Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for part of William Kennedy’s Albany saga, Ironweed.
Book Review
Ironweed, William Kennedy, The Viking Press, New York, 1983
The paragraphs below were used to review the book that this film is based on. Since the film very closely follows the story line of the book the comments there can, for the most part, stand here. I would only add that Jack Nicholson’s role as ex- baseball player, hard guy, and hobo “alkie” Fran is probably more understated that the book character (and more understated for him, given some of his more in-your-face roles like in The Shining or Five Easy Pieces). Meryl Streep, well is Merlyn Streep, and plays the role of Helen, Fran’s street companion/lover, to a tee (although she might be a tad bit more beautiful that your average woman rummy). The surprise treat is the secondary role played by raspy singer-songwriter Tom Waits as Fran’s sidekick, Rudy. On reflection though, for those, like me, who know Waits’ later musical, work his role should not be surprised. Who else lately could fill that kind of ‘lost soul’ hobo role so naturally?
William Kennedy is, at least in his Albany stories, my kind of writer. He writes about the trials and tribulations of the Irish diaspora as it penetrated the rough and tumble of American urban WASP-run society, for good or evil. I know those people, their follies and frauds, like the back of my hand. Check. Kennedy writes, as here, about that pervasive hold that Catholicism has even on its most debased sons and daughters, saint and sinner alike. I know those characteristics all too well. Check. He writes about that place in class society where the working class meets the lumpen-proletariat-the thieves, grifters, drifters and con men- the human dust. I know that place well, much better than I would ever let on. Check. He writes about the sorrows and dangers of the effects alcohol on working class families. I know that place too. Check. And so on. Oh, did I mention that he also, at some point, was an editor of some sort associated with the late Hunter S. Thompson down in Puerto Rico. I know that mad man’s work well. Check
The above, in a tangential way, gets you pretty much all you need to know about the why of reading this book (and other stories by Kennedy), except a little something about the plot line. Well, that is fairly simple. Old time baseball star Fran and his erstwhile companion, a gifted singer, Helen are drunks working their way through the edges between skid row and respectability. And, mainly, losing to the lure of the bottle and to the hard, hard struggle that it takes just to get through the day when your options are limited. Put that task together with trying to survive in the jungles, with its endless twisted characters, of Great Depression (that other one in the 1930s) Albany, trying to figure out when life went wrong and trying to figure out why it all went wrong- while fighting a losing battle against society’s expectations- and one’s family’s. This will provide enough dramatic tension to keep you interested. Oh did I mention that Kennedy writes with verve, with an uncanny understanding of his characters (although only Fran and Helen get the full treatment here) and with no holds barred, or punches pulled down there on cheap street. See, that is why Kennedy and Thompson connected in the literary world. They KNOW the underside of life. Read this thing, please.
Showing posts with label irish diaspora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label irish diaspora. Show all posts
Monday, March 19, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
When The Boyos Cried Out Against The Rough-Edged Night– “Blackout”- The Dropkick Murphys- A CD (DVD) Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Dropkick Murphys performing Worker’s Song.
CD (DVD) Review
Blackout, CD with bonus DVD with live performances, Dropkick Murphys, Hellcat Records, 2003
Guys (guys being used here colloquially for men and women) with a sense of Easter 1916, James Connolly, Irish Citizens Army, General Post Office, fight the damn English 800 hundred year oppressors history. Rock and roll guys, hard rock and rock guys, who throw back to classic 1960s days (ouch!, ouch for me that is). Boston mean streets guys. Irish guys, working class guys, Irish working class guys, not always the same thing as elsewhere and perhaps a bit more clannish what with that Aer Lingus making Dublin a suburban stop from Logan. What is there not to like for a Irish-immersed working class guy who lived just a stone’s from mother home Southie.
And the answer is nothing, including a nice little bonus DVD to see the boyos (also colloquially used) rage against the hard-edged world night. And do it on their own terms from up-tempo Irish Saint Patrick’ Day “drunk as a skunk” standards like Black Velvet Band to homage working class Worker’s Song to just regular working class angst stuff to just regular boy meets girl, heaven hell no way out stuff boy meets girl stuff, that we all face, and face gladly. Nice work, boyos. And don’t ever get complaisant, okay.
CD (DVD) Review
Blackout, CD with bonus DVD with live performances, Dropkick Murphys, Hellcat Records, 2003
Guys (guys being used here colloquially for men and women) with a sense of Easter 1916, James Connolly, Irish Citizens Army, General Post Office, fight the damn English 800 hundred year oppressors history. Rock and roll guys, hard rock and rock guys, who throw back to classic 1960s days (ouch!, ouch for me that is). Boston mean streets guys. Irish guys, working class guys, Irish working class guys, not always the same thing as elsewhere and perhaps a bit more clannish what with that Aer Lingus making Dublin a suburban stop from Logan. What is there not to like for a Irish-immersed working class guy who lived just a stone’s from mother home Southie.
And the answer is nothing, including a nice little bonus DVD to see the boyos (also colloquially used) rage against the hard-edged world night. And do it on their own terms from up-tempo Irish Saint Patrick’ Day “drunk as a skunk” standards like Black Velvet Band to homage working class Worker’s Song to just regular working class angst stuff to just regular boy meets girl, heaven hell no way out stuff boy meets girl stuff, that we all face, and face gladly. Nice work, boyos. And don’t ever get complaisant, okay.
Monday, December 19, 2011
The “Shame” Culture Of Poverty- Down In The Base Of Society Life Ain’t Pretty
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Irish-American writer and my muse on this post, Frank McCourt.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A few years ago in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different, in some ways very different, the story that he told of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, North Adamsville, a generation later. A recent re-reading of that work only confirms my previous appraisal. The common thread? Down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange Arkie/Okie Dust Bowl hollow-boned despair, hardship windowless, hell, door-less, hovel, no end in sight, no good end in sight photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams, very small steps up the mobility ladder from generation to generation. If that much, of step up that is. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the the soul-starving “dole” and getting a “soft” low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age.
