On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel

the fireplace. A lamp high on the wall, with two thick wicks and a mirror behind it, shed plenty of light. Tomás would draw up to the fire, light his pipe, “smoke a fine blast” of it, lay out his paper, and set to work in the quiet of the house, till maybe ten o’clock, or half past. And when he was finished, Seán recalled, “he’d dry it with a piece of cloth and a bit of paper and put it away. If a butterfly or a cricketin the corner as much as touched it he’d nearly kill them. Not a hand was to be laid on the pen in case it might be damaged.”

    Part of a letter, in Irish, from Tomás Ó Criomhthain to Brian Kelly, who more than anyone else encouraged him as a writer.
( Illustration Credit ill.8 )
    At first, Tomás wondered if maybe Brian wanted his scribblings merely to assure himself a steady stream of Irish, to keep up his language skills—or so he said later, out of who knows what false modesty. But hecame to understand that Brian wanted the best for him. “He said it would be a pity if I were idle.”
    Tomás had told Brian about one day in his youth, on a turf-gathering expedition to the other side of the island, when he’d been waylaid by Seán Ó Duinnshlé, orSeán Dunlevy, an island poet who died in 1889. “Well, isn’t it a pity for you to be cutting turf on such a hot day,” said the poet. “Sit down a bit, the day is long, and it’ll be cool in the afternoon.” As the two of them lay out in the sun, Dunlevy recited a long, angry poem about asheep killed by neighbors:
                   Aréir is mé go haoiblhinn
                   Is mé sínte ar mo thaoibh deas
                   ‘Sea tháinig aisling taoibh liom
                   Do sprioguigh mé thar meón …
    At the end, according to Tomás, Dunlevy asked if he had something to write it down with: “The poem will be lost if somebody doesn’t pick it up.” Tomás fished out paper and pencil and, in some crude English-basedphonetic script, recorded it. Now, these many years later, Brian was making a similar plea. “I thought it a pity that [the life of the island] would die, unrecorded, and I felt that Tomás could make it live on paper for future generations.” He needed to write about the ordinary and everyday in island life.
    And so Tomás did, for five years the flow never abating. Sharply observed little stories, rarely more than a few paragraphs, a few hundred words at a pop; short gathered dialogues; moral lessons; bits of light comedy. The first to make it into
Allagar na hInise
(which represented only about a third of Tomás’s output), was dated April 1919.“Seamus and His Cravings,” it was called in the book’s English translation,
Island Cross-Talk,
and it describes men working in the fields who stop for a smoking break. Another tells of an island character,Tadhg the Joker, who hears a cuckoo but fears no one else has. A third pictures as manywomen gathered at the village well “as there are in Killarney.… They drowned the noise of the King and the noise of the ocean too.” We learn the price of sugar, flour, and tobacco, island blessings, ornate curses. Some stories carry a bitter tang, reflect the harshness of island life. Others are warm and wise. Still others express moments of idyllic beauty. And inevitably, right in the middle of things, stands Tomás.
    “The mountains were aglow with every hue,” he writes in the spring of 1920.
    A fire was burning here and there, tokens that people were cutting turf in various parts of the bog. The sea was calm with currachs coming and going. Seán Léan was rowing a currach, all by himself, as proud as the Prince of Wales in his stately yacht. The fish were lifting their heads out of the water, the birds singing their music and on land the people were stripped to their shirts, re-earthing the potatoes. Groups were coming down both sides of the hill with