by Frank Gannon
If they ever had a world competition for talk, Ireland would be a dominant nation. They would be like the Cuban boxing team or the Russian weight lifters. When I brought Paulette home to “meet the family” there was an awkward period. This lasted eight seconds.
In Ireland, no matter where we went, it was the same. We would walk into a pub, sit down, and in ten minutes, be into a deep conversation about something. It could be trivial or profound, but it was, invariably endless. Talking in Ireland is breathing. When you stop talking in Ireland, you are dead. Then they will no longer talk to you. They will talk about you. They will say many, many things about you. If you have led a truly exemplary life, “the life of a saint,” only half of what they say will be bad.
You can’t spend time in Dublin without thinking of writers. We wandered into the staggering library of Trinity College and looked at the long line of white marble busts in the great hall. You can’t avoid the writers. Many of them would be shocked to see that they’ve made it to this room. When they were alive, Ireland sure wasn’t thrilled with them.
A Dubliner who taught at Trinity told me that some writers earn a greater honor than a place in the Trinity University library. They have pubs named after them.
The Pubs of Dublin would be a massive tome. More likely, it would be a multivolume set. Dublin is like a drinker’s heaven. The bars, as far as I can tell, haven’t one single video game, and they all seem to have booths.
There are always a few old guys who are as serious about drinking as Elton John is about Lady Di. There are also several guys who look like they belong somewhere near Fifty-seventh and Park. These groups never interact.
The sheer number of Fifty-seventh-and-Park guys is startling, as dense as downtown Manhattan at five in the afternoon. If all the cell phones in Dublin went off at the same time it would destroy eardrums.
The whole Hermes tie-wearing set is also startlingly young in Dublin. Over half of the 1.5 million people look like they could be in the Irish version of Friends. A lot of these guys work for American companies. Microsoft Europe is in Dublin, and Dell and Hewlett-Packard also have their European bases there, but there are also monster home-grown computer firms: Iona and Trintech.
There are theories about why Ireland is so tech-friendly. I’ve read that the Celtic mind is naturally cyber-ready, but I’m a walking argument that the Irish brain, even after prolonged exposure to American technology, is still quite dinosaurlike in its resistance to high tech. But I am an old Irish guy. Among Dublin’s population I would be considered a pronounced elder. Dublin’s silicon group looks like the senior class at Cal Tech.
Like every other place in Ireland, Dublin has some amazing churches, and these are much larger than the usual town church. Among the most striking is St. Mary’s, with its soaring steeple looking down over Parnell Square. Even though it’s a church, it looks threatening. It’s called “the Black Church.” That’s its color, but it also seems to describe its menacing aspect. If they wanted to make the movie The Irish Omen, that would be a good place for something scary and terrible to happen.
It would be, for a guy like me, a nightmare to drive in Dublin. I would be an even-money bet to get lost every ten minutes. Every street seems curved. We went for a two-hour walk. I strolled along thinking that Paulette was keeping track of where we were going. I finally asked her. She said she thought I was keeping track.
We asked several people and we received very friendly but utterly incomprehensible directions. I have a hard time with directions given in slow American English. In Irish English, I’d be better off reading the Rosetta Stone.
As we were wandering around half-lost reading street signs, I had a flash of recognition. I felt that somehow, I had seen these street names before. When you are lost in Dublin, and you went to college, you are inevitably thinking of that big black book that begins with that giant S…“Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan…” Ulysses! It was finally going to be of some use to me.
It is a good, but intimidating idea to read Ulysses before coming to Dublin. You can then walk along with the book’s characters and visit the same places Joyce immortalized in the book. Joyce’s book is set on June 16, 1904. That is also Paulette’s birth date (month and day, not year). As I was an English major, that explains my fascination with her.
I read Joyce’s book in college, and I remember it as being rare and among the only difficult-to-read books that were actually worth the trouble. It’s hard going, but has some truly amazing and funny parts and is, in every sense, a real literary masterpiece.
Every June 16, Joyceans from around the world come to Dublin and live “Bloomsday.” They dress like Joyce (an easy Halloween choice: eye patch, glasses, semi-Fu Manchu) or one of the characters in the novel and, if they follow the book closely, end the day drunk. As you walk around Dublin you notice “pavement plaques” that mark where things happened in the novel. One says, “He crossed at Nassau Street corner and stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the field glasses.” As the game of Monopoly is to Atlantic City, so is Ulysses to Dublin.
It was not June 16 when we were in Dublin, so I missed out on the literary magical mystery tour. I also missed out on the idea of using the novel as a directions device (I forgot too much). But we did visit the James Joyce Museum. It’s near Dun Laughaire, walkable from anywhere in the city, and it’s worth visiting for anyone with any interest in Ireland’s most famous exile.
The mere existence of the museum says something about Ireland’s “puzzle-the-world” contradictions. James Joyce was not, in life, a big fan of Ireland. Joyce described Ireland as (among other unpleasant things) “a Sow that eats its own farrow.” If so, it never quite digested him. He also supposedly rejected Ireland’s religion and even his own family. However, Ireland is, of course, the thing he always wrote about, from Dubliners on. It is quite remarkable to consider Ulysses’ effect on Irish tourism. How many dollars have all these English majors tossed in on their yearly pilgrimages?
