New Ways to Kill Your Mother (11 page)

The aura of the previous inhabitant of this house, in which I ended up living for almost eight years and where I wrote most of my first two books, appeared to me sharply only once. I was putting books in the old custom-made bookshelves in the house when I noticed a book hidden in a space at the end of a shelf where it could not be easily seen. It was a hardback, a first edition of Louis MacNeice’s
Springboard: Poems 1941–1944
. I realized that these shelves must have, until recently, been filled with such volumes, and that the woman who had left this house and had gone, I discovered, to a nursing home, must have witnessed a lifetime’s books being packed away, the books that she and her husband had collected and read and treasured. Books bought perhaps the week they came out. All lost to her now, including this one, which gave me a sense of her as nothing else did.

I asked about her. Her name was Lilo Stephens. She was the
widow of Edward Stephens, the nephew of J. M. Synge. In 1971 she had arranged and introduced Synge’s
My Wallet of Photographs
. Edward Stephens, who died in 1955, was the son of Synge’s sister Annie. Born in 1888, when Synge was seventeen, he was aged twenty when his uncle died in 1909. Later, he became an important public servant and a distinguished lawyer. In 1921 he accompanied Michael Collins to London for the negotiations with the British that led to the Treaty which set up the Irish Free State. He was subsequently secretary to the committee that drew up the Irish constitution and thereafter became assistant registrar to the Supreme Court, and finally registrar to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

In 1939 on the death of his uncle Edward Synge, who had not allowed scholars access to Synge’s private papers, Edward Stephens became custodian of all Synge’s manuscripts. He began working on a biography of his uncle, which would partly be a biography of his family. ‘I see J. M. and his work as belonging much more to the family environment,’ he wrote, ‘than to the environment of the theatre.’ He had been close to his uncle, having been brought up in the house next door to him and spent long summer holidays in his company, and been taught the Bible by Synge’s mother, as Synge had. But, in Synge’s lifetime, not one member of his family had seen any of his work for the theatre. At his uncle’s funeral, Edward Stephens would have had no reason to recognize any of the mourners who came from that side of his uncle’s life. For his family, Synge belonged fundamentally to them; he was, first and foremost, a native of the Synge family.

‘It was [Synge’s] ambition,’ he wrote,

to use the whole of his personal life in his dramatic work. He ultimately achieved this … by dramatising himself, disguised as the central character or, in different capacities, as several of the leading characters, in some story from country lore or heroic tradition. It is in this sense that his dramatic work was autobiographical and that the outwardly dull story of his life became transmuted into the gold of literature.

In his work, Edward Stephens ‘transcribed in full,’ according to Andrew Carpenter in
My Uncle John
,

many family papers dating back to the eighteenth century; he copied any letters, notes, reviews, articles, fragments of plays, or other documentary evidence connected, even remotely, with Synge. He also recounted, with a precision which is truly astonishing, the events of Synge’s life: the weather on particular days, the details of views Synge saw on his bicycle rides or walks and the history of the countryside through which he passed, the backgrounds of every person Synge met during family holidays, the food eaten, the decoration of the houses in which Synge lived, the books he read, his daily habits, his conversations, his coughs and colds – and those of other members of the family.

By 1950 the typescript was in fourteen volumes, containing a quarter of a million words. On Stephens’s death in 1955, it had still not been edited for publication.

Lilo Stephens inherited the problem of the Synge estate. Out of her husband’s work – ‘the hillside,’ as one reader put it, ‘from which must be quarried out the authoritative life of Synge’ – two books came. Lilo Stephens made her husband’s work available to David Greene, who published his biography in 1959, naming Edward Stephens as co-author. Later, in 1973, Andrew Carpenter would thank her ‘for her patience, enthusiasm and hospitality’ when he edited her husband’s work to a book of just over two hundred pages,
My Uncle John
. Lilo Stephens had also inherited Synge’s papers, which had been kept for years in No. 2 Harcourt Terrace as her husband worked on them. In 1971 Ann Saddlemyer would thank her for first suggesting the volume
Letters to
Molly
and providing ‘the bulk of the letters as well as much background material’. Edward Stephens had purchased these letters from Molly Allgood so that they would be safe. Finally, Lilo Stephens ensured the safety of Synge’s entire archive by moving it from Harcourt Terrace to Trinity College, Dublin, where it rests.

Synge’s family remains of considerable interest, either because of the apparent lack of any influence on his work, or because they may or may not hold a key to his unyielding and mysterious genius. He seemed in his concerns and beliefs to have nothing in common with them – he stated that he never met a man or a woman who shared his opinions until he was twenty-three – and yet, for a great deal of his adult life, he lived with them and depended on them. Any version of his life and work has to take his family into account and understand the idea, in Edward Stephens’s words, ‘that the context of his life … was quite different from any other writer of the literary movement. I tried to create a picture of a class or group in Irish society that has almost vanished.’

If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us in his essay on Synge and Wicklow in
Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000
, ‘owned not only Glanmore [in County Wicklow], with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil’s Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate of over four thousand acres’. His grandfather, however, managed to lose most of this property, a portion only of which was bought back by Synge’s uncle. Synge’s father, who became a barrister, died when Synge was one year old. He left a widow, four sons, a daughter and four hundred pounds a year. The first three sons were solid citizens, becoming a land agent, an engineer and a medical missionary to China respectively. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed,
despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would eventually find a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.

In his book
Letters to my Daughter
, published in 1932, Synge’s brother Samuel, the missionary, wrote:

There is little use in trying to say what if our father had lived might have happened different to what did happen. But I think two things are fairly clear. One is that as your Uncle John grew up and met questions that he did not know how to answer, a father’s word of advice and instruction would have made a very great difference to him. The other thing is that probably our father would have arranged something for your Uncle John to do besides his favourite reading, something that would not have been too much for him but would have brought in some remuneration at an earlier date than his writings did.

