NO IRISH NEED APPLY (Fordham St. Patrick’s Brunch The Yale Club, March 17, 2017)

I’m proud to be invited here today, but to use an Irish word, I confess to being a little verklempt.  On my way in, I was handed a very special message that arrived only a short time ago and that I’ve been asked to share with you.  It’s a tweet from the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who spent two years at Fordham,

It reads as follows: “I was Fordham’s best student ever. Nobody even close. Then I transferred to the Ivy League.  Now the Rams are little league. A total disaster.  Sad.”

My time at Fordham didn’t overlap with President Trump’s.  As a matter of fact, for eight years I took the Bx 20 Bus past Fordham to attend the borough’s most prestigious Catholic educational institutions, Manhattan Prep and Manhattan College.  I then threw caution to the wind, left behind Catholic schools, and put myself in the hands of the Jesuits.

In the end, I wound up with the best of all possible worlds–a Christian Brother’s education and a Jesuit diploma.  That said, I want to acknowledge my debt to the Jesuits, not just as teachers but as friends and mentors. Father Daniel Ryan was a formative influence on my life; Joe O’Hare published some of my earliest work in America magazine; the late George Hunt was a dear companion, counsellor and guide

The debt runs both ways.  My daughter graduated from Boston College and Fordham Law School; my son from Fordham Lincoln Center. In terms of the tuition checks I wrote, I figure the Jesuits are in debt to me to the tune of about $350,000.

Which is exactly the speaking fee I’m asking for today.

Having been a speechwriter for two governors and a corporate scribe for 25 years, I became expert in fudging facts and camouflaging my cluelessness. But this once, out of respect for Father McShane, who’s risked his reputation by inviting me, I thought I might talk about a subject I actually know something about.

For the last seventy years–and for the foreseeable future–I’m an Irish American.  But I’m not just Irish American or even a New York Irish Catholic.  I’m in a very special category.  I’m a Bronx Irish Catholic or, as we call ourselves, B.I.C.s

I know Father McShane will agree with me when I point out the primacy that B.I.C.s enjoy among our counterparts from the lesser boroughs. Let’s be honest:

 the Staten Island Irish are really New Jerseyans;

the Manhattan Irish are mostly a memory;

the Queens Irish all wished they lived in Brooklyn;

and the Brooklyn Irish–besides Pete Hamill, the late, great Hugh Carey, a long-vanished baseball team, and the world’s largest concentration of hipsters–their claim to fame is a bridge.

The fact is we B.I.C.s never needed a bridge because we’re the only borough on the mainland of the United States.  And our uniqueness doesn’t end there:

ours is the only borough with the definite article THE in front of it;

the only borough with a river running through it;

the only borough in the country with a baseball team–aptly nicknamed the Bombers–that has won 27 World Series;

and, at least according to the most-recent edition of the Oxford Book of Modern English Usage, the Bronx is the only place in the entire English-speaking world where “have a nice day” is pronounced “why don’t you go screw yourself.”

My native habitat was the East Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester, which we always referred by our parish name, St. Raymond’s, which was pretty much divided between Irish and Italians. Back in the 1950s, there were tensions.  An Italian-American carting outfit had emblazoned on the side of its garbage trucks–I’m not making this up–“We Cater Irish Weddings.”

 St. Raymond’s schoolyard could sometimes feel like an ethnic Serengeti where only the strong survived, and the rest of us tried to blend in with the asphalt.  But friendships blossomed along with fights, and over time the magic of sexual attraction led to what was then referred to as “intermarriage”–an Italio-Irish marital meltdown that produced the borough’s best-looking offspring.

One notable difference between us was the way Irish and Italians celebrated two March feast days.   On the 17^th, we Irish honored our patron saint with high-spirited tributes and traditional Irish cuisine, like green beer and green bagels. On the 19^th, Italians celebrated St. Joseph with a special pastry, zeppelo di San Giuseppe Girls wore red carnations and boys red ribbons.

As a kid, I never thought much about the Italian claim on St. Joseph.  I chalked it up to a harmless rivalry, an ethnic tit-for-tat…or Joe for Pat.  It wasn’t until a few years ago when I was living in St. Augustine’s parish in Park Slope that I mentioned it in passing to my pastor and good friend, Monsignor Ernie Fiorello.

Ernie was very proud of his Italian heritage and had a ready explanation for the Italian identification with St. Joseph: in the Roman Empire, he said, it was common for legionnaires to settle in areas where they’d been stationed, marry into the local population and take up a trade. He pointed out there’s scant evidence in the Gospels to rule out that Joseph was a Roman G.I. named Giuseppe, from Calabria–where many recruits were from–who after serving his time in Palestine, went native, settled in Nazareth, found a Jewish bride and took up the trade of carpenter.

Confronted with that fact, it suddenly dawned on me that if Joseph was Italian, Mary must have been Irish.  Consider the circumstantial evidence.  Her name, for instance: How many Jewish girls named Mary have you ever met? And how would Giuseppe have gotten into the all-Irish carpenters’ union without an Irish wife?

Mary stayed pure, even after she was married, and in good Irish-motherly fashion, she kept her bachelor son at home until he was 30 and treated him like he was God.

And then there’s the conclusive evidence–the case closer–the so-called Wedding Feast at Cana.  We all know the story from John’s gospel:  At Mary’s behest, her son performs his first public miracle, saving a wedding reception from going down the drain by turning water into wine.  Now I’ve been to Jewish weddings–all wonderful, warm affairs with the huppa, the hora, the endless hors d’oeuvres–but I’ve never been to a Jewish wedding reception where the guests drank the place dry.

 And ask yourself this:  How likely is it that the first miracle a Jewish mother would ask of her Messiah son isn’t to get into Harvard; isn’t to become a doctor; isn’t to marry a nice Jewish girl; but to reload the wine bar at somebody else’s wedding reception?  I won’t ask for a show of hands of how many of you buy this story, but for me it has more holes than a golf course.

What, then, really happened at Cana?  The gospel writer can be forgiven for getting it wrong.  He’d never heard of a celebration that went on for so long that the fun-loving guests liquidated the libations and necessitated the first-century equivalent of a beer run. But the answer is so glaringly self-apparent, it’s bewildering that in the two millennia since, no one ever caught on. 

The wedding feast at Cana was in fact–it couldn’t have been anything else–but an Irish wake. 

If I’m right–and I invite any biblical scholars in the audience to examine the evidence–if Irish Mary and Italian Joseph gave their son a Puerto Rican name–Jesus–then Our Savior was an Irish-Italian, Spanish-speaking native of Israel.

The theological implications aside, what a perfect candidate for mayor of New York.  And what a reminder that the old cliché is true: On St. Patrick’s Day everyone, no matter who they are, has a bit of Irish in them. 

That’s especially true here in New York.  We don’t observe this feast day quite the same way as they do in Ireland, where it’s always been a drier, quieter, less boisterous affair. That’s because as well as honor Ireland’s national saint, we recall an American story of immigrant struggle, survival and ultimate triumph, a story that though it ends happily, began in tragedy with an imperial government in London whose policy of malign indifference and legislative malice put economic theory ahead of human suffering and produced Europe’s largest toll of civilian deaths between the Black Death and the World Wars.

In the single decade between 1845 and 55, while a million Irish perished in the Great Hunger, two million–a quarter of the Irish population–fled.  A million passed over South Street.  They were met with a wall of distrust and hostility.

The American Party–the largest third party in history–sought to deny them citizenship. The governor of Massachusetts compared them to, quote, the “barbarian horde” that overthrew the Roman Empire. The country’s most famous cartoonist depicted them as half-men, half apes.  “[They] are at work night and day,” warned a prominent minister, “to break down the institutions of this country.”

No Irish Need Apply, we were told.

But we applied anyway.

We mined coal, dug canals, laid track, scrubbed floors, scoured privies.

We changed the country’s politics, transformed its cities, confronted and defied those who claimed America was theirs alone.

We fought and died in the country’s wars.

We insisted on the rights of working people and refused to accept that the many must live on what remains from the banquets of the few.

We shared in our country’s failures as well as successes, sometimes turning our backs on those denied what we had gained.  But we never lost confidence that wrongs could be righted, that the genius of our country is, as Robert Kennedy put it, “its refusal to accept that the future must endlessly repeat the past.”

We became fully American yet refused to forget.  In doing so, we opened the door for the millions who followed.  We proved that becoming American didn’t mean abjuring your religion, abandoning your heritage, turning your back on your ancestry.  A century ago, we inspired, supported and supplied the war of independence that led to the Irish Republic.   The hyphen in Irish-American has always been a bond–a bridge–never a minus sign.

In a short while, we’ll march up an avenue our forebears paved, away from the docks where they arrived as strangers in a strange land.  We’ll march north toward the blessed Bronx and the sprawling country beyond that belongs to us as much as anyone.  We’ll march past the cathedral that Archbishop John Hughes–the founder of Fordham–erected to the glory of God, the honor of St. Patrick and the memory of the famine immigrants he served so fiercely.

Amid the cheering and shared sense of pride, let me suggest that for this day to be more than an act of ethnic self-congratulation, we remember as well as celebrate. 

Remember where we come from, our exodus, the journey that took us here.  Remember the dream of liberty, equality, inclusion that we Irish helped shape.

Remember that the dream is alive in each of us, in our willingness to see in the millions uprooted and dispossessed, those fleeing persecution, deprivation, starvation, those seeking some measure of hope and opportunity for their children, not a faceless horde of strangers, not an alien race.

But the faces of our ancestors.

An image of ourselves.

So that, “now and in a time to be, wherever green is worn are changed, changed utterly…”

God bless America!

Up the Republic!

Let’s go, Rams!

As we say in the Bronx, have a nice day.

Recollections of a B.I.C.

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land! / Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, / As home his footsteps he hath turn’d …” Sir Walter Scott

