Immigration, history and creativity in Mary Rose
Callaghan’s Emigrant Dreams
“The dead are a notoriously perverse and unmanageable
lot. They tend not to be safely buried,
and in fact resist all efforts at obliterating their traces” (Sante x).
In Mary Rose
Callaghan’s Emigrant Dreams, the
Irish narrator, Anne O’Brien, is haunted by the ghost of her grandfather,
Marcus Quilligan O’Neill, who dies over ninety years earlier. She sees him as
she gets off the plane at Kennedy
Airport, and he continues
to pop up throughout the course of the novel. Anne’s Irish-American cousin Ogie
has been badgering Anne to write the biography of their grandfather. O’Neill’s
presence in the novel, both historical as Anne researches his life, and actual,
as he haunts Anne demanding that she not believe everything she reads about
him, provides the focal point of an exploration of the differences between
emigrant and immigrant perspectives as well as an investigation into the
process of creation and the difference between history and fiction. An Irish writer, Anne is caught between two
worlds: having traversed the Atlantic fifteen times (Callaghan, Emigrant Dreams 4) ,
she approaches America
from the outside but with something of the insider’s perspective. She is the fourth generation in her family to
“ferry back and forth between two continents” (10), and although she does not
stay in America
permanently, she comes to this country with something of an emigrant
perspective. Her husband Fergal, who
refuses to come with her and threatens to leave if she goes to America again,
has accused her of “thinking that the streets were paved with gold. I wanted to emigrate completely, but he hated
the place” (5). So although she has the urge to emigrate and can understand
such an impulse, she never becomes an immigrant. As Anne tells us her story as
well as the story of her grandfather, we come to see America from both outside and
“inside” perspectives, that is, from the perspective of emigration as well as
of immigration. These two perspectives are linked in the novel to a question of the creation of fiction from
fact. As Anne’s dead grandfather Marcus “emigrates” from the past into her
present, Anne must rewrite history just as the historical immigrant rewrites
his own past and his own roots.
First generation
immigrants are never, of course, truly insiders. Even those who attempt to assimilate remain
outsiders in the dominant culture.
Anne’s grandfather, Marcus, comes to the USA
as a child and essentially grows up here: still he feels like an outsider,
identifying more with Ireland
and the Irish, trying to return, marrying an Irishwoman, making sure all of his
children are born in Ireland. But the term “immigrants” extends to include
more than just the people who settle in a particular country. The immigrant perspective is shared not only
by the first generation immigrant himself but also, often, by second and third
generations. In fact, because of the way
the Irish in particular have continued to identify with the mother country, the
second and third generations characters we see in this novel share some of the
perspectives of the first generation.
Despite the fact that Irish began
their upward mobility in America
during the 1870s, as late as 1900 they were 42% of the nation’s urban poor
(Miller 499).
The Irish, in short, stood at the
opening of the 20th century
with a foot in each world. The desire to join the “ins” conflicted with the desire
to lead the “outs.” The wish to climb socially ran counter to the impulse to
champion the rebellious, restless poor. The options for the individual Irishman
were numerous: conventional success or frustrated insurgency, individual
assimilation or the chauvinism of the Irish community, bleached-out
respectability or labor radicalism, adherence to the political machine or
acceptance of good government (goo goo) values, the American style of idealism
of Gibbons and Ireland
or the clerical reaction of Corrigan and McQuaid. They had come a long way in seventy
years. They knew they still had a long
way to go. (Shannon 145)
Even early on, the Emerald Isle
kept calling its exiled children both physically and sentimentally, not only
creating a rationale for their exile but also wrapping their own role in
American history in myth and legend in what Thomas Brown refers to as
“apologia” or “works of justification” (Brown 25). Examples of such apologias include the idea
that the New World was discovered by St. Brendan; that Columbus was rowed ashore by an Irish
navigator; that both countries were products of the rejection of English
culture with its presuppositions of moral and political superiority. Irish-American myth has it that the fighting
Irish won the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American
Wars, and that without Irish labor, America’s material progress would
have been impossible (Brown 26-31). Thus could the Celtic myth provide for the
American Irish a pride in the past, a hope for the future in their adopted
country, and an image that supported nationalism in Ireland.
