The London premiere of Robert J. Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran, was held on the 25th of April, 1934. Among the VIPs were the trio who played the family at the film’s heart: Colman ‘Tiger’ King (‘A Man of Aran’), Maggie Dirrane (‘His Wife’) and Michael Dillane (‘His Son’). Their struggles to sustain a life on the Aran Islands, that fringe of life off the Clare coast, cre- ate much of the action. Newsreels of the premiere show the trio surrounded by evening gowns and greatcoats. Flashbulbs pop; there is much excited jostling. In the midst of all this, the three Aran faces are happy and baffled. Arguably, they are hemmed in by more people than they have seen in their lives. Behind them, so to speak, stands the work which clearly influenced Flaherty, J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, first published in 1907.
Twenty years after the premiere, the novelist Heinrich Böll took his family for an extended holiday on the Irish mainland, observations from which led to his 1967 Irish Journal (considered here in an excellent translation by Leila Vennewitz). He, too, is often happy and baffled by his experiences, but for very different reasons. Chronology is important here; the intrusions of history, even more so. Between The Aran Islands and Irish Journal came world war, Irish rebellion, independence and civil war, and world war again. Synge and the Aran Islanders were spared the wars and, excepting the younger Islanders, did not live to see the establishment of the Irish republic. Böll, on the other hand, came to Ireland aware of what those intervening years contained. Aware and burdened: his homeland had initiated both wars, the second under the banner of Nazism, which he and his family roundly rejected. Into the mix comes the fact that, during World War Two, Ireland was neutral. It could thus be argued that Synge’s Aran experience is a singular version of the long Edwardian summer enjoyed by England, that fantastical era beyond the hill of August 1914, while Böll’s Irish sojourn is problematized by all manner of mid-century complications, assumptions, adjustments. Synge’s islanders frequently ask him for news of ‘away’: that vast world beyond their shores. For him and them, however, many events in ‘away’ could be happening on the moon. Böll, meanwhile, journeys through a society which feels the pull of the modern and also the chill of Cold War.
But for all their differences in time and nationality (and despite the fact that the Aran Islands to this day hold to an identity that places them first and Ireland second), Synge and Böll share a number of fundamental perceptions about the people among whom – as not quite tourists, not quite natives – they dwelt. The Aran Islands and Irish Journal focus upon the people, their culture and their conception of life beyond their towns and cottages.
Between 1898 and 1902, Synge spent his summers on the Aran Islands. There is evidence that this was partly a rest-cure regime: in 1897, he had suffered his first attack of Hodgkin’s disease. In The Aran Islands, however, he rarely alludes to his own constitution, being more fascinated by that of the people who, by main force, sustain a living on those hard islands. They are emphatically not part of the Celtic Twilight being so assiduously created by co-writers elsewhere at the time. This is not a place of lush meadows, of dusk dropping softly on the Glen of Aherlow. Life is real here: earnest.
At an inn on Aranmor (now known as Inishmore), the northernmost and largest of the three islands, he looks out ‘through the mist at a few men who were unlading hookers that had come in with turf from Connemara, and at the long-legged pigs that were playing in the surf’. This early ob- servation prepares the ground for themes to which he frequently returns: the hazards of crossing to and from the mainland; the dangers of shipping and unloading livestock; and the islanders’ acceptance of the fact that, bar-ring on the stillest days, peril waits for them once they step off the land. In Synge’s account, peril seems almost like a patient uncle, waiting to meet each day’s clutch of nephews; and it appears thus because of the islanders’ attitude, something beyond stoicism. Yes, there is high keening at funerals or while waiting for news of a missing hooker or curagh. Beneath that, however, there is an acceptance that life and death are intertwined in this place which, from what Synge can see, appears to manufacture its own mist, fog and rain. Sometimes, that acceptance becomes literal: the bodies of lost fishermen and cargo-men occasionally drift back to the islands on the tides.
In the islanders’ culture, Synge notes, paganism forever presses against Christianity like one of the recalcitrant fairies that populate so many of their stories. On Aranmor, a teacher of Gaelic tells him how he lost one of his children. The tale takes in its mother’s thwarted attempt to bless it, an inexplicable wound on its neck, an orchestra of noise in the house and finally, having ‘told his mother that he was going to America’, the child’s death: ‘“Believe me,” said the old man. “The fairies were in it.”’ That last Irishism, implying casual involvement, is poignantly at odds with the im- pact, dramatized in so many stories that Synge hears, of the fairies’ caprice and frequent malignity. The same fortitude is displayed by Pat Dirane, a story-teller on the middle island, Inishmaan, one of whose tales represents the fairies as unearthly stakeholders in Ireland’s GDP: ‘the fairies have a tenth of all the produce of the country, and make stores of it in the rocks’. Not that all of the islands’ tales are rooted in the supernatural: the oldest man on Inishmaan diverts Synge with the tale of ‘a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in passion, and then fled to this island’. In 1907, that same tale would arouse passions of disgust and condemnation when it surfaced in The Playboy of the Western World, Synge’s best-known play.
A source of fascination shared by all the islanders is the concept of ‘away’: not only life on mainland Ireland but the doings of the whole world. Such newspapers as reach the islands, notes Synge, arrive late. Inevitably, as a duine uasal, a noble person who has studied at the Sorbonne, he is questioned about the manners and customs of ‘away’, often in order for the islanders to refine their sense of place in the scheme of things. Frequently, the
questions concern war. The Spanish-American war (1898) troubles them deeply: if America loses, they fear, they will be denied its flour and bacon and the rigours of island life will become unbearable. Elsewhere, however, they regard Gaelic as an emollient for the world’s troubles:
‘I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,’ said one man, ‘and there does be a power of 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.’
