Synge (15 page)

We couldn’t see what the rioting was about, though we supposed that Dublin people must be easily shocked. Maybe they were Protestants and of a higher sensibility? Not even the nuns were shocked by the drift of chosen females in their shifts. That image only struck us because it was versatile. Nuns still wore habits then and were just about to uncover their hair. Since rumour was rife about whether they had any at all, the picture of a drift of them in slips or nightdresses was too good to resist. As for the hero, even someone as desperate as we supposed young nuns to be wouldn’t think much of the Playboy, and even nuns knew Shaneen Keogh was more of a failed priest than a man.

Young girls, as the agony aunt Angela McNamara remarked once in a radio interview, can be very bold. Synge was taken with such boldness, but I don’t believe he understood that boldness was legislated for by a mixture of religious rules and marriage prospects that brooked no disobedience if a girl wanted to retain her good name. Good name, like virginity, could never be recovered and soiled goods were not wanted. The rules of behaviour might be different from those in his Protestant Dublin world, but there were rules and they were clear to the locals if not to him.

There is no evidence in any of the plays that Synge knew or cared about the quick slip that could lead to disgrace, nor the consequences of it. But the girls knew, and this kind of gap can lead to mistakes in interpretation. No father hoping to marry a daughter to the likes of Shaneen Keogh would leave her in the presence of a strange man at night, much less one whose seed, breed and generation were unfamiliar. All this we girls took in at a glance during the late sixties, when our lives and our society were balanced on the cusp of change. Things of a sexual nature were never mentioned directly; it was all hint, allegation and giggling embarrassment. But girls are bold at that age.

The close connection between the black ram, the Widow Quin’s breast and the bishop disgusted as much as it mystified. Not even the explicit passages where Diarmuid lay with Grainne in the Toraiocht, and there is no getting away from it in middle Irish, were passed over as swiftly by the nuns as some of the more outlandish speeches in
The Playboy
. Anything in literature that causes a nun major embarrassment sticks in the mind forever, but I have no memory of this passage from my schoolgirl reading. It bothers me now, because there is an authentic spite in the accusation, as the exact register of Christy’s ‘God save you kindly’ prevents me enjoying the play as a gaudy romp with purple interludes and awakens, in Corkery’s words, ancestral disturbances. My disturbances are neither nationalistic nor religious. They have to do with language and cultural appropriation.

Certain places exercise such a powerful force on the creative imagination that they become territorially attractive to artists. I grew up in such a place. It became clear to me at a young age that the outside world had little interest in what locals thought, and that by and large the increasing numbers of visitors had no interest in us beyond the provision of local colour.

As I read more widely, and began to read literary criticism at University, I was disappointed to see that this lack of curiosity applied also to academics, though that was not really surprising. After all, better to work out your theories on the blank canvas of a real landscape inhabited, if at all, by idealized stereotypes than to risk the awkward answer, the dissenting word of the actual people themselves.

The people themselves were not represented in English. I found wonder and joy in literature in English, but I only encountered my own world in the stories of Ó Flatharta and Ó Direáin, Ó Cadhain. The poetry worked on another level, and it gave me some small permission, but the prose legitimized the world I came from, though all I knew then, or needed to know, was the right sort of ease and unease. ‘They gave me permission’, as Seamus Heaney so accurately put it, referring to his early reading of Kavanagh, ‘ to dwell without anxiety among the cultural landmarks of my life.’ In literature, I only glimpsed the world I knew second-hand in the English in which I was raised.

Some years ago, when I read Tim Robinson’s brilliant and cogent introduction to
The Aran Islands
(and why – since he himself so clearly states the obvious: that all introductions reduce ‘the dimensionality’ of what they introduce – was this not published as an afterword?) I gleaned a great deal about the intellectual concerns of the author and several sharp insights into Synge’s overheated passion for the actress Molly Allgood. My schoolgirl reading would have been well served by the clear chronological detail, and the geographical information, but the cultural contextualization in this or any other critical work would have done me no good at all.

The questions we pose about a society we are outside of can be useful or they can be irrelevant. The answers, should we be so brave as to offer them, will always tell more about their author than about that society. The world Synge wrote about in both
The Playboy
and
Riders to the Sea
is essentially the world I grew up in, defined by the two great signifiers of that world: speech and the sea. This was the peasant idiom that Synge, perhaps uniquely, has mastered and it is therefore impossible for me to read him with the disinterested attention of the critic or academic. I will always see or read Synge’s plays and, by definition, critical commentary on them, through the particular lens of my place and background.

Riders to the Sea
plays equally well in English and in Irish. It would, I have little doubt, play as well in a good translation of Greek, Italian or Spanish and it would certainly play well in Portuguese. This is a near perfect play, ‘a tiny epiphany’ as an Aran man told me. It is Synge the poet at his magnificent best. The play is short. Its theatrical brilliance lies in making the realism of the set serve as an altar for the ritual objects and actions surrounding death by sea, the purgatorial vigil while the mother waits for her son’s body to be found, then the relief of a funeral, a grave to go to. Maurya is Everymother. This is real life pared down, simple objects invested with their full symbolic power. It has the measure and comfort of a Latin rite, a rare event when poetry and drama are one, the rhythm of the speech underpinning the action and driving the momentum towards its perfect – and inevitable – conclusion.