Native land means different things to different people. To some it’s a nation with well-defined borders, like France or Sweden; to others, it transcends borders, à la Ireland or Korea. For many, I think, native land invokes something more intimate and parochial: a patch of earth that, no matter where life takes us, stays synonymous with home. For me, that place is the Bronx of the 1950s and 60s, a lower-middle/middle-middle-class agglomeration of apartment houses, single-family homes and small businesses sprawled between Long Island Sound to the east and the Hudson River to the west, a so-called bedroom borough whose north-south subway lines transported its inhabitants to and from jobs in Manhattan.
Reeking of exhaust and incinerators, the Bronx was chockablock with pizzerias, German and Jewish delis, Irish bars; blessed with spacious parks, a world-class zoo and botanical garden; and possessed of the Ruthian diamond–the crown jewel of major league baseball–Yankee Stadium. The skyline looming to the south was the imperial city, a dream-big place, proximate yet far away. Ours was the workaday, no-illusion city, its concrete precincts filled with cops, firemen, pipefitters, clerks, mechanics, motormen, taxi drivers, teachers, housewives, shop owners, wire lathers, civil servants and union members, the everyday people who kept the place running.
Solid, stolid, often the butt of jokes (“The Bronx, no thonx” wrote Ogden Nash), the borough was a small-scale Yugoslavia: ethnic enclaves interspersed with areas in which, though physically mingled, groups lived psychically and culturally apart. Jews, by far the Bronx’s most numerous population, branched out from the Art Deco stem of the Grand Course. Highbridge, Kingsbridge and Woodlawn were heavily Irish. Fordham, presided over by the Jesuit Gothic of the eponymous university, was bordered to the west by the well-heeled Irish parish of St. Nicholas of Tolentine; to the southeast by Belmont, a tight- knit Italian village of modest apartment buildings and meticulously tended one- and two-family homes. The once Irish/Jewish South Bronx was rapidly filling with newly arrived Puerto Ricans and African Americans. The East Bronx was a trifecta of Jews, Irish and Italians.
We Bronx Irish defined ourselves as much by parishes as neighborhoods. I was from St. Raymond’s parish, in Parkchester, in the East Bronx. Despite all belonging to the genus of B.I.C. (Bronx Irish Catholic), we at St. Raymond Elementary School considered ourselves distinctly different from our counterparts in the cheek-by-jowl parish of St. Helena’s. A planned community of 12,000 apartments, Parkchester was created by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which also financed construction of Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. Parks and open spaces were strategically placed. The main means of transportation were subways and the extensive system of city-owned bus lines. But in prescient anticipation of a rapid increase in car ownership, there were multistoried garages and copious parking spaces.
The majority of Parkchester’s residents were Jews and Catholics (Irish in the main). The few Protestants were regarded with curiosity. Up until the 1960s, Metropolitan Life excluded African Americans from both Stuyvesant Town and Parkchester. This was of a piece with the intransigent residential segregation that prevailed (and still prevails) across large swathes of the city. Desperate to increase the supply of middle-class housing–at least for whites–New York’s progressive mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, reluctantly went along. (Ironically, the oval at Parkchester’s center once contained the ballfield in which the Negro League’s Lincoln Giants played their home games.)
Parkchester was built on the site of the old Catholic Protectory, which was founded in 1863 by Archbishop John Hughes, the Ulster-born hierarch who established Fordham University, initiated the building of St. Patrick’s cathedral, and made the New York Irish into a political as well as religious constituency. The Protectory housed orphans and abandoned children, mostly Irish, whom the Children’s Aid Society had begun shipping west on “Orphan Trains” to be settled among God-fearing, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Bordering Parkchester, Morris Park to the west and Castle Hill to the east were heavily Italian. A step behind in terms of assimilation and economic advancement, Italians generally preferred houses with small gardens over apartments. Parochial schools brought us together. Friendships blossomed and so did fights. I remember the schoolyard of St. Raymond’s as an asphalt Serengeti where the weak were bullied and tough Irish battled it out with tough Italians. (Pugilistically inept, I did my best to be inconspicuous.) Sometimes the rivalries were humorous. One Italian carting company emblazoned on its garbage trucks “We Cater Irish Weddings.” When I heard talk of “intermarriage” it referred to Irish-Italian nuptials. It wasn’t until later that miscegenation escalated into ethnic meltdown and bred a new strain of Hiberno-Mediterranean offspring notable for their good looks.
Over the years, I’ve heard from Jewish Bronxites about suffering verbal harassment (“kikes,” “sheenies,” “Christ-killers”) and physical abuse from, as one friend put it, “Irish pogromists.” Without doubting their accounts, that wasn’t my experience. Through all my years of parochial school, I never heard anti-Semitic professions by teachers or clergy. We were told it was our sins that nailed Jesus to the cross. If either of my parents suspected we were cursing or bullying Jews, retribution would have been swift and severe. Yet I had no Jewish friends. We lived separately together. One thing shared by gentiles and Jews was a familiarity with Yiddish. To be a Bronxite was to schlepp and kibitz, and to understand the difference between a smuck and a mensch.
I had no acquaintance with Jewish girls, except one. We rode the 20 BX bus together, she to Walton Girls High School in Kingsbridge, me to all-male Manhattan Prep in Riverdale. I sat in the back with my school buddies, she in front with her classmates. The first time I saw her, I was smitten by her thin and graceful figure, clothes loose and flowing (the style was tight), thick, black curls (the fashion was long and straight), an early blossoming flower child. It was part of growing up in the Bronx to figure out, as quickly as possible, a person’s tribe. I identified her Jewishness in the same way, if she bothered to notice, she perceived my goyishness. We never spoke. And then, one September, she was gone, off to college I presumed. I spent months bereft. Recently, for the first time in 50 years, I rode a bus along the old route, and it all flooded back, my lonely-hearts Bronx tale, unbridgeable worlds in the same borough, on the same bus.
My first ancestors arrived in New York when Margaret and Michael Manning fled the Great Famine. Margaret Manning, their daughter and my paternal grandmother, was born in 1867, in the village of Fordham, at that time part of Westchester County. (The Bronx didn’t become a separate county until 1914.) My grandfather Patrick Quinn, born in Tipperary in 1859, arrived with his family in 1870. As a young man, he went west as a coal stoker on the railroad, became a labor organizer, and eventually returned and rose to the presidency of New York City’s Central Federated Union. He married Margaret Manning, a seamstress, in St. Brigid’s church, on the Lower East Side, in 1899. It was Patrick’s second marriage. After his first wife died in childbirth, he left his infant daughter with a sister and went off to Cuba for two years. It’s uncertain if he was actually married to his first wife. An aura of roguery hung about him.
Contra the notion of Irish obsession with ancestry, my family showed little interest in the past. My mother had an active disinterest, routinely tossing out documents and obfuscating or bowdlerizing the fate of relatives who fell victim to impoverishment or their own misbehaviors (or both). The primary focus of my parents and grandparents wasn’t on the Irish past but the American future, and their children’s role in it. My father recalled that as a boy on the Lower East Side he shared a room with his older brother in which they rarely stayed. My grandparents hosted relative after relative as they arrived from Ireland, until none were left to bring over. If my grandfather heard anyone sentimentalizing about the old country his instant riposte was, “If you miss it so much, why don’t you go back?” Romantic Ireland didn’t ring very convincingly in crowded tenement rooms.
Catherine Riordan of Blarney, County Cork, landed at Castle Garden in 1888. (It would be four years before Ellis Island opened and processed its first immigrant, Annie Moore, also of County Cork.) Though Catherine claimed to be 18, it’s more likely she was 15 or 16 and lied about her age so she could join her older sister as a domestic and begin sending remittances home to finance her siblings’ journeys. She stayed at maid’s work until she met James Murphy, a native-Irish speaker from Macroom, who worked as a mechanic at Yorkville’s Rupert Brewery. My mother, Viola Murphy, the last of their six children, was born on the top floor of a four-story walkup on 149th Street, in the Bronx.
Coming of age in the1920s, my parents belonged to the first truly modern generation. Electricity rolled back night and blazed the Great White Way. New appliances alleviated the burden of ancient drudgeries. Movies and radio revolutionized entertainment. Cars and airplanes shrank old barriers of distance. Credit and the installment plan made commonplace what were once luxuries. People’s expectations rose exponentially. Progress and prosperity were presumed, with America in the vanguard, and Jazz Age New York ahead of all.
Where none of my grandparents went beyond primary school, my parents graduated college. My father received a B.S. in civil engineering from Manhattan College and worked on the construction of the IND subway while attending Fordham Law School at night. My mother was a classics major at Mt. Saint Vincent. They met in 1928 at a parish St. Patrick’s Day dance in the Bronx. Beyond-expectation embodiments of their parents’ immigrant ambitions, they loved nightclubs, the theater–musicals, the Marx Brothers, Shakespeare–and reveled in the speakeasy hubbub in which my mother’s bartender brother was much admired for his skill as a mixologist.
The presumption that they escaped their ancestors’ world–a chronicle of unhappy endings that culminated in starvation and migration–was rocked by the Crash of ’29 and the Great Depression. My mother lost her small savings as a teacher when the Edgewater Savings Bank folded. Her immigrant father lost his life savings, the accumulation of forty years working in a brewery. Pensionless, he worked until until he died. My two aunts, one a teacher, the other a secretary, stayed unwed and at home to support my grandmother.
Though he had an engineering and law degree, my father struggled to find fulltime employment. He volunteered with the local Democratic Club. Edward J. Flynn, the formidable Fordham-educated leader (AKA “The Boss”) of the Bronx Democratic organization and a confidante of Governor Franklin Roosevelt, took a liking to him. Flynn sent my father to the 1932 convention to Chicago as part of a contingent that worked behind the scenes to keep the New York delegation in line for FDR. He campaigned hard for FDR, speaking around the city from the back of a flatbed truck. In 1936, he was elected to the State Assembly. A week after the election, eight years after they met, my parents were married.
My father spent the rest of his life in Bronx politics, serving in the assembly until 1944, then a term in the U.S. Congress (he was one of the two congressmen from New York who rode FDR’s funeral train to Hyde Park), and the rest of his career as a judge of the Municipal Court, chief judge of the City Court, and a justice of the State Supreme Court. A well-respected jurist and noted public speaker, he was at home in the Bronx, in the parish in which he grew up. A devout New Dealer haunted by memories of the Depression, he never owned a stock or bond, and encouraged my brother and me to seek the security of careers in the civil service.
His obituary in the New York Times states that his “associates described him as a witty and brilliant man who loved to sing Irish songs and tell Irish stories.” My father and mother were both fine singers and dancers. The songs were mainly from Broadway shows or the Great American Song Book, the dances foxtrots and waltzes, not reels and jigs. The “Irish songs” weren’t folk tunes but Irish-American favorites like “Harrigan,” “Galway Bay,” and their all-time favorite, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” (lyrics by Jewish songwriter, E.Y. Harberg). The stories my father excelled at telling–stories salted with theatrical mastery of dialects–rarely involved Ireland (when they did, they were ghost stories) and rose instead from his life amid the mishegas of New York politics.
I went to the same grammar school, high school and college as my father, all in the Bronx, all Catholic institutions. I took for granted that the Irish-American community my family existed in for over a century would remain as it was. The election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 felt like a capstone. Shortly before the election, Kennedy spoke at the Concourse Plaza, once the borough’s only top-of-the-line hotel—today it’s a nursing home–a Mickey Mantle homerun away from Yankee Stadium, around the corner from where my wife was raised. My father, running in his last election for the state Supreme Court, also spoke. Afterwards, Kennedy traveled up the Grand Course on the back of a convertible, a quaintly distant, pre-Dallas image. My friends and I stood in front of the Loew’s Paradise, a movie palace since stripped and defaced, and helped swell the frenzied delirium that greeted Kennedy as he mounted the platform in front of long-vanished Sachs Furniture and Krum’s Candy stores.
Permanence of any kind is the grandest of illusions. What was different about the Bronx was the velocity with which the illusion crumbled. The origins of the Bronx as one of the city’s five boroughs (the only one on the U.S. mainland) were obscure even to Bronxites. I heard passing mention among my elders of “annexation” and “consolidation,” but the hardedge, unremitting brick-on-brick streetscapes disguised its overnight transformation from pastoral to metropolitan and made it seem pretty much the same since the Dutch forcibly evicted the peaceable, innocent Lenapes.
The centrifugal swirl that memory insists descended suddenly, like a fast-moving storm, had been building for some time. The pharaonic schemes of nonpareil powerbroker Robert Moses carried traffic around and across the Bronx to Long island and New Jersey. The fund-starved, once-efficient public transit system creaked and sputtered. FHA mortgages spurred the upwardly mobile aspirations of would-be homeowners and at the same time maintained and abetted the legacy of residential apartheid that condemned minorities to decaying, substandard housing stock.
Economic change drove social change and cultural change, and was reinforced by it. Vatican II altered our unalterable church. Priests and nuns molted back into civilians. Parishioners moved away. Once-thriving parishes became enfeebled. Rock ‘n’ roll and the sexual revolution made the generation gap seem more a chasm. Drugs spread. Crime and fear of it escalated. The Grand Concourse grew gritty. The boring Bronx, synonym for low-rent bourgeois blah, descended into the burning Bronx, global synecdoche for urban ruin.
The future fled the Bronx. Friends moved away or never returned from college. Soon enough I followed, serving as a VISTA volunteer in Kansas City. Beckoned by the beautiful and new–everything the Bronx wasn’t–I felt the lure of California. It was then, for the first time, I thought about what I was leaving behind: the saga of the Atlantic passover from poverty and subservience to steerage and immigrant tenements; those who made it, those who didn’t, those whose names I knew, those I didn’t. In all my years in schools founded or largely staffed by Irish and Irish Americans, my only encounter with Irish history was in a course on Victorian Britain. The past was a blur. It was as if we emerged from the shadows and fully entered history when we came to the Bronx.
My threadbare connection to Michael Manning, my great-grandfather, was my father’s memory of him as an old, blind man, quiet and gentle, who never alluded to what led him to emigrate other than to say that he would never think about going back “until they hanged the last landlord.” That was all I knew about him, except for a line in the census–occupation: laborer–and the place of his death on January 10, 1910, 296 East 7th Street, a long-ago demolished tenement. I later learned the name Manning was an errant transcription of Mangan that, for whatever reason, stuck. The rest was silence.
When I returned to New York, the little research I did was lackadaisical, accidental, addled. So was my career. I worked as a high school teacher, Wall Street messenger, dishwasher, court officer, archivist, until I found my way to a graduate program at Fordham University. I served as a graduate assistant to the late Maurice O’Connell, a scholar of Irish history and the great-grandson of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, a towering figure in that history. I traveled to Ireland and studied there and, as comfortable as I felt, faced that it wasn’t home and I didn’t belong; that the break was final and irreversible; that caught on the hyphen between this small island to the east and the vast continent to the west, my native land was the interspace on America’s Atlantic ledge.
Driven by the blunt trauma of permanent underemployment as an academic, I stumbled into speechwriting with the thought of doing it for a year, which stretched into thirty, through two New York governors and five chairmen of Time Inc./Time Warner. The past kept nagging me. I toyed with attempting a history of the famine immigration to New York. In the time I could game or grift, I dipped into records and newspapers. I grew increasingly aware that the history I sought belonged to lives too unimportant to record, people who suffered history rather than recorded it, servants, laborers, anonymous poor, ordinary moments that weren’t written anywhere, the intricate tangle of individual existences shrunk to generalities, statistics, accidental mention, a census line.
Despairing of history, I turned to fiction. I began rising at 5:30 a.m., working for two hours before turning the page to nose-grinding, bread-winning labor. I read whatever I believed relevant, copied paragraphs from novels that I admired, scribbled the beginnings of the story I wanted to tell. I found characters who guided me, some imaginary, some like Stephen Foster and John Hughes, real. I listened as they mumbled, murmured, shouted, revealed themselves, led me places I didn’t know existed.
I researched, wrote, despaired, rewrote, deserted, returned, persisted across an entire decade. I discovered in fiction truths I didn’t in history. I grappled with the power of the past to bolt in place the unconscious exoskeleton that supported and shaped–sometimes misshaped–expectations and relationships far into the future. I came to grasp the human need to forget as well as remember. I learned that what goes unspoken, unacknowledged, has the greatest sway of all. Everything around me, parish, school, politics, religion, the Bronx I grew up in and carry with me, sprang from and contained what came before. The past never goes away, I realized, only unnoticed or denied.
My characters became my companions, comrades-in-arms, soulmates, a company of aspiring, compromised, lustful, decent, cowardly, ruthless, compassionate, befuddled human beings–Irish, African-Americans, old-stock New Yorkers–that I gathered under the rubric of a familiar prayer: “banished children of eve.” I felt a pang of emptiness when I finished the last page and let them go. Mixed in was a sense of a journey done: In T.S. Eliot’s words, “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