That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. The carping, “Why don’t you take the civil service exam?,” so on and so on. Escaping that white-walled nine-to-five, three-week vacation and a crooked back cubicle fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of what the capitalist system does to the denizens down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had placed) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, Tales From The ‘Hood', on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled ragamuffin upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In Angela’s Ashes he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, A Coming Of Age Story, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants, denims of course, one of about three pair that I rotated until they turned to shreds in the course of time, for a square dance demonstration for our parents in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with at Adamsville South Elementary School. I caught holy hell, serious holy hell for weeks afterwards, for that (and missed, due to my mother’s public rage in front of everybody, my big chance with the youthful stick girl “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences as also noted in that series mentioned above that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in.” One of the ways to be “in,” at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool,” you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” was to be ….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother, an older brother who was build larger than you and you had to kind of tuck in that and roll up that. Or to wear, mother–produced from some recessive poverty gene Bargain Center midnight fire discount sale, oddly colored (like purple or vermillion) or designed (pin-striped then not in style or curly-cues never in style) clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys.” I remember the routine even now-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store, like the Bargain Center mentioned above, of the day.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right,’ meaning respectable, added up. All of this created a “world” where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed, followed unsuccessfully for life, and that I did for a minute), where the closeness of neighbors was suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” was more like something out of “the night of the long knives.” If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan," in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying that in the 21st century we need that social solidarity not less but more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary that I titled, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A few years ago in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different, in some ways very different, the story that he told of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, North Adamsville, a generation later. A recent re-reading of that work only confirms my previous appraisal. The common thread? Down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange Arkie/Okie Dust Bowl hollow-boned despair, hardship windowless, hell, door-less, hovel, no end in sight, no good end in sight photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams, very small steps up the mobility ladder from generation to generation. If that much, of step up that is. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the the soul-starving “dole” and getting a “soft” low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age.
That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. The carping, “Why don’t you take the civil service exam?,” so on and so on. Escaping that white-walled nine-to-five, three-week vacation and a crooked back cubicle fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of what the capitalist system does to the denizens down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had placed) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, Tales From The ‘Hood', on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled ragamuffin upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In Angela’s Ashes he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, A Coming Of Age Story, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants, denims of course, one of about three pair that I rotated until they turned to shreds in the course of time, for a square dance demonstration for our parents in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with at Adamsville South Elementary School. I caught holy hell, serious holy hell for weeks afterwards, for that (and missed, due to my mother’s public rage in front of everybody, my big chance with the youthful stick girl “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences as also noted in that series mentioned above that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in.” One of the ways to be “in,” at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool,” you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” was to be ….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother, an older brother who was build larger than you and you had to kind of tuck in that and roll up that. Or to wear, mother–produced from some recessive poverty gene Bargain Center midnight fire discount sale, oddly colored (like purple or vermillion) or designed (pin-striped then not in style or curly-cues never in style) clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys.” I remember the routine even now-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store, like the Bargain Center mentioned above, of the day.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right,’ meaning respectable, added up. All of this created a “world” where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed, followed unsuccessfully for life, and that I did for a minute), where the closeness of neighbors was suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” was more like something out of “the night of the long knives.” If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan," in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying that in the 21st century we need that social solidarity not less but more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary that I titled, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery
Click on the headline to link to a website devoted to oatmeal bread recipes. Hey, I never said I wasn't quirky on some of these links.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, comment:
There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Today though I am in thrall to smells. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while ago, passed a neighborhood bakery here on the St. Brendan Street that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house, living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.
Of course one could not dismiss, dismiss at one’s peril, that invigorating smell of the salt air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up. A wind that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at North Adamsville Beach, the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. Or evade the fetid smell of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts. (Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo race expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.)
Or the smell sound of the ocean floor (or dawn, if you got lucky) at twilight on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell this retro crowd, the crowd that will read this piece, about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.
You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set foot one in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you grew up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.
Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any give time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her to when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.
Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by this morning’s sough-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, tuna fish. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a desecration. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s grape, also of course) and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.
And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I draw blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredient she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, comment:
There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Today though I am in thrall to smells. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while ago, passed a neighborhood bakery here on the St. Brendan Street that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house, living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.
Of course one could not dismiss, dismiss at one’s peril, that invigorating smell of the salt air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up. A wind that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at North Adamsville Beach, the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. Or evade the fetid smell of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts. (Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo race expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.)
Or the smell sound of the ocean floor (or dawn, if you got lucky) at twilight on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell this retro crowd, the crowd that will read this piece, about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.
You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set foot one in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you grew up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.
Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any give time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her to when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.
Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by this morning’s sough-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, tuna fish. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a desecration. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s grape, also of course) and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.
And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I draw blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredient she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
The Face Of Old Irish Working-Class North Adamsville- Another Moment In History -In Honor Of Kenny, Class Of 1958?
Another Moment In History- A Guest Post, Of Sorts
Kenny Kelly, Class of 1958? comment:
A word. I, Kenneth Francis Xavier Kelly, at work they just call me Kenny, although my friends call me “FX”, am a map of Ireland, or at least I used to be when I was younger and had a full head of very wavy red hair, a mass of freckles instead of a whiskey and beer chaser-driven mass of very high-proof wrinkles, and my own, rather than store-bought, rattlers, teeth I mean. For work, ya, I’m still rolling the barrels uphill, I, well, let’s just say I do a little of this and a little of that for Jimmy the Mutt and leave it at that. I am also the map, the Irish map part anyway, of North Adamsville, from the Class of 1958 at the old high school, or at least I should have been, except for, well, let’s leave that as at a little of this and that, for now, as well. I’ll tell you that story another time, if you want to hear it. Or talk to that old bastard, Headmaster Kerrigan, Black-Jack Kerrigan, and he’ll give you his lying side of the story if he can still talk the bastard.
