Irish : Ever After - Review

National Review, Sept 27, 1999 by Pete Hamill

'Tis: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt (Scribner, 367 pp., $26)

The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, by Thomas Keneally (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 736 pp., $35)

The Irish diaspora is a tale of such extraordinary complexity that even a crowd of monks, laboring in a sanctuary on some wind-blasted rock with access to all the resources of the Internet, would be sorely pressed to tell the entire tale.

The shape of the larger narrative is, of course, generally known. From the time of Elizabeth I until the early 1920s, the story of Ireland was the story of an oppressed majority. The English colonial settlers were a small fraction of the population of Ireland. And for centuries, this minority used force of arms, a corrupt legal system, religious division, and a snarling cynicism to maintain an iron grip on their stolen property.

To be sure, many of the Irish resisted; sporadically, they rose in foolishly brave rebellions that were put down savagely. But the English attacked the Irish spirit in other ways-with networks of spies and informers who made uncertainty part of the Irish character, and with the impositions of codes of manners intended to make the Irish feel permanently inferior. The urban Irish were forced to bend to the minority power, collaborate with it ("taking the king's shilling"), and surrender their language and religion, or be cast out to the margins of society. The immense numbers of rural Irish were deprived of property rights, education, and religious freedom, forced to subsist on the potato, while paying rents to English landlords and tithes to the Church of Ireland (which they did not attend). This vicious system was perfectly designed for maintaining power (Oliver Cromwell was one of Hitler's heroes), but it created a seething population. The calamitous British mismanagement of the 1846-52 famine removed from the Irish any temptation to believe in the myth of British justice. Hundreds of thousands of the Irish died; more than a million would cross the Atlantic, in desperation and hope, to America. That great migration changed the United States, and changed Ireland too.

"An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country," wrote Oscar Wilde in 1889, referring to Ireland, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.

In their separate ways, these two fine books confront the realities of exile, the long leaving of Ireland by Irish people. It is a measure of their value that they add new dimensions to the story without in any way inflating it, or reciting a mere catalogue of injuries.

Frank McCourt's book is a continuation of the personal story begun in his superb, and astonishingly successful, Angela's Ashes. Part of the harrowing, accumulative power of the first book lay in its clear-eyed focus on an Ireland from which the British had departed. For millions, that departure from 26 of Ireland's 32 counties removed a factor that had become a crucial part of the Irish character: a sense of the enemy. The Ireland of Frank McCourt's childhood was the Ireland of Eamon DeValera, the cold, autocratic politician who dominated Irish life for a half- century after Irish independence in 1921 (and who, like McCourt, had been born in New York). That is, it was the country of DeValera's peculiarly anti-modern utopian vision: rural, Catholic, neutral. The country was priest-ridden, oppressed by an obsessively puritanical censorship (you could buy whiskey, but not James Joyce), economically backward by design.

The gray bitter drizzle of the DeValera years, the emptiness and hardship, can be sensed in many of the stories of Frank O'Connor, in the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and in Angela's Ashes.

In 'Tis, McCourt tells the story of his escape from Ireland to that dreamed-of city of his birth, New York. He fled in 1949, with $40 in his pocket, 19 years old. He had left school after the eighth grade. He had bad teeth and infected eyes, conditions that serve as recurring motifs in this second memoir, perhaps symbolizing the damage done to him physically and psychologically in Limerick.

"The minute I made some money in America I'd have to rush to a dentist to have my smile mended," he writes. "You could see from the magazines and the films how the smile opened doors and brought girls running and if I didn't have the smile I might as well go back to Limerick and get a job sorting letters at the post office where they wouldn't care if you hadn't a tooth in your head."

We never learn when he had the bad teeth repaired. The same is true of his eyes, rimmed with caking yellow pus. At one point, he mentions conjunctivitis. It's as if in some deep recess of his Irish heart, he believes that fixing his teeth and his eyes would be a double sin of vanity. In New York, he finds work, almost immediately, through a priest with Democratic-party friends. He met the priest on the ship; later the priest would make a pass at him in a hotel room. At the Biltmore he is assigned to a menial job, sweeping up in the lobby. His American life begins.