The Aran Islands. J. M. Synge
he is declaring that it has been fulfilled: that Synge’s theatre work, based on his Aran experiences, places him among the world’s great dramatists.
Synge was naturally happy to accept the accolades of this literary celebrity, but that does not mean his motivations were identical with William Yeats’s. Eighteen months passed after that meeting in Paris before he journeyed out to Aran. He spent six weeks on the islands on that occasion, during late spring, then returned to them in the Septembers of 1899, 1900 and 1901. It was after the 1900 visit that Synge sat down in his Paris apartment to gather the notes of his journeys to date into the book’s first three parts, which he duly submitted to Yeats and Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory. The latter replied, speaking for the poet as well as herself, that the manuscript was ‘extraordinarily vivid’, but that it would ‘gain by the actual names of the islands and of Galway not being given’ and ‘would greatly be improved by the addition of some more fairy belief ‘. Both these lofty apostles of the Gaelic Revival longed for a text about Aran that would be imbued with ‘a curious dreaminess’. For on Yeats’s own sea-journey there through the fog and spume, the poet had found powerful fuel for his mystical inclinations: ‘I have never believed less in the reality of the visible world,’ he rhapsodised.
Synge received Lady Gregory’s letter during his fourth spell on the island, but hardly heeded its directives when he wrote up the visit. One publisher who looked at the completed manuscript, however, rejected it just because it was too immaterial – ‘too shapeless … too much hung in the air’. Others simply responded that its Celtic subject-matter was too uncommercial. (‘Poor Johnnie!’ commented his mother. ‘We could all have told him that.’) The Aran Islands joined Synge’s stack of rejections. From 1903, however, his ambitions at last began to acquire substance, as the dramas he was also coaxing out of the Aran material were staged by the new Irish National Theatre Society (another initiative of Yeats and Lady Gregory). Through this new forum, Synge got to meet the English poet John Masefield: and it was through Masefield that he got to team up with Jack Butler Yeats, the younger brother of William. Masefield, who was on the staff of the Manchester Guardian, suggested to its editor that the promising new author from Dublin could be paired off with an artist friend of his to deliver a series of illustrated features on social conditions in the west of Ireland.
Jack Yeats, who was a couple of months younger than Synge, had quite another style of operation to his bardlike sibling. He bantered, he disarmed; he was canny, droll, unassuming, elliptical. He had chosen to follow his father John into art by way of a training in London, but instead of portraiture he concentrated during his early years mainly on graphic work. Jack Yeats drew for British outlets such as Punch, culling a stock of comic material from Ireland’s race tracks, boxing rings, circuses and streets. His draughtsmanship carried forward much of the brusque, rumbustious vigour of John Leech and Charles Keene, Punch’s Victorian mainstays, but into an age where Japanese prints were setting the style. As with the graphics of William Nicholson in London or of Félix Vallotton in Paris, Yeats made much active use of the frame and the blank and the interplay of fat lines with lean. He was all the while stealthily building up a knowledge, not just of eye-catching Irish characters, but of a whole way of living on the earth and reflecting on that life. The most original aspects of Jack’s imagination would in fact only reveal themselves later in his life (a career pattern echoed by his brother’s), in the thirty years of extraordinary painting that began around 1920.
But as of 1905 Jack was walking the counties of Galway and Mayo in the company of Synge, sketching the poor of the ‘Congested Districts’ for the Guardian. The collaboration was a great success. Jack was stirred by Synge’s robust curiosity. ‘He was the best companion for a roadway any one could have,’ he later remembered, ‘a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun and the pelting rain … always ready to go anywhere with one and when there to enjoy what came.’ Also by his kind heart:
Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass alongside the newly metalled roads because he thought they had been put there to make soft going for the bare feet of little children.
The twelve articles, combining incisive analysis of social problems in the disadvantaged west with lively forceful pen drawings, were much admired by the Guardian’s editor and readership. In their wake, Synge could at last persuade Maunsel & Co. of Dublin to publish his unplaceable typescript about the Aran Islands. As an inducement, he was able to promise them a set of illustrations by his new artist friend.
And so the text and pictures reprinted here finally appeared in print in April 1907,1 three months after Synge had hit the headlines with the greatest (and most controversial) of his plays, The Playboy of the Western World. The bold graphic work needs little commentary. But note that, in a very specific sense, it speaks for Synge. Jack Yeats did not actually visit the Aran Islands to research this project: departing from his normal working practices, he drew close adaptations of photographs taken by the author. That fact reflects back on the text in several ways. Synge’s original plates, taken with a hefty Lancaster Instantograph, show him to be an admirable visual artist in his own right. They come at the islanders and their land intimately and earnestly, often looking from a low viewpoint and (breaking beginners’ guidelines) straight into the light. So it is with the prose. The author’s eye is everywhere keen with inquisitive wonder. Where black-and-white illustration cannot reach, his enthusiasm rushes in, evoking ‘the joy’ – on grey days – ‘with which the eye rests on the red dresses of the women’, or alternately ‘the radiance of blue light … Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at’ as he basks in sunshine, ‘a perpendicular cliff under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings’. These islands and these seas, unlike William Yeats’s, are in high definition – pinned down on the map, sharply physical too, with their stones that grate upon the ankles and their ‘crash and rush of water’.
And at the same time, this fresh-eyed observer makes his own camera-work a facet of his story. He tells how he showed islanders pictures from his first visit when he returned for his second: when some ‘young and beautiful woman leaned across my knees to look nearer at some photograph that pleased her, I felt more than ever the strange simplicity of the island life’. By the same token, Synge touches on his own difference from that life – just as he touches on broader cultural ironies when he quotes the islander who claims that ‘there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic’. This account of a kind of idyllic simplicity is never itself simplistic, and for all Synge’s ardour for the archaic ways of life, ‘strange’ they remain to him. He is unable to enter into the islanders’ churches, just as he cannot spiritually inhabit their awe-inspiring keening nor yet their hardness of heart towards others’ sufferings. The Aran Islands is thus poised on a delicate, light self-consciousness. It is neither an attempt at ethnographic or topographic objectivity, nor yet, like so many more recent travel books, a self-serving tale of ‘how I found who I was at the ends of the earth’ – even if that happens to be the function that Synge’s visits to Aran performed in his career as a writer.
For of course, the sense that is uppermost in this book is not sight but hearing. Synge is there to listen. Partly he is on Aran to gather folklore, all those yarns tied up with the refrain Seo mo scéal – ‘That is my story.’ The voices floating on the peat smoke and the westerly wind will be captured and preserved, their diction distilled and their narratives lent literary permanence: the man who shams dead to catch out his wife will inspire The Shadow of the Glen, the man who flees to the islands having killed his father ‘with the blow of a spade’ will become the Playboy’s Christy Mahon, while Riders to the Sea brings together all Synge hears on his third visit about drowning and bereavement. But the will to listen goes beyond his own search for dramatic and idiomatic material. Masefield remembered his friend as ‘the perfect companion’, invariably quiet about his own opinions:
He liked to know the colours of people’s minds. He never tried to be brilliant. Life was what interested him. His talk was all about men and women and what they said and did when life excited them.
Synge’s interest in people is unremitting, but it is level-tempered. He lets us feel his angry sympathy with the victims of eviction in their struggle