A Date With Cousin O’Keeffe : In Ireland, Understanding Her Is Genetic

What I know of Georgia O’Keeffe and her art is almost entirely confined to images on calendars. Yet I must celebrate her, if only for personal reasons. It’s enough for me that she kept intact the beautiful name brought by her grandfather from Ireland.

In the middle of the last century, an O’Keeffe rarely survived the Atlantic passage without losing some part of his identity. Typically, the double “f” disappeared under the pen of some bureaucrat on that shore or this--beauty, if you like, tossed overboard in the interests of utility and speed. So I’m happy to encounter the name in its classic shape. And now with an exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work on Los Angeles’ horizon, the signature has set sail for the Pacific Coast, though under a very different kind of canvas.

Pierce O’Keeffe must have been a special kind of immigrant. Like many another, he could have mutilated or even scuttled his identity. Famine Ireland was a country he surely wanted to forget, with his failed wool business and a million O’s and Mac’s dying in the ditches. Yet he neither disowned his name nor considered it a thing of movable parts.

Not so long ago at the port of New York, I was false to his spirit. Just off the Atlantic along with my trunk, I was bound for the Southern California town of Camarillo. All my labels clearly said so. But a dispatcher propelling her Magic Marker had other ideas. “Mr. O’Keith,” I heard her saying to herself, “one trunk, freight, Amarillo.” It took another dispatcher to convince her that there is indeed a place called Camarillo. But only after I had cried out, “Change my name if you must, but for heaven’s sake don’t change my destination!”

So I reached California almost by detour. A bit like the O’Keeffe paintings; they’ll arrive here after a year on the road, according to reports tracing their travels.

But nowhere have I seen mention of the exhibition of O’Keeffes I attended last summer, so I’m reviewing it here for the first time. It was held without curator’s writ and with little advance publicity. Yet Georgia O’Keeffe would have been pleased with the event, I think, held as it was in an Irish valley that is ancestral home to everyone of her name.

It’s a long way from the elegant County Museum of Art beside the La Brea Tar Pits to the tiny community hall in the valley of the Blackwater in the County of Cork. Not that the Blackwater is without elegance. You can catch the reflection of Tudor ruins on the smooth-sliding river. Yes, the Elizabethans were here. One of them, Spenser, the famous poet, dispossessed the O’Keeffes. The dispossessed responded with their own kind of elegance--Gaelic lament.

I had heard about the Irish exhibition of O’Keeffes just days before. They were, explained the woman on the phone, mustering that weekend. The caller was one of them, five names away from me in the Tipperary directory. They were spreading the news by telephone tree among thousands of listed O’Keeffes. Would I pass the word about our first gathering to five others? Within the hour, I had given my five tribal shouts.

When Gathering Day dawned, I rose with the sun. Before me lay at least a hundred humpbacked bridges, so I sat down to a sensible breakfast, something that would travel well. I ate coarse bread spread with country butter, and a spray of watercress. An O’Keeffe tackling ancestral roads must always breakfast on watercress.

Then I headed south for the valley of the Blackwater. And only miles into the journey, I began to understand something I had never fully understood--the emotion of Americans in Ireland.

There I was, like all my namesakes, pressing madly on the gas, trying to throw history into reverse and to repossess for a day the green valley that Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh had stolen. Something of Georgia O’Keeffe was also making the journey. And why not? I know it seems a far cry from that well-watered land to her desert home, but in New Mexico some remember that her speech carried echoes of the Blackwater valley.

I didn’t stop for Spenser’s castle, Kilcolman. It’s just rubble, the place where the poet dined and smoked with Raleigh, and suggested that the Irish must ultimately be famished. The famous moat in which the O’Keeffes once beheld their reflections is now waterless.

What did those images look like, I wondered. Slightly Basque, like their descendant’s? There is no classic painting from that time, but there is a word-portrait, itself a classic. It is Spenser’s picture of the dispossessed as they edged toward the greens on his moat: “Out of every corner of the woods they came creeping, like anatomies of death. They spake like ghosts crying out of their graves. And if they found plot of watercress or shamrock, there they flocked as to a feast.”

Before long, enough of them had the strength to rise up and burn Kilcolman down. Spenser, pursuing his Faerie Queene in London, never went back.

Between the hedges of snowy whitethorn, we the O’Keeffe survivors had our day in the sun. Later, inside the community hall, a historian chronicled the name; he began with the shadowy Owen and ended with Georgia: “Last year there died an American painter--Georgia O’Keeffe. Her grandfather left Blackwater at the height of the Great Famine. Here is her book.” Not far from where he spoke, the Blackwater still irrigates the garden in which Raleigh experimented with the potato that would famish nearly all the O’Keeffes.

Then the packed hall drank to all who had left and to all who had stayed. And as I was leafing through “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Art and Letters,” I was struck by her companion Juan Hamilton’s recollection: “In the kitchen was a basket of dark green watercress that had been freshly picked from a mountain stream.”