This current
immigration situation, as exemplified at the start of the novel by the boy on
the plane, is seen in the context of the historical, post-famine immigration of
Anne O’Neill’s grandfather. Marcus
Quilligan O’Neill, the ghostly figure who haunts Anne, is, in fact, based on
Callaghan’s own grandfather, James Mark Sullivan. “I never thought of writing
my grandfather’s biography,” said Mary Rose
Callaghan when we asked her about the inception of Emigrant Dreams. “Nor did I want to write an historical
romance. I wanted to write a book set
in the present time [. . . .] I was writing about the effect the past has on
the present, which is one of my preoccupations [. . . . ] The story always haunted me” (Callaghan,
“Interview” 3/02). But writing her
grandfather’s life is exactly what Anne O’Brien, the main character in
Callaghan’s fifth novel, is trying to do.
Anne struggles
with Marcus’s history and its effect not only on her but also on her entire
family both in America and
in Ireland. Marcus becomes the pivotal character in the
novel that allows the author to focus on the older emigrant perspective, the
newer perspectives of exile, and the Irishwoman’s view of her Irish-American
relatives. Anne O’Brien’s research into her ghostly ancestor’s past exposes the
various dreams of both Irish and Irish-Americans, past and present.
From the start we
realize that Marcus has an axe to grind. He is unhappy about the way he has been
presented in history. During the course
of the novel, we learn that he has participated in a number of historical
events: he was counsel to Bald Jack Rose
in the Becker-Rosenthal case, he was
minister to Santo Domingo during the Wilson administration, and he was arrested in Dublin during the 1916
rising. But history, both official and familial, has not been kind to him, and
he is determined to get his side of the story to the public. Hence, he haunts
his granddaughter to right the historical accounts: “I was plenipotentiary, Minister
Extraordinaire, and I want a biography,” demands Marcus (53). But Marcus doesn’t want an accurate
biography. What he wants instead is a nostalgic recollection of his
achievements against tremendous odds. He wants to salvage his reputation:
People who experienced [past] decades [ . . .]attain
positions of power in the world. In
their years of struggle they primarily looked to the future; having both
achieved their goals and failed to realize their fondest wishes, they have the
rue and leisure, the complacency and dissatisfaction to look backward, and the
means to broadcast an idealized version of the remembered past, from which,
however, the grime of history cannot entirely be washed. (Sante xii)
Anne muses, “Only his public life
was deemed worthy of mention. Still
there was a story there” (57). Marcus Quilligan O’Neill “wanted to be an old
Joe Kennedy, but hadn’t made it” (46).
He began his days in Brooklyn and,
thanks to a connection with Bald Jack Rose,
the Jewish mobster (also an historical figure), Marcus made some money, perhaps
illicitly, in backing prizefights: “They weren’t crooked, though. [ . . . .]
Get that idea outa your head” (53).
Marcus used the money to go to Yale Law School, where he took the Townsend Prize
for oratory. According to the New York Times, the real Sullivan was an
“omniverous reader, [. . . ]a man of wide erudition” (“Minister Sullivan
Oniverous [sic] Reader” 5), and the Yale degree was one step toward his moving
up in his newly adopted country. But the Irish in the early part of the century
were not welcomed into the ranks of the rich and famous. Marcus would
resemble Joe Kennedy only in his shadier dealings, his film connections,
and his informal approach as a diplomat; his power would be short-lived, and he
would never get rich. Marcus, like Sullivan, “took an active part in Tammany
Hall politics” (“James M Sullivan ex-Diplomat Dead” 13). In one of many apparitions in the novel,
Marcus points his stick at his granddaughter Anne saying, “You can criticise
me, but it was hard to be Irish then” (68). The Irish response to nativist
prejudice was both retreatist and aggressive; that is, they tended to
intermarry with their own kind, the Catholic hierarchy warning them that unions
with Protestants was tantamount to consignment to hell (Parillo 153). Poverty forced many families to take in
boarders and to rely on mutual welfare associations fostered by the emergent
trade unions and political associations. Condemned for their “clannishness,”
the Irish were further isolated from assimilation into American society. In addition, Catholic Irish alienated
themselves from Anglo-Saxon America by their association with militant labor
unionism, especially when late immigrant groups were used against them, as
scabs. Marcus needed to be connected if he wanted to make it big. Marcus is
typical of the educated Irishman of his day in America. In fact,
Traditional interpretation of Irish participation in the
world of finance—where serious money was (and is) in New York, and where
achievement translates into real power and influence on a national scale—is
that it was off limits in the first half of the century. The exceptions are
used to prove the rule. Joseph Kennedy came from Boston to pursue his ambitions, but Wall
Street kept him at its edges. He
prospered from his own shrewd judgments but was never invited into the closed
club of old-stock Protestant investment bankers who though little of the Irish.