This was to consign Synge’s mother Kathleen to dust, to suggest a sort of powerlessness for her. She was, in fact, a very powerful person. Synge’s mother was born Kathleen Traill in 1838. Her father was a clergyman of whom Edward Stephens wrote: ‘He spent his life, as he put it, waging war against popery in its thousand forms of wickedness, which did not always endear him to his ecclesiastical superiors.’ Finally he became rector of Schull in County Cork, where he died in 1847 from a fever caught from the people among whom he worked. His widow, who had been brought up in Drumboe Castle in County Donegal, moved to Orwell Park in the southern suburbs of Dublin. From here in 1856, her daughter married John Hatch Synge, the playwright’s father. They lived in Hatch Street in the early years of their marriage, later moving to Rathfarnham, where John Millington Synge was born. Later, after her husband’s death, Kathleen Synge moved her family to Orwell Park in Rathgar.

Synge’s paternal grandfather and his Uncle Francis, who had
bought back some of the family estates in County Wicklow, were members of the Plymouth Brethren. Mrs Synge’s father had held strong evangelical views, which his daughter also shared. She brought up her children according to strong religious principles, and her social life, such as it was, seemed to include only people who were of a like mind and background. Edward Stephens wrote:

Mrs Synge conducted her household by a rule as strict as that of a religious order and supposed that her children would acquiesce without question. She was very well versed in the doctrine to which she adhered and she could support every tenet by citing scriptural authority. She believed the whole Bible to be inspired and its meaning to be clear to anyone who read with an open mind and faith in the Holy Ghost.

In an autobiographical essay composed in his mid-twenties, Synge wrote:

I was painfully timid, and while still young the idea of Hell took a fearful hold on me. One night I thought I was irretrievably damned and cried myself to sleep in vain yet terrified efforts to form a conception of eternal pain. In the morning I renewed my lamentations and my mother was sent for. She comforted me with the assurance that the Holy Ghost was convicting me of sin and thus preparing me for ultimate salvation. This was a new idea and I rather approved.

Between the ages of four and twenty-one Synge took part in his family’s annual move to Greystones in County Wicklow, where his mother had friends and associates among the evangelical community. These ‘summer visits to the seaside’, Synge remembered, ‘were delightful’. His mother had the policy on holidays as well as during the rest of the year of gathering together as many members of her family as were available. When they were not available in large numbers, she invited friends, usually women of
the missionary persuasion, to share the family sojourn in Wicklow, which often lasted for three months.

Nicholas Grene writes about Synge’s relationship to his family: ‘There is nothing very unusual about a writer or artist from a conventional middle-class background diverging from his family’s political, social and religious views. What is striking about Synge’s case is that he maintained such close relations with the family in spite of his dissidence.’ However, while he spent most of his life in Ireland under his mother’s roof, sharing even her holidays, he seems to have been seldom alone with her and this might have helped to maintain close relations. Mrs Synge’s house in Orwell Park had an entrance in the dividing wall to her mother’s adjoining house, where her daughter Annie, her husband and their children, including the young Edward Stephens, lived, as did Aunt Jane, Mr Synge’s sister. On 13 April 1890, after Mrs Synge’s mother’s death, when the Stephens family decided to leave Rathgar, Mrs Synge wrote to her son about her prayers to the Lord: ‘I am … asking Him to find us two houses together as we are here. He can do all things, so if he pleases to do that for me it is quite easy for Him.’

The Lord came to her aid. He was assisted by Mr Talbot Coall, the estate agent; they combined to find two adjoining houses at Crosthwaite Park in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire. Thus the extended family remained together and Mrs Synge could continue to instruct her grandchildren in the ways of righteousness, as she had her children. While four of her five children carried her instruction faithfully into adulthood, it made her sad that John, the youngest, did not. In the letter quoted above, she also wrote: ‘Dear Sam is always a comfort when I see him. My poor Johnnie is not a comfort yet.’ Soon after the move she wrote: ‘John – poor boy. I am so sorry for him, he looks unhappy. He has not found the Saviour yet and until he does, how can he be happy?’

Her son, who had not found the Saviour, had found much comfort instead in the natural sciences and in his own imagination. In his autobiographical sketch, he wrote about an awakening that changed everything for him:

When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin’s. It opened in my hands at a passage where he asks how can we explain the similarity between a man’s hand and a bird’s or a bat’s wings except by evolution. I flung the book aside and rushed out into the open air – it was summer and we were in the country – the sky seemed to have lost its blue and the grass its green. I lay down and writhed in an agony of doubt … Incest and parricide were but a consequence of the idea that possessed me … Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derision.

Synge was not naturally social. Because of ill health he had been educated at home for much of the time. Thus, when he went to Trinity College in Dublin, he took no great part in academic or student life. His reading had been intense and sporadic. His study of science and archaeology had been done for their own sake. His most notable attribute was his polite distance from those around him. By seventeen he did not seem to have shared his doubts and derisions with his mother, who wrote:

This is Johnnie’s birthday. I can hardly fancy he is seventeen. I have been looking back to the time he was born. I was so dreadfully delicate and he, poor child[,] was the same … I see no spiritual life in my poor Johnnie; there may be some but it is not visible to my eyes. He is very reserved and shut up on the subject and if I say anything to him he never answers me, so I don’t know in the least his state of mind – it is a trying state,
very
trying. I long so to be able to see behind that close reserve, but I can only wait and pray and hope …