RUNYON’S WAY: A WRITER’S MEMOIR

‘All Life Is Six to Five Against,’ Damon Runyon

No writer grows up aiming to be a copycat, at least none I have the good fortune or misfortune to know. It is true that some writers never grow up at all, and it is also true that I have never been to France or Europe where, or so I am told by those who have, there are customs and practices which, while they hold wine over there, do not hold water over here.

I cannot claim to have the skinny on all writers over there. I know for sure that over here, as a general proposition, they have heroes they look up to in the way ballplayers do to the bronzed immortals bolted into the walls of Cooperstown.

For ballplayers and scribes alike, the goal is not to be a gonniff and lift their heroes’ stuff in the sense of committing larceny in the style of a first-class four flusher. It is to learn what it takes to keep alive the desire to stand apart and above, the grit that keeps a wheezer in the game when he digs deep into his pockets to feel what he has got left and all he can feel are his fingers, and them just somewhat.

If you ask me, and I know you did not but I will tell you anyway, being a writer is a little like falling in love. No matter how uncomplicated it seems at the start, it is always complicated. It ends up breaking more hearts than it mends. It is always a whole lot easier to make sense of when you are out of it than in. The trick is to persist.

Writers must learn these things for themselves and find their own way. Yet for most, if not all, the path is so crooked and confusing that getting lost is as easy as falling off a barstool after gargling one-too-many alcoholic beverages of one type or another. (My preference is for Manhattans.) Sometimes, however, with luck—and don’t kid yourself, whether it comes to love, or writing, or playing ball, or staying alive, luck has as much to do with it as anything—it makes all the difference if a guy or doll is introduced to or stumbles upon a hero at just the right moment.

Take Damon Runyon, for instance. We are never formally introduced because he has the bad fortune to die several months before I have the good fortune to be born. The first time I hear his name is from Joe O’Brien, who is not given to gab about events and personalities in Ulan Bator, Tibet, or Fort Lee, New Jersey, so right away I presume Runyon lives in or close by our Bronx bailiwick.

The year is 1955 or 1957 or somewhere in between and I’m eight or ten or somewhat close. Royal blue bathrobe tied tight around his spare frame, Joe sips his morning coffee at the table in the dining room (which is more nook than room) in the Parkchester apartment he shares with short, plump Gertie, my hug-you-till-it-hurts aunt who sits directly across from him and neither smokes cigarettes nor drinks coffee. She places a chocolate doughnut on the plate in front of me and pours Coca-Cola into two red plastic glasses filled with ice, one for me, one for her.

Beyond that he is my uncle by dint of marriage to Gertie Quinn, my father’s older sister, there is not a lot I know about Joe. There are occasions when I overhear whispered conversations and insinuations that make me suspect that there are things about Joe I am not supposed to overhear. For instance, whether he ever spends time in the Big House is a matter of conjecture of the kind I usually do not indulge in and, the one time I do, my parents put the kibosh on.

When it comes to the Little Red School House, I know by way of for sure that Joe doesn’t go beyond a stretch in the third or fourth grade. In terms of reading, I never see him eyeball anything besides bladders the likes of the Daily News and the Mirror. Joe is the night clerk at the George Washington Hotel, on Lexington and 23rd, a house of hospitality that when it comes to high-class amenities isn’t exactly running neck and neck with the Waldorf Astoria but is free of bed bugs and in-house floozies whose affections rent by the hour.

The George Washington, which has many guests who are there for longer than a night or two, maintains a strict no-questions-asked policy with all who sign in, which is why, as I learn years later, W. H. Auden and his lover Christopher Isherwood reside there for a time. They are by no means the only pair of such an inclination as theirs to do so.

Gertie and Joe are like no two other adults I know, not only because of the nocturnal lives they live but they have no kids, which among married couples in the Bronx of that day and age is about as common as the practice of animal husbandry or polygamy. Stranger still, they like having kids around, particularly nieces and nephews, and supply all the chocolate doughnuts and Coca-Cola said nieces and nephews should care to consume, and my special status as their only godchild brings a number of additional fringe benefits, including but not limited to a shiny silver quarter every visit.

Gertie works full time. After she bids the schoolhouse a fond adieu—to be honest, I’m not sure about the fond part—in or near about the eighth grade, she obtains a night gig with the phone company that with the passage of several decades leads to a position as a supervising operator, about as high as anyone of the feminine persuasion can rise in a company that, known far and wide as Ma Bell, is pure Pa Bell when it comes to big jobs, cushy offices, and plenty of moolah.

Joe, whose wavy hair and pencil mustache make him a ring dinger for actor William Powell—he of “The Thin Man” movie fame—always takes his wake-up cup of coffee this same way: clad in the same royal blue bathrobe, enthroned in the same chair at the same dining-room table, he flips through the morning blats at two o’clock in the afternoon.

This is their regular routine as Joe and Gertie leave for work somewhere around 5:00 p.m. and sign out in the neighborhood of 4:00 a.m., then hang in Manhattan until whenever they come home. According to my father, Gertie and Joe haven’t been up before noon since around the time President Warren G. Harding was either done in by a heart attack or stroke or poisoned by his wife, depending on which version of events you prefer.

Joe parks a Chesterfield cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He uses the stub of one to light another so the parking space is always taken. He deposits generous doses of cream and sugar into his coffee and swirls them with a tarnished silver spoon embossed with what I take to be a grapefruit and an ice pick until Gertie explains to me they are the Trylon and Perisphere which, Joe chimes in to add, served time as symbols of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

I cherish the time I spend in their apartment, which is tidy clean but not immune to a dust ball there or messed cushion here, nowhere near the spic-and-span formality or lace-curtain gentility I’m accustomed to at home. Lean, long Joe and round and low Gertie are, in their way, a kind of Trylon and Perisphere, an observation I keep to myself as I am careful not to say anything that might sound critical or, although unintended in any way, give offense.

GERTIE AND JOE GAB about the gangland rubouts and Broadway shenanigans and socialite swanky panky that are the bread and butter of the blats. They never worry about making it sound fit to print in a hoity-toity tattler the likes of the New York Times or suitable for the ears of a legal minor the likes of me. But this time, when Joe puts down his Trylon-and-Perisphere World’s Fair spoon, instead of thumbing through the News or the Mirror as he normally does and kibitzing with Gertie about the contents, he picks up a book and starts pawing through it.

Gertie gloms the blats and scopes out Klein on the Square’s full-page ads for brassieres and garter belts and girdles and women’s hosiery of all kinds and configurations, preferring them to the latest rubouts and shenanigans. Joe flips through until he fingers a certain page in the book he holds and suddenly, without a poke from Gertie or me, begins to read aloud.

I am surprised not just because I never heard Joe recite aloud from a book before—or, for that matter, hold a book—but also because of the easy way he manages the words, never stumbling somewhat for even a small second, and I think it’s sad that for whatever reasons Gertie and Joe missed out on the education my parents got. Though my parents never bring it up, at least in front of me, I see their eyes roll when Gertie or Joe pronounce “oil” as “earl” and “choice” like “cherse” and theater “thee-ate-her,” which without ever being told directly I know are the pronunciations used by people who in terms of scoring a hit with the Three R’s never get beyond batting practice.

Joe reads, chuckles, and keeps reading. Gertie looks up from the full pager for Klein on the Square’s brassieres and girdles and women’s hosiery of all kinds, frowns, not chuckles, and says something like this:

“Joe, it might be funny to you, but it’s nothing a kid his age”—she leans her head in my general direction—“who also happens to be an altar boy should be hearing from a book, mobsters and murderers and the like tying people up in sacks, practical jokes that are nothing more than the crimes and antics of no-class hoodlums.”

I pretend I’m not listening to what Joe is reading, munch my chocolate doughnut, take a generous gulp of Coke, and study the pages of the Mirror, a blat I only read at Gertie and Joe’s because my parents forbid it from entering our house and, truth be told, don’t their pusses curdle and go sour at the mention of its name.

I’m thinking to myself along the lines of this: It’s funny the way Gertie is okay with me reading about rubouts and Broadway shenanigans and socialite swanky panky in the News and Mirror, and she is fine kibitzing with Joe about such dirty, rotten doings in front of me, but objects to Joe reading aloud about such from a book.

Years later, as I think back, it dawns on me Gertie’s early adieu, fond or otherwise, to the formal pursuit of the arts and sciences leads her to regard books as something the likes of holy water fonts, sources of moral uplift and spiritual inspiration, not feeding troughs filled with the world’s sins and scandals, the slops on which blats everywhere feast and grow fat.

Joe is silent a second or somewhat. He employs the stub of one Chesterfield to ignite a fresh one, parks it in the familiar spot, wields the World’s Fair Trylon-and-Perisphere spoon to re-stir his coffee. “It’s Damon Runyon,” Joe says. “We were together once in a card game. I always loved reading his stuff when he was alive and then somebody leaves this volume on the front desk and I can’t put it down once I pick it up. It’s as good as it gets.”

He starts reading where he left off. Next thing, his chuckle gets brevetted to general laughter and before you know it, tears are running down his cheeks and he’s breathing like it’s hard to drag air into his lungs.

Gertie gives her head a disapproving shake or two. “Runyon, onion, bunion, it stinks like an East River garbage scow.” She turns the page from Klein on the Square’s brassieres, garter belts, girdles, and the like to Wanamaker’s ovens, refrigerators, radios, and TVs. “If you got to read it, read it to yourself.”

Joe drags on his Chesterfield and exhales through his nose. Smoke steams dragon-style out of each nostril, a trick I promise to learn as soon as I reach twelve or fourteen, which is the generally accepted age among Bronx youth of my generation for taking up a lifelong (and life-shortening) relationship with cigarettes. He ignores Gertie’s cease and desist, and goes back to his reading.

At this time, since I’m eight or ten, I’m definitely not fully ingesting the nuances and meanings of every line but despite what difficulties exist, my altar-boy brain gets the drift, which is as follows, and also to wit: A character named Joe the Joker who hangs around a restaurant called Mindy’s claims to be the inventor of the hot foot.

THOUGH SOME MIGHT question Joe the Joker’s claim, and prefer to date the invention of the hot foot to the days when Aristotle or Alexander the Great or some other toga-wearing ancestor of Nick the Greek first figured out the sandal, there is no disputing the basic technique, which involves slipping a match into where the sole kisses the upper part of the footwear. When lit, this causes the unsuspecting proprietor of said footwear to jump around in the fashion of a Radio City Rockette who’s temporarily lost her marbles.

