SYNGE CENTENARY: ADRIAN FRAZIERreviews Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908By JM Synge, edited by Nicholas Grene Lilliput Press
This is a year of anniversaries – Seamus Heaney turned 70, John Montague 80, and March 24th clocked the 100th year since the day JM Synge died.
At the centenary conference earlier this year on Synge and Edwardian Ireland, a generation of scholars gathered, many of whom had been at Trinity in the early 1970s. Declan Kiberd, whose first big achievement was Synge and the Irish Language(1979), was there. Beside him on a panel sat WJ McCormack, who has since unearthed generations of Synges, and in a string of books, like a cross between Le Fanu and Adorno, meditated on the buried moral history of Protestant settlement in Ireland.
By McCormack's side was Anthony Roche. His 1970s dissertation on Synge set him on the path toward his ground-breaking 1994 Contemporary Irish Drama. In the conference's opening lecture, Terence Brown characteristically saw the big picture. Synge and Joyce, fathers and sons, Protestants and Catholics, Dublinersand The Playboy, were depicted as caught up in an epochal tipping point. Nicola Gordon Bowe gave a time-travelling slide lecture back through the Arts and Crafts movement of Georgian Dublin.
It is remarkable that the work of a person whose writing life lasted not much more than five years, and who finished only one three-act play, should so have preoccupied and shaped the intellects of one generation of literary scholars.
Of course, the quality of the writing – instantly recognised by Yeats – is a factor in the fascination; so is the enigmatic riot over The Playboyin 1907; and the fact that the play is a classic and classics are rare; and the inflammatory way in which Yeats in one of his greatest essays made Synge the touchstone of "the Ireland of His Time".
Nicholas Grene led the modern study of Synge with his 1975 book and 1990 founding of the still-flourishing Synge Summer School. His latest offering is an edition of the playwright’s travel writings, made up into a beautiful book by the incomparable Lilliput Press.
There is a careful, forensic aspect to the editorial treatment given to these texts. We are able to follow dates of composition as well as of publication. Synge left unmentioned his travelling companions and modes of transportation (bicycle, train). He changed the names of his interlocutors, or left them out altogether. By putting back in what Synge left out, the editor, through the footnotes, allows us to see more clearly what we are reading and how it was written.
An uncle of the playwright had been on Aran as an evangelist in the mid-19th century, and Synge’s older brother gave him a tip on where to stay at Mountain Stage in Kerry. He himself had recently been fishing in the neighbourhood. But Synge went West with a different purpose in mind. He was, Grene points out, surprisingly 20th century in his equipment. He had a bicycle, a typewriter, and a camera. His initial aim in 1898 seems to have been shaped by Yeats’s advice to go to the Aran Islands, live among the people, and give expression to an ancient form of life that had never found expression. He would, Yeats led him to understand, find in Aran the pure gold of literature: folklore, faery stories, primal reality, and a naturally metaphoric speech. With his machinery, he meant to record it.
In his first travel writings, Synge did his best. He hunts up the village storyteller, and records a tale that combines, he pedantically explains, motifs used in The Merchant of Veniceand Cymbeline. He keeps noting that the residents have "the charm of primitive man". Some even seem to have "pre-Celtic blood". Ah, but don't we all! Partly, the emphasis on the primitiveness of Aran islanders comes from Yeats's preconceptions, and partly from Synge's own personal feeling of inauthenticity (a common crisis for late-19th-century European artists).
But he could not have been more wrong about Aran. The islanders down through the years had seen a great number of fine scholars, the ones who had come to see them. As seafarers, they had also been up and down the coast, and met mariners from many countries. Most had family members living in the USA. People on the islands today see more people from more countries (tourists) than do residents of any other parish in Ireland, and in 1898 they were far from isolated, much less primitive. In fact, at just that time (as David Fitzpatrick explained in his centenary lecture), they were carrying out a modern experiment led by the Congested Districts Board to salt local fish on a factory scale and trade it internationally.
A few years later, Synge is ready to see all such things and take their measure. His series of 1905 articles for the Manchester Guardianon Galway and Mayo focus in particular on the failures and successes of the schemes of the Congested Districts Board. He insists again and again that state functionaries must never forget that "the small farmer is not a fool", and usually knows best how to help himself, once freed of misgovernment and debt.
In his later visits to West Kerry, one would have to think Synge achieved a significant intimacy with local cottiers. He was given a bed in a small room, and late at night, the man of the house joined him in it, there being no other, and lit up his pipe and began to chat. Later still, the son climbed over, to make three in the bed. The following morning as he shaved, Synge saw in the piece of broken looking-glass he was using, the eyes of 20 onlookers behind him. He dried himself with the one towel used by the whole family.
It was on this visit that he was finishing The Playboy of the Western World.
- Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908 By JM Synge, edited by Nicholas Grene Lilliput Press, 185pp. €25
Adrian Frazier is the director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies at NUI Galway and editor of
Playboys of the Western World: Production Histories
(2004)