On an Irish Island (40 page)

In the early 1900s, books began to appear on the island. So did
photography. Synge took a few pictures in 1905. In 1920 and then again in 1924,
Carl von Sydow took numerous islander portraits. In 1923, from London, George mailed to Maurice’s sister Eibhlín the first photographic image of herself she’d ever seen, one he’d taken just before leaving the island that first time.

In 1931, an article in
The Irish Times
reported, Robin Flower attributed the decay of folk culture in part to
gramophones, which offered Blasket youth “more popular entertainment than the telling of tales around the fireside.
It is strangely ironical that the instrument which does most to preserve Ireland’s folklore should be an agent of its decline.” Peig Sayers told countless stories into Flower’s
Ediphone; you can hear her gravelly whisper of a voice today online, or at the
Blasket Centre in Dún Chaoin, where hundreds of photos taken on the island, as well as sound recordings and film images, are now digitally enshrined.

By the 1930s, certainly, islanders were well aware of amusements and conveniences they lacked. Lís threw out a suggestion to Chambers in a November 1938 letter:

A penny from each of the factory’s four hundred workers, she figured, would do it. Chambers did not oblige.

Technology had figured all along, of course, in the island’s transformation from an isolated, more or less self-sufficient community to the creaking social and economic ruin it was on the eve of its abandonment.
The big motorized French fishing trawlers handled larger catches at lower cost than the little
naomhóg
s ever could. The narrow-gauge railroad that, beginning in 1891, snaked round and through the hills of
West Kerry from
Tralee to Dingle delivered Synge and other visitors to West Kerry—but also
Mary Kearney and countless other emigrants away. Once they reached Cobh, twenty pounds would get them to
Boston or
New York in a week or two, courtesy of great ocean steamers in all their relentless cost-per-mile efficiency.

Meanwhile, all across the first third of the century, Tomás Ó Criomhthain was slipping out of a fisherman’s life and into that of writer and intellectual; at the time of his death in 1937, he may have had more in common with
Robin Flower than with Tadhg and Séamus and the other fishermen he’d immortalized in
Island Cross-Talk
and
The Islandman.
Sometime before 1922, he’d tell the story, he’d helped
Seoirse Mac Cluin, a Catholic priest visiting the island, compile an Irish phrase book. “
We used to be sitting at it eight hours a day in two sessions—four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon—for all that month. That’s the most painful work I ever did, on land or sea.” Tomás was talking like “knowledge workers” the world over, lamenting the brain-scrunching burdens of sustained intellectual effort. “It is a book that couldn’t be found written in any language,” he’d brag in English to his son of
An tOileánach
in 1931; “3000 of them is sold now.”

In the 1930s, the Great Blasket could be mistaken for a tourist town, with outsiders, drawn by its literary reputation, no longer so rare a sight. “Lá Breágh”s, the islanders called them, from the Irish for “a fine day,” which was about the only Irish most visitors could manage.
Peats Tom Kearney’s place, next door to
Peig Sayers’s, was sometimes called
Kearney’s Hotel, or Pats’ Inn. For now, sheer physical inaccessibility saved the island from a precipitous descent into touristic gimcrackery. Still, it was enough to
remind you of a Nice, France, say, in its first flush of tourist development 150 years before.

In the 1960s, a black-and-white documentary called
The Village
showed Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets sprinkled with tourists. One well-dressed Englishwoman with an upper-class accent can be heard—with what an anthropologist reviewing the film termed “Protestant incomprehension”—coming near to dismissing local
poverty altogether: “I suppose it’s their Faith; they know that material things don’t matter very much.…” This fine lady exulted in “the complete absence of all the
modern machinery” in the village. “I think that’s what I like best. Not men with tractors,
but a man in a field cutting down the oats by hand. And a donkey cart instead of a car. A sort of fairy tale … All the nasty, modern things aren’t here.”

More and more, of course, they were.

