At our dinner, words accumulated and meandered, drawn onward by the magnetic fields of memory and association. Everyone sat leisurely while a story was told, then brought forth another story, personal or comic, as a response. Paddy began one by explaining to me that Knock means hill, and it’s also the name of the town in the north where the Virgin miraculously appeared, not in the flesh but as an apparition, in the last century. A man is crossing the border back into Northern Ireland from Knock, and the border guard says, What’s in that bottle?, and the pilgrim says, Holy water, and the guard opens it and says, It smells like poteen (bootleg whiskey) and the man cries, A Miracle! His sister Mary told a related story about her youngest child’s first communion, and then they began to tell immigrant stories, since I was something of one myself.
Their grandfather from the west of Cork had been sent the money by his emigrant older brothers and sisters to join them, and he hopped a boat—in those days, they said, you didn’t need passports or visas—got through Ellis Island and New York to Boston, where the family was, took one look at the place and came straight back. When he was old and losing his memory, he would say several times a day, I knew New York like the back of my hand. It reminded Dennis of a story about the woman who took care of his grandfather and didn’t know how many brothers and sisters she had and, because she was illiterate, lost track of her son in America. This too turned into a story: The post office gets a letter addressed to My Son in America and delivering it becomes a challenge that drags on and on—until one day a man walks in to mail a letter addressed to My Mother in Ireland, and they know they have their man. The others talked about how the families who remained behind wondered about those who emigrated, that even those who weren’t uprooted felt a loss I had never heard about, the loss of the left behind.
Only at one point did the storytelling rhythm of the evening dissipate: when Mary and Dennis began to tell us, in tandem, about a television program on cheetahs they’d just seen. They spoke of it not with the ready gape at superlatives and statistics sheer entertainment provides, but with a tender awe at what biology was capable of producing. There was a note of yearning in their voices for such marvels, for the bursts of speed and power the cheetahs represent in an undiminished primal landscape, or for the real presence of the totems and symbols that linger in the imagination. Sometimes the wolf at the door should be a real wolf, but Paddy said the last wolf in Ireland had been killed in 1792, on Mount Gabriel in the far southwest of Cork. I told them about the woman who’d been killed in California, not long before I left, by a mountain lion, and about the black bears that had returned to the mountain in the center of the county I grew up in, about the ways in which my own landscape was still marvelously wild, even if almost everyone in it was too inarticulate to tell a story.
Around midnight, after we had all emptied our first glass of whiskey, the son who had figured as a naive child in Mary’s stories came home, a man of my age. They insisted he drive me to my lodgings, though I was unintimidated by whatever the nights of Cork could hold. On the way there, they instructed him to take me on a detour, to St. Ann’s Church, Shandon, across the river in the heights of the city, so that I could see the golden salmon atop the spire of the church, the highest thing in the city, and I saw it, swimming in the night sky. Whatever the fate of the live animals of Ireland, their images circulate still—literally, too: the coins, which Yeats designed, bear salmon, stags, horses, a sort of kingfisher, and, on the small change, a couple of intricate mythological birds.
It was a story Lee and Paddy had told me seven years ago that impressed upon me how different the sense of time here could be and that had drawn me back. We had come to stay with them straight from the airport, and so we were still slightly dazed by jetlag when they took us on an outing a day or two afterward. They led a local archeology club in west Cork, the Mizen Field Club, which once a month went on an excursion in a rented bus. Its members were mostly local farm families, though I remember a defrocked minister and a stroke-silenced local historian among the people who embarked with us on that drizzly Sunday in May. The bus wound us over a steep landscape in which every third house seemed ruined and abandoned, to the Mizen Peninsula, the second of four peninsulas sticking out like limbs or fronds on Ireland’s southwest coast. The sites we visited were determined more by proximity than by chronology, and for the locals they must have all fit into a general picture. But for us, it was a jumble, as we shot from pre-Christian Celtic sites to those of Elizabethans and the IRA along the coast. And at each stop in the steep coastal landscape Paddy got up before us and recited the events that had unfolded on the ground where we stood. The idea of songlines in Australia—long trajectories across the landscape navigated by narratives of the Dreamtime—has become familiar, but the Irish countryside Paddy guided us through seemed more a palimpsest than anything so neat as a directional map, scored and scribbled over by thousands of years of events running in every direction, almost all of them marked by some further rearrangement of the superabundant local stone.
What I remember best is the great stone pile of a fortress where O’Sullivan Beare’s followers had heroically and unsuccessfully resisted an English siege in 1603, one of the last great battles before the Flight of the Earls, which marked the end of the indigenous aristocracy; and a few miles away another ivy-tangled ruin, of an Anglo-Irish stately home destroyed by the IRA in the 1920s. Better than these reciprocal ruins even, I recall a stone that had only been altered by the addition of legend. A rough, hulking, henshaped thing at the top of a steep slope above an inlet of the sea, it was said to be the Hag of Beara, the wife of the god of the sea who had been turned to stone by a resentful priest and left to brood forever over the nearby coast; she appears later, in a ninth-century poem, as a with ered mortal recalling lost beauties and lovers. On the way back, the little girls sitting together in the back of the bus amused themselves by singing, in thin, good voices, a long gory ballad whose refrain went, “They hung ’er by a ribbon from the sour apple tree / And we won’t see her no more.”
