Enemy of Twilight
By ANTHONY BURGESS
A ND the mist on the Wicklow hills,' said Louis MacNeice, 'is close, as close as the peasantry were to the landlord, as the Irish to the Anglo- Irish . . .' Well, not all the Anglo-Irish were close to the Irish, and those that thought them- selves most close were often least. In the Irish literary renaissance (which was chiefly Anglo- Irish), a good test of closeness was provided by a sort of scale of popular vilification. No Irish- man ever got mad with an Anglo-Irish writer who presented the Irish as holy, ethereal, sober, and sexless; let any Anglo-Irish writer get close enough to see the Irish as hypocritical, materialis- tic, drunken and salacious, and the quicklime would be got ready. The Countess Cathleen caused anger at the Abbey Theatre, because it showed an Irishwoman selling her soul that the people might have bread; Yeats, then, must have been pretty close to the Irish. The greatest anger of all was reserved for John Millington Synge, so he must have been very close.
The Playboy of the Western World was first presented at the Abbey in 1905. William Fay considered that the first two acts were pretty safe, but foresaw that there was going to be a row over the third. He begged Synge to turn Pegeen Mike into a decent colleen, not one who puts a rope round her lover and burns his leg with a white-hot bit of peat. But Synge had already re- written the third act thirteen times, and that was enough. Fay was right, though. The first two acts flowed through without a murmur. In the third act, Christy said : 'And to think I'm long years hearing women talking that talk, to all bloody fools'; the catcalls began. Then came 'A drift of chosen females standing in their shifts itself; all hell broke loose, fighting started, the call-boy grabbed an axe to kill the first man who crossed the footlights. This was only the first night. By the last night there were 500 police keeping order.
'A vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform' (Arthur Griffith). 'The hideous carica- ture would be slanderous of a Kaffir kraal' (Freeman's Journal). But it was the word 'shifts' that really caused the trouble, making the pit call : 'Lower the bloody curtain, and give us some- thing we bloody well want.' Lady Gregory asked the theatre charwoman whether she considered the use of the word indecent, and was told that she did : even when talking to herself she would refer to the garment as a chemise. And she added : 'Isn't Mr Synge a bloody old snot to write such a play'—though, out of deference to her ladyship, she said that to the stage carpen ter.
It wasn't Synge's naturalism that offended so much as his fusion of naturalism and heightened folk-poetry. He made the mistake of choosing Irish earth rather than Irish mist—Red Dan Sally and Tubber Fair instead of Angus, Maeve and the Garden of Fand. The early Yeats and the changeless AE tried to feed the Irish on fairy candyfloss and lead them to the Land of Heart's Desire; Synge smelled stirabout and felt the palpable rock of Aran on his bottom. If he had contrived an urban instead of a folk realism it wouldn't have been too hard to place him— a dirty Zola or Anatole France type man cor- rupted by Paris, one who could be dismissed without a hearing. His crime was to find murder condoned in County Mayo and as much poetry in the real country libido as in the fancied country soul. Once his hypnotic rhythms started playing, his audience sat back for a gorge of decent blarney and blarneyed decency, like The Colleen Bawn; what they got instead was Ireland as seen by the Western World—fine talk cover- ing drunkenness (`there were five men, aye, and six men, stretched out retching speechless on the holy stones), vindictiveness, amorality, con- nivance at crime, the lechery of the timid. It was stronger meat than would be served at a . high tea in Rathfarnham.
But Synge, for all his intermittent wild- goosery, loved Ireland, knew Ireland, even spoke Irish (which was more than a lot of the Fenians did), and was dedicated as much as Joyce to bringing real Ireland into European literature. Like so many Irish writers, he didn't at first know what he wanted. A failed musician in Germany, a Racinean and minor poet in Paris, he had to be told by Yeats (in Paris, naturally: no Irish writer has even been able to leave Paris alone) to get out there to Aran and live with the peasants and try to express their soul. Yeats himself had just been to Aran, where almost the first words spoken to him were: 'If the gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my own home six months till he got away to America.'