One German neither rich nor ‘studying the Gaelic’ – but still drawn to its place of origin – was Heinrich Böll, who found himself in a far differ- ent Irish society to that which mesmerised Synge. Though not specifically hailed as a noble person, he was, like Synge, drawn with easy acceptance into what by then was a republic finding its feet.
Synge attends to the individual and the community: the lone net-mender absorbs his attention as much as the crowds on the island slipways await- ing the steamship. Böll divides his fascination similarly. Not long arrived in Dublin, he encounters an armless beggar in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Countering the man’s destitution, ‘his thin, dark face had a beauty that will be noted in a book other than mine’. Böll finds himself performing the secular equivalent of the corporal works of mercy extolled by Catholicism:
I had to light his cigarette for him and place it between his lips; I had to put money for him in his coat pocket; I almost felt as if I were furnishing a corpse with money.
The encounter leads Böll to ponder other forms of destitution, self-willed or even used as a shield against the pressures of everyday life. Their setting is not a cathedral’s precincts but rather ‘the private drinking booth with the leather curtain’, in which the lone toper
… lowers himself deep below the surface of time …. Here the man is alone with his whisky, far removed from all the activities in which he has been forced to participate, activities known as family, occupation, honour, society …
Yet Böll is equally struck by inertia’s opposite: the impulse that makes an individual borrow from Yeats and announce ‘I will arise and go now’. Moving on to the south-west, he finds a symbol of regularity in the life of Limerick City: milk-bottles on the doorsteps, full in the morning, empty at night. But one bottle is still rebelliously full by evening and, enlightened by the old woman in the next doorway, he peers through a lighted chink above it. Its owner has emigrated to Australia that day: simply walked, it seems, out of one life and into another:
… in a tiny hall a towel was still hanging on a doorknob and a hat on the peg … a dirty plate with the remains of some potatoes lay on the floor.
Pondering the country’s sense of community, Böll is drawn to structures – transport, communications – and their human faces. In ‘Mrs. D’s Ninth Child’, he considers the life of Siobhan, Mrs. D’s oldest daughter, and how her life will be when she takes over from her father in the Post Office of a rural town (possibly on the Clare coast: he refers to seeing ‘blue islands’, which could be the Arans). He imagines how, with a saintly lack of hurry, she will become the gatekeeper for transactions both over the counter and from the ends of the earth. She may, for example, have to deal with a visitor
… who obliges her to open the fat tariff book and make complicated calculations, or has friends who compel her to decipher telegraph texts from code: ‘Eile geboten. Stop. Antwortet baldmöglichst.’
Perhaps inevitably, given his nationality and the time at which he made this journey, Böll hears one particular name surface on the topic of the world and Ireland’s place in it. In one conversation with a man named Padraic, and after banter about whether Böll thinks the Irish are a happy people, the man
… found the courage to ask me what he had been wanting to ask me all along. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a low voice, ‘Hitler—war—I believe—not such a bad man really, only—in my opinion—he went a bit too far.’
Gently, encouraged by his wife (‘Go on, don’t give up, pull out the whole tooth’), Böll unpacks ‘went a bit too far’, clearly mindful that Padraic is pulled two ways: between the image of Hitler that might have formed itself in neutral Ireland, and the apprehension of darker truths. He also under- stands the likely effect of his dentistry:
‘Did it hurt much?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it hurts and it’ll go on hurting for a few days till all the pus is out.’
‘Don’t forget to rinse your mouth, and if you’re in pain come and see me, you know where I live.’
‘I know where you live,’ said Pad, ‘and I’ll be sure to come, for I’ll be sure to be in pain.’
Synge’s yearly departure from the Aran Islands was carefully pre-arranged. Böll and his family were obliged to leave Ireland half-unexpectedly: further funds for which they were hoping did not arrive. This turn of events adds extra vividness to the conclusion of Irish Journal. Like many another literary traveller, Böll uses the time of departure to try and distil his thoughts on the people he has met and the landscapes that claim them. In ‘Epilogue – Thirteen Years Later,’ he notes that, in the years since he wrote Irish Journal, ‘Ireland has leaped over a century and a half and caught up with another five’. However, even in ‘Farewell’, the final section of the journal proper, he is attuned to the ways in which Ireland’s present is wrestling free of its past. ‘Farewell’ offers a dreamscape of people and objects from the family’s tour, their Dublin boarding house, the National Museum, Dublin Zoo and the Liffey, whose waters ‘turned black, carrying history out to sea like flotsam’, leaving Böll to dramatize what remains. Motley pointers to the future, these include the memory of a cinema in the middle of Connemara or Mayo or Kerry – a pleasure-dome akin to William Trevor’s Ballroom of Romance – in which projectors ‘buzzed Monroe, Tracy, Lollobrigida onto the screen’; a combustible debate in the papers about what should be done with Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street (he was finally unseated in an explosion in 1966); and their Dublin landlady, a depressive who hears voices warning her against the whisky on which she lives:
‘My psychiatrist,’ she said, suddenly lowering her voice, ‘claims the voices come out of the bottle, but I’ve told him he’d better not say anything against my voices, for he lives off them after all.’
‘And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, / That dying chose the living world for text’– thus does Yeats characterize his friend in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.’ In The Aran Islands and Irish Journal, Synge and Böll examine (albeit using vastly different pages) Ireland’s contribution to that text. Time, politics and progress separate these two enquirers. Taken together, however, their own texts have much to reveal about the foibles, confusions and beauty of the human spirit. Beautiful themselves in conception and execution, they are well worth any reader’s time.