NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 2004

"A Monument More Lasting than Bronze”: Eoin McKiernan, 1915–2004 james murphy Finding Home: Aughkiltubred, 1969 e. moore quinn Toasters and Boasters: John D. Crimmins's St. Patrick's Day (1902) joanna brooks Held Captive by the Irish: Quaker Captivity Narratives in Frontier Pennsylvania jack morgan Thoreau's “The Shipwreck” (1855): Famine Narratives and the Female Embodiment of Catastrophe louise imogen guiney Filíocht Nua: New Poetry daniel tobin Modernism, Leftism, and the Spirit: The Poetry of Lola Ridge ron ebest Uncanny Realist: John T. McIntyre and Steps Going Down (1936) matthew jockers A Window on the West: Charles Driscoll's Kansas Irish charles f. duffy Family, Ireland, and Politics in Edwin O'Connor's All in the Family grace neville John Healy's Nineteen Acres: Mayo, America, and History from Below mary l. bogumil “Nothing Worse Than a Traveler Who Keeps Looking Backwards”: The Murderous McLaughlins Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover News of Authors

Clúdach: Cover In this Joycean year, we continue our presentation of images from the approximate era of Ulysses—this time, by offering an 1888 photograph of Michael's Lane. We have grown used to seeing images of Dublin in Joyce's day present an energetic cityscape: trams, shop fronts, and bustling streets. Here, we see another Dublin—a city's underside, literally in the shadow of Christ Church Cathedral. Although this particular street is never mentioned by the novelist, the harsh reality of the urban poverty depicted here could never be far from Joyce's consciousness. Indeed, Michael's lane is only a stone's throw from Marsh's Library, where—as we learn in the Proteus episode of Ulysses—Stephen Dedalus prided himself on his acquisition of esoteric knowledge. Surely, walking into the gritty day-to-day life of Michael's Lane, where the precarious economic lives of the poor were much in sight, would give the lie to his pretensions of escape. This image is drawn from the William Lawrence Photography Collection, a major holding of Ireland's National Photographic Archive consisting of 40,000 glass plate negatives from 1870–1914. The images were produced commercially by the Lawrence Studio, which opened on Sackville Street in 1865, and which was a major producer of postcards and viewbooks for the tourist trade of its day. The Lawrence Collection was acquired by National Library of Ireland in 1943. Many of the images have now been digitized and can be seen on the library's search on-line catalog at http://www.nli.ie/new_archive.htm; scholarly researchers and casual visitors alike will find this database an astounding window on Ireland's history, both urban and rural. We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
With this issue, New Hibernia Review offers something new in its eight-year history: a themed issue, devoted to neglected works of Irish-American literature. In an issue that aspires to step back and to reconsider, it is fitting to open with the most ruminative and retrospective of literary forms, a memoir by Dr. James Murphy—now director of the Irish Studies program at Villanova University, “Finding Home: Aughkiltubred, 1969,” recalls its author's first trip to Ireland in the company of his immigrant father. The journey began worriedly, with the newly widowed father wondering if he could pick up the threads of a life he had left behind four decades earlier. In the end, the journey that began so uncertainly was gratifying for all – though, as befits a memoir, in unforeseen ways.

Writing from the perspective of a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. E. Moore Quinn, who is currently engaged in a study of Irish-American folklore, draws our attention to the 1902 collection St. Patrick's Day: Its Celebration in New York and Other American Places, 1737–1845, compiled by John D. Crimmins. In particular, Quinn probes the cultural significance of the many toasts of St. Patrick's Day celebrations in that period. Sometimes eccentric, often bombastic, the multiple toasts that were de rigueur encomia to the national holiday provide a rich resource by which to understand the aspirations of the Irish in colonial America and the Early Republic. Quinn shows that there was more than self-congratulation at work: the grandiloquence of the toasters was, in fact, a sophisticated strategy for asserting a claim to cultural legitimacy and full citizenship.

Rooted in Puritan religious testimonies, the genre of the captivity narrative took many forms, but always framed itself around the basic story of a forced detention among aliens. As Dr. Joanna Brooks demonstrates, the Pennsylvania backcountry gave rise to a particular subset of such narratives in which Quakers depict themselves as surrounded by the savage Scots-Irish minority. Examining this little-studied literary genre, Brooks finds that these narratives reflect the Quakers' wish to portray the frontier realpolitik to their own advantage: She observes that Quakers thought that, “Were it not for this barbarous minority . . . [they] might have maintained a more peaceful relationship to the Indians; the outrages of a few Scots-Irish frontier settlers dragged the whole of the colony into war with the Indians and the Quakers into open conflict with their own peaceful principles.” Joanna Brooks is the author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (2003).

However much popular culture may promote the image of the raffish, rough-and-tumble “Paddy” in nineteenth-century America, there was always a simultaneous tradition of literary high culture to refute it. A ready example is Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), a selection of whose poetry we present in this issue. Associated with the “aesthetic revival” school of New England poets that included John Boyle O'Reilly, John Jeffrey Roche, and other writers at the Catholic Boston Pilot, Guiney looked to the Romantics and earlier for her forms. But in these poems from the 1880s, we find a woman of far-ranging interests, alert to the world around her. “Two Irish Peasant Songs” offer lush natural images, while in “An Epitaph for Wendell Phillips,” Guiney pays tribute to the famous Abolitionist orator. And in “Gloucester Harbor ” she alludes to Al Borak, the horse of Arab myth—hinting at Guiney's future career as a student of Arab literature, and as the “discoverer” of Khalil Gibran.

