For Mc Cormack, the life and work of Synge is a narrative which involves, in all its local particularities, the crisis of the European bourgeoisie in the period between the 1890s and the outbreak of the first World War
The biographer of John Millington Synge is confronted by two considerable problems. One, which W. J. Mc Cormack admits early in his text, through appropriate Biblical allusion to making bricks without straw, is the paucity of materials - letters, papers - which, combined with familial reticence, "self-censorship" and destruction of crucial elements in the documentary record, make the act of biographical portraiture difficult indeed. The other is the degree to which Synge's life and achievement has been so sedulously entered, not in the comparatively straightforward annals of literary history, but as crucial icon in the colourful tapestry woven by cultural nationalism to represent the rebirth of the Irish nation in the first two decades of the 20th century.
In this Synge plays a major role, as the scion of an Ascendancy family who, obeying Yeatsian exhortation, escaped the cultural banality of his Victorian Protestant background and the Parisian decadence which tempted him, through immersion in the pristine waters of Gaelic civilisation in the Irish western isles. A more recent version of this oft-told tale has Synge, not the misrepresenting caricaturist of Irish rustic life those who hated The Playboy of the Western World so vociferously took him to be, but as a radical visionary who apprehended the revolutionary energies at the heart of Irish experience, which made parricide seem the metaphor of a liberating post-colonial consciousness.
Mc Cormack in this consistently interesting book addresses both difficulties by focusing not on Synge as a figure in a national or colonial drama, but as a member of a highly specific social group whose history and life experience, unique in so many ways, is also an epiphenomenon of broader historical crisis than any affecting Ireland alone. For Mc Cormack, the life and work of Synge is a narrative which involves, in all its local particularities, the crisis of the European bourgeoisie in the period between the 1890s and the outbreak of the first World War. So his book establishes - through the kind of painstaking familial and dynastic research which in earlier books made Mc Cormack the most convincing critic of Sheridan Le Fanu's clammily Gothic writings - the Wicklow history of the Synges, of their relations and acquaintances, to compose a narrative of inexorable transition from the inherited graces of rural life behind estate walls at Glanmore to the rigours and tedium of professional duties and polite forms of emigration (missionary work in China, engineering in Argentina) in a provincial version of that modernity whose filthy modern tide Yeats would later so futilely inveigh against.
And the world Mc Cormack brings before our minds in his curiously accretive text (he eschews the naive biographer's resolute attachment to plodding chronology) is reminiscent of Le Fanu's tales of cursed inheritance, of hauntings poised between metaphysical and the psychological realities, of Swedenborgian correspondences. Though in Synge's Wicklow the revelations of the Swedish mystic were replaced by a more local guide to Heaven and Hell and the eschatological signs of the time: the teachings of the 19th-century Wicklow clergyman, John Nelson Derby, founder of the primitive Christian sect which subsequently became known as the Plymouth Brethren.
Mc Cormack is fascinating about the social nexus of Wicklow Brethrenism within which Mrs Kathleen Synge, the dramatist's widowed mother, lived, moved and had her being, with Greystones as a kind of spiritual epicentre, situated as it was between country and suburb. He has a keen eye for social nuance, class gradation and the strange blend of arcane system-building and obscurantist philistinism such a background constituted for the all-too-soon unbelieving son of a possessively pious mother (Mc Cormack treats their difficult relationship with real feeling: "we cannot say whether she and John stood, sat, or kneeled side by side within the enclosed `horsebox' pew; we cannot recover the harmony of their fingers meeting on the open pages of a church hymnal they shared. We can rely on the divergence of minds").
BUT I think he might have explored a little more deeply the kind of prophetic religion the brethren and sisters spoke about among themselves when they had obeyed the exacting Biblical injunction to "come out from among them, and be ye separate". For in its complex dispensationalist reading of Scripture, Brethren doctrine inscribed a Biblical historicism which seemed of more immediate personal use in foretelling the future than Swedenborgian geographies of heavenly and hellish zones had been in Le Fanu's time. And in this way it was a world-view more adequately adapted to a later stage in the crisis of decline and eventual disintegration to which Le Fanu had, perhaps unconsciously, responded earlier in the 19th century. The sense of life lived under imminent judgment which Synge's writings suggest, may in part derive from it.
In other respects Mc Cormack fully realises that Synge's familial obsessions - which find, he argues, troubled, disguised expression in the plays - are of a different kind to those which preoccupied Le Fanu and his personae. For in Synge's world dynastic curse had now more obviously become an ineffectual hold on a dubious patrimony, and Le Fanu's consideration of uncanny and psychological explanations for Gothic disturbances had given way to a stark opposition between strength and degeneration, health and disease, survival and death. In Mc Cormack's sense of the matter syphilis, as in Ibsen's Ghosts, tuberculosis as metaphor and disease, as in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, terminal cancer, are now the ghastly presences that make the erotic occasions in Synge's dramas and the poignant moments of hope shared in his last months with Molly Allgood, interludes in a tragic rather than Gothic weaving of the threads of destiny.
This is very much a book of Wicklow, with journeys to accompany Synge to Germany, Paris, Aran and the West. It is informed by the author's deep affection for the county's topography and lore, and by his knowledge of its houses and families. Yet in its pages a small Irish county and the dramatist it nourished are seen in convincing European perspectives. This is Mc Cormack's best book to date.
Terence Brown is Professor of Anglo-Irish literature in Trinity College, Dublin. His The Life of W. B. Yeats: a Critical Biography appeared last year.