(McNickle 344)
The distance persisted through
the 1950s. When a Boston newspaper referred to him as an
“Irishman,” Joseph P. Kennedy said: “I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do
I have to do to be called an American?” (quoted in Shannon
vii).
Although Marcus is
for a time part of the Tammany machine, unlike Kennedy, he is finally shut out
socially, politically, and financially: “After meeting Presidents and speaking
before the King, he died in Florida—poor,
an utter failure, haggling over pennies” (46). It is not with the Protestant
establishment of New York
politics that Marcus joins forces.
Marcus remains on
the outskirts; any power he has comes from doing favors. His model, Sullivan,
was at best a “struggling lawyer whose clients were mainly poor people and he
had a great deal of criminal, but a general practice, which was not very
profitable” (Phelan Report 6). Sullivan
was known as a police court lawyer and was not a member of any reputable
association (Phelan report 6). He was tied into the gangland underworld as well
as the Irish political machine through the real-life “Big Tim” Sullivan. Tim
Sullivan, “the most powerful politician in lower Manhattan, a nonsmoking, nongambling
teetotaling saloon-keeper, bought food and clothing and paid rent for the poor
from vice protection graft (he was accused of but denied prostitution
connections). The ‘King of the Bowery’ also championed organized labor and
social and political feminism” (McCaffrey 223). Tim Sullivan was a part of the
old Tammany political machine. He epitomizes the kind of wheeling and dealing
that the Irish in the early part of the century had to do to make it big in the
new country. “Following the lead of Tim Sullivan in the Bowery [. . . ]Tammany
established political clubs throughout the city. These groups provided social entertainment,
including boat trips and clambakes for the entire family, and took a close
personal interest in neighborhood people” (McCaffrey 227). The reality,
however, is closer to Sante’s assessment:
what helped Tammany succeed over so many years was that
its operators did not stand on ceremony, did not make class distinctions with
anyone willing to play the game, and, above all, had a realistic understanding
of weakness and vice. Tammany in its
many guises was a confidence game, an often foolish embezzlement ring, an
oligarchy of wise guys, and it cost the city incalculable millions in various
boondoggles, swindles and white elephants, but it provided the people with
bread and with circuses, and with no lectures to spoil enjoyment of the latter.
(Sante 277)
This interest translated into
loyalty, which in turn translated into votes for Democratic candidates. It was
this sense of “owing,” of repaying the favor, the “paternalistic patronage”
that not only gains Marcus his notoriety but also leads to his involvement in
corruption and, finally, to his resignation as Minister of Santo Domingo. Curiously, when Anne asks Marcus why he
wanted the diplomatic job, his response is “To get even” (69).
Anne’s historical research into Marcus’s life reflects the confusion even with
actual historical accounts about many of the immigrant “upstarts” of the
period. Yet even for Anne, Marcus verges on the stereotype of the Tammany
Irishman: at one point while she is researching his life, he climbs over her balcony
and appears before her “younger and heavier.
He wore a straw boater and chewed gum like an overweight James Cagney”
(118). And during their conversations, Marcus talks early twentieth century
Runyonesque “gangster talk” : “How else couldya be a criminal lawyer” (118),
and “Aw, shut yer trap” (119).
Marcus is linked
to Big Tim not only in his business dealings but also, according to erroneous
historical accounts, by blood.