If Joyce is still floating around up there it’s hard not to think that he would be astounded at the way things worked out. Writer rejects his country. He writes a book about Dublin. The book is declared obscene. The book is finally published. The “difficult” book becomes required reading in colleges everywhere in the English-speaking world. People who have read the book come back in droves to visit and leave money in the rejected country. Enough irony there.
Joyce’s friend Oliver Gogarty felt that Ulysses became so big in America because Americans like crossword puzzles and detective stories and anagrams and smoke signals.
Whatever the reasons, no writer ever created a myth around a city like Joyce, who said of his self-exile, “I go forth to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” For Joyce, the ultimate player with words, the word “forge,” with all of its meanings, couldn’t have been accidental.
Ulysses is a great novel, but it’s no good as directions-finder in Dublin. We got in a cab and told the driver to take us to a big American hotel. Hey, we were lost.
We woke up in a hotel in Dublin. It was our first non-B&B night, and it was a little strange. There were no religious artifacts in the room, no holy water fonts, no crosses. There was a picture on the wall. The frame looked more interesting than the picture in it. It looked a little bit like a Chagall and a little bit like a Picasso. It was color-coordinated with the wallpaper. Our bed was huge and perfectly flat, the first perfectly flat bed we had slept in since we got to Ireland.
There was a huge dark brown piece of furniture with a large television in it. Across the room there was a minibar. Where the hell were we?
I flipped on the television. CNN. Augh. I flipped it off.
I went over and looked out the window. Yes, it was Ireland all right. What now, room service?
I had been in hundreds of rooms like this in America, and now, even though I was an ocean away, I was back in one. Things started climbing the ladder of my consciousness. We had checked into the
hotel because we were tired and lost. I was still tired. I had just completed, oh, nine hours of sleep, but I found that I wanted a few more hours. But no. I drank some coffee and got ready for another day in Ireland. It was very odd in that hotel room. We were well rested and everything was nice, but it seemed that we were more in America than in Ireland. I stumbled over to the shower.
I must admit that it was very comforting to experience great water pressure again. After showers, we dressed, packed our bags, and went down to eat breakfast.
Although it was on the menu, we didn’t order the “Irish Breakfast.” It didn’t seem right to eat it in this huge room. I saw some people at a nearby table eating it, the same massive artery-clogger. The people eating it were wearing suits. One took a call while he was eating it. Cell phones and Irish breakfast? Blasphemy!
I listened to their voices. Yes, Irish people. But Irish people with yellow ties. The infamous Irish yuppies. I had heard of their existence but, up until now, I had thought them to be mythological. (I would see many more of them later.)
Paulette had a fried egg and bacon. I had cornflakes. I felt as Irish as Gorbachev.
We paid our bill and went to our car. We were feeling what Frank Kermode called “the Sense of an Ending.” We knew that it was time to begin phase two of our Irish experience. Time to look for Mom and Dad.
PART THREE
THIRTEEN
Mom and Dad
In 2002 most of the Irish people are in America. In 1841, the population of Ireland was 8,175,124. By 1926, the population sank to 4,228,553. During the years between 1841 and 1926, the world’s population more than doubled. Ireland’s numbers are a reminder of the enormous suffering the little country went through during those years. A lot of Irish people died, but a lot more left. And it is not inaccurate to say that today a large part of the Irish population is living in America.
The Irish started arriving in America in the 1820s. Economically, things were disastrous in Ireland, but they became much worse. The potato famine between 1845 and 1847 brought about one and a half million Irish people to America.
Most of the Irish people who left Ireland for America were, of course, poor. For the most part they stayed where their boat landed, New York, Boston, and, a little later, Chicago. Those three cities have massive Irish populations, but there are Irish people all over America. Montana, for instance, had a huge number of Irish immigrants.
According to the 1980 census, the Irish and their descendants form the third largest ethnic group in America. This massive exodus from Ireland has always produced big questions: Were the people who left Ireland castoffs, the dregs of society? Or were they actually the best of Ireland, the most ambitious: people whose aspirations could never be satisfied in their little homeland? These are impossible questions, but I know what my dad would say. For him, people who chose to live in a country like Ireland, when America was right here, merely three thousand miles away, were insane or lazy. For him, America saved him from a life of misery, working on a farm and living pretty much the way his people had lived for centuries. For a lot of Irish people, however, the rewards of the Old Country were more than enough, something they embraced and welcomed. There is something undeniably beautiful in the rural way of life in the West of Ireland; it’s not something to be “saved” from.
In 1990 Mary Robinson, the president of Ireland, stated that there were 70 million Irish people living outside Ireland, most of them in the United States. So there is an Ireland that exists squarely in the United States, and it is much larger than the real Ireland. It is composed of people whose families had lived in Ireland for centuries, but now lived in America.
The list of Americans of Irish ancestry is pretty well-known, but some names still surprise. Buffalo Bill Cody. Butch Cassidy. William S. Hart. John Ford. Cardinal Spell-man. Bill Murray. Jimmy Cannon. James Cagey. Bugs Moran. Grace Kelly. Nelly Bly. Jimmy Walker. Buster Keaton. John Huston. Bing Crosby. And on and on.
