New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Johnnie is on the move; he is at home today packing and sorting over books, clothes etc… I feel his going very much: furnishing these rooms, trying to make a little home for himself on such a very small and uncertain income. I am giving him some old furniture etc, and he must buy some… Johnnie says this move reminds him of his trips to Paris! Counting over his socks etc putting away things he does not want! However, he adds, it is not far.

Both Synge and his mother were ill that winter. Both had operations, and it must have been obvious to the doctors that both of them were doomed. In April, Mrs Synge wrote to her son Robert about Synge’s marriage, making clear that she must have been, up to recently, opposing it: ‘Johnnie came to see me on Friday last; he is seriously thinking of being soon married… [and] as he is determined… it is no use opposing him any more and we must only trust that he may get on.’ He was, however, too ill to remain in the flat he had dreamed of with Molly for so long. Once his operation was over, he came home to his mother once more: ‘We got [his] furniture all back from Rathmines yesterday,’ she wrote,

It was such a sad little flitting altogether. I remember now remarking how ill he looked when he was going away. He says those pains began in December! I think if he had been at home, I would certainly have thought there was something serious going on; but I saw him very seldom during the four months he was away, and I know he did not feed himself as he was accustomed and he used to be so very hungry for his dinners when he came. God has permitted it all to happen so I can say nothing.

In the time that remained to him, Synge travelled to London, returned to Koblenz to stay with the family who had hosted him years earlier, wrote tender letters almost daily to Molly Allgood and worked on his play Deirdre. Death was never far from his mind. On 2 November 1908 he sent Molly a draft of a new poem:

I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.

And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots pressing round that new
Oak coffin — they alive, I dead beneath
That board — you’d rave and rend them with your teeth.

His mother died while he was in Germany. On 7 November, on his return to her house where he was to stay for the remaining months of his life, he wrote to Molly: ‘I am home at last. I am inexpressibly sad in this empty house.’ In February 1909 he went into hospital in the knowledge that he was dying. In his notebooks from his time on the Aran Islands, there is a passage that he did not transcribe fully when he came to write the book. He was in a curragh on a bad sea:

I thought almost enviously what fatiguing care I would escape if the canoe turned a few inches nearer to those waves and dropped me helpless into the blue bosom of the sea. No death were so delightful. What a difference to die here with the fresh sea saltness in my hair than to struggle in soiled sheets and thick stifling blankets with a smell of my own illness in my nostrils and a half paid death tender at my side.

During his long death battle, Molly came to see him every day until she went to play Pegeen Mike in Manchester where The Playboy was warmly received. On 23 March Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:

I have just met M. [Molly] in the street and saw by her face that she had bad news. She told me that Synge is now so weak that he cannot raise himself on his arm in bed and at night he can only sleep with the help of drugs. For some days he has been too weak to read. He cannot read even his letters. They have moved him to another room that he may see the mountains from his bed.

The following day he died. He was buried in the family plot in Mount Jerome cemetery.

Before the funeral, Synge’s brother Robert wrote in his diary: ‘Received a visit from Yeats and the Sec. of Abbey Theatre with a request which I refused as impossible.’ They wanted to have a death-mask made. Edward Stephens wrote: ‘Robert would have disliked it under any conditions but he… believed John’s face to have changed so much during his last illness that no real likeness of him… could have been obtained.’ Stephens noticed that at the funeral the mourners were divided, ‘as they had always been in his lifetime’, between family and the people among whom he had worked. Molly Allgood did not attend his funeral.

Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother

In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1938, Thomas MacGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’ Beckett wrote to MacGreevy to say that he did ‘not think there is a syllable that needs touching’ in the first eighteen pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side’. He admitted his

own chronic inability to understand… a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after, or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests and by the demagogues in service of the priests, or that it will ever care, if it ever knows, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats.

Like MacGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in his letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930 MacGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack Yeats:

My last year’s colleague… is still in Dublin for a little while. He’s a nice fellow, the nephew of Cissie Sinclair [who had been a painter]… It would be a charity to ask him round one afternoon and show him a few pictures and drop all the conversational bombs you have handy without pretending anything. But the luck will be all on his side, he says very little, especially at first, and you might find him not interesting, so don’t do it unless you feel like doing nothing one day. Joyce does like him however, and I’m genuinely fond of him tho’ he’s maddeningly young.

After the visit, MacGreevy wrote to Yeats again: ‘Beckett wrote me about his visit to you. I’m glad you liked him. He was completely staggered by the pictures and though he has met many people through me he dismissed them all in his letter in the remark “and to think I owe meeting Jack Yeats and Joyce to you!”’ In February 1935 Yeats, alert to Beckett’s solitary habits, wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I tried to get Beckett on the phone one day but he was away. I wanted to arrange a day for him to come here — when there wouldn’t be other visitors as he doesn’t