The area would soon even feel a breath of celebrity culture.
Men of Ireland
and its shabby little black-and-white excuse for a story was one thing. David Lean’s 1970 Hollywood epic
Ryan’s Daughter,
filmed in living color on the mainland within sight of the Blaskets, was quite another. Today the locals can direct you to where star
Robert Mitchum liked to down his Guinness, or show you the remains of the schoolhouse built for the film. To
Séamus Delargy, folklore was an oral “
literature of escape” through which spellbound listeners “could leave the grinding poverty of their surroundings, and in imagination rub shoulders with the great, and sup with kings and queens.” Film, Delargy would also say, had become “the modern folktale.”

The wandering scholars of old were gone, Robin Flower wrote in
The Western Island,

There was no escaping modernity’s grip.

In August 1969, Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán, by now seventy and living on the mainland, near Smerwick Harbor, dropped by to see his eighty-six-year-old neighbor. “
It is a strange world to him today,” he would write of the old gentleman, “with the mad rush there is on everybody,” and people having so much of everything. “ ‘This is the modern way of life,’ says I to him, ‘and if peace lasts and no war breaks out, ’tis only better it will be getting for us, if God spares us to see it. Did you hear,’ I went on, ‘that men landed on the moon last night?’ ”

In the inexorable tension between the simple ways of the Blaskets and the push and shove of modern life, the influences, however, don’t go just
one way. The little village is gone, but its story has a way of sticking. “
Their collective narrative,” writes Fintan O’Toole of the autobiographies by Tomás, Maurice, and Peig, “haunted, and to a degree still haunts, the Irish imagination.” “Haunts” is just the right word, but it’s not only the Irish imagination.
An tOileánach
has been translated into English,
French,
German,
Italian,
Swedish, and
Danish;
Fiche Blian ag Fás
into at least four languages. The three original Blasket books are all still in print and have been joined by several dozen others—books by Seán Ó Criomhthain, Mícheál O’
Guiheen, Máire Guiheen, Lís Ní Shúilleabháin, and others among the islanders, as well as by Thomson and Flower. Each year, close to
fifty thousand visitors make their way across the
Dingle Peninsula to
Dún Chaoin’s Blasket interpretive center, a handsome museum, archive, and conference center dedicated to the legacy of the island community, its great picture windows looking out at the island from across the sound. Each year scholars from Ireland, England, America, and elsewhere descend on it for a conference, conducted mostly in Irish, devoted to Tomás Ó Criomhthain, say, or
George Thomson, to the island’s music or its religious faith. Meanwhile, the Blasket books continue to shoot tendrils out into the worldwide community of scholars, captivating students of literature; and also of history, geography, anthropology, and folklore; and, because they stand astride at least two sets of paired languages—Irish and English, oral and written—of
translation itself as subject of study.

But the Blasket story matters not alone for the sake of the island itself, or the people who once lived there, or the literature it produced, but for how it reflects back at us our lives today. Almost from the moment Tomás’s book first appeared, it’s been like that—life on the Blasket seen in stark contrast to modern lives that, in the right light or the wrong mood, can seem too fevered, insubstantial, or inauthentic. The Blaskets speak to us not only of what
they
once were, but of how
we,
the rest of us, are today. “
It was a simple culture,” Thomson wrote of the island, “but free from the rapacity and vulgarity that is destroying our own.” True or not, the assertion, like others over the years from critics and scholars, makes the Blaskets into a kind of half-silvered mirror that, even as we look back through it to the past, shows us ourselves and something of how we live today.

No one anytime soon is returning to live on the Blaskets; the hundreds of islanders who over the years left it behind for America and Canada might scratch their heads, incredulous, at the thought. But this truth doesn’t deny another truth, that the island has something for us yet to
learn.
George Thomson once lamented that he’d “
failed in the work I had set out to do—that is, bring the people of the Gaeltacht into modern civilisation while retaining their own culture.” But there is other work to do—to confront modern civilization with the story, the example, the contrast, of places like the Blasket: As counterweight to a “progress” that sometimes seems too headlong, or not progress at all; as repository of those old ways of pre-modern life worth reclaiming today, or at least revisiting; as testimony that life’s satisfactions lie amid people, individually or together, undistracted by the ceaseless swell of clatter and activity, goods, gadgets, and pixels that constitutes our lives today.