Synge, when he got there, was to hear the same sort of story again and again and store it up for The Playboy. Aran was the making of him as a writer. It gave him plots for his plays, as well as an uncorrupted vernacular that was very rich. It also gave him an entree into the true Celtic madness, which is not psychotic but merely a poetic confusion of the real and the imagined. His uncle had been there before him as a failed Protestant missionary, his only monument to this day a ruined church on Inishmore. Synge went not to convert but to listen. He listened hard.
The second volume of his collected works* contains his two major prose books, The Aran Islands and In Wicklow and West Kerry. If you can call them travel-books, they are among the best travel-books ever written. There is nothing of the self-conscious stylist showing off (as there is, alas, in Arabia Deserta, Eothen and even Sea and Sardinia). The people themselves pro- vide the style and the colour; Synge records with a self-denying plainness. 'Priests is queer people,' says a girl, 'and I don't know who isn't.' There is nothing to say after that, unless it is some- thing said by another- islander : 'A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.' The English spoken by Gaelic speakers has a terrible fascina- tion; one can see the necessity in Synge for pushing to the limit, drunk with the possibilities of indigenous syntax, preposterous imagery, * Cot LECTED WORKS. By J. M. Synge. Volume II: Prose. Edited by Alan Price. (O.U.P., Spa,) logic that looks madder than it is, form that takes off from sense.
Pegeen Mike says to the Widow Quin: 'Doesn't the world know you reared a black ram at your own breast, so that the Lord Bishop of Connaught felt the elements of a Christian, and he eating it after in a kidney stew?' And Christy Mahon says to Pegeen : 'If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be strain- ing the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.' The wild cadences of the West are caught in something artful enough, but Synge never stops sounding authentic: nothing is too exag- gerated to be true rural Irish, and nothing in that vernacular is unmelodious enough to strike with a force harsher than that of mere phatic communication. When, as a student, I came home drunk, my stepmother from Galway rebuked me with 'We thought you going to the university would be a blessing and a salvation, but 'tis turned out to be a curse and a ruin.' I did not feel rebuked. Perhaps, then, 'shift' and 'bloody' struck with such force in The Playboy because of that lordly cocoon of delirious word-play : to meet them was like being jolted out of a dream. And yet Synge's language is no dream-fabric: it is a natural product of colonialism, a Saxon-Celtic hybrid for philologists to pick at, not (like the crepuscular homespun of the Dublin fairies) the mere fanciful coin of a minor poet.
Minor poet Synge was: this is confirmed by a re-reading of the first volume of the collected works, in which all the verse, translations, drafts and fragments were brought together by Robin Skelton. Like Joyce, Synge was a lion that had no skill in dandling the kid; both were too big for the dainty lyric and not big enough for the ultimate Yeatsian rhetoric, which was a kind of stripped Protestant Anglo-Irish not at all close to the never-stripped (read The Ginger Man on this) Catholic Irish. The next two volumes will be very exciting, since, under Dr Ann Saddle- myer's editorship, they will give us the plays. Here, in the meantime, is the raw material of those plays and a riveting expository skill which has one echoing At Swim-Two-Birds: 'A pint of plain is your only man.' There is a fair amount of prose not published before, including some literary notes which reveal equally Irish boldness (`Every healthy mind is more interested' in Tit-Bits than in Idylls of the King'—very Bloom-cloacal) and Irish timidity: 'A book . . . that one feels ashamed to read in a cottage of Dingle Bay one may fairly call a book that is not healthy—or universal.'
The evidence of wide reading in European literature should serve to remind a new generation that Synge was not closing in to parochial art when, in 1902, he sat down to write Riders to the Sea. While Joyce was an Ibsen-worshipping undergraduate, Synge was producing a kind of European tragedy that Europe had forgotten how to produce : It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleep- ing in the long nights after Samhain, if it's only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking. . . . Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.
Satisfied? Our stoicism is not that of either Synge or the Aran Islands. That Synge should die at thirty-eight of Hodgkin's disease is another grudge we have to carry against the Destroyer.
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