On an Irish Island (9 page)

Given how adept he became in Irish, it may be hard to imagine a time when he wasn’t. But at first, Flower struggled with it like everyone else. Indeed, although the pickax letter cited previously was written in Irish, its author appended a few sentences in schoolbook English. “
Dear young gentleman. I don’t like to finish this letter in Irish for fear that you couldn’t understand the whole of it.” It was signed Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

Ó Criomhthain, of course, was Marstrander’s teacher. He had become Robin Flower’s. And it is perhaps time we addressed him as Flower would all his life, and as he was generally known by the visitors who revered him:
Tomás—
just the one name, confused with no one else on the island. Flower would write of returning to the island, being greeted by the villagers, doling out sweets to the
children, watching them run out the door and onto the hill with their prizes. And then:

On an island where hardly anyone knew how to read and write Irish, Tomás learned to do both. The wonder is, how?

By one strand of evidence from 1936, a
Gaelic League teacher came to the island in 1905, when Tomás was about forty-nine. From him, Tomás learned to read his native language, then taught himself to write by imitating what he found in books.

That’s one possibility. Another is that Tomás may have learned to read a little Irish
in the Protestant
school that, back in the 1860s, when he was of school age, still had a place on the island. Around the time of the
Famine, Irish Protestants set up schools throughout the country that dispensed soup and other needed nourishment, along with liberal doses of theology, and instruction through the
Irish language. “
Soupers,” Catholics called these proselytizing Protestants. On the Great Blasket, the
Scoil an tSúip was located down the hill, near the approach to the village. Tomás may for a time have attended.

If so, when he got the chance to tell his story later, by which time the Protestant presence on the island was gone, he’d hardly have wanted to bruit it about. His own account, certainly, makes no mention of it, but credits his introduction to
written Irish to the very end of the nineteenth
century. It seems that, when bad weather left him stuck on the mainland with his boat, he’d often stay in the
Dún Chaoin house of a cousin, whose children were by now being introduced to Irish in school. They read to him, the way Tomás tells it, “
until I got a taste for the business and made them give me the book.” He caught on quickly, his stock of
spoken Irish alchemically transmuting the ink squiggles of the books into order and sense. “My head was full of it, and, if I came across a limping sentence, all I had to do was to hunt for it in my own brain.” In time, he gathered a few books himself and took to reading them to other islanders. It gave him pleasure. He never wearied of it, “for I was red-hot to go ahead.” By the time Carl Marstrander showed up on the island, Tomás was a decade into working with the language, and the villager best equipped by far to help the visitor with it.

Tomás was a proud man, especially of his abilities in written Irish. Among a group of letters he wrote in the early 1920s, some, treated purely as objects of
calligraphic art, must be reckoned minor gems. Written in the old style, where pronunciation changes of consonants are marked by little dots rather than the auxiliary “h”s they get now, they rarely show so much as a smudge or cross-out. The “fadas,” accent marks, are spare, graceful slashes, like the fine lines of an etching. When signing his name, Tomás does so sometimes with a flourish that hints at the outsized sense of self behind it.

He was born in 1855 or 1856, grew up in “
a cramped little house, roofed with rushes from the hill.” Hens nested in the thatch and laid eggs in it. He lived there with his parents and older siblings, together with their cow, ass, and chickens. His father’s family had come from Dún Chaoin and married into the island.
“My father was a marvellous fisherman and a great man for work”—a stonemason, a boat’s captain, and altogether “handy at every trade.” So was Tomás. He was probably in his teens when he began his life as a fisherman.

As part of a boat crew, young Tomás would sometimes visit
Inishvickillaun, one of the
Lesser Blaskets, a few miles away. A single family lived there, the Dalys, with their five sons and five daughters. To young Tomás, it has been written, Inishvickillaun “was Tir na nOg, with sport and fun and company, and fine, lively, beautiful girls with big hearts.” He fell in love with one of them, Cáit. On one visit, Tomás would write, Cáit “went out the door and, as she went out, waved me out too that I might follow her.” Follow her out he did, “not pretending anything.” It was a fine November day in 1877. It seemed possible they would marry.

But larger family interests intervened. Cáit’s family lived a hard
naomhóg
row away, not right at hand when help was needed. A better match, Tomás’s older sister insisted, would be a young Blasket woman, Máire Mhici, sister of the future island king. Weeks later, in February 1878, the two were married. Some controversy lingers as to whether a sad, lonely song Tomás sang at the wedding in Ballyferriter was just a pretty song or amounted to a public lament for his lost love. “I well knew how to deliver it,” Tomás recalled. “You would think that there was no other voice in the house, loud or soft, until I had finished it.”

The loss of Cáit was hardly his last. All told, he had ten children with Máire Mhici; she died in childbirth with the last of them, in about 1902. One child, aged seven, fell to his
death from a cliff. Two died of measles. One immigrated to America. Tomás would
one day record this sad litany under the heading of “
The Troubles of Life,” describing them in language so spare and unadorned as to seem coldhearted.
“I was told he was very hard and tough in his youth,” his grandson,
Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, would assert. That’s just how the Ó Criomhthains were, “like iron in body and soul. It was difficult to make them cry, or shed a tear. It was difficult to imagine them mourning someone’s death.”

