Reading Matters

'The Aran Islands' by J. M. Synge

 

Non fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 208 pages; 1992.

At the turn of the 19th century, Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge made numerous visits to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. He had been encouraged to make his first visit in 1897 by his friend, William Butler Yeats, who told him: "Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression."

I wanted to read this book, because I had imagined it to be one of those oh-so authentic travelogues that would tell me what it was like to live in a remote place at a time when tourism was not commonplace. And that, my friends, is pretty much exactly what I got, along with a healthy dose of fairy stories and some wonderful descriptions of breath-taking scenery.

As Tim Robinson points out in the introduction, the book is completely self-sufficient in the sense that Synge never explains why he went to the Aran Islands nor what impact it was to have on the rest of his life. But we know now that he spent his first summer there shortly after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease (then completely untreatable) and that after his final visit, some five years later, he achieved extraordinary success with his play The Playboy of the Western World first published in 1907, the same year as The Aran Islands was published. He died just two years later.

The Aran Islands records the day-to-day lives of Irish peasants living in small fishing communities on one of the most rugged and windswept islands in the world. Here's Synge's first impression of the island as he wanders along its "one good roadway":

I have seen nothing so desolate. Grey floods of water were sweeping everywhere upon the limestone, making at times a wild torrent of the road, which twined continually over low hills and cavities in the rock or passed between a few small fields of potatoes or grass hidden away in corners that had shelter. Whenever the cloud lifted I could see the edge of the sea below me on the right, and the naked ridge of the island above me on the other side. Occasionally I passed a lonely chapel or schoolhouse, or a line of stone pillars with crosses above them and inscriptions asking a prayer for the soul of the person they commemorated.

But while a great deal of this book is about the landscape and the terrain and the ever-present roaring sea, it is also about the people whom he befriends along the way. And here, huddled around turf fires, he not only perfects his Irish but collects stories and folklore from local residents. On his first visit he meets a blind man who believes in the "superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world".

Afterward he told me how one of his children had been taken by the fairies.
One day a neighbour was a passing, and she said, when she saw it on the road, 'That's a fine child.'
Its mother tried to say, 'God bless it,' but something choked the words in her throat.
A while later they found a wound on its neck, and for three nights the house was filled with noises.
'I never wear a shirt at night,' he said, 'but I got up out of my bed, all naked as I was, when I heard the noises in the house, and lighted a light, but there was nothing in it.'
Then a dummy came and made signs of hammering nails in a coffin.
The next day the seed potatoes were full of blood, and the child told his mother that he was going to America.
'That night it died, and believe me,' said the old man, 'the fairies were in it.'

Synge also records the harsh conditions in which the island's tiny population lives and the difficulties that confront them in terms of feeding and clothing themselves adequately. His description of poverty-stricken villagers is, at times, heartbreaking. But he also enjoys experiencing the primitiveness of the culture, such as sailing on the ocean in a curagh -- "a rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea" -- and using handmade articles from natural materials -- cradles, churns, baskets and the like -- which "seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them". I particularly loved his descriptions of the island's fashions:

The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the local air of beauty. The women wear red petticoats and jackets of the island wool stained with madder, to which they usually add a plaid shawl twisted around their chests and tied at the back. When it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the waistband around their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn, and during the thunderstorm I arrived in, I saw several girls with men's waistcoats buttoned around their bodies. Their skirts do not come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy indigo stockings with which they are all provided.

Because Synge makes several visits over a five-year period he is able to notice small changes to the culture with each visit he makes. Take this example, written during his fifth and final visit, in which he realises that progress has made its mark, and not necessarily in a good way:

I am in the north island again, looking out with a singular sensation to the cliffs across the sound. It is hard to believe that those hovels I can just see in the south are filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend. Compared with them the falling off that has come with the increased prosperity of this island is full of discouragement. The charm which the people over there share with the birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who are eager for gain. The eyes and expression are different, though the faces are the same, and even the children here seem to have an indefinable modern quality that is absent from the men of Inishman.

The Aran Islands is a fascinating account of another culture in another time confronted by development, or, as the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition so eloquently puts it, "the passionate exploration of an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism". Not necessarily an easy read, but an enjoyable one nonetheless.

