American literature and Irish culture, 1910–55

The politics of enchantment

Tara Stubbs

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719084331
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book discusses how and why American modernist writers turned to Ireland at various stages during their careers. By placing events such as the Celtic Revival and the Easter Rising at the centre of the discussion, it shows how Irishness became a cultural determinant in the work of American modernists.

Chapter 1

Cultural and racial (dis)affiliations

And partly because Ireland is small enough
To be still thought of with a family feeling¹

A study of American modernism and Irish culture must necessarily begin with a consideration of family. The affiliations and disaffiliations to Ireland experienced by the American writers discussed in this chapter reveal a reading of ‘family’ as literal and metaphorical, building on the kind of familial intimacy implied by the ‘family feeling’ that MacNeice places, in the above lines, at the centre of the ‘small’ domestic sphere of Irish life. This ‘smallness’ might also have appealed to American modernists thanks to what Paul Giles, quoting Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, attributes to ‘nearly all of the major writers of the time’: that is, ‘The widespread feeling after the First World War that the world was now “too huge and complex” for “individualism”’.² Thus the writers included in this discussion, all searching in different ways for an individual voice that might somehow connect with their American literary expression, have nuanced and often troubling relationships with Ireland – thanks to family connections that are sometimes enhanced, and at other times played down, according to complex channels of racial and cultural influence and interference.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, keenly emphasised the Irish, maternal side of his heritage during his early career, making most use of it in his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920). John Steinbeck, meanwhile, appeared to be preoccupied with his Northern Irish maternal heritage throughout his working life: referencing Irish themes in early works such as Cup of Gold (1929), displaying the influence of the Celtic Revivalist playwright J. M. Synge in his ‘play-novelette’ Burning Bright (1950), and giving the Northern Irish, Hamilton side of his family the contrapuntal saga to the Trasks in East of Eden (1952). Marianne Moore claimed in a letter to Ezra Pound in January 1919 that she was ‘Irish by descent, possibly Scotch also, but purely Celtic’, despite only having loose family connections to Ireland through a maternal Anglo-Irish/Scots-Irish heritage.³ Finally, Eugene O’Neill described himself as ‘the last of this pure Irish branch of the O’Neills’, dismissing his unfortunate children as ‘a weird mixture, racially speaking’.⁴

What all of these writers have in common is the fact that their Irish heritage was exaggerated or romanticised in order to give their writing an intimacy and cultural depth. Ron Ebest points out that ‘ethnicity is itself to some extent an act of personal and social imagination; as the Great Famine recedes into history, maintenance of Irish-American identity requires more and more of both’.⁵ Although this book is concerned with a broader labelling of identity which discusses American writers with a variety of inherited links to Ireland, Ebest’s description is telling: as each of the writers discussed here applies something of their ‘personal and social imagination’ to their interpretation – and misinterpretation – of their family relations to Ireland. In several of these examples, too, such relations are accompanied by racial assertions: Fitzgerald, for example, described himself in a letter to John O’Hara as ‘half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions’,⁶ while Steinbeck was concerned to stress his ‘pure Ulster’ heritage and his distaste for the ‘dirty rednecks’ of the southern Irish Free State.⁷

Such comments coincide with a growing interest in racial heritage during the period, which was marked by the publication of Edward A. Ross’s The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (1914) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the latter running to several editions and reaching its peak popularity in the early 1920s. A declared eugenicist text, The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, is even referred to inaccurately by the bigoted Tom Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925).⁸ Concurrent with, and thanks in part to, the dissemination of such publications, 1924 saw the passing of a new Immigration Act. Matthew Frye Jacobson notes that the ‘provisions’ of the Act ‘ensured that those new arrivals who were still allowed entry, in the self-congratulatory words of the immigration commission, once more “looked exactly like Americans”’. However, Jacobson traces the start of ‘such views of race and immigration’ to an earlier point in history, arguing that they ‘had become fixed in the lexicon of the state as early as 1911’.⁹

Though it is important that we do not overstate the significance of eugenicist texts by writers like Grant, Ross and Stoddard, Fitzgerald’s deliberately inaccurate reference to Stoddard’s text in his 1925 novel, written at the height of the immigration debates, is telling:

‘Civilization’s going to pieces’, broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured [sic] Empires by this man Goddard?’

‘Why, no,’ I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

‘Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.

It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’¹⁰

The narrator, Nick Carraway, expresses ‘surprise’ at Tom Buchanan’s vitriolic ‘tone’, a surprise that enables Fitzgerald to offer a critique – through the inaccuracy of the reference to Stoddard’s text, and through Buchanan’s sweeping summary – of the ways in which eugenicist texts have assumed a generalised authority within white upper-class American circles. Later in the same discussion, Buchanan offers the thesis that: ‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are … And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’. This association between the ‘Nordics’ and ‘civilization’ allows Tom Buchanan, a ‘sturdy strawhaired man of thirty’, with a ‘cruel’, hulking body, to contrast with the outsider Jay Gatsby, an ‘elegant young rough-neck’, with ‘tanned skin’, whom Buchanan suggests might hail from ‘Oxford, New Mexico’ rather than Oxford University;¹¹ thus Buchanan insults Gatsby with an entwined dismissal of his dark appearance and his claims to a ‘civilized’ education.

