J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival

By Giulia Bruna

Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination.

J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780815654117

Book preview

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Copyright © 2017 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2017

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3545-1 (hardcover)978-0-8156-3533-8 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5411-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruna, Giulia, author.

Title: J. M. Synge and travel writing of the Irish revival / Giulia Bruna.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2017. | Series: Irish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034884 (print) | LCCN 2017043630 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654117 (e-book) | ISBN 9780815635451 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815635338 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Synge, J. M. (John Millington), 1871–1909—Criticism and interpretation. | Travelers’ writings, Irish—History and criticism. | Travel writing—Ireland—History. | Ireland—In literature.

Classification: LCC PR5534 (ebook) | LCC PR5534 .B78 2017 (print) | DDC 822/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034884

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Will and to my families in

Cuneo, Dublin, and Boston,

with deepest gratitude

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Traveling Ireland and Writing Travel with J. M. Synge during the Revival

1. The Cuckoo with Its Pipit

Travel and Modernity in The Aran Islands

2. Reimagining Travel and Popular Entertainment

The West Kerry Essays

3. Traveling Journalist

J. M. Synge in the Congested Districts

4. J. M. Synge in the Garden of Ireland

The Wicklow Essays

Epilogue

Turning Home

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Matilda E. Banim, A Lesson in Spinning, illustration, 1892

2.J. M. Synge, photograph of people waiting for the steamer on Kilronan Pier, Aran Islands, c. 1900

3.J. M. Synge, photograph showing a man and boy rolling up a rope on Innis Óirr, c. 1900

4.J. M. Synge, back of photograph documenting rope-making activity on Aran, c. 1900

5.J. M. Synge, photograph of the MacDonagh cottage on Inis Meáin, Aran Islands, c. 1900

6.Matilda E. Banim, Long Car, illustration, 1891

7.Jack B. Yeats, sketch with detail of a hotel room in Swinford, 1905

8.Jack B. Yeats, sketch of Synge sitting on a bench in Carna, 1905

9.Jack B. Yeats, sketch of Synge’s profile overlooking a landscape, 1905

10.Jack B. Yeats, sketch of man in traditional Chinese clothes with children, 1905

Acknowledgments

This book has been a life-changing experience that took me on a journey to Ireland, where I found the support of colleagues, family, and numerous friends. First of all, I thank P. J. Mathews at the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. He has been a fantastic mentor, and I am grateful beyond words for his intellectual guidance, expertise, and constant support throughout my career.

At University College Dublin (UCD), I found a supportive and thriving academic community that helped me and sustained me from the first moments I set foot in Belfield. I acknowledge most sincerely the UCD Humanities Institute and its directors over the years, in particular Gerardine Meaney. The institute has been a comfortable academic home to me. Its research support, the stimulating intellectual environment, as well as the other researchers’ company and camaraderie were crucial to me in many phases of this project. John Brannigan in the UCD School of English also deserves a special mention for his mentorship in 2015, when I worked there and for the Humanities Institute as a research assistant. In the School of English, I am also indebted to the numerous staff, fellow lecturers, and tutors with whom I worked. Among them, I thank in particular Fionnuala Dillane for her help and guidance in teaching matters and for her ongoing support.

I thank Professor Melita Cataldi for the passion and intellectual acumen she demonstrated for Irish literature at the onset of my Irish journey (in Italy!). She inspired my travels to Ireland and in the academic world and always encouraged me during my studies in Italy and Ireland during her numerous visits. At the beginning of my Irish journey in Ireland, Professor Declan Kiberd was a wonderful teacher while I was pursuing an MA in Anglo-Irish literature at UCD. I thank him for his encouragement that I undertake doctoral studies and for his ongoing support over the years.

