Ghost Light: A Novel by Joseph O'Connor (2011, 256 pages)

The Irish Quarter

I just finished a few days ago Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor and I was completely amazed by it.  (My post on it is here.)  Star of the Sea centers on the crossing of the ocean in 1847 from Galway to New York City by people driven from Ireland by the famine.

I am not sure this is right but at this moment I think Ghost Light:  A Novel is the greater of the two novels.  Ghost Light:  A Novel centers on Molly Allgood, the love interest in the life of John Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World.  John Synge (1871 to 1909) is one of the most important authors in Irish literary history.  W. B. Yeats, who plays a minor but important role in this novel, proclaimed him a great genius.  I will say it takes either great self-confidence or a degree of hubris to include W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge as characters in a novel but O'Connor pulls this off with transcendent brilliance.   The novel begins in London long after Synge has died.  He never married her, even though he wanted to because his wealthy mother, by whom he seems dominated at least in his portrayal here, did not approve of her.   Molly Allgood is in very bad shape in every possible way.   She keeps her pride by reliving the days when Yeats proclaimed her a great actress and John Synge loved her.  Lady Gregory comes across as very class conscious and tries to tell Synge, not seemingly a strong person, that he is degrading himself through his relationship with Molly.   

There is just so much to like in this novel.  It was just wonderful to see W. B. Yeats brought down from the status of a towering icon to a real person.  One of the really amazing parts of the book was the treatment of Yeats.  As we first meet him he seems a complete egoist, totally full of himself but then we slowly begin to grasp what he was and we are humbled to be in his presence.   We do not like him but Gods don't always have to be likable.  

The novel goes into a lot of detail of how The Abbey Theater worked, behind the stage.  It flashed widely back and forth in time. Molly Allgood (also known by her stage named Marie O'Neill-1885 to 1952) outlived John Synge by fifty-three years but she never moved on from him.   How she copes with her poverty is just heartbreaking.  We also learn about her film career, her years down and out in London, and the start of her acting career.  She appeared in Juno and the Peacock directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  She married twice but, had children but it was always John Synge in her heart.

I love this book.  I am also very interested in the people in the novel.   I concede if you are not interested in John Synge (or for sure if you have not heard of him) this book may not be for you.  I would really suggest you read at least The Playbook of the Western World before reading this novel.  Everyone in this novel is a flawed person, even Yeats, but that just makes the work all the more wonderful.  

I will soon read his novel about the Irish in the American Civil War, Redemption Falls.   

Please share your experiences with O'Connor with us.  

I am also seeking recommendations for post 1990 Irish novels.  

Mel u

The Tinker's Wedding by John Synge

The Tinker's Wedding by John Synge (1908)
"J. M. Synge-Remembering the Future" -Chapter Ten of Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd

The Irish Quarter

1871 to 1909

I have so far read The Aran Islands and The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge.   I am convinced by reading Kiberd's analyses of his work and Colm Toibin's remarks in Lady Gregory's Toothbrush that Synge is the third most important modern Irish author.   His use of language is just incredibly powerful.   His conversations and the patterns of speech in his plays are just wonderful.   It is how I imagine Irish was spoken and I love it!.   There is a beautiful cadence in his plays.  I hope to see one of his plays performed when I am in Ireland in May 2013.

I first became aware of the Irish Traveller culture (once called "Tinkers") when I discovered their predominance in the short stories of Desmond Hogan.  In the spirit of a famous line in Gravity's Rainbow, I think some secrets have been given to the Travellers to preserve against centrifugal history.   I recently acquired an ebook of the complete poems and plays of W. B. Yeats and a search found "Tinker" appears forty one times.   I think in the work of Synge and Yeats Travellers are romanticised and I think to some extent the treatment of Travellers by Hogan is a revolt against this romanticism and attempt to discover some darker truths than Yeats or Sygne were able to deal with.   Yeats and Sygne saw them as stock figures, symbols of freedom that did stand above the cant of Irish culture, where  Hogan helps us see the most oppressive cant was in the allegedly treatment of the Tinkers by figures of the Irish Renaissance in which they acted as though they were attacking the established culture.

A lot of the fun of The Tinker's Wedding is in the language.   Kiberd says the theme of the story is the conflicts between the culture of the Tinkers and the Anglo-Irish as represented by the wish of the Tinker woman to have a bishop perform her marriage ceremony.   I really enjoyed the conversations.  

