Stones of Aran (24 page)

In the decades since Artaud’s fire-storms, tourists have become more a matter of statistical interest to the islanders than vice versa; each season is “up” or “down” on the last by so many per cent. Correspondingly, new treatments of Aran in old and new media have to be reckoned in batches. Of the many books now available a favourite is
Aran,
Islands
of
Legend,
by P.A.Ó Síocháin (published in 1962 and doing well in the New Age), according to which the islands are but the tiny fragments of a great Atlantis, of which the Aran forts were the defence-line until it subsided into the ocean without geological fuss “about 2,200 years ago,”
halving
Dún Aonghasa in the process and leaving behind the
ancestors
of today’s Araners. In contrast,
Oileáin
Árann,
stair
na
n
oileáin
anuas
go
dti
1922,
a
well researched history, particularly good on nineteenth-century politics (it has saved me weeks in old newspaper files), by an island-born teacher, Antoine Powell, has been unjustly neglected; one elderly shopkeeper of Cill Rónáin said to me “I suppose because he’s one of our own we think it can’t be any good.” Almost too late for me to mention it here,
appears
a competent multidisciplinary study with the comic title,
The
Book
of
Aran.
Seamus Heaney has written on these “three stepping-stones out of Europe,” as have his contemporaries,
Michael
Longley and Derek Mahon; there are dozens of television films in various languages, an opera (
Opera
d’Aran,
by Gilbert Bécaud, first performed in Paris in 1962), pamphlets, pop-songs, pocket-guides, maps…. The islands are perpetually stormbound in interpretations.

Finally, Aran has evinced a sentimental interest in tourists too. For some time it has been offering its own temperate version of the sun-sand-&-sex culture of more torrid shores. A few of “the lads” took to hanging around on the beaches hoping to pick up “women”; one of them, I remember, was so assiduous his mates used to say, “Pity he can’t swim, he’d make a great lifeguard.” And then, one summer in the ’seventies, a scattering of girls of a new breed arrived, like rare butterflies from some exceptional hatching far away. They knew enough about sex to intimidate the local experts, but they wanted something more—total mystical identification with the island through love. One of these girls, a Californian, somehow drifted into our home and settled there for a bit, sustaining herself on a little jar of tofu she had with her and an occasional lettuce leaf from the garden. Her project was
simple
: to have an affair with a man called George or the local
equivalent
, on as many famous islands as possible. We heard a good deal about her adventures in this parodic quest. She soon picked out and got to know one Seoirse, a handsome young fisherman devoted to the quiet pint. She suggested a stroll through the
fragrant
, twilight boreens; he was agreeable, and they met by
appointment
. When he went stumping off ahead of her, shoulders bowed as if he were carrying a sack of feed-beet to the cattle, she scampered after him crying “Seoirse! You might at least hold my hand!”; and then, running ahead to ambush him, “Seoirse! I’m the best thing that ever happened to you—why don’t you
recognize
that?” But Seoirse was slow to recognize that, and she
became
impatient. The affair reached its climax when her island love was due back from a few days away with his trawler. She put on a floaty cotton dress and highlighted her hair, and waited for him in the American Bar, in company with the wife of another of the boat’s crew. When at last the trawler appeared in the mouth of the harbour, the Californian suggested that they should both run down onto the quay to welcome their menfolk home from the sea; but the Aran woman was amazed at the idea and hastily said that she had to go home and put on the spuds. So California
teased up her hair into a storm of sparks and went skipping down the harbour road alone. Seoirse, peering out of the little window of the deck-house, saw this maenad approaching, and dived into the hold, where he busied himself gutting fish for an hour or so, until she had given up and gone away disconsolate. Later that evening she sat under a wall in a field, wondering if she should leave the island, and waiting for Nature to send her a sign. As dusk gathered about her, a strange rippling mystic music drifted to her on the breeze; she looked over the wall and found it was a cow copiously urinating. And so she decided to leave Aran. We used to get postcards from her now and again; she was screeching around Capri on the pillion of Giorgio’s Vespa, or sweeping up broken glass in Georgieu’s taverna on Mykonos. As an expert in ironies she will forgive me for having merged her story with that of one of her sister visionaries.

And so Aran, and especially Cill Rónáin, continues through the years to disappoint, to be a little discrepant to the visitors’ dreams. Nowadays something like 150,000 people visit the islands each summer. Long after midnight the roar of the pubs spewing out their clientele can be heard as far as where St. Enda’s bones rest on the farther side of the bay, and at the end of the season it takes a fortnight of autumn gales to hose the town into sobriety again. A line of Yeats suggests we should tread softly upon dreams, but in truth dreams themselves are heavy-footed, whether they wear pampooties or jackboots. Sometimes I tremble for the stone that has to bear all their trampling.

