Synge (14 page)

But Lough Nahanagan is not so far from The Seven Churches as it happens. It is a region of mortarless walls, deserted lead mines and the like, and a river, and a fine, well a wonderful, waterfall, down which Margaret Synge tells me a lady fell to her death. I ask her if she committed suicide, but Margaret says she didn’t think so, though she might have pulled her chair too close to the falls with something vague in mind. Otherwise, apart from thoughts of that lady, there is no one about except a few very cold tourists, who might even be Irish, but everyone is a tourist up here, except Margaret. (Her old map across her lap has pencil markings on it that turn out to have been written there by her father years ago. It is a wonderful rare map, with all sorts of secret information on it that the world will never know. Such maps are extinct.) Even Lough Nahanagan is not quite ‘at home’, at least it is invisible from the road. It is said there are good trout up there, if crazy in the head, and I can believe it. But they must be lonely. It is fearsomely lonely. There are no people going about speaking a language ‘more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught’. There is no one at all to call Synge, or Mrs Synge, or even myself, a foreigner.

Synges themselves are few on the ground, although we do stand later on sacred ground, ‘the Synge paddock’ as Margaret calls it, a little Victorian enclosure where Synges lie in the Synge churchyard, including her marvellous John. ‘I’ll be lying in there,’ she says, pointing to some unpromising dockleaves, and I ask her of her kindness to stay alive at least another twenty years, if only for my sake (I am selfish in my friendships and care nothing for anyone else). She says she will, and she will likely keep her word.

It is the word of a Synge. Fifteen thousand words of a Synge made the greatest play in the Irish canon,
The Playboy of the Western World
. It is a very nice thing that the Western world he refers to is actually Mayo, where once I lived myself. I always think of Mayo as a little Northern (not Connemara, not Galway, the traditional West). It could have been
The Playboy of the North Western World
. His other plays, apart from
Riders to the Sea
, are set in Wicklow, in the ‘eastern world’ of Christy’s speech. And I think it is true that they all speak the same, the characters, so it is a very democratic language, and he has bestowed his discoveries in language on the entire nation, as if that English he heard through the floor in Wicklow were really an Irish – a National tongue. Even the ancient grandees in
Deirdre of the Sorrows
speak the same language. It is a measure of Synge’s elegant love, that he could fish such a language up from a Wicklow kitchen and spread it all over the country.

We go into the church and Mrs Synge shows me the stone that remembers the death of young Captain Synge. The Fall of the House of Synge, she calls it, but it is one of her singing pleasantries. The house of Synge is quite eternally alive. The people are gone from Lough Nahanagan, and the tinkers from Ballinaclash, and even Rathvanna, that never existed; The Beauty of Ballinacree is gone, Sarah Casey herself, they are gone from the lonely glens and the back roads of Rathdangan, where Synge saw the Tinkers gathered every year to choose a yearly wife. The descendants of those Travellers used to come up our own farmyard and rattle the latch on Sarah Cullen and Annie Dunne, and frighten the life out of us children. That’s how it was in those times, and I have written about it without ever thinking till this moment that I lived as a little boy of four in the land and the language of Synge. I write this little rambling essay here under those very mountains, of Kiltegan, Ninevah and Kelsha. All those people are gone, my own included, but the house of Synge will never be gone. For it is a house made of such words that no wind can touch it, government disdain it, or mortal life leave it empty.

Illustration 7: Riders to the Sea
, 1906, with Maire O’Neill, Sara Allgood and Brigit O’Dempsey. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin

Synge’s Aran, I read. Synge’s peasants. Picasso’s women. Lorca’s Andalucia.

This is a reader’s response to one playwright and two plays, without a reader’s distance. If I am a writer whose imagination is now weaned, as Seamus Heaney so aptly puts it, from my origins, those origins are important to me not alone as the locus of so much of my work and my self, but because they are the site of the peasant idiom so famously employed by John Millington Synge, whose ear was very finely tuned and who often got it technically as well as dramatically right. And while the writer’s imagination is weaned from her origins, the writer never is.

I grew up in a welter of lobster pots and nets and currachs being tarred. I played in the upside down cathedral of one half – the stem – of a cut-in-two pucan. This had been put in a field out of sight of the sea. The other half was for the hens, and covered in bird droppings as thickly as Alcatraz, though no magenta flowers grew on our unyielding climate. I was taken out in a currach very young and I loved the green swell of it, the massive oxen of a deep current, Lorca’s ‘buey de agua’ sensed beneath the surface. I learned how to sit still and not ask questions while the men talked. I felt safe. I knew the sea could turn.

As a young child I picked carrageen and picked spuds and salted fish. All these activities were carried out in the cold lash of April, or the bitter wind of November, so the body’s memory insists. I know the salting was actually done in summer, the minute the fish were gutted and washed. This task I also carried out, when I was old enough to be trusted with a knife. My fingers were thin and they reddened and froze more quickly than anybody else’s, I was nervous and lacked dexterity so I did all of these things badly, but as the eldest I had to show some sort of example.

While we were not as dependent on the sea as an island would be, we depended on it for sustenance, for beauty and for escape to America. The sea was capricious. The ability to predict weather had to be matched by the ability to know where and when the fish were to be found, as well as how to catch them. The sea could be miserly, ensuring a winter of want and poverty, or it could, without warning, be lavish.