I plan to read and post on all of Synge's plays.


Please share your experiences with John Synge with us.

"Silence" and "Synge and his Family" by Colm Toibin

"Synge and his Family"  (2012, Chapter Four of New Ways to Kill Your Mother)
"Silence"     (2011)

The Irish Quarter

I am now firmly convinced that John M. Synge (1871 to 1909-most famously author of The Playboy of the Western World) is the third most important figure in modern Irish literary history.   I am still pondering how Lady Augusta Gregory, co-founder and patron of the Abby Theater, should be viewed.   Much of my current understanding of her was shaped by my reading of Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin.  Clearly she was of at least two minds.   On the one hand she was deeply into Irish culture and on the other she as deeply aristocratic, she was very hard on her tenant farmers and basically romanticized the ordinary people of Ireland while looking down on them as individuals.   

"Silence" is  the lead story in Colm Toibin's most recent collection of short stories, The Empty Family.   In this story, which does not let us know who it was about until a few pages have gone by probably so we will not prejudge Gregory, we see how Gregory viewed herself.   We learn of her long term adultery, we learn a good bit about her marriage, and we see how society viewed her.   "Silence" is a very good story.   I think it helps if you know something about why Gregory matters and once you do maybe you will be able to understand her motivations a bit better.   If you want to read this story, you can download the sample eBook from Amazon. 

"Synge and His Family" is a biographical and literary essay from Toibin collection Nine Ways to Kill Your Mother.  ( I think in  Synge one should first read The Playboy of the Western World and then The Aran Islands, followed by the rest of his plays, there are only six and one is incomplete.)  Toibin's essay  is very interesting and I think anyone into Irish literature would profit from reading it.   He tries to "debunk" the notion that W. B. Yeats pushed Synge into going to the Aran Islands, explains his role as the "black sheep" of the family and his long term dependency on his mother.  HE also helps one to understand why his famous play was so controvesial when it was first produced.  




Please share your experience with John Synge or Augusta Gregory with us.

"Sounds ever so dull to me"
Carmilla

Mel U

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin  (2002, 82 pages-Biography)

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin centers on the life of Augusta Gregory (1852 to 1932, Galway, Ireland).   Lady Gregory, she got her title when she married Sir William Gregory, thirty five years her senior,one time governor of Ceylon and considered to have been instrumental in passing laws while a member of parliament that made the fates of the Irish peasants much worse during the famine years.   Gregory, partially thorough and maybe largely through her contact with William Butler Yeats and John M. Synge, came to idolize and romanticize those same peasants while never abandoning the sense of entitlement her marriage gave her.   She is sometimes seen as a hypocritcal figure who spoke of her love for freedom and her wish for a better life for the peasants of Ireland while clinging to her  big house, her Anglo-Irish money and her view of real life ordinary Irish people outside of her small circle as unwashed people who mostly did not own toothbrushes.

Lady Gregory helped found and directed the famous Abby Theater in London.   Toibin does a great job of explaining why this theater was very important in the creation of a sense of Irish identity through plays like The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge.  When the play was first preformed there were riots at the Abby Theater, partially caused by references to Irish women in "shifts" and by its seeming portrayal of the Irish as loving violence country buffoons .   Lady Gregory, as Toibin explains it, referred to the conflict over this play as the battle between those who use a toothbrush, the play's supporters, and those who do not.  Like many an aristocrat who cry out their love for the common man, she liked them best in plays and stories.

Toibin help me greatly to understand the importance of Lady Gregory to Irish Theater.  Even though it can be argued that she was simply a rich woman buying attention from literary greats with money she inherited from a man who exploited horribly the Irish peasants, there import in the great plays of Synge and O'Casey can be directly traced to her.   She did not just give money, she worked very hard to promote the theater and was a still respected student of Irish folklore.   It is hard to really determine Yeats true feeling for her, he needed her money so everything has to a bit ambiguous.  Toibin handles this brilliantly without forcing an opinion on us.

Toibin's prose is as one would expect wonderful.   Lady Gregory's Toothbrush for sure increased my understanding of the Irish culture.   I am starting to understand more and more the central import of the plays of John Synge and Toibin was very illuminating in his remarks on Synge.   I also learned a good bit more about the background of William Butler Yeat's great poems concerning the death of Lady Gregory's son, the most famous of which is "An Irish Airmen Foresees His Death".

