Synge / Grene J.M. Synge, Travelling Ireland

Essays 1898-1908
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84351-240-0
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 185 Seiten

Synge's topographical essays appear here in their original newspaper and periodical publication form, taken from the Manchester Guardian, The Gael and The Shanachie, complete with illustrations, mostly by Jack B. Yeats. A substantial essay-introduction by Nicholas Grene places his work in its historical context (1898-1908) and evokes the man and his milieu. Synge's writings explore social, political and aesthetic perspectives gained from his travels on the Atlantic seaboard and among the Wicklow Hills. Eighteen of them concern the Aran Islands and the west of Ireland of the Congested Districts, from County Donegal down to Galway, describing famine relief projects, ferrymen, kelp gatherers, boat-builders, peasant proprietors, small shopkeepers, races and fairs. Nine deal with County Wicklow and West Kerry, their vagrants, landlords and pastimes. Maps, photographs by Synge, facsimile title-pages, and above all Jack Yeats' inimitable drawings, embellish the text.

NICHOLAS GRENE is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. His previous works include critical studies of Shaw, Synge (Interpreting Synge, 2000), and most recently Yeats (Yeats's Poetic Codes, 2008).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Synge, Jm

Grene, Nicolas

Leseproben

Introduction

In the ‘Preface’ to Synge and the Ireland of His Time, W.B. Yeats tells how he consoled himself during his friend’s final illness with the thought that at least Synge ‘would leave to the world nothing to be wished away – nothing that was not beautiful or powerful in itself, or necessary as an expression of his life and thought’.1 The Preface goes on to explain why Synge and the Ireland of His Time was appearing as a separate pamphlet rather than as the Introduction to the four-volume Works of John M. Synge, published by Maunsel in 1910. Yeats had quarelled bitterly with the publisher George Roberts over the decision to include in the Works the twelve essays, ‘In the “Congested Districts”’, published in the Manchester Guardian in 1905. For Yeats this inferior journalistic writing was not worthy of the Synge canon, but something to ‘be wished away’.

With the authority of Synge’s executors apparently behind him, Roberts had won the day in this argument. The fourth volume of the 1910 Works had duly appeared with the somewhat awkward subtitle: ‘In Wicklow, In West Kerry, In the Congested Districts and Under Ether,’ the latter a previously unpublished piece Synge had written about his experience of undergoing his first operation under general anaesthesia. In 1911, however, the topographical essays were collected as In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara with eight newly commissioned drawings by Jack Yeats, to match those that illustrated The Aran Islands as originally published in 1907, and this was to become the received form of Synge’s travel writings. Although Roberts and Yeats were initially at odds over the issue of literary standards, they were both concerned to compose Synge’s work into a monumental completed oeuvre. The invented title In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara brings together three picturesque areas of rural Ireland into a resonantly rhythmic and alliterative cadence. North Mayo, one of the less famously scenic of the Congested Districts observed is omitted, as is the term ‘congested districts’ itself, with all its associations of political and social issues. The travel writings are aestheticized and removed from their historical contexts.

The aim of this edition is to re-historicize them. Yeats wanted within the Works nothing that was not ‘beautiful or powerful in itself’; Roberts in publishing In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara sought to produce another book to complement The Aran Islands and the plays by which Synge had won his fame. My aim, by contrast, is to return to the original writings of the literary journalist who was still struggling to get published, who wrote and re-wrote his reflections in Ireland for whatever journals or newspapers could be persuaded to take them. In place of a travel book organized by area,2 the original texts of the essays published in his lifetime are here arranged in the chronological order of their publication. Synge and the Ireland of His Time was an attempt by Yeats to conjure up a specifically Yeatsian vision of the Ireland of Synge’s time. This edition looks to situate the travel essays within an Edwardian Ireland rather different from that of the Yeatsian or even the Syngean imagination. I want to include some of the features of that period which Synge may have chosen to omit or occlude. This is not done out of either pedantry or perversity. Rather, I hope to provide a context for Synge’s travel essays – the places he went to, the forms of transport he used to get there, the journals and newspapers in which he published – that may help us better to understand both Synge and the Ireland of his time.