Gertie shakes her head as Joe repeats the story word for word, exactly—as far as I can tell—as Damon Runyon writes it, including his assessment of Joe the Joker as such a pro at pranks that “many guys on Broadway are willing to lay you odds that he can give a mouse a hot foot if you can find a mouse that wears shoes,” which is among the many lines that cause my uncle to laugh.

He laughs heartily as well at other of Joe the Joker’s comic endeavors such as where he rigs a chair with electric wires intending to give a schlemiel named Commodore Jake a friendly jolt but delivers “too much juice” and comes within a whisker of turning jest into capital punishment.

“What’s funny about that?” Gertie wants to know, but Joe keeps reading as if he doesn’t hear.

It seems to me that the story takes an altogether threatening turn when Frankie Ferocious, a gangster from Brooklyn, comes upon the scene and Joe the Joker sizes him up as a suitable candidate for a hot foot, which even someone with a ten-year-old altar-boy brain instantly recognizes as most unwise.

As Joe continues reading, more and more of what follows stretches my powers of comprehension, such as when Rosa Midnight, a singer at a watering hole called the Hot Box and Joe the Joker’s wife, runs off with Frankie Ferocious, and a gangland hoo-ha ensues in the course of which several guys are “scragged,” which I take to mean—accurately, as it turns out—killed, including Joe the Joker’s brother.

Truly, this I am impressed by, which makes it harder for me to pretend I’m so absorbed in the Mirror that I’m not hanging on every word of Damon Runyon’s that issues forth from the mouth of Joe. I turn to the sports pages and dutifully run my finger down the box scores like I give a squirrel’s nuts who among the Bronx Bombers or Brooklyn Bums gets a hit or strikes out. Why my uncle continues to chuckle at certain parts, especially when Ropes McGonigle enters the story, escapes me.

Ropes’s talent is for trussing people in sacks in such a way that when they struggle to get out, they end up strangling themselves to death, an outcome I suspect will reappear in the nightmares that compete with increasingly vivid dreams of a mortally sinful nature, such as the racy possibilities when Rosa Midnight, clad only in the brassiere and garter belt she purchases at Klein on the Square, undertakes indecent flirtations with the patrons of the Hot Box.

Gertie carefully tears the page of Wanamaker’s ovens, refrigerators, radios, and TVs from the newspaper and gets up from the table. She puts her hand on my topper as though to bestow a blessing sufficient to ward off the serpents Joe might be carelessly setting loose to slither amid what she imagines is the formerly pure and uncorrupted Eden of my pre-pubescent altar-boy brain.

“All I got to say is it’s lucky for you the boy isn’t listening,” she harrumphs. “So go on and keep reading because I’m going shopping and you’ll be reading to yourself.” With that, she plucks her pocketbook from the chair beside the door and leaves the apartment to Joe and me alone. I close the Mirror, push the pile of blats aside, and focus my full powers of attention on Joe’s recitation of Damon Runyon’s story, which, it has become obvious to me, is speeding headlong in a direction that will not end anywhere close to happily ever after for one or more of the participants.

In fact, when the end comes, I am a little shocked and maybe more than a little scared, as my Aunt Gertie is probably right that the still-intact and heavily fortified ramparts of my safe, sanitized, parochial-school-boy brain leave me wrestling to process such mayhem as what Damon Runyon chooses to describe.

Soon after, if not that night, I have one of those more than somewhat very scary, horrifyingly real dreams you’re not sure are dreams at all until you are out of them. In this one, Ropes McGonigle trusses me up in a burlap sack he delivers to Frankie Ferocious whose evil laugh echoes in my ears as he pulls out his John Roscoe intending to plug the sack with a half-dozen or so bullet-shaped ventilation holes.

Apparently, I cry out in my sleep because next thing somebody sits next to me on the bed. A hand gently rocks my shoulder. The light on the nightstand clicks on. Momentarily startled, I open my eyes. I feel well north of relieved to find there beside me not Ropes or Frankie Ferocious, but my mother.

“You’re having a bad dream.” Small as her smile is, to me it is as monumentally reassuring as the Statue of Liberty. Her hand rests on my topper the same way Gertie’s did, as if to guard against the snakes that crawl into a kid’s noggin. “What was it about?”

I know it is a sin to lie, maybe even a mortal sin when it’s to a parent, yet I am not about to rat out my Uncle Joe, so I lie as follows: “I can’t remember.”

My father looms in the doorway behind her. “What’s the matter now?”

“He had a nightmare.” My mother turns slightly but leaves her hand where it is.

“Jesus.” The Times is folded and tucked beneath my father’s right arm. “Damned television. It’s terrible what it’s doing to kids’ minds. God only knows where it’ll lead.”

My mother’s eyes are twenty-two karats worth of caring, just what a kid wants his mother’s eyes to be, all soft and concerned, my father’s, what a kid expects his father’s to be, not exactly angry but definitely on the other side of the street from my mother’s. “Go to sleep,” he barks.

“Sweet dreams,” my mother purrs and snaps off the light.

Well, she gets her wish, in a fashion, although not likely in the fashion she or any other Irish Catholic daily Mass-going mother in the Bronx of the 1950s might intend.

I never again dream of Ropes McGonigle or Frankie Ferocious or Joe the Joker. Instead, as time goes on, the dreams ripen into suggestive and saucy and way beyond sweet. The portal of sleep proves a revolving door into a Hot Box of the imagination, where new and improved versions of Rosa Midnight and her ilk are dolled up in brassieres and garter belts, and frolick with raw abandon in positions of such a compromising nature that in its wildest flights of fancy the ten-year-old altar-boy brain never anticipates them.

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOW, I spend a lot of time reading but Damon Runyon is never on my card. Maybe it is a bit because the story my Uncle Joe reads aloud that day when I am an impressionable kid in the Bronx makes an entirely wrong impression. More likely it is because I develop a taste for reading history before anything else, even planning one day to become a history professor with pipe between my teeth and suede patches on the elbows of my tweed jacket.

My closest encounter with Runyon is when an English teacher, whose mission in life seems to be inflicting on his charges the driest, dullest stuff penned in the English language in the last five hundred and fifty years, dismisses a mug or moll in some book or play as “Runyonesque,” which he doesn’t really explain but which I take to mean a kitschy, quaintly exaggerated urban-type person gone the way of vaudeville and the Victrola, and now planted in an unmarked grave next to the public toilet in the park behind the 42nd Street Library.

The one place I keep running into Runyon is in the movies. His short stories (he never writes a novel) are for a long time popular with the Titans of Tinseltown. I see the 1934 version of “Little Miss Marker,” starring Adolphe Menjou and Shirley Temple on the Late Show. Adolphe was okay. Born in Pittsburgh to a French father and an Irish mother named Nora Joyce, he is a political reactionary and a better-than-ordinary actor, which is more than you can say about his right-wing pal, Ronald Reagan.

At the end of every Shirley Temple movie I always feel like where I am at Gertie and Joe’s and scarf down too many chocolate doughnuts and Cokes and have to fight the urge to throw up. (The movie was also released under the title “The Girl in Pawn,” a homonym whose X-rated possibilities are unthought-of in the days when the sun shines bright on America’s Queen of Cute.)

For reasons unknown or known alone to the moviemaker’s mind, Little Miss Marker is remade three times: in 1949 as “Sorrowful Jones,” with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball; in 1962 as 40 Pounds of Trouble, with Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette (filleted by Bosley Crowther of the Times as a “witless remake of a Runyon story…hackneyed and dull”); and again in 1980 under the original title, starring Walter Matthau. I miss the Curtis-Pleshette version but while crawling through the sleepless, lonesome gulch of a busted romance, I see the other two on late-night TV.

Whereas I almost reach the end of the Hope-Ball film before I fall asleep, I’m quickly numbed into dreamland by grumpy, rumpled Walter Matthau’s rendition of a grumpy, rumpled movie version of himself. Once amid a winter dreary, stranded in a motel in Albany and channel-surfing weak and weary, I come upon the 1951 film based on Runyon’s short story “The Lemon Drop Kid” (Bob Hope headlines in this one, too), a leftover lab specimen from the days when movie moguls and medicine men essentially operated according to the Hippocratic maxim of “Do No Harm.”

The touchstone of my acquaintance with Runyon is the same one shared with millions of my fellow hoi polloi: The 1950 Broadway hit musical “Guys and Dolls,” lyrics by Frank Loesser and book (which is show-biz lingo for the script) by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, runs for some twelve hundred performances. It wins the Tony for best musical and almost gets a Pulitzer Prize except the country is in a tizzy about Reds under every bed, and among those accused of being if not under the bed then in bed with the Reds is Abe Burrows. The Pulitzer is flushed.

I don’t see the play during its original run. At some point—I’m not sure exactly when—I see the 1955 film version of the play. A deluxe Technicolor production bankrolled by Sam Goldwyn and directed by Joe Mankiewicz, it features Frank Sinatra, whose career is on the way back from a brush with oblivion, and Marlon Brando, whose role as Sky Masterson is ten blocks and a hundred miles away from his Academy Award–winning performance the previous year as Terry Molloy in “On the Waterfront.”

The popularity of hit songs like “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” help make the movie a sure-fire hit. It pays big-time spondulicks, to the tune of $20 million on Goldwyn’s $5-million bet. No longer a could-a-been contender, Brando is a heavyweight box-office champ.

Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Runyon gets it in the neck (he dies of throat cancer) in 1946, and, so the story goes, his incinerated remains are scattered over Times Square from an airplane. The ashes are blowing in the square some nine years when the movie “Guys and Dolls” premiers. In fact, Runyon never wrote a story by the name “Guys and Dolls.” It is the title of a 1931 collection of short stories and used for the play, a banged-together rewrite of Runyon tales, the main one being “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown.”

Though I remain in the pygmy minority uncharmed and unconvinced by the supposedly convincing charms of the movie and the inevitable Broadway revivals (one of which I saw several years ago, which left me unconvinced still), it is indisputable that Runyon’s reputation stays in lights not because of his stories but because of the juice generated by the theatrical versions of “Guys and Dolls” on stage and screen.

IN MY THIRTIES, I abandon my on-again-off-again pursuit of pipe, tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, and a tenured professorship in history and fall into a job as a political speechwriter. I spend the next six-and-a-half years as scribe-in-chief for two New York governors.

The excitement I feel at first has the shelf life of an over-ripe banana. After the umpteenth all-nighter spent writing and rewriting in a mostly dark and deserted state capitol, the endlessly grinding demands make me feel like a salt miner in one of Joe Stalin’s Siberian labor camps.

Inspired by the success of James Patterson, who is fast becoming the country’s most successful and richest mystery writer and who sits in back of me in freshman English class at Manhattan College, I decide to try to make my escape by becoming a fiction writer. Except possibly for certain facts and flourishes inserted in the gubernatorial oratory it is my responsibility to produce, the writing of fiction is territory in which I have traveled lightly, if at all. I start to familiarize myself by signing up for a course on “The Art of the Short Story” at the New School.

My classmates and I are required to read short stories by James Joyce, Christopher Isherwood, Frank O’Connor, Alice Munro, and many others. A woman who sits near me and has hair dyed the color of orange Jell-O, stubby legs, and an accent I recognize as sister to my own outer-borough style of speech, brings up O. Henry and Damon Runyon.

Our Italian-American teacher is a curvy, articulate, erudite native of the Nutmeg State. Right away, on top of leaving no doubt that she knows what time it is when it comes to short stories, she makes it instantly clear she is cold to frigid on O. Henry and Runyon.

At the mention of their names, she razzes the duo with the academic equivalent of a Bronx cheer: saccharine, out of date, and in Runyon’s case, more cartoonist or caricaturist than artist, sexist, racist, and often downright silly. Quickly, like a boxer turned bloodthirsty after landing one on-target blow after another, she escalates the pummeling. Runyon is not really a twentieth-century writer at all. He is a nineteenth-century sentimentalist. She aims a straight right cross to the jaw. Runyon is all artifice and affectation—and here it comes pow right in the kisser—utterly devoid of authenticity.

My stubby-legged, orange-haired classmate raises her hand. The teacher gives her the blind-man shuffle and declares a TKO: “Our time is better spent on writers of real consequence.”

After I read short stories by James Joyce, Alice Munro, and many others, I try to write my own. It takes me a year to write one. It is eventually published in a journal whose readership is probably in the high single digits—I’m being generous—and is so obscure I don’t recall its name.

I start another story. I struggle against the limits and constraints the form imposes. I recall fragments of a tune Roy Rogers sings, although it could be Gene Autry…don’t fence me in, don’t fence me in…give me space, lots of space…let me ride with the wind…across a wide-open countryside. Maybe it is not those words exactly, but close, and if the lyrics are off a bit, it is the sentiment that matters most to me.