The closely built-up Cill Rónáin that measures itself by the
bed-nights
and coffee-spoons of tourism, Íochtar an Bhaile, fades out only a couple of hundred yards north of the harbour, and beyond it Lár an Bhaile, the “middle of town,” is made spacious by the
disused grounds and empty shells of the Protestant church and rectory. That faith, in its complicity with economic and social power, is extinct in Aran, and its practice restricted to private observation. Only a few elderly islanders still feel resentful of the stony contempt with which the select little community stared down its neighbours, and what they remember of its history is reduced to a few grotesque motifs that could furnish the
beginnings
of a ghost story. Some years ago, before the bright clean waves of electricity and tourism had swept out the old pub of the area, a descendant of a member of that Cill Rónáin ascendancy—a rather aberrant member in the eyes of his co-religionists—came back to Aran looking for his roots:

The last of the daylight, sodden with porter, eased itself out of the door, but the creature of sticks and crumpled brown paper behind the bar showed no inclination to replace it with the cheer of a lantern. Three or four elderly islanders on a wooden bench along one wall looked down as if observing the occasional involuntary shiftings of their boots on the concrete floor, glanced from under their brows at the stranger on the bench opposite, looked down again, left the silence to thicken, broke it with a brief sardonic interchange about the old sack that had been thrown over the vomit left in the corner from the previous night, let their eyes stray across the stranger again. George Stoney, professor of Film and Television at New York University, noted with an eye trained by his medium the symptoms of their
reluctance
to answer his queries. That afternoon he had located the grave of his grandfather in the farthest corner of the Protestant churchyard; it was marked, not by a proper tombstone like those of the coastguards but by two small boulders, like an unbaptized child’s grave, one of which bore the name “Dr. Stoney,” and no date. As a doctor, Stoney would have been one of the élite. What then was the reason for this ignominy? So far all he had prized out of the taciturn natives was some gossip about Dr. Stoney’s wife, a drunkard. Stoney used to lock her in her bedroom to keep her away from the public house, and still he would find her roaring drunk when he came home, for the old
crone
from
the
shebeen
would
come
round
with
a
sup
of
poitín
for her, which Mrs. Stoney would suck up with a straw through the keyhole. The professor sighed, and nodded to the lugubrious publican, and waited while another round of pints materialized like fungus on the damp counter. The natives were all leaning together in
whispering
consultation. Apparently one of them was seeking the authority of the rest to tell the tale of Dr. Stoney’s burial, for he eventually leaned a little forward of the others, and a slow hesitant muttering emerged from between the peak of his cap and the great knot of fingers before his face. With difficulty the American disengaged a narrative from the repetitious web of obscurities. Dr. Stoney, he gathered, had been a drunkard too, and also used to take laudanum from the dispensary he ran. One day he had been found dead, or apparently so. Mr. Kilbride, the minister, didn’t like the doctor because once when some poor people were in arrears and their cases were due to be heard, he had got into the land-agent’s office—it shared a building with the dispensary—and forged the agent’s signature on the dockets saying the rent had been paid, and the agent hadn’t noticed the signatures, so that when he produced the dockets in court everyone laughed and the judge threw out the case, and the poor people couldn’t be evicted. All the same, Dr. Stoney was a Protestant, so Mr. Kilbride had to let him be buried in the Protestant graveyard. Four men carried the
coffin
on their shoulders, and each one of them thought he heard the body shift in it, but didn’t like to say so for fear of making a fool of himself. And some say that Mr. Kilbride heard Dr. Stoney stirring too, but “he got him buried while he had him ill, because there was a rumour out that Stoney was going to turn Catholic.”…

Professor Stoney is not a horror-film director—he had come to Aran, not just to look up his grandfather’s grave, but to make a documentary on the filming of
Man
of
Aran
—and so we have no further development of this promising scenario. We are left to consider an incredible allegation, that the Protestant rector
allowed
one of his flock to be buried alive rather than risk losing him to the Catholic faith. How could such a thing come to be
believed? Sadly, the whole history of Protestantism in Aran
answers
that question.

In the far background of Irish folk attitudes to Protestantism stands Cromwell, synonymous with massacre and sacrilege, and in Aran there are ruined churches and the battlements of Arkin Castle to keep his memory alive. But by the early nineteenth
century
the garrison had so long departed and the abandoned fort had been so thoroughly recolonized by the village that his long shadow would have been greatly attenuated. Protestantism then was a handful of government officials and the twice-yearly visits of the landlord’s agent; it was in the long-settled nature of things that the alien faith went with a secular authority emanating from so far away as to be almost abstract, and whose representatives on the ground of Aran were not too pressing, not too hard to outwit. In practice the islanders were ruled by their priest and by the Catholic middleman, Patrick O’Flaherty. A Protestant school had been opened in 1826, funded by the London Hibernian Society and later taken over by the Irish Island Society, a charity founded expressly to service the Protestant communities of such remote areas as this. There was also, briefly, a Protestant minister in Aran in 1835, whose congregation was composed of a few coastguards, and there were schools in Kilmurvey and Kilronan at which both the Protestant and the Catholic catechisms were used. Such a state of affairs was to become unthinkable within twenty years.

