The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (2 page)

The freeing of the imagination is one of the great bounties of literature. Before going to Aran he had been something of a dilettante, and afterwards came the notebooks and a series of plays bursting with the viscera of that hurt land and that hurt race. Unlike James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, Synge deemed it a sin to have spent any night out of Ireland and even admitted to a jealousy upon hearing of an acquaintance going back to the Blasket Islands, when Synge himself could not go because some duties at the Abbey Theatre kept him captive. Everything Irish became sacred and he had fallen in love, rather as if he had fallen in love with a goddess. But this was no courtly dalliance; this was a hard exacting place, and even in the eyes of the young girls he sensed a prehistoric disillusion. It was also a new world and the necessary rupture which he required from his own class. Before that, he had lived with his mother and family in faded grandeur and even mourned the passing of the eighteenth-century aristocracy manifest in the broken greenhouses and the moth-eaten libraries. His family were landowners, his brother had to evict people from their holdings in County Wicklow and later burned the cabins, but Synge does not write about this—perhaps he couldn't. He does, however, describe an eviction on the island, his throb of pain at seeing the armed police and a hired rabble arrive in a steamer to evict the people and take away their few animals as surety. What began as tragedy ended in pandemonium, with the women howling and the men driving their pigs and cattle among the police to create chaos and eventually letting loose a bull so that the proceedings were thwarted. English jurisdiction he resented, but he was not a fervent nationalist, not like Maud Gonne, or Yeats under the aegis of Maud Gonne, whose incendiary passions alarmed him. His untethered imagination put him beyond any consideration of national pride or political fervor.

Yeats and Lady Gregory, fearing that the myths and folktales of Ireland would get lost, visited the peasants and copied down what they heard, but Synge went deeper, he lived with them. A change in a writer's daemon is a baffling thing and usually brought about by some crisis or inner convulsion. It may be that Synge recognized that the tumor that had to be removed from his neck was the outset of the cancer that would kill him. It may be. Soon after, he lost his hair and from then on, in company, wore a copious black wig. Whom the gods love die young. And it is a great thing when in that abbreviation of time, something seismic is created. Synge knew, and so his characters were to know, man's ridiculous stance against the furies of time and nature. He knew in his soul (as Camus only knew in his mind) the absurdity of existence and knew that man's only recourse is defiance. In
In the Shadow of the Glen,
for instance, a tramp says to a disenchanted woman who is about to leave her snarling husband, “Come along with me now, lady of the house and it's not blather you'll be hearing only, you'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm.” No soft words here. These people have too bitter a time of it and for the most part their dreaming is kept to themselves. Yet they do dream luxurious fables—a a woman in the dark night summons up houses of gold and speckled horses and is wakened by the cold and the dripping thatch and a donkey braying. Synge's empathy with nature was uncanny. He did not merely describe storms, he lived them and induces us to live them with him; the canvas boat rolling and vaulting; at one moment being plunged down into the furrow of the dark green water, then flung up into the air and looking down on the heads of the rowers as if on a ladder, or splayed across , a forest of white sea-crests, the struggling men like centaurs, and all the time his fear countered with a strange exhilaration, on account of being so close to death.

He is a naturalist, botanist, poet and storyteller all in one. You have to live a lonely and self-immolating existence to be as aware as that. The loneliness at times was transmuted into a kind of reckless ecstasy so that in the miasma of rain and grayness we find him on a rock in Aran absorbing the luminous warmth of the sun, seeing the island itself as a jewel, the bay almost too blue to look at, a white cirrus of gulls' wings, a shift from darkness to blinding brightness. Reading it one feels the correspondence between the outer light and his own mood, a sudden deliverance from despondency. He believed that some places make for dementia. He had a liking for mad things. Barbaric stories fascinated him. One was of a man in Wicklow, who after a few whiskies stripped off his clothes, went into the glens and was found days later, the crows feeding on him. When a writer chooses a theme he is merely amplifying his inner affinities. This silent drifting man had in him the makings of a murderer. Murder first occurred to him as a young man when he renounced his faith and in the doing renounced his mother. Born into this pious family where the Bible was read each evening, his company comprising his mother and grand-mother and a tutor, he seemed the perfectly shy, dutiful youngest son. Then at the age of twelve a crisis of faith: he read Darwin and upon learning that a human hand was a genetic development from a bat's wing, he renounced Christianity, betrayed Christ and believed himself to be a Judas. Incest and parricide were what struck him, as they did Proust, but whereas Proust turned his pathology into a glorious labyrinthine elegy, Synge followed the fates of the outlawed and the savage.