I feel with the short story like I’m trying to swim laps in a bathtub or run a cross-country race in a closet. The point is this: I want space, lots of space. A friend of mine who is a published writer seals the deal when he points out that a short story is harder to publish than a novel and, with the exception of a few literary hot shots, far less lucrative.

I sit in my office late at night in the state capitol. I Bogart cigarette after cigarette, use stub of one to light another, exhale through the nose, and shoot twin columns of smoke, Joe O’Brien-style, out my nostrils. I listen to the wind as it whispers through the halls. It is freighted with the sad, haunted sighs of long-gone honchos like Al Smith and Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller, whose high hopes for a rendezvous with destiny and a big wet kiss from history went dry and unmet.

Finally, in a mental sense, I give myself a good swift boot in the caboose. I read all the novels I can get my mitts on. I fall hard for Papa Hemingway. I imagine a day when I go on the lam from the gubernatorial gulag, shake free of salt mines, and pursue the writer’s life amid sunshine and turquoise seas and the tropical embrace of the Florida Keys, where I have never been, but it must be more hospitable to human habitation than Albany in January. I start writing a novel.

SOMEONE ONCE SAID that the happiest time in a novelist’s life is the night before his first book is published. Though I’m sure that’s not true for all novelists, especially ones who hit the bestseller list or score a Pulitzer or a Nobel, it proves true for me.

My first novel, “Banished Children of Eve”, which is set in New York City during the Civil War, takes ten years to research and write. I work on it in the early, early a.m. before I turn to my day job. During that decade, I go from politics to corporate speechwriter at Time Inc., which makes my life somewhat easier, though not as much as I hope. I write slowly. Business interests me about as much as a manicure. But the pay is top shelf. I am happily married and soon father to two tots who quickly grow accustomed to three squares a day and sleeping indoors. The gulag is now a gilded cage.

THE MANUSCRIPT COMES IN at a King Kong–sized eight hundred pages. I inflict it on my pal Frank, a high-school English teacher who shares my writing ambitions. We often discuss writing while we excogitate, and imbibiate, and commiserate about the books we wish to write but haven’t. A wry and gentle native of Limerick, Ireland, he describes what I give him as “Napoleonic.” I know Frank means it as a compliment. But I can’t help thinking of the fate the Frenchman and his fellow frogs suffer on the frozen steppes of Russia.

When “Banished Children of Eve” is published in 1994, it crosses the finish line at 600-plus printed pages. The reviews range from high praise to whatever the critical equivalent of disembowelment is. The review in the New York Times is couched in such a way it takes me several readings to make out the thumb is up, not down. The second-to-last sentence in the last paragraph leaves me as much terrified as mystified. It reads: “This very long and quite accomplished book is, surprisingly, a first novel; “Banished Children of Eve” certainly seems the mature fruit of protracted labor. It is to be hoped that Peter Quinn hasn’t shot his bolt. [Emphasis added.] Historical fiction as well made and whole as this is not common.”

I leave unchallenged James Patterson’s status as world’s bestselling author. The following year my friend publishes his memoir, “Angela’s Ashes”, and bing, bang, bingo, three cherries in a row, Frank McCourt is Pulitzered, cinematized, and financially speaking, baptized in the one, true faith of do-re-me.

I bang my head against the golden bars of my gilded cage. When I am done turning in my quota of corporate prose, which is routinely stuffed and mounted by in-house legal and financial taxidermists, I stare out my office window at the gray granite façade of Radio City and wonder, where oh where can my bolt be? I look under my desk. It is not there.

After two years, my bolt resurfaces and I reinsert it. I start another novel, a mystery set in New York and Berlin in 1938, which revolves around the eugenics movement. I give myself three years. I fall out with booze and butts and Hemingway but still dream about the Keys. Soon I am lost without a map in the Great Okefenokee of research and rewriting. Three years balloon to eight.

My second novel, “Hour of the Cat,” is published in 2005. At three hundred and fifty pages, it is barely up to the waist of “Banished Children.” I am writing shorter for sure, whether better is not for me to say. My editor on the first book, a true hero of the publishing industry, is retired by now. My new editor is known as Red Ned, not because of his red hair or fiery temper or the leftward bent of his politics but because of his reputation for marking up manuscripts with his red pencil. It turns out that with me his touch is light. The pages I get back aren’t heavily littered with scarlet, only lightly blemished here and there with crimson question or correction.

In our first conversation after he buys the book, Red Ned says how much he enjoyed reading the manuscript. He mentions one scene in particular in the George Washington Hotel where Joe O’Brien, the night clerk, maintains what is the longest-running poker game on the island of Manhattan. I don’t immediately own up that Joe O’Brien is based on my real-life uncle and how after he dies of lung cancer in or about 1960, Gertie tells me about Joe and the card game.

At the time Joe first sets it up, she says, around when the Depression gets really depressing, Gotham’s banditti are on a tear, preying on each other’s illegal liquor deliveries, knocking over banks, and holding up illicit gambling parlors and card games. Joe takes out a highly effective form of no-fault insurance by seeing to it his game is seasoned with police detectives and, if possible, some of the brass. The game goes unmolested for nearly three decades.

I am about to reveal these real-life roots when Red Ned zooms ahead of me and interjects something like this: “It’s obvious who one of your literary heroes is.”

I clam up. While I make no claim to literary scholarship, I have not one hero but two, and so what? My former editor never brings it up. Why should he? What scribe perspiring for his daily bread as a wage slave doesn’t harbor at least one or two literary heroes whose mastery he silently aspires to?

In my case, as well as being nobody else’s business, this is a matter of special sensitivity. For years, whenever I feel blocked or stale, I make it a practice to copy out sentences and paragraphs from the works of my patronos, Raymond Chandler and William Kennedy. I write and rewrite their words and sentences over and over, trying to distill what makes their words and sentences so much better than all the other words and sentences I regularly encounter that are DOA.

GET ME RIGHT: I aim to be a maker, not a mime—to get inside their hoodoo spells and hocus-pocus power over words, to ingest their unholy magic and be digested by it, to have it the way I have skin and bone and soul, to own it, myself alone.

Red Ned asks, “You still there?”

I say, “Yes,” and no more.

“I can tell you’re a big Damon Runyon fan.”

When I speak, I hear the rumble of shock and anger in my voice, as if I am reacting to Sugar Ray Somebody or Rocky Whoever landing a direct hit on my beezer: “Damon Runyon?” Suddenly smacked by the similarity between “Damon” and “Demon,” I repeat myself thus: “Damon Runyon?” Words race through my head like a half-remembered lyric: all artifice and affectation…utterly devoid of authenticity.

Now the silence is all Red Ned’s. He’s no knucklehead. I sense him backpedaling, as if getting set to dodge a counterpunch. Maybe he’s not sure what he said that made me sore, but he knows he’s said something. Finally, he says like this:

“Well, I’m not talking about the Runyon style, the gangster patois, the colorful names, the grammatical tics and trademark penchant for casting his stories in the ever-present present tense. I mean your sympathies.”

“Sympathies?” I am smoothed, mostly, but confused, a bit. Sympathies are close to affections and that sounds a lot like affectations.

“Yes, your feel for the city, for its tempos and personalities. You love the place the way Runyon did and that shines through, I think. I presumed you borrowed the name Brannigan for that nasty cop of yours from ‘the strong-arm copper’ in his stories.”

“I’ve never read Runyon.” I zip my lip about the story Uncle Joe read me all those years ago. It dawns on me that I don’t even know the title.

“You should. I think you’ll enjoy him.”

“I will.”

I do. But not yet. First, I kvell a while over the success of “Hour of the Cat.” The reviews are uniformly positive. USA Today calls it “a chilling history lesson wrapped in a murder mystery…the novel packs good writing and riveting history.” It is republished in France, Britain, and Australia. There is a feeler from a film-production company that, oh so predictably, turns out to be nothing more than a quick feel.

Three shakes of the old-fashioned fountain pen with which I still write and I am back in the Valley of Uncertain Beginnings to which the aging, grizzled scriveners of my acquaintance all eventually return, the forsaken, shadow-ridden hollow at the foot of the foreboding alp which can only be scaled empty page by empty page, line by line, one sentence at a time.

“Hour of the Cat” pays the kind of return that earns another run around the track. I agree with my publisher that it is the first of a trilogy—we joke about calling it a tricycle—of novels featuring Fintan Dunne, World War I vet and ex–New York City cop turned private eye. The following novels will not be written in strict chronological order. They are to be stand-alone stories, yet those who care to dig beneath the fiction will find a running commentary on the changes in the city between 1918 and 1958.

“The Man Who Never Returned,” the second saga in the trilogy, is a case of my stumbling across the police files surrounding the strange, still-unsolved case of Judge Joseph Force Crater, a justice of the New York State Supreme Court who on the evening of August 6, 1930, after dining with two companions, gets in a cab on West 45th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenue. Neither the taxi nor His Honor is ever seen again.

Crater’s vanishing is a cause célèbre in its day. It is officially closed in 1979. The files are presumed destroyed, except they aren’t. They sit atop a cabinet in an NYPD file room, a tale from the crypt unopened and unread, for the next twenty-five years. The minute I begin reading them, I know I have a novel, or at least the beginnings of one. I know too that the hour is come round at last to read Damon Runyon who enters his heyday as nonpareil chronicler of Broadway’s guys and dolls just as Judge Joe plants his keister in that cab and off they go to wherever it is they go.

It is not hard to get my hands on his stories. My local library has several collections and anthologies. I take one home. It has an intro by William Kennedy, who it turns out is quite a fan. I page through it until I find the story my Uncle Joe reads aloud that afternoon in the Bronx half a century before. I discover the title is “Sense of Humor.” It is originally published in Cosmopolitan, in 1934. I understand for the first time what my Uncle Joe finds funny and why my Aunt Gertie is not amused.

The quips and observations snap, crackle, and pop. Yet underneath the narrator’s shtick is an undertone dark as India ink. Joe the Joker and Frankie Ferocious are monsters, not much different from real-life, cold-blooded killers like Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll and Dutch Schultz, angry, out-of-control kids from fatherless immigrant families (Irish Catholic for Coll, German Jewish for Schultz) who don’t need much more than a tickle to incite them to homicide.

Runyon’s description of Frankie Ferocious captures exactly the simmering menace that defines a generation of urban gunslingers, bootleggers, and gangsters:

Frankie Ferocious’s name is not really Ferocious, but something in Italian like Feroccio, and I hear he originally comes from Sicily, although he lives in Brooklyn for quite some years, and from a modest beginning he builds himself up until he is a very large operator in merchandise of one kind or another, especially alcohol. He is a big guy of maybe thirty-odd, and he has hair blacker than a yard up a chimney, and black eyes, and black eyebrows, and a slow way of looking at people.

I READ RUNYON’S stories at the same time as I study the police files. I am amazed by the fluency and clarity with which the detectives searching for Crater record their investigations. One dick in particular, Jacob Von Weisenstein, writes with a flair that make me think he must be reading Runyon as he works on the case. He records meetings with what he refers to as “denizens of the demimonde,” prostitutes, informants, showgirls, pols, gangsters, bookies, pimps, bootleggers, who belie the notion that Runyon invents the inhabitants of the midtown blocks he dubs the Roaring Forties.

I remember Uncle Joe tells me he and Runyon “were together once in a card game.” I search the stories looking for Joe. I think I find him here and there. I know I’m projecting, finding what I want to find. Yet Joe is a 100-percent habitué of Runyon’s world, and to the degree Runyon gets that world right, he gets Joe.

Runyon is no mere cartoonist or caricaturist. I’m certain of that. In his stories I hear the real ring-a-ding of people I encounter in the police files and those I come to know in my gypsy years as Wall Street messenger, dishwasher, court officer in Bronx Landlord and Tenant Court, and in the half-Yiddish, half-English conversations of the old men in the Jerome Avenue Cafeteria where I eavesdrop as I eat lunch, and in the banter of the cops and steamfitters I grow up with, and in the table talk of my Trylon-and-Perisphere aunt and uncle in that dining nook in the Bronx.

At times, I suppose, Runyon comes across as a sentimentalist but so do Dickens and Shakespeare and Hemingway, and if he is not quite in their league, there is a hard-edged realism to many of his stories that captures the brutality and cynicism and inequality and dog-eat-dog reality of Prohibition and the Depression. The plots can be all-too predictable. They can also be sophisticated, surprising, and riveting.