A brief consideration of the eugenicist texts published in the first half of the twentieth century is, therefore, valuable for considering the extremes of class-based and racial views disseminated within American society. For the purposes of this study, an analysis of the ways in which such texts treated the indigenous Irish is also helpful. In The Passing of the Great Race Grant associates nationalism and patriotism with the desire of ‘inferior’ races to rise against the ‘master race’: ‘The resurgence of inferior races and classes throughout not merely Europe but the world, is evident in every despatch from Egypt, Ireland, Poland, Rumania, India and Mexico. It is called nationalism, patriotism, freedom and other high-sounding names, but it is everywhere the phenomenon of the long-suppressed, conquered servile colonies rising against the master race’. Grant goes on to worry about ‘the hyphenated aliens in our midst upon whom we have carelessly urged citizenship’.¹² Edward A. Ross expands upon the ethnic make-up of American immigrant groups, distinguishing between the ‘Scotch-Irish’ whom he claims ‘molded our national character’ ‘more than any other stock’, and the ‘Celtic Irish’ to whom he is less kind: ‘During its earlier period, Irish immigration brought in a desirable class, which assimilated readily. Later, the enormous assisted immigration that followed the famine of 1846–48 brought in many of an inferior type, who huddled helplessly in the poorer quarters of our cities and became men of the spade and the hod’.¹³

In a later text, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945), this distinction between the ‘inferior type’ of the ‘Celtic Irish’ and the lionised Scotch-Irish group is emphasised still further. The text’s authors, W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Strole, drew up tables of ‘Cultural and Racial types’ based on the following criteria: degree of subordination, strength of ethnic and racial subsystems, time for assimilation, and form of American rank. In this table, the ‘Racial Type I – Light Caucasoid’, which is placed at the top of the hierarchy, is sub-divided into ‘Cultural Types’. ‘Cultural Type 1’, in which the degree of subordination is ‘very slight’ and the time for assimilation ‘very short’, includes ‘English-speaking Protestants’, with the test cases consisting of ‘English, Scotch, North Irish, Australians, Canadians’. For the ‘south Irish’, we have to wait for ‘Cultural Type 3’, in which the degree of subordination is ‘slight’ and the time for assimilation ‘short to moderate’. ‘Cultural Type 2’ consists of Protestants who do not speak English, including ‘Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, French’.¹⁴ In The Passing of the Great Race Madison Grant strengthens such arguments with a table entitled ‘CLASSIFICATION OF THE RACES OF EUROPE, THEIR CHARACTERS AND DISTRIBUTION’. In this table Grant classes the English, Scotch and most Irish as ‘Nordic’ (the superior race), but notes that there are ‘doubtful traces among West Irish and among the old black breed of Scotland and Wales’ of the lowest European race, the ‘Middle Paleolithic’, which has a ‘broad nose’, and is ‘short and powerful’, with ‘probably very dark’ hair and eyes; he is also ‘probably non-Aryan’.¹⁵

In the context of such pervasive ethnic and class-based stereotyping, it is perhaps unsurprising that American writers during the period seemed compelled to describe or even define their connections to Ireland. However each writer discussed in this chapter displays rather inconsistent attitudes towards these issues. For example, Fitzgerald’s pejorative description of his ‘black Irish’ heritage – referring to Irish of Mediterranean appearance but also associated with the term ‘wild Irish’, which describes ‘the less civilised Irish’¹⁶ – seems at odds both with his portrayal of the red-haired ‘Irish’ sophisticate Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (1934) and with his declared attraction to Celticism as a young writer starting out. In one memorable letter to Edmund Wilson Fitzgerald, he declared his desire to ‘prove myself a Celt’, and signed off another ‘Gaelically yours’.¹⁷ Marianne Moore was similarly disingenuous in her attitude towards her apparently ‘purely Celtic’ background. While Moore’s family inheritance was not ‘purely Celtic’ – being derived from an English/Anglo-Irish/Scots-Irish, Dublin/ Ulster background – in her poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941) she uses an imagined conversation to remark sarcastically upon a dismissal of a potential suitor on grounds of race:

‘Although your suitor
be perfection, one objection
is enough...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface The politics of enchantment
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction ‘Why do we like being Irish?’
• 1 Cultural and racial (dis)affiliations
• 2 American modernists and the Celtic Revival
• 3 Rural Ireland, mythmaking and transatlantic translation
• 4 Enchantment and disenchantment in political poetry
• 5 The legacy of Yeats’s poetic conviction
• Conclusion Cultural credibility in America’s Ireland – and Ireland’s America
• Select Bibliography
• Index