But at least once, Tomás did. In the early summer of 1909,
Eveleen Nichols, a student at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin, and already, at twenty-four, a rising figure in the language movement, visited the island; the
Gaelic League was by then encouraging people to visit
West Kerry to better learn the language. She took to the island right away, making friends with Tomás’s daughter Cáit. “One day they would be on the hill,” Tomás would remember, “another about the strand and the sea; and when the weather was soft and warm they used to go swimming.” One August afternoon, the sea was breaking hard on the beach and they got caught in the tide. They tired. They called for help. Tomás’s eighteen-year-old son, Domhnall, was digging potatoes in a field above the beach—accounts differ on this and other details of the tragedy—when he heard the commotion and realized they were in trouble. He threw down his spade, bolted to the beach, and, still in clothes and shoes, ran into the surf. When he found his sister safe, he swam out to save Nichols. Both of them drowned. Tomás and brother Pats were returning from the day’s fishing and spied boats bringing to shore two lifeless bodies. When he reached the confused scene, he saw first the boy’s shoes—or, rather, their soles, with a nail pattern he recognized at once; he’d repaired them himself. “
He let out a scream,” someone said later, “that could be heard on the two sides of the village.”

Tomás would tell of brothers and sisters dying; of islanders hurt or killed in accidents and
drownings; of casting a crab-baited line for rockfish and getting the hook stuck in his finger. But he told of wakes and Christmases and weddings, too, of dripping lobster pots, of hiking up the hill to cut turf. He played hurling on the beach in his bare feet. He made windows from driftwood washed up onto the shore. He made panniers for the donkeys. He built himself a house. He hunted seals and rabbits. He fished.

But he was never an ordinary fisherman. At the island
school, Tomás had learned to read and write—read and write
English, that is—better than most other islanders. At least once, when the teacher was laid up, he and another older boy were delegated to fill in for him. Tomás was a natural pick: “
Dónall’s Scholar,” they sometimes called this son of Dónall Ó Criomhthain. By 1907, certainly, he had a reputation as a man of studious temperament, interested in books, reading, and learning; small wonder that Marstrander and other Irish-language devotees were sent his way. And for all the push for English in those days, the Irishness rose up in him. In the 1901 census, he gave his name as Thomas Crohan; in 1911, he was Tomás Ó Criomhthain, the
only island name recorded that year in Irish. He’d early grown interested in the work of the
Gaelic League, which even in tiny neighboring
Dún Chaoin had a presence, and at some point began sending brief stories to Irish-language publications.

Later, when books bearing his name appeared in print, reviews were apt to picture them as the work of an Authentic Blasket Islander, unmediated by art, a peasant incarnate, profoundly
of
his island home; indeed, that was made to seem the rare wonder of them, that they’d come from so unpromising a source, from so ordinary a peasant fisherman. But Tomás Ó Criomhthain, it stands repeating, was no ordinary anything, much less fisherman. By any standard, whether of his time or our own, he was “gifted.” And all the visitors knew it. Marstrander did. So did
Robin Flower.

Thinking back to his early days with him, Flower described Tomás as “
a small, lively man, with a sharp, intelligent face, weathered and wrinkled by the sun and rain and the flying salt of the sea, out of which two bright, observant eyes looked critically upon the world.” Together they’d sit in Tomás’s house, or in the king’s kitchen, or under the lee of a turf rick, Tomás disgorging “tales and poetry and proverbs,” together with “precise explanations of difficult words” and lively observations of the island world around him.

The two of them, said Flower’s daughter Síle, who saw them together
a lot on the island in the 1920s, became “
tremendously close friends. I think he must have been one of his best friends in life.… They loved each other,” and had a great deal in common. After Flower’s first visit, in 1910, the two of them kept in frequent touch. Tomás wrote him about the island roads and houses they’d worked on together, congratulated him on his marriage. Flower sent him tobacco, and money, too. One time, Tomás wrote back about the hit he’d made with some money Flower had sent, distributing it among the islanders in the form of beer. Typically, he’d write to Flower in Irish, often appending a letter in English to Mrs. Flower as well, thanking her for the calendar she’d send him each Christmas. Once the war was over, he told her in a 1915 letter, he would “
cross the Irish Sea out to him. Then the children might have Irish out there. He might laugh when he will hear this.…” Tomás concluded with a few words in Irish
to her husband, then added: “May the Almighty God protect and save ye from all danger’s that’s going about.”

His face “is dark and thin, and there look out of it two quick and living eyes, the vivid witness of a fine and self-sufficing intelligence”:
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, as Robin Flower described him, shown here about
1925
.
(
Illustration Credit ill.7
)

But by 1916, the world war had been on for two years, and it had been that long since the two men had seen each other. Flower was in
London, but just then relieved of his regular job at the Museum and assigned to translating foreign newspapers, sometimes more than a hundred a week. “At present I am in despair under the weight of the Dutch and Belgian press,” he wrote late that year. “
It is horrid work.”

By this time, Tomás
stood off to the side of his island brethren—or in some ways, it’s difficult to deny, above them. He couldn’t have been immune to the attention and respect he’d gained. It had to have been exhilarating to be singled out, introduced to the Norwegian linguist, to work with him, teach him, be sought after for knowledge. And likewise to engage in far-ranging conversations with the scholar from the great museum in London. Tomás might reasonably have concluded, and with some satisfaction, that he had transcended by far what might otherwise have been his lot. Or else, in a darker, elegiac mood—he was now about sixty, wizened, past his physical prime—he might have concluded that he had done all of noble note he would ever do.