Guys get riddled with bullets. Dolls are used, abused, betrayed, and tossed aside like Kleenex. Ethnic and racial slurs are as common as cigarettes. The world of financiers and pols and stuffed shirts is every bit as rigged and unfair as that of the gamblers and bootleggers and racetrack touts. Damon Runyon’s America is neither Norman Rockwell’s nor for that matter the stage set for theatrical or Technicolor renderings of “Guys and Dolls.”

“The Man Who Never Returned” comes out of the gate strong but fades at the turn. The reviews are favorable but far fewer than with my previous books. It finishes out of the money. I am so taken with Runyon that I toy briefly with attempting to write a story in his style. But the notion passes. I stash it for some other day. I need to get pedaling on the third novel in the tricycle.

The whole print industry is being turned upside down. I’m told I must have a website. I accede but am not quite sure what a website is or what I am to do with it once I have one.

The bookstore in my town—a town chockablock with writers—closes down. Retired from my corporate job, I ride the train into Manhattan less frequently than before. When I do, I am agog at the speed at which my fellow travelers abandon books and newspapers for iPhones, iPods, and I don’t know what. I feel as though I need to complete the trilogy while the hardcover book is still to be found outside a display case in the Museum of Print.

I can’t seem to get off the dime. I begin several stories only to dump them after a week or so. I call Red Ned and arrange to meet him for a gargle or two. He is no longer an editor. He is a restaurateur. He misses the book business but is married and wants to start a family and feels he will never make dough enough to afford it.

It is a winter afternoon when Red Ned and I meet in a shebeen across from where the imperial, Roman-style edifice of Penn Station stands before the Visigoths not only sack the old masterpiece but, to add injury to insult, stick in its place a concrete-and-plastic Space Age hunk of junk unworthy of downtown Yonkers or Buffalo or some other down-for-the-count upstate berg.

I have divorced cigarettes on the basis of forever. But alcohol and I are reconciled. Now in my golden years, I burnish their twilight hue with an occasional Manhattan. Or two.

I unload on Red Ned my doubts and fears. I expect only sympathy for the old skeesicks such as I feel myself to be this particular afternoon. He offers none. He speaks as follows: “I enjoyed the book business, but I can live without it. You, on the other hand, have a gut-seated passion for this city and for writing about it. You need to write to stay alive. Look at Runyon. He kept writing right up to the bitter end. He never gave in. Neither should you. Finish the trilogy and go on from there.”

I indulge a third Manhattan. The booze makes me more sad than mellow. I resurrect a line of Runyon’s that is buried in my head: “All life is six to five against.”

Red Ned shrugs. “Odds aren’t outcomes. The big tell in a writer’s life is persistence. That’s as true for you as it was for Runyon.”

We part company in front of the pub. He gives my shoulder something between a friendly poke and a real punch. “Remember what I said.”

I stroll over to 8th Avenue. The sun sets over New Jersey. It is cold. I shove my almost-numb fingers into my pockets. I walk and think and study the sidewalk as if I might find some message there. The first time I look up, I am at 45th Street, just down the block from where Judge Crater is last spied. It’s a spot with which I’m intimately familiar from having written “The Man Who Never Returned.”

The streetlights are on. I don’t know if I never see it before or if my failing memory is now in a free fall or if it has only recently been put up but, whatever the case, the moniker below the numerical street designation hits me like a hammer right between the peepers. It goes like this: RUNYON’S WAY.

(Published in Commonweal, 06/25/15)

The Train Wreck to Come

In response to last week’s derailment and the carnage it caused, Congress immediately (and predictably) engaged in partisan finger-pointing. The Republicans vociferously opposed any funding that might at some point require a raise in taxes which, to their minds, doesn’t make any sense unless it involves a further swelling of the military budget. The Democrats timidly called for an increase to fund repairs that might prevent another accident.

The problem is the Northeast rail corridor can no longer be nickeled and dimed. It’s beyond being repaired. It has to be entirely rebuilt, from the rail bed to the overhead signals, nuts, bolts, everything. At present, it is a broken-down, creaking, crawling, ramshackle, rickety relic of a time when the Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York-Boston corridor was one of the country’s–and the world’s–finest and efficient rail links.

Its crowning glory, marking the Pennsylvania R.R.’s successful tunneling under the Hudson and its access to New England via the Hell Gate Bridge, was the once-majestic Penn Station, which fell to the barbarian’s wrecking ball and is now a giant pissoir. (For a well written account of Penn Station’s construction, and the immense project of which it was only a part, see Jill Jonnes’s Conquering Gotham.)

If Joe Biden thinks LaGuardia seems worthy of a “Third World country,” he ought to take a stroll through the Fifth World stygian stink hole that stands where Sanford White’s masterpiece once did. To borrow Nietzsche’s judgment on Wagner, the current terminal is “the last mushroom on the dunghill” of the Northeast corridor.

Every other industrialized nation is building or planning to build high-speed rail links between their major cities. China’s vast network of high-speed trains represents one of the world’s largest infrastructure projects. Paris and London are connected by the Chunnel. Italy, France, and Germany (of course) are investing in building 21st century rail systems.

Meanwhile, Congress keeps funding a rubber band-and-glue approach that postpones until tomorrow a final descent into paralyzing decrepitude and irreparable obsolescence.

The endemic rock throwing and rampant vandalism that might (or might not) have caused last week’s derailment should come as no surprise to anyone who credits (as I do) the “broken window theory”—the assertion that a lack of minor repairs inevitably invites a rapid increase in lawless behavior.

The Northeast corridor isn’t a broken window. It’s a bloody shambles. The urban landscape it traverses, once a testament to America’s manufacturing might, resembles the Ruhr after the RAF and the Army Air Corps got done pounding it.

To credit rock-throwing vandalism as the cause of the problem is to imagine it was snowball-throwing passengers and not a ship-sized iceberg that sent the Titanic to the bottom.

The cost of a sweeping and head-to-toe reconstruction would be daunting. More daunting is the system’s continued decline that leaves it so hobbled it becomes irrelevant. Congress would have to fund a second (and third level) to the Interstate and five (or six) bridges across the Hudson. Instead of traffic problems in Fort Lee, there’d be region-wide gridlock.

Apropos of Fort Lee, Governor Christie’s decision to cancel building a third rail tunnel beneath the Hudson (80% funded by the Federal government) is an egregious example of the kind of craven political expediency that puts personal ambition ahead of the public good and ensures the decline and fall of the country’s infrastructure.

When amortized over years and decades, public investment in large-scale infrastructure projects is dwarfed by the long-term economic effects. Think of President Eisenhower’s decision—a far-seeing Republican– to build the interstate highway system, at the time the largest public-works project in history.

In contrast, Governor Christie’s decision to abandon the Hudson tunnel and use the bulk of the money to avoid raising the gasoline tax (and boost his fast-fading chances of winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination) is a profile in cowardice.

It’s time to stop substituting band aids for a heart transplant, and to replace a decrepit eyesore with a sleek, safe, state-of-the-art system worthy of the world’s premier industrial power. A good place to start is demolishing the vile version of Penn Station now in place (where is the RAF when you need it?) and erect a terminal that isn’t a national / international embarrassment.

The choice is clear: Either begin the process of a fundamental, ground-up rebuilding or continue the ruinous slide and allow the Northeast rail corridor to become the world’s largest train wreck.

Things Fall Apart

The greatest failure in America is the failure to stay young. It is a failure of imagination, the inability to grasp the alternatives offered by surgery, cosmetology, and pharmacology. It is a failure of will, the indiscipline that results in flagging energies, flabby bodies, and clogged arteries.
It is a failure of financial planning, the incapacity to amass the resources needed to deploy the full panoply of anti-aging techniques and technologies. Most basic of all, it is a failure of genetic foresight, the prenatal indolence that passively accepts a poisoned lineage of physical and mental infirmities, moral laxness, and hereditary balding.
The only room for old men and women in this country is in separate bathtubs atop a cliff, holding hands as they watch the sunset and wait for the antidote to flaccidity to kick in so they can frolic in the same tub; or, in the case of a failure to achieve liftoff, throwing themselves in the sea, in a watery version of suttee.
For me, the nightfall of old age is particularly upsetting. I tried hard to seize and hold the day. I was born to healthy, middle-class parents in a good neighborhood. Except for college, the office Christmas party, and that weekend in Las Vegas, I drank moderately. I exercised regularly and completed several marathons. I had regular checkups and took care of my teeth. I’ve enjoyed a reasonably successful career, a happy marriage and a retirement undimmed by fear of living in a cardboard box and subsisting on the kindness of strangers.
Some changes were only to be expected. At thirty, I faced up to male pattern baldness. At forty, I purchased my first pair of reading glasses. At fifty, I added Metamucil to my orange juice. At sixty, I started blood-pressure medication and did my best to eschew meat and order whatever fish was on the menu
Despite hard work, sound planning, lifestyle adjustments, and unusually well-behaved Irish genes, I find myself–to paraphrase the poet Yeats– “where all the ladders” end, “in the foul rag and bone shop” of encroaching decrepitude.
One day I had hearing as good as a rabbit’s. The next I suffered “sudden onset hearing loss.” In a flash, I went deaf in my left ear. At cocktail parties, I can no longer distinguish conversation from background noise (not that it matters much). Going out to dinner requires several minutes of configuring the seating to compensate for my auditory deficiency.
I developed epilepsy. I was sitting down for a television interview when, bang, I suffered a grand seizure that left me unconscious (so I’m told), writhing on the floor. I’ve had several since, the last of which resulted in a head injury that required several stitches. As a result, I can no longer drive, ride a bike, swim alone or–not that I had ever had the desire–swing on a trapeze.
After 50 years of running, my knees resemble the coil springs on a rusted ’56 Chevy. Two weeks ago, something snapped in my upper arm while doing my morning pushups. I can’t lift my right arm above my shoulder. Last week, while jogging, I wrenched my back so badly I can’t walk right. I recently had surgery for thyroid cancer. My medicine cabinet resembles the pickup window at the local pharmacy.
My powers of recall are showing signs of wear and tear. I open cabinets and drawers and instantly forget what I’m looking for. The ability to attach names to the faces of friends and acquaintances is becoming one of life’s small triumphs.
“The wages of sin,” wrote St. Paul, “are death.” Either he forgot to mention or deliberately left out that so are the wages of virtue. We’re all inching or hurtling toward the egress, and we Baby Boomers are elbowing our way to the head of the line. For us, keeping the Grim Reaper at bay looms as an increasingly expensive proposition.
According to the Medicare Newsgroup, an independent source for coverage of Medicare-related issues, end-of-life care continues to be characterized by highly aggressive medical intervention and runaway costs. Medicare spending in 2011 totaled more than $550 billion. Of that, $178 billion, or 20%, was spent on patients’ last six months of life.
It’s true you can’t take it with you. It’s also true that we members of the over-sixty-five set will suck up a disproportionate share of the country’s medical resources in order to make incremental additions to life spans already longer than those enjoyed by 99% of our ancestors.
There are plenty of seniors with the energy and strength to lead productive lives for years, maybe decades to come. But, in the words of Daniel Callahan, president emeritus of The Hastings Institute, “no matter how (many) medical treatments we get, it’s never good enough because people eventually die … We’re not in a winnable war against death.”
The inevitability of the final curtain doesn’t make it easier to accept. I’m as reluctant and fearful as anyone else to face the end. But, sooner or later, it’s all right to think about making room instead of taking it up. A degree of resignation and acceptance isn’t a bad thing.
We can claw and cry for a day or two more, and spend whatever it takes. We can rage against the dying of the light and resent it as a violation of an imagined right to live forever. Or we can enjoy what we’re still capable of enjoying and exit, if not laughing, then with a smile of gratitude for the miracle of existence we’ve been privileged to share.

Vive Brigitte Bardot!

Happy Bastille Day! Vive la France! Vive la révolution!

Vive la Republic!

Vive Brigitte Bardot!

Most of all Brigitte!

Our first encounter was outside the Circle movie theater in the Bronx. Teetering on the brink of puberty, I glanced innocently at the poster advertising the feature that was playing: And God Created Woman.

There, lying on her stomach, was this mind-bending, impossibly beautiful girl, the naked arch of her back exposed, tousled blond hair framing seductively pouty lips. And those eyes! Those come-hither eyes so blue, so bold, so shamelessly inviting!

