Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Is there still a distinct Irish identity in America? This highly original survey says yes, though it's often an indirect one. True, the age of heroic immigration is over, and today the term "Irish-American" almost always means an American of Irish descent. If the Irish long ago ceased to be America's largest ethnic group, they've nonetheless stayed among the most visible (not least because St Patrick's Day has been adopted by the nation at large). But for all the external trappings of Irishness, the terms, traditions, and nuances of that identity stay elusive.
Irish-American Autobiography opens a new window on the shifting meanings of Irishness over the twentieth century, by looking at a range of works that have never before been considered as a distinct body of literature. Opening with celebrity memoirs from athletes like boxer John L. Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mack—written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them—later chapters trace the many tensions, often unspoken, registered by Irish Americans who've told their life stories. New York saloonkeepers and South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, setting a pattern of being on the outside looking in. Even the classic 1950s TV comedy The Honeymooners speaks to the urban Irish origins, and the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Catholicism, so key to the identity of earlier generations of Irish Americans, has also evolved. One chapter looks at the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers, and others reveal how traditional Irish Catholic ideas of the guardian angel and pilgrimage have evolved and stayed potent down to our own time. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connection—documenting an "ethnic fade" that never quite happened.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780813229188 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Catholic University of America Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2017 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 271,523 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
James Silas Rogers is the editor of New Hibernia Review.
Read an Excerpt
Irish-American Autobiography
The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More
By James Silas Rogers
The Catholic University of America Press
Copyright © 2016 James Silas RogersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2918-8
CHAPTER 1
Sporting Gentlemen
The Memoirs of John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, and Connie Mack
At its emotional core, Irish literature almost always returns to binaries, dualisms, and contradictions. Whether at home or abroad, Irish life seems to rest on one fault line after another. It is easy to compile a list of such fissures: for starters, the dual traditions of Gaelic and English; the happy-go-lucky comic versus the brooding pessimist; authoritarianism against a taste for anarchy; piety locked in battle with cynicism; home and exile; and immigrant or emigrant, which in the United States is followed by the unending negotiation of "Irish or Irish-American?"
The Irish-American community, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, moved back and forth across another such divide: a complicated evolution of class and status that came to be known in shorthand as the clash of the "shanty Irish" and the "lace curtain Irish." On the one hand, the Irish aspired to respectability, good citizenship, responsibility, and self-control; on the other, they were emerging from the near anarchy of the years that followed the famine immigration. One highly public site in which Irish Americans, eager to be accepted and recognized, set out to prove their all-American credentials was in the arena of sport.
And what athletes they were! As the nineteenth century wound down, the Irish were as visible in sports as African Americans are in our day. Traditional Irish games, such as hurling or handball, had only a spotty presence in the New World (or had not crossed the ocean in the first place; the Gaelic Athletic Association, so central to the "revival" of these games, was not founded until 1884). But the Irish dominated early baseball, track and field events, and most conspicuously, prizefighting.
In 1888, the poet and littérateur John Boyle O'Reilly published a high-minded defense of athleticism entitled The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport. The very idea that O'Reilly would write a book about a sport that confirmed all of the public's worst fears about the Irish abounds with irony. Whereas the typical boxer of the day was presumed to be intemperate, uncouth, corrupt, and violent, O'Reilly was, at that point, the most respected Irishman in Boston. He served as almost the default orator at Irish social events and was a bright light in the literary and cultural world of his adopted home. As the editor of the diocesan paper The Pilot and a friend of Longfellow and Howells, O'Reilly embodied Irish-American gentility and social aspirations. His literary career bridged the Irish community and the world of high culture. After dramatically escaping an Australian prison colony where he had been sent for his revolutionary activities, O'Reilly had found his home and fame in America, and he fully embraced nineteenth-century American patriotism. His boxing book is in all ways an American treatise; O'Reilly boasts of American manliness and vigor, delivered in the spirit of moral uplift. But unsurprisingly, he also finds many occasions to praise specifically Irish contributions to the cult of athleticism. His insistence that prizefighting could also be ennobling amounted to making the same claim for the Irish, who, he asserts, are blessed with natural athleticism. He goes so far as to make the unvarnished claim that "there is no branch of athletics in which Irishmen, or the sons of Irishmen, do not hold first place in all the world." The boast is subject to debate but, on the whole, was closer to true than many would realize.
