On an Irish Island (41 page)

Or so, voicing this objection, speaks Maturity, the grown-up part of us that insists on being hardheadedly realistic. But of course that was not
the part of them the Blaskets claimed. Because for them the Blaskets were their youths, their Land of the Young.

Synge, twenty-seven when he first visited Aran, was older at the time of his visit to the Blaskets, thirty-four. George was twenty. Marstrander was twenty-three. Sjoestedt was twenty-four. Brian Kelly was twenty-eight, as was
Robin Flower.
“To him,” his bilious friend
Edward Meyerstein wrote of Flower on a trip to the island, “this place is a dream of his youth.” And it was something like that for most of them.

“Dream” suggests unreality, fantasy, nothing to be taken quite seriously, what the crimped adult in us is quick to smack down as ephemeral or silly. But—like Utopia, with its paradoxical intimations of impossible
and
ideal; or for that matter, the Irish Tír na nOg, Land of the Young, itself—“Dream” also suggests something rare and good, on a higher, if elusive, plane, a vision of a happier time or a better world. And it’s this we see again and again among the Blasket visitors—their idyllic days on the island transmuted into a personal vision, into sensibilities that reached across their lives and into old age.

Around the time of
George Thomson’s eightieth birthday, he was visited by Irish scholar
Seán Ó Lúing, a native of West Kerry who’d been intrigued by Thomson ever since reading
Fiche Blian ag Fás.
It was a memorable day for Ó Lúing in Birmingham, he and George talking of prospects for the Irish language in Ireland, of links between Greek and Irish. “
As he was speaking,” Ó Lúing wrote, Thomson “got up and paced the room, a light came into his eyes, his voice which at first has been weak, grew stronger, the years fell away, and I found myself listening to a man who spoke with the animation and fire of youth.”

For Thomson, the Blaskets seem to have defined a personal state of grace, a time when he was tied to his fellows in a way he perhaps never was again.

These are lyrics from a song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from one of his early albums. Dylan wrote it when he was just twenty-one. Even then, it
seems, he cherished the memory of a yet earlier, magical time, full of easy fellowship:

For Dylan in his dream, at least from the other side of the confounding gates of memory, younger was simpler, and simpler was happy. When we yearn for simplicity, for lives less saddled with stuff, for time less crowded and closed down, it’s usually our youthful selves we want back—for the early years when, just out of school, not making much money, as young officers, assistant professors, or junior engineers, we sat “simply in that room again,” in pub, bar, or coffee shop, with friends. For the times when, typically, we had less, yet more. “
They haven’t much worry about material things, really,” said the upper-caste Englishwoman in
The Village.
“They prefer to have the extra time to sit around and talk.” Insufferable as she could seem, she was on to something, seizing on what, among her friends back in England, she didn’t have, or didn’t have enough, and what maybe these Irish villagers did.

Some of the islanders’ own memories retain this same sense of youth at its delighted ease. Maurice O’Sullivan’s book is one long paean to an exuberant youth from which he’d not wholly emerged, full of adventure, games, drinking, and horseplay, steeped in friendship.
Mícheál O’Guiheen calls his book
A Pity Youth Does Not Last.
Lís Ní Shúilleabháin “
spent the most wholesome part of my childhood and young womanhood” on the island, she wrote
George Chambers, “and not a single night passes without me in my happy dreams on the white sand shore.” Honeysuckle-sweet nostalgia? A little. But if we ache for the past, maybe it holds something for us.

“
The long years have vanished and all I can see today are the old ruined houses where people used to live,” Mícheál O’Guiheen recalled in old age. He and one island girl, he remembered, “
would walk and walk until we reached the top of the hill. The height wouldn’t bother us. We were like a little brother and sister together. I would pick every bright flower growing on the mountain and tie them in a button-hole in front of her dress to please her. We were young and everything looked good to us.”

•   •   •

So much, on that beautiful island off the farthest shore of Ireland, looked good to young George and the others. Yet, in the end, the Blasket community perished. That is the verdict of history, brutal in its finality. Modernity won out. Today, in the big cities of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, traffic roars and restaurants glitter. Suburbs leap across the countryside. Music pounds from the bars of
Boston and the
boîtes
of
Paris. Online sites herald conferences and conventions. Technologies advance. New companies start up. Food is shipped across the nation and the world. “Social networking” takes some new fashionable form, it seems, every few months. Our world crackles and hums.