“
We were poor people who knew nothing of the prosperity or the vanity of the world,” said
Peig Sayers. She and the other islanders lived hard lives, buffeted by the extremes of nature, isolated and narrow. Still, most of the time, it was enough. Whereas today—doesn’t it seem?—nothing is ever enough.

Or, seen another way, it’s too much, leaving us to yearn for just a little less of everything. Today, right beside Facebook Nation and the rest of the twenty-first-century digital world, coexists a twenty-first-century counterculture in sometimes uneasy tension with it: Slow food, locally grown. An intimate urbanism built around compact, walking-scaled city neighborhoods. Vacations offering respite from the hammer and thrum of modern life—camping, long-distance bicycle touring, folk-dancing camps, trekking in Nepal, hiking along the Appalachian Trail. Each offers at least a hesitant, momentary step into a slower, less
technology-tangled life; one of less choice, less convenience, closer to nature, maybe some taste of real community. A little, in short, like the Blasket in its prime. The Blaskets “
may be a broken-down culture,” wrote
Thomas Barrington in 1937. “It may be a culture run to seed. But seeds scattered over a field prepared for them will produce a new crop.”

Should it surprise us that our visitors loved the Blasket? They were products of a society by now almost a century past, yet much like ours, with many of the urban, technology-bound pleasures and social pathologies we experience today; we need scant imagination to recognize their worries, problems, and preoccupations as our own, their lives like ours. One man a frustrated, bureaucratized intellectual, forever coming down sick, behind in his work, worried about his bills. Another a great playwright, denizen of Paris and Dublin when he wasn’t on the road, a sometimes reluctant player in the literary and theatrical world of his day. A Left Bank intellectual, prone to depression. The troubled
Brian Kelly, struggling
with obscure psychic wounds, finally retreating to an insular little world on the Continent. And of course Thomson, who worked for much of his life against what he deemed the evils of industrial capitalism. All, in the Blaskets, had found a balm, a peace, a happiness.

Thomson, who would insist that he came to see beyond the romantic haze through which he’d first seen the island, nonetheless did view it through a scrim of longing. So did the other visitors. Yeats said of his friend Synge, “
It was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither riches nor
poverty, neither what he calls ‘the nullity of the rich’ nor ‘the squalor of the poor,’ that his writing lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace.” There, according to Yeats, Synge found men and women who had “refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary, had dignity and good manners where manners mattered.”
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote in 1925: “
I am greatly taken with this place, lonely and wild as it is.… I don’t think I shall ever get tired of it.”

Are we required to judge as distorted or naïve all that these superbly educated men and women experienced on those windy heights above the sea? Must we dismiss it on the simple if undeniable grounds that their place in the island world was temporary and artificial, their immersion incomplete, their insight skewed?

Today they would all be termed “privileged.” Each was spared the island’s grimmest truths, was buffered from the village’s social pressures, could come and go as he or she pleased. What George and Marie-Louise and Marstrander lived was not what the islanders lived. Australian scholar
Irene Lucchitti says Synge’s sympathetic picture of the Blaskets “
recognises neither the realities of poverty nor the ordinary complications of Island life.” Synge and the others may have hauled nets, collected turf on the hills behind the village, rowed until their muscles burned. But, unlike the islanders, they weren’t consigned forever to labor and hardship. Their livelihoods didn’t depend on it. Their prospects ranged beyond the sea-ruffled edge of the island. They were on vacation, or they were on leave, or they were doing research, or they were working on their Irish. Usually it was summer, and the sun shone; come winter, they were back in the city. With no matter what clarity Synge, Thomson, and the others could see the harshness of island life, they nonetheless enjoyed the mental leisure, the freedom from exigency, to see it warmed by softer light.…