As Professor Jack Morgan notes, the presence of famine immigrants was an inescapable fact of life in the New England of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Transcendalists. The 1855 essay “The Shipwreck” opens a window on Thoreau's particular perceptions of the immigrant Irish. At one level, the essay is invaluable reportage; at another level, it can be read as a meditation on human indifference. At a still deeper level, Morgan argues, “The Shipwreck” illustrates Margaret Kelleher's theories of catastrophe literature by conflating voyeuristic and transgressive elements in its descriptions of female drowning victims. Jack Morgan's most recent book is The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (2002).

No scholar has done more to delineate a tradition of Irish-American poetry than has Daniel Tobin, as his Book of Irish-American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, due from the University of Notre Dame Press in 2005, will attest. Tobin is also the author of the two honored collections of poetry—the most recent Double Life (2004)—that enrich the tradition he has helped to define. Here, Dr. Tobin considers the career of Dublin-born Lola Ridge, and especially her 1918 book The Ghetto, written out of her experience of the Jewish immigrant slums in New York City. Prominent in the avant-garde literary scene of her day, Ridge may best be understood in the context of the modernist milieu in which she moved—and also by what Tobin calls her “need to fuse her own passion for the material plight of the world she encountered with a spiritual ideal.”

The name of Philadephia's John T. McIntyre (1871-1951) may not ring many bells today, which, Dr. Ron Ebest argues, is all the more reason that he should be considered here. Over a sixty-year span, the eccentric McIntyre cranked out dozens of books, most without the slightest literary merit. In 1936, however, he produced a masterpiece in Steps Going Down—an unprecedented amalgam of urban realism and the supernatural. McIntyre was lauded in Time, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, and a panel of distinguished critics chose Steps Going Down as the finest American novel of the year—only to watch its author fritter away his talent in frivolous projects. Ron Ebest is co-editor of Reconciling Feminism and Catholicism? (2003), and contributed several articles to The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America (1999).

A famous New Yorker cover renders a map of the United States from the perspective of New York City, wherein almost the entire continent lies east of the Hudson River, and the Midwest and Mountain States simply vanish. Until recently, Dr. Matthew Jockers would contend, such was the study of Irish-American writing. In this issue, Jockers introduces the journalist Charles Driscoll and his autobiography Kansas Irish. Central to Driscoll's tale is the figure of his father, Big Flurry—a tragicomic figure who may have tamed the land, but who never conquered his own restlessness and dissatisfaction with life, though the portrait of Big Flurry that emerges in Driscoll's memoir is colored by compassion and forgiveness. A specialist in both the literature of the American West and in academic technology, Matthew Jockers also edits the Newsletter of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Overshadowed by the blockbuster The Last Hurrah (1956) and the highly honored The Edge of Sadness (1962), Edwin O'Connor's last novel All in the Family (1966) is usually dismissed as a roman à clef about the Kennedys. Here, Dr. Charles Duffy asks us to reconsider this surprisingly subtle novel. O'Connor's fictional Kinsella family may indeed have disappointed readers who came looking to find another Irish “pol” drawn as an engaging rogue. What the novelist had in mind was something more: a portrait of the Irish after assimilation, told in a family's reckoning with the spiritual costs of chasing the American Dream. Charles Duffy is the author of A Family of his Own: A Life of Edwin O'Connor (2003).

It may seem surprising that an issue devoted to the Irish-American experience would feature a memoir of farming in the 1930s on a small holding near the Mayo-Sligo border. Grace Neville shows, however, that John Healy's Nineteen Acres (1978) is in fact saturated with a consciousness of America. The United States was present in both the material circumstances and in the imaginations of Healy's family and neighbors. Homes were purchased with immigrant remittances, and in the Ireland of Healy's youth, many of the few material comforts had come from American relatives. Most important, America offered an alternative to the prospect of subsistence living on poor land. A professor of French, Dr. Grace Neville's research interests and publications span disciplinary boundaries. Her publications include a chapter on the folklore of the “American wake” in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora (2000). With Eamon Maher, she recently edited France-Ireland: Anatomy of a Relationship (2004).

The divided heart of the immigrant haunts Irish-American literature, in which a search for home—often a psychic home—almost always informs the writing. As Mary Bogumil notes here, Jack Dunphy's autobiographical novel The Murderous McLaughlins (1988) is framed by unspoken tensions between the Old World and the New, by the clash of the present with an imagined past. In cautious, yet strangely compelling prose, Dunphy's novel reconstructs the world of ethnic Philadelphia in the 1920s as it tells of a boy's attempt to reconcile the fractures in his family. The story turns on the boy's Irish grandmother, Mary Ellen, with whom he travels to Connemara—and whose unexpected discovery there of both her own losses and of a renewed optimism becomes her most enduring bequest. A frequent contributor to theater and composition journals, Dr. Mary Bogumil is the author of Understanding August Wilson (1999).

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