tie, hair parted on the left,
all turned white. He is still a good-looking man—not old, but no longer young, either. He’s in his mid-forties now, looks as if he’s stepped from one of the many snapshots that come down to us of Blasket fishermen—hearty and vigorous men, their boyish youths only a memory.

By the spring of 1950, George has lived in
Birmingham for more than a decade. He is,
this academic year, president of the Classical Circle, its aim being “to encourage the appreciation of Greek and Roman Literature, Art and Civilisation, both for their intrinsic value and for their bearing on modern conditions.” He is president of the Socialist Society as well. His appointment book notes a visit to Nottingham set for May 22, a garden party for Thursday, June 22, meetings with Russian émigré linguist
Nicholas Bachtin and others among his friends.

On Monday, June 26, a telegram arrives:

The day before,
Máire, six years old, is out playing. It is four or five in the afternoon. A man in uniform comes to the gate.

The house is full of chatter and music, crowded with Sunday visitors, people in the sitting room singing. When Máire sees the uniform—just like her father’s, that of a Guard—she thinks at first that it
is
her father. The man comes to the door, huddles with her mother. He tells her he has some bad news.

It happened at a public beach just outside Galway, in Salthill, at a place called Lover’s Strand. A few months earlier, in February, at last giving up on trying to support his family as a writer, Maurice had re-joined
the Guard, sixteen years after leaving it. It could not have seemed like much else but failure.
Four days before his death, he’d been transferred from Oughterard, a pretty little village on the shores of Lough Corrib, to a station in
Galway itself, twenty miles away;
a strike was on, police were needed.

Maurice’s biographer, Nuala Ní Aimhirgín, doesn’t think he
killed himself. Neither does his daughter, Máire. “
I think he had a heart attack while he was in the water,” she has said. He was a good swimmer, but “there was a strong undertow. It was pulling him out to sea. He managed to swim in to the shore. But he seems to have collapsed. And the tide came in. He drowned in about three or four inches of water.”

“
Sixty I may be,” wrote Máire—grown, a wife, a mother—in a poem, “but my soul remains at six/Just as it was on the Sunday you slipped into silence, into serenity/On to another Island, out of sight.”

When George got the telegram he was at home. The house he and Katharine had lived in for ten years, one of four such houses built in a closely spaced row around 1930, was from the street an unprepossessing affair. From the back, though, it was memorable for a great sweep of garden that dropped down to a stream. Bourne Brook it was called, and that’s where George, in shock, went now. He was “
barely able to speak,” Katharine recalled.

Today, the banks of the stream are fettered in concrete. In those days, though, George’s young daughter Margaret liked to play there, scampering beside the brook, ducking in and out of neighboring properties. A heavy rain could turn the stream into a torrent, rising up enough over root-entangled banks to flood part of the garden. In summer, it was most likely just a trickle; the Thomsons sometimes kept hens and rabbits there. “The bottom of the garden” Meg called the spot, and it
was
somehow the bottom—more, through its particular play of topography than it was the garden’s end, or edge, or boundary. A world apart, a leafy enclave far from the eyes of others, far enough from the house that you had to
go
there, a journey. George made his way down the whole length of the garden, two hundred feet from the house, past the apple tree, the little redbrick outbuilding, the vegetable patch at the bottom.

Margaret watched. From the drawing room, looking out the back window, she saw “Dad, walking up and down, up and down, tears in his
eyes. Then he went to the very bottom of the long garden and stood and watched the stream.”

What’s the matter with Daddy? she asked her mother. “It was the first time I’d seen my father so unhappy. I’d seen him worried, but I’d never seen him express such grief. And I don’t think he ever felt any person’s death so deeply ever again.”

There will never again be on the Great Blasket a village of fishermen and subsistence farmers who live in rude stone
houses, fish the surrounding waters in canvas-clad boats, do without electricity, and speak only Irish. Perhaps, as scholars say, human history traces no simple straight line of progress, but this is probably one prediction as safe as any.

