Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

Celebrated Irish playwright John Millington Synge was born to a landed family and studied at Trinity College and the Sorbonne. Rising to prominence in the Irish literary renaissance, he worked at the Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats. He rose to fame on the satirical social realism of his plays. Arguably his best-known work, The Playboy of the Western World, caused riots in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, as well as at The Abbey in Dublin.

His romantic life was troubled. When he fell in love with an actress, society and both families disapproved. Molly Allgood was born in Mary Street in Catholic Dublin. Under the stage name Mairie O’Neill, she brought his memorable character Pegeen to life in the first production of Playboy. In the novel, even Yeats and Lady Gregory fail to condone his romantic attachment. After all, Mairie is labour, and he management.

Author Joseph O’Connor grew up near the house where Synge lived with his mother, and was strongly aware of its atmosphere — redolent of Edwardian Dublin. Though the story of the star-crossed theatrical lovers is well-researched, Ghost Light is entirely a work of fiction and takes “immense liberties with fact.” The author even apologizes to the “noble ghosts” of Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, and Sean O’Casey for “not changing the names of the innocent.”

O’Connor’s imagined Molly is impressive and utterly believable. Plunged back to 1950’s London, we see her first as a a penniless old woman who drinks more than is good for her. Synge is long since dead. Through Molly’s memories, we are carried back to her early life when she was a well-known actress in love.

O’Connor’s felicity with language impressed me deeply, in particular his unveiling different aspects of Molly’s character through her thoughts and words. Frustrated by Synge’s continuing to defer their marriage, she suspects he sees their courtship as nothing more than “an agreeable hobby, leading to nothing but literature.”

At the same time, her insight into the sources of his fears shows her generosity in making allowances for his hesitancy. This is a man who gave up his ambition of professional musicianship out of paralyzing stage fright. Resorting to theatrical imagery, she sees him “still frozen in the wings…afraid to step out into the scene that is begging for him.”

His extreme shyness, she feels, was “probably his mother’s doing.” Yet instead of judging Mrs. Synge harshly, she sympathetically assumes the woman’s “extraordinary cruelty” was “well-meaning.” While she “gruelled [her son] on the Bible, on the castigations of Hell,” she herself “roasted on the flames of her widowhood.”

Molly has deep insight into Synge’s contradictory feelings about being isolated. She finds it “exhausting” that he “doesn’t want to belong.” While he complains of being “always a kind of outsider,” he “never stops fretting about what people will think.”

Seen through Molly’s eyes, Synge himself comes across as a tragic figure. Physically ailing, he is chained to his art. Though he appears to love Molly, he seems too fearful of society’s judgments to commit to marrying a much younger woman, different in class and religion. Mentally enclosed by what Molly thinks of as the dreary bourgeois suburbs, he inhabits a tragic prison of his own making.

Synge’s social prejudices, along with his attempts to rebel against them, come into sharply comical relief as he walks with Molly through the National Portrait Gallery in London and comments on the paintings. Comparing the Duchess of Blandford’s face to “a bag of rusty spanners,” “the door of a jakes,” and “Mussolini in a wig,” he displays his rebelliously critical attitude toward the class he was born into. Fair enough — until he goes on to inform Molly “what it’s like with the aristocracy.” When he shares his astonishing belief that “it’s up and down with their drawers like a funicular railway, and they rutting like rabbits,” we have to smile at this innocent generalization, which serves to betray his personal and social discomfort with the physicality of sex.

This fictional Molly is more courageous than her literary lover. A realist, she considers her situation and faces up to her doubts. Both her sister and the priest have warned her that “when a man is not willing to be seen with a girl in public, there is something deeply the matter.” She is also acutely aware of Synge’s determination never to be a father. When he explains that he refuses to bring a being into the world to suffer as he has suffered, she pictures him as “a terrified newborn, croup-racked, asthmatic, flailing at the banshees that swoop at his cot.”

Yet in the theatre, she senses his power. The rehearsal room is “haunted” with the “uneasy certainty” that “if he didn’t receive complete obedience, he would leave…in a way that would not give affront or cause a scene,” but simply “gather his notebooks and pencils, probably apologizing on the way out the door.” Able to “say things without having to say them,” and appear “puzzled by simple questions,” he uses his “aura of eccentric ineptitude” as a “means of getting his way.”

We smile when we see him use such means to vanquish an actor he spars with. Grennan has his own way of operating, endowed as he is with “a Dubliner’s ability to express disapproval by the giving of compliments.”

In the end, Molly reaches her own brave conclusion about Synge, whom she considers not to be normal. The only way to meet a character with such “unpardonable faults” is to love him. She must forgive his “crippling fear of happiness,” or leave him.

Molly tours in the U.S., but it is her sister Sara, also an actress, who buys into the simplistic Irish trope of equating America with Heaven. While Sara sees it as “the freest country on earth, where everyone married whoever they wanted,” Molly, less naive, feels a protective indulgence of her sister’s “lovely ignorance.”

Molly’s thoughtful insight stretches beyond individuals; she sees the contradictions in society itself: “Little helpful hypocrisies that keep everything going.” Always with a kindly eye, she witnesses the “Snobbism deep in those who have nothing,” along with the kindness and bravery, as society totters along with the theatrical twins, Tragedy and Comedy.

In her youth, Molly had briefly entertained the idea that men are all the same. A certain type of man, she thinks, “admires intelligence in a woman,” but only as “a windmill” to pit himself against, “a quality he can punish,” and “a reason for a woman to have to apologize frequently, which is what men find most arousing in women.” Yet in the next moment, she catches herself, sees the unfairness of this sweeping generalization, and freely admits to herself that “Not all men are like that.”

Molly is an extremely well-developed character — a woman as well as the actress who loved Synge and brought his characters to the stage. Well along in the book, we learn that she was married after Synge’s death. Though “himself” remains shadowy, the love she feels for her only child, Pegeen, leaps off the page in this arresting passage: “There are times you truly think your daughter the most admirable person you know. Wasn’t easy for her, either. She saw a thing or two, poor kid. Listen to you — “kid” — and she a middle-aged woman. This morning she was teething in my dreams.”

Flawed as her fellow humans, Molly is intelligent, sensitive and kind-hearted. Even as she faces the challenges of a lonely old age, she continues to command respect and friendship, in the reader as well as among those she encounters in the life Joseph O’Connor has generously imagined for her.

As Molly herself reflects, “We did not make this world. If we had, it might well have been worse.”