Stones of Aran (26 page)

A single-storied, many-windowed house that nowadays gives the impression of being a trifle tired of sunshine and sea breezes
enjoys
a spacious setting on the western shoulder of the bay at Cill Mhuirbhigh, near an old stone pier. It was built in the Twenties for a Mrs. Sharman of London, a frequent visitor to the island who became friendly with the Johnstons, the successors of the O’Flahertys at Kilmurvey House, and was eventually given this lovely site—a choice that indicates the arrival in Aran of the
concept
of a view. At that period the glassy display cases in which prosperous Aran trawlermen are now housing themselves would have been inconceivable, and the relaxed, open look of this
self-confessed
holiday home must have been strikingly alien to an Aran that knew only the shy, sly, little cottage windows that wink and peep, and the cold lofty stare of Kilmurvey House. In 1932 and ’33 it was the fitting seat of the great-hearted court of Robert Flaherty, who leased it for himself and his family during the
making
of
Man
of
Aran,
the film that Aran people call simply “the Film.” Flaherty’s definitive remake of timeless Aran was at the same time a definite intervention in Aran history, and one which is rapidly acquiring the moss of myth in its own right. His fame and lavish hospitality brought many visitors to watch him
building
what appeared to be yet another storey of that sublime and
ill-founded
tower, the Aran legend; his giant presence redirected dozens of island lives, and his creation, ambiguously situated
between
documentary and mythology, yearly allures hundreds of
romantic
pilgrims and journalistic hacks to an island it would please them to see as situated in a changeless and heroic era. But the
lasting
elements of Flaherty’s magnificent construction are certain huge, deep and simple intuitions of the physical universe, for which he hunted here with his camera as he had in the Canadian snows and the tropical Pacific. To suggest that the exotic
incidentals
of his film measure the subtle, complex and changing surface of Aran is to falsify Flaherty’s work and even make it ridiculous—but
in the zeal of promotion that is exactly what Flaherty
himself
did.

Aran used to suspect that Flaherty’s prestigious surname was a mask adopted to help make his way in the islands, but it is mere coincidence that the name appears yet again in local history. Robert J. Flaherty’s father was a second-generation Irish-American of Protestant stock who owned and managed an iron mine (the profession may not be irrelevant) in Ironmountain, Michigan, where Flaherty was born in 1884. When the slump of ’93 closed that concern young Flaherty accompanied his father to his new post of manager of an iron mine in Ontario, Canada. Flaherty himself later returned to train (briefly, until expelled) at the
Michigan
School of Mining, and his early years were spent in mapping, prospecting and mining in Northern Ontario and Vancouver Island. In 1910 he was commissioned to explore the iron-ore
potential
of islands in the east of Hudson Bay, and it was there, in the previously almost unknown Belcher Islands, that he first filmed the Eskimos who were his guides, hosts and friends. He later burned this film (accidentally, he claimed), but from its ashes arose
Nanook
of
the
North,
which was screened in ’23 and established him as a celebrant of the primaeval duel of Man and Nature.

His next film,
Moanna,
was set in Samoa, and his backers, Paramount, expected him to find the exotic, as before. But for Flaherty the languor of the lagoon was no equivalent of the wind-blasted icefloes. Even the man-eating shark he had hoped to cast in the adversary role of Nature failed to turn up, and to give his hero something to endure he had to revive a happily extinct
ceremony
of initiation by all-over tattooing. For his pains, Flaherty too ended up with a superficial film of beauty.

It was on his way to Britain to work on documentaries that
Flaherty
first heard of Aran, as a place where men pit themselves against mountainous seas in frail coracles, from a stranger met on board ship. (This unknown voice prompting the re-invention of Aran—a person from Porlock perhaps, expiating his
interruption
of an earlier visionary landscape in creation?) Flaherty later
enquired further, and the documentary film-maker John Grierson gave him Synge’s
The Aran
Islands
and
Riders
to
the
Sea.
After a
period
of unsatisfactory work in Britain, and a spell of what he termed “mental hookworm,” Flaherty came to look at Aran in the autumn of ’31, and evidently saw it as the rock from which he too could launch his frail craft against the mounting waves of doubt. He returned to install himself, his wife Francis and their three daughters in the house by Port Mhuirbhigh in the following January.

On his first visit Flaherty had been shown around the island by a Cill Rónáin man, Pat Mullen, who made his living largely by his pony and side-car. As a young man Pat Mullen had been in America—had indeed left a wife running an illicit drinking-house there—and his years of rambling, labouring and moonshining, and then the friendship of educated visitors to Aran, had given him a breadth of outlook that many of his neighbours identified as Socialism and Atheism. He rather naturally now became
Flaherty
’s courier and contact-man, which probably added to the
islanders
’ suspicions about Flaherty’s proceedings. Both Mullen and Flaherty have left accounts, or at least streams of anecdotes, of that period (Pat Mullen’s were published under the rather
opportunistic
title of
Man
of
Aran
in 1935, and Flaherty’s are retailed in Arthur Calder Marshall’s study of him,
The
Innocent
Eye,
of 1963). As both men were
raconteurs
it would be in two senses an
ungrateful
task to search among their entertaining inconsistencies for the truth of various incidents in the cycle of legends that accumulated around the making of the film.

Casting was made difficult by the islanders’ fear of alien
corruption
and by their shyness which wrapped itself in a fierce pride. But, whether by Pat Mullen’s ready tongue or Flaherty’s
geniality
, the wages he offered and a discreet donation to the Church, all obstacles were overcome and a cast was assembled that served the half-comprehended enterprise with courage and loyalty.

