Stones of Aran (27 page)

Winter gave Flaherty those scenes of desperate landfalls—the half-drowned crew floundering ashore leaving their currach to be gnashed between wave and rock—that make the beginning and end of the film. And then summer, as if not to be outdone, gave him the central theme he was still waiting for, the giant shark the South Seas had denied him. And in some profusion, if his own
account
is to be believed:

Pat Mullen managed to find two rusty harpoons tied to a rafter above the fireplace in his grandfather’s old house, and took them to Galway for a smith to copy. But a generation had passed away since the basking shark had last been hunted in Aran waters, and Mullen had to seek out a deathbed-ridden centenarian in the Claddagh district of Galway and ask him how to harpoon the Levawn Mor, as he calls it (from the Irish,
an
Liamhán
Mór
):

With just so much knowledge of the art, Flaherty’s
shark-hunters
set off in a small open boat, a wooden Connemara
púcán,
and rowed up to the tranquil monsters to try out their unfamiliar harpoons, while Flaherty followed with his camera mounted on a larger boat with an engine. But, until Tiger King mastered the skill of striking into “the grey streak under the big fin,” the
harpoons
bent on the impenetrable hide or were easily torn out when the shark dived; and then, because the rope always snapped or the light failed at the crucial moment, not much film had been made by the time the sharks moved on from Aran waters, and Flaherty had to prolong his shooting schedule into the next season. This time he called in a friend from the Hudson Bay years, a retired whaler captain, to show the crew how to mount a snubbing post near the stern of the
púcán
and use it to check or slacken away the rope as the shark ran. The captain brought a harpoon gun with him, and he would use it to put a heavy whale-harpoon into the shark from the larger boat to begin with; then the line would be passed to the
púcán
and the Aran men would use their
hand-harpoons
when they had hauled themselves close enough to the dying fish. And so at last the record of the noble pursuit was
concocted
. A few briefer sequences of Aran’s more photogenic
land-based
activities—fishing from the tall cliffs, seaweed-gathering in storms, “making land” by spreading seaweed on bare rock—made up the rest of the film.

The anachronism of the shark-hunt was one factor in the
c
ontroversy
that arose after the film’s first screening (in April 1934 at the New Gallery, London), for it was presented as a documentary of contemporary reality—and Maggie, Micilín and the Tiger were brought across to the premier in their homespuns to enforce the point, while a stuffed shark, shortened by removal of a middle cut, was displayed in the Gaumont-British Film Company’s Wardour Street window. In the context of those depression years Flaherty’s Aran appeared to be mere escapism. C. A. Lejeune’s opinion was that the real story of Aran was the fight to hold the land against eviction, which Flaherty had not told, while Graham Greene
condemned
the wearisome affectation of his figures against the
skyline
and the meaninglessness of his magnificent photography of
storm after storm. In America criticism was more responsive to the theme of “a unit of life—man, woman and child—the
continuing
link in the human race winning survival in an unending war with the grim impersonality of the elements.” Commercially the film did moderately well, and by degrees, as the question of its
relationship
to Aran of the Thirties has fallen away into the past, its almost abstract splendours have been revealed.

Island gossip about the film often reverts to the idea that there is another
Man
of
Aran
film somewhere, made up of all the scenes people remember being shot but which they do not find in the film as we know it (and as the islanders in particular and in detail know it, for it is shown repeatedly throughout the summer in the Hall in Cill Rónáin). One of these “missing” sequences haunts my
imagination
too. John Goldman, who was sent out to Aran by
Gaumont-British
to cut some sense, or what they would have regarded as sense, into Flaherty’s profuse streams of unpre-edited footage, mentions it in the course of justifying his own work on the film:

Or, perhaps, what the cinema of the time did not
want 
done
.
This visual scaling of the cliff sends me back to the early, Canadian, pages (to me, unversed in film history, much the most exciting) of
Calder Marshall’s biography of Flaherty,
The
Innocent
Eye.
Was this eye in fact always that of a
prospector,
looking into the heart of matter through measurement of its surface? I see Flaherty
wandering
in a giant landscape trying to subject it to the rule and
compass
of geology—and then through the Eskimos finding he could apply a more compelling measure to the immensities of snow and ice, that of human endurance. (In a more recent climate he might have been able to unfold about that landscape a more subtle,
web-like
extension of his measure, human adaptation.) But what was prime, what mattered, was to him not endurance as such (and
certainly
not the endurers) but the rhythms and structures of a
non-human
reality. That in exploring the substantiality of place he repeatedly used (as his mine-workers) societies nearing the end of their timelessness, and further blurred their historicity by his unsignaled recursions to their past, identifies him as a poet of the material, rather than the temporal, imagination. And it is because he went so deep in search of its materiality that his Aran stands like a rock after all the buzzing froth of Celtic and filmic
exaggeration
has fallen from it.

To suppress Time, so as to throw the grand material dimensions into relief against that blank, is a masterly way with reality. But even if it does justice to the artist’s own splendid simplicities such a work should not pretend to
adequacy
(in a sense that I would like to explain to myself through this book) to even that scrap of the world it takes as its pretext; a million of the little nerves and veins in which Time, as life and sense, works through the material, broken by the great interruption, would cry out against it. Being more concerned with justice to Aran than to Flaherty, I will take up two of these threads (which entangle with the Flaherty story), as example, as reparation, as steps on my way.