Afterwards Lee and Paddy took us to a tiny pub in a town that was little more than a place where the road was paved and lined with houses. The walls of the room we sat in were lined with corrective horseshoes of wildly varying size and shape, labeled with all the equine afflictions they were made to address. It was at the end of that day, in the dim, diminutive pub, that I heard the story, which they had heard themselves from their near neighbor. He was a nonagenarian and a native of the area, and when he was a small child near Skibbereen at the turn of the century, a beggar would come round every two or three months, quite regularly. His mother would always give the beggar a meal, but the tale-teller himself would always hide in the lane when the beggar came, frightened and fascinated by his walk, a walk for which the other boys mocked him. (Somehow I came by a mental picture of the whole scene: a pale dusty road lined with hedges and the view from around a hedge of the beggar coming up it.) The man scuttled with a crablike gait, legs turned out wide and knees bent.
One time his mother told him the beggar’s story, to explain the gait and dissipate the fear. The southwestern counties of Cork and Kerry had been worst hit by the potato blight that struck in 1846 and returned several times in the following years, and so many died at the height of the Famine that funeral ceremonies were abandoned. Instead two men with a cart were sent around each day to collect the corpses and bury them in a pit. The children of one poor couple had died, all but one small boy, and the mother couldn’t bear the thought of throwing this last child in the common grave. She prevailed upon her husband to make a coffin from the few scraps of wood they had, and the coffin he built was short but wide. They had to break the dead child’s legs to make him fit, and then they gave the coffin to the carters to take away. Returning later that day with another load of corpses, the carters heard a mewing sound from the pit. It was the boy in the coffin, not dead after all, and it was he who eventually became the beggar who used to circulate around County C
ork.
It was an appalling story, but for me it was also a marvelous story. I had thought of the Famine as something irrecoverably distant, as far beyond the reach of living memory as the Inquisition or the sack of Rome, for my own history at that time had hardly included tales that stretched back before the Second World War. That there was a man living who remembered a survivor of the Famine—that the link to events of a century and a half ago was unbroken—was a discovery of astonishing delight. Time itself is elastic: the past is kept breathing by speech or buried in silences. About a hundred and fifty years seems to be about the farthest reach of living memory, the length of time encompassed by an old person who as a child encountered a survivor of some long-ago drama. The story of the beggar was my first intimation of how far back memory could stretch.
Picture what is remembered as a kind of daylight shared by the living, and picture its farthest reaches as the place where twilight is falling, beyond which is only the blackness of oblivion and the dryness of recorded history. That the day before the dark could be so long I learned for the first time over a glass of beer in that dim room full of corrective horseshoes. For historians the reach of living memory makes an immense difference in the nature of their work and forms the boundary to a certain kind of history, one yet unrecorded, still surviving in conversation, a history that does not yet belong entirely to the past but is still alive in the present. Time itself is elastic, uncertain, the past brought close by speech or buried in silences. There are moments of passage, a kind of amber late-afternoon light, in which events assume a final determining significance before those who remember them begin to fade away, and the event becomes nothing but history; one can watch all the atrocities of the Second World War now, with their long shadows stretched across us still, retreat from the personal to the public, from memory to history, as the 1919–22 Irish War of Independence largely has (though Paddy still had stories to recount which he’d heard from participants).
It is fortunate that so much work has been done already on such events as that war, for those passages of people’s lives are entering the night of the grave and the book. There have been moments and figures that historians have cared about too late, so that there are few firsthand accounts with which to work, and the evidence is all indirect; nothing can make it come to life again. The Famine which determined the crippled beggar’s life is something like that. My hosts’ old neighbor remarked that no one would talk about it when he was growing up in Skibbereen, and most accounts of the Famine come from horrified witnesses and rationalizing administrators rather than those who experienced its effects firsthand. Silence is one of the elements of the Famine that witnesses describe over and over again, the silence of those who died and those who were too weak to separate themselves from the dead next to them, and the silence of those who toiled like wraiths on the road-building and stonebreaking relief projects by which they earned a bare survival. A nineteenth-century archeologist who tried to recover that history wrote, “This awful, unwonted silence, which during the Famine and subsequent years almost everywhere prevailed, struck more fearfully on their imaginations, as many Irish gentlemen informed me, and gave them a deeper feeling of the desolation with which the country had been visited, than any other circumstance . . .” Trauma is inherited as silence, a silence it may take generations to learn to hear.
