The Forgotten Irishmen of American Literature

A Year ago, in a front-page article in the New York Times Book Review, Mary Gordon wrote that for some time she had been unable to explain why “the country of Goldsmith and Swift, of Maria Edgeworth and Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, above all the country of Yeats and Joyce, the country of O’Casey and Synge, of O’Connor and O’Faolain produced so little in its American branch.”

The writer went on to acknowledge O’Neill, Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, J. F. Power, William Alfred, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Howard and William Kennedy as the only producers of works that would qualify for a course on American Irish literature. And such a course would take up no more than half a semester, she claimed.

The majority of the classic Irish writers whom Gordon named were Protestants. Yet when she shifts to the “American branch,” she confines herself to writers who were or are Catholic. Thus she merely conforms to the apparently universal practice of only acknowledging Catholic Americans of Irish descent as Irish Americans.

Historically, Irish society was made up of three classes. Catholics, who were largely peasants; Ulster Presbyterians, who were mainly descended from Scottish planters, and the ruling Anglo-Irish Protestant class.

Ulster Presbyterians came to America in considerable numbers during the 18th Century, and Catholics came in their millions during the 19th Century. Both groups came for religious, political and economic reasons, though to different degrees. And America often was the ideal dumping ground for the superfluous sons and daughters of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. All were Irish.

The American branch of the Ulster Presbyterians contributed more than a little to American literature. The father of Henry, William and Alice James was the son of a Presbyterian from County Cavan who came to Albany just after the Revolutionary War, and their mother was descended from a Walsh who came to America from County Down, at about the same time.

Edgar Allen Poe’s grandfather came to America from the same county, and other Irish names in Edgar’s blood were McBride and Cairnes. Thomas Wolfe’s mother was the daughter of an Ulster Presbyterian temperance lecturer who had served as a major in the Civil War. John Steinbeck’s mother’s people were Hamiltons from County Derry. William Faulkner’s father always maintained that the family had come from Ulster just before the Revolutionary War.

To Gordon’s list of American writers who are Catholics of Irish descent, I would add Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell, John O’Hara, Mary McCarthy, Edwin O’Connor, Thomas Flanagan, J. P. Dunleavy, Cormac O’Rourke, John Kennedy Toole.

As to the Anglo-Irish ruling classes; well, it was Gore Vidal, who, on a BBC radio interview after the publication of his novel “Lincoln,” said that his family came from “nearby Donegal.” And indeed the Gores had vast tracts of land in the west of Ireland at the beginning of the 18th Century. Seven members of the family were in the Irish Parliament. But they were prolific too, and so the superfluous ones were sent to settle on the Potomac, where they intermarried with other Anglo-Irish immigrants--to all of whom we are indebted for producing a man of letters most definitely in the public and provocative tradition of Swift, Wilde and Shaw.

Read the letters of Raymond Chandler and you will come across some interesting comments on his mother’s people, Anglo-Irish Protestants from County Waterford. In one written in 1945 he wrote: “I have a great many Irish relatives, some poor, some not poor, and all Protestants and some of them Sinn Feiners and some entirely pro-Britain--almost all the great Irish rebels were Protestants. I grew up with a terrible contempt for Catholics--I could make a book about these people, but I am too much of an Irishman myself to tell the truth about them.” And if Poe invented the private detective, it was Chandler who gave us the wittiest and most golden-tongued one in the genre.

The contribution of Irish Americans to the continent’s literature is therefore considerable. That it does not appear so is due to two factors. One, the narrow and illogical definition of Irish American. Two, the transcendence of ethnic barriers in the bulk of the works of Irish American writers.

The Irish arrived in America already knowing the language, as Gordon herself wrote in her article. And surely it was this advantage that allowed them to transcend ethnic preoccupations in so much of their writing--not a disadvantage that prevented them from producing recognizably ethnic literatures such as those written by Jewish and Black Americans, as Gordon suggests. A brief run through the works of the Irish American writers I have referred to will show that the American experience re-created in them is extraordinarily wide.

But what has astounded me in my recent pursuit of American writers of Irish descent, for a book on that topic, is that there is an enduring Irish, or Celtic if you like, quality in their works. The Irish Catholics and Ulster Presbyterians were Celtic in provenance, whereas the Anglo-Irish Protestants were so through intermarriage and infectiousness.

Even Henry James, the most cerebral of writers, displayed a Celtic extravagance in his ambition for the English sentence. Thomas Wolfe poured out words sometimes at the rate of 10,000 in one day, words that his most recent biographer demonstrated could be technically analyzed as poetry. And Poe is pure celt with his chilling tales and haunting verse, and public taunting of his fellow man.

Faulkner too had extravagant ambitions for words, and used them with tremendous imagination in dark stories of great cleverness and wit. As for tale-benders, there have been few to equal Margaret Mitchell, a descendant of Philip Fitzgerald from Tipperary. What about all the comedy that the Catholic Flannery O’Connor observed in the condition of man in the Protestant Bible Belt.

Turn over any literary rock in the United States and you will find a Fitzgerald, and the same dedication to words and poetry as had the chiefs of that family in the old days in Ireland. The chiefs were very often poets or patrons of poets, and it is interesting how their names have resurfaced in the American writers of Irish descent: O’Connor, O’Hara, McCarthy, O’Donnell, O’Neill, Fitzgerald. No wonder their love of words and wit infected the Anglo-Irish who unseated and subjected or replaced them, and who gave us Swift, and Wilde, and Shaw, and, dare I say it, Gore Vidal.

Tale-bending, extravagance, the supernatural, wit, grotesquerie, poetry, bawdiness have been the recognizable preoccupations of old Gaelic and modern Irish literature. They traveled across the Atlantic and survived and are to be found by those who know what to look for, and more important, where to look.

For if you don’t know what an Irish American is, how will you ever find that what I claim is true?