Newspapers identify him as cousin to Big Tim (57) and the actual cousin
Tim to whom he gives jobs in the Dominican Republic is said to be
“Little Tim,” a distant cousin to Big Tim.
As if all Sullivans were naturally related, the reporters connect these
characters in ways that do not merit connection. Although all three are Sullivans, the Tim
Sullivan who is Marcus’s cousin is not related to Big or Little Tim of Tammany
fame. But the confusion is typical of
the way Irish immigrants were lumped together as a group that would of
necessity, be corrupt, nepotistic, and inter-related.
In Emigrant Dreams, Marcus’s second and third generation
relations also play a role. Bracing
herself to go through customs Anne ponders, “Was fear passed in the genes? Was it some racial memory? Had our ancestors
felt this, landing on Ellis Island with a one-way
ticket, tired and probably sick? The hungry Irish, having to face doctors,
afraid of being sent back to starvation and certain death. But the sweatshops of New
York and Boston
were as bad a fate. Worse” (10). In
fact, “the tenements of Boston’s Fort Hill, New York’s Five Points, and
Chicago’s Bridgeport were as unhealthy as the wretched huts of Ireland’s West
and Southwest” (Brown 18). But Anne’s contemporary experience is vastly
different from that of the famine emigrants.
The reference to Ellis Island and
starvation is triggered by her thoughts about the current diaspora, as well as
by her images of her grandfather, another post-famine immigrant.
In fact, it is the Irish-American
relatives who insist that Anne, the Irish writer, research Marcus’ s life. Third generation Irish in New York, Anne’s cousin Ogie has convinced
her children that Marcus is an heroic figure, and they want to restore him to
his “rightful place” in American and Irish-American history. Ogie has quite a skewed idea of Ireland and its
history as well as of her grandfather’s place in American and Irish history.
One very clear difference between Irish-American and Irish perspectives is
shown in the names of Ogie’s children.
Anne is met in New York
by her cousin’s children, Jessica Sinn Fein and Jason Ira. When she’d first heard these names, Anne had
written Ogie “that nowadays these movements were associated with violence. The
IRA were criminals. But it was no good.
Ogie was typically Irish-American—the sort of person who worshipped ancestors”
(21). Anne is horrified by her cousin’s glamorizing of the IRA: “No one in our
family every had anything to do
with the IRA. They’re criminals! . . .Americans didn’t
realize how sick of IRA violence the Irish were” (36-7). But what Ogie seeks is
not truth, but myth, nostalgic distortion. She wants the fragmented forms of a
previous generation passed on as reality—part of the immigrant dream of
progress, betterment, upward mobility in America—not “the repressed history
of vice and crime, misery and graft, panic and despair, chaos and saturnalia”
(Sante xv). Anne O’Brien’s Irish –American contemporaries are well-represented
in the professions, finance, management—living in upscale urban areas and
enjoying high incomes and status far removed from the reality of the urban
shantytowns, misery, crime, oppression, and violence of earlier
generations. Given such circumstances,
it’s easy to understand why they sought to gloss over the misery and focus instead
on success. Isn’t that the myth of America? Ogie wants to dissociate herself from the
nativist violence used against the Irish and the violence they used in
establishing labor unions in their adopted land against other immigrant scab
laborers, blacks and rival groups. The American cousins are determined to weave
the stereotypical myths around the memories of their grandfather and the
Irish. What they want from Anne is a
biography opf their grandfather that will cement his place firmly and heroically in the
American national narrative while at the same time romanticize his Republican
Irishness.
Ogie may represent the typical
Irish-American, her ethnic identity blurred by her marriage to Hans, whose
heritage is German-Jewish (13). She has
scant understanding of either American or Irish history (36). But this, according to Callaghan, is part of
the emigrant experience. By the
1960s—and certainly by the time of Anne’s visit in the novel—about a quarter of
a century later, the Irish-Americans had become American-Irish, with cultural
roots in the old country but a present and future belonging to America.