If you're interested in reading the book for yourself, a free version is available online at Google Books.

'Krapp's Last Tape and Embers*' by Samuel Beckett

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 39 pages; 2001.

Is it possible to say anything that hasn't already been said about Samuel Beckett's much-produced, much-loved play Krapp's Last Tape? Type the title into Google and you'll get more than 90,000 entries, which isn't bad for such a slim volume.

The play was first performed in October 1958 by Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Since then everyone from Albert Finney to John Hurt have traipsed the boards, playing the sole character of this one-man play. 

In Krapp's Last Tape an elderly world-weary man sits at a desk to make an annual recording on his birthday. He is 69.

In his tape recorder he finds an earlier tape, one that was made when he was 39, and so he listens to it in bursts -- fastforwarding it in places, rewinding it in others -- while he takes notes in the present.

What emerges is that despite the passing of time -- 30 years to be precise -- Krapp does not seem to have lead a very fulfilling or productive life and his best memories are snatches of stolen moments, whether it be walking the dog or making love to a woman, from the past. Indeed the older Krapp describes the younger version as a "stupid bastard" and finds it "hard to believe I was ever as bad as that".

Essentially this is a play about memory, sexuality, the purpose of life, and death. But it's one that can be read over and over to discover new meanings and new insights. Not having seen it performed live, I imagine that it doesn't fully come into its own until the words are given proper voice by a real actor. Thank goodness, then, for YouTube, where I found this rather good version that very much enhances the reading:

* Embers, the second play within this slim volume, was specially written for radio and first performed in 1959. In it a man called Henry walks along the beach thinking about his dead father while other familar voices, including his wife Ada and his young daughter Addie, speak to him from the past.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Popular Classics; 67 pages; 1994.

In my quest to read more work by Irish literary greats this year, I recently purchased a newly repackaged Penguin Popular Classic version of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest. This edition, with its vibrant green cover and tracing-paper thin paper (all 100 per cent recycled), retails for a meagre £2 -- that's a damn cheap price for a masterpiece, in my opinion.

I don't normally read plays (as the 200-plus reviews on this blog will attest), but I decided to make an exception in this case. (Well, to be honest, I'd already read The Picture of Dorian Gray back in my early 20s and because there's a distinct lack of other novels in Mr Wilde's back catalogue I wasn't left with much choice.)

I had seen a film version of this play a couple of years ago (the 2002 version starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Frances O'Connor, Reese Witherspoon and Judi Dench) and I remember laughing out loud at a lot of it. But seeing the words in black-and-white print makes them seem even funnier -- if that is possible.

For those who don't know the storyline, the brief synopsis goes something like this: Country gentleman Jack Worthing invents a younger brother, Ernest, whom he pretends to be when he visits the city. This gives him free reign to pursue the beautiful Gwendolen. Meanwhile his city-based friend, Algernon Moncrieff, invents a poorly relative, Bunbury, whom he pretends to visit in the country in order that he can leave his dull city existence behind for a bit of fun and frivolity. One day Algernon pretends to be Ernest and visits Jack's pretty charge, Cecily, in the country, which leads to all kinds of confusion about identity. Obviously, Jack is not happy, but when his own deceptive behaviour is called into question, the scene is ripe for much farce and hilarity.

In three short acts, this play delivers so many laughs and classic one-liners it's difficult to appreciate the genius of it in just one reading. Fortunately, it's short enough -- just 67 pages in this edition -- to read cover-to-cover twice in a very short amount of time.

How many people haven't heard this line?

(Delivered by Lady Bracknell to Jack): To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune: to lose both looks like carelessness.

Or this one:

(Delivered by Gwendolen to Cecily): I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

But it's not just the lines which are funny, but the setting and the ways in which they are delivered that makes certain scenes especially comedic. This scene, in which Cecily serves tea and cake to her new rival in love, Gwendolen, is a good example of Wilde's ability to capture the little details in people's behaviour that conveys so much about their character and mood.

Cecily [sweetly]: Sugar?

Gwendolen [superciliously]: No thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar in the cup.]

Cecily [severely]: Cake or bread and butter?

