The Irish have never known quite what to make of John Millington Synge (1871– 1909), a major stalwart, with Lady Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats, of the Irish Literary Revival and a director of the Abbey Theatre, which produced his plays. His best-known work, The Playboy of the Western World, a satirical farce that still manages to remain unclassifiable as to tone and intention, brought its author notoriety when it opened in Dublin in 1907. Nationalist reviewers found the play “dreadful,” an “offensive production,” and a “sordid, squalid, and repulsive picture of Irish life and character.” Audiences’ negative reactions led to disruptions of performances.

Like many members of the Protestant Anglo–Irish governing class, Synge was fascinated by the customs and speech of the Catholic peasantry. A fluent speaker of Irish, he found something in the musical cadences of the language, its color and extravagance of expression, that he could render in a Hiberno–English that imitated the speech he heard among the wayfarers in his native Wicklow, and especially among the fisherfolk, weavers, publicans, and plain people of the Aran Islands.

W. B. Yeats took credit in his autobiographies for having steered Synge in the direction that looks in retrospect almost preordained for him to fulfill his artistic destiny. “I said, ‘Give up Paris… . Go to the Aran Islands,’” Yeats wrote—though there seems to be some question as to whether his memory of their encounter in Paris was accurate. This has, in any event, become the accepted version of how Synge happened to start spending time on the Aran Islands, listening to storytellers, listening to the séan-nos (“old-style”) singers, and playing his fiddle in the kitchens and around the hearths of the Aran cottagers. Yeats creates in his great elegy, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” where he recalls friends who have died, an unforgettable thumbnail sketch of Synge:

And that enquiring man John Synge comes
next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
Passionate and simple like his heart.

The playwright celebrates these “passionate and simple” Aran Islanders not only for their theatrical way of speaking—forceful and fanciful both—but also for an amoral vitality underlying the starched cassock of Irish Catholicism, a kind of paganism which he defiantly asserts in the face of the nationalists. Defending in theological terms his not altogether flattering view of the peasantry—that there is as much vice as virtue in the ordinary Irishman—Synge wrote:

One would hardly stop to assert a fact so obvious if it had not become the fashion in Dublin, quite recently, to reject a fundamental doctrine of theology, and to exalt the Irish peasant into a type of almost absolute virtue, frugal, self-sacrificing, valiant, and I know not what. There is some truth in this estimate, yet it is safer to hold with the theologians that, even west of the Shannon, the heart of man is not spotless, for though the Irish peasant has many beautiful virtues, it is idle to assert that he is totally unacquainted with the deadly sins, and many minor rogueries.

The “heart of man” that Synge exalts in his plays is emphatically not “spotless,” but full of passion and animated by vivid conflicts that make his characters, largely drawn from the Irish peasantry, unforgettable. On the other hand, Synge was appalled by the new and staunchly patriotic Catholic middle class that was taking over around the turn of the century in Ireland: “There are sides of all that western life,” Synge wrote in a private letter,

the groggy-patriot-publican-general shop-man who is married to the priest’s half-sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor that are horrible and awful… . I sometimes wish to God I hadn’t a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn’t they hop!

But Synge did have a soul, one that responded warmly—with love but not reverence—to the plain folk of the west of Ireland. For the Irish Literary Revival there were only two classes worth contemplating: the aristocracy and the peasantry. It would be up to Joyce to scarify the soul of urban middle-class Ireland. Yeats in “Under Ben Bulben” issued to his confreres the following heady challenge, defining their mission:

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen …

To some this is snobbery. Contemporary Ireland rejects it utterly. But for Yeats and Synge at their best, it defines a literature of ineffable nobility, an aesthetic Yeats calls as “cold and passionate as the dawn.”

The critic and historian Leo McNamara has claimed, only half for effect, that the terminus ante quem of the Middle Ages in Ireland was 1950. Yeats and Synge were given the rare opportunity to experience the crumbling edges of an ongoing Medieval culture, while at the same time having at their disposal the tools to present it to a contemporary audience.

The aristocracy that so entranced Yeats did not interest Synge even though, or perhaps because, his people were typical of this class of Englishmen who had come to make their fortunes and to rule in Ireland. His great-grandfather had been master of Glanmore Castle, with an estate of some four thousand acres in Wicklow. Given this background the Synges were oddly evangelical in their religious leanings, members of an obscure group called the Plymouth Brethren. The family produced five bishops and an archbishop.

The Anglo–Irish story is one of grand pretensions, lost fortunes, bankruptcy, and making-do. Synge’s father, a barrister, died of smallpox when his son was an infant, leaving the family in somewhat reduced circumstances. A crisis of belief during his twenties accompanied his study of Darwin. As a young man, Irish nationalism became his religion. “Soon after I had relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland,” he later wrote with unusual self-knowledge. “Patriotism gratifies Man’s need for adoration and has therefore a peculiar power upon the imaginative sceptic.” By the time he arrived at the height of his powers and wrote The Playboy and his five other plays, Synge had tempered his youthful enthusiasm enough to view his subject, the Irish peasant, in a more balanced light.