As in fishing villages the world over, the men were either ‘out on sea’ or the currachs were in. When I was nine or ten the family moved to a house with a view of the quay and my father got a bigger boat, a twenty eight footer, the ‘Grainne Mhaol’. The dominance of the sea was then complete; I depended on it for dreams.

The season was short, the winters long and life often brutal. In summer, the boats went out and money came in. If weather threatened or the boat was late, one of us children would be sent down to the pier head to look over the stormwall and scan the grey for a sight of the boat. If there was further cause for concern, a fast child was sent to see if anything could be spotted from further along the shore and finally – and I only remember this happening half a dozen times – someone was dispatched to see if the men had landed in the next village, and if not, whether anyone else was in. The fears were never voiced, but even the youngest child felt the tension – we learned it with our prayers.

Aillbebrack in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties was far closer to the world of Synge’s
Aran Islands
than it was to Dublin or to the Galway of today. This small village at the edge of the Atlantic in the area was known to outsiders as Connemara, but to people from other parts of the region, and to us, it was known as Errismor.

Such knowledge, or lack of it, was one of the many small signifiers that told us whether someone was a stranger or not. Another was how they spoke. Not alone the accent, but more importantly the use of the telltale phrase. Even the children in every locality in Ireland could, before television, tell who came from within its borders and who from without after a few minutes of conversation.

The history of a people works on their language; the language limits what they can express of their world. When a language is lost in the place to which it is native, the effects are by definition more extreme than when this happens because of migration or immigration. This part of Connemara spoke an English not alone wedded to its deeper Irish grammatical structure, but moulded into a shape that could to some extent express the place and history of those who lived, and lost, in it. ‘The limits of our language are the limits of our world’, Wittgenstein says. For ourselves, or for others? This is, in some ways central to how I read Synge, and to the critical essays and commentaries that I have read about him.

My grandmother and parents, my uncles and the neighbours spoke an English that was far from standard. ‘We’re going out after the pots’ or ‘He’s over after the cattle’ or ‘Think will herself be looking for more flour?’ ‘I hear there was great gaisce altogether at Taimin over in Keogh’s.’ ‘By the cross of Christ, I’ll lay that fella out with a kick’ would not be out of the question. Such language is easy to exaggerate and it is no surprise that Synge lost the run of himself in
The Playboy
.

There is a very clear line between parody and poetry, but the ear has to be finely tuned to the idiom and every nuance to achieve one and avoid the other. Daniel Corkery has described this linguistic minefield more than adequately in his
Synge and Anglo Irish Literature
,
and I think that in essence he is right. He also says, to paraphrase wildly, that as a Protestant in love with the notion of the wild natural man, Synge didn’t understand the nature and place of Catholicism, and this lack of understanding led him astray in
The Playboy
. Corkery is referring to the use of profanity, certain aspects of the overtly sexual talk and behaviour in the play that cause it to be read as parody, if not insult.

In other words, when Synge wanted pagan, he saw only pagan. He intended not to insult but to express what he saw as the great sport and heroics of the unfettered peasant. But the peasant world was guided by one god with two sets of saints and two kinds of knowledge, the old and the Roman. There was little direct conflict between the two.

As a child, I never gave any thought to the fact that our three main saints, Brigid, Cailin and Mac Dara were never on the calendar. I knew St Patrick wasn’t either and if I thought about it at all, I put it down to them being somehow native because St Patrick, wherever he was from, is legitimized by the same type of half heroic story as the other three, and all gave their names to known places.

Synge wrote
The Playboy
in a ferment of sexual frustration, and it shows. When he arrived in Inis Meain at the age of twenty-seven with a sack of books and a broken heart, he had an eye for the beauty of the girls, and they must have had great sport with him on an island well out in the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth century.

When I first read
The Playboy
sometime in my teens I thought it was ridiculous. I was mildly offended, not at anything in the play, but that educated people thought it had something to say about the kind of life lived by my ancestors and their like. A few girls in my class immediately adopted several phrases from the play’s rich store and used them at every opportunity, as young girls will. Everything that girls could be doing in the long evenings after Samhain they would be accusing one another of doing, from ‘eating a bit in one house and drinking a sup in another, like an old braying jackass’ to ‘squeezing kisses on the puckered lips’ of whoever was that week’s object of desire.

We loved Shaneen Keogh, he was such a slieveen, and a boy was instantly, and unanimously, nicknamed in his honour. We thought Pegeen Mike was alright, if a bit rough. We didn’t know what to make of the Widow Quin, but none of that mattered, because no woman in her right mind would be so desperate for a man that she would have the Playboy, ‘even if he was served up on a plate with sauce’, much less take him seriously. Then it got more ridiculous – the great deed that made a hero out of him was killing his father? And as for two women fighting over him …
seafóid.
We couldn’t see why grown women and a number of men had to take Christy Mahon making an eejit out of himself seriously, or why we had to do it over three acts.

We had learned about the willing suspension of disbelief, but this was a step too far. We knew, though there would have been no need to articulate it, that killing a father could be a sin and a tragedy, but it could never be taken as the basis for comedy. It seemed insulting, that such a man could be presented as serious, what kind of fools did people take us for? Noble fools, in Synge’s case.