In the post I imported yesterday on "Regional Film-Making and Location Shooting," I mentioned the enormous impact that David Lean's shooting of Ryan's Daughter on Ireland's Dingle Peninsula had on that region in the extreme west of the country (part of County Kerry). My Ryan's Daughter obsession and where it leads offers a perfect example of how I let one thing lead to another by simply pursuing a thread.
In this case, I became aware of Michael Tanner's recent book Troubled Epic: On Location with Ryan's Daughter, which I obtained as an inter-library loan through the Appleton Public Library. In reading it, not only did I learn a lot more about the film and the personalities involved (there are many entertaining Robert Mitchum anecdotes, as you would expect), but also about the Dingle Peninsula itself. It has historically been not just a remote but difficult-to-reach area, very much out of even the Irish mainstream. Partly for that reason, the Irish language thrived there in fuller vigor for a longer time than in most of the rest of the country (the same is true of some other pockets along the western coast). The scenery is breathtaking, as anyone who has seen Ryan's Daughter can attest (although Lean did mix in location shooting done along the sunnier coast of South Africa, after getting fed up with the unpredictability of Dingle weather).
Off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula -- indeed, they are the westernmost bit of the country -- are the Blasket Islands. They have their own celebrated history, partly owing to a literary renaissance they experienced between 1929 and 1936, when three now-famous Blasket memoirs were published, first in Irish and then in English: Peig Sayers's Peig, Maurice O'Sulivan's Twenty Years A-Growing, and Tomas O Criomhthain's The Islandman. These have been followed by a number of further Blasket books (Sayers's and O Criomhthain's sons contributed to the literature in the next generation). Since the Blasket Islands population at its maximum (in 1911) was all of 160 souls, it can be said without exaggeration that if the Blasket Islands can have a literary renaissance, your block could have a literary renaissance. The Islands were evacuated in 1953 because of a population decline after World War I which brought the residents down to 22 hold-outs, but they still loom large symbolically (and can be visited).
Clearly I needed to know more about the Blaskets (in part because I'm a good percentage Irish). So, again through inter-library loan, I obtained Joan and Ray Stagles's The Blasket Islands: Next Parish America, an excellent introduction to the islands' history and lore that I am almost done reading. As it happens, a local used bookstore recently shelved several volumes of Blasket literature that had been issued in a uniform paperback edition by Osford University Press; I'll be picking those up.
The Stagles book lists more Blasket and Dingle-related titles in its endnotes (notes and bibliographies are the best!). So I've got additional books to track down, such as the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge's In Wicklow and West Kerry (very obscure compared to his better-known book on the Aran Islands, which are a distance north of Dingle, are also a strong haven of Irish speakers, and became famous through Robert Flaherty's 1934 documentary film Man of Aran).
This has been a relatively straightforward thread to pursue so far, but they can get interestingly loopy and can cross other threads in unexpected ways. I don't mind.
Breakfast is being served
3 years ago