The Blasket visitors we’ve met in these pages had seen vestiges of their own slower, horse-drawn past recede from view, too. They felt some of the ambivalence many today feel at the disappearance of the front porch, the corner market, and the local pub. “
It is sad to think,” George wrote Katharine in 1937, on a visit with
Moya Llewelyn Davies at her new home in
Raheny, “that in a year or two the village of Raheny will be swallowed up in the Dublin suburbs”—as indeed it is today. All in our day who chafe at the insistent demands of lives that move too fast, too divorced alike from nature and human community, are a little like Flower, Thomson, Sjoestedt, and the others who found, among their fisherman friends, something they missed in London, Cambridge, or Paris.

The islanders, too, were racked with ambivalence as they left their homes. “
Whatever happens on the Island,” Lís Ní Shúilleabháin wrote Chambers on February 23, 1942, reporting their decision to leave the Blasket, “I have one gifted thing to tell you of it, I was always happy there. I was happy among sorrows on this island.” Another islander,
Seán Ó Guithín, when asked about emigrating, said, “
The Island will be in my head as long as I live.… The coming of each season brought its own charm for us especially when we were young lads. There was the time for making
lobster-pots and time for
fishing with the pots,” which sounds straight out of Ecclesiastes. In the end, there can be no surprise—nor surely is there any contradiction—that people can embrace the blessings of modern life, even reach hungrily for more of them, yet know they’ve lost something in the bargain, and grieve for it.

It is not entirely mysterious, really, what this something-lost was. We have only to turn to the visitors themselves to see what captured their imaginations; persistent themes run through their writings. They tell of
the peculiar dignity and grace of the island people, of their abiding hospitality. They tell of their bravery and strength and capacity to endure. They tell of how, with reading, writing, and pre-packaged distraction such a small part of their lives, vitality shot through their everyday human interactions. They tell of the islanders as creators of joyful music, exuberant
dance, and artful language, not mere consumers of them. They tell of time taken to enjoy moments of extraordinary natural beauty. They tell of men and women measured not by one narrow yardstick of performance, doing one thing capably, but of an adaptability that left room for doing much well, living life well.

Such qualities can’t easily be figured in to the social and economic equations comparing one society or culture with another. They are hard to stack up against food prices, miles-per-gallon, music downloads, life expectancy, stock options; they don’t compute. What, then, should we do with these “losing” graces? As we think of the Blaskets, how they touched the visitors, and what we might draw from them today, how are we to retrieve them, ensure they don’t slip irredeemably from sight? How are we to treat virtues too amorphous, soft, and tentative to count, too sweet and admirable for any place but our dreams?

The Blasket books ensure they won’t be forgotten; this much, at least, is certain. “It was often,” island poet
Mícheál O’Guiheen wrote in one of them, that “I spent a while taking my ease spread out on the brown heather, listening to the murmuring of the wind and the moaning of the waves in the coves.” Sometimes he’d feel the urge to compose a piece of poetry, yet wouldn’t. “
It wasn’t from laziness I didn’t do it, but because those pictures most pleasant to my heart were too much for me to describe.”

It would be silly and misguided to imagine the Blaskets as some straightforward model for a richer, better way of life, or from which to draw too-easy lessons of sociology or culture. The visitors themselves, certainly, were not deceived. They were all seasoned intellects. They visited the island. They were seduced by it. But they were clear-eyed and self-possessed enough not to hold it up as an exemplar to be transported bodily somewhere else. They’d been lucky, and they knew it: they’d landed on the island when they were young and had the wisdom to let it change their lives.

“I have been reading the Irish version of Maurice’s book,” George wrote in 1937 to Katharine while briefly away in Ireland. “
It is as fresh as ever, and as beautiful—much more beautiful in Irish than in English, but it leaves me rather sad thinking over the past. Not that I want it back
again. What I want is to be back with you. This is a lovely place, but I could not live here because it is too remote from the ugly world, which is less forbidding when one lives in the thick of it.”