Above her picture was her name: Brigitte Bardot! I’d never heard of her before. We stared at each other. I stood for what seemed an hour (but was probably only a minute or two.) “Brigitte,” I whispered, “I love you.” Her eyes spoke back to me: “I love you too, mon Pierre.”

I stepped up to the box office in expectation of buying a ticket only to find that the gate to paradise was barred. The sign in the window was printed in big black letters: POSITIVELY NO ONE UNDER 18 ADMITTED.

Right there, I decided that since I couldn’t see the movie, I’d save up for a trip to Paris. I wrote Brigitte care of her studio. I told her I was coming. If she was already living with a lover–which seemed likely since she was French–and didn’t want to break his heart (not yet), she should write back and tell me the street corner where she’d be waiting. We’d find a cozy, inexpensive hotel nearby.

In my recurring dream, she loitered there expectantly, the lamplight encircling her, her trench coat pulled tight, a small bag with her night things (a very, very small bag) slung over her shoulder, a Gaulois dangling from those lips, sigh, those lips.

I never made the trip. She never wrote back. Not that I know of. But sometimes, I think that she did get my letter, that she did write back, and that her letter–so brief, so sweet, so Brigitte–was lost. Only a few lines, it went like this:

“Quand je te pense, mon âme monte. Mon coeur ne peut pas contenir sa joie! Au coin de la Rue de Dames, sous la lampadaire, mon seul refuge de la nuit sans étoiles, je t’attends. Et je t’attendrai. Jusqu’à ce que tu viens. Viens vitement, mon amour.”

(When I think of you, my soul soars. My heart cannot contain its delight. On the corner of the Rue de Dames, beneath the streetlight, my only refuge from the lonely, starless night, I wait. And will wait. Until you come. Come quickly, my love!)

O Brigitte! My Brigitte, I’m on way!

Adam’s Curse

Quote of the Day from Mike Tuberty’s blog, Boat Against the Current …

Elizabeth Hardwick, on Making a Living as a Writer:

“Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.” —Elizabeth Hardwick, “Grub Street: New York,” The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963

I greatly admire Elizabeth Hardwick. (And thanks to Mike Tuberty for providing the quote above.) But as someone who’s made a living as a writer for the past 30 years, I strongly dissent from the assertion that making a living as a writer (or a teacher, or a sanitation worker, or a nurse, or a salesperson—you name it) is “nothing.” From my experience, the only people for whom making a living is nothing are trust-fund babies (“trustafarians”).

Writing is work. Like any other job, it’s a matter of showing up, of living with highs and lows—of successes punctuated by terrible disappointments—of insecurity and doubts and fears, and above all else of persisting. I’ve always wondered where the romantic notion about writing comes from—the notion that it’s some sort of idyll of the imagination that’s easier than other forms of work.

Nobody has ever put it better than W.B. Yeats in his poem “Adam’s Curse”:

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

The Hunger Games: Who Gets to Eat & Who Decides

Along with air and water, food is the common denominator of human survival. Throughout history, the quest for daily sustenance has often been precarious. Food shortages caused by crop failures or extreme weather were (and are) common enough. But beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, as millions left the land for the cities and populations exploded, thinkers disagreed about how best to feed people in an economy based on manufacturing rather than agriculture. Should it be left to the free market? Or should governments take control? What criteria should be used to decide who gets fed—and in what amount—and who doesn’t? Are some more deserving of being fed than others?

Weighing in on these questions, Adam Smith was sanguine. In 1776 he published “The Wealth of Nations,” in which he lauded the free market and the profit motive as drivers of economic progress. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest.” The “invisible hand” of competition would harness private ambition to the public good. Smith’s near-contemporary Thomas Malthus was far more pessimistic. Malthus’s influential tract “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” first published in 1798 and revised several times afterward, turned the invisible hand into an iron fist: Unless kept in check, he maintained, human reproduction would outrun the best efforts to increase the food supply and would lead inevitably to famine and mass death.

Charles Darwin and Karl Marx sided more with Smith than with Malthus. Although Malthus’s assertion of the indifference and profligacy with which nature spawned and destroyed life helped Darwin formulate his theory of “natural selection,” in which only the fittest survived, Darwin believed that famines no longer played a critical part in human evolution. In his seminal book “On the Origin of Species” (1859), he described “famines and other such accidents” as occurrences “to which savages are so liable.” In “The Descent of Man” (1871), he expanded on that liability:

“With savages the difficulty of obtaining subsistence occasionally limits their number in a much more direct manner than with civilized people, for all tribes periodically suffer from severe famines. At such times savages are forced to devour much bad food, and their health can hardly fail to be injured.”

Darwin’s comment offers no hint that even as he worked in his home in Cornwall writing “On the Origin of Species,” the greatest civilian catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe was unfolding just a day’s journey away, in Ireland—the Irish famine, which triggered waves of mass death and emigration. The failure on Darwin’s part to mention the Irish famine might have reflected his belief that it was a historical aberration, or perhaps he wished to steer clear of the political and nationalistic passions it stirred.

Karl Marx, on the other hand, was too busy hailing the coming triumph of the urban proletariat to pay attention to the collapse of the antiquated and doomed social structure of rural Ireland. Marx didn’t touch on events in Ireland in “The Communist Manifesto,” published in 1848 at the height of the famine. Instead he celebrated the bourgeoisie as the gravedigger of the old order: “It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” In his masterwork, “Das Kapital” (1867)—he sent an inscribed copy to Darwin—he wrote dismissively that “the Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only.”

In “Famine: A Short History” (2009), Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda questions whether famines ever served as a Malthusian check on population. “In the past,” Ó Gráda contends, “the demographic impact of famines tended to be relatively short-lived.” Disease provided the Grim Reaper a more reliable scythe, especially among infants and the aged. It’s undeniable, however, that famines played a critical role in the struggle for global supremacy that unfolded from the middle of the nineteenth century into the second part of the twentieth. Along with John Kelly’s eminently readable history of the Irish famine, “The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People,” three recent books—Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” Lizzie Collingham’s “The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food,” and “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962” by Yang Jisheng—provide instructive reminders of the degree to which food supply has been used as a tool of social engineering and a weapon of war.

As these books make clear, between 1845 and 1961—a span of little more than a century—the number of deaths from hunger and its effects exceeded the total in all of preceding human history. The ratio of deaths to population in the Irish famine (1845–51) and the Chinese famine (1958–61) represent record rates of mortality. The central problem in most modern famines was never an absolute lack of food. At issue was distribution. Contra Malthus, the volume of mortality wasn’t simply a case of too many mouths to feed; rather, to one degree or another, economic theories and government bureaucracies were the culprits. This was no mere innocent bureaucratic bungling, as John Kelly’s book makes clear. On the contrary, these catastrophes were either used or conceived to bring about the modernization of underlying socioeconomic structures.

How did this happen? The short answer is that hunger shook hands with administrative bureaucracy, economic theory, and political ideology. As Cormac Ó Gráda reminds us, the United Kingdom of the 1840s possessed “the wealthiest economy in the world.” Its navy and merchant marine ruled and regulated world trade. It dominated markets across the globe, sometimes—as with the Opium Wars with China—prying them open at gunpoint. Its manufacturing prowess was unchallenged. For all these reasons, Britain in the mid-nineteenth century could accurately be described as the first nation to make the full transition into modernity. The Irish famine was part of this transition. With the arrival of a devastating potato blight in the autumn of 1845, Sir Robert Peel, the Tory prime minister, took steps to prevent a catastrophic increase in mortality. But Peel also intended to use the crisis to break the tenacious grip of Ireland’s small farmers and laborers on their paltry holdings and turn them into wage earners employed on large, efficient farms—or factory workers in the industrial centers of the British Isles.

Peel may have hoped this could be done with a minimum of distress to the several million people at the bottom of the Irish economic pyramid, but by the summer of 1846 he was out of office—and Sir John Russell, his Liberal Party successor, was a disciple of the Manchester School, which held that government should abstain from interference with the laws of supply and demand. This faith was reinforced by the reigning orthodoxies of Protestant Evangelicalism and Providentialism, which rested on the confidence that God sent disasters like the potato blight as punishment for human transgressions and as an opportunity for imposing the kind of moral reform that would bring Ireland into conformity with the superior values of Anglo-Saxon society. As the London Times editorialized in the autumn of 1846, “An island, a social state, a race is to be changed. The surface of the land, its divisions, its culture…its law, its language, and the heart of a people who for two thousand years have remained unalterable within the compass of those mighty changes which have given us European civilization, are all to be created anew.”

Before the work of re-creation came the job of razing what was in place. Sir Charles Trevelyan, an eminent Victorian who served as assistant secretary of the Treasury, welcomed the blight as a heaven-sent chance to “cure” the Irish of chronic dependency. In 1847, the Parliament abandoned any pretense of assisting the Irish—shutting down soup kitchens and other relief efforts—and acted to facilitate clearing the land of as many tenants as possible. For anyone remotely acquainted with the situation in Ireland, the consequences were obvious. “But unlike the morally blinkered, who saw only hunger, misery, and death in the ruined potato fields,” writes John Kelly sardonically,” Mr. Trevelyan saw the restless hand of God at work.”

In his 1860 jeremiad “The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps),” Irish nationalist John Mitchel charged that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.” In indicting the British government for “deliberate murder” —the word “genocide” wouldn’t be coined for another eight decades—he articulated a sentiment shared by many Irish and Irish-Americans, both then and today. Kelly’s judgment on this question—that while “the intent” of British relief policy “may not have been genocidal…the effects were”—is equivocal. But perhaps it’s as close to the truth as we can get. Though contempt for the Irish colored everything they did, Trevelyan and company neither caused the blight nor set out to send a million people to their deaths. Yet they concocted a policy of malign neglect and active interference designed to use a food shortage to reshape Irish society. Whether the Irish wasted away from hunger and disease or fled abroad—in excess of 2 million emigrated in a single decade—didn’t matter. The ideological end of modernizing “an island, a social state, a race” justified the means.

More than half a century later, in the wake of World War I, hunger once again became a tool of peacetime social engineering on a massive scale. In sync with the “scientific certainties” of Marxism, the Bolshevik faction under Lenin that took control of Russia in 1917 believed in iron laws of economics as devoutly as did the acolytes of the Manchester School. Yet the fruit that had fallen into their lap wasn’t, as Marx had predicted, an industrialized society planted and ripened by the bourgeoisie, but rather the ramshackle, backward, heavily agricultural Czarist Empire, where socialism would have to be sown and grown, not reaped through revolution.

Timothy Snyder portrays Lenin as shrewdly tempering ruthlessness with realism, conducting a “political holding action” that gave a degree of autonomy to the various republics and allowed private ownership. But after Lenin’s death in 1924, his choice as general secretary of the Communist Party, the crafty and conscienceless Joseph Stalin, put aside his predecessor’s caution and pursued an overnight transformation of the new Soviet state. Begun in 1928, Stalin’s first Five Year Plan was a breakneck push into urban-industrial modernity premised on returning peasants to serfdom. Their crops would feed the cities and provide exports to generate the hard currency to buy foreign machinery. The wealthier peasants were tagged kulaks (“tight-fisted”), an elastic label stretched to include anyone who resisted surrendering his holdings, however meager, to the state. Tens of thousands were shot; 1.7 million were deported to the Gulag.

The epicenter of this action was Ukraine, which, in Snyder’s description, became “a giant starvation camp, with watchtowers, sealed borders, pointless and painful labor, and endless and predictable death” (see “Europe’s Darkest Hour,” Commonweal, February 22, 2011). The result was the famine of 1930–33—“the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world”: more than 5 million died in what Snyder deems an act of deliberate genocide directed against the Ukrainian people. Writing in the London Review of Books (November 4, 2010), historian Richard J. Evans argued that Stalin’s starvation policy didn’t actually single out Ukrainians but was directed against kulaks—many of them Russian. Yet Snyder is indisputably correct when he emphasizes the non-Malthusian essence of Stalin’s famine, which “took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization.”

During World War II, Adolf Hitler pursued a policy—justified as a requirement of German national survival and as a right conferred by racial superiority—of making war in order to seize new national living space (lebensraum). The key lay in the East, from which, as Lizzie Collingham puts it, Hitler imagined Germany could carve out “its own version of the American west.” Collingham’s enlightening book reveals the extent to which food production, distribution, and consumption were critical to the conduct and outcome of the war. Often ignored or relegated to the war’s backstory, food, as Collingham tells it, was a prime motive in the ambitions of the aggressors and a strategic priority among the major combatants.