As the new century starts, Irish-Americans are, for the first time in history, going back to Ireland. This drastic change in the situation of the Irish-Americans is a nearly exact reversal of what has always been the pattern. While writing this book, I’ve met and talked to many people, some of them young and ambitious, whose parents had been born in Ireland. These people had been in America since birth, but now they were going back to live in Ireland on a permanent basis maybe eighty years after their parents “got off the boat.” These people are dying to get back to Ireland, a country they see as an appealing place with a healthy and expanding economy.
Many first-generation Irish-Americans consider themselves (and their future) American. Most of these people visit Ireland a couple of times and nothing goes beyond that. They are born in America and they, along with their families, will die in America. They may root for Notre Dame. They may become members of some Irish organizations like the Hibernian Society. They may buy and read books about Ireland, but they never think of themselves as “Irish.” I would have to fit in this category. I can’t see Ireland getting so appealing that I go there permanently. Never say never, however.
There is no word in Irish for immigrant or emigrant. The Irish used the word “Jure,” which really means “exile.” “Immigrants” left their countries because they wanted to. The vast majority of Irish who left Ireland were leaving because they had to. That, more than anything else, is the Irish tragic moment: the beautiful, perfect place that you have to leave. Wakes are happy. Departures are sad.
Until fairly recently in Ireland the only economic factor was land. Since the English had permanently taken all the land, Irish people for centuries were faced with these options: A) Live in poverty and pay the English landlord; B) Make some weapons, band together, and then kill the English landlord; C) Leave. C was the popular choice—as an Irish person would say, the best of a bad lot.
You could go to England, the home of your oppressor, you could go to Australia, or you could go to America.
A lot of Irish mythology has to do with the ocean. The white tops of the waves are horses. There is a magic island out there, the land of eternal youth. Also, way way out there, is America. In the eighteenth century most of the people leaving Ireland for America were Protestants from the north. By the nineteenth century it was mostly Catholics. But reading about Ireland is reading about a departing. The songs about leaving and the songs about dying are the same songs.
Ellis Island is a couple of hundred yards north of the Statue of Liberty. Between 1892 and 1954 over ten million immigrants passed through there on their way into America. There is a good chance that if you are an American, your father or grandfather or great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather’s first sight of America took place in Ellis Island.
Today there is a museum there. There are lots of artifacts and recorded oral histories and other mementos of coming into America. There is a big wall, the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, which contains the names of five hundred thousand immigrants. There’s George Washington and Myles Standish. Nobody named Gannon up there.
My mom was twenty-three when she became a citizen of the United Stated on April 28, 1932. She listed her former nationality as “British,” and her race as “Irish.” When my dad became an American citizen, on January 11, 1935, he listed his former nationality as “British,” but under race he wrote “______.”
This was not that surprising. My dad didn’t like to draw attention to his Irishness. That was something that never changed with him. I have the documents.
My dad wrote my mom a letter on November 29, 1932. On December 22, 1945, he wrote her another letter. Between those two days my mom and my dad wrote a lot of letters. Herbert Hoover was president when the first letter was written. By the last, FDR had just died. The Great Depression ended between the letters, and World War II started and ended. The war ended, the letters stopped, my mom and dad got married, and, a few years later, I was born.
When my mom died I found the letters. They were kept neatly in a box wi
th string around them. My mom must have kept almost all of my dad’s letters. I couldn’t find any that she wrote him. The letters my mom wrote would have been much longer. It was hard for me to picture my dad writing my mom a letter. It was hard for me to imagine him writing a letter to anybody. If he wrote the way he talked he would have done a lot better with postcards. Since a lot of the letters were written when my dad was in the army, I can see him stopping and asking the guys in the next bunk, “What can I say now?”
I don’t know what he did with her letters, but my dad moved around a lot when he was in the army, so maybe that’s the reason. My mom had the same address throughout this period—Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where she worked for a rich, Mainline family, the Windsors. She helped out around their massive house, and she took care of the children. A lot of Irish girls did the same thing when they first came to America. A lot of them still do.
I was a little embarrassed for us when I found out that my mom had been a servant for over a decade. I first found this out when I was thirteen, an age when everything about your parents embarrasses you. My mom wasn’t at all embarrassed. She was proud of the work she did. She called her job “nurse.”
Because he was in the army when World War II started, my dad’s letters were sent from all over Europe. It must have seemed ironic to him that he had tried so hard to get across the pond, and now they were sending him back. He never went to Ireland, although parts of England reminded him of the Old Country. He found France “about the same as Pennsylvania but not as New Jersey.”
The letters had a sort of tonal arc. He’s depressed by the army, then bored, then interested but bored, then, as the war gets near its end, joyful and anticipatory. The last letters are very short—little notes more than letters, cut to fit into the V-Mail envelopes—and they all say pretty much the same things. The weather is good (or bad), he misses home, and he hopes that the war will be over soon. He played a lot of baseball with the division team and counted days.