The three eventually called to stand as the film’s nuclear family were a boy from Cill Éinne called Micilín Dillane, a careworn
beauty, Maggie Dirrane, whom Flaherty had noticed cradling her baby at her cottage door in Sruthán, and the Man of Aran himself, Colman (nicknamed “Tiger”) King, a magnificent young giant whom one of the Flaherty daughters spotted sitting on the quay at Cill Mhuirbhigh. The Kings, hereditary blacksmiths in Fearann an Choirce and an intensely self-respecting family, suspected Flaherty of Socialism. Flaherty had for some time been pursuing Tiger’s brother Pádraig for the part, but Pádraig stoutly resisted his destiny (and went on instead to the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of Connacht, and a career in the
gardaí
). The Tiger, however, was at last cajoled into a film-test, and so it was that the eagle profile of the Kings came to be stamped on an Aran that is still current coin.

Memories connected with three buildings scattered around the Sharman house by Port Mhuirbhigh are satellite to those of
Flaherty
’s
bright and massive presence. The traditional thatched
cottage
, with what looks like half another cottage built against it at the rear, was created to be the home of Flaherty’s archetypal island family, and its odd design was to enable the taking of cottage-door shots by either morning or evening light. Pat Mullen oversaw its building (its kernel was the arch of an old fireplace he had had carted across from a ruined house in Gort na gCapall), and
according
to his account the rumour went around that it was to be a “Birds” Nest,” as those hated institutions of the Famine times had been called, in which destitute Catholic children were brought up as Protestants. Micilín Dillane’s family were particularly anxious about the danger of proselytism, and only the reassurance of the parish priest himself won their permission for Micilín to come to Cill Mhuirbhigh. In 1976 when the American cinematologist George Stoney was making a film or metafilm on Flaherty’s film, he came across a fascinating hoard of huge wooden film reels and other antiquated equipment in the loft of the cottage, and arranged for their transfer to an archive set up for the purpose by Raidió Telefís Éireann. Until a few years ago the cottage was owned by Flaherty’s daughters who occasionally spent a summer
there. It has changed hands a couple of times since and become very dishevelled; now it is being adapted to some other future, but whatever this may be it will always be known as the Man of Aran cottages.

The second building of Flaherty connections lies near the shore to the north of the last; it is a tiny cottage, now roofless, of which only the chimneytop can be seen from the road. Some of
Flaherty
’s
many guests were lodged here, and it must have been a charming retreat, in a lush (by Aran standards) water-meadow by the sea, tucked under a flowery scarp. (The place is called Fearann na Bacaí, which probably used to mean “the Field of the Bend,” for the scarp echoes the curve of the low-cliffed coastline into the bay, and the meadow follows between. But this sense has been lost to speech, and an islander suggests that the name is really Fearann na bPacaí, “the Field of the Packs,” the big canvas bags in which
carraigín
was carried—in which case the gaunt figure of the old shore-life makes its momentary reappearance….)

Among the residents in this cottage was a Newton Rowe,
former
District Inspector of the Samoan island of Savaii, to whom Flaherty owed a debt of more than hospitality from the time of the making of
Moanna.
Flaherty had been taken mysteriously ill while filming on Savaii, and Rowe had had him carried to his house and nursed him there until he could be transferred to the capital. (The illness was later found to be due to contamination of the pool from which Flaherty drank, by silver nitrate from the film-processing.) Rowe had since left the New Zealand
Government
Service and had published a denunciation of its iniquities in his book,
Samoa
under
the
Sailing
Gods,
of 1930. Now he was a freelance journalist with a novel in mind, and Flaherty invited him to come and write it in this island, in every way the antipodes of Samoa—but of the outcome, if any, I have learned nothing.

Another visitor to Fearann na Bacaí was the English Celticist Robin Flower, most widely known in connection with the Blasket Islands and their literature. He had come to Aran to collaborate with Flaherty on a project for the Free State government, a film
called
Oidhche
Sheanchais,
an evening of traditional lore, or
The
Story
Teller.
This, the first film ever made in the Irish language, featured an Aran man, Seáinín Tom Ó Direáin, entertaining a fireside audience with a long tale. I have never seen this film, but when it was shown privately in Dublin in 1934 it won praise from a critic in
The
Irish
Times,
although as he admits he did not understand a word of it.

The third building, also co-opted into Flaherty’s solar system, was an old stone fish-curing shed by the quay. It was taken over by Flaherty’s young technical assistant John Taylor as a film-processing laboratory; a darkroom was improvised in one corner, and a
generator
, the first in Aran, was imported. The shed is hardly used now except for the gear of the one lobster-boat that works out of the bay, and the remains of the darkroom can be seen through its gaping door. A rusty chunk of the generator lying nearby must still be able to power bright memories in a few old islanders, for every now and then Flaherty would decree an evening of
céilí
dancing on the waterfront and send for the island musicians; then a cable would be run out from the generator for lamps to prolong the summer twilight while Francis Flaherty would oversee the
local
girl she had hired as cook (to whom I owe this vignette) in making trays of butterscotch for the dancers.

Island lore still shakes its head over the dangers to which Flaherty exposed his actors in the scenes of shark-hunting and homecomings from stormy seas that make up most of the film. He has indulged in something between confession and
showmanship
on the question:

However, as one old man who had played a bare-foot urchin in it told me, “That was the exaggeratingest film ever made!” And just as Flaherty’s telephoto lens had the effect of piling up distant waves into awesome overhangs about to swamp his foreground figures, so every detail of the film’s history has been wrought up into the terrific by the combined garrulities of the Aran hearthside and the film-world’s dinner tables. Flaherty himself is no mean
exaggerator
: