Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 6 Tess Gallagher A Network of Sympathies and Distant Connections

CHAPTER 6 Tess Gallagher A Network of Sympathies and Distant Connections MARY ANN RYAN Tess Gallagher’s maiden name is not Gallagher—it is Bond—but her literary legacy is not and will not be founded on another marital connection, her eleven-year partnership with Raymond Carver, for her writing talent was clearly self-possessed years before she and Carver met. In addition, Gallagher ’s literary reputation is not founded in her fiction; rather, she is known foremost as an American poet. She is neither a New Yorker nor from the East Coast; she is from the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest. Although she is of Irish descent (as well as other ethnicities, including Native American), Theresa Jeanette Bond was not raised Catholic, nor was she named after St. Teresa, whom she has quoted in epigraphs. In fact, Gallagher’s maiden name is quite appropriate since her work is informed pervasively by bonds—her exhumations, postulations, and venerations of human bonds, whether familial, marital, or social. It is her awareness of ancestral bonds that calls our attention to her work as representative 139 Ebest 06 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 139 140 | Mary Ann Ryan of Irish American women’s fictions, even though her life circumstances are in direct contrast to those of most of the Irish American women writers discussed in this volume. Gallagher possesses an Irish heritage on both sides of her family. Although she is at least a third-generation Irish American and has never bothered to trace her roots fully, she honors her ancestors , keeping a photograph in her kitchen of her great-great-grandfather, Timothy Halsey Quigley. Gallagher’s Irish ancestry informs her short story, “The Lover of Horses,” the title story from her first collection of fiction. In this story the female narrator is unexpectedly overcome by atavistic impulses. The greatgranddaughter of an Irish “horse whisperer,” she realizes, “Suddenly, I felt that an unsuspected network of sympathies and distant connections had begun to reveal itself to me on my father’s behalf ” (8). The Lover of Horses begins with a tale of a daughter’s acceptance of her incorrigible father and his legacy, which urges her to take risks in life. The collection ends with a story full of friction between a mother and daughter—both common subjects for Irish American women writers (Ebest). “The Lover of Horses,” in particular, serves as an example of Gallagher’s more dramatic tendencies. Her other stories are less lyrical, without the magic of horse whisperers, less dramatic and more quiet. In this story and in many others from The Lover of Horses collection and her next, At the Owl Woman Saloon, Gallagher’s characters are often “stolen” by things: horses, drink, a pair of glasses, guns, an abandoned child, hummingbirds, or other people’s lives, whether these others are bank robbers or Avon ladies. Some characters commit their own thefts either literally—as in stealing a rival’s poodle, $46,000 from a bank, a great fir “spar” (a necessary anchoring tree for loggers), a house—or figuratively, as in a native language, someone else’s mother, another’s place in line, or other people’s hard-earned wages. After reading Gallagher’s works and interviewing her, it becomes clear that Gallagher herself was stolen by words at an early age. This connection to Irish writing’s reputation for impressive linguistic formulations is a foremost aspect of her Irish heritage. Possessed by the power of language , Tess Gallagher—from the other side of the social track and across the Puget Sound from Seattle—re-imagined her potential. After a high school job at a newspaper, she realized her desire to pursue writing as a vocation . Against her father’s expectations, she committed herself to a college education (McFarland 8). She moved across Puget Sound and enrolled Ebest 06 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 140 at the University of Washington. Yet despite considerable artistic success, Gallagher has never abandoned nor denigrated her background, which continues to inform her sensibility and her writing. Gallagher identifies herself proudly as the “daughter of loggers” and describes her parents’ marriage as a “sweat-of-the-brow partnership” (“Tess Gallagher” 19). Her father, Leslie Bond, was born in an Indian dugout in New Mexico and was reared in Oklahoma. According to Gallagher, her father ’s family were itinerant subsistence farmers, horse-traders, and “Ridge Runners” running...