NICHOLAS GRENE

On the Margins: Synge and Wicklow

I. THE SYNGES OF WICKLOW

The Synges of Glanmore Castle in County Wicklow, like so many landed Anglo-Irish families, had come down in the world by the time of the playwright at the end of the nineteenth century. Their Wicklow property had been established in the eighteenth century following marriages with the Hatch family and was at its heyday in the time of Francis Synge (1761-1831). He owned not only Glanmore, with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil's Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate in all of over four thousand acres. It was Francis who had the older house of Glenmouth enlarged and redesigned by Francis Johnson as what was then called Glenmore Castle, described in all its glory in Lewis's Topographical Dictionary (1837):

Glenmore, the splendid residence of J. Synge, Esq., is a handsome and spacious castellated mansion, with embattled parapets, above which rises a lofty round tower, flanking the principal parapet, in the centre of which is a square gateway tower forming the chief entrance; it was erected by the late F. Synge, Esq., and occupies an eminence, sloping gently towards the sea, near the opening of the Devil's Glen, and surrounded by a richly planted demesne, commanding a fine view of St George's Channel, and the castle, town, and lighthouses of Wicklow, with the intervening country thickly studded with gentlemen's seats.1

Unfortunately, this idyllic picture of natural beauty and civilized power was not to last. Francis's heir John (1788-1845), known in the family as 'Pestalozzi John' because of his enthusiastic advocacy of the Swiss educationalist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, became increasingly indebted and on his death the estates were bankrupt.2 His son Francis Synge managed to buy back Glanmore but not Roundwood Park from the Commissioners of Encumbered Estates in 1850. Although in his lifetime the reduced estate of Glanmore was relatively prosperous, after his death in 1878 his widow, Editha, and her second husband Major Theodore Gardiner lived in the house only intermittently and the property suffered under erratic management. This was the state of the family fortunes which the adult John Millington Synge (1871-1909) would have known.3

He himself came from a younger branch of the Glanmore family. His father John Hatch Synge (1824-72), the seventh child of 'Pestalozzi John', was a barrister by profession who died when John Millington was only one, leaving his widow with five children to bring up. With an income of £400 a year derived from land investments, Mrs Synge did not live in poverty, but rather in what were known as 'reduced circumstances'. Her older children all became comfortably settled in middle-class professions. Edward was a land agent to (among others) Lord Gormanstown and, from 1884 on, to the Synge estates in Wicklow. He was, it seems, regarded by the tenants as a hard man, at least to judge by one incident reported by Mrs Synge: 'He heard them talking among themselves and one said "it would take a Synge to do that"' (Stephens MS f. 478). Robert trained as a civil engineer, then emigrated to Argentina, where for a number of years he ranched with cousins on his mother's side. Samuel, with qualifications in divinity and medicine, served as a medical missionary in China. Annie married a solicitor, Harry Stephens, and their family continued to live close to Mrs Synge. Only the youngest, 'Johnnie', proved a problem, horrifying the family with his aspiration, on graduating from Trinity College, of becoming a musician. 'Harry had a talk with him the other day,' Mrs Synge wrote Robert in January 1890, 'advising him very strongly not to think of making it a profession. Harry told him all the men who do take to drink!' (Stephens MS f. 586). Johnnie persisted, all the same, at first studying music in Germany, and then - equally unsatisfactorily from the family's point of view, and equally unrewardingly - living in Paris with some ill-defined aim of becoming a writer. In Mrs Synge's letters to her other sons, her youngest is a constant source of worry: 'My poor Johnnie is my failure' (April 1894); 'Johnnie is vegetating in Paris. He calls himself very busy, but it is a busy idleness, in my opinion' (November 1896) (Stephens MS f. 931, f. 1148).

