Stones of Aran (48 page)

The feminine world of Gort na gCapall was not, however,
totally
open to me, a man. If I nodded into a kitchen here on my way home from the cliff-tops, the ladies would make a hospitable but unexcited move to the kettle. But if M appeared in the
doorway
behind me, all eyes would light up, arms would be flung open, sweeping me aside as of no consequence. Then if any relict village male was hunkered down by the range in the hope of a cup of tea he would get up wordlessly, sidle out of the back door, and cover his superfluousness by picking through a heap of old nets in an outhouse. I might soon join him there to talk of fishing,
potatoes
and history, while M would be examining Aran sweaters, and learning new stitches, and nosing out the secret history of the craft—which, it turns out, is not what it is supposed to be.

As the world has read in a thousand glossy magazines, each family in Aran has its own repertoire of stitches passed down from mother to daughter since time immemorial, rich in Celtic significances and useful in the identification of the corpses of its drowned menfolk; Synge wrote a play on this morbidly
intriguing
aspect of daily life in the islands. Through the Tree of Life, the Honeycomb, the Carraigín Moss, the Bobailín, the Castle, the Anchor, the Little Fields and Crooked Roads and dozens of other stitches brought by St. Enda from Coptic Egypt, dolorous mother-love and man’s ineluctable fate are entwined into
garments
of universal sales appeal.

Understandably, the Aran women who knit sweaters, socks and bobbled caps for sale either from their own houses or through marketing organisations that supply them with the wool, prefer not to disturb the tourists’ belief in this contemporary folklore. To begin unpicking it, one could refresh one’s memory of the Synge play,
Riders
to
the
Sea
: A fisherman has not returned; a body is
washed ashore far away, and a bit of a flannel shirt and a stocking from it are sent to his sisters for identification:

In fact stockings were almost the only item knitted on the
islands
at the period of Synge’s visit, and as he observed himself, the younger men were just beginning to adopt “the usual
fisherman’s
jersey,” that is, the plain blue jerseys on sale in Galway as in all towns of the Atlantic seaboard. Maeve’s mother-in-law Katie, who was shortly to take to her bed for her latter years, told M that only stockings were knitted in her youth, and that she never
knitted
a sweater until she married. She vividly remembered the first time she used a cable pattern, having memorized it off the back of a visitor sitting in front of her in the chapel. Bridgie had been taught to knit at school in the late ’twenties by Mrs. Ó hEithir, who had learned from English and American magazines and was the only teacher to teach knitting in the island. The sweaters they knitted had plain bodies and patterned yokes of cables, shadow diamonds and moss stitch, and were died navy or black; Bridget taught her own mother how to make them. The “bawneen”
sweaters
of unwashed and undyed wool, with narrow panels of various patterns running from hem to shoulder, now synonymous with Aran, were a later development. By the early ’thirties a fashion had evolved in Aran of dressing little boys in white sweaters
involving
some patterned stitches for their first Communion;
visitors
drawn to the islands by Robert Flaherty’s presence noticed these, and their demand for adult-sized versions initiated a new employment—one of the many ways in which Flaherty
unwittingly
intervened in island history. The stitches used were those common to many areas of western Europe (the local word for a sweater being
geansaí
or gansy, pointing to an influence from Guernsey). Some had probably been introduced by Scottish and Donegal fish-wives brought in by the Congested Districts Board, others arrived in knitting patterns sent home from America by “Yanks,” the Araners’ emigrant relatives. Certain stitches were
local inventions—there is one known as
Praiseach
Pheige
Cuaig,
Peggy Cooke’s mess, though no one would dare use the name in her hearing (this Peige Cuaig was Máirtín Ó Direáin’s mother and has long gone beyond taking umbrage, which is why I can mention it). Soon a craft of amazing complexity was in rapid
evolution
; the sweater became a broad field for the display of taste both good and bad. Most of it is done by memory, and it is
astonishing
to see, as I have, an old lady knitting as she trots down a boreen to the cow. In about 1935 the artist Elizabeth Rivers
introduced
her friend Muriel Gahan, founder of the famous Country Shop in Dublin and the dedicated champion of Irish crafts, to some of the best knitters, and for the first time Aran knitwear went on sale outside the islands. Soon after that Pádraig Ó Máille’s, the famous old dress shop in Galway, began to sell Aran knits, and Pádraic Ó Síocháin of Galway Bay Products in Dublin began exporting them in large numbers to America, which
necessitated
regularizing the sizing; before that, as he says “If the Aran knitter had a small husband, you got a short jumper. If she had a long husband, you got a long jumper.” (Ó Síocháin’s book,
Aran
—
Islands
of
Legend,
has done its bit for the propagation of the romantic mythology of Aran knitting.) The cash income was of great importance in those pinched times, and M’s friends could remember exactly what had been bought with their first earnings. In the late ’fifties the typical price paid to a knitter for a garment was £2.10s, the wool being supplied by the dealer, and twenty-five years later it was around £12. Today most Aran sweaters are made in Donegal, and by machine. The professionally designed
machine-made
products in alpaca and other luxury yarns from the
Inishmaan
Knitwear Company penetrate the most sought-after
markets
, and its founder, Tarlach de Blácam, paces the crags with his mind on the lira, the yen, and the politics of Peru. (Fortunately his company also still fosters the hand-knitting tradition of Inis Meáin, which seems to be even richer than that of Árainn.)
Perhaps
the Aran bawneen reached its apogee in 1985 when one of Jean Paul Gaultier’s male models paraded in tight-knit trousers,
sweater and cap in snow-white wool, an outfit that certainly would have identified him had he been washed ashore drowned.

It is very difficult to persuade an Aran hand-knitter to
calculate
or even guess what her hourly rate is at the price she gets for her output; M in 1986 thought it was about 50p for a fast worker. The mistress of an Aran household does not think of knitting in these terms, or evades the question by saying, “It passes the time; I might as well be doing something while I’m waiting for the potatoes to boil.” Pride in craft, mental and manual activity
however
limited, solace the long hours, especially in winter. But when I was making my map and lodging in cottages throughout the three islands, I sometimes heard the sigh with which the “woman of the house” took up her knitting having served my breakfast, and I smelt exploitation, resignation to an ancient wrong,
something
indeed passed down from mother to daughter. Nowadays fewer and fewer women are finding it worth their while to knit for sale. M found that among the mothers of younger schoolchildren few could knit with the speed and skill of their elders, and most preferred to earn proper wages of £60 or £100 a week in the little factory in Eoghanacht. The only young wife who
knitted
professionally was our neighbour Máire Uí Fhlatharta in Fearann an Choirce, whose husband was away on the South Aran Light for half the time and who had a toddler to care for; she could knit a sweater in one long day, and she relished the
independence
of her income, small though it was compared with the factory wages, but she had failed to persuade her friends to join her and felt isolated in her craft. Sadly, at all age levels, nobody actually enjoyed knitting. Only the rudiments of the skill were taught in the primary schools, and one never saw a young girl take up the needles.

So it seems that as the myth of Aran hand-knitting spreads world-wide, at its origin the reality is fading. What radiated from those knitting-courts where M gloried and drank tea, was a
comfortable
sense of the pastness of the past, a mutual congratulation of retired heroines. All were happy to reminisce and to show M
their stitches, all were happy not to have to bend their fingers to it for hour after hour. The click of needles was no longer as close to them through the waking hours as the pulse; they had time for their own hearts. True, one of Bridgie’s sons had laid it down, in a school essay he showed me on the theme “Woman’s Place,” that “A woman’s place is in the home, because when a man comes in he wants his tea.” But even men and their irrefutable arguments could be accommodated in these women’s lives. For whole
afternoons
at a time, Gort na gCapall, like Cranford, was “in the hands of the Amazons.”

Meanwhile, talking to “himself” in the outhouse, I was learning that history, even in Gort na gCapall, is a matter of men….