For this book, I had the fortune to carry out research in a number of libraries, archives, and special collections in Ireland and the United States. I am thankful to various institutions for granting permission to publish various manuscript materials and illustrations. The Board of Trinity College Dublin generously gave me permission to quote from Synge’s manuscripts and to reproduce his Aran photographs. Sincerest thanks to the National Gallery of Ireland for also granting me license to reproduce important material held in the Jack B. Yeats Archive: two photographs by Synge, Jack Yeats’s sketch from his trip to the Congested Districts with Synge in 1905, and the postcard with a photograph of a jaunting car that graces the cover of this book. At the National Gallery, I am thankful to Barry McLoughlin and in particular Sean Mooney for their help in retrieving these important materials. All of Jack Yeats’s material used here is published with permission from the Estate of Jack B. Yeats, Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) London/Irish Visual Artists Rights Association (IVARO) Dublin. I thank Adrian Colwell at IVARO for his assistance. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, granted permission to reproduce three of Jack Yeats’s sketches in chapter 3. I am indebted to the Berg curator Isaac Gewirtz and in particular to Berg librarians Joshua McKeon and Mary Catherine Kinniburgh for their assistance. My friend Irene Bulla, teaching fellow in Italian and comparative literature at Columbia University, also provided invaluable help in retrieving the reproductions. The images from Mary Banim’s book Here and There through Ireland in chapters 1 and 2 have been published courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. J. M. Synge’s poem Abroad in the epilogue is printed by permission of Oxford University Press.

I am also most indebted to Ondřej Pilný at Charles University in Prague for providing important Czech sources used in chapter 4. I also thank him for permission to reproduce material in chapter 3 that had previously appeared in my article ‘I Like Not Lifting the Rags from My Mother Country for to Tickle the Sentiments of Manchester’: Synge’s Subversive Practice in ‘In the Congested Districts,’ in The Politics of Irish Writings, edited by Kateřina Jenčová, Michaela Marková, Radvan Markus, and Hana Pavelková (Prague: Centre for Irish Studies, Charles Univ., 2010), 46–56. Dr. Pilný’s Centre for Irish Studies hosted an unforgettable postgraduate conference in 2009 that proved crucial for me to rehearse some of the ideas contained in this book. Some material in chapter 3 also appeared in my article On the Road in the Congested Districts with John Synge and Jack Yeats: Visual and Textual Shaping of Irishness, in Founder to Shore: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies, edited by Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Lindsay Milligan, and Dan Wall (Aberdeen: Arts and Humanities Research Council Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 2010), 43–54. I am grateful to Shane Alcobia-Murphy for granting me permission to republish that material. The conference he organized in 2009 at the University of Aberdeen Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies provided another useful forum for discussion.

In 2009 on Inis Meáin, I attended the launch of an exhibition of J. M. Synge’s photographs arranged by Siamsa Tíre (National Folk Theater of Ireland) that I discuss in chapter 1. I thank its curator, Ciarán Walsh, for facilitating my visit to the island for the exhibition launch.

A special mention must also be made of the staff at Syracuse University Press. This book would have never seen the light of day without the unstinting support of acquisitions editor Deborah Manion, whose enthusiasm, professionalism, and always helpful guidance have sustained me throughout the publishing process. I am grateful to her for passionately believing in this project and for seeing it through completion. I would also like to acknowledge the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript and offered precious advice.

Warmest thanks go to my friend and colleague at UCD Catherine Wilsdon for her friendship, collegiality, and support in this and other projects. With Catherine, I share a passion for J. M. Synge and many academic adventures: from Irish Revival conferences to the Irish Revival Network and more.

My gratitude also goes to a number of friends I have made in Ireland since 2006—Carlos Castro, Leo Close, Tom Cronin, Ritchie Jorge Fernandez, Ciaran McCabe, Anna Molinari, Anne Mulhall, Robert Murphy, David Ryan, and others. They have sustained me with their laughter, innumerable coffees, dinners, pints, and unforgettable literary chats in front of the library and football matches. Very special thanks go to Elena Boychenko, Gabriella Caminotto, Paola Cortese, Chih-Hsien Hsieh, Sonka Ihnen, my Irish sister Monica Insinga, Michiko Okazow, Antonio Pieri, Silvia Pischedda, Maurizio Pittau, Corinna Ricasoli, Viviana Spagnuolo, Chiara Tedaldi, Ben Tsutomu, Kumiko Yamada, and Ciarán Young as well as to all the Radio Dublino crew. Grazie to Marguerite Duggan for her kindness and support. Thanks also to Barry Curran, Lorraine Forde, and the Curran families in Headford.

