Synge (2 page)

Colm Tóibín
was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford and is a novelist and journalist. His novels are
The
South
(1990),
The Heather Blazing
(1992/1993),
The Story of the Night
(1997),
The Blackwater Lightship
(1999), for which he was shortlisted for The Booker Prize, 1999; and
The Master
(2004). His non-fiction includes
Bad Blood
(1994) and
The Sign of the Cross – Travels in Catholic
Europe
(1994). He recently won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year for
The Master
, which was also shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin and is a member of Aosdána.

Vincent Woods
is a poet and playwright. He was born in Co. Leitrim and has lived in the United States, New Zealand and Australia. He worked as a journalist with RTE until 1989, when he began writing full-time. His radio play,
The Leitrim Hotel
, was a prize-winner in the P.J. O’Connor Awards for radio drama and his poetry collections include
The Colour of Language.
His plays include
At the Black Pig’s Dyke
(1992),
John Hughdy and Tom John
(1991),
Song of the Yellow Bittern
(1994), and
A Cry from Heaven
(2005). Among his adaptations and translations are
Fontamara
(1998) and
Winter
(2005). He has won the M.J. McManus Award for Poetry and is a member of Aosdána

From J.M. Synge, My Wallet of Photographs

Frontispiece J.M. Synge and Molly Allgood. Níl sí ag Eisteacht by Sean Keating PPRHA. Reproduced by kind permission of Sir and Lady A.J. O’Reilly. Copyright permission granted by the Keating Estate.

1 The Synge Family. (Seated, from left) Samuel, Mrs. Synge, John; ( standing) Annie later Mrs. Harry Stephens), Robert, Edward. From Edward Stephens,
My Uncle John
.

2 Druid Photo of Marie Mullan

3 Islanders on Inishere.

From J.M. Synge,
My Wallet of Photograph
s.

4 Photo of J.M.Synge

5 Synge’s Paris: The playwright’s room in the Hotel Corneille, where he lived in 1896. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin.

6 A Wicklow Tramp, possibly the old sailor described by Synge in his essay ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’. From J.M.Synge,
My Wallet of Photographs
.

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.

8 Synge with his mother, Rosie Calthrop (centre), and Annie Harmar, in the summer of 1900.

From Edward Stephens, My Uncle John.

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.

10 Molly Allgood.

11 Druid Playboy Shot.

Illustration 1:
The Synge Family. (Seated, from left) Samuel, Mrs. Synge, John; (standing) Annie (later Mrs. Harry Stephens), Robert, Edward. From Edward Stephens,
My Uncle John.

In 1980, having been evicted from a flat in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin, I was offered temporary accommodation around the corner at Number Two Harcourt Terrace. The house, three storeys over basement, was empty, having recently been vacated by its elderly inhabitant. It was early April when I moved in and the cherry tree in the long back garden was in full blossom. Looking at it from the tall back windows of the house, or going down to sit in the garden under its shade, was a great pleasure. The thought might have occurred to me that whoever had just sold this house could be missing it now, but I don’t think I entertained the thought for very long.

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 ‘My Wallet of Photographs’, by J.M. Synge. Edward Stephens, her husband, 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 which led to the Treaty. He was subsequently secretary to the committee which 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 dramatizing himself, disguised as the central character or, in different capacities, as several of 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

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.

His widow, 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 manuscript 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
. In 1955, Lilo Stephens also had inherited Synge’s papers from her husband. They had been kept for years in Number Two Harcourt Terrace as her husband worked on them. In 1971, Ann Saddlemyer would thank Lilo Stephens 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 where it rests.

Synge’s family remains of great interest, either because of the apparent lack of any influence which they had 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 sense, in Edward Stephens’ 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 a very great dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us

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 his 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. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed, despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would find eventually a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.

In his book
Letters to my Daughter
, written 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: