What is this Irish thing about? For Dad? Was it real?
Monday, January 26, 2009
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About Me
- VassarGirl
- A painter and a writer, I've studied 7 languages. I read everything and cook anything. Vassar College (AB in Art History), George Washington University (MA in Anthropology) and University of Penn. (ABD in Linguistics) Peace Corps Volunteer 1968-1970, Ecuador, Trainer and Technical Writer, Digital Equipment Corp. 1978-1990. Studied Japanese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Brush Painting at City College of San Francisco. Docent at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
I don't know what it was about entirely. But there are clues. The war book says he went to Ireland as a young man (probably during Sorbonne year) and met family, probably felt very accepted (not like at Choate) for his Irishness, told Ann Matthews (Cairo flame) he wanted to go back after the war and collect Irish stories and she said she'd love to. He loved the culture. I think he felt it was a deep, true, poetic, very real identity, not the surfacey one he had been sent East to school to learn -- the establishment ways. It can be hard to really understand just how truly sold the whole country was on the superiority of the WASP elite. Everybody wanted a WASP ancestry; Fitzgerald writes about it; it was a kind of mania.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think he sensed on a deep, perhaps unarticulated, level that his Irish ancestry was the genetic origin of his creativity, his ability to throw himself into a creative project, work with unremitting energy, dream big dreams, see the poetry in things, remain eternally curious, in love with life, make a contribution (as per the Choate WASP phrase), and that in the soul of a true poet -- the soul he saw in O'Neill -- was someone who had chosen to make the huge trade-off of sacrificing happiness for art -- he had delved into his torment and stuck with it and gotten it out on the page. Torment was O'Neill's material. He mined it. There was also a more general idea that a writer was supposed to be tortured. I think this is the darkness he sensed in O'Neill when he first met him and that he wanted to explore in O'Neill and in himself.
And Dr. Brooks the Freudian at an hourly rate would be there to help him.
The Jocasta novel at the end of his life was a Freudian-inspired dive into the oedipal drama. On the couch he had been taught to believe the "Oedipus complex" was the deepest horror those who nobly turned inwards and sought their unconscious truths could uncover. He was trying to demonstrate that in fiction and mine the material from his painful love affair with Dody and transform it into art. He probably even thought the talking cure could cure his biological depressions if he worked at it.
On Shane O'Neill -- I remember hearing him root around in the kitchen at night when he was staying in Chappaqua for the book party on the O'Neill bio and the next morning mom said he was probably thirsty for orange juice and maybe looking for drugs. She also said they were not so badly off as she had seen a nice bunch of green vegetables on their kitchen counter. I was fascinated by him.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere someone commenting on the "with the assistance of Shane O'Neill" thing as fake, but even though Shane O. may not have had much to put into the bio I think the collaboration existed in a real way on another level -- giving Daddy the chance to work his way intuitively into understanding the family structure and the emotions swirling around in it; also just wanting to help the guy.
He felt very jealous of the time the Gelbs had to devote to O'Neill. They had academic posts. He had to get the book done and earn money, go on to the next one. They did the Burns doc in the end; they were the final finishers, got the prize for "authoritative biographers."
ReplyDeleteAnd we're off! Pixels, bits, words, sentences flying around the Internet!
ReplyDeleteDad was third generation, both his grandmother and mother married, Connor and Bowen, repectively, Americans of Irish or at least non-English heritage, but Protestant beliefs. Nanny Bowen's Catholic religion, was as I remember, very strong, if sentimental(?) She got Billy to convert. Dad's first boarding school was the now-defunct Newman in New Jersey.
(I'm plannng a Chinese grave cleaning ceremony in the Cemetary in Toldeo. Any takers?)
When he got to Choate, did he feel like Michelle Obama at Princeton, suddenly aware that his background was different?
The Larrikin phenomenon in Australia is an Irish response to British rule that can take the form of criminality, acting out. There is something in the outsider role both delicious and tragic.
Carey McWilliams (my California hero) quotes BCB Jr's PM piece about the Princeton dropout neo-Nazi in McWiliam's book on the connection of anti-semitism with all forms of minority oppresion. Seeing the non-European world in WWII got BCB to see the racism and classism of those British officers, whom he admired for their style...to them, everybody else is a Wog.
>>>you wrote: The Larrikin phenomenon in Australia is an Irish response to British rule that can take the form of criminality, acting out. There is something in the outsider role both delicious and tragic.
ReplyDelete>>>I say: There is an inheritable character disorder in the DSM (modern psychiatry's Bible) now identified as "antisocial personality disorder." There is no pill for it. Only a lifetime of hard knocks teaches some to ask "what was I thinking?" OTOH sometimes it is beneficial; sometimes such people create a new world order that proves out to be for the good.
Evolution works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.
ASPD is worldwide(called "Larrikkinism" only in Australia). It is -- I think -- a combination of inheritable factors which in the extreme manifest as psychopathy and on the other end of the curve as mild oppositionality. Environment plays a mild role. The primary symptom is "trouble with the law." Australia was a place where the British sent their criminals. A whole nation founded by ASPDers!!
I think Daddy had a mild form of it and his fascination with criminals came from his identification with them. (I remember he had stolen a sweater for a flame of his in the '30's, Theodora Finney. He was, I guess, a bit of a shoplifter.)
But, through a combination of environment (family, schooling, money, psychoanalysis, love affairs with good women etc. etc.) and originally only mild ASPD genetics (he did not torture animals or set fires as a child, I would guess, nor develop a taste for tattoos in adolescence), he was able to escape prison.
Still, he had the same innate instinct to challenge authority, to shake the cages of the ruling class, that the Australian "Larrikins" have. They all came by in the real way -- in their DNA.
Daddy's championing of the "little guy" and his
instinctual rebellion against the "stuffed shirts" was a socially productive manifestation of ASPD/Larrikinism.
His was socially productive because he was both intelligent and a good writer, and so he helped pioneer a new way of looking at the criminal mind that said "there but for the grace of God go I." These people have souls, have the same basic psychic structures that we have, that we must approach and understand as being on the same spectrum of humanity as we are.
Only recently society had been sending its insane to Bedlam and its criminals to dungeons. There was no rehabilitation.
Things have changed.