John Synge's failure to find a respectable and respectably paid profession was not the only cause of worry for his family. There was also his loss of faith, deeply disturbing to his mother. On both sides of his family, his religious heritage was one of evangelical Protestantism. His grandfather John Synge and his uncle Francis had both been members of the Plymouth Brethren, which had its origins in Wicklow. His mother's father, Robert Traill, was a clergyman from Antrim who felt that he had been denied preferment in the Church because of his strongly evangelical views. Mrs Synge shared those views and it was a real grief to her when John, at the age of eighteen, declared that he no longer believed, and refused to attend church any more. Again and again over the years her letters record her prayers for him and her yearning for him to accept Jesus as his Redeemer.

Synge was at odds with his family politically as well. Although he canvassed for an Anti-Home Rule Petition in 1893,4 and as late as 1895 was of the view that Home Rule would provoke sectarian conflict,5 by 1897 he was prepared to join Maud Gonne's Association Irlandaise in Paris and, like most Irish nationalists, he took a strongly pro-Boer position in the Boer war (Stephens MS f. 1602). He was not only nationalist but socialist in principle. 'A radical', he told his young nephew Edward Stephens in an unusual outburst, 'is a person who wants change root and branch, and I'm proud to be a radical' (Stephens MS f. 1663). Such ideas were hardly likely to be acceptable to his family. 'He says', reported Mrs Synge indignantly to Samuel in 1896, 'he has gone back to Paris to study Socialism, and he wants to do good, and for that possibility he is giving up everything. He says he is not selfish or egotistical but quite the reverse. In fact he writes the most utter folly .' (Greene and Stephens, 62).

There is nothing very unusual about a writer or artist from a conventional middle-class background diverging from his family's political, social and religious views. What is striking about Synge's case is that he maintained such close relations with the family in spite of his dissidence. From 1893 to 1902 he spent his winters on the Continent, but his home remained with his mother in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) and, with the exception of two brief periods when he took rooms in Dublin, he went on living with her until her death in 1908, not long before his own. He shared also the prolonged family holidays in Wicklow. Throughout Synge's youth and adolescence Mrs Synge had taken a holiday house each year in Greystones and lived there as part of the tightly knit Greystones Protestant community. From 1892 on, the houses she rented were in the Annamoe area, close to Glanmore, most frequently Castle Kevin. Most years the Wicklow stay lasted from June through September, providing a family base for Robert or Samuel Synge when they were home from abroad, for the Stephenses, and for cousins and missionary friends visiting Ireland. It was from these summer periods spent with his family around Annamoe that Synge formed the impressions of Wicklow which served as the basis for his essays and plays.

The Synges came to Annamoe as something between urban summer visitors and members of the local landowning family. They no longer stayed at Glanmore, as they had during the lifetime of Francis Synge; Francis's widow Editha and her second husband, Major Gardiner, when they were resident, lived on the hill farm of Tiglin for economy and rented out Glanmore Castle. The houses that the Synges rented were suggestive of their social position. Castle Kevin, a substantial early nineteenth-century house, home of the Frizell family, was vacant and could be rented cheaply because it was boycotted. The Synges spent in all seven summers there between 1892 and 1901. They did not seem to be troubled by the boycott, though Synge found on the doorpost of Castle Kevin (and later published) a triumphalist verse celebrating the departure of the Frizells.6 When Castle Kevin was not available, Mrs Synge rented Avonmore, a big eighteenth-century house on the Castle Kevin property, lived in by Henry Harding, a local farmer and caretaker for the Frizells. For the month of August 1897 they stayed on the Parnell estate at Avondale, not in the big house, but in the steward's house, 'Casino', something which Harry Stephens felt was a social indignity. In other summers they had to be content with still less grand places to stay. In 1895 it was Duff House, a farmhouse with a beautiful situation on the southern side of Lough Dan. 'It was with some misgivings that Mrs Synge brought her future daughter-in-law [Robert's fiancée] there, for, as the house was owned by Roman Catholics, she feared that it would not be free from fleas' (Stephens MS f.1022). Tomriland House, where the Synges stayed in 1902, 1903 and 1904, was just as unpretentious, but the farmers who owned it were Protestant.

In her holiday homes,...