Synge (5 page)

I first saw him in the North Island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and the seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.

Later, she wrote about his work once he had arrived on the Islands:

He had done no good work until he came back to his own country. It was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style ... bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion of a whole countryside.

Soon, he was invited to Coole and quickly became part of the movement which resulted in the Abbey Theatre. He became, eventually, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, one of the three directors. He wrote five plays for them –
The Shadow of the Glen
(1903);
Riders to the Sea
(1904);
The Well of the Saints
(1905)
The Tinker’s Wedding
(1907);
The Playboy of the Western World
(1907). He left one play unfinished,
Deirdre of the Sorrows
, which was first produced, in a completed version, in 1910. His imagination was powerfully autonomous; his plays combined the knowledge he had amassed through his study and his wanderings in Europe with a real openness and freedom and an immense natural talent. He delighted in language and character, in wild talk and massive abandon, as though he were concerned to dramatize and most portray what he himself in his own life kept in abeyance.

In these eleven years he took part in all the rows which ran at the theatre, seeming much of the time calmer, more focused, less vindictive and, on some matters, more determined than his colleagues. He believed that Yeats was too impetuous to deal with the actors. In some of the correspondence, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘he sounds both older and wiser than Yeats; he appears more at ease in dealing with people.’ In 1908, when the Fays had left the theatre Synge remarked: ‘Since then Yeats and I have been running the show, i.e. Yeats looks after the stars and I do the rest.’ The actors and workers in the theatre liked him. He appeared more natural, more in possession of himself than either of his colleagues. An Australian visitor in 1904 described him:

He was full of race and good breeding, courteous, sensitive, sincere … a simple man; but there was something strange and alluring about him, an indescribable charm expressed in his voice and manner and, above all, in his curious smile that was at the same time ironic and sympathetic.

With the Abbey, as with his family, Synge was skilled at withdrawing. ‘I have often envied him his absorption,’ Yeats wrote, ‘as I have envied Verlaine his vice.’

Lady Gregory disliked
The Playboy of the Western World
, although she defended it in public. She made sure that Yeats’s play
The Pot of Broth
was not used as a curtain-raiser, which would be, she wrote to Yeats, foreseeing the riots, like ‘Synge setting fire to your house to roast his own pig.’ After Synge’s death, she wrote a passage in her journal which she did not publish:

One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments, they were to his own.’

Yeats in his journal wrote: ‘I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.’

The truth was that he understood the value of his own plays and did not rate very highly the work of Yeats or Lady Gregory for the theatre, although he admired other aspects of their work, such as Lady Gregory’s translations. He made no secret of this, and of his profound irritation at Lady Gregory’s tireless and fearless promotion of Yeats’s work and her constant production of her own work. In December 1906 she told Synge that Yeats’s dramatic work ‘was more important than any other (you must not be offended at this) as I think it our chief distinction.’ In March 1907, when
The Playboy of the Western World
has already been produced and Charles Frohman, an American producer, came to the Abbey looking for new work to tour in the U.S., Synge wrote to Molly Allgood:

I hear that they are showing Frohman
one
play of mine, ‘Riders’, five or six of L.G.’s [Lady Gregory’s] and several of Yeats. I am raging about it, though of course you must not breathe a word about it. I suppose after the P.B. [
Playboy
] fuss they are afraid of stirring up the Irish Americans if they take me. However I am going to find out what is at the bottom of it and if I am not getting fair play I’ll withdraw my plays from both tours English and American altogether. It is getting past a joke the way they are treating me.

They, on the other hand, became increasingly sure that they had invented him. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:

You did more than anyone for him, you gave him a means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you and the theatre … I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets.

As soon as Synge arrived on the Aran Islands, he wrote to his mother, who wrote to his brother Sam:

I had a very interesting letter from Johnnie last week … The islanders of Aran found out that he was related to Uncle Aleck [who had been a missionary on the Islands] and came to see him and were quite pleased. He is now on Inishmaan Island – went there in a
curragh
and is much pleased with his new abode, a room in a cottage inside the kitchen of a house … and he lives on mackerel and eggs and learns Irish; how wonderfully he accommodates himself to his various surroundings.

When he returned to Dublin he accommodated himself to his mother’s surroundings once more, joining her on holiday in County Wicklow. He would return to the family from his daily outings by foot or bicycle with stories of tramps he had met, including one who claimed to have known his grandmother and who had told him: ‘I never went there but Mrs Synge offered me a glass of whisky.’ Later, when the young Edward Stephens mentioned the tramp to Synge’s mother, she remarked:

I wish Uncle Johnnie would not encourage tramps; I don’t know why he wants to talk to queer people. I’m sure that Mrs Synge never offered a tramp whisky.

Once the summer was over, Synge followed his usual routine. He returned to Paris for the winter, visiting Brittany in the spring and returning to Ireland for the annual long holiday with his mother in County Wicklow. This year his mother had two young women, both interested in evangelical Protestantism, staying. Synge became close to them. His mother wrote:

Both girls are very lively and there is a great deal of joking and fun goes on between them and John. I have not see him laugh so much for years.

