NONFICTION - Jan. 21, 1996

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE: A Biography by David M. Kiely (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne: $23.95; 305 pp.). James Joyce didn’t have the recently dead John Millington Synge in mind when he called Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow” but the description fits. Although Synge’s plays deal realistically and poetically with Irish laboring life, being based on stories he heard while living among Gaelic speakers in the Aran Islands, his work was routinely attacked for being insufficiently Irish, vulgar and politically incorrect; the 1907 premiere of “The Playboy of the Western World” caused riots and the black satire was boycotted, denounced and repressed for years to come. Freelance writer David Kiely presupposes much familiarity with the Irish literary scene--he takes for granted detailed knowledge of the “Playboy” uproar--to concentrate on Synge the man but doesn’t make much progress here, either; he settles for calling his subject “something of a chameleon,” reserved around literary aristocrats like W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory (with whom Synge founded Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre) but open around ordinary, plain-spoken people. Sparse records and a short life--Synge was dead of cancer at 37--make a biography of the playwright problematic, but Kiely seems to get the main influences right: rejection of a strict, intolerant Protestant upbringing, cultivation of a fine musical ear, a Wordsworthian love of natural, unencumbered existence. This life is by no means definitive, but it’s a reasonable introduction to an overlooked writer.