today’s reader will be moved by the spare lyricism of Synge’s descriptions of natural beauty, it is his accounts of encounters with local people that are likely to be most memorable, and perhaps most problematic. The question that has often been asked about his plays – did any Irish peasant ever speak like this? – is amplified in these prose pieces.
‘Ah, Avourneen, the poor do have great stratagems to keep in their little cabins at all,’ says one woman he meets. [p.45] ‘Glory be to His Holy Name,’ she continues, ‘not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it. It’s small right we have to complain at all.’ Lines like these have led to accusations that Synge over-egged the cake of the Hiberno-Irish dialect with folksy inventions. St John Irving’s allegation that the writer was ‘a faker of peasant speech’ has been well dealt with by Declan Kiberd, who, unlike most Synge scholars, is fluent in both of that creole’s constituent tongues. While Kiberd concedes that ‘No peasant ever talked consistently in the cadenced prose employed by Synge,’ he insists that the language is heightened, not faked.4 Synge’s peasants ‘continue to think in Irish even as they speak in English’, he adds, arguing that they tend to speak a language that ‘owes more to the literal translation of the Irish of Aran than to Wicklow Hiberno-Irish’ and that such literal translation, oddly enough, produces poetry.
This effectively addresses the point made in a subsequent – and very informative – essay by Nicholas Grene, who quotes Synge’s well-known admission that the language of one of his Wicklow plays, In the Shadow of the Glen, had been inspired by his eavesdropping on a pair of kitchen maids.5 Grene makes the interesting observation that the two maids in question ‘had been brought up in a Protestant orphanage and did not necessarily come from Wicklow at all’. But this does not disqualify their speech as raw material for the play, or for these essays. Synge’s language is generic rather than regional and, above all, it is the product of a unique poetic imagination.
This imagination was deeply rooted in fact. Elaborate speech combined with a passionate, if sometimes topsy-turvy, knowledge of the world could be found widely in the Wicklow of my young adulthood, and still – just – exists today. I remember in particular two elderly uncles of my employer on Calary Bog. As recently as 1970 they lived in a degree of poverty that might have surprised even Synge, in the one house with their cattle and sheep. Like many mid-Wicklow small farmers, they were Protestants, but had enjoyed none of the privileges of the playwright’s landed class and shared none of his gentle scepticism and tolerance.
‘The Pope,’ one of them informed me confidentially as we drove some scraggy sheep from the Red Lane across the Glen O’ the Downs, ‘appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany beyond, and his so-called Holiness started the Second World War. You are not taught that above in Trinity College, I suppose.’ I instinctively knew better than to question such Orange certitudes. I could not resist expressing some surprise, however, when the same man told me about the great regret of his life. He always wished, he said, that he had joined the expeditionary force of General Eoin O’Duffy, Ireland’s Mussolini manqué, and fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Was he not aware that General Franco was a fervent Catholic, I asked. ‘I know that,’ came the sure reply, ‘but wasn’t he fighting the Communists?’
Wanderers in the Irish countryside a century after Synge will, of course, find great changes, as well as a number of landscapes that retain their magic. The playwright would be delighted to find that so many local people now live in comfort, some even in affluence, but he would be saddened by the current hostilities between small farmers and hill-walkers, which can turn an innocent ramble into an angry confrontation over rights-of-way. He would certainly regret that the people he called tinkers suffer more discrimination in our democratic Republic than they did under British rule. In their case, and perhaps more generally in Irish rural society, he might feel vindicated in his ‘dread of any reform that would tend to lessen their individuality rather than any very real hope of improving their well-being’. [p.145]
Synge’s Wicklow articles are the most lyrical, and least journalistic, of the three collections in this book, while the West Kerry section also contains many passages that will remind readers of his poetic dramas. ‘There was great sport after you left,’ he is told after a horse-race and drinking session near Dingle. ‘They were all beating and cutting each other on the shore of the sea... Then there was a red-headed fellow had his finger bitten through, and the postman was destroyed for ever.’ [p.129] This, of course, is pure Playboy of the Western World.
The Connemara pieces, commissioned by the Manchester Guardian to investigate the social conditions of the West, show that Synge was a master of that rare kind of journalism that truly falls into the category of ‘a first draft of history’, and professional historians have, indeed, mined these pieces for their rich seams of precise first-hand observations. Like all first-class journalism, however, they are also shot through with literary qualities. The very poorest people are ‘pinched with hunger and the fear of it’. [p.148 my italics, P.W.] A shop window in Swinford suggests a list that might have become a poem, rich in witty juxtapositions: ‘saddles, fiddles, rosaries, rat-traps, the Shorter Catechism, castor oil, rings, razors, rhyme-books, fashion plates, nit-killer and fine-tooth combs’. [p.210]
These articles also include one of the finest warnings ever written against hacks who quote hackney-drivers; a passionate indictment of the kind of ‘relief works’ dictated by market economics; an admirable awareness that solutions to local problems require local knowledge; and a caution against environmental blight that has proved all too prescient.
None of these essays could have been written by a man who was not a hill-walker, someone whose unobtrusive love for both nature and common humanity opened doors to him wherever he rambled. He had a sharp and well-informed ear and eye for birds, some of them now lost to us in Wicklow, at least, like the nightjar and the corncrake, and some, like the siskin, still common enough but very easy to miss.
Even in the remotest places, he also had a healthy eye for a good-looking woman, and female as well as male companionship shortened many a long road for him. He was not afraid to take a drink – and in these parts fear is prudence where poteen is concerned. But when he risked typhus rather than refuse a hospitably offered cup of milk, anxiety about contracting the disease spoiled his walk back to the cottage where he was staying.
In short, he is an excellent and very human travelling companion, who can make the landscape talk to us as eloquently as the people. I have had the privilege of re-reading these essays in a house in the heart of Synge’s Wicklow. It is still possible to go out the door and walk and walk and walk until you find a place where ‘There was not light enough to show the mountains round me, and the earth seemed to have dwindled into a mere platform where an astronomer might watch.’ [p.44] But the lights of Dublin, and even of the new suburbs of nearby Rathdrum, make such an experience rarer, and more precious, every year. Maybe that is as well, since Synge went on to suggest that such ‘intense solitudes’ led to the madhouse. But maybe it is not.
Paddy Woodworth
Cois Abhainn
Ballintombay Lower
Glenmalure
January 2005
Notes
1. Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, London 1988, p.125.
2. Seamus Heaney, Field Work, London 1979, pp.33–43.
3. The other editor was George Gmelch, who contributed the photographs to the 1980 Dublin edition of In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara.
4. Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, London 1993, p. xv.
5. Nicholas