I am indebted to all my friends in Cuneo, Italy, for remaking home for me every time I traveled back there and for visiting in Dublin. Thanks to Luca Barbero and the rest of the Sisimizi ska band, Anna Bottero, Elisa Candela, Luciano Cavallero, Ottavia Emmolo, Sara Garis, Paolo Ghibaudo, Enrico Gerardo Giorda, Luisella Mellino and Carmen Musilli at Radio Piemonte Sound, Alessandro Oreglia, Federica Ramella-Bon, Alessandra Rostagno and the Champions volleyball team, and Valentina Tortone, along with everybody else whom I forgot to include. In Verona, where I completed this book, I thank my friends Lorenzo Agostinis, Elinor Anderson, and Patrick O’Connor, who have provided much needed destressing moments and support.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my families in Cuneo, Dublin, and Boston. I am indebted to my family in Ireland—Manuela Costamagna, Mark Guildea, and Sophia Guildea—for providing necessary distractions from research, for feeding me, and for entertaining me with familial warmth and the deepest affection. In Boston, Paul and Mary Hutchinson and the Hutchinson household always made me feel welcome, providing hospitality, unforgettable Christmas parties, and summer days at the beach. My family in Italy—my father, Sergio; my mother, Valeria; my brother, Michele—deserve all my gratitude for their untiring love and unobtrusive support and for always accepting and encouraging my choices. They have also followed me on a couple of memorable windswept journeys in Ireland, and I thank them for that, too. To William Hutchinson go all my love and gratitude for always being there as well as for his never-ending support and understanding, his generous advice, and his loving care.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Traveling Ireland and Writing Travel with J. M. Synge during the Revival

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was a gifted travel writer. He saw travel as engrained in his academic and artistic aspirations and wrote some of the most poignant travel writing of the early twentieth century. In the lines he jotted down to his fiancée, Abbey Theatre actress Molly Allgood, while he was heading to England to visit Jack Yeats on May 30, 1907, a vivid snapshot of Synge as a travel writer comes into focus: "It seems funny to me to be on the road again I have been so long shut up. Certainly there is nothing like traveling. I feel better already. It is one of the wettest nights I have ever come across, it is coming down in bucket-fulls so I cant [ sic ] walk about anywhere. This is like writing when you are hypnotised because I’m scribbling away as hard as I can and all the time I’m listening to the talk at the table behind me. I dont [ sic ] know how much this trip will cost, I like this route it has something out of the common." ¹ In the passage, Synge’s journey is forced into a temporary rest owing to a heavy rainfall. During this break from traveling, Synge’s physical dynamism—his delight to be on the road again and his renewed energy after a relapse of the disease (Hodgkin’s) that would be fatal to him in 1909—is channeled into writing. In these rushed lines, the ideas of mobility and creativity seem to be almost interchangeable, to the point that one could almost substitute the word traveling with writing (and vice versa), and the sense would remain unaltered. Broadly speaking, this book ponders the interlocking of traveling and writing in Synge’s nonfiction about Irish places. Travel, in James Clifford’s inclusive definition, encompasses a range of more or less voluntarist practices of leaving ‘home’ to go to some ‘other’ place. Clifford further notes how this displacement takes place for the purpose of gain—material, spiritual, scientific. It involves obtaining knowledge and/or having an ‘experience’ (exciting, edifying, pleasurable, estranging, broadening). ² Synge left home both to return and to re-turn to it physically and imaginatively—his gain from travel being undoubtedly artistic and inspirational for his playwriting and, significantly, for his experience as a travel writer. This book offers a comprehensive reappraisal of Synge’s travel nonfiction and of his role as a travel writer in Ireland during the early-twentieth-century Irish Revival.

