Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 9 Blurring Boundaries Eileen Myles and the Irish American Identity

CHAPTER 9 Blurring Boundaries Eileen Myles and the Irish American Identity KATHLEEN ANN KREMINS Charles Fanning’s inclusion of Eileen Myles in his seminal The Irish Voice in America indicates his recognition of the evolution not only of Irish American realism but also Irish American identity. Much of twentieth-century Irish American writing reflects the dominance of realism and explains why Irish American fiction has both contributed to and dispelled historical and fictional stereotypes of the Irish (Conners 9). Contemporaries of Myles, such as Pete Hamill, Frank McCourt, and Alice McDermott, employ modernist conventions in their recollection of childhood, whereas Myles rejects linearity in narrative, closure, and “straight” realism. Myles writes from the disjointed time of memory, a place that lacks closure (and even defies it at times), thus injecting a suspicion of nostalgia while inhabiting a reality often altered by alcohol and/or drugs. Whether Myles is postmodern is not the focus of this chapter (although it bears deeper conversation). Rather, this chapter focuses on how Myles views “Irish American” as one 189 Ebest 09 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page 189 190 | Kathleen Ann Kremins of her identities and how those identities merge and conform to six thematic domains of the Irish American female writer. Eileen Myles’s Irish American world is Boston (especially the areas of Arlington, Somerville, and Cambridge) in the 1950s through early 1970s. It is a world dominated by Irish democratic politicians and Irish-Catholic mayors: John B. Hynes, John F. Collins, and Kevin H. White. Yet by the mid-1960s, the insular world of Irish-Catholic Boston began to change. City government and white ethnic neighborhoods engaged in a power struggle, while black residents grew increasingly discontented (O’Connor 239). As Myles explains, “My town’s identity was in flux when I was growing up, but there were still plenty of ye olde elements that added texture to our play” (Cool for You 31). The Myles family represents the second and third generation’s attempts to deal with the breakdown of the strict boundaries of ethnic communities, the shifting line between the working and middle classes, the shocking move into mixed ethnic and religious marriages , as well as new opportunities in higher education and white-collar work. Granted, the Catholic Church and schools provided some element of stability in this “mixed” Polish-Irish family, not poor yet not rich; it encouraged education as a means of social mobility, as it had done since the late nineteenth century. For Eileen Myles, education and reading led to a poet’s life and a fictional style that defies categorization. Both of her novels, Chelsea Girls and Cool for You, blend fiction, memoir, autobiography, and prose poetry. The hybrid style of Myles’s works melds with the subtextual layer of shifting identities, a new type of migrating. Rather than moving to another country, Eileen Myles and her family contend with the movement from one social and/or economic level to another. Her father holds a coveted government job—he is a postman—and her mother is a secretary for a toy company. Because of her father’s alcoholism, however, the social shift is never smooth, and the money earned is not necessarily applied toward the family’s advancement . For the Myles family, social identity vacillates between middle and lower class, despite the white-collar positions of Myles’s parents. Identity also raises issues pertaining to gender, race, and sex—taboo topics in many previous works of Irish American fiction. Myles reveals the turbulent period following World War II when the values of the IrishCatholic community came into question. Not only does she address the ever-present condition of the “single” Irish American woman (either unmarried , widowed, or “abandoned”) but also the racial tensions in Boston: Ebest 09 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page 190 that apocryphal host of Cambridge ministers who ran little churches on the side streets of Central Square, down by Western Ave, where you weren’t supposed to go if you were white—which was a pity because there were plenty of big cheap apartments down there. . . . And I would drive slow through all those special streets, with tons of kids, and hair stores and jazz clubs and crane my white neck all I liked. It was the unwealthy side of the river. (Cool for You 21) Most significantly, Myles explores the previously avoided topics of sexuality and sexual identity...