Yeats’s piece of advice, “Irish poets, learn your trade,” should perhaps be supplemented with another admonition, which Yeats himself, Joyce, Beckett, O’Connor, Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, and others have followed: “Irish poets, get out of town.” After his youthful love affair with the west of Ireland, Synge traveled and studied in Europe, assisted financially by a tiny inheritance. The aptitude for languages he had already exercised by learning Irish at Trinity College served him in good stead on the Continent, where he became fluent in German and then in French. He was living the bohemian life in Paris when Yeats “discovered” him, according to the story, rescuing him from the possibility of being just another minor Symbolist poet. Having absorbed the avant-garde at its sources in Paris and London during the years modernism was bubbling up underneath the dominant bourgeois culture, Synge was in no danger of approaching Irish culture uncritically or conventionally.

David M. Kiely, whose first book this is, has to his credit written a non-academic biography directed at the general reader, and his biography will have a wide appeal. I am not always convinced by his innovative methods, which are clearly designed to make his rather enigmatic subject come alive before our eyes:

See Synge sitting in the Atlantic Hotel, overlooking the harbour at Kilronan… . Yeats insists that Synge is here on his recommendation: “I said, ‘Give up Paris… . Go to the Aran Islands.’” But Yeats remembers this in hindsight. Sometimes Yeats has a creative memory; sometimes Yeats believes his own myths.

Like a good, docile reader, I have attempted to see Synge sitting in his hotel, but I don’t get far, because Synge is a hard man to picture. The use of the present tense, which is meant to lend immediacy to the story, succeeds merely in being annoying. I find it hard to entertain the notion of Yeats alive, perhaps because this book inspires little confidence that its author has the breadth of knowledge and understanding fully to comprehend Yeats in his complexities. Critics—not to mention the poet himself—have had so much to say about Yeats and his myths that the bland assertion, “sometimes Yeats believes his own myths,” seems facile. At a point like this I am inclined to mumble, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

This opening formula, with its very post-modern imperative, perhaps suitable for a screen treatment, is repeated often throughout the book, right down to the moment of Synge’s funeral: “See the hearse and its four black horses halting at the gates of Mount Jerome cemetery. See the mourners alight from the carriages,” etc. Synge’s short life was, tragically, a constant and losing battle against ill health. He struggled with hay fever, bronchitis, asthma, influenza, and finally and fatally, Hodgkin’s disease.

Kiely is informative on the playwright’s health problems and romantic aspirations and provides the historical background. But a reading of the book suggests that he lacks the literary background to guide the reader effectively through Synge’s writings. Of the following passage, he comments, “It cannot have escaped Yeats’s notice that almost every line that Bride [a character in Synge’s early play When The Moon Has Set] utters is written in blank verse.”

BRIDE: My uncle is a bit queer too, one time and another. I’m thinking it was him your honour seen this night upon the roads, for he does be always walking round like yourself, God bless you, a fine handsome man, and it’s two years now since we seen him.

Kiely proceeds to print the speech out as if it were poetry, but in trimeter and tetrameter lines, suggesting that he doesn’t know what blank verse is. I gather he means that the speech has a roughly iambic rhythm. On the next page he tells us that in the west of Ireland, “storytellers are judged as much by their lyrical verbosity as by the content of their tales.” Is verbosity ever a praiseworthy quality in a storyteller? Perhaps fluency or facility or inventiveness is what he has in mind.

Solecisms and inaccurate formulations of this kind make this book resemble too many biographies that one sees—biographies that look like they were assigned by publishers or written on contracts wangled by agents or worked up by writers in search of material. In great biographies, on the other hand, it is always clear that the biographer has an obsession with his subject, that another person’s life has gripped his soul and will not let go.

Turning from the biography to Synge’s masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, is like the difference between eating a frozen Lean Cuisine entrée and a fresh salmon steak and potatoes grilled over hardwood. The play’s very title is a stroke of genius, striking and yet tantalizingly ambiguous. “The Western World” includes within its resonance both the far-western reaches of Ireland and, more widely, the civilization in which we live and breathe.

The play’s effect has to do with the audience’s perception of the ironic tension between how things are understood within a provincial Irish setting and how they might be understood in the larger Western World. What exactly is the connection between murdering your father and being a “playboy”? Our laughter is uneasy: the play violates in a very nervy way the taboo against patricide. Among its delightfully farcical moments are the scenes where the “playboy,” Christy Mahon, is lionized in a small community in Mayo because he has distinguished himself by murdering his father. The villagers’ traditional courtesy becomes hilarious in view of what Christy has supposedly done:

SARA: And asking your pardon, is it you’s the man killed his father?

CHRISTY: I am, God help me!

SARA: (taking eggs she has brought) Then my thousand welcomes to you, and I’ve run up with a brace of duck’s eggs for your food today… .

SUSAN: And I run up with a pat of butter, for it’d be a poor thing to have you eating your spuds dry, and you after running a great way since you did destroy your da.

CHRISTY: Thank you kindly.

Synge evidently was an unusually private man, and I don’t fault his biographer much for not having been able to illuminate his inner life for the reader. Perhaps, to paraphrase Faulkner, Synge’s best biography would be brief and to the point: “He wrote the plays and then he died.”