My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

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  There was a mystery about the new townhouse development we had moved into, the one in the exurbs of Putnam County, New York. On the surface, what had seemed new, clean, and large slowly revealed itself as cheaper and draftier than we expected. But there was something else about it that began to weigh on me. Why build row houses in the middle of clear fields? Why build this enclosed, half-private, half-public green space? Soon I noticed that the classmates who moved into our development did so after their parents divorced. And then it became clearer to me. These houses were built to lean on each other because the homes inside were broken. The manicured green spaces between them gave kids places to play, but no way to walk to another neighborhood. The men who mowed our common green space, and the men who shoveled the stoops and the walkways, were all hired hands. These men themselves were thousands of miles from their children. This was an architecture of fatherlessness.

  On the whole, your generation successfully minimized its own risk of becoming domestic tyrants. But they had done so by handing us over to ourselves, and many of us discovered the tyrant within. To empower me and my generation, everyone pretended that there were no insurmountable obstacles in the way of our finding our true selves. But this gave us the sense that every misfortune or setback was entirely self-authored. Assured there was no judgment from without, our desires and expectations made us pitiless judges of our own lives. We had little resilience to meet challenges; we assumed the adults would just keep removing them and settling things for us. But the message was still clear to us: Your parents had torn down almost all the unjust taboos and barriers. You just needed a good education, and life would be whatever you wanted it to be. I believed this. It was so much a part of my mother’s milk and the culture’s propaganda that I have always struggled to disbelieve it, even now.

  Because for a time, it seemed to work. As a teenager, wherever I wanted to go, a friend’s car would arrive and take me there. Whenever I needed permission, it was given. High school teachers had decided I was intelligent and engaged in class, so they stopped marking me down for not doing homework. They asked politely that I do show up for class. My mother, practiced in years of indulging me, did the same. I was constantly in love, and the girls I loved returned love to me generously. No one expressed any worry about what kind of man this would make me. By all the measures that mattered, I was doing fine. Fatherless? Look at the grades. The world yielded to me, and in turn I would yield to it. To be young, dumb, and handsome enough. Looking back, I guess that was your excuse once too.

  At the spiritual level, this myth of liberation— a liberation already accomplished—made my generation into powerless narcissists. We who worshipped authenticity—being your true self—even as most of us accused ourselves, in our own hearts, of being frauds. Some of us fell into despair and chemical dependency. Others coped through dual membership in the cults of productivity and self-care. A few now turn to internet father figures who tell them that life is struggle, that it is defined by self-assertion and dominance. And some, tired of trying to find a motive for existence from within, turned to political radicalism. But all this wreckage was a decade or more away from me and my friends then. We had no idea what was coming. Depression? Economically, we were assured it was unlikely to ever come again. Personally? Well, there were new drugs for it.

  * * *

  —

  And my mother was increasingly on those drugs. When my grandmother died, my mother lost her role as the dutiful daughter. And she could see that in a few years I would also fly from home. Where would it leave her? I experienced the 1990s as me coming into my own, of the world opening up for me. My mother experienced something else. Her life shrunk. She didn’t travel as much. She tried to make arrangements to move us to London, where she had been so happy once. But she shelved them.

  There was a great deal of talk at that time about the heroism of single mothers, but not all the taboos were pulled down. She had stuck it out with the baby, assured that the world would increasingly accept, and admire, her decision. In truth, it did so only provisionally. IBM would not and then could not fire her for being a single mother. But her form of life as mother, often overworked due to her circumstances, had none of the honor and understanding that is extended to widows, whom everyone feels obliged to help generously. This state of life was what she chose, after all. Or people would retain the suspicion that she must be at fault somehow, that she had failed to keep the man for a reason. Her form of being single was impaired by motherhood, having none of the real freedom and allure of those who were truly unattached. I would later discover she had admirers and even lovers, but she could—or would—never make them into committed boyfriends or suitors.

  As depression set in, she gained weight and became more frequently ill. I heard people worry for her, saying that she was “letting herself go.” She was. She lived on the other side of the culture’s liberation, and her unhappiness in life was held to be her fault. The cliché about lying in the bed you have made for yourself became her reality. She had finally thrown away the old couch and pullout for a real, proper, queen-size bed. But now she slept in it constantly. It was as if the culture had slipped her its real judgment in secret, the cruel truth that was unspeakable in public. And she accepted that judgment and internalized it.

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  —

  This larger cultural formation, as I received it, wasn’t cruel to me. And although it had encouraged skepticism and deconstruction of anything received, it didn’t take away everything of my childhood, exactly. It didn’t vacate the world of all meaning, or make me a nihilist, living entirely in my own head. I still had an identity. People still joked about my 180-proof Irish name. I still needed meaning and purpose. And I still needed father figures. It didn’t deny me these things outright, but it subtly changed their meaning.

  Instead, it encouraged a curator’s approach to life, which I took to be common among my friends. There was nothing that we were obliged to believe. No type of life that was strenuously urged on us. We could make use of our ethnic identities or not. We could draw on or reject our parent’s religion, or be coolly indifferent. We could try on any number of identities. We could throw ourselves into a social scene, or, if you had skill, flit between them. The important thing was that it be entirely a personal choice. And, if you were talented, that you didn’t screw up your earning potential in the future.

  For white kids in the suburbs, paradoxically, this assumed freedom made the project of self-definition seem epic and unimportant at the same time. You were captain of your own ship, and you must chart some great adventure—but if there were no obstacles, how could you know the adventure was great? In some ways, I would have appreciated more pushback from my mother, from teachers, and from the culture. If only to give my acceptance of their guidance, or my rejection, some weight. And yet, I was happy.

  Late in high school I grew close to an English teacher, Mr. Scanlon. He was the most important in a long succession of substitute father figures. He sprang around the halls of my school as if his movements were choreographed by an unseen animator. He was giving me the power of English, at least with a pen. In the long run, I suppose, he was giving me a livelihood. He was also a man with Irish roots. Knowing my background, he began feeding my imagination with W. B. Yeats, the Pogues, and James Joyce. “Who goes with Fergus?” he asked as he bounded into a room. He played “Bottle of Smoke” while we edited the school’s literary magazine, and he filled my world with sad, colorful Dubliners.

  I remember him reading out of Joyce, aloud, and an image from the short story “Araby” so impressed itself on my mind, it made its way into one of the many love letters I wrote as a young man. It’s the one in which a young man obsesses over a woman he sees framed in the light of an open door. That little light, described by Joyce as shining out onto the darkened North Richmond Street in a Dublin winter, added color to my already colorful world. In
a way, the clatter of Irish music, the strangeness of the Irish sky, and a repository of Ireland’s national genius were all returned to me, not as an inheritance to be treasured and passed on, but as ornaments of a life defined by enjoyment, consumption. And this curator’s approach seemed to let me enjoy them safely. That little bit of ironic distance prevented these things from really touching the parts of my soul and mind that were vulnerable to developing a deep conviction.

  In all my reading, I’ve started to question whether the Irish are telling the whole truth about the Holy Catholic Ireland of the twentieth century. The Catholic Church in Ireland is so reduced, it has maybe half a dozen public apologists these days. They complain, sometimes tirelessly, of the unremittingly hostile media environment. They occasionally romanticize another Ireland. But I’ve been somewhat surprised to find that this perception—unremitting hostility against the Church—is not relatively new. It’s older than you are.

  In the first half of the 1950s, the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote a parody of what we now take as the modern Dublin view of the world. “House Party to Celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland” takes the perspective of a man celebrating his spouse’s new book. All the same rhetoric that we think of as modern Ireland’s clichés are present in the 1950s. In the poem, a husband is profoundly outraged that some “rural savage” has described his wife as “A female replica of Cromwell’s face.” And in his mind he retorts that “The Jansenistic priesthood of the nation / Had perished by this woman writer’s hand.” Something is so familiar about the following lines:

  The reviews were coming in by every post,

  Warm and fulsome – Seamus read extracts:

  ‘The Roman Catholic Hierarchy must

  Be purple now with rage. She states the facts

  With wit, and wit is what they cannot bear.’

  In far of parishes of Cork and Kerry

  Old priests walked homeless in the winter air

  As Seamus poured another pale dry sherry.

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  —

  I almost feel ashamed to say that I sympathize with the rural savage. As a teenager, I returned to the Church of my baptism. And also in an odd form and from an unlikely source. One of those girls who loved me was an Evangelical Christian. Her father and the other men of her church subverted my prejudices about enthusiastic Prods. My view had always been that American Baptists were, well, inherently ridiculous. But these were serious men, who thought hard and studied harder, not just on how to get ahead, but on how to live in this world, and how to love the people around them. They were impressive, and my teenage atheism dissolved on contact. And by my senior year of high school, I wound up back in the Catholic Church.

  I had bursts of real religious enthusiasm, as teenagers often do. But that larger culture enfolded me again, the one that told me to take things lightly. I explained to people that this was just my chosen form of teenage rebellion. I had obviously been raised in a way that seemed calibrated to make me an ex-Catholic, and I was just subverting expectations. Keeping life on its toes. That is, over time, I was anxious to assure others that nothing about me was so changed that it had to be taken seriously.

  * * *

  —

  You say your father prayed five decades of the Rosary with the family each day. At night, your four sisters would file into one bedroom. You and your brother would go in to sleep in the same room with your parents. Your father would climb into bed and pray five decades of the Rosary again with your mother. Years later, in the old folks’ home, when nurses and orderlies offended his sense of modesty, he would rage and struggle in his dementia. But these angels attending him learned to just shout the beginning of a prayer. Instantly, the rage subsided, as he started his stiff, ceremonious sign of the cross and joined them in prayer. For you and the usual audiences for the story, the image is funny. For me, it has become something else. In a world where everything is plastic, everything is unserious, this adamantine stubbornness feels like a shelter.

