The Big Green Question

Irish America: Coming Into Clover, by Maureen Dezell (Doubleday, Paperback, US$13.00 (261p) ISBN 0-385-49596-X)

Our family spent every summer in the Co. Kerry village that my parents came from, and after a few weeks we were so much a part of the village that my brothers and I would boisterously leap about the side if the road, arms waving, whenever a busload of yanks drove through. We knew that they loved to talk about how friendly everyone in Ireland was, and as long as they couldn't hear our New York accents, we were happy to oblige, however tongue in cheek.

My paternal grandfather owned a small shop there, and when I was old enough to make change accurately I would mind the counter for a few hours now and then. One day, a middle-aged woman, obviously American, came in, perused the crates of fruit, and asked in a voice that still to this day strikes my mind's ear like an airhorn: "Are these apples from ar-MAW [translation: Armagh]? Because my grandfather was from ar-MAW." Even at twelve I was appalled. I don't remember where the apples were in fact from, or more to the point where I actually told her they were from, but what I do remember was her confusion and disappointment when I opened my mouth and the accent was not, shall we say, as "magically delicious" as she'd expected. The crestfallen look on her face spoke of the odyssey that began two generations ago, way up in ar-MAW, crossed 3,000 miles of treacherous ocean, endured decades of hardship and noble suffering, wove the family dynasty into the respectable fabric of some part of suburban Indiana, inspired the devotion of one granddaughter to take a journey of truth to the land of saints and scholars, only to end here in rural Kerry, with the purchase of the produce of her ancestors from a 12-year-old New Yawkuh.

It has always been one of my favorite stories to tell, but as the years wore on it began to feel as illuminating as it was comical. The hardest part about growing up as a first-generation Irish American in the 70s and 80s was what I recall as a vague sense of absence, and I think I now recognize that what was absent was a feeling of authenticity. I wasn't authentically American, because my dad didn't watch baseball and my mom didn't make me peanut butter sandwiches; and I wasn't authentically Irish, because when I went back to Ireland I was "a yank." So the anecdote became an expression of where I was (or, more precisely, wasn't) culturally: not American, not Irish, and (God forbid) not even Irish-American, if that woman was any indication of what that meant.

For me, that all began to change very quickly in 1988. There was this band that I'd read about, described as a cross between punk rock and Irish music. On the strength of that intriguing description, I decided to buy their latest album, although the best I expected to hear was, say, a Replacements-style "Danny Boy" performed at 90mph, or, more likely, another foray into the territory already mapped out by Thin Lizzy's "Whisky in the Jar." I remember my first sight of the CD cover: A famous photo of James Joyce, surrounded by copies of the same photo, with the faces of the band members replacing Joyce's. Its simultaneous reverence and cheekiness were strangely thrilling. I got home and popped it in the CD player, and—I may be exaggerating, but only slightly—had the wind knocked out of me from the first note. These guys had turned the obvious approach on its head: Rather than playing Irish music with electric guitars, they were playing punk rock with an accordion—and, more strikingly, making it sound self-evident, and authentic. The band, of course, was The Pogues, the album was If I Should Fall From Grace With God, the pinnacle of their achievement; I was 21, and I have never been the same since. I shouldn't say that The Pogues per se made me proud to be Irish, but they did give me a point of reference to create my own pride.

Now, I am 35 and the father of a precocious toddler, who is old enough to ask questions like: "what is Ireland?" and to sing a verse and chorus of "Molly Malone," and I find it's time to reexamine the big green question. So far, I have reduced my existential tangle to this: If we take Irish culture, remove the shamrocks, the lepruchauns, Riverdance, and, above all, the drinking, what remains? Good question, but that's pretty much as far as I'd gotten. Not having an answer to the question, "what is your daughter's heritage?" had begun to haunt me, as if I didn't even know her blood type.

Just in time, comes Irish America: Coming Into Clover, by Maureen Dezell. This relevatory book opens with a short anecdote about the event that was the catalyst for the project, in which the author expresses her horror at the thought that a "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" button should encapsulate a culture for her son, then even more horror that she was unable to say what instead that culture was. It turns out to be a helpful framework for reading the book, as Dezell goes to work defining Irish America like a sculptor at a block of marble, awakening the beauty within by chipping away the parts that aren't part of it.

The book is organized around eight topics:

the Irish American image,
the Irish diaspora,
the "CWASP" (Catholic/Celtic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant),
women,
alcohol,
public service,
the Catholic church, and
the most recent immigrants.

At points the book seems to lose its cohesive thread and begins to sound like a loosely organized string of interesting facts, but for the most part each topic is handled expertly, and the research is exhaustive and obviously meticulous. In fact, the sheer volume of information within the book will likely make it a canonical entry in the bibliography of any related book for years to come. (Luckily, the index is thorough and well-organized.)

By far, Dezell is at her best in the preface and the closing chapter, when she allows herself to be the excellent journalist that she obviously is, synthesizing and analyzing facts, and relating the larger events and trends to her own experience and thereby back to all of us with a shared consciousness. Still, I personally had a hard time relating to the frequent references to the bussing problems in Boston's Southie during the 1970's; I was young and in New York at the time, but even in the years since then I've never been given the impression that it was casting the die for all of Irish America, as Dezell seems to suggest. Regardless, her premise is compelling, and her conclusions are ultimately convincing.

I can't say that Dezell has answered my big question, but she is obviously satisfied that she has answered her own, and that may be the point. Dezell has accomplished something extraordinary here, and I suspect that this book will do for many of its Irish American readers what Alex Haley's Roots did for Americans of all ethnicities in the mid-1970's: To rouse a longing to figure out what's missing, where we came from, or why we're like this.

Of course, the critical failure of the geneology fad that has for the past two decades been blowing open Ireland's yellowed parish and steerage records is that what's missing is, alas, not buried with a grandfather in Armagh. As Dezell declares, with what struck me as remarkable candor for reasons I probably don't need to explain: "I am not a Celt, nor am I of Ireland. I'm an American. An Irish American."

Whether by the journey that ended in stepping off the ship or the one that began there, we Irish have been changed—changed utterly—by America, and the answer lies somewhere in that terrible beauty.

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