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‘This is travel writing of a special kind’
Bruce Arnold, Irish Independent
‘Captivating ... profoundly attuned to the spirit of the place’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Travel writing of the highest order’
Time Out
J. M. Synge, playwright, poet, essayist and translator, was a key figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Born in County Dublin in 1871, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and then at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. With Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and others, he was a co-founder and later a director of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for The Playboy of the Western World, which famously provoked a riot on its opening night, and his travel writing – notably, The Aran Islands and Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. He died in 1909, aged thirty-seven.
Julian Bell is a painter and writer whose books include Mirror of the World: A New History of Art and What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art. He is a regular contributor to the London and New York Review of Books.
J.M. Synge
The Aran Islands
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Foreword by Julian Bell
Serif
London
This e-book first published 2015 by
Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA
Originally published in 1907 by Maunsel & Co. Ltd, Dublin and Elkin Mathews, London
Foreword copyright © Julian Bell, 2008, 2013, 2015
Corrections to this edition copyright © Stephen Hayward, 2008, 2013, 2015
This edition copyright © Serif, 2008, 2013, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN 978 1 909150 45 4
e-book produced by Will Dady
Foreword
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‘Here I am Lord of all I survey – surrounded with dirt & ignorance … It is a very
wretched Island, the soil very scanty almost all a barren rock … I get on with the people so far very well but how it will be when we begin to attack their bad ways & religion etc. I don’t know.’ The Synge who was preparing to ‘attack’ the Aran Islands was not John Millington Synge, born in 1871, but his uncle, a Protestant minister, writing his letters home twenty years before. The Reverend Alexander Synge spent three years on Inishmore (also known as Aranmor), the largest of the three rocks in Galway Bay, during the early 1850s. It was an unhappy sojourn. The minister could only draw a trickle of islanders to his services, though by way of a small victory for propriety he managed to put a stop to their Sunday games of handball. The land being unprofitable, he tried to introduce some enterprise by investing in a sailing trawler. The fishermen of Galway saw it as a threat to their catch and set out in a flotilla to board it, armed with spears and stones. After his narrow escape from the ‘organised terrorism’ of these ‘savages’ (in the words of the 1853 Galway Vindicator), the Reverend attempted to identify the ringleaders’ boats, but was set upon by massed fishwives and only escaped by jumping in Galway’s Corrib River, while the police charged the mob with fixed bayonets. Luckily for him, Alexander Synge soon afterwards found a living in London.
The contrasts could hardly have been greater when Alexander’s nephew ventured, for the first time in his life, out into the west in 1898. It is fair to say that at the age of twenty-seven John Millington Synge had so far proved a grave disappointment to his proud Ascendancy family. The Synges had been Church of Ireland bishops and they had much land in Wicklow; one elder brother was a missionary in China, while another ran estates, supervising among other matters the evictions of defaulting peasant tenants. But the youngest son, reared among women after losing his father in infancy, was regarded as sickly and sensitive; much worse, his scolding mother came correctly to suspect that as he grew up he was losing his faith. Music became his main escape route from the Protestant pieties of her house in the Dublin suburbs. He took off to wander Germany with a violin. From there he drifted towards Paris and towards the notion of somehow becoming a writer. But while he attended courses at the Sorbonne, his attempts at poetry and essay-writing accumulated nothing but rejection slips.
The Left Bank brought Synge into contact with socialism, spiritualism, the drama of Ibsen and suchlike vogues of the 1890s; also, with the growing intellectual interest in the archaic Celtic world. The Sorbonne’s Professor de Jubainville and his colleagues in German universities were lending a new scientific edge to the fascination with Europe’s ‘primitive’ far west that had taken root in the Romantic era. These citydwellers’ reveries had tended to fix on distant Aran. Just a few years after the Reverend Synge’s colonial encounter with its ‘ignorant’ natives, a deputation of Dublin antiquaries made a grand pilgrimage to Inishmore, hailing its prehistoric hill fort of Dun Ængus as ‘the last standing-place of the Firbolg aborigines of Ireland’. Now, towards the century’s end, the gap between missionaries and mythologisers was being filled in by statisticians – as in an 1893 Ethnography of the Aran Islands, measuring the inhabitants’ average height and cranial conformation – and by philologists and folklorists. Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inishere offered an ideal laboratory to those investigating the Irish language – its etymological strata, its dialectal variations, its repositories of oral narrative. An islander’s perspective on all this activity is recounted somewhat wryly:
‘I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,’ said one man, ‘and there does be a power a Irish books along with them, and they reading them better than ourselves. Believe me there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic.’
These then were the broad cultural currents that carried along the solitary, gaunt-faced passenger who took a train from Dublin to Galway on 10 May 1898 and the next morning boarded a steamer crossing the bay – the journey described on the book’s opening page. Synge had in a sense reached the west of Ireland by way of continental Europe: a radical-leaning cultural sophisticate stirred into a quest for authenticity. With his own brothers, the land agent and the missionary, he was by now quite out of sympathy. But two other brothers, each after his fashion Synge’s friend and supporter, were instrumental in launching the book that was to be the backbone of his brief but momentous literary career. One, the poet William Butler Yeats, provides the standard account of how Synge was impelled towards The Aran Islands. In a 1905 introduction to Synge’s play The Well of the Saints, he describes how he met the unknown littérateur – six years his junior – in Paris in 1896:
He had … nothing to show but one or two poems and impressionistic essays, full of that kind of morbidity that has its root in too much brooding over methods of expression, and ways of looking upon life, which come, not out of life, but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror …I said: ‘Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’ I had just come from Aran, and my imagination was full of those grey islands where men must reap with knives because of the stones.
The great poet was a great looker-through of people. Where others