The cottage that Flaherty had built to house his Man, Woman and Child of Aran had a modest afterlife once those eternal
verities
had quitted it, serving the growing tourist trade encouraged by the film. It was rented by Elizabeth Rivers, an English artist born in 1908, who came here in 1935. Miss Rivers, as she was known here, stayed in Aran for most of seven years until she went to London to do her bit in the Fire Service during the Blitz. She returned for a short time after the war, and then settled in Dublin, working with Evie Hone on stained glass, and involving herself with the Independent Artists’ Group. She died in 1964.

During her Aran years Miss Rivers supported herself by
putting
up visitors (poorly off Bohemians, many of them, attracted by the power of Flaherty’s romantic vision), whom Pat Mullen would bring over to her from Cill Rónáin pier in his side-car. One of these visitors, Lady Clara Vyvyan, became a friend, and has left a tender portrait of her, and of the cottage’s brimming social life, in her book of dreamily bedazzled travels in Ireland,
On
Timeless
Shores.
Betty Rivers, she tells us, “with her sloe-black eyes and
upstanding
crest of dark hair and quiet voice, was a very
gentle-seeming
person of forceful character.” And as will appear shortly, she was to have need of that quiet fortitude, for her life in Aran was not always the continuous festival of friendship Lady Vyvyan describes. Unfortunately the “timeless” mode of writing (that of the consciousness on holiday, especially in the West of Ireland) tends to be too diffuse for quotation, but it does nevertheless catch certain subjectively genuine moments, and I like to read her descriptions of those spontaneous kitchen
céilí
dances of long ago in the Man of Aran cottage when wide-eyed visitors found
themselves
whirling in constellation with mysterious beings who seem to have just lifted the latch and stepped in from the Celtic
otherworld
.

Elizabeth River’s woodcuts of island life, in a style slightly
cubicized
by her earlier studies at the Academie L’hôte in Paris, hang in a number of Aran homes. She also provided covers for various books (those of Pat Mullen and Tom O’Flaherty, that came in the
wake of the Film, and Risteard de Paor’s work of young love of Aran,
Úll
i
mBarr
an
Ghéagáin
)—likeable and competent work, if unsound on the question of which end of a currach is the sharp one. She was a writer too; I have already quoted from her
autobiographical
Stranger
in
Aran,
apropos of the ghosts of the old
shore-workers
. The book, published in 1946, is one of those slim hand-printed volumes from the Cuala Press with the feel and look of a delicately flavoured and wholesome biscuit. She was evidently a keen and sympathetic listener, and I find her record of Aran’s talk (at work and at dances, matchmakings and weddings) more vivid and convincing than the cursory Dufyesque notes with which she illustrates herself. Aran’s silences too are well rendered: her
account
of a wild sea-crossing after which the currach crew lie on the shore for a while and then walk inland without having referred in any way to the dangers they had been through, is in its quietism more telling than all the blustering breakers of other Aran books.

One of the rather vague sketches in
Stranger
in
Aran
shows young men carrying seaweed up the shore, and in the
reminiscences
of those men, now grown old, I find Miss Rivers as an equally vaguely observed figure with a sketchbook looking down at them from the shinglebank. It seems that she was liked and
respected
by the islanders, but her life here was shadowed by the hostility of a cleric of the old school, Father Thomas Killeen, who was parish priest of Aran from 1935 to 1948. This man was agitated by the question of
mná
treabhsair,
as the islanders called women who wore trousers, and in a sermon on the topic he recalled the Old Testament (rather than the New) on the stoning of immoral women. Stone-throwing was a pastime for which the young were more usually reproved in Aran, and no doubt the children took the hint joyously when Father Killeen suggested it would be right to let such women know they were not welcome in the
community
. Some respectable ladies of Aran still remember with rueful smiles ambushing trousered women visitors to Dún Aonghasa. According to one version of the tale, the first to have to run from the attack were the wife and daughter of a superintendent of
police
,
who complained to the local
garda
í
and
were not mollified on hearing that a sermon had been “misunderstood”; shortly
afterwards
the priest was called to the Archbishop at Tuam and his zeal reproved. Another version has it that he had to abandon his
crusade
when his own niece returned from America wearing trousers. In any case he restricted himself thereafter to the repression of courting, dancing and dirty books, especially those of Liam
O’Flaherty
.

Many people, including herself, suspected that Miss Rivers was the real object of the priest’s campaign, that he wanted to drive her out, as being an artist and therefore a potential corruptor of the community. Father Killeen is remembered today as much for the wearisome length of the feast-day processions he inaugurated, and to which he was devoted, as for his intolerance of laxity. But once when the headmaster of the Cill Rónáin school asked Miss Rivers to paint a banner to be hung across the road for one of these processions, she agreed only after he had sworn himself to secrecy as to her part in it, for it seems that the priest would have ordered it to be taken down if he had known it was her work. This atmosphere of insult made her unhappy here, but she did not leave, and the absence of bitterness in
Stranger
in
Aran
is a Christian eloquence. However, the word
stráinséar,
the usual Aran-Irish term for a non-islander, has no undertone of hostility and it is not quite exactly translated by the English “stranger”; so perhaps Miss Rivers did allow the slightest tinge of bitterness to shade the title she gave herself.