Part of making
their place in America
is, for Ogie and her family, mythologizing the “famous” grandfather Marcus:
“Did you know that Marcus put down a revolution?” (34) Ogie insists, “Marcus was a famous lawyer”
(35)—this despite the fact that according to the Phelan Report, Marcus’s model,
Sullivan had but a “struggling practice.” Jessica Sinn Fein asks her Irish
cousin, “Is it true he founded the IRA?” (35). Writing as Callaghan was in the
1980s and 90s, this no doubt reflects contemporary Irish attitudes towards “the
Troubles” and the emergence of the Provos during
the sectarian violence in Ulster. Horrific atrocities were committed on both
sides and because of the country’s relatively small size, the war became an
intimate part of people’s consciousness. “Everyone knows someone who has been
killed or injured. A weirdly local, almost domestic war, is how ordinary people
experience it [. . . .] At these moments it was as if Kathleen ni Houlihan was
once again challenging the nation with blood sacrifice” (Kennelly 99-100). But the nightly television images of modern
terrorist violence made only a small minority give encouragement and support to
that old message. In the course of the conversation in the novel, Callaghan
reveals that O’Brien’s Irish –American cousins are ignorant not only about the
current situation in Ireland but also about real Irish history as they try to
place Marcus squarely in the middle of both American and Irish affairs. When Anne tells Ogie that Marcus was
accidentally arrested in the 1916 rebellion and that Tim Healy “raised the
matter in the House of Commons” (36), she realizes it would be futile to even
begin to explain that Healy was “Parnell’s great enemy [because Ogie] wouldn’t
have heard of Parnell” (36). Anne
recognizes that what the Irish-American relatives want to hear is the “usual
spiel about the poor immigrant making good” (27). Still, their ideas about
Marcus mix fact and fiction. In fact, Marcus had “spoken before King George V
when the monarch visited Ireland
after his coronation” (57). And he was
“held on political charges in 1916 in connection with the uprising”(56). The American relations have only half the
information and twist it to suit their own view of him. As Anne writes: “It was
strange reading your family history in newspapers—and everything the opposite
of what you’d been told. It was reality
versus myth. Marcus was a chancer from
the beginning” (63). To the American
relatives more than fifty years afterwards, Marcus’s arrest in the 1916
uprising meant he was an IRA member even though Anne knows he ‘was arrested by
mistake [ . . . .] He was walking down Baggot Street. And ended up in Kilmainham
Goal” (36). Even Anne’s mother Oonagh,
raised in America before
moving to Ireland,
may have confused some of the family history: “Marcus had been reluctant to
talk about the Rosenthal case. Why had Oonagh never mentioned it? She talked about the Thaw case and the film
about Evelyn Nesbit, The Girl on the Red
Velvet Swing. Perhaps she had mixed up Rosenthal
with Thaw. The last two syllables
sounded alike” (70).
Oonagh wants to be sure that her version of the past is, at least in some
respects, a positive one: “Remember, our family emigrated from choice. We were
never starving” (44). And Anne herself
meanders along the mythic past, preferring to believe that her great
grandfather was a Kerrry schoolmaster “too clever for ordinary high schools”
(44). Yet doubt creeps in: “Maybe our ancestors had built the railways like all
the other Irish. But could a labourer
produce a Marcus Quilligan O’Neill?” (44).
Anne O’Brien
extends this question of romanticizing the past from her own family to all
Irish immigrants: “How many Irish Americans knew that their ancestors had
staked out territory in the city? You
thought of them as Rosary-muttering Catholics, but many were thugs” (176).
Some Tammany politicians began their
careers as leaders of gangs—Richard Croker of the Tunnel gang, Big Tim Sullivan
of the Whyos (Sante 267-8), and Charles Murphy of the Gas House Gang (Myers
299). Gang warfare between the Eastmans, led by Monk Eastman, and the Five
Pointers, under Paul Kelley, lasted for over two years and over 30 gangsters
were killed (Asbury 234). Big Tim often
used the Eastmans to make sure appropriate results were obtained for Tammany
during elections (Werner 439).