Gwendolen [in a bored manner]: Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

Cecily [cuts a very large slice of cake and puts it on the tray]: Hand that to Miss Fairfax.

Without wishing to wax lyrical, this is a sumptuous, dazzling read -- a wonderfully clever farce to brighten up the dullest day. It's tightly written, with not a word wasted, and there's a delightful conclusion in which all the lose ends are brought together and tied up with an unexpected flourish. Masterpiece, indeed.

'Tarry Flynn' by Patrick Kavanagh

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 192 pages; 2000.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) is best known as an Irish poet, but he also dabbled in fiction. Tarry Flynn, first published in 1948, is perhaps his most popular and most famous novel. It is set in rural Ireland in the 1930s and tells the story of a young farmer's day-to-day desires: women, nature and poetry, not necessarily in that order.

On the face of it, this book does not have much of a plot. It's essentially a series of vignettes, held together by the passing seasons, but it is written in such beautiful, evocative prose, it's difficult to find fault with the narrative. There's a quiet, understated grace to every sentence that makes it a powerful and affecting read. I never thought I would say this, but I loved this book so much I'm afraid the late John McGahern, my favourite Irish writer and possibly my favourite writer per se,  has a rival for my affections.

There are lots of similarities in style and content -- I rather suspect that McGahern (1934-2006) drew inspiration from Kavanagh's work -- but it is their shared ability to find beauty in the simplest of things, in the mundane tasks of people's lives, that I love so much.

In Tarry Flynn, the farmer of the title, Kavanagh creates a character that is also able to find beauty in a world that he finds otherwise perplexing.

He stooped down under the belly of the animal to catch the girth strap and as he did he caught a glimpse of the morning sun coming down the valley; it glinted on the swamp and the sedge and flowers caught a meaning for him. That was his meaning. Having found it suddenly, the tying of the girth and the putting of the mare in the cart and every little act became a wonderful miraculous work. It made him very proud too and in some ways impossible. Other important things did not seem important at all.

And:

Walking in the meadow in summer was a great excitement. The simple, fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing -- marsh-marigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story.

In fact Tarry is so awe-struck by the fields and flowers and changing seasons that he believes that the "Holy Spirit was in the fields" and that religion is "beauty in Nature". When he shares these views with his overbearing mother, she feels that there is a "kink in him which she never had been able to fathom" and that he spends far too much time with his head in the clouds.

And he was forever reading and dreaming to himself in the fields. It was a risk to let him out alone in a horse and cart. The heart was often out of her mouth that he'd turn the cart upside down in a gripe while he was dreaming or looking at the flowers. And then the shocking things that he sometimes said about religion and the priests. She was very worried about all that. Not that she loved the priests -- like a true mother she'd cut the Pope's throat for the sake of her son -- but she felt the power of the priests and didn't want to have their ill will.

The priests are, indeed, powerful. The local priest, Father Daly, is so worried that Dargan, the rural area in which the story is set, is "in danger of boiling over in wild orgies of lust" that he organises a special Mission to warn parishioners about the sin of sex outside of marriage.

Tarry, who is fast approaching 30, is one of those bachelors to whom the Mission is aimed. But he has never even kissed a girl, much less gone "all the way" and so the Church's crusade is pretty much a lost cause as far as he is concerned. Indeed, it tends to backfire a little because as he moulds the potatoes one morning "his mind drifted to a new excitement by the thought of all the strange girls that would be coming to the Mission. It often worried him that a lot of other men might be as hypocritical as himself. He, when he analysed himself, knew that he went to religious events of this kind mainly to see the girls".

While the book has dark overtones -- the Mission and the Catholic Church's control of every aspect of village life is pivotal to the story -- it also contains some light-hearted scenes and there's a gentle witticism that pervades much of Tarry's escapades, especially his dispute with a neighbour over the purchase of a field.

All in all, this is a lovely, gentle story about one man's struggle to rise above the burden of family, farm and lust, all set in the idyllic surrounds of 1930s rural Ireland.

An Irish writers' year

It's no secret that I have a penchant for modern Irish fiction. I've read everything from John McGahern to Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy to Jennifer Johnston. But despite one (timid) foray into James Joyce, I've never really explored the great Irish writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. This year I hope to change all that.