Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

Finding Ireland

Finding Ireland To visit a country whose authors we have read, to read books by writers from lands we have visited— these are two ways we learn about cultures beyond the one we were born into. The desire to visit places we first encountered in books must be among the commonest instincts of literate people. As readers we live through our imaginations; one reason we want to travel to the places we read about is to find out whether those places are as they appear in books. A recent book, The LiteraryTourist:Readers and Places in Romantic andVictorian Britain, by Nicola J. Watson, examines this phenomenon disapprovingly . Her view is that literary tourism is “typically defined . . . by nostalgic belatedness and by a constitutive disappointment ,” and that “the power of fiction is actually confirmed by the tourist’s disappointment.” According to her, “the internal workings of an author’s works . . . produce place, not the other way around.” My view is somewhat different. More typically, an author produces fictional places not as pure products of the imagination, but by creatively modifying actual places.We learn a lot about how an author’s imagination works by comparing the raw material with the fictional result. I have seldom been disappointed on my literary pilgrimages. 3 Tillinghast pt 1 2/4/09 1:45 PM Page 3 Samuel Johnson has written, “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” Dr. Johnson gives pride of place here to “reality”; in her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop wonders whether the traveler might not be deficient in imagination: “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?” The book you hold in your hands, Finding Ireland, has emerged from my own explorations of Irish literature, which have been closely intertwined with my getting to know Ireland itself. I do not claim, however, to have found Dr. Johnson’s “reality.” My Ireland, even now that I live here, remains an imagined place. No doubt many non-Irish readers of the current book are happy to stay at home, read novels and poems by Irish authors , see plays by Wilde, Synge, Friel, Tom Murphy, Connor McPherson, and other Irish playwrights, and be content to visit Irelands of the mind. I hope there is plenty in the present book for readers belonging to this school, who would agree with Emily Dickinson that “There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away.” In the chapters that follow, starting with the “letters ” written in 1990,1998, and 2005 for the Hudson Review and the New Criterion, my intent is to serve the non-Irish reader as a foreign correspondent, reporting back from Galway, Dublin, and other parts of this island. Throughout Finding Ireland I attempt to take the reader along with me on a virtual tour of the settings, actual and imagined, of the books I write about and even to a few of my favorite pubs. Irish literature, as much as any other in the world, is local and personal, rooted in particular places, glorying in strong and eccentric personalities. I hope that reading my book will be the same voyage of discovery for you that writing it has been for me. As for Irish readers, I hope they will tolerate the brashness of an American expressing opinions about a culture that is his own only by adoption. I would even venture to hope that the insider-outsider vantage-point of an American who now makes Finding Ireland Tillinghast pt 1 2/4/09 1:45 PM Page 4 his home in this country would bring a certain freshness to familiar topics. It must be said that not being American has never stopped Irish people from setting themselves up as experts on the United States.You can find a specialist on American life in every pub from Waterford to Donegal. And there is something oddly appropriate about this: Ireland is more closely intertwined with America than any other European country is. (I use the term “America” in this book as often as “United States,” incidentally , in conformance with customary Irish parlance.) While I am trying to define this book, it might be well to declare what it is not. It is certainly not comprehensive: there is nothing of substance here on writers...