This book was a great pleasure to read.  Toibin also lets us see that Lady Gregory, with deep Anglo-Irish aristocratic roots, her money came directly from Irish peasants working in near slave conditions for her husband and his ancestry, was trying desperately to produce an Irish identity for herself while keeping her deeply entrenched belief that she, along with her primary mentor and patronage recipient, were of an old the natural heirs of an Irish aristocracy going back to the Celts and beyond.  In Lady Gregory's jest about a toothbrush, one seems beneath layers of pretense.

I very much enjoyed this book, learned a lot from it, and I endorse it to anyone interested in Irish literature or history.

It is available from Lilliput Press, Ireland's leading independent publishing house.  A perusal of their catalog is itself a great learning experience.

Mel u

The Aran Islands by John Synge

The Aran Islands by John Synge (1901)
"J. M. Synge-Remembering the Future" -Chapter Ten of Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd

The Irish Quarter

1871 to 1909

Dublin, Ireland

John Synge, only known outside of serious Irish reader circles for his play The Playboy of the Western World, appears to be, based on my reading of Declan Kiberd's thoughts on him, the third most important figure in Irish literature, behind James Joyce and William Butler Yeats.   Synge, in his plays about Irish peasants and in his travel book,  The Aran Islands, helped to create the soul of Irish literature.   I have previously posted on two of his plays, Riders of the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World.  I know now I did not come close to "getting" these works and I will reread them soon along with his other plays.   (I will next read The Tinker's Wedding.)

Synge was born into a family of Protestant landed gentry.  Synge was educated in private schools in Dublin and Bray.  His mother's family was the Galway area.  (There is some background information on him in my prior posts on his work.)    He was to develop a great interest in the culture and history of Ireland, especially in antiquites and folk tales.   At the urging of Yeats, he made a visit to the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway.  The islands are very rugged and the only way for the people who live there to survive is from fishing and potato farming.   The conditions were near neolithic when Synge visited.  Kiberd talks about how Synge did in fact romanticise and perhaps Orientalize the residents of the islands but it is clear from reading The Aran Islands that he was deeply moved and transformed by his encounters with the people there, his perception of their very old and very hard way of life, the wild to him beauty of the women and the sheer power of the sea surrounding the islands.   Through the eyes of Sygne, we learn of the belief in fairies among the island residents, we hear the stories of their lives and we walk the islands with Synge.   

The Aran Islands is a beautifully written work, you can feel the deep impact these islands had on Synge.  

Anyone seriously into Irish literature and culture needs to read this book, my guess is most already have.   

I will be reading all of his plays, I hope

Please share your experience with Synge with us,

Mel u

The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge

The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
Riders to the Sea (1904)

Two Dramas by one of Ireland's Premier Playwrights

"And that enquiring man John Synge comes next"-W. B. Yeats

John Synge (Dublin, Ireland, 1871 to 1909) is most famous for his drama The Playboy of the Western World.     The title of the play has become an international cliche.    (There is good article on his life, work and influence here).    He was a co-founder of the famous Abbey Theater and an associate of many of the literary greats of the period.

In his day his plays were considered quite daring in their content.

I am very glad I decided to read both of these works.  The Playboy of the Western World would probably take at the tops two hours to preform on the stage and Riders to the Sea  under thirty minutes.

The Playboy of the Western World is set in County Mayo on the western coast of Ireland.   This is what "western world" means.   The action takes place in a pub.,   The central character, the playboy, tells the patrons of the pub that he is on the run because he has killed his father.   The atmosphere of the bar is beautifully done down to the wild looking publicans daughter who is quite taken with the young playboy.   It turns out that he is only pretending to have killed his father to give himself status.   

I loved the dialect and the vocabulary  used in this work.   I think done well it would be beautiful to hear.    It also brings home how important having a good story to tell was in Ireland and the role of the pub in Irish life at the time.   

Riders to the Sea is a brief one act drama.   It is set in the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.   These rugged islands became the last refuge for many Catholics during the invasion by Cromwell.   A great many of the residents make their living from the sea.   The most important character is an older woman, Maurya, who has lost her husband, her father in law, and five sons to fishing accidents.   They went to the sea and never returned.  This is a profoundly sad work.   

You can easily find these works online.   I read them both via dailylit.com.   They are very much worth the time it takes to read them.   I think you need to read both to get an accurate understanding of the work of Synge.

The next drama I post on will be Miss Julia by August Strindberg, followed by The Countess Cathleen by W. B. Yeats.   

Mel u