'Little Towns Should Have Had Their Chroniclers'

Every St. Patrick’s Day my mother pinned on my shirt before I walked to school a green and white knitted shamrock and reminded me of the origin of my first name. Her father was born in County Cork, as were her mother’s parents. I waited until the third grade to rebel against wearing the shamrock. Not coincidentally, that was the year I developed an unrequited crush on my teacher. The shamrock embarrassed me and I had no  sentimental attachment to the Old Sod. Only as a teenager did Ireland again become important to me, by way of its literature – Yeats and Joyce, and a little later, Beckett, MacNeice and Flann O’Brien, and then Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. 

Something similar occurred with the other half of my genetic inheritance. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland early in the last century, and in high school I gravitated to Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz and other Polish writers – a natural, unconscious decision.

 

Like many Americans, I’m a mutt. I speak American. Sponge-like parts of me, many of which I’m not aware of, are Irish and Polish – and Jewish and Italian. The one thing I remember Ralph Ellison saying when I heard him speak my freshman year at university was that all of us in the audience were, culturally speaking, Afro-American. We came by our various inheritances honestly. Every American is multiple.

 

Only in the 1990s did I internalize another Irish writer and add him to the private pantheon, the essayist Hubert Butler (1900-91). Late in life he collected a lifetime of essays in three volumes published by Lilliput Press in Dublin. Two more followed posthumously and, finally, in 1996, a selection titled Independent Spirit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was published in the U.S. Butler was a cosmopolitan devoted to the local. Born in County Kilkenny, he traveled widely but lived in the family house on the River Nore all of his life. He was an amateur archeologist, translated Chekhov and worked with Quakers to save Jews in Austria. In his 1984 essay “Beside the Nore” he writes:

 

“There are many beautiful little towns along the Nore, but since ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ it is perhaps unsafe to admire them. Their beauty depends on humpbacked bridges and winding streets and large trees, all of which obstruct the motorist in his race to progress. The curves of the bridge are now being straightened with cement but often you can see the great stone slabs of the parapet jutting out of the stream below the bridge.

 

“All these little towns should have had their chroniclers, for one chronicler attracts another and a village, conscious of its history, can resist the tyranny of the government official.”