Anne O’Brien’s
American cousins are not alone in this kind of romanticizing of the past: “Many
journalists and novelists have exaggerated and romanticized the positive side
of Irish politics and its power broker significance” (McCaffrey 228). Callaghan’s narrator herself says “The
historians say we changed American history by the parish mentality of
our representatives, who made sure of votes with buckets of coal and bags of
groceries. The Democratic Party’s New
Deal was an extension of this. But the
bad result then was Tammany” (176).
The contrasts
between the Irish and the Irish-American characters in the novel is
striking. While the Irish Americans
romanticize the old country, long to “return” to marry a fresh young colleen or
visit the villages of their ancestors, the Irish narrator is disgusted by the
parochial attitudes of her homeland. She is realistic about the need to escape Ireland to make
a living. And although Anne has difficulty facing the truth about her
grandfather, she has no difficulty seeing her cousin clearly. In fact, Ogie and
Anne, despite their emotional closeness, are different spirits, Ogie living in
her version of the past, what Kennelly refers to as the “closed mind [, . . .]
firm, contained and resolute in itself, in its own defined context [ . . . ;]
it craves the conviction that it alone is the sole embodiment of truth”
(Kennelly 167, 169). Anne, however, is
beyond that confining narrowness.
Speaking in her own voice, by the end of the novel she has found the
potential to develop, change, and grow, entering the lives of those who are
profoundly different from her. She has
“put all the stifling Irish Mothers (Mother Ireland, Mother Church,
Mother Machree) where they belong. Nowhere” (Kennelly 181).
Anne’s
Irish-American cousin Bud, named after his grandfather Marcus, appears to be an
ethnic atavism, a throwback to a time when the Irish were linked to crime and
deviance. He volunteered for the army
“to get out of reform school” (107); he was “movie-star handsome” ( 27) like
“someone sent up from central casting for
a lead in a soap opera” (105). He
had three unsuccessful marriages and drifted in and out of various jobs, ending
up as a card dealer at the Desert Inn (35, 107). As early as 1969, when she knew him as a
teenager, Anne thought he was linked to criminal elements, having discovered in
his apartment closet “rows of fur coats [that] looked hot—in the criminal
sense” (107). And like his grandfather
Marcus, he sought (unsuccessfully) a “little bit of heaven in the shape of an
Irish colleen” (107). Bud had an
intimate knowledge of Mafia politics (198-9) which, given his ignorance on
other issues, lends credibility to the idea that he walked close to the edge of
illegal activity. If Marcus was involved
in the seedy underworld of New York,
Bud “hadda get his ass outa Vegas in one hell of a hurry” (109) because they
thought he was “graftin’” and the mob “threatened to break [his] fingers”
(110). When Anne demands an
explanation, Bud avers, “A guy’s gotta live, don’t he?” (110), hearkening back
to Anne’s conversation with Marcus about his allegedly crooked boxing matches.
Bud packed a gun (196), stayed inside behind drawn curtains, and wore
sunglasses and a hooded track suit even when he went out at night (113). And Bud had even developed a rationale for
his behavior; Bud notes, “Our grandfather mighta done in some innocent. He mighta taken graft . . . .Well, Coz, one
way or another, we all take graft” (201).
Anne recognizes that “it was something out of Bald Jack’s time” (110).
The emigrant
dreams of the title are exposed as pipe-dreams as Anne compares the actual
history of her grandfather with the version that the second and third
generations of her family have come to believe.
No American streets were paved with gold: Marcus had to play the often seedy Irish-American game in his
attempts to become the Horatio Alger of the O’Neill clan. This romanticized version is the one his
ghost and his family want to perpetuate.
But the dream is exposed in Anne’s research, in her mother’s hint that
“he was not a proper father” (24), and in the character of Bud, whose life
parallels his grandfather’s in so many ways.
Anne herself is drawn to and struggles with the dream. She feels the pull to emigrate, she is
enchanted by the lure that America holds out, and the hallucinations of her
grandfather tug at those romantic longings, urging her to write the history he
wants written, the cleaned-up version, the one that makes him the hero, the one
that covers up the facts of his life.