Maidhc Mhicil Phádraic Bheartlaiméid Bhriain Bheartlaiméid was the name by which Liam O’Flaherty’s father thought of
himself
, when he wanted to rehearse his descent from Beartlaiméad Ó Flaithbheartaigh, the first inhabitant of Gort na gCapall.
According
to Liam’s elder brother Tom, this Beartlaiméad or
Bartholomew
“built his house upon a rock, not for reasons of security or because he considered the rock symbolical of continuity, but because he did not want to waste a piece of good pasture or tillage land under a house.” Four generations later, when such
communal
undertakings as the basking-shark hunt were being planned, it was an O’Flaherty that convened assemblies on the
carcair,
the rise leading into the village. An old man recalled the scene for Tom:

In the next generation it was Maidhc Mhicil (Mike son of Michael) who led the village. He had run off with Maggie Ganly from Mainistir, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Thomas Ganly the lighthouse-builder. Liam’s earliest memory of his mother was the romantic story of her marriage, told while she was combing his hair:

It was the time of the Land League, of the cliffing of the
Kilmurvey
House cattle, the shooting of the bailiff; Maidhc was
imprisoned
a couple of times on suspicion of his part in these crimes. The household narrowly escaped eviction when her first son, Tom, was just old enough to remember the event:

Both Tom and Liam attended Oatquarter National School
under
David O’Callaghan, the Sinn Féiner and Gaelic Leaguer, who taught them to read and write their native tongue. When Sir Roger Casement visited the school and asked if any pupil could “grind his way through” an Irish column from a newspaper, O’Callaghan proudly called forth Tom, who performed so well that Sir Roger gave him half a crown, and later sent him books, including Fr. O’Leary’s
Séadna,
which, though little read nowadays, was then
regarded as the foundation-stone of modern literature in Irish. Although Casement planned to send him to college, “fate
intervened
” (as Tom’s unrevealing account has it), and he emigrated to Boston in 1912, where he became active in social-revolutionary circles. He began his journalistic career by writing for the
Daily
Worker
and the
Labor
Defender,
and after he had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 as a Trotskyist, for the
Militant.
A sick man, he returned to Ireland in 1934, and helped to found a remarkably radical (and remarkably forgotten) Irish-language weekly called
An
t-Éireannach.
Written for the working classes and for the Gaeltacht in particular, anti-fascist, internationalist, out of sympathy with the self-absorbed and religiose tone of the language movement of that time, the newspaper lasted just three years. Some pieces Thomas wrote for it later appeared in English versions in his two books,
Aranmen
All
(1934) and
Cliffmen
of
the
West
(1935). These collections of Aran stories and reminiscences are full of tenderness and irony—but in the world of writing it is his brother who is O’Flaherty. Thomas died in 1936.

Liam O’Flaherty was born in 1896. He too attracted attention at school. His earliest literary composition horrified O’Callaghan, he tells us, and he was thrashed for it. This was a story of a murder in an Aran potato-garden: a woman brings his tea out to her man working in the garden, and because the tea is cold he kills her with his spade and buries her between two potato-ridges. “The point of the story,” according to O’Flaherty, “was the man’s
difficulty
in getting the woman, who was very large, to fit into the fosse.” O’Callaghan may well have been shocked by this
melodramatic
assault on the Gaelic League’s idealization of the Irish
peasant
, but he recognized his pupil’s abilities and drew him to the attention of a visiting priest, who arranged for him to train for the priesthood. When Liam, aged thirteen, left the island for
Rockwell
College in Tipperary, it was the first step in a career that zigzagged wildly away from Gort na gCapall and would
eventually
lurch across the stage of fame. He went on to study at
Black-rock
(where he organized a corps of Republican Volunteers) and
then at Clonliffe seminary in Dublin, although he later claimed that he never felt any vocation and indeed “despised the
priesthood
and thought it was more noble to do the ordinary chores of our society as a lusty male, to till the earth, to be strong and brave at sea, to marry and beget children, to raise one’s voice with
authority
in the council of one’s fellows,”—nor did he want “to
suffer
the humiliation of wearing a priest’s womanly rig.” However after only a few weeks at Clonliffe, “I danced on my soutane, kicked my silk hat to pieces, spat on my religious books, made a fig at the whole rigmarole of Christianity and left that crazy den of superstition.” A brief period at University College Dublin gave him Catullus, Connolly and Marx instead, but then in 1915 he flung himself into the nightmare of history by joining the Irish Guards, and underwent an experience which, he says, saved him from becoming just another narrow-minded Irish patriot. For this step, which, even more than his baulking at the priesthood, was responsible for the outcast position he later rejoiced in, he adopted his mother’s family name of Ganly, probably because of its Ulster Protestant resonance.

