Synge's Last Play: "And a Story Will Be Told For Ever"

SYNGE'S LAST PLAY: "AND A STORY WILL BE TOLD FOR EVER" YEATS, FOR THE MOST PART, was unsentimental about his contemporaries. But of Synge's achievement, and of Synge as a person, he had only good things to say; he probably learned more from Synge than from any man save Ezra Pound. In part, of course, Synge's indifference to the demands of convention-loving playgoers and critics endeared him to Yeats. "He did not speak to men and women, asking judgment, as lesser writers do," wrote Yeats in Dramatis Personae; ''but knowing himself part of judgment he was silent."! Synge went his lonely way. Of his innate shyness, a life-long characteristic , we know a great deal. John Masefield was one of many persons struck by Synge's willingness to answer questions, a trait which stood out all the more because Synge hated to put himself forward. "When someone spoke to him," Masefield wrote about an evening in Bloomsbury in 1903, "he answered with the grave Irish courtesy. He offered nothing of his own."2 It is likely, as Masefield suggests, that Synge could talk brightly and charmingly to women. Still, "his place was outside the circle, gravely watching, gravely summing up, with a brilliant malice, the fools and wise ones inside."3 Daniel Corkery suggests, too, that Synge's solitude, like that of Goethe's, fostered his genius.4 But the passion for independence led to an unwillingness, perhaps an inability, to take kindly to the wellmeant advice of others. For example, Masefield recalls that, at their last meeting, Synge narrated a wild, picturesque study of a murder in Connaught, which had served as inspiration for one of his ballads. When Masefield suggested that the ballad needed an explanatory stanza near the beginning, Synge replied, "Yes, but I can't take your advice, because then it would not be quite my own."5 Hence, Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, has been discussed in some unreliable criticism because Synge was so reluctant to indicate the true direction he was pursuing, to state explicitly (as Yeats and Moore were always doing) what he wanted to accomplish. The play, for one thing, never attained its final form. Synge died before he could synthesize the more than a dozen manuscript versions that he had been working on. (Molly Allgood, Yeats, and Lady Gregory had to patch 1. William Butler Yeats, Autobiography (New York, 1958), p. 346. 2. John Masefield, John M. Synge (New York, 1915), p. 9. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin, 1931), p. 33. 5. Masefield, p. 22. 306 1961 SYNGES LAST PLAY 307 together an acting version.) For another, the original production lacked enthusiasm, and was either indifferent to or ignorant of the mounting excitement of the final moments of the script. This heaviness of production depressed the audience, which concentrated its adverse criticism on non-essentials: Last night the audience was small-under ten pounds-and less alive than the first night. No one spoke of the great passages. Someone thought the quarrel in the last act too harsh. Others picked out those rough peasant words that give salt to his speech, as "of course adding nothing to the dialogue, and very ugly." Others objected to the little things in the costuming of the play which were intended to echo these words, to vary the heroic convention with something homely or of the fields.6 George Moore, one of those who believed that the language of peasants was inappropriate to kings and queens, wrote that Synge used to speak of Deirdre as his "last disappointment."7 A satisfactory script need not have remained an insoluble problem, but time ran out in the hospital room where Synge died of Hodgkin's disease, and the achievement, after all, is no mean one. A few more months, and Deirdre might have become more than Synge's most interesting play; it might well have turned into his greatest achievement. A little more time, and Synge might have made the Old Woman, Lavarcham's servant, a more highly individualized figure, or a more portentous one, instead of the convenient bystander; he would...