Introduction: An Interpretation of Silences

INTRODUCTION: AN INTERPRETATION OF SILENCES PETER QUINN in the midst of John O’Hara’s much-underrated novel BUtterfield 8, with its finely drawn portrait of speakeasy New York as it tottered from the golden twenties into the leaden thirties, there is a short exchange between Jim Malloy, an Irish Catholic from the coal country of Pennsylvania, and his WASP girlfriend. A generation before, such a cross-class, cross-ethnic pairing would have been highly improbable. But in the tumultuous cocktail -shaker mix of post-World War I New York, all sorts of new combinations were being served up. Malloy, however, isn’t simply a self-willed cultural amnesiac imbibing the bootlegged possibilities for passing as a true son of Yale and Brooks Brothers. Malloy has a deeper, older, intractable sense of who he is, a blend of pride and grievance that the lubricants of alcohol and ambition have failed to smooth away. Riled by his companion’s disdain for the unglamorous denizens of the speakeasy he has taken her to, Malloy lets fly: I want to tell you something about myself that will help to explain a lot of things about me. You might as well hear it now. First of all, I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick. Now it’s taken me a little time to find this out, but I have at last discovered that there are not two kinds of Irishman. There’s only one kind . . . We’re Micks, we’re non-assimilable, we Micks. (50) I’m unsure of John O’Hara’s connections to the Great Famine. The recent biography by Matthew Bruccoli, The O’Hara Concern, is short on the writer’s forebears. It says only that his paternal grandfather arrived in the coal region during the Civil War (Bruccoli 7). Grandfather O’Hara married into a Protestant Irish family that had converted to Catholicism and was able to join that thin strata of so-called “respectable Irish” who weren’t consigned to the lung-destroying work of wresting anthracite from the earth. INTRODUCTION: AN INTERPRETATION OF SILENCES 7 The silence about when and how the O’Haras arrived in America may or may not be significant. It has been my experience that the less the members of an Irish-American family know about their Irish antecedents—who came when, from what county or village, the minimal facts that most immigrants preserve—the more likely it is they arrived during the famine years. Especially when it comes to learning anything of the lives of those who experienced the famine, the process often seems more archeology than history—a reconstruction of mute and fragmentary remains that will always be incomplete. Silence is among the greatest legacies of the Great Famine. This issue of Éire-Ireland confronts that silence. Each of the articles represents a step in piecing together a coherent narrative of what occurred and why; each work seeks to advance our collective knowledge of the Great Famine. It is, I suppose, a cause both for reflection and regret that at this late date we are still trying to fill in the blanks so that we might grasp the enormity of the event. But, as Joan Vincent made clear in her talk on the famine’s impact in County Fermanagh, which she presented at the May 1997 Great Famine Commemoration at Dublin Castle, there is no other way: I can’t help feeling, as an anthropologist, that a great deal of my perception of that Great Irish Famine of one hundred and fifty years ago has to be based on the interpretation of silences, on what did not happen, and on what one does not know, but needs to know. (22) In John O’Hara’s case, whatever his personal link to the famine— a legacy that was common enough among the Catholic Irish of nineteenth -century America—the area he grew up in was intimately and inescapably connected to its consequences. Even lace curtains, washed and rewashed to banish the invidious grime that...