Notes
Epigraphs
Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books/Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 12: “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-ofcountry may experience this loss in an intensified form.”
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Sam Hamill, trans. (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1991), p. 3.
1 The Cave
p. 4: Bill’s book is: William Studebaker and Max G. Paresic, Backtracking: Ancient Art of Southern Idaho (Pocatello, Idaho: Idaho Natural History Museum, 1993).
2 The Book of Invasions
p. 12: “As everyone does, they partitioned . . .” and “On Monday in the beginning . . .” from Lebor Gabala Erenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland, Part IV, R. A. Stewart MacAlister, ed. and trans. (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1941), pp. 15 and 203.
p. 12: I was informed of the discovery of this Roman fort by Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press.
p. 14: “Britain, by thee we fell . . .” in Jonathan Swift, “Verses occasioned by the sudden drying up of St. Patrick’s Well near Trinity College, Dublin, in 1726,” Herbert Davis, ed., Swift: Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 385.
p. 16: “It was at best a mariage de convenance . . .” in Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 273.
p. 16: “Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree . . .” in Seamus Heaney, “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 46.
p. 18: Dean McCannell compares tourist and military complexes in a Headlands Journal 1992 interview (Sausalito, Calif.: Headlands Center for the Arts, 1994).
p. 23: “that these Heaps were laid there . . .” in Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 30.
p. 23: “I reckon no man truly miserable . . .” in David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (A Critical Biography) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 111; and “I choose to be a freeman” in Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape, p. 52.
p. 25: Re the Irishness of the Brontës, see Edward Chitham, The Brontës’ Irish Background (London: Macmillan, 1986).
p. 25: Edward Said on Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988).
3 Noah’s Alphabet
p. 28: Recent scholars have speculated that St. Patrick’s snake-charming . . . in Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), The History and Topography of Ireland, John O’Meara, ed. and trans. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1982), p. 130, note 13.
p. 28: Gogarty . . . long ago loosed some snakes . . . in Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1983), p. 252.
p. 33: Elephants, for example, signify . . . in The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from the Latin Book of the Twelfth Century, T.H. White, trans. (New York: G. B. Putnam’s Sons, 1954).
p. 35: “The first subject matter for painting . . .” in “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 7 and 9.
4 The Butterfly Collector
p. 38: “These people were regarding steadfastly in the direction . . .” James Stephens in “The Insurrection in Dublin” in Dublin: A Travellers’ Compendium, Thomas and Valerie Pakenham, eds. (New York: Atheneum, 1988), pp. 276–8.
p. 40: his father would swim out to sea . . . in B. L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 4.
p. 41: “I was taught nothing about Ireland . . .” in Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 42.
p. 41: “I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness . . .” Joseph Conrad quoted in Paul Hyland, The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989), pp. 74–5; and Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, p. 14.
p. 42: “Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent” from Joseph Conrad’s Congo diary in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Robert Kimbrough, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1960), p. 110.
p. 43: “I had been away from Ireland for years . . .” in René MacColl, Roger Casement: A New Judgment (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1957), p. 70.
p. 43: to “put a bridle on Spain . . .” in William Theobald Wolfe Tone, ed., The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, written by himself and extracted from his journals (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1828), pp. 32 and 43–5.
p. 44: “It was only because I was an Irishman . . .” in René MacColl, Roger Casement, p. 63.
p. 45: Casement’s report on the Congo, reprinted in Singleton-Gates and Girodias, The Black Diaries, pp. 96–190.
p. 45: “It used to take ten days to get . . .” in Casement’s Congo Report, reprinted in The Black Diaries, p. 112.
p. 46: “Brutal, savage, and barbaric torture . . .” in Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 38.
p. 47: “The task which the State agents . . .” excerpted from “Letter from the King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State to the State Agents, Brussels, 16th June, 1897,” reprinted in Singleton-Gates and Girodias, The Black Diaries, p. 83.
p. 50: “September 30th . . .” in Singleton-Gates and Girodias, The Black Diaries, p. 251.
p. 50: “to relieve our feelings we began an elaborate . . .” in Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, p. 110.
p. 50: “I said to this man that under the actual regime . . .” in Singleton-Gates and Girodias, The Black Diaries, p. 302.
p. 51: When T. F. Meagher . . . in Costigan, A History of Modern Ireland, p. 200.
p. 54: “When I landed in Ireland that morning . . .” in Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, p. 351, Singleton-Gates and Girodias, The Black Diaries, pp. 413–14.