During the years when our story plays out, then, just as in the years since, and in the years to come, the eternal oppositions remain: To live challenging lives that don’t grind us down with their pace and pressure. To sample the best of the “simple” things while enjoying the benefits of a complex and sophisticated society. To exult in the beauty of wild places yet not destroy them through use. To embrace the wisdom of our parents and grandparents while adapting to new situations and passing on new wisdom to our children.

Their time on the Blasket didn’t leave our visitors able to resolve such oppositions. In our consumer society, men grow rich by convincing us that the next new product, or exercise regimen, or exotic locale can fix the contradictions nagging at us. But of course they never do. The timeless tensions and lingering mysteries take new form in every culture and in every generation, are never resolved.

Not resolved permanently, anyway. But back then, on that ocean-swept island, for Robin Flower and Carl Marstrander, George and Marie-Louise, the mysteries were clarified, the tensions relieved, and everything, for the blessed days of their youth, was just right.

It was Trish Hogan and Ed Barrett who, when Sarah and I were weighing where to go in Ireland for our honeymoon in 2005, suggested a spot at the far western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, the village of Dún Chaoin, County Kerry. Not long after we returned, Trish introduced me to some of the Blasket-related books in her substantial library of Irish literature. In the years since, she has been unfailingly enthusiastic and a wonderful friend. Ed, an MIT colleague, and his wife, Jenny, also took an early interest in the project and, for one of our times in Dún Chaoin, let Sarah and me stay at their house. I owe both of these Cambridge friends many thanks, not the least for pointing me to their own most cherished place in Ireland.

The day after we’d first found our way from Shannon Airport, over the Connor Pass to Dingle and then, around Slea Head, to Dún Chaoin, Sarah and I stumbled on the Blasket Centre; what happened next is briefly told in the Prologue. What’s not told there, and needs to be said here, is how much friendliness and cooperation I enjoyed during my research trips to the Centre, which is archive and museum as well as visitor’s center. There, Dáithi de Mórdha responded to untold questions and research requests. He tracked down books, papers, and photographs, never protested, never wavered. He and his father, Mícheál de Mórdha, the Centre’s director, gave me the run of the place, or so it seemed, routinely advising me of materials just then reaching the archive, introducing me to people, doing spot translations from the Irish. My warmest thanks to them for their dedication, their professionalism, and their many kindnesses.

Thanks as well to others in the Dún Chaoin community who freely offered help and hospitality to me and my wife. Chief among these are Frances and John Kennedy, our neighbors across the road from Ed’s house who were so generous—with flowers from their garden, honey from their hives, books from their library, stories from their experience. Through Frances’s memorable portrayal of Maurya in a local performance of Synge’s
Riders to the Sea,
I came away with an indelible impression of the fortitude and forbearance demanded of the fishing families of Ireland’s west.

Much material about the Blaskets is available in English; some is not and can be found only in Irish-language sources. For her translation work, I wish to thank Ruth Úi Ógáin, whose intelligence, skills, and seriousness of purpose helped make this book a better one. Right from the start, she grasped the tack I’d taken and guided me to particular resources of the Blasket Centre, where she had formerly served as guide, translator, and researcher. She did this, I should say, while juggling the demands of home and family, seemingly without breaking a sweat.

Many people, most cited by name in the Notes, granted me interviews, furnished correspondence and photographs, invited me into their homes, or lavished on me the resources of their libraries and archives. My debt to them is substantial. I wish especially to acknowledge Séamus Mac Mathúna, for going far beyond his duties at NUI Galway to talk to me at length about George Thomson’s time at Galway seventy-five years earlier; Leslie Matson, for sharing with me his vast trove of Blasket lore and for the hospitality he and his wife accorded me in Waterford; Muiris Mac Conghail, for his generosity in sharing the fruits of his Galway research and his high-spirited conversation in Dublin; Breandán Feiritéar, for driving me around Connemara, where Maurice O’Sullivan lived much of his life after leaving the island, and sharing with me insights and impressions culled from his deep knowledge of the Blaskets. Thanks, too, to Gilberte Furstenberg, who secured for me a rare French-language publication, and Pádraig Ó Healai, for translating substantial excerpts from his mother’s book.