Edward Stephens remembered:

John had learned to enjoy their company so much that he never withdrew to read in his room when he had an opportunity of sitting with them on the steps looking at the view or, on wet days, on camp stools in the porch looking into the mist that hid everything but the tops of the trees below the house.

In September Synge returned to the Islands and then in November to Paris where he began to write his book about the Aran Islands. In May 1900 he returned once more not to miss his three months in Wicklow with his mother, who once more had invited young women, including one Rosie Calthrop, to stay and keep her son company much to his delight. His mother, however, became jealous that summer of her son paying kinder attention to other women than to her. She was not, it seems, content to play the Widow Quin to her guest’s Pegeen Mike. She wrote to her son Sam:

She seemed to appreciate Johnnie’s thoughtfulness and kindness very much! It is a pity he does not show it to me and not only to strangers. He was most attentive to both in little matters I could see, and he was always at their beck and call to walk or ride or escort them anywhere! So no wonder they like him, but it was rather aggravating to me; he wanted to put me aside entirely. But I told Rosie and then she did not fall in with his plans, though she loved to be out walking with him I know.

The idea of Mrs Synge telling her guest that she was jealous of her son’s attention to the guest is intriguing. It is hard to imagine what terms she used to make herself clear. It is also possible that the guest was forced to explain to Synge what the problem was, that the older woman was aggravated by his sudden success with strangers, and when there were no strangers around he did not bother displaying his charm and his willingness to please. Thus a central part of the action of
The Playboy of the Western World
was being played out in a rented house in Wicklow in the summer of 1900.

That September Synge set out again to charm strangers by returning to the Aran Islands. This was his third visit. He arrived in a particular state of gloom because his neighbour Cherrie Matheson had been receiving a gentleman whom she would later marry. They had met on the street and Cherrie had introduced her new boyfriend to Synge. The following month when he returned, this visit having sown the seeds that would become
Riders to the Sea
, his mother wrote to his brother Sam:

Johnnie came home last night from the Aran Islands. He has one very large gland on his neck just above his collar; he looks very well and the time on the Islands agreed with him. I was glad to have him safe back. The sea has been very rough and great gales lately and it was hard for him to get away. He had a very rough passage to Galway on a miserable little steamer. The engines stopped several times and went on again.

That autumn Synge bought a portable typewriter, a Blickensdorfer, which Richard Best chose for him. It came in a varnished wooden case. When he brought it home, he said that it spelt worse than he did. When he went back to Paris, his mother missed him. She wrote to Sam:

My poor Johnnie went off this morning; it is very calm, I am thankful to say, but raining and thick at sea … I miss Johnnie. As usual I have been very busy stitching and mending his clothes and getting him some new ones. The gland on his neck is very large, but back pretty far. He is getting rather anxious about it. I think he is improved; he has been more pleasant and chatty than usual of late, and I think his queer time in Paris always injures him, and he is so queer when he comes home and so out of all our ways, and then it wears off by degrees. I am trying to persuade him to give up his room in Paris and make a fresh start nearer home.

The gland in his neck was still swollen when he returned at the beginning of the summer; when he saw the doctor in Dublin he was given an ointment and a different medicine. His mother invited Rosie Calthrop to stay with them once more and wrote to Sam about the amount of money Synge and Rosie had spent on an outing. ‘John does not mind at all,’ she wrote, ‘of course it is my money and he has no scruples about that. However, I don’t mind now and then, but I would not like it often.’ Synge had his typewriter with him and was working on the first draft of a play
When the Moon Has Set
, which dealt with his own class and was thinly disguised autobiography, which he brought with him when he went to stay at Coole. Lady Gregory, when she read the play, told him, however, that it was not good and of no literary interest. From Coole he went west to the Islands and then back to Paris. That May of 1902 he was asked to review Lady Gregory’s
Cuchulain of Muirthemne
, in which a version of the dialect spoken around Coole was used. Synge found this dialect close to the living speech he knew from rural Wicklow. In his review he described the language as ‘wonderfully simple and powerful … almost Elizabethan.’ The Elizabethan vocabulary, he wrote,

has a force and colour that make it the only form of English that is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind, and in her intercourse with the peasants of the West Lady Gregory has learned to use this vocabulary in a new way, while she carries with her plaintive Gaelic constructions that make her language, in a true sense, a language of Ireland.

He was working on the drafts of his first plays. In
The Shadow of the Glen
and
The Tinker’s Wedding
he was, to some small extent, dramatizing the role of the artist, or the outsider, versus the role of the settled and respectable community; in other words, he made these plays as versions of his own plight at being turned down by Cherrie Matheson. Other aspects of these plays came from his own dreams and observations, especially in the summer months in Wicklow. Edward Stephens, who was fourteen at the time his uncle worked on these plays, wrote that the material

was derived from the lore of the country people, not from any direct association with the tinkers themselves. They were so dirty and in their mode of life so disreputable that it would have been impossible for John to mix with them at his ease. He warned me against dropping into conversation with them on the road.