Synge (17 page)

The Well of the Saints
abounds in ironies; in
The Playboy of the Western World
they are piled one on top of another in superb succession, and they are almost all related to what males have agreed among themselves to call the contrariness, the unpredictability, and the caprices of women. Never mind that the ultimate fraud is Christy, the greater crime, in the eyes of the ordinary male, is Pegeen’s preference for him. The plot is too well known to need discussion: suffice it to say that neither Synge’s preface, the anthropological school of criticism, the five hundred policemen, nor Yeats’s idealizations of the peasantry can conceal the fact that the play is about the effect on women – on Pegeen Mike, the Widow Quin, and the famous drift of girls standing in their infamous shifts – of a man’s fraudulent reputation for being a dangerous rogue; and that Pegeen Mike is one of the great feminine creations of dramatic literature, romantic, realist, obstinate, and tender all at once, while the Widow Quin is among the most memorable of women cynics. The fact that Christy, though a timid fraud, rises to great heights of daring and boldness while under the eyes of the girl he has beguiled is one of the ironies of the male’s role, but the final master stroke concerns the woman’s attitude, and it comes in the very last line. Pegeen has scorned and even hated him for the fraud he is discovered to be and the fool he has made of her, yet she cries out at the end: ‘Oh my grief I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.’ He had, after all, the fine talk.

Deirdre of the Sorrows
was written in the last year of Synge’s life, when he probably knew he was dying, but when his relationship with Molly may have been, strangely enough, at its happiest. The usual misconceptions surround it. It is in no sense a classical tragedy (unless Conchubar, not Naisi, is the tragic hero) and the syntax is certainly not anglicized Irish. It is in fact, like all the others, a play about the unbiddability of the female heart, and its two highest moments are revelations of female psychology. One is Deirdre’s reaction when she overhears her lover discussing with Fergus the possibility that they might grow tired of each other; the other is when, without hope of ever making amends, she reviles him for going off to die with his brothers and is immediately stricken by remorse for what can never be unsaid.

There are in fact few writers to equal this somewhat unsuccessful lover as an inventor of women and an observer of the situations they contrive to create out of what seems to male eyes mere caprice and wilfulness. That this ‘ascendancy’ writer succeeded in fashioning partly out of Irish syntactical modes and stored phrases a language to fit his own vision is part of his achievement, though it is largely fruitless to argue how much he owed to either memory or Irish. That he also decided to set his stories in the habitations of simple people where the mere sophistications of society would not occlude his vision or obscure their psychology we owe partly to his love for the bare and barren places of Ireland, but even more, in all probability, to the deep interior instincts of a great artist.

It would, on the face of it seem that the comic misconceptions inherent in the relationship of men and women appeal to Irish writers more than to others. Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, all more or less compatriots of Synge, had after all, been before him with the theme. But their interest had been as much in the societal misconceptions as in the psychological, the one sort admittedly feeding off the other, but the main burden of the comedy, with its societal archetypes, being in the interaction of the two. Synge sought out the primitive so that he could be free from these conventions and bring men and women face to face in a world where five pounds or a tin can were as important as a peerage or a great name. If, in doing so, he overlooked the strength of convention in his apparently primitive social milieux the fact is simply one further proof that he had, as an artist, a purpose other than the anthropological. That purpose was to expose the equivocations, the comic and tragic humiliations, ‘the moods of varying rapture and dismay’, the sheer bewilderment inherent in the relationships of men and women. It is done of course partly through male eyes: there would be no comedy if there were no dismayed or bewildered men. But whatever may be said about Wilde or Shaw, Synge is streets ahead of Congreve or Sheridan when it comes to understanding women and the springs of what the male merely sees as unpredictable and erratic behaviour. It is not, strangely enough, the successful lovers who know what Synge knew about women. And it is part of the triumph of the man as well as the artist that he feels with them, rejoices with them and laughs with them rather than with the almost always simpler, stupider and slower-witted males of his plays. Synge, the man, may have had a hard time of it with Molly; but he achieved as an artist the coolness of vision which is essential to comedy; and beneath all the comedy the underlying emotion is a veneration for the life-enhancing, convention-defying subtleties of feminine psychology which is rare enough in any literature; but which, taking Joyce and Yeats – not to mention Shaw – into account is, surprisingly or not, perhaps less rare in Irish literature than in some others.

Illustration 9:
‘Selling on the Stones’, St. Patrick’s Street, before the market was closed by the Corporation in 1906. From J.M. Synge,
My Wallet of Photographs.

All of us know that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world.

It is a wonderful sentence. I thought it was said during the
Playboy
riots, I thought it was something to do with Pegeen in her shift, but in fact it was said in response to
The Shadow of the Glen
in 1903 and it was said by Arthur Griffith. I finally tracked it down to my school history text by F.S.L. Lyons,
Ireland since the Famine
. I have remembered this sentence for twenty-six years.

I have, in that time, forgotten who Arthur Griffith was, or I have remembered and forgotten again. Maybe I never really knew. When I look him up now I find that he was a member of the committee of the Irish National Theatre Society, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory. When
The Shadow of the Glen
was read in Lady Gregory’s rooms in the Nassau Hotel, Maud Gonne and Douglas Hyde left the committee in a huff, while Griffith was prompted to set up his own organization, which he called Sinn Fein.

August 1903: this was the exact place where art and nationalist politics split. I wonder when it happened, and at what line. Perhaps it was when Nora told the tramp that she was not afraid of him, ‘I never knew what way I’d be afeared of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all.’ Maybe it was when she said, ‘If it’s a power of men I’m after knowing they were fine men, for I was a hard child to please, and a hard girl to please, and it’s a hard woman I am to please this day.’ Surely it was long before she gathered her fate about her, and chose the tramp, with, ‘you’ve a fine bit of talk stranger and it’s with yourself I will go.’

Whichever line it was, Nora Burke has a lot to answer for. She is the opposite of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the eponymous heroine of the play premiered in 1902, when the dramatic nationalists were all singing from the same hymn sheet and Maud Gonne enjoyed playing the role so much that it was with great difficulty she was persuaded to return the wig.

I am bad at history. Here are some facts: Arthur Griffith was initially in favour of a dual monarchy for Ireland and England. He once wrote an essay called ‘The pirate, the freemason and the Jew.’ No one told him about the Easter Rising, so he sat it out at home in Clontarf. He headed the Irish delegation negotiating the Treaty in London in 1921. In two years time I will have forgotten all these; the only thing I will remember about Arthur Griffith is that he’s the stupid eejit who said, ‘All of us know that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world.’

All of us? His Mammy knows it, and he knows it, and his sister knows it, and the boy on the butcher’s bicycle knows it, and the tram conductor and the priest knows it, and the slavey knows it, and the second downstairs maid knows it, and they all go around knowing it all day long: because all of us (yes all of us!) know that the Phoenix Park is the largest enclosed park in Europe and O’Connell Street is the widest street in Europe and Irish women are the most virtuous in the world. More virtuous than Burkina Faso, certainly. Or Haute-Volta as it was then known.

Of these, the three founding myths of my Irish National School education - the park, the street and the lovely Irish girl, only one really endured. We were never much good, as a nation, at urban planning, but we did a mean job of keeping the lovely Irish girl lovely, for many decades to come.

Being bad at history, I go online to find out just who knew the thing about Irish women being the most virtuous in the world. A trawl at the more academic end of the internet yields three interesting returns for the phrase ‘Irish prostitutes’ (not that prostitutes are less virtuous than the rest of us – just that they are so clearly not the Rose of Tralee). The earliest, from 1776, comes from Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ where, as an economist, he is writing in praise of the potato as a staple food:

The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater part of them from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root.

Smith is quite casually of the opinion that prostitution was as Irish an activity as coalheaving. He does not say that these Irish women lack virtue, only that they are ‘unfortunate’. He also thinks that they are beautiful. Smith may not think of the Irish as being separate in a modern sense; in this passage Irish merely seems to be of a piece with ‘London poor’. So although he was not one of Griffith’s ‘all of us’, this may have been before ‘us’ was invented. It is good to see at any rate that the lovely Irish girl, even in this early incarnation, was already considered lovely.

The second reference is to the nineteenth century scientist, George Cuvier who removed the reputedly super-sized genitals of Saartje Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, and put them in a jar for posterity. Writing about him, Elizabeth Alexander, Associate Professor at Yale, says:

If you were to understand the essence of African women, he believed you should examine – indeed, dissect – their genitalia. He believed the same for Irish prostitutes.

It seems that Cuvier, a Frenchman, not only forgot what all of us know - namely, that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world – he went so far as to link them, anatomically, with a woman he considered to be halfway between mankind and the beasts.

The century that separates Smith and Cuvier saw a degradation of attitudes towards female sexuality – still, it is possible that two men will walk through a red light district, even today, and see very different women standing there. Whether Cuvier’s problem was personal or historical, the sad fact of it is that when this man of science thought about Irish women he thought not of their poverty, their beauty, or their sad fate in life, but in a rigorously scientific way, of their nethers. Irish women, in this casual association with Saartje Baartman, were by anatomical imperative sexually depraved.

Cuvier met Baartman, naked and festooned with feathers, at a ball hosted by Madame de Barry: he dissected her body in 1815. The next reference to Irish prostitutes, talks about the years after the famine. It is from an article by William J. Stern, who has written many times about the New York Irish in various respectable, if slightly right wing, publications:

The Irish immigration of the 1840s was some 60 percent female, most of them single, and many of these newcomers soon found themselves on the street. Ronald H. Baylor and Timothy J. Meagher report in their book,
The New York Irish
, that the prostitute population jumped from 11,000 in 1839 to 50,000 ten years later, and these ‘nymphs of the pave,’ as people called them, were mostly young Irish girls. But it wasn’t just prostitution: venereal disease, alcoholism, opium addiction, child abandonment, infanticide – the New York Irish suffered crippling levels of social pathology.

This figure of 50,000 Irish prostitutes on the streets of New York is so alarming that it deserves further investigation. Carol Groneman in the
Journal of Urban History
, looks at the incidence of prostitution in the immigrant Irish population and her abstract concludes that