  He should have been a priest, you said. And your brother became just that. You remain heathen. Even with all the aid of cruel, holy Ireland and a father willing to drill you in The Penny Catechism, which discloses to you the purpose of life and the mysteries of religion in precisely 740 English sentences: Who made you? God made me.

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  —

  In college, the Rising came back to me as well, in history classes where I was advantaged by childhood familiarity with the rebels’ names, their views, and their deeds. The hardline revisionists had the courage to take them seriously, alternately detesting and pitying their subjects. Each of the seven men who had signed the Easter Proclamation could be reexecuted in a few words. Tom Clarke: addled by long imprisonment. Joseph Mary Plunkett: dying of tuberculosis, therefore indifferent to life. Seán Mac Diarmada: second-rate radical. Thomas MacDonagh: failed poet, wrote himself into history instead. Éamonn Ceannt: Galway crawthumper. James Connolly, a well-meaning but deluded socialist, who stupidly got himself killed with Patrick Pearse, a boy-crazy creep, the reason Irish people must learn the blasted Irish language in school.

  But as time went on, with little distance from the Troubles, with the Celtic Tiger in full swing, the rebels’ views became somehow muted and less threatening, and before long no one even offered them the dignity of hating them. Instead of being celebrated or reviled, the rebels were given back to me as trivia and kitsch. They became decorations, men who hung on the wallpaper of O’Connor’s Public House, my local. Their great deeds and the songs I knew from childhood extolling them were an ironical source of identity. Their aspirations were not detestable, exactly, but made for good comedy when held against the reality of Ireland today, and when held against me.

  Connolly had died convinced that the causes of Ireland and labor were intertwined, but modern and free Ireland was lately hailed as a capitalist miracle. Pearse had believed that Ireland could win a place among sovereign and free nations by reclaiming the creative energy still existing in its Irish-speaking culture, but the great power in Irish culture is English and American media, and the nation’s lifeblood is found in the creative way America’s tech giants wring continental profits through Irish tax loopholes. Aspiration after aspiration had proven idealistic and naïve, so we hung the idealists’ faces on the walls as decoration and made them watch Irish America’s version of Erin Go Puke every Paddy’s Day. Having them around was like an inside joke about how irrelevant they were.

  Your generation makes a different kind of joke about the Rising. I’ve seen it when you’re in St. Sylvester’s GAA club. Maybe a man with a Kerry accent cheers a local singer for his rebel song and his Sinn Fein politics. You put on your thickest Dublin accent, asking, “And where were youse when we was doing all the fighting?” As if you yourself, as a Dub, inherit the reputation of having fought in the Rising, and all these culchies inherit the guilt of having sat out Ireland’s great hour. When you joke like this, the humor is a backward way of paying tribute to the real thing. The self-deprecation inherent in it is like an act of humility, even gratitude.

  What I mean by the Rising becoming kitsch for me is that in my generation, our joke would be to say anything is serious at all. The idea that events and ideals have real meaning, that something outside ourselves deserves our loyalty, is what’s ridiculed. We were so conditioned to think of things like honor and shame as delusions. Ha ha, just imagine dying for a political idea, and what an idiot you’d have to be to do that. We think this aloofness makes us look unflappable, that it even grants us a certain austere dignity. But it really just makes us satisfied with remaining shallow. We call the higher ideals a form of narrowness, and shrink away from them. Keep an open mind, play the options in front of you. Be smart. Aloof is the safe bet.

  But aloofness misleads us. This ironic distance is insufficient when we are really tested. I notice that Sir Roger Casement is now on
e of the few leaders of the Rising whom Ireland can praise without equivocation. Born in Ireland, he went into imperial service. He became something like the first modern human rights activist, after documenting the abuses of Belgium in the Congo. Gradually he embraced the Irish national cause. Caught off the coast of Kerry trying to deliver weapons from Germany ahead of the Rising, he was tried for treason. Britain exposed his “black diaries,” which detailed his sexual preoccupation with young men. And now, I read many articles about how he foreshadowed this more inclusive Ireland. In a recent biography, the author tried to cast him as fully modern in his sensibilities. And at some times in his life, he did take the modern view of things, including religion. He wrote to a friend, “There can be no heaven if we don’t find it and make it here and I won’t barter this sphere of duty for a hundred spheres and praying wheels elsewhere.” And yet that sense of duty eventually carried him beyond what was safe and modern.

  In his prison cell, awaiting certain death, he decided he would convert to Catholicism. The archbishop demanded that he recant his Irish nationalism. He refused. But the priests attending him said that he died “with all the faith and piety of an Irish peasant woman.”

  He wrote a letter explaining himself.