Callaghan’s reflection on
immigration and immigrants fits neatly into what we know about the Irish
immigrant experience. The fact that the Irish continue to come to America in
relatively large numbers reinforces Miller’s point that post-famine Irish
migration was “escape” not “exile” (Miller 363). Then, as now, cheap, easy transport made the
voyage palatable for most of those seeking personal and material
advancement. Anne O’Brien, unlike her
grandfather Marcus, embodies both perspectives in one: emigrant and
immigrant. As a late-blooming feminist
(63), she is repelled by the Catholic conservatism of her homeland,
rationalizing her two-continent commuter career by saying, “I had to land in
the US
every year to keep my green card [. . . . T]hey always renewed my
contract. There was a demand for Irish
women abroad. At home they stoned you “ (4).
And later, “Irish women of my generation were reared on a diet of
Romantic poetry and niceness. It was our
fatal flaw. Also Catholicism”
(123). Happy to have arrived, she
thought, “Still, I liked to know what was going on. America was an injection—the
climate, or something, was energizing [. . . .] It certainly beat staying
home. Thanks to the college, I now had
an identity” (58-9). “It opened up my
life” (10), deriding her Irish homeland as “A fascist backwater, a frog’s hole
of swollen egos and begrudgery” (115).
Yet at the same time, Anne was repelled by America: “Why was everyone so
aggressive here? [. . . .] the sky was aflame/. There was a smell of
pollution. Horns blared and brakes
screeched as we merged into the Van Wyck Expressway” (15)
Tied up with the question
of emigration, the American Dream, and Marcus’s history is the larger question
of Anne as creative artist. Throughout the novel, Anne struggles with the idea
of whether or not to take on the challenge of writing her grandfather’s story.
As she uncovers more and more scandal about him, it becomes clear that she
cannot write the biography her Irish-American relatives want her to write. Perhaps even more frightening to her, she is
haunted by her grandfather’s command to tell HIS side of the story, not the
version written up in the history books and the newspapers. Anne’s profession
as a novelist is one that puts her in close proximity with that of a
biographer. In fact, she writes historical romances, books that distort
history, fictionalizing it, to put in forth to audiences who want to believe
this “prettified” version rather than the real truth. As such, she feels like a
hack (quote). What Ogie and Marcus want is not history or biography but
historical romance. They want Anne to alter the facts to fit their perceptions
of those facts. Anne ‘s hints throughout
the novel of her “madness,” tie the question of the creative process to that of
fact-finder. (think this through). One
of the major issues in this novel is the question about how close madness is to
creativity. When we first meet Anne and she sees her grandfather, we are not
sure whether or not he is real. We are meant to wonder about his existence: is
this a ghost? Is he a man whom she misinterprets, seeing him as her
grandfather? Is it a figment of her tortured imagination? Or is her vision of
Marcus simply the artist’s way of imagining, creating a reality of the mind
quite as real as that one outside the mind? Is Anne mad? Or is she ”just” a
writer?
These questions
haunt the reader as Marcus haunts Anne.
As Marcus enters Anne’s world, he brings the past with him, a past that
is murky, full of misinterpretations, false memories, distorted images (this is
the part I need to think through—tie it all up here_
Ultimately, Anne
never writes the biography of her grandfather Marcus Quilligan O’Neill. Her contract up, the disastrous affair with
Chuck over, Anne returns to the land she is critical of—her home. Boarding her flight, she was “glad to see the
familiar green uniform of the Aer Lingus
hostess [. . . .] Soon we’d head up the coast of north
America . Then out to sea and home” (297).
It is clear at the
end of the book, when she is once again on an Aer Lingus flight, that Anne takes control of the ghosts of her
immigrant past (and the romantic impulse to write history to fit the emigrant
dream). If the novel begins with a flight from Ireland to America,
it ends with a flight back to Ireland.
In America,
she has confronted her “demons” with courage, tenacity, and humor. Anne banishes Marcus’s ghost from her
life—but not before creating a handlebar mustache on him. She jokingly makes him the stereotype of the
villain, not the hero. She acknowledges
his limitations and sees him not as “the famous grandfather,” but as a human
being who did some good and some bad. It is this realization that allows her to
close the book and go back home.
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