On an Irish Island (13 page)

For an Englishman from London like George, a thicket of confusion obscured the
names of his new acquaintances. This was no trifle on a par with whether Edward goes by “Ed,” “Teddy,” or “Ted.” Nor was spelling really the problem; the island’s was an oral culture, most islanders being illiterate in Irish, so spelling needn’t have much troubled him. Rather, the confusion stemmed in part from the fact that most of the island population, about 150 at the time, derived from only a handful of families. There were lots of Guiheens on the island, just as there were lots of Keanes, Kearneys, and O’Sullivans, to momentarily cede them the Anglicized forms of their names. Refer to “that Guiheen girl” and you might leave the listener hopelessly unenlightened:
which
Guiheen girl? Nor was “Máire Guiheen” much better; there were only so many families, but also only so many given names, like Máire, Eibhlín, and Nóra, or Seán, Pádraig, and Tomás among the men and boys. During one period, the village was home to
six Seán Ó Cearnaighs.

How to distinguish the many Guiheens one from another? This particular Mary Guiheen—Máire Maidhc Léan Ní Ghuithín—was the daughter of Maidhc and the granddaughter of Léan. Her mother, Maidhc’s wife, was
Máire Ní Chatháin, Synge’s little hostess, now about forty; island women often retained their
maiden names. But because there might well be other Máire Ní Chatháins—as indeed there were—the little hostess was also known as Máire Pheats Mhici—or Máire, daughter of Pádraig, granddaughter of Mícheal.

But we are not done yet. The islanders often bore distinguishing
nicknames unrelated to
genealogy.
Pádraig Ó Catháin was, as we’ve seen,
an rí,
the king. One particular Tomás Ó Cearnaigh, who had immigrated to the States only to return, was known as An Poncan, the Yank. Eibhlín Ní Shé was known as Nelly Jerry. In one of his books,
Tomás Ó Criomhthain dubbed a villager Tadhg the Joker. Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, when a bit older,
was usually just An File, the poet. His mother, island storyteller
Peig Sayers, was almost never known as Máiread Sayers Uí Ghaoithaín, her proper name; she was simply Peig, or sometimes Peig Mhór, Big Peig.

This way of names had emerged naturally enough in use. But to anyone new to the island, and certainly for an
Englishman encountering it for the first time, it posed problems—as it does for us here, in print, lost among Irish names thick with seemingly familiar English consonants and vowels that nonetheless don’t add up to familiar English sounds. In Irish, “Siobhán” is pronounced “Shivanne.” “Ó Laoghaire” is “Ó Leary.” To vex us the more, Irish spelling changed during the years our story spans; for instance, the name for Ireland’s Irish-speaking area went from “Gaedhealtacht” to “
Gaeltacht.” Names changed, too. Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, an island schoolteacher who later wrote a book under that name, might have been known a few years later, or had she immigrated to America, as Nora O’Shea.

But Nóra Ní Shéaghdha
didn’t
immigrate to America and would not have been known by an Anglicized version of her name—except, perhaps, to English-speaking merchants in Dingle or tourists who didn’t know any better. In this book, islanders most often retain their Irish names. So do Irish scholars and writers, such as
Muiris Mac Conghail or
Pádraig Ó Fiannachta.

Leslie Matson, an Irish schoolteacher who in the late 1950s took an interest in Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets, later prepared a compendium of brief island biographies, “Blasket Lives,” for which, as helpful resource, he prepared lengthy lists and cross-lists of each islander’s Irish name, Anglicized name, maiden name, nickname, or pet name; that was one good answer to a problem with no perfect solution. George Thomson himself, in a note to one of his translations from the Irish, would write, “With regard to the spelling of proper names I have sought rather to help the English reader than to be consistent. Some Irish names have an English form, others have not; and we have used one or the other, whichever seemed the more convenient.” In these pages, I steer close to Thomson and adhere to no one fixed method or system. Rather, I have tried to let the story itself, as it develops, suggest which name to use when, and so, just possibly, keep things straight.