I grew up in a place without a past, the shadeless artifice of suburbia. My parents hardly spoke of their own past, and no one had anything to say of the past of the place we’d landed in. My father told me exactly three stories about his childhood in an immigrant ghetto in East L.A., each overshadowed by public violence such as the pogroms, and there were seldom relatives around to make up the lack. The real function of my mother’s tales always seemed to be to demonstrate that she and her brother and sisters had been sunny paragons by comparison with her own monstrous brood of boys and me (and they probably had been, though Uncle Dave once teased his mother, when she made the same point about his five children. We weren’t good, just malnourished). We lived in a house in a new subdivision where everyone else seemed new to the area too, except the old couple in the big square two-story farmhouse across from the beginning of the street. They must have sold the farmland that became our tract, but they still kept the hill around their home rural, with a grumpy old sheep, several Herefords, ruinous barns, and a working windmill arrayed around it. Their house was just off a road that began as a main street in town and faded into a dirt track that came to an end in a horse pasture. The last street off this road was ours, a double strip of new houses all built according to two or three sets of plans, but painted and trimmed to suggest individuality. The neighbors were mostly conservative white people whose unimaginative offspring chose to play in the street far more often than on the hills up the road. Even the plants around the houses were baleful things with blue needles, inedible fruit, glossy evergreen leaves, as much like plastic as any living thing could be, nameless plants that had no symbology, no meaning, and no use, but for their low-maintenance decorative qualities. The pieces of this subdivision didn’t yet add up to culture, something built out of stories about which further stories can be told.
The uneventfulness of the Golden Age is storyless, best celebrated in lyric poetry and static paintings. Story, and history, begin when something goes wrong, when a child appears to die, when a woman talks to a snake, when a man is hung up upon a tree. But to be changeless and storyless in anything less than the Golden Age is to be stuck in tedium. Stephen Dedalus said in a famous line of Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” and contemporary Irish writers complain about the American appetite for the Irish past; the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott penned an implicit reply: “Amnesia is the true history of the new world.” History hovered outside the borders of my own sedative neighborhood like one of those dreams that are all the more alluring for being just beyond recollection. That the primary subject of that dream was suffering didn’t dissipate its enchantment for me, and still hasn’t. I didn’t hear histories until later, only read them in books which I piled up around me like the stones of a fortress, against not only a family and a neighborhood, but even an era that seemed unsympathetic and blankly amnesiac. Now a number of long memories have come my way as stories, of the Indian wars, of southern families, even a few of my own family in Ireland and in the Russian-Polish Pale, but no place seems as haunted and infested by stories, and by the past, as Ireland.
I heard a story once about a tourist who goes to a pub in Ireland, where the locals so incite him with outrage over the deeds of the English that he starts off drunkenly to right the wrongs, and they have to hold him down and explain that it all happened several lifetimes ago, however vividly it lives in their conversation. I met an Irishman who’d emigrated to South Africa and cursed Ireland for its inability to outlive the past: his new home, he asserted in the wake of President Mandela’s inauguration, would set the past behind it, heal the historical wounds, and invent a new nation. At least for outsiders much of Ireland’s charm is that it is still, however literate, an oral culture. Talk is a principal form of entertainment and an art, and internal memory hasn’t been entirely eclipsed by recorded history or amnesia. Storytelling itself has been in a long decline elsewhere, in part because the generations are all but segregated in most industrial societies, because a tale requires a leisurely pace for both teller and listeners, and because telling has been replaced by commercial entertainment. The appetite for stories seems undiminished, but the information and entertainment media have evolved to fill it with narratives in which the listener is forever inaudible and invisible, never the teller or part of the tale. These sources don’t really replace firsthand stories, which cast their glow over the events and places of one’s own life, incorporate one into a community of meanings.
There are other measures than the bucket brigade of memory by which to gauge the repercussions of an event. Those of the Irish Famine are still being felt. It was the fulcrum whic
h changed Catholic Ireland from a nation of entrenched peasants to a wellhead of emigrants, and that torrent which populated and helped shape much of the rest of the English-speaking world is still flowing. The immediate source of the Famine was the potato blight, which caused the crop suddenly to rot in the fields or in storage, with a terrible stench, partially in 1845 and then almost totally in 1846 and 1847, and to varying degrees for years afterward. Much of the impoverished majority lived close to the edge under ordinary circumstances, and numerous previous famines on a smaller scale preceded the several years of potato blight that would become known as the Great Famine. It affected potato crops across Europe, but only in Ireland was the population so dependent on this one vegetable that the blight brought disaster. The scope and horror of the disaster—of widespread starvation, the intermediate malnutrition which brought on blindness and insanity, and the concomitant spread of diseases such as typhus—was incomparable to anything of its time; historians still reach back to the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that devastated all of Europe, for a parallel.
It is fair to say and often said that though the Famine was in its origin a natural catastrophe like the Black Death, its effects were drastically magnified by politics and economics. Had the Irish poor and their spokespeople been less inaudible in the English Parliament, had the late and scanty famine relief allocated by England not required many small landholders to give up their land to receive aid, had the potato growers not already lived in a poverty that made them utterly dependent on a single crop, without cash or commodities to exchange for other food, the outcome might have been far different. As it was, Ireland remained a food-exporting country throughout the Famine—three-quarters of its farmland was planted to grain inaccessible to the majority of its potato-eating population. So they starved amid plenty. The Famine was itself, like many contemporary ones, a consequence of the distribution of wealth and power rather than of the fickleness of nature or absolute scarcity.
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