Let’s also put it that I grew up, rough and tumble, mostly rough, very rough, on the hard drinking-father-sometimes-working, and the plumbing-or-something-don’t-work- and-you-can’t- get- the-tight-fisted-landlord-to- fix-anything-for-love-nor- money walk up triple decker just barely working class, mean streets around Sagamore and Prospect Streets in one –horse Atlantic. At least my dear grandmother, and maybe yours too, called it that because there was nothing there, nothing you needed anyway. You know where I mean, those streets right over by the Welcome Young Field, by Harry the Bookie’s variety store (you knew Harry’s, with the always almost empty shelves except maybe a few dusty cans of soup, a couple of loaves of bread and a refrigerator empty except maybe a quart of milk or two, an also active pin-ball machine, and his “book” right on the counter for all the world, including his cop-customer world, to see), and the never empty, never empty as long as my father was alive, Red Feather (excuse me I forgot it changed names, Dublin Grille) bar room. Now I have your attention, right?
But first let me explain how I wound up as a “guest” on this “Tales of Old North Adamsville” blog. Seems like Peter Paul Markin, that’s the half-assed, oops, half-baked, manager of this site, posted up some story, some weepy cock and bull story, about the Irish-ness of the old town, “A Moment In History… As March 17th Approaches” to the “North Adamsville Graduates Facebook” page and my pride and joy daughter, Clara, North Adamsville Class of 1978 (and she actually graduated), saw it and recognized the names Riley, O’Brian and Welcome Young Field and asked me to read it. I did and sent Peter Paul an e-mail (christ, where does he get off using two names like he was a bloody heathen Boston Brahmin and him without a pot to piss in, as my dear grandmother used to say, growing up on streets on the wrong side of the tracks, over near the marshes for chrissakes, wronger even than the Sagamore streets). (Or my baby Clara did, after I told her what to write. I’m not much of hand at writing or using this hi-tech stuff, if you want to know the truth)
I don’t know what he did with that e-mail, and to be truthful again, I don’t really care, but in that e-mail I told him something that he didn’t know, or rather two things. The first was that I “knew” him, or rather knew his grandmother (on his mother’s side) Anna Riley because her sister, Bernice, and my dear grandmother, Mary, also an O’Brien but with an “e”, who both lived in Southie (South Boston, in those days the Irish Mecca, for the heathens or Protestants that might read this) were as thick as thieves. When I was just a teenager myself I used to drive his grandmother over to her sister’s in Southie so that the three of them, and maybe some other ladies joined them for all I know, could go to one of the Broadway bars (don’t ask me to name which one, I don’t remember) that admitted unescorted ladies in those days and have themselves a drunk. And smoke cigarettes, unfiltered ones no less, Camels I think when I used cadge a few, which his stern grandfather, Dan Riley, refused to allow in the house over on Young Street.
I know, I know this is not the way that blue-grey haired Irish grandmothers are supposed to act, in public or private. And somebody, if I know my old North Adamsville gossips, wags and nose-butters, and my North Adamsville Irish branch of that same clan especially, is going say why am I airing that “dirty linen” in public. That’s a good point that Peter Paul talked in his story about Frank O’Brian and not airing the family business in public (in that post mentioned above). So what am I doing taking potshots as the blessed memories of those sainted ladies. That is where my second thing comes in to set the record straight – Peter Paul, and I told him so in that e-mail (or Clara did) with no beating around the bush, is to me just another one of those misty-eyed, half-breed March 17th Irish that are our curse and who go on and on about the eight hundred years of English tyranny like they lived it, actually lived each day of it. (Yes half-breed, his father, a good guy from what my father told me when they used to drink together, was nothing but a Protestant hillbilly from down in the mountain mists hills and hollows Kentucky)
Now don’t get me wrong. I am as patriotic as the next Irishman in tipping my hat to our Fenian dead, and the boys of ’16, and the lads on the right side in 1922, and the lads fighting in the North now but Peter Paul has got the North Adamsville Irish weepy, blessed “old sod” thing all wrong. No doubt about it. So, if you can believe this, he challenged me, to tell the real story. And I am here as his “guest” to straighten him out, and maybe you too. Sure, he is helping me write this thing. I already told you I’m a low-tech guy. Jesus, do you think I could write stuff like that half-assed, oops, half- baked son of an expletive with his silly, weepy half-Irish arse goings on? I will tell you this though right now if I read this thing and it doesn’t sound right fists are gonna be swinging, old as I am. But let’s get this thing moving for God’s sake.
Let me tell you about the shabeen, I mean, The Red Feather, I mean the Dublin Grille, bar room on Sagamore Street. That’s the one I know, and I am just using that as an example. There were plenty of others in old North Adamsville, maybe not as many as in Southie, but plenty. If you seriously wanted to talk about the “Irish-ness” of North Adamsville that was the place, the community cultural institution if you will, to start your journey. Many a boy, including this boy, got his first drink, legal or illegal, at that, or another like it, watering hole. Hell, the “real” reason they built that softball field at Welcome Young was so the guys, players and spectators alike, had an excuse to stop in for a few (well, maybe more than a few) after a tough battle on base paths. That’s the light-hearted part of the story, in a way. What went on when the “old man”, anybody’s “old man”, got home at the, sometimes, wee hours is not so light-hearted.
See, that is really where the straightening out job on our boy Peter Paul needs to be done. Sure, a lot of Irish fathers didn’t get drunk all the time. Although the deep dark secret was that in almost every family, every shanty family for certain and I know, and many “lace curtain” families they was at least one reprobate drunk. Hell, the local city councilor’s brother, Healy I think it was, was in thrown the drunk tank by the coppers more times than he was out. They could have given him a pass-key and saved time and money on dragging him to the caboose. But the king hell takes-the-cake was old Black-Jack’s Kerrigan’s brother, Boyo (sorry, I forget his real name). Ya, the North Adamsville High headmaster’s brother, the bastard that I had a run-in with and had to hightail it out of school, although it was not over his brother. See Black-Jack’s family though they were the Mayfair swells since Black-Jack had gone to college, one of the first in the old neighborhood, and they had that big single-family house over on Beach Street. But more than one night I found Boyo lying face-down on Billings Road drunk as a skunk and had to carry him home to his wife and family. And then head back to the other side of the tracks, that wrong side I already told you about. Next day, or sometime later, Boyo would give me a dollar. Naturally when I went to school after that I went out of my way to flash the dollar bill at Black-Jack, saying “Look what Boyo gave me for helping him out.” That’s all I had to say. Black-Jack always turned fuming red, maybe flaming red.
A lot of Irish fathers didn’t beat on their wives all the time either. And a lot of Irish fathers didn’t physically beat their kids for no reason. Plenty of kids go the “strap” though when the old man was “feeling his oats.” (I never heard of any sexual abuse, but that was a book sealed with seven seals then.) And more than one wife, more than one son’s mother didn’t show her face to the “shawlie” world due to the simple fact that a black eye, a swollen face, or some other wound disfigured her enough to lay low for a while. I had to stop, or try to stop, my own father one time when I was about twelve and he was on one of his three day Dublin Grille whiskey straight-up, no chaser toots and Ma just got in his way. He swatted me down like a fly and I never tried to go that route again. But he didn’t try to beat my mother again either, at least not when I was a around or I would have heard about it on the shawlie wire.
And a lot of Irish wives didn’t just let their husbands beat on them just because they were the meal ticket, the precious difference between a home and the county farm or, worst, the streets. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t make excuses for dear old dad (or pray) when the paycheck didn’t show up and the creditors were beating down the door. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t let those Irish fathers beat on their kids. And a lot of Irish mothers didn’t tell their kids not to “air the dirty linen in public.” But, don’t let anyone fool you, and maybe I am touching on things too close to home, my home or yours, but that formed part of the scene, the Irish scene.
Maybe, because down at the Atlantic dregs end of North Adamsville the whole place was so desperately lower working-class other ethnic groups, like the Italians, also had those same pathologies. (I am letting Peter Paul use that last word, although I still don’t really know what it means, but it seemed right when he told me what it meant). I don’t know. Figure it out though, plenty of fathers (and it was mainly fathers only in those days who worked, when they could) with not much education and dead-end jobs, plenty of triple decker, no space, no air, no privacy rented housing and plenty of dead time. Ya, sure, I felt the “Irish-ness” of the place sometimes (mainly with the back of the hand), I won’t say I didn’t but when Peter Paul starts running on and on about the “old sod” just remember what I told you. I’ll tell you all the truth, won’t you take a word from me.
Kenny Kelly, Class of 1958? comment:
A word. I, Kenneth Francis Xavier Kelly, at work they just call me Kenny, although my friends call me “FX”, am a map of Ireland, or at least I used to be when I was younger and had a full head of very wavy red hair, a mass of freckles instead of a whiskey and beer chaser-driven mass of very high-proof wrinkles, and my own, rather than store-bought, rattlers, teeth I mean. For work, ya, I’m still rolling the barrels uphill, I, well, let’s just say I do a little of this and a little of that for Jimmy the Mutt and leave it at that. I am also the map, the Irish map part anyway, of North Adamsville, from the Class of 1958 at the old high school, or at least I should have been, except for, well, let’s leave that as at a little of this and that, for now, as well. I’ll tell you that story another time, if you want to hear it. Or talk to that old bastard, Headmaster Kerrigan, Black-Jack Kerrigan, and he’ll give you his lying side of the story if he can still talk the bastard.
Let’s also put it that I grew up, rough and tumble, mostly rough, very rough, on the hard drinking-father-sometimes-working, and the plumbing-or-something-don’t-work- and-you-can’t- get- the-tight-fisted-landlord-to- fix-anything-for-love-nor- money walk up triple decker just barely working class, mean streets around Sagamore and Prospect Streets in one –horse Atlantic. At least my dear grandmother, and maybe yours too, called it that because there was nothing there, nothing you needed anyway. You know where I mean, those streets right over by the Welcome Young Field, by Harry the Bookie’s variety store (you knew Harry’s, with the always almost empty shelves except maybe a few dusty cans of soup, a couple of loaves of bread and a refrigerator empty except maybe a quart of milk or two, an also active pin-ball machine, and his “book” right on the counter for all the world, including his cop-customer world, to see), and the never empty, never empty as long as my father was alive, Red Feather (excuse me I forgot it changed names, Dublin Grille) bar room. Now I have your attention, right?