George Thomson, we’ve said, would become an eminent classical scholar. But just then, it needs saying, he was a kid—a university student just
turned twenty. He was handsome, amiable, and deeply interested in everything around him, so it wasn’t long before he fell in among villagers his own age. One was Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, or O’Guiheen in English (who, about George’s age, looked something like the young John Lennon). “We became close friends,” George recalled.
“He was different from the other boys—studious and introspective.” And compulsively superstitious: once, when a boy he didn’t see threw pebbles at him, he was sure the fairies were attacking him. He was imaginative, smart, and one of only a few islanders who could read and write in Irish; when just fifteen, he had a poem published in a national Irish-language publication. “There never were children with cleverer heads for books,” his mother once told Robin Flower. On September 7, 1923, Mícheál noted in his journal that he and Seoirse—George’s name on the island—went down to the slip. “
He’s a nice boy. He has a camera.” And he was snapping pictures with it like the tourist he still was.

Mícheál’s journal was one of at least three being kept on the island that year. Another, as we’ve seen, was that of
Tomás Ó Criomhthain. The third, also likely at
Brian Kelly’s behest, was that of
Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, a round-faced woman just a bit older than George. “
I have not seen the young Englishman since he came to the village,” she wrote on August 30. But just three days later, she and her friends were hanging out with him and another visitor, a Tipperary boy whom she described as “great fun and a joker.” Not so George. He was “very friendly altogether, but I don’t think he likes the joking at all.” At this point, he had little Irish, but she did her best to engage with him. Did he have a girlfriend? Eibhlín understood him to say that he did, one of recent vintage, that the girl was on the island, right there among them. Repeatedly, according to her diary entry, he said “he had a pain in his heart because of her.”

How much of this flirtatious muddle owed to the language barrier, how much to nerves or youthful cluelessness? In any event, a severe toothache kept Eibhlín home for three weeks, and not until the day before his departure did George reappear in her journal. She wanted him to take a picture of her, but all morning it was foggy. That afternoon, though, the sky cleared, and George lined her up with five other young people. He snapped them all together, the low, grassy little island of
Beginish just behind them, the mainland off in the distance.

But George wanted one of just her, too. She grabbed her brother’s cap and planted it atop her head, brim backward. Don’t laugh, said George. She wore a dark sweater, gently scalloped at the neck, with tapered sleeves
that stopped a few inches short of her wrist. A wisp of hair peeking out from under her cap blew in the breeze. A perfect little triangle of light settled on her cheek.

She hoped George would send her the photo, she wrote in her journal that evening, “
because I’ve never seen my own picture.”

Eibhlín’s younger brother was named Muiris—or, in English,
Maurice—and was just George’s age. His mother had died when he was just a babe. Whereas Eibhlín stayed on the island, he’d been shipped off to an orphanage on the mainland. When he was seven, in July 1911, his father brought him back. By that time, he spoke only English. But back on the island he absorbed Irish quickly and, by the time he met George, had taken his place among the other young Blasket fishermen. The two of them would become lifelong friends.

Maurice loved teasing, pranks, and every kind of deviltry, and his joie de vivre, when it didn’t curdle over into depression, was the delight of his friends. He’d make up stories for the old women, a cousin remembers, tell them “
that this girl was going to get married, that this fella had made a match. And they’d believe him.” One time, he dressed up in his dead grandmother’s old clothes, a
ghost in her coat and shawl, leaving his sister and her friend to scream in terror. Another time, he loaded up George with such a weight of heather on his back that he keeled right over. “He was great fun,” said this cousin, Máire Mhic Ní Shúilleabháin, in 1993, and “great company for George.”