When Maurya says of the young priest : ‘Tis little the like of him knows of the sea … Bartley will be lost now … ’, she speaks with the perfectly pitched authority of dream. The priest, saying God would not leave her ‘ destitute, with no son living’, speaks with the distant authority of Rome and she pays him no heed. Here is a perfect rendering of the balance struck between faith and fatalism, a balance absent from most of the other plays. ‘If it’s meant for you, it’ll follow you.’ This is still said of death by drowning.

A musician I know says every human being can survive a specific number of renditions of the song ‘The Fields of Athenry’. It is important to know your decreed number, because one too many will kill you. He has forty, so he takes great care to limit his exposure. I feel like that about
The Playboy
.

Garry Hynes’s famous first production of it and the gleeful savagery of Maeliosa Stafford’s Christy and Marie Mullen’s Widow Quin did something to convert me. The relish with which the words were spoken, down to even the most cringingly embarrassing of the love talk, drew me in. The best conversations I have had about the play are with actors. In their world, the language has become the main character and while I have come to enjoy its extravagance it will forever be a language adrift from its moorings.
Riders to the Sea
is language raised to a higher power. In
The Playboy
, ‘they’ are using ‘our’ language.
Riders to the Sea
is written in everyone’s language, and wherever it places itself, its poetry cannot be divorced from its origins.

Illustration 8:
Synge with his mother, Rosie Calthrop (centre), and Annie Harmar, in the summer of 1900. From Edward Stephens,
My Uncle John

The creative process thrives on ambiguities and indeed apparent contradictions. Criticism is often surprisingly less happy with them afterwards. In the case of John Millington Synge certain ambiguities which were at the mainspring of his creative urge have had an unsettling effect on criticism; and made him the victim of confusions about the relationship of his life to his art – and of Irish life to his art – which still prevent us from assessing his achievement dispassionately and perhaps celebrating it as we should.

He has not on the whole been well served by his critics, and perhaps even less so by his partisans. He had the misfortune first of all to have a man of supreme genius as an ally and indeed as an impresario, making as is usual an impresario’s inaccurate claims. Yeats was a great theorist of art and artistry but he wrote criticism only in snatches and as an addendum to theory. Of the three essays included in
The Cutting
of an Agate
, the first, the preface to
The Well of the Saints
, reminds us of the famous exhortation to ‘Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression’ – and we are back with Synge as the anthropologist-naturalist and all the dreary quarrels, from the
Playboy
row down to the present day, about his accuracy in the plays as a describer of folk-life and Irish peasant character, the endless arguments about whether he was, on the one hand, traducer, or, on the other, idealizer. In the same essay Yeats goes on to say:

He went to Aran and became a part of its life, living upon salt fish and eggs, talking Irish for the most part, but listening also to the beautiful English which has grown up in the Irish speaking districts, and takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of the translators of the bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor from Irish. When Mr. Synge began to write in this language, Lady Gregory had already used it finely in her translations of Dr. Hyde’s lyrics and plays, or of old Irish literature, but she had listened with different ears.

This too perpetuates argument and, worse, confusion. ‘Kiltartan’ is still, quite properly, a dirty word in certain circles; and although Yeats, with his usual percipience, almost cuts out the confusions he has already raised when he adds, ‘He made his own selection of word and phrase, choosing what would express his own personality’, he has still said enough to invite, in the course of time, retorts such as that of the strictly urban-minded Myles na Gopaleen who declared:

A lifetime of cogitation has convinced me that in this Anglo-Irish literature of ours (which for the most part is neither Anglo, Irish, nor literature) nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is comparable with Synge … The trouble probably began with Lever and Lover. But I always think that in Synge we have the virus isolated and recognizable … It is not that Synge made people less worthy or nastier, or even better than they are, but he brought forward amusing clowns talking a sub-language of their own and bade us take them very seriously. There was no harm done there, because we have long had the name of having heads on us. But when the counterfeit bauble began to be admired outside of Ireland by reason of its oddity and ‘charm’, it soon became part of the literary credo here that Synge was a poet … a bit of a genius indeed … And now the curse has come upon us, because I personally have met in the streets of Ireland persons who are clearly out of Synge’s plays. They talk and dress like that and damn the drink they’ll swally but the mug of porter in the long nights after Samhain.

What Myles is saying is slightly different from what Oscar Wilde said: according to Myles, life imitates bad art; but it is noteworthy that Synge is also getting the blame for the sort of intellectual stage Irishness which undoubtedly has been the bane of much of our literature since independence. In effect, Myles says, Synge raised the tone of stage-Irishism, and made it acceptable in more or less nationalist literary circles. Nationalism, or at least the more nationalistic kind of writer, having attacked the Synge-song to begin with, ended by apparently adopting it. The appeal of the picturesque triumphed over the ideal of purity; an ideal strangeness was more important than an ideal sexlessness.

This is perhaps why the
Playboy
riots now seem so far away. Synge’s brief moment (1902 to 1909) coincided with the rebirth of a kind of nationalism which was guilty of distortions in the interests of the ideal; but, if it is now a long time in fact, it is an even longer stretch in terms of fashion since Arthur Griffith attacked the
Playboy
as a libel on Irish womanhood and five hundred policemen were needed to keep order within and without the theatre.