But first let me explain how I wound up as a “guest” on this “Tales of Old North Adamsville” blog. Seems like Peter Paul Markin, that’s the half-assed, oops, half-baked, manager of this site, posted up some story, some weepy cock and bull story, about the Irish-ness of the old town, “A Moment In History… As March 17th Approaches” to the “North Adamsville Graduates Facebook” page and my pride and joy daughter, Clara, North Adamsville Class of 1978 (and she actually graduated), saw it and recognized the names Riley, O’Brian and Welcome Young Field and asked me to read it. I did and sent Peter Paul an e-mail (christ, where does he get off using two names like he was a bloody heathen Boston Brahmin and him without a pot to piss in, as my dear grandmother used to say, growing up on streets on the wrong side of the tracks, over near the marshes for chrissakes, wronger even than the Sagamore streets). (Or my baby Clara did, after I told her what to write. I’m not much of hand at writing or using this hi-tech stuff, if you want to know the truth)
I don’t know what he did with that e-mail, and to be truthful again, I don’t really care, but in that e-mail I told him something that he didn’t know, or rather two things. The first was that I “knew” him, or rather knew his grandmother (on his mother’s side) Anna Riley because her sister, Bernice, and my dear grandmother, Mary, also an O’Brien but with an “e”, who both lived in Southie (South Boston, in those days the Irish Mecca, for the heathens or Protestants that might read this) were as thick as thieves. When I was just a teenager myself I used to drive his grandmother over to her sister’s in Southie so that the three of them, and maybe some other ladies joined them for all I know, could go to one of the Broadway bars (don’t ask me to name which one, I don’t remember) that admitted unescorted ladies in those days and have themselves a drunk. And smoke cigarettes, unfiltered ones no less, Camels I think when I used cadge a few, which his stern grandfather, Dan Riley, refused to allow in the house over on Young Street.
I know, I know this is not the way that blue-grey haired Irish grandmothers are supposed to act, in public or private. And somebody, if I know my old North Adamsville gossips, wags and nose-butters, and my North Adamsville Irish branch of that same clan especially, is going say why am I airing that “dirty linen” in public. That’s a good point that Peter Paul talked in his story about Frank O’Brian and not airing the family business in public (in that post mentioned above). So what am I doing taking potshots as the blessed memories of those sainted ladies. That is where my second thing comes in to set the record straight – Peter Paul, and I told him so in that e-mail (or Clara did) with no beating around the bush, is to me just another one of those misty-eyed, half-breed March 17th Irish that are our curse and who go on and on about the eight hundred years of English tyranny like they lived it, actually lived each day of it. (Yes half-breed, his father, a good guy from what my father told me when they used to drink together, was nothing but a Protestant hillbilly from down in the mountain mists hills and hollows Kentucky)
Now don’t get me wrong. I am as patriotic as the next Irishman in tipping my hat to our Fenian dead, and the boys of ’16, and the lads on the right side in 1922, and the lads fighting in the North now but Peter Paul has got the North Adamsville Irish weepy, blessed “old sod” thing all wrong. No doubt about it. So, if you can believe this, he challenged me, to tell the real story. And I am here as his “guest” to straighten him out, and maybe you too. Sure, he is helping me write this thing. I already told you I’m a low-tech guy. Jesus, do you think I could write stuff like that half-assed, oops, half- baked son of an expletive with his silly, weepy half-Irish arse goings on? I will tell you this though right now if I read this thing and it doesn’t sound right fists are gonna be swinging, old as I am. But let’s get this thing moving for God’s sake.
Let me tell you about the shabeen, I mean, The Red Feather, I mean the Dublin Grille, bar room on Sagamore Street. That’s the one I know, and I am just using that as an example. There were plenty of others in old North Adamsville, maybe not as many as in Southie, but plenty. If you seriously wanted to talk about the “Irish-ness” of North Adamsville that was the place, the community cultural institution if you will, to start your journey. Many a boy, including this boy, got his first drink, legal or illegal, at that, or another like it, watering hole. Hell, the “real” reason they built that softball field at Welcome Young was so the guys, players and spectators alike, had an excuse to stop in for a few (well, maybe more than a few) after a tough battle on base paths. That’s the light-hearted part of the story, in a way. What went on when the “old man”, anybody’s “old man”, got home at the, sometimes, wee hours is not so light-hearted.
See, that is really where the straightening out job on our boy Peter Paul needs to be done. Sure, a lot of Irish fathers didn’t get drunk all the time. Although the deep dark secret was that in almost every family, every shanty family for certain and I know, and many “lace curtain” families they was at least one reprobate drunk. Hell, the local city councilor’s brother, Healy I think it was, was in thrown the drunk tank by the coppers more times than he was out. They could have given him a pass-key and saved time and money on dragging him to the caboose. But the king hell takes-the-cake was old Black-Jack’s Kerrigan’s brother, Boyo (sorry, I forget his real name). Ya, the North Adamsville High headmaster’s brother, the bastard that I had a run-in with and had to hightail it out of school, although it was not over his brother. See Black-Jack’s family though they were the Mayfair swells since Black-Jack had gone to college, one of the first in the old neighborhood, and they had that big single-family house over on Beach Street. But more than one night I found Boyo lying face-down on Billings Road drunk as a skunk and had to carry him home to his wife and family. And then head back to the other side of the tracks, that wrong side I already told you about. Next day, or sometime later, Boyo would give me a dollar. Naturally when I went to school after that I went out of my way to flash the dollar bill at Black-Jack, saying “Look what Boyo gave me for helping him out.” That’s all I had to say. Black-Jack always turned fuming red, maybe flaming red.
A lot of Irish fathers didn’t beat on their wives all the time either. And a lot of Irish fathers didn’t physically beat their kids for no reason. Plenty of kids go the “strap” though when the old man was “feeling his oats.” (I never heard of any sexual abuse, but that was a book sealed with seven seals then.) And more than one wife, more than one son’s mother didn’t show her face to the “shawlie” world due to the simple fact that a black eye, a swollen face, or some other wound disfigured her enough to lay low for a while. I had to stop, or try to stop, my own father one time when I was about twelve and he was on one of his three day Dublin Grille whiskey straight-up, no chaser toots and Ma just got in his way. He swatted me down like a fly and I never tried to go that route again. But he didn’t try to beat my mother again either, at least not when I was a around or I would have heard about it on the shawlie wire.
And a lot of Irish wives didn’t just let their husbands beat on them just because they were the meal ticket, the precious difference between a home and the county farm or, worst, the streets. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t make excuses for dear old dad (or pray) when the paycheck didn’t show up and the creditors were beating down the door. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t let those Irish fathers beat on their kids. And a lot of Irish mothers didn’t tell their kids not to “air the dirty linen in public.” But, don’t let anyone fool you, and maybe I am touching on things too close to home, my home or yours, but that formed part of the scene, the Irish scene.