Destinations

John Millington Synge was a city-dweller. Born in Rathfarnham near Dublin in 1871, the son of a barrister who died when he was only a baby, he lived almost all his life with his widowed mother in one Dublin suburb or another, apart from some time in Germany (1893–5) shortly after graduating from Trinity College, and a series of winters in Paris (1895–1902). When he became a founding Director of the Abbey Theatre in 1905, he was the only one of the theatre’s ruling triumvirate actually resident in Dublin: Lady Gregory lived in Coole Park, County Galway, W.B. Yeats was based in London. The Synge family, however, was only one generation removed from land and landownership. Synge’s grandfather had held large estates in Wicklow, and when the writer was a boy, his uncle, Francis Synge, still occupied the grand Georgian castle of Glanmore. Synge was thinking of his own family situation when, contemplating ‘A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow’, he remarked that ‘many of the descendents of these people have … drifted in professional life into Dublin, or have gone abroad’. One of John’s older brothers was a landagent, another an engineer working in Argentina, a third a medical missionary in China; his sister had married a lawyer. To some extent, still, they thought of themselves as the Synges of Wicklow, and it was close to Glanmore and the village of Annamoe that Mrs Synge, the playwright’s mother, rented holiday homes for the months of summer from 1890 on.

Map of Wicklow

For Synge to travel to Wicklow each summer was to return to familiar territory, but also to escape from the city. He participated in the country pastimes of his family, typical enough of their class; he fished, walked and cycled with his brothers. If he did not shoot with his brother-in-law Harry Stephens, he accompanied him on the outing to retrieve a wounded gun-dog, the incident that provided the basis for ‘An Autumn Night in the Hills’. It is noticeable, however, that in the essay the brother-in-law is suppressed altogether, and the journey to Glenmalure (which was actually a family affair involving two outside cars, Synge’s mother, sister, niece and nephews) is turned into a solitary walking expedition into the mountains.3 Instead of the sinister return alone through the darkening valley portrayed in the essay, Synge had ended the actual day in question fishing with Stephens, and taking table d’hôte in the Glenmalure Hotel.4 Synge, as family dissident, nationalist in politics, freethinker in religion, saw Wicklow differently from the people of his class and background. His self-consciously Wordsworthian poem ‘Prelude’, for instance, has no place for social setting. It represents instead a flight from human contact towards an unmediated intercourse with nature:

Still south I went and west and south again,

Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,

And far from cities, and the sites of men,

Lived with the sunshine and the moon’s delight.

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,

The grey and wintry skies of many glens,

And did but half remember human words,

In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens. (CW I 32)

The push in Synge’s travels was towards edges, peripheries, away not only from Dublin but from the socio-political contexts in which he, by virtue of being one of the Synges of Wicklow, was implicated. He sought those least modernized, least Anglicized remotenesses of Ireland in which people lived on frontiers of the natural world.

Wicklow itself was curiously anomalous in this. Its wild mountainous terrain made it one of the last strongholds of native Irish resistance to English rule. Still in the late sixteenth century a traditional chieftain like Feagh MacHugh O’Byrne could hold out against the colonial forces of the English, and inflict repeated defeat on the forces of Lord Deputy Gray, to the indignation of Spenser in his View of the State of Ireland.5 Wicklow, known throughout this period only as the ‘O’Byrne country’, was the last county to be assimilated into the standard English administrative system when it was shired in 1606.6 But, so close as it was to Dublin, by the eighteenth century it had become a favourite site for gentleman’s residences, landed estates with fine houses and picturesque views owned by aristocrats such as the Fitzwilliams, who had huge properties elsewhere, or people, like the Synges themselves, who had made their money in the city and invested in land as a sign of status. This upper-class recreational aspect to Wicklow became a mass phenomenon in the nineteenth century when its beauty-spots, Glendalough, the Meeting of the Waters – made famous by one of Thomas Moore’s ‘Irish Melodies’–drew regular crowds of day-trippers from Dublin. It is from this time that the county acquired its tourist soubriquet of the ‘Garden of Ireland’. Yet still there were mountains and wild glens beyond the tourist trail, and it is to these empty spaces and the sparse population that inhabited them that Synge was drawn. In the Wicklow essays it is such a territory that he contemplates, a territory beyond the tenanted social landscape of his own family, a natural world on the margins of the processes of history.

If Wicklow was one sort of marginal space for Synge, in spite of its proximity to Dublin, Aran as islands off the west coast of the western island of Ireland represented some sort of ultimate extremity. ‘It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction,’ commented Synge in The Aran Islands on his first curragh journey from...