One night in 1917 a lost and bewildered Private Ganly and two others were hiding in a hole near Langemarck in Belgium,
drinking
whiskey from the broken neck of a bottle and watching shells bursting among a platoon of advancing guardsmen, when there was an annihilating flash and roar. He awoke to blood and
hysteria
; he was dragged to a dressing-station where someone picked a scrap of mangled flesh off his tunic saying, “What’s the matter with you, mate? This part of you?” It became impossible for him to speak, although he felt he had something important to
communicate
. Later he attacked a doctor who seemed inimical, and was held and doused with cold water, and his voice came back to him. “
Melancholia
acuta
” was the citation with which the war rewarded him. He felt he would go through life with that shell bursting in his head.

Liam’s wanderings after his discharge, recounted with the
immediacy
and terror of hallucination in a fragment of
autobiography
called
Two
Years,
read as if he were searching for bits of his psyche splattered world-wide. Deciding, as he says, to cut himself adrift from everyone he knew, he goes off to London on his
winnings
at a race-meeting, and spends the lot in a forty-eight-hour debauch in that city whose “majestic size satisfies the human craving for something that is eternal because it is too vast for comprehension.” After being thrown off various jobs for his
insubordinate
attitudes, he ships as a stoker on a tramp-steamer, across the sea which is for him the masculine half of beauty, “the more beautiful because it was more strong,” and feeling himself “young, carefree, plunging towards a romantic and tropic land.” He approaches Rio with the same sense of awe and romance as he did Galway on his first trip with his mother on the steamer
Du
ras
,
but his experiences of the brothel-quarter and the beach where he lives rough with hobos leave him with the knowledge that “each country is as dull and commonplace as the next, each person intrinsically as disappointing as the previous one I have met.” He sees a headline about the declaration of the Irish
Republic
, and ships for Liverpool; “So ended my first expedition to the Tropics, in disillusion and without any credit to myself, unless I could count among my gains the renewal of my faith in the
superiority
of European man.”

By the time he reaches Europe, though, he has lost interest in Irish revolution, and signs on for a Mediterranean voyage. The inhabitants of the Balkans, he finds, are “a bad smell,” and as barbarous today as the Romans found them two thousand years ago. But an epic drinking-bout in Smyrna culminates in his
being
lugged off by two blacks to the divan of a Circassian woman, who justifies everything he has heard of her breed (“How can a woman of your beauty and refinement be content to live in a house like this?” “C’est la guerre.”). He sails on, he is cured of
delirium
tremens
by a storm at sea, he arrives at Montreal.
Despairing
of living up to his concept of man’s destiny, which is “to struggle towards the perfection of his species to a state of
godliness
,” he walks off into the night and the waste places. He takes
odd jobs on farms, but “it is almost impossible to believe how uncivilized these French-Canadian peasants are,” and it is in a condensed-milk factory that he finds a god he can worship, “this god of machinery, more powerful than any god man has yet created.” After a wall of piled-up boxes of condensed-milk tins
collapses
on him, he wanders off, and after some months finds
himself
in the lumber-woods of Northern Ontario. There he meets an agitator from the International Workers of the World, “the type of a new aristocracy that was to spring from the machine.”
Expelled
from the lumber-camp as Wobblies, the two of them have to walk fifty-five miles and flee a forest fire; then they jump trains to Port Arthur on Lake Superior. In a labour-camp near there he falls in love for the first time, with an Irish settler’s daughter, and realizes “the tragedy of my sex, which lies in the impossibility ever to completely conquer that shadowy phantom which is the soul of woman.” Leaving her, he sneaks across the American
border
, and goes to join his brother in Boston. In the James Connolly Club there his sceptical spirit is aroused, by opposites, to
comprehension
of the power and beauty of American capitalism. His wild two-year excursus peters out in unsuccessful attempts to write, and a succession of lost jobs. He feels a growing inner
madness
“forcing me to retire within the walls of my mind.—Where? What place could be more remote than the rock of my nativity?” And so, by debauch from port to port, he makes his way home, and arrives “like a ghoul, speechless, gloomy, a companion of the rough winds and of the breakers.”