Maybe, because down at the Atlantic dregs end of North Adamsville the whole place was so desperately lower working-class other ethnic groups, like the Italians, also had those same pathologies. (I am letting Peter Paul use that last word, although I still don’t really know what it means, but it seemed right when he told me what it meant). I don’t know. Figure it out though, plenty of fathers (and it was mainly fathers only in those days who worked, when they could) with not much education and dead-end jobs, plenty of triple decker, no space, no air, no privacy rented housing and plenty of dead time. Ya, sure, I felt the “Irish-ness” of the place sometimes (mainly with the back of the hand), I won’t say I didn’t but when Peter Paul starts running on and on about the “old sod” just remember what I told you. I’ll tell you all the truth, won’t you take a word from me.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The Children of Easter 1916- A Moment In History… For M.M, Class of 1964
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of William Butler Yeats' ,Easter, 1916.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
“A Terrible Beauty Is Born”, a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Easter, 1916.
At the corner of Hancock Street and East Main Street, forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high school, ancient North Adamsville High School now of blessed memory although that hard fact was not always the case after passing through its portals but that for another day, stands against all weathers a poled plaque, sometimes, perhaps, garlanded with a flower of flag. From that vantage point, upon a recent walk-by, I have noticed that it gives the old school building a majestic “mighty fortress is our home” look. The plaque atop the pole, as you have probably already figured since such plaques are not uncommon in our casualty-filled, war-weary world, commemorates a fallen soldier, here of World War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many.
That plaque furthermore now, as it did not back in the 1960s, competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings; a football game here, a soccer game there, or upcoming events; a Ms. Something pageant, a cheer-leading contest, a locally produced play; or honoring somebody who gathered some grand academic achievement, won some accolade for a well-performed act and so forth. In due course that billboard too will be relegated to the “vaults" of the history of our town as well. This entry, however, is not about that possible scenario or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men (and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old men (and now old women), although that would be a worthy subject. No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name, O’Brien, and the Irish-ness of it.
A quick run through of the names of the students listed in, our yearbook, the Magnet for the Class of 1964, will illustrate my point. If Irish surnames are not in the majority, then they are predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. My own family history is representative of that social mixing with a set of Irish and English-derived grandparents. And that is exactly the point.
If North Adamsville in the old days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and to hear. More than one brogue-dripped man or woman, reflecting newness to the country and to the town, could be heard by an attentive listener at Harry’s Variety Store on Sagamore Street seeking that vagrant bottle of milk (or making that bet with Harry’s book on the sure-fire winner in the sixth at Aqueduct but we will keep that hush since, who knows, the statute of limitations may still not have run out yet on that “crime,” although the horse certainly did, run out that is). Or at Doc Andrews’ Drugstore, ya, good old Doc over on the corner of Young Street and Newberry seeking, holy grail-seeking that vagrant bottle of whiskey, strictly for medicinal purposes of course. And one did not have to be the slightest bit attentive but only within a couple of blocks of the locally famous, or infamous as the case may be, Dublin Grille to know through the mixes of brogue and rough-hewn strange language English that the newcomers had “assimilated.” And, to be fair, those same mixes could be heard coming piously out of Sunday morning Mass at Sacred Heart or at any hour on those gas-guzzling, smoked-fumed Eastern Mass buses that got one hither and fro in the old town. That North Quincy was merely a way-station away from the self-contained Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Rivieras, like Marshfield and heathen Cohasset and Duxbury, of the area was, or rather is, also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.
And that too is the point. Today Asian-Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities have followed that well-trodden path to North Adamsville from way-station Boston. And they have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this hard-working working-class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef and cabbage (and colorful, red-drenched pasta dishes, from the other main ethnic group of old North Adamsville, the Italians) has been replaced by the pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sweet sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.
Yet, I can still feel, when I haphazardly walk certain streets, the Irish-ness of the diaspora “old sod” deep in my bones. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground reminded me, there were many, too many, father whiskey-sodden nights (complete with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his “demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the grandmother passed-down ubiquitous, much dented, one-size-fits all pot on the old iron stove for the potato-ladened boiled dinner (that’s the corn beef and cabbage mentioned above for the unknowing heathens) that stretched an already tight food budget just a little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same door.
And, of course, there was the great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the family “dirty linen” from the public eye, from those “shawlie” eyes ready to pounce at the mere hint of some secret scandal. But also this: the passed down heroic tales of our forbears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp beneath the crown” (and even heathens know whose crown that was); of the whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.
Oh, by the way, that Frank O'Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named, would have been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Markin (nee O'Brien) from over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.
Easter, 1916-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
“A Terrible Beauty Is Born”, a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Easter, 1916.
At the corner of Hancock Street and East Main Street, forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high school, ancient North Adamsville High School now of blessed memory although that hard fact was not always the case after passing through its portals but that for another day, stands against all weathers a poled plaque, sometimes, perhaps, garlanded with a flower of flag. From that vantage point, upon a recent walk-by, I have noticed that it gives the old school building a majestic “mighty fortress is our home” look. The plaque atop the pole, as you have probably already figured since such plaques are not uncommon in our casualty-filled, war-weary world, commemorates a fallen soldier, here of World War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many.
That plaque furthermore now, as it did not back in the 1960s, competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings; a football game here, a soccer game there, or upcoming events; a Ms. Something pageant, a cheer-leading contest, a locally produced play; or honoring somebody who gathered some grand academic achievement, won some accolade for a well-performed act and so forth. In due course that billboard too will be relegated to the “vaults" of the history of our town as well. This entry, however, is not about that possible scenario or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men (and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old men (and now old women), although that would be a worthy subject. No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name, O’Brien, and the Irish-ness of it.