Likely, too, is that, around the world, places like the Blasket will grow fewer. “
Maybe it will come that all the little islands, all the little places where men do make a livelihood together out of the gathering of the strand and the hunt of the hill and the fish of the sea will be empty and forgotten.” These are the words
Dylan Thomas gives
Maurice O’Sullivan’s grandfather in a screenplay, never finished, based on
Twenty Years A-Growing.
And that surely is the pattern of the past century and more, countless versions of the Blasket abandonment being played out in Italy, India, Mexico, and Korea, one village after another vanishing altogether or stepping into the modern age.

The Blaskets lost.
London and Los Angeles,
Dublin and
New York won. Here and there, as with the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish or other religious communities, a few try, and may partially succeed, in squirming free of
modernity’s grasp. But mostly, the movement goes the other way, toward ease and security, plumbing and packaged goods, cell phones and flat screens, or whatever else constitute the marvels of a time and place.

The visitors to the Great Blasket we’ve met here likewise valued modern life; they didn’t forsake it, anyway.
Carl Marstrander did fieldwork in out-of-the-way places like the Blaskets, but spent most of his professional life in the capitals of Europe.
Robin Flower? For all the many years he visited the Blaskets, he and his family lived, for eleven-twelfths or more of each year, in comfortable houses in the inner suburbs of
London, always near a train to get him to work.
George Thomson turned his back on Oxbridge, but chose an alternative that, for all its nuanced points of difference, left him for most of his life in England’s second city, imbibing eagerly of politics and ideas. They and the other visitors could, in principle, have rejected big-city life and embraced the Blasket, moving there, living among their island friends not for the summer but throughout the year and for the rest of their lives. But they didn’t, all of them acquiescing to one or another version of the modern metropolitan lives for which they’d been groomed.

Of course, one visitor, it could be said,
did
throw in his lot with the Blaskets. This would be Neal O’Moore—or that, anyway, is the name a scriptwriter gave his character. On May 28, 1937, Lís Ní Shúilleabháin wrote
George Chambers that some “
film stars” were on the island. And I suppose they were, if the likes of
Cecil Ford, the unknown actor who played Neal, qualifies. He and a coterie of other unknowns were there to film a movie about the island inspired by Robert Flaherty’s instant classic,
Men of Aran,
a dramatized documentary of Aran life that had appeared to much acclaim in 1934. (Robin Flower visited Flaherty on Aran in 1932 and saw some of the early footage. Flaherty seemed to him “
a great man … [with] a great anger against civilisation and the machine age.”)

So our
Neal O’Moore, Dublin medical student, comes to the Blasket and falls in love with an island girl, Eileen, who is pledged to another. They draw closer, but she holds back. “I can never mean anything to you,” she says, “I will marry Liam,” the sturdy island lad she’s known all her life, whom Neal befriends as well. Near the end of his stay, they climb up to a rocky outcropping, the sea beneath them. “If I come back again, I’ll stay for good and all,” says earnest Neal. “I’ll become an island man.”

He returns to Dublin, but then, one day, hears Eileen on the radio in his college rooms, singing a song she’d sung on the Blasket, captured with the fledgling electronic technology of the day and broadcast across the country. He’s smitten all over again, of course, and returns to the island—this time, he declares, to stay. “I’m not returning to the mainland,”
he tells Eileen and Liam. “I’ll become an island man, cultivating, turf cutting, cattle breeding. Yes, and if you will help me, Liam, I’ll become a curragh man.” That is, he’ll become strong enough—man enough, really—to row an island
naomhóg.

As you may have decided from these bits of dialogue, the film is not very good. Its American distributor called it
Men of Ireland,
shamelessly exploiting its Aran forebear. In Ireland and England it was known as
The Islandman.
But “
that Film is not about my father-in-law—may God rest his soul,” Lís wrote Chambers. Rank melodrama it was, down to a worthy Catholic priest issuing homilies to his “children,” wooden acting, and a nascent
ménage à trois
of a story that managed to remain not just chaste but bloodless. The film was redeemed only by some nice dancing and singing—
filmed in a Dublin studio—a
naomhóg
race, glorious island vistas, and the two pounds a day villagers got for hauling cameras up the cliffs.