Synge traditionally sits among the pantheon of Ireland’s greatest playwrights and founding figures of the Irish national theater. His plays, from Riders to the Sea to the controversial The Playboy of the Western World, have been praised by critics for their unflinching portrayal of rural Ireland and for their bravura in the use of Hiberno-English. Alongside his dramatic production, Synge also wrote poetry and nonfiction—ranging from book reviews to journalism and travel writing about Ireland³—but they are generally considered writings of minor impact. Among the artists of the Irish literary Revival, he was one of the most widely traveled. In his early twenties, he visited Germany, France, and Italy, spending a few months in each place and becoming well acquainted with each language, literature, and culture.⁴ Although he did not publish travel writing about his journeys on the Continent, he did bring his European experience and his keenness for languages to bear on his approach to home travel, and in his late twenties he started traveling around Ireland and writing about it. Out of more or less ten years of home travel (1898–1908), which complemented his career at the Abbey Theatre, Synge produced a travel book, The Aran Islands (1907) and a series of travel essays about Wicklow, West Kerry, Connemara, and Mayo that appeared in newspapers and periodicals while he was still alive and that were anthologized in posthumous editions of the Collected Works under the all-encompassing title In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara.⁵

This study historicizes Synge’s travel texts within the context of contemporaneous travel literature and journalism about Ireland written by Irish artists and activists during a crucial time for Ireland’s national self-determination. It argues that Synge’s travel texts, far from being solely source material for his plays, are ground-breaking narratives that privilege plural and dialogic constructions and that challenge inherited modes of place portrayal associated with imperial and nationalist discourses. In this book, Synge’s travel narratives are studied not as a minor accomplishment but rather as the output of an original ethnographic and journalistic imagination. As noted, in general Synge’s nonfiction about Ireland has been analyzed primarily as a kind of rough work for his plays.⁶ Although this approach is certainly necessary for a fuller understanding of his dramatic aesthetic, along with being amply sanctioned by his own manuscripts and letters, this book takes that reading as a given and does not look at Synge’s plays or dramaturgy: it instead focuses on his travel narratives in their own right. To highlight Synge’s achievement in nonfiction writing, it provides new interpretative frameworks in which his nonfiction can be read and analyzes critically neglected sources: Irish travel writing of the Revival period.

Recent criticism has added original contexts to the study of Synge’s topographical nonfiction. His travel writing, especially his travel book The Aran Islands, has been widely examined within the framework of anthropological discourse and compared with ethnographic writing.⁷ However, although this approach has drawn interesting parallels between Synge’s nonfiction and heterogeneous scientific writings by others (e.g., the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and contemporaneous Aran Islands ethnographies such as the one by Alfred Cort Haddon and Charles R. Browne), it has generally overlooked more popular travel writing. Mary Louise Pratt notes the indebtedness of ethnographic writing to genres such as travel writing and journalism, adding that at times ethnography blinds itself to the fact that its own discursive practices were often inherited from . . . other genres (travelogues, memoirs, journalism and official institutional and colonial reports).⁸ In light of this remark, this book examines Synge’s travel nonfiction in connection with critically neglected contemporaneous travel writing and journalism. In addition to correlating Synge’s work to official ethnographic writing, some critics have also traced his indebtedness to an old-Irish tradition of travel texts. For instance, Tony Roche persuasively identifies textual connections between The Aran Islands and the eighth-century tale The Voyage of Bran, arguing that Synge composed the account of his journey to the Aran Islands with growing awareness of the literary and mythic antecedents of such voyages.⁹ In a similar way, John Wilson Foster parallels The Aran Islands with the medieval immrama and echtrae, tales about sea voyages to the Otherworld and about adventures to the Otherworld, respectively.¹⁰ Furthermore, Synge is also directly influenced by Breton writers such as Pierre Loti; for instance, Synge brought Loti’s novel Le pêcheur d’Islande (1886) with him to the Aran Islands during his first trip there¹¹ and mentioned it in a typescript draft of his introduction to The Aran Islands.¹² This monograph, however, is not a study of the literary influences on Synge’s travel texts because the critical works I referred to earlier, along with others,¹³ have already traced that subject in detail.