p. 56: sex with members of “the lowest orders” in Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984): “In his far from celibate practices he satisfied his yearnings with partners who, in the main, came from the lowest orders of society” (p. 2) and “Another aspect of his sexual activities was that, with only one recorded identifiable exception, all his partners, regardless of nationality, were of the lowest social class. One can only estimate the effect of such intimate and frequent associations with those from a very different world on a man who was himself socially ambivalent; it threw him completely off balance . . .” (p. 145). Lack of landscape appreciation on pp. 47–8 of MacColl, Roger Casement: A New Judgment, where MacColl adds on p. 63, “My feeling is that Casement could rather easily have been steered away from the path of the treason which he finally chose, by the simple expedient of someone having been a bit nicer to him. All he really needed was to be flattered . . .”
p. 60: “The apparition was always said to be of a kindly nature . . .” in Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, p. 17, note D.
5 The Beggar’s Rounds
p. 70: “History is a nightmare . . .” in James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), p. 13.
p. 70: “Amnesia is the true history of the new world” in Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 372.
p. 72: “And so we lost our history . . .” Sinéad O’Connor. Along with Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, the book Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Changed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse (New York: Harper and Row, 1986) documents some of the historical effect of potatoes and potato blight in Ireland.
p. 73: Kerby A. Miller, Emi
grants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), in the sections “Change: Ireland before the Great Famine” and “Continuity: The Culture of Exile.’
p. 73: Joseph Lee, in Irish Values & Attitudes: The Irish Report of the European Value Systems Study, Michael Fogarty, Liam Rian, and Joseph Lee, eds. (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1984), p. 112.
p. 75: “Most countries send out oil, iron . . .” John F. Kennedy in Fintan O’Toole, Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland (Dublin: New Island Books, 1994), p. 98.
p. 78: “It is obvious that Ireland’s misfortune is . . .” in Engels, History of Ireland, in Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writings by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 174.
6 Anchor in the Road
p. 83: “Man is naturally a nomad . . .” J. M. Synge in Alan Price, ed., J. M. Synge Collected Works: Prose (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 195–6. See also J. M. Synge, The Aran Isles and Other Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), especially the essays “The Vagrants of Wicklow,” “In Wicklow,” and “On the Road.”
p. 84: “she saw a bird coming to her . . .” and subsequent quotes from “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Jeffrey Gantz, trans. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1991), p. 64.
p. 86: “It blew a heavy gale . . .” in The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, p. 74.
p. 86: St. Brendan’s encounters from Geoffrey Ashe, Land to the West: St. Brendan’s Voyage to America (New York: Viking Press, 1962), and D. P. Conyngham, Lives of the Irish Saints (n.p.: P.J. Kennedy and Sons, n.d.).
p. 95: “with a terrifying exactitude” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland July–August 1835, Emmet Larkin, trans. and ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), pp. 91–2: “I found myself this morning [1 August 1835] on top of the coach beside an old Catholic . . . He went on from there to tell me what had been the fate of a great many families and a multitude of estates, passing from the time of Cromwell to that of William III with a terrifying exactitude and local memory. Whatever one does, the memory of the great persecutions is not forgotten. And when one sows injustice, he sooner or later reaps its fruits”
7 Wandering Rocks
p. 99: Re Drake and the potato: see Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, p. 147 and following. This is the classic work on potatoes and their transit from Peru to Ireland.
p. 100: “about roses growing out of . . .” Bob Dylan in Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 116–17. Some of the following statements about American musical history are also drawn from conversation with Marcus, with thanks.
p. 101: Re Timothy Murphy, see Hubert Howe Bancroft, Register of Pioneer Inhabitants of California 1542–1848 (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Bookshop, 1964), and volumes XX–XXII of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, Vols. 3–5 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Wallace Hebberd, 1969, facsimile of the first editions) throughout which brief references to Murphy are scattered.
p. 101: For the Californios . . . the 1830s were something of a Golden Age: see Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Alfred Robinson, Life in California during a Residence of Several Years in that Territory . . . (Santa Barbara, Calif, and Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Publishers, Inc., 1970); and Neal Harlow, California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific, 1846–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
p. 102: the infamous Zimmermann Telegram: see Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (New York: Viking Press, 1958).
p. 106: “The pear is near ripe for falling” in Harlow, California Conquered, p. 103.
p. 107: On Murphy’s about-face, see Alan Rosenus, General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), p. 167.
p. 107: Jerry Garcia’s Olompali vision: Bill Barich, “The Last Transcendental Trip,” The New Yorker, XXX October 11, 1993, p. 101.