A quick run through of the names of the students listed in, our yearbook, the Magnet for the Class of 1964, will illustrate my point. If Irish surnames are not in the majority, then they are predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. My own family history is representative of that social mixing with a set of Irish and English-derived grandparents. And that is exactly the point.
If North Adamsville in the old days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and to hear. More than one brogue-dripped man or woman, reflecting newness to the country and to the town, could be heard by an attentive listener at Harry’s Variety Store on Sagamore Street seeking that vagrant bottle of milk (or making that bet with Harry’s book on the sure-fire winner in the sixth at Aqueduct but we will keep that hush since, who knows, the statute of limitations may still not have run out yet on that “crime,” although the horse certainly did, run out that is). Or at Doc Andrews’ Drugstore, ya, good old Doc over on the corner of Young Street and Newberry seeking, holy grail-seeking that vagrant bottle of whiskey, strictly for medicinal purposes of course. And one did not have to be the slightest bit attentive but only within a couple of blocks of the locally famous, or infamous as the case may be, Dublin Grille to know through the mixes of brogue and rough-hewn strange language English that the newcomers had “assimilated.” And, to be fair, those same mixes could be heard coming piously out of Sunday morning Mass at Sacred Heart or at any hour on those gas-guzzling, smoked-fumed Eastern Mass buses that got one hither and fro in the old town. That North Quincy was merely a way-station away from the self-contained Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Rivieras, like Marshfield and heathen Cohasset and Duxbury, of the area was, or rather is, also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.
And that too is the point. Today Asian-Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities have followed that well-trodden path to North Adamsville from way-station Boston. And they have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this hard-working working-class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef and cabbage (and colorful, red-drenched pasta dishes, from the other main ethnic group of old North Adamsville, the Italians) has been replaced by the pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sweet sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.
Yet, I can still feel, when I haphazardly walk certain streets, the Irish-ness of the diaspora “old sod” deep in my bones. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground reminded me, there were many, too many, father whiskey-sodden nights (complete with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his “demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the grandmother passed-down ubiquitous, much dented, one-size-fits all pot on the old iron stove for the potato-ladened boiled dinner (that’s the corn beef and cabbage mentioned above for the unknowing heathens) that stretched an already tight food budget just a little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same door.
And, of course, there was the great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the family “dirty linen” from the public eye, from those “shawlie” eyes ready to pounce at the mere hint of some secret scandal. But also this: the passed down heroic tales of our forbears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp beneath the crown” (and even heathens know whose crown that was); of the whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.
Oh, by the way, that Frank O'Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named, would have been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Markin (nee O'Brien) from over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.
Easter, 1916-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Easter 1916- A Novelistic Treatment- William Martin’s “The Rising Of The Moon”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for novelist William Martin, author of The Rising of The Moon.
Book Review
The Rising Of The Moon, William Martin, Crown Publishers, New York, 1987
The last time that the work of novelist William Martin appeared in this space was when I reviewed his novel, Harvard Yard several months ago. The idea behind reviewing that novel was simply to use Martin’s novelistic treatment of the history of Harvard University (his alma mater)that was, moreover, filled with interesting and informative historical facts about that august bourgeois training ground and use it to make some political points about the nature of American society, American class society mainly. I should also note that I came to like the novel as its plot unfolded so that was a bonus. Here, in reviewing The Rising Of The Moon, I have a slightly different reason tied in with my Irish heritage on the anniversary of the Easter uprising of 1916.
Here Mr. Martin roped me in by presenting another Boston local novel (he has also written other Boston-centered novels, Back Bay and Cape Cod as well). More importantly he has tied in the familiar Boston scene with a topic very close to my roots, my family roots, the struggle for Irish freedom from English tyranny. And has used the events of the national liberation struggle named forever and framed forever by William Butler Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916.
Of course a primary consideration of any national liberation struggle, old style or new, is weapons-guns, ammo, etc. in order to fight the oppressor. And that thread, that desperate need for weapons against a heavily armed opponent, the British Occupation Army, is what drives the plot. But let's face it a simple exposition of the military needs of insurgents, Irish or otherwise, would make for an interesting history book but would no find favor in modern novelistic conventions.
However, what if you linked the Irish struggle in 1916 with the Irish diaspora in Boston. And what if you linked up Irish freedom fighters in Ireland with co-opted Irish freedom fighters in Southie (oops, South Boston) then the homeland to a great portion of the American Irish diaspora. And what if you surrounded the problems associated with getting weapons with kinship questions, some unfinished family business between Irish cousins, and, and, a little off-hand sex and romance in the person of a fetching Jewish girl (who also happens to be interested in national liberation struggles elsewhere- in Palestine). Well then you have William Martin’s interesting little novel that helps fill in the gaps, painlessly, about the Irish struggles and about what Boston, Irish Boston, looked like about one hundred years ago. As I said about Harvard Yard I liked the novel better as its plot unfolded so that was a bonus here as well. Kudos.
Easter, 1916 -William Butler Yeats
I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terribly beauty is born.
III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashed within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Book Review
The Rising Of The Moon, William Martin, Crown Publishers, New York, 1987
The last time that the work of novelist William Martin appeared in this space was when I reviewed his novel, Harvard Yard several months ago. The idea behind reviewing that novel was simply to use Martin’s novelistic treatment of the history of Harvard University (his alma mater)that was, moreover, filled with interesting and informative historical facts about that august bourgeois training ground and use it to make some political points about the nature of American society, American class society mainly. I should also note that I came to like the novel as its plot unfolded so that was a bonus. Here, in reviewing The Rising Of The Moon, I have a slightly different reason tied in with my Irish heritage on the anniversary of the Easter uprising of 1916.