In life he was always contriving to distance himself from the mother with whom he could not make a complete break. When she died from a growth similar to his, he commemorated her in a rare fit of bathos, and this no less to his betrothed, Molly Allgood. When he was not wandering in the glens or in Aran, Synge stayed with his mother in County Wicklow and his one really determined effort to leave her, in his late thirties, has in it all the flurry of improvisation. Old pieces of furniture and books were flung onto a cart that was covered with a tarpaulin, clumsily secured, so that everything got wet. He arrived in a terraced house in Dublin to be closer to his sweetheart but did not stay long. As a lover, he was prey to the same suspicions as most; he took umbrage upon hearing that Molly was seen linking an actor called Dossy Wright and scorned her excuse about a sprained ankle, insisting she was as well able to keep on her feet as anyone he knew. His sexual hungers were great, and a few days after their weekly tryst in the Dublin mountains he would describe himself to her in a letter as “a very starving man.” Sometimes he became a little craven, was ready to go down on his knees to her shadow, then at other times he cancelled meetings at the last minute to accommodate his family yet sat in his room imagining her footfall.

He feared that his mother would not approve of Molly, this inamorata who, after all, was a mere shop assistant brought in by her sister, Sara Allgood, to play a small part in an Abbey play, and recognized by Synge as ideal to play his ungovernable heroines. Glad he was of her lively and plucky way but yet he set about trying to educate her, to make her a “lady.” Between the imagination and the notion of protocol there lies such a lamentable gulf, and luckily for us, his imagination and her resistance to being gentrified won the day and these great plays are beyond the confines of gentility or propitiation.

As his health got worse he was wracked with the fear that he would never again write anything so rich and arresting. To Molly he confided his anxieties about his tumors, his exhaustion, his pacing up and down the room at night in the dark; his waning hope. She was young, ambitious, flirtatious, she listened, but had, too, some of the unconscious recoil that the healthy reserve for the ill. Their plans to marry were once again thwarted. He had gone back to his mother's house in Glendalough where he began to write a new play for Molly,
Deirdre of the Sorrows,
but the malign cells were at their work, and he was a man with a death sentence. His last letter to her in 1909, before his operation, is heartbreaking in its restraint, simply asking that if anything should go wrong that she be brave and remember the good times and the beautiful things they had seen.

He gave Ireland what Ireland needed and he was crucified for it. In “The Death of Synge” Yeats calls it “A trumpeting and a coming up to Judgment.” But he has the last word. His detractors are long forgotten, his star is candescent.

In writing
The Playboy of the Western World,
as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk-imagination of these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.

—J. M. S.
January 21, 1907

DAN BURKE
(farmer and herd)
NORA BURKE
(his wife)
MICHEAL DARA
(A young herd)
A TRAMP

 

SCENE.
The last cottage at the head of a long glen in County Wicklow.

Cottage kitchen; turf fire on the right; a bed near it against the wall with a body lying on it covered with a sheet. A door is at the other end of the room, with a low table near it, and stools, or wooden chairs. There are a couple of glasses on the table, and a bottle of whisky, as if for a wake, with two cups, a teapot, and a home-made cake. There is another small door near the bed.
NORA BURKE
is moving about the room, settling a few things, and lighting candles on the table, looking now and then at the bed with an uneasy look. Some one knocks softly at the door. She takes up a stocking with money from the table and puts it in her pocket. Then she opens the door.

 

TRAMP
(outside).
Good evening to you, lady of the house.

NORA. Good evening, kindly stranger, it's a wild night, God help you, to be out in the rain falling.

TRAMP. It is, surely, and I walking to Brittas from the Aughrim fair.

NORA. Is it walking on your feet, stranger?

TRAMP. On my two feet, lady of the house, and when I saw the light below I thought maybe if you'd a sup of new milk and a quiet decent comer where a man could sleep.
(He looks in past her and sees the dead man.)
The Lord have mercy on us all!

NORA. It doesn't matter anyway, stranger, come in out of the rain.

TRAMP
(coming in slowly and going towards the bed).
Is it departed he is?