A Window Facing West: Charles Driscoll's Kansas Irish

In his preface to Daniel Casey's and Robert Rhodes's Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism, William V. Shannon comments that the collection examines "the whole ground of American-Irish writing [and] demonstrates the scope and variety of the Irish communities experience in the United States."¹ A close examination of the collection, however, reveals that as recently as 1979, Irish-American literature was still considered the domain of authors located in eastern, urban locations. Writers from the Great Plains and further west are notably absent in the essays gathered by Casey and Rhodes, and those few who are noted in the bibliography—Paul Horgan, Thomas McGuane,and Larry McMurtry—are, in terms of an ethnically oriented Irish-American literary tradition, minor figures who do not engage specifically ethnic dimensions in their work.

Scholars of Irish-America have been slow to recognize the experiences of the Irish outside of the East. Although there have been a series of notable historical studies focusing on the Irish in the West, particularly since the 1970s, little has been written about the literary accomplishments of Irish-Americans west of the Mississippi.² Such neglect is understandable; west of St. Louis, the number of well-known, or even locally known, Irish-American writers is decidedly small. With the possible exceptions of San Francisco and Butte, Montana, there are no cities in the West where Irish communities have flourished to an extent that would rival those that flourished in Boston, New York, or Chicago.³

However, when we open the western window, and look out onto the vast expanse of plains and mountains, we also see a significant number of interesting and accomplished writers who have chronicled the Irish-American experience in the West. Some of the more accomplished Irish-American writers from the West include Josephine Donovan of Iowa, Kate Cleary of Nebraska, Charles Hayes of Kansas, George Jessop, Peter B. Kyne, and Kathleen Norris of California, Clyde Murphy, Joe Duffy, and Richard O'Malley of Montana, and Edward McCourt of the Canadian Midwest. Among these western regional writers, Charles Driscoll is one of the more gifted, and his memoir of growing up Irish in Kansas offers a realistic and engaging glimpse into the rural, western Irish-American experience.

Published in 1943, Driscoll's Kansas Irish is a sincere and forthright book that portrays his cantankerous Irish immigrant father, his stoic Irish mother, his six brothers and sisters, and the various trials they faced as farmers, as Catholics, and as Irish-Americans in Kansas. The book also investigates and chronicles the difficult and precarious relationships that the author and his family negotiated with Big Flurry (Florence) Driscoll, their Irish immigrant father. Florence Driscoll often subjected his family to irrational demands. He insisted that the boys walk behind the plow rather than ride. Having purchased a riding plow, he then removed the seat and sold it as junk metal. Indoor plumbing was an unnecessary "vanity" to be spurned in his house, and—perhaps most distressing—education was a pursuit for the idle. Although we sense the author's antipathy toward the indignities of his youth spent under the thumb of a domineering and unreasonable father, through the series of editorial epigraphs that precede each chapter, Driscoll also manages to balance the story of his angry father with a countertext of respect and appreciation. In the end, we see Florence Driscoll as a man who remained sadly alienated from American life, even after four decades as a citizen.

Early reviewers of the text praised Driscoll for recreating an authentic Kansan atmosphere and for showing farm life candidly, with all its difficulties and rewards. Paul Wellman of the Saturday Review of Literature called specific attention to how "the very conflicts and contrasts between Hibernian Catholicism and blue-nosed Kansas Protestantism make 'Kansas Irish' a diverting book to read." He adds that by bringing together two "inharmonious" subjects, "the State of Kansas and the Irish," Driscoll created an "arresting effect." Wellman was perceptive, and the only reviewer among a dozen who drew attention to the apparent peculiarity of yoking "Kansas...