But if you can pull away from the story long enough—and, believe me, it will come as a relief—the film raises a serious question: could Neal, or anyone like him, forsake the intellectual and professional rewards of medical school, along with Dublin’s comforts, stimulations, and seductions, to live permanently among the islanders? Could Neal ever truly become “an island man”?

Back in Aran, J. M. Synge apparently once did flirt with going native. One day, rowing to Inishmaan with some islanders and caught up in a “
dreamy voluptuous gaiety,” he finds his friends “so full of divine simplicity that I would have liked to turn the prow to the west and row with them for ever.” He’d return soon to Paris, he tells them, to sell his books and his bed, and then he’d be “coming back to grow as strong and simple as they were among the islands of the west.”

He did not do it.

Among visitors to the Blaskets, none seems to have gone even so far as Synge did. Did Flower, Thomson, or Sjoestedt—of a perfect island night, the
peat fire glowing, the west wind outside not too cold or too wet—never think of settling on the island for good? If so, I haven’t heard or read of it. Flower came so regularly on holiday and was so generally liked that he was all but an honorary Blasketer. But he, like the others, knew full well he was a visitor, not an islander, and always would be. And all of them were clearheaded enough to see that the island culture so precious to them was becoming extinct.

In Aran,
Declan Kiberd has written, Synge fed “
off the death of the
old Gaelic culture, as do all coroners and morticians”; and was aware, too, that the beauty of the dialect he used in his plays was
“the beauty that inheres in all precarious or dying things.” Might some similarly dark thought apply to the Blasket visitors? Did their coming accelerate the island’s decline? After all,
Brian Kelly brought books to the island; these helped inspire Tomás to write his own books, weakening the oral culture; Tomás’s celebrity brought tourists, diluting authentic island life; George Thomson induced Maurice to leave the island for the Guard.… Still, weighed against the overwhelming economic and social currents lashing at the Blaskets, these must be reckoned secondary influences at best. The “
tangled world of to-day” had been reaching out to the Blaskets and its mainland neighbors all through the early twentieth century—and, really, long before.

That phrase owes to Robin Flower. In his book
The Western Island,
he writes of being rowed out to the island, which from a
naomhóg
’s perch seemed to recede “behind the dancing company of the waves. ‘Say your farewell to Ireland,’ cries one of the rowers, and I turn and bid farewell, not only to Ireland, but to England and Europe, and all the tangled world of to-day.” In a 1937 talk he gave in Germany, folklorist
Séamus Delargy worried that in Europe there were “
only a few remaining corners where the old world can find a free place. The storm and violence of modern life, the hustle and bustle of the big cities, the wail of the factory horn, the whirring of machines”—these could be escaped only “in the far west of our remote island,” in
Irish-speaking places like the Blaskets. But long before the Blaskets were abandoned, they and Flower’s tangled world, distinct and apart for so long, had been drawing irredeemably closer.

We’ve seen how English encroached on
West Kerry Irish; Synge and Marstrander lamented as much in the first decade of the century, and
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt supplied evidence and detail for it in her 1928 paper.
Literacy itself helped pull the island out of its insular past and into the European future. “
Having acquired the doubtful blessing of being able to read the newspapers,”
Daniel Binchy wrote in 1934 of Ireland generally,

Blasket storyteller Seán Eoin O’Donlevy told
Robin Flower once, “
It was only the other day that I had all the old tales in my mind.” Now, he’d forgotten them, and it was
Tomás Ó Criomhthain to blame, he said, “for he has books and newspapers, and he reads them to me; and the little tales, one after another, day after day, in the books and newspapers, have driven the old stories out of my head.” Of the islanders
George Thomson would observe,
“Within the space of a single generation, their whole outlook on life had been transformed by literacy,” which had “opened up a new world of commercialised mass entertainment.”