8 Articles of Faith
p. 116: “above 150,000 Irish acres in Kerry” in Arthur Young, Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland, Arthur Wollaston Hutton, ed. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), vol. 1, p. 344.
p. 118: “The builders penetrated inland . . .” in Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of the British Isles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 224.
9 A Pound of Feathers
p. 122: “There is something magnificently wild . . .” in Young, Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland, vol. 1, p. 348.
p. 123: “he leapt the wall . . .,” Horace Walpole in “The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening” in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 313.
p. 126: “a mobile army of metaphors . . .” in “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,” Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, Maximilian A. Mugge, trans. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 190.
p. 128: “They are the oldest living things . . .” in Man Ray, Self Portrait (New York: McGraw Hill, n.d.), p. 356.
p. 129: “. . . when a European conceives of confronting nature . . .” in Joseph Brodsky, New Yorker essay on Robert Frost, 26 September 1994, p. 70.
p. 130: “When it comes to belief in ‘the soul’ . . .,” Ryan in Fogarty, Rian, and Lee, Irish Values & Attitudes, p. 99: “By any standards, Ireland is still a preeminently religious country. More people attend church once a week than in any other country in the world. Asked how important God was in their lives, the Irish were far ahead of any nation in Europe. When it comes to belief in “the soul,” in “life after death,” in heaven, and in prayer, the Irish are so far ahead of the rest of the western world that any comparisons are totally irrelevant.’
p. 130: John O’Donohue’s Stone as the Tabernacle of Memory was published as a small book (without a publisher, but printed by Clodoiri Lurgan, Inverin, Co. Garway) in 1994.
10 And a Pound of Lead
p. 140: Re the history of Irish forests and deforestation: sources include Frank Mitchell, The Irish Landscape (London: Collins, 1976); F. H. A. Aalen, Man and the Landscape in Ireland (London: Academic Press, 1978); Eoin Neeson, A History of Irish Forestry (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993); Susan Powers Bratton, “Oaks, Wolves and Love: Celtic Monks and Northern Forests,” Journal of Forest History, January 1989; “The Oakwoods of Killarney,” brochure by the Office of Public Works, Dublin; Alan Craig, “Woodland Conservation in Killarney National Park and Elsewhere in Ireland,” National Parks and Wildlife Service, Dublin, 1992 (unpublished).
p. 132: “no less cautions . . .,” Fynes Moryson in Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 2. See also The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650, K. R. Andrews, Nicholas Canny, and P.E. H. Hair, eds. (Liverpool and Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State Press, 1978).
p. 132: “It was ominous for both . . .” in Canny, Kingdom and Colony, p. 35.
p. 132: “Fraught with all vice . . .” in David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 135–6: “Gervase Markham had just returned from Irish service in 1600 when he wove a long episode about the Irish kern into his rambling poem, ‘The New Metamorphosis.’ ”
p. 132: See Edmund Spenser’s A View on the Present State of Ireland, reprinted in James P. Myers, Jr, ed., Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983); and Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989).
p. 133: George Percy in Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, p. 23, along with many other such analogies.
p. 133: “I defy you, my dear cousin . . .” in Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqu
eville’s Journey in Ireland, p. 7.
p. 133: “In a few more years, a Celtic . . .” in The Times, quoted in Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, p. 307.
p. 133: See James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, republished with an introduction by Bernard Fontana (Glorieta, N. Mex.: Rio Grande Press, 1973).
p. 134: “starvation and squalor caused an outbreak . . .” in Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero, p. 92.
p. 134: Ward Churchill in Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), pp. 234, 310 and 342, note 45.
p. 135: The Irish . . . had a long history of comparing themselves to the Jews . . . See Canny, Ireland in the Atlantic World, p. 111: “. . . many priests had . . . sought to ‘comfort their flocks partly by prophesies of their restoration to their ancient estates and liberties . . . by way of God’s promise to restore the Jews and the kingdom of Israel.’ ” The same analogy is used in Joyce, Ulysses, p. 143. See also Pat Feely, “Aspects of the 1904 Pogrom” in Old Limerick Journal 11, Winter 1992.
A Book of Migrations Page 26