Imagining Ireland
2009; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2009.0055
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoPage 27 May–June 2009 Imagining Ireland Daniel Leary Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture Richard Tillinghast University of Notre Dame Press http://undpress.nd.edu 296 pages; paper, $25.00 My Ireland was South Buffalo in the Great Depression, and I’d had enough, couldn’t wait to get out. Seán O’Casey’s Paycock and Joxer caught it: blather and booze. Know-it-all, out-of-work Chris Fitzgerald hanging round near supper lecturing me that the Jesuits at Canisius High had it all wrong— “Boyo, it’s pronounced Kickero not Sisero.” And then my father, Big Dan, the policeman, singing at the bar of Crotty’s Grill some twenty or so tedious verses of “The Philadelphia Boy,” with Chris egging him on to another verse and another boiler-maker. You never knew what Dad would come up with. It might be the breathtakingly lovely “If All Those Endearing Young Charms” floating seemingly on one breath, “the way John did it”—McCormick.Who else? Mom and me, we’d come in the side door—the family entrance—waiting for him in a booth against the wall with a buzzer to alert Mr. Crotty, who’d cashed Dad’s paycheck, that he could serve the Friday fish-fry any time now. Fast-forward to June 1965. Just been hired at CCNY and my salary has practically doubled to $7,400. Big Plans: for me the Grand Tour at last, and for my parents a return to their beginnings for the first time in half a century—County Clare for Mary Elizabeth Murphy, County Cork for Daniel Thomas O’Leary, spend a week with them and their kin, see the peasant west through their eyes and then escape Ireland and be off to the wonders of Europe, pick ’em up six weeks later on the way back to the States. Neat, eh? I know, I know, Old-TimerAlzheimer wandering down Memory Lane. Just listen for a few minutes, will you?You’ll see how “by indirection”—as windy old-timer Polonius put it, “by indirection we’ll find direction out.” I’m trying to pinpoint through the experience of my own imaginative awakening what it is that makes Finding Ireland such an engaging, insightful, as well as useful, volume. It has to do with imagination, with “fancy” as the nineteenth century had it, and I don’t mean “Wishing will make it so.” It’s closer to Keats in a letter of 11/22/1817, but read them all: “To know the truth of the imagination is to live again.” Keats on my mind: “Oh sweet fancy, let her loose. / Every thing is spoilt by Use.” My Big Plan got off to a bum start: Mom wouldn’t go because “Outhouses is what we’ll be usin’.” Turned out she was right, but the real trouble was one Mom and I shared. I picked it up in Crotty’s back room waiting with her: we couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t imagine life into these Paddies with their screaming fake laughter. Dad who did elect to go was full of enthusiasm, carried his ebullience from South Buffalo back to Cork and Clare where it came from. He was at home, open to the experience, open to the tea and the gab, to the Irish, and I don’t mean the whiskey, but that too, of course. He grew before my eyes, grew before the audience he had round him as he gave them, for example, Lord Grattan’s challenging speech before the English Parliament: “Is the gentleman done? Is he completely done? He was unparliamentary from the beginning….” I looked it up when I got back from my tour. Dad improvised parts of that ten-minute rhetorical glory but that semi-preliterate memory of his held true. Anything he heard and felt was beautiful became real and part of him. The preliterate are closer to their imaginations than we semi-literates. Look at the kids for whom everything is alive. The West-world appreciators made me see my father as “The Playboy of the Western World,” and I was now one of...
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