Oh to be on Aran. John S. Doyle writes: "You wrote in the summer of last year about Aran in the old days. I was over there shortly afterwards, and thought you might be interested to see, from the enclosed photographs, how little has changed. The main way (he is writing of the big island, Inishmore) is jammed with Italians on sidecars and bicycles, but the little byroads are as quiet as ever, full of flowers; and the larks and the choughs are busy." He brings to mind the small juniper trees, just peeping from cracks in the stone, and then growing, not upward, but spreading across the flat surfaces; wild roses, too, if memory serves aright. And his photos are reassuring: the only living creature on the beach at Kilmurvey is a dog, digging a hole. And over towards the point, on the left of the picture, is a fine white house standing over a small harbour. Nestling in behind it is a smaller house, thatched, it appears. It was here that Robert Flaherty settled when he was making his celebrated film Man of Aran. In a book on the filmmaker The Innocent Eye, Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote that the main house was only large enough for living quarters, another was built as a studio, with a turf-covered roof thatched with straw. Pat Mullen, the centre of the film, engaged the labour and while the studio was a-building drove the Flahertys around looking for possible film types and incidents which might be built into a film about the typical Flaherty film family. And Pat Mullen later wrote a book about the making of the picture also Man of Aran (Faber and Faber 1935).
You don't forget this film if you've seen it - the dizzying scenes on the clifftop, the mountainous seas and above all the struggles of the brave fishermen in pursuit of the basking sharks. Looking back, Flaherty said, according to Calder-Marshall's book: "I should have been shot for what I asked these superb people to do for the film, for the enormous risks I exposed them to, and all for the sake of a keg of porter and £5 apiece. But they were so intensely proud of the fact that they had been chosen to act in a film that might be shown all over the world that there was nothing they wouldn't do to make it a success." Further on the author writes: "He was gambling with death and no wonder, if after a thick and sleepless night he sometimes flung his breakfast across the room." John is now wrestling. Y