On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel Page A

bundles of furze, and children raced east along the slope after morning school. Smoke was rising from every house at this time—dinner on the way surely.
    A vignette recorded a few months earlier suggests how the island’s “simple life” could be anything but. A neighbor walks by Tomás’s house and the two stop to chat. “I have the seven cares of the mountain on my shoulders,” Seán Shéamais tells him. “I need turf. I have sheep to dip. I need flour. I have a wall to repair. I have a shed to rebuild. I have a trawl-line to see to and a net to prepare.” He can’t decide what to do first and in frustration has “left the house now to have a day away from it all.” Tomás is not sympathetic.
    For all the iconic status granted Ó Criomhthain’s later work,
The Islandman,
some hold
Island Cross-Talk
to be more interesting. “I had forgotten that it contained such fine things,” observedGeorge Thomson after reading it again in Irish many years after its first publication. “Yes, indeed, it does recall Irish naturepoetry, and Shakespeare’s sonnets as well.”Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Tomás’s grandson, called it “the great pearl of Tomás’s writing,” praising it for “nice little scenes beautifully assembled and polished,” like stones on the shore worked and polished by the waves.
    “A long-distance conversation with his friend Brian”—that’s how Blasket scholarMuiris Mac Conghail described it. But, although encouraged by Brian, Tomás probably never felt wholly free to express all that he saw and felt. His family, friends, and neighbors were crowded one on top of another in a tiny village at one end of an island. Everyone was a cousin of everyone else, the families entwined bymarriage. He had gumption to write about them as honestly as he did, but there were limits. Tomás changed names. He held back. He didn’t always “manage to describe whatwas in his heart,” saidPádraig Ua Maoileoin. “There was no way that poor man could do that and live within that community.They lived [there] in each other’s shadow.”
    But what he did he did. “He was a mason as well as a fisherman,” Brian said of him, “accustomed to put up a house stone by stone. ‘Do the same with words as you would with stones,’ I used to say to him.” The pages of foolscap in Brian’s care piled up, 189 of them before Tomás was finished. An entry for April 1922 tells of a Clare man seeking an islander to improve his Irish, leading Tomás to mention Brian Kelly by name: “I don’t know whether anyone else in the country has as much written Irish in front of him as he has to hand.” And then he adds: “Wouldn’t it delight my heart to be able to read a book of my own before I died.”
    We enjoy here the hindsight of history, sure that Tomás’s efforts will bear fruit, that his work ultimately will get bound between covers and set before the world. But Tomás wished for this in 1922, and it would be many a long year of uncertainty and doubt, demanding more than anything Brian Kelly could give it, before he’d be able to pose for a photograph, leaning against the low stone wall in front of his house, with his own book in his own hands.
    Tomás’s stories were almost all rooted in the life of the island itself—acts of kindness, foolishness, or bravery, clever repartee, chatter at the village well, accidents and injuries, and always the changingweather. But news of the big world did sometimes make its way acrossBlasket Sound. Twice a week in good weather, the king broughtmail by
naomhóg.
And the islanders were always much attuned to prices in the mainland markets, on whose whim their livelihoods depended. In June 1919,mackerel went for four shillings a hundredweight in Dingle,lobsters for a shilling a piece. In September, in the wake of a carters’ strike inDún Chaoin that kept their catch from market, villagers groused that an ounce oftobacco cost almost a shilling, a new net four pounds. The island stood