A few years later, when Maurice described
meeting George Thomson for the first time, he recalled encountering him on the path one bright sunny day, stopping for a smoke, and trying to talk across the language gap.
Beware the laugh of an Englishman,
Maurice had been brought up to think, but George was the happy exception. “George and I spent the next six weeks walking together on strand, hill, and mountain,” he wrote, “and after spending the time in my company he had fluent Irish.” If he did, of course, it was because he worked at it; that first summer, he’d endlessly repeat Maurice’s “words under my teeth before I could understand them.” On his part, Maurice saw in George a rare devotion to Irish. “
If everyone in Ireland were as eager as he for the language, the people of old Ireland would be Gaels again without much delay.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Maurice offering a lightness of being that was welcome balm to George’s overheated intellectuality. Later, Maurice would have much to learn from George. Now George had everything to learn from him.

Islanders seated on the wall are, left to right, Seán Ó Criomhthain,
Eibhlín Ní Shúilleabháin, Micheál Ó Gaothín, and, melodeon on his lap,
Maurice O’Sullivan.
(
Illustration Credit ill.9
)

One hot day that first summer, the two young men and Maurice’s father hiked, “
happy as children,” to the back side of the island to retrieve two sheep. At a gloriously situated spot along the hillside about two miles west of the village, looking south to the Skelligs, they sat down to rest. Were the Blaskets much different from London? Maurice’s father asked. They were, said George.

“It is a pity I am not in the city of London now,” said Maurice, “for it is a fine view I would have.”

George, his unlined young face scrunched up into a frown at the idea, looked at Maurice sharply. “Indeed, you would not,” said he, as Maurice told it later, “but the heat killing you and your health failing for want of air. And as for the view, you would be looking at the same thing always—people walking the streets with nothing in them but only the breath, and believe me if one of them could see this view out before me now, he would give his riches for it.”

That first summer, George came under the spell of Maurice’s grandfather,
Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin—Eugene O’Sullivan, or “
Daideo,” as George came to know him. He was a heavily built man of about seventy-five with a good singing voice, a bent for argument, and a head full of traditional
lore. Maurice delighted in his company, as did George. Years later, while visiting
China, George met a frail old professor who chanted a Chinese poem for him, head thrown back, eyes shut, the same deep feeling in his voice, and that was all it took to transport him back to the Blaskets. “
If I had been listening with eyes closed, having forgotten where and when it was,” he’d write, “I should have imagined that I was listening to Maurice’s grandfather.” Just before he returned to England, it was Daideo who said to him, “
Casta na daoine ar a cheile ach ni chasta na croic ar na sleibhte
”: “
Men meet but not the hills or mountains,” a nod to the tenacity of human connection. “
I never took much notice of it,” George would write in a letter to a friend many years later, “beyond thinking it was rather an odd idea, not more odd however than other Irish proverbs.” But then he encountered Daideo’s parting remark in other languages, countries, and contexts, its layers of ambiguity never for him quite resolved.

“
George left us today,” Eibhlín wrote in her journal on September 30, “and we are rather lonesome after him.… Few people have ever left this place without feeling lonesome and George was near to tears.”

Late one afternoon two weeks later, she went down the hill for the
mail, which hadn’t reached the island in a week, hoping for a book she was expecting. It hadn’t come, but what had come was a letter for her in Irish, in an unfamiliar hand. When she tore it open, a
picture slipped out. She looked at it and laughed. It was the one George had taken of her, cap turned backward, sent to her from England.

Back in Cambridge, George had spacious new rooms at King’s.
He was in Bodley’s Court now, a range of four-story stone buildings at the far end of the college from the great chapel frequented by the tourists—up a winding stone staircase, leaded windows at each landing, to the top floor. From a bank of windows in the big front room he could look down over the Backs, the great green expanse between the university colleges and the river Cam, spanned by little King’s Bridge. It was the iconic Cambridge scene. He was back in this cradle of scholarship, of privileged people with time to read, write, and think. It was the world for which he had been groomed and where he excelled. He might have been pardoned for thinking those six weeks on the island had never happened.