But where is Molly?
P. J. Kavanagh FOOL OF THE FAMILY: A LIFE OF J. M. SYNGE by W. J. McCormack Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 500 John Millington Synge (1871-1909), play- wright, was a Protestant, as were most of the leaders of the Irish Literary Revival. Difficult to think of a Catholic among them, and it is only necessary to say 'most' in order to avoid an argument, because this biography is an account of Irish arguments, political, social, cultural, in many of which Synge took no part, and the reader longs for a quiet life, as did Synge. However, Synge wasn't just a Protestant — not even in the Wildean sense, 'I have no religion, I'm an Irish Protestant'; on his death bed he was reading the Bible, hidden by a brown-paper cover, in case anyone noticed — he was brought up about as Evangelically 'low' as it is possible to be. His widowed mother had connections with the Plymouth Brethren, and Synge's first love was a devout member of that sect. It was when she rejected his proposal of mar- riage that he first went, famously, to the Irish-speaking Aran Islands. Now 27 years old he had never before crossed the Shan- non, or reached Sligo, 'the country from which his mother derived most of her income, on which he still depended'. On Aran he witnessed an eviction, with horror, but must have known that his brother-in-law was legal adviser to the Guinnesses, who caused the eviction. In his teens he had asked his mother about such things and she had replied: 'What would become of us if our tenants stopped paying their rents?' To this he could find no answer. (His mother privately believed that Catholics had fleas.) He was not only a Protestant therefore, but one of the cut- off-from-the-majority, Protestant landown- ing classes who was soon to be in contact (at arm's length) with a movement, literary and political, that would not only under- mine his own social position — about which, perhaps, he cared little — but which inspired in him, he said,
dread of any reform that would tend to lessen [Aran, Irish] individuality, rather than give any real hope of improving its well- being.
Mysteriously, this young gentleman, travelling, reading, suddenly came up with Riders to the Sea, a classic one-acter, pared to the bone. 'Like Aeschylus,' said Yeats. `Who's Aeschylus?' said Padraic Colum. `Like Synge.' So few records remain, and Synge himself cultivated such reticence, his biographer has difficulty in explaining such an unexpected peasant-sympathetic master- piece.
He was a reluctant revolutionary, if he was one at all. The translator of Plotinus, Stephen MacKenna, was with Synge in Paris when he met Yeats and Maud Gonne. In a memorable phrase MacKenna was amused to observe Synge 'gently hating' Maud Gonne for her political violence and her half-truths.
Brave in the face of illness — `lumps in Johnny's groins' said his mother and in his neck (Gogarty, on sight in the street, diag- nosed Hodgkin's disease) — he was dead at 37 and was raised by Yeats into the Nationalist Valhalla in a way that would have made this aloof man wince. Synge had already told MacKenna — surely under- estimating Yeats, but it was early days — 'I do not believe in the possibility of a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring- daying, Cuchulanoid National Theatre.' He was a cussed man, more interesting than the secular saint Yeats invented. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:
We can't say & don't want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow-workers, authors and actors.
This could mean merely that he did not agree with her and Yeats, and, as for actors, Synge fell wholly in love with one of them, Molly Allgood, who was both Catholic and working-class. Even his moth- er (whom Synge revered) resigned herself to this passion of her son's, despite her views on Catholic hygiene.
He became too ill for them to marry, then it was too late, and after his death people seemed to have closed ranks on the subject of Molly Allgood, writing her out of the script. But Synge certainly wrote her into it — the parts of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World, and Deirdre, in Deirdre of the Sorrows, his last, unfinished play, were written for her. If all gossip about her has somehow been excised (hard to believe that in a place like Dublin) at least there must exist reviews of her per- formances which might suggest something of her, this Muse, this young girl who broke through her lover's massive reserve. Alas, no sign of them here.
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