This book takes a different approach. It provides a new context in which Synge’s travel writing can be read and sheds light on a critically overlooked genre: travel writing compiled by Irish artists and activists affiliated with Revival networks. Following Synge’s travels to the Aran Islands, Connemara, Mayo, West Kerry, and Wicklow, this study explores both Synge’s and the broader Revival movement’s poetics and politics of place and travel. Synge’s travel book The Aran Islands, his journalistic series about poverty in the so-called Congested Districts of Connemara and Mayo written in 1905 for the Manchester Guardian, his travel essays about West Kerry and Wicklow are compared with a selection of travelogues and journalism dealing with the same areas. This comparison contributes to a fuller understanding of Synge’s innovative achievement as a nonfiction writer. Shawn Gillen has suggested that The Aran Islands can be considered an early masterpiece of literary nonfiction in that it contains many different genres in a hybrid pastiche of lyricism, reportage, precise description, and dramatic vignettes rendered in journalistic detail.¹⁴ It is this ability to draw from such a multifaceted heritage that makes Synge’s travel narratives a great accomplishment in the genre and a vehicle to assert a precise local identity, transcending rigid taxonomies of empire and nation.

In particular, Synge’s topographical journalism—his series about distress in the Congested Districts of Connemara and Mayo as well as his articles about West Kerry and Wicklow—has always been overlooked and considered a minor attainment in comparison with both his theatrical oeuvre and The Aran Islands. There are several reasons for this underestimation. According to Nicholas Grene, the first person who contributed to a misjudgment of Synge’s travel articles was the same person who participated in the myth making of Synge as playwright of genius and artist par excellence, W. B. Yeats. Grene recalls how, despite Yeats’s opposition to collecting and publishing Synge’s journalism (especially the Manchester Guardian articles) after Synge’s premature death in 1909, the executors finally won the battle.¹⁵ In 1910, the prose volume of Works was issued and contained Synge’s travel journalism along with a juvenile piece entitled Under Ether.¹⁶ The following year another edition of the travel essays left out Under Ether and published the topographical essays under the new, all-encompassing title In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara, trying somehow to assemble for posterity a sequel to the fully shaped travel book The Aran Islands. Synge had actually intended to collect his travel essays in book form, but death prevented him from doing so. Subsequent editions that appeared in the early 1960s followed the pattern of the prose volume of the Works in 1910, integrating the travel pieces with excerpts from Synge’s unpublished material from the manuscripts, such as his early prose and miscellaneous articles about literature, all accompanied by scholarly notes that contributed to a more accurate understanding of his aesthetics. However, in part because of these inevitable anthologizations, in critical analysis the travel articles have been read as an integrated text rather than referred to as individual and separate pieces worthy of a more specific investigation. In this sense, the recent edition of the travel essays edited by Nicholas Grene and collated from the periodicals in which they were first published, J. M. Synge: Travelling Ireland, Essays 1898–1908, redirects the focus toward each single piece, therefore restoring the historical contingency in which Synge’s journalistic artifacts were produced.

The emphasis on reading Synge’s topographical writings as part of a travel literature tradition is due in part to the fact that The Aran Islands and Synge’s essays were marketed as travel narratives at the time of their publication. For example, in some of the ads that appeared in an issue of The Shanachie in 1907, an enthusiastic reviewer noted how The Aran Islands superseded the expectations of the genre: Worth any hundred ordinary travel books. It is full of strange suggestions to the eye and to the imagination.¹⁷ Thus, this study also illuminates a wider tradition of revivalist nonfiction and the Revival milieu in which Synge’s oeuvre took shape. As P. J. Mathews contends, the Revival was far from being an elitist movement preoccupied with a backward-looking Celtic spirituality, a nostalgia for Gaelic Ireland and an obsessive anti-modern traditionalism. The Revival instead needs to be understood, he argues, as a progressive period that witnessed the co-operation of the self-help revivalists to encourage local modes of material and cultural development.¹⁸ These revivalist modes and ideas were showcased and publicized through low-brow periodicals that were often packaged to appeal to a general audience. Recent scholarship on the Revival has increasingly given critical attention to popular and low-brow cultural and literary forms that had an