However, even in that relatively ecumenical pre-Famine
period
Protestantism was held in strict quarantine by the Catholic priest. In 1841, when a Presbyterian missioner, the Rev. Henry M’Manus, asked an Aran boatman in Galway docks to bring him over, he was told “Sure we’re ordered not to take any Jumpers into the islands.” (The OED states that the word “jumper,” meaning a Protestant, originated from the leapings of a Welsh sect.) The
offensive
term was new to M’Manus, but he ignored the insult and jumped into the boat, saying in Irish “I’ll go in, in the name of God.” This half-convinced the Aranmen that he was a priest, and they carried him to Cill Rónáin for nothing and were kind to
him in his seasickness during a stormy crossing that took thirteen hours. Once on the island, however, he found he could do
nothing
to bring the Bible to the people. A coastguard told him that the priest allowed no communication, not even a common
salutation
, between his flock and the Protestants, while a Methodist missionary who was lodging with the coastguard was “barely
permitted
to exist on the island” and was denied all access to the people. M’Manus wanted to preach a sermon in Irish, but he was told that “even if the people were willing to come, they durst not, so great was the persecution that would ensue.” Taking his Irish Testament he went from door to door, but was everywhere
politely
refused permission to read from it, and eventually he retired to a lonely place among the rocks and spent a solitary Sabbath reading comforting words in view of the great Atlantic. Then, having found no “door of usefulness” open to him, he decided to return to Galway; but no boat would carry him, and it was only after eight days of detention that he was rescued by some Galway gentlemen who happened to land on the island. The experience showed him “the utter inexcusableness of that system of
intolerance
to which they [the islanders] were subjected by their
clergyman
,” for that clergyman was not putting into their hands the means of enlightenment, the Scriptures, in the Irish language. In fact M’Manus claims that in twenty years of travelling in the Irish-speaking west and south he never once found an Irish school set up by the Catholic clergy, or an Irish Bible circulated;
whatever
had been done in that way was exclusively the work of
Protestant
churches. And as for the Catholic idea that the means of salvation could be taught without Scripture books, it was in his opinion totally discredited by the instances of gross superstition and blind credulity he had come across in Aran, such as an
attempt
he had witnessed to calm a storm by immersing a bag
containing
two temperance medals and a scapular in the sea.

Nevertheless the Island and Coast Society (as the Irish Island Society had renamed itself) could report some progress in that decade before the Famine. In 1833 their officers had found not a
single native who would listen to the Gospel, but ten years later their school in Cill Rónáin had twenty-five scholars on its rolls despite that fact that “the most unworthy means have been used to induce the parents to withdraw their children.” In 1845 it
was supporting a minister in Aran, the Rev. Mr. Cather, who joined with the Catholic clergy, Patrick O’Flaherty and other members of the local relief committee in gathering money and distributing meal to the starving. By 1846 the church had been built, and “though as yet silent and unconsecrated, the erection of this
beautiful
edifice, sacred to the worship on which they have hitherto looked with contempt, seems already to have produced an effect on the minds of the natives, who now treat with respect those persons they had been taught to despise—formerly a walk around the largest Island, nineteen miles in circuit, without food, was the penance for communication with any of the Protestants or
converts
—this is entirely done away with.” The boiler brought in by the Society was providing two hundred quarts of soup a day to the Aran poor—and in this charitable act, here as throughout Ireland, were the poisonous seeds of “souperism,” the use of food to bribe the hungry to quit their native faith.

It was not until 1851 that Aran got a permanent and resident minister. The Rev. Alexander Hamilton Synge spent four
complaintful
years in the island, which was not for him the adored if difficult mistress it was to be for his nephew J. M. Synge nearly thirty years later. The minister’s letters to his brothers show him cringing away from the place in disgust. At first he lodged in the inn, where

He saw himself as a castaway from all comforts:

In fact his letters report only one such attack:

As for his ministry to the Protestants, “the sermon writing is the most difficult of all & takes up a great deal of time—then preaching it to a very small number makes it some thing harder I think.” The newly built rectory he moved into in December of the next year was “a wet and windy concern—it leaks like a sieve & rocks in the wind.” From all this his refuge was the open sea and the deck of his fishing smack, the
Georgiana,
which he bought within months of arriving in Aran, and the fortunes of which fill most of his letters. At that period the fishermen of the Claddagh, the Irish-speaking and semi-autonomous village outside the walls of Galway, claimed exclusive rights in the whole of Galway Bay, and the “Jumper’s boat” aroused their resentment. Unable to
market
his catch in Galway, Synge had to have it basketted and sent by the recently established railway to Dublin, and even to Liverpool. The Claddagh men then became dangerously threatening. The
Galway
Vindicator
of 2nd June 1853 reported the confrontation: