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 with the ‘civilised’ class to which his own brother belongs, and yet he discourages the villagers from returning violence. (Nor does he dissociate himself from the missionary uncle who preceded him.) Rather than draw rhetorical conclusions from that charged episode, he deflects the onward flow of his writing instead back to folklore – telling a tale of the Phoenix. And this, I think, is because the steering principle of this book derives from his musical studies, and that is to open up themes and then interweave them, to return, to variegate, change key, keep all in play. What Synge called in a notebook ‘the strange concord that exists between the people and the impersonal limited but powerful impulses of the nature that is round them’ is thus translated into an extended tone poem. The Aran Islands is humane, physically vivid and informative, yet ‘hung in the air’ is not actually a bad description.
The gaunt and pallid passenger who stepped onto the Inishmore quay in 1898 was under a stay of execution. The year before, he had experienced his first encounter with the lymphatic cancer that would hound him through the decade to come and kill him at last in 1909. Death at thirty-seven, needless to say, only helped to cement Synge’s reputation, and his lovely book about Aran soon became a fixture of twentieth-century Irish culture. It has ploughed an ever-spreading wake of myth-elaboration and reinterpretation, in film, television, poetry and prose, all serving to open Aran to us visitors.2 Its impact can be sensed in the airstrip and the tarmac roads that now greet us. It has worked its way into the islands’ rocks.
Julian Bell
Lewes
January 2008
Introduction
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The geography of the Aran Islands is very simple, yet it may need a word to itself. There are three islands: Aranmor, the north island, about nine miles long; Inishmaan, the middle island, about three miles and a half across, and nearly round in form; and the south island, Inishere – in Irish, east island – like the middle island but slightly smaller. They lie about thirty miles from Galway, up the centre of the bay, but they are not far from the cliffs of County Clare, on the south, or the corner of Connemara on the north.
Kilronan, the principal village on Aranmor, has been so much changed by the fishing industry, developed there by the Congested Districts Board, that it has now very little to distinguish it from any fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The other islands are more primitive, but even on them many changes are being made, that it was not worth while to deal with in the text.
In the pages that follow I have given a direct account of my life on the islands and of what I met with among them, inventing nothing and changing nothing that is essential. As far as possible, however, I have disguised the identity of the people I speak of, by making changes in their names, and in the letters I quote, and by altering some local and family relationships. I have had nothing to say about them that was not wholly in their favour, but I have made this disguise to keep them from ever feeling that a too direct use had been made of their kindness and friendship, for which I am more grateful than it is easy to say.
Part I
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I am in Aranmor, sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of Gaelic that is rising from a little public house under my room.
The steamer which comes to Aran sails according to the tide, and it was six o’clock this morning when we left the quay of Galway in a dense shroud of mist.
A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the rigging and a small circle of foam.
There were few passengers; a couple of men going out with young pigs tied loosely in sacking, three or four young girls who sat in the cabin with their heads completely twisted in their shawls, and a builder on his way to repair the pier at Kilronan, who walked up and down and talked with me.
In about three hours Aran came in sight. A dreary rock appeared at first sloping up from the sea into the fog; then, as we drew nearer, a coastguard station and the village.
A little later I was wandering out along the one good roadway of the island, looking over low walls on either side into small flat fields of naked rock. I have seen nothing so desolate. Grey floods of water were sweeping everywhere upon the limestone, making at times a wild torrent of the road, which twined continually over low hills and cavities in the rock or passed between a few small fields of potatoes or grass hidden away in corners that had shelter. Whenever the cloud lifted, I could see the edge of the sea below me on the right and the naked ridge of the island above me on the other side. Occasionally I passed a lonely chapel or schoolhouse, or a line of stone pillars with crosses above them and inscriptions asking a prayer for the soul of the person they commemorated.
I met few people; but here and there a band of tall girls passed me on their way to Kilronan and called out to me with humorous wonder, speaking English with a slight foreign intonation that differed a good deal from the brogue of Galway. The rain and cold seemed to have no influence on their vitality and, as they hurried past me with eager laughter and great talking in Gaelic, they left the wet masses of rock more desolate than before.
A little after midday when I was coming back one old half-blind man spoke to me in Gaelic, but, in general, I was surprised at the abundance and fluency of the foreign tongue.
In the afternoon the rain continued, so I sat here in the inn looking out through the mist at a few men who were unlading hookers that had come in with turf from Connemara, and at the long-legged pigs that were playing in the surf. As the fishermen came in and out of the public house underneath my room, I could hear through the broken panes that a number of them still used the Gaelic, though it seems to be falling out of use among the younger people of this village.
The old woman of the house had promised to get me a teacher of the language, and after a while I heard a shuffling on the stairs and the old dark man I had spoken to in the morning groped his way into the room.
I brought him over to the fire and we talked for many hours. He told me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many living antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr Finck and Dr Pedersen, and given stories to Mr Curtin of America. A little after middle age he had fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had little eyesight and a trembling of his hands and head.
As we talked, he sat huddled together over the fire, shaking and blind, yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an ecstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit or malice, and growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of religion or the fairies.
He