Here Mr. Martin roped me in by presenting another Boston local novel (he has also written other Boston-centered novels, Back Bay and Cape Cod as well). More importantly he has tied in the familiar Boston scene with a topic very close to my roots, my family roots, the struggle for Irish freedom from English tyranny. And has used the events of the national liberation struggle named forever and framed forever by William Butler Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916.
Of course a primary consideration of any national liberation struggle, old style or new, is weapons-guns, ammo, etc. in order to fight the oppressor. And that thread, that desperate need for weapons against a heavily armed opponent, the British Occupation Army, is what drives the plot. But let's face it a simple exposition of the military needs of insurgents, Irish or otherwise, would make for an interesting history book but would no find favor in modern novelistic conventions.
However, what if you linked the Irish struggle in 1916 with the Irish diaspora in Boston. And what if you linked up Irish freedom fighters in Ireland with co-opted Irish freedom fighters in Southie (oops, South Boston) then the homeland to a great portion of the American Irish diaspora. And what if you surrounded the problems associated with getting weapons with kinship questions, some unfinished family business between Irish cousins, and, and, a little off-hand sex and romance in the person of a fetching Jewish girl (who also happens to be interested in national liberation struggles elsewhere- in Palestine). Well then you have William Martin’s interesting little novel that helps fill in the gaps, painlessly, about the Irish struggles and about what Boston, Irish Boston, looked like about one hundred years ago. As I said about Harvard Yard I liked the novel better as its plot unfolded so that was a bonus here as well. Kudos.
Easter, 1916 -William Butler Yeats
I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terribly beauty is born.
III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashed within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Monday, April 11, 2011
***March 17th or Easter 1916?-For Jimmy J., Class of 1966
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of William Butler Yeats', "Easter, 1916".
Al Johnson, Class Of 1964, comment:
Originally posted in April 2008 on Classmates
What part, if any, did your ethnic heritage play in your growing up?
"A Terrible Beauty Was Born" the last line from William Butler Yeats- Easter, 1916
In our last posting I mentioned that I would give my answer to the question of whether I skipped school to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day in the next posting. Part of my reasoning for not answering the question fully then was to answer the more general question above using my own background as a foil. By a natural coincidence this year Saint Patrick's Day and Easter, two 'high holy days' on the Irish cultural calendar, fall on successive weeks and therefore permit a comparative analysis. Here goes.
In the interest of full disclosure I confess here (and will provide the requisite transcripts) that I never skipped school on March 17th to go to the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Boston. I do not, moreover, recall then ever really wanting to go to the event, although plenty of people in my old neighborhood did so. That is the rub. I, along with many of you, have some degree of Irish in us (just look at the names of the members of our class on the class list). Quincy was a first steppingstone in the second Diaspora (out of Ireland, out of South Boston/Dorchester) on the way to 'lace curtain' respectability, although my own family never made it pass 'shanty'. Just as today Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, have followed that well-trodden path to Quincy. In the case of my family, however, those roots were submerged in an American vanilla assimilationism. We never got past the desperate fight against being dirt poor to think of such high subjects as ethnic identity.
I have been a partisan of a just solution to the national question in Ireland and justice for the Catholic minority (and any Protestant worker who would listen to reason) in the North almost my whole adult life. For this class member, then, today the more important question is not one of ridding Ireland of snakes but ridding it of the bloody English Army. Thus, the above-cited line commemorating Easter, 1916 is what I would skip school for, gladly. I now take a certain pride in the accomplishments of our common Irish cultural heritage. However, it has been only very recently that I found out that my long-departed maternal grandfather was an ardent, if quiet, Irish nationalist. It is in the blood, apparently. However, this new knowledge kind of puts one of the sources of my youthful indifference into perspective, doesn't it? Chocky Ar La (Our Day Will Come).
Easter, 1916-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Al Johnson, Class Of 1964, comment:
Originally posted in April 2008 on Classmates
What part, if any, did your ethnic heritage play in your growing up?
"A Terrible Beauty Was Born" the last line from William Butler Yeats- Easter, 1916
In our last posting I mentioned that I would give my answer to the question of whether I skipped school to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day in the next posting. Part of my reasoning for not answering the question fully then was to answer the more general question above using my own background as a foil. By a natural coincidence this year Saint Patrick's Day and Easter, two 'high holy days' on the Irish cultural calendar, fall on successive weeks and therefore permit a comparative analysis. Here goes.
In the interest of full disclosure I confess here (and will provide the requisite transcripts) that I never skipped school on March 17th to go to the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Boston. I do not, moreover, recall then ever really wanting to go to the event, although plenty of people in my old neighborhood did so. That is the rub. I, along with many of you, have some degree of Irish in us (just look at the names of the members of our class on the class list). Quincy was a first steppingstone in the second Diaspora (out of Ireland, out of South Boston/Dorchester) on the way to 'lace curtain' respectability, although my own family never made it pass 'shanty'. Just as today Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, have followed that well-trodden path to Quincy. In the case of my family, however, those roots were submerged in an American vanilla assimilationism. We never got past the desperate fight against being dirt poor to think of such high subjects as ethnic identity.
I have been a partisan of a just solution to the national question in Ireland and justice for the Catholic minority (and any Protestant worker who would listen to reason) in the North almost my whole adult life. For this class member, then, today the more important question is not one of ridding Ireland of snakes but ridding it of the bloody English Army. Thus, the above-cited line commemorating Easter, 1916 is what I would skip school for, gladly. I now take a certain pride in the accomplishments of our common Irish cultural heritage. However, it has been only very recently that I found out that my long-departed maternal grandfather was an ardent, if quiet, Irish nationalist. It is in the blood, apparently. However, this new knowledge kind of puts one of the sources of my youthful indifference into perspective, doesn't it? Chocky Ar La (Our Day Will Come).
Easter, 1916-William Butler Yeats
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
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