Synge

Abstract

Dear Sir,—Lest a legend arise, I feel obliged to correct a suggestion made in the letter of my dear friend, Arthur Lynch, in the I.S. of loth October. I never gave Synge ‘active help’ in any of his works; we were the most intimate of comrades and talked days and nights through, and mainly on literature and the technique of it; but except for the Aran Isles and his critical work for some London journal—The Speaker, I think—I never knew what he had on the loom. He often read me an isolated sentence from the sheet on his Blick—often an entire day’s work—but I never knew where the sentence fitted. I did know curiously a good deal about his unpublished work; I imagine because he never intended it for publication; he gave me once an immense wad of his verse to read and return; we never spoke of it; I have wondered what he did with it?

The Irish Statesman (Dublin) xi, no. 9 (3 Nov 1928) 169–70.