This chapter will look at memoirs by three of those "sons of Irishmen." Their books open a window on this transitional era. John L. Sullivan, the last bare-knuckle champion and the first champion of the modern era, was born in Boston in 1858; he was a genuine superstar, an irresistible outsider in an age when the idea of celebrity was being refined and cultivated in the media. Connie Mack (whose real name was Cornelius McGillicuddy), baseball's "Tall Tactician," was born near Worcester in 1862; in his public life, he raised respectability to an art form. Boxer James J. Corbett, widely known as "Gentleman Jim" and the man who took the title from Sullivan, was born in San Francisco in 1866. His role in Irish-American life is a complex one, crossing both sides of the social gulf.
The not-so-hidden subtext of each of their autobiographies matches that of O'Reilly's defense of pugilism: an assertion that, despite the poverty of their youths and the rough edges of their sporting lives, they were gentlemen. They understood, too, that as public figures, they were taking on the burden of representation for their ethnic group; Sullivan would write on one occasion that "My father and mother were Irish, and I always aim at upholding the honor of the Irish people, who are a brave race."
As literature, these memoirs are far from artful. Mack's is particularly wooden. They are in almost all ways the stories of the authors' lives in sports and not explorations of their private lives. Nor is it likely there could be interiority; even to call them autobiographies is a stretch, as the athletes themselves may not actually have written them. Sullivan's Life and Reminiscences appears ghostwritten, with a great deal of it comprising reprints of press clippings. Corbett's The Roar of the Crowd (first published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post) is easily the most interesting of the three books, in part because it does show the hand of its author — though internal cues indicate it was written by dictation and revised on the fly. Mack's My 66 Years in the Big Leagues appeared in 1950; according to his biographer, Norman Macht, Mack himself may never have read his own ghostwritten autobiography.
Yet it hardly matters. Any insights about the inner lives of the authors (or putative authors) found in these books reveal themselves by indirection. Men who spent their professional lives in staging highly public athletic contests would naturally be inclined to approach life-writing as if it, too, were a performance. It is worth noting that the boxers also moved seamlessly into a life on the stage, and although Connie Mack never went on the vaudeville circuit, many of the stars whom he played with or managed routinely did so in the off-season; despite the complaints of purists, baseball has always included an element of show business.
But it would be wrong to assume that the rowdiness and egotism of the earlier day were completely disowned or denied, or that these qualities did not also appeal to newly respectable Irish Americans at the time; the Irish exaltation of personality goes way back.
We should be on guard against presentism as we consider these texts. Their solemn professions of propriety may appear quaint to us, and our contemporary tastes are likely to find the flamboyant personality and raciness of Sullivan more attractive than the bourgeois figures who succeeded him. Faced with a prude like Connie Mack, we incline to sniff out repression and, by extension, to conclude that his decorousness includes a measure of covering-up and hypocrisy.
In fact, men like Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack were well aware of their capacity for disreputable conduct. They knew their "dark sides" full well and how recently they and their families were presumed to be outcasts. The factories, docks, and construction sites where they had worked as young men, or in which their fathers worked, were brutal, violent places, as were the saloons and brawls that comprised much of the social milieu. But they believed that they had a "better self" as well and carried the conviction that when in the public eye it was necessary to perform that better self. Manners, social codes, and the expectations of a gentleman were a way of regulating what they considered their own worst instincts — in a word, their sinfulness. In these books and in their lives they may have been "performing respectability" — but just because it was a performance, that doesn't mean they didn't believe it.
The internal clash of cultures in Irish America saw a mythic enactment in the famous match between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in 1892. John V. Kelleher, who wrote as intelligently as anyone ever has about Irish America, opens his 1961 article "Irishness in America" precisely by discussing the Corbett-Sullivan bout. The transition from Sullivan to Corbett provided a perfect symbol of the transition that Kelleher's father called the great "sorting out" of the Irish, when the sons of Irishmen "walked easily into jobs their fathers could never have dreamed of." As the century drew to a close, Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack, along with tens of thousands of other such sons and daughters of Irishmen, participated in a massive upward spike in Irish economic and social advancement. Kelleher quite specifically pinpoints 1904 to 1905 as the tipping point when the Irish community lost the last of its roughest edges. Sullivan, he writes, "was only eight years older than Corbett, but they stood on either side of a gulf of history neither their imagination nor their experience could bridge."
Boxing has always melded sophistication with brutishness; its ringside fans in tuxedoes assert as much at every title match. In the nineteenth century, that brutishness carried a distinctly Irish cast. The sport's most prominent practitioner (and the recipient of effulgent praise in O'Reilly's book), John L. Sullivan, was a man who — when not defending his championship — earned and squandered several fortunes, drank champagne by the bucket, left his wife to live openly with a chorus girl, and generally served as a walking affront to Victorian morality. In his drinking days, the champion routinely announced his entry into any saloon by striding up to the bar, bringing his fist down with a crash, and declaring "My name is John L Sullivan and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the house!"
When, in 1979, a publisher spotted his Life and Reminiscences of a 19th-Century Gladiator in public domain and reissued it, the memoir was retitled I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House — a celebration of loutishness that would have horrified O'Reilly and, for that matter, Sullivan himself when he was on his good behavior. Again, the Irish gift for contradiction leaps out. The fact that the same book could appear under two titles, one evoking classic courage and the other hooliganism, is, in a way, the point: Sullivan knew that certain behaviors were unacceptable, but at the same time he delighted in his own transgressiveness and knew that the public delighted in it, too.
The authors were much in the public eye at this moment of "sorting out," though Mack's longevity as a manager (more than fifty years; it helps to own the ball club) kept him a public figure for much longer than the two prizefighters. All three grew up in and, in Sullivan's case, became the celebrated exemplar of the old Irish-American community of rough-and-tumble street life, part of what Kelleher describes as "a huge fund of poor, unskilled, cheap, almost infinitely exploitable labor ... [that was expended] with a callousness now hard to comprehend." And all three — in their well-constructed public personae and in these texts — deliberately shed the association with disreputable origins. To a considerable extent each approached his autobiography as an exercise in performing respectability
Aware of John L.'s raffish reputation, O'Reilly's defense of boxing had nonetheless proudly noted that Sullivan, by insisting on Marquis of Queensbury rules, effectively put an end to the bare-knuckle era. "In America," he wrote, "Sullivan's example has done much to bring glove contests into professional practice; and when the man's faults are rehearsed, it is only fair that this should be remembered." His roundhouse style of fighting remained a matter of raw strength, but it was civilized.
Sullivan announces in the early pages of Life and Reminiscences that his goal is to show that he can hold his own in respectable society:
I wish to show to my readers and to the public in general, that there is one, who, while in the line of a professional pugilist and boxer, is quite capable of informing them through the medium of this book, that he is gifted with ordinary ability, and is conscious of being something more than a pugilist. I want them also to understand that, while not of an egotistical nature, I have a fair amount of common sense, and, with a Boston public school education, can give an intelligent opinion on almost any subject, and conduct myself as a gentleman in any company.
The word "gentleman" is key. In the late nineteenth century, to be a gentleman entailed a number of virtues: intelligence, certainly, but also integrity, well-regulated emotion, respect for women, dutifulness, and, highly important, an avoidance of rough language; in a word, manners. Irish Catholic respectability stressed further elements: religious observance coupled with an exalted view of the priesthood and a "filial piety," which often meant a home life focused on an idealized version of motherhood. Less familiar to present-day sensibilities, the Victorian ideal of gentlemanliness to which the athletes aspired unapologetically involved breeding, as well. John Ruskin had written, "The essence of a gentleman, is what the word says, that he comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred." Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack's affectionate portrayals of their parents amount to more than sentiment; they are a claim of the social, cultural, and genetic legitimacy that — however much it may have been thwarted in Irish history — was now allowed to display itself in America.
Sullivan says little about his mother, who was from Athlone, County Westmeath, though he does give her credit for his physical stature. Admitting that he "has been noticed for size or strength" and that "my father was a small man" (only five-three), he goes on to note that "My mother was of fair size, weighing about one hundred and eighty pounds, and some have given the credit to her."
In the first chapter, Sullivan offers these enticing sentences about his adolescence: "After leaving the Public School I went to Comer's Commercial College, and attended about one year. From that I went to Boston College, Harrison Avenue, where I studied about sixteen months. It was the desire of my parents to have me study for the priesthood, but it was not mine." Not a lot of evidence, but that simple equation — it was their desire "but it was not mine" — suggests he was not merely a strong boy, but a strong-willed boy.
Connie Mack completed grammar school, but at age nine he began summer work in a Brookfield cotton mill, working twelve-hour shifts. At age thirteen, he started to work in a shoe factory and rose to the position of assistant foreman by the time he was twenty-one. His baseball career was confined to amateur play. Financial disaster struck when the shoe factory closed in 1884, but fortunately, Mack was offered a chance to play professionally for the Connecticut State League. But first, Mack did what any good boy would do and consulted his mother (though as the region was in the midst of a paralyzing recession, one has to wonder what his economic choices really were). Nonetheless, he did seek her advice, which was cautionary regarding the rough characters he was likely to encounter. Here is the reported exchange: "'Promise me one thing,' she said. 'Promise me that you won't let them get you into bad habits. I've brought you up to be a good boy. Promise me that you won't drink.' I promised her, and that promise I shall keep to the end of my life." Mack always urged his players to be kind to their own mothers. His loyalty was repaid: when his first wife died of tuberculosis only five years after their marriage, Mack's mother raised his three children while Connie lived the itinerant life of a professional athlete and manager.
Corbett's The Roar of the Crowd repeatedly asserts his lifelong dedication to his parents. After attaining success, he pays off their mortgage, and late in the book the champion takes great delight in taking his mother back to Ireland. He presents his family as exemplary: "That there was harmony in our family, and respect paid to our parents, is evident from the fact that for the six years I was a bank clerk I gave my monthly salary to my mother each pay day." Corbett was indeed a new kind of fighter — not the profligate, throwing his money away, but the responsible saver. It should surprise no one that his mother, too, had another dream for her son: that he become a priest. (He was deliberately given the name "James" for the uncle back in Ireland who had a vocation.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Irish-American Autobiography by James Silas Rogers. Copyright © 2016 James Silas Rogers. Excerpted by permission of The Catholic University of America Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The "Ethnic Fade" That Never Quite Happened 1
1 Sporting Gentlemen: The Memoirs of John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, and Connie Mack 9
2 Dancing Like Merry Hell: Barbara Mullen's Life Is My Adventure 26
3 Joseph Mitchell's Irish Imagination 41
4 The Honeymooners: Jackie Gleason's Memoir of Brooklyn 55
5 A Culture of Diffidence: Mid-Century Irish-American Priests' Autobiographies 69
6 Flowering Absences: Recent Irish Writers and Genealogical Dead Ends 82
7 Tis, Meaning Maybe: The Uncertain Last Words of Angela's Ashes 98
8 "Someone Watching Your Back": Guardian Angels in Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls 114
9 Picture Windows: Irish-American Memoirs of the Suburbs 129
10 Secular Pilgrimages: Recent Irish-American Memoir and Journeys of Healing 143
Bibliography 165
Index 181