In 1941, a critical year in the war, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, in the hope of scoring a lightning victory over the U.S.S.R. Like Stalin, Hitler focused on a swift and radical transformation of the Soviet countryside, particularly Ukraine. Herbert Backe, head of the innocuous-sounding Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture, drafted the Nazi blueprint. A classic “desk criminal” (Schreibtischtater) who never served on the front or set foot in a death camp, Backe laid out a grand scheme for a postwar resettlement—“The Hunger Plan”—that envisioned “a European California,” its “idyllic new towns and ideal agricultural communities” built on the graves of 30 million Slavs methodically starved to death, with another 70 million shipped off to the Soviet Arctic zone to labor and die in a gulag now under German management.

In the event—and at the price of horrendous losses—the Red Army stopped the Nazi onslaught, and the Hunger Plan was never put into full operation. Nevertheless, Hitler used hunger against his opponents wherever he could. Patients in the Reich’s mental hospitals were put on a diet designed to kill in three months. Of the 3 million Soviet POWs who died in captivity, Timothy Snyder estimates that 2.6 million perished from hunger. Several million Soviet civilians starved, 1 million in the siege of Leningrad alone. And many of the 6 million Jews who perished, both in and out of the death camps, died from hunger.

On the Western front of the war, Hitler had hoped that a relentless campaign of U-Boat attacks could damage Britain’s supply lines so badly it would be forced to make peace. And indeed, at their peak, U-Boats sank about 10 percent of food shipments to Britain. Thanks to the astounding prodigality of U.S. supplies and shipping, however, the U-Boat attacks never came close to sinking Britain itself. “Throughout the worst months of the Battle of the Atlantic,” Collingham concludes, “British civilians were never confronted with the problem of hunger, let alone the specter of starvation.”

For its part, Britain ran its wartime food policies according to what Collingham describes as “an unspoken food hierarchy” that relegated the needs of its colonial subjects to the bottom. As she reports, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet decided “that India would be the part of the empire where the greatest civilian sacrifices would have to be made.” When told that the food situation in India had become critical, the War Cabinet’s reaction, in Collingham’s judgment, was “irresponsible and brutal.” Echoing Trevelyan’s verdict on the Irish a century before, Churchill “claimed that Indians had brought these problems on themselves by breeding like rabbits and must pay the price of their own improvidence.” The Bengal famine that raged between 1943 and ’44 killed approximately 3 million people. Confronted with the facts of what was happening, Churchill asked “if food was so scarce in India, why had Gandhi not yet died?” That famine, ironically, was carved forever into the childhood consciousness of Amartya Sen, then a nine-year-old boy in West Bengal. Sen grew up to become a Nobel Prize–winning economist whose seminal work on famine has revealed how far the phenomenon rests not on actual shortages of food, but on social inequalities and on politicizations of the food-provision mechanisms that invariably work against the poor.

As for the other major combatant nations in World War II, imperial Japan didn’t plan for systematically starving those under its sway. In Collingham’s view, however, the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the planned settlement of a million Japanese farmers in Manchuria shared the same rationale as the German drive for lebensraum; expansionism and the exploitation of conquered peoples and territories were seen as the sine qua non of being a player on the world stage. Collingham estimates the toll inflicted by the Japanese invasion of China to be “at least 15 million civilians, 85 percent of them peasants, and virtually all them the victims of deprivation and starvation.” The suffering in China was paralleled by that in Indo-China, where Japan’s “ruthless requisitioning of rice” led to the Tonkin famine, in which 1 to 2 million Vietnamese died of hunger, with new research suggesting “that the scale of the horror was far greater.”

Despite early success at plundering the empire they’d conquered, the Japanese themselves soon felt the effects of the counterattack mounted by the far more powerful United States. Where German U-Boats failed to sever Britain’s supply lines, the U.S. submarine campaign shredded Japan’s maritime supply lanes. By 1944, Japan’s shipping capacity had been reduced by 60 percent, and the situation quickly worsened, threatening ultimately to become militarily decisive. As Collingham makes clear, citing Napoleon’s famous adage that “an army travels on its stomach,” Japan’s military crawled to defeat on a nearly empty belly, with “60 percent, or more than 1 million, of the total 1.74 million Japanese military deaths between 1941 and 1945…caused by starvation and diseases associated with malnutrition.”

These food-related deaths were the result of dedicated American military policies. Beginning in March 1945, the United States undertook Operation Starvation, dedicating a special force of B-29s under General Curtis Lemay to seed the waters around the home islands with mines. Japanese shipping was paralyzed. Hunger was rampant, famine inevitable. Only the dropping of the atom bombs spared the Japanese from having to choose, in the end, between starvation and submission.

Two great powers emerged out of World War II: the Soviet Union and the United States. Historians continue to debate the origins of the Cold War that followed. How much was due to Stalin’s intransigence and belligerency? How much to blind anti-Communism on the part of American leaders? What’s clear is that among a significant portion of the anticolonial leadership in the less-developed world, choosing the Marxist-Leninist model of imposing industrialization and modernization through central planning and one-party control seemed more viable than following the capitalist road. The victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 put the world’s most populous nation under the rule of Mao Zedong, a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist who set out in as short a time as possible to make the People’s Republic the equal of the two superpowers—an ambition embodied in the cruelly named “Great Leap Forward.”

As chronicled by Yang Jisheng, a long-time reporter for China’s official news agency, the Great Leap Forward pulled the country into an abyss of mass starvation and death. Yang recognizes his own complicity in the cover-up that followed. He didn’t question the Communist Party’s version of events—in which his own father perished—until, disillusioned by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, he set out to unearth the truth behind the famine of 1958–61. The resulting book, “Tombstone,” is a highly detailed, two-volume account (the English version has been edited into a single volume) intended by Yang as a memorial to his father—a “tombstone in my heart,” he writes—and to the millions of other victims.

Yang demolishes the notion that bad weather, tight global grain markets, or the withdrawal of Soviet advisers contributed to the deaths of 30 million people, and lays the blame squarely on Mao. A megalomaniacal tyrant who envisioned his rule as a marriage, in his own words, of “Marx with [the ancient emperor] Qin Shi-huang,” Mao used the Great Leap Forward to gather the peasantry into military-style communes, turning the Chinese countryside into a gigantic barracks. Civil society was abolished. The family was done away with. Every aspect of life and work was regimented by the state. The people were to be created anew.

Ideological rigidity and economic fantasy produced collective insanity. When Beijing issued quotas, which local officials met and exceeded by requisitioning every ounce of grain, officials then set new and higher quotas. Communal kitchens, inefficient to begin with, became hopelessly undersupplied. An utterly unrealistic plan for spurring local steel production led to communes melting down whatever was at hand—cooking implements, ploughs, temple bells, etc. When the true effects of the catastrophe grew evident, Mao denounced “right-deviationist thinking” among naysayers and subversives, and unleashed a wave of violent repression.

Yang’s chronicle of the suffering that flowed from Mao’s orders insistently recounts the mind-numbing particulars of how many died, where, and how. “The labor reform team of the Zhongba administrative district,” “Tombstone” tells us, “included an eleven-year-old girl named Chen Yuxiu, who was forced to work for five straight days and nights. She collapsed, bleeding from the nose and mouth, and ultimately died.” In the details of suffering, all famines are, finally, alike. Mao’s Chinese victims underwent the same gruesome physical ravages John Kelly describes among the Irish: “the eyelids inflame; the angular lines around the mouth deepen into cavities; the swollen thyroid gland becomes tumor-sized; fields of white fungus cover the tongue, blistering mouth sores develop, the skin acquires the texture of parchment; teeth decay and fall out, gums ooze pus, and a long silky growth of hair covers the face.”

The suffering continues among the survivors in weakened bones, damaged hearts, haunted memories, and multi-generational psychological effects. Studies done after the Second World War indicate that, when subject to malnutrition and starvation in the womb, children were born with a predisposition to schizophrenia and psychotic depression. The repercussions, reports Lizzie Collingham, “are still echoing down through the generations, into the present day.”

Whether adherents of Marxism, the Manchester School, or National Socialism, in both war and peace those in charge of modern famines agreed that it was the victims who were at fault. Irish peasants were lazy and superstitious; Ukrainian kulaks, greedy and reactionary; Slavs and Jews, filthy untermenschen; Bengalese, chronic overbreeders. In the eyes of the Japanese, Chinese peasants were incorrigible and primitive; in Mao’s view, they were “regressionists” who lacked “adequate psychological preparation for socialist revolution.” Progress, however defined, depended on removing the human impediments that stood in its way.

This article was published as the cover story in Commonweal (May 16th, 2014)

 

 

The “Banished Children of Eve” at 20

Twenty years ago this month, I published my first novel, “Banished Children of Eve.” When the idea for the book first came to me, I conceived of it as a work of nonfiction, not a novel. I had put on temporary hold (alas, it turned out to be permanent) my pursuit of a Ph.D. in history and was working in Albany as a gubernatorial speechwriter. Lapsed historian though I was, I hadn’t lost my interest in the past.

In the course of researching a speech on housing policy, I stumbled across the first report made by the state legislature on conditions in New York City. Dated 1855, it was a Dickensian catalogue of poverty, disease and appalling overcrowding in the immigrant wards on or near the city’s waterfront. As I dug deeper, it became obvious that the vast majority of those living amid these wretched and unsanitary conditions were Irish immigrants and their children who’d fled the Great Famine and its aftermath.

Though I was soon finished with the speech, I had just begun the exhaustive process of research into the epic effects that the Famine immigration had on American urban life in general and on the shaping of New York in particular. Overnight, New York went from being an important Atlantic entrepôt to what it remains to this day: an immensely energetic, sometimes conflicted, always dynamic immigrant city of global proportions.

The deeper I dug, the more I was struck by how every aspect of the city was changed by the sudden arrival of a tsunami of traumatized peasants fleeing the worst civilian catastrophe in Western Europe between the Thirty Years’ War and World War One. I was equally impressed by the amnesia that seemed to erase the scope and sweep of these changes not just from the minds of most New Yorkers but from the very consciousness of these immigrants’ descendants, myself included.

As I devoured newspaper accounts and historical records, I gave real thought for the first time to the fact that my own great grandparents, Michael and Margaret Manning, were buried among these words and statistics. Beyond that they arrived in or around 1847, I knew that they probably came from Kilkenny. It seems they might have been illiterate, and it’s even possible that the name Manning had been changed from Mangin due to an error in transcription.

I started out wanting to write a social history that described in exhaustive detail the flight of the Famine Irish to New York–a million of them entered the port between 1845 and 55–and what awaited them once they arrived and struggle to start new lives. The year of research that I allotted myself stretched into three and then four. The more I learned, the more I felt there was more to know.

The historical details were endlessly fascinating. And yet, I grew increasingly frustrated by what was beyond my learning and what I could never know. The unrecorded everyday experiences of these immigrants, their quotidian fears and expectations, their fondest memories and deepest hopes were lost. They were faceless and voiceless. The density and complexity of their passions and pain were reduced to a single line in a census or death certificate.

Eventually, I gave up on history. If I was going to reach these people in their individuality and particularity, if I was going to enter their vanished world, I could only do it through an act of the imagination. I decided to attempt a novel.

I started by imagining a story built around the catastrophic Draft Riots of 1863, the worst urban disturbance in American history. It took three years of writing before I finally got to the riots. The characters–African Americans as well as Irish and native Yankees–took control of the plot. They led me down the labyrinthine ways of their individual existences, each in his or her own way a banished child of eve, all of them moving through this vale of tears to the music of Stephen Foster, whose life and songs are the book’s leitmotiv.

In the twenty years that “Banished Children” has remained in print, it has opened more doors, taken me more places and introduced me to more people than I could have ever possibly imagined. I rapidly discovered that the great silence that followed the Great Famine wasn’t a unique part of my family’s legacy but woven into the fabric of the Irish-American experience.

As I traveled with the book, I met an amazing array of artists and writers–Irish and otherwise. They are involved in unearthing, exploring and celebrating the rich and hidden histories of immigrants, slaves and working people whose labor, sacrifices, songs, stories and aspirations, though often given scant attention in official accounts, have enriched our country beyond all measure.

The night before “Banished Children” came out, I met Tom Flanagan at the Madison Avenue Pub for a celebratory drink. As well as a master novelist–his “Year of the French” is, in my opinion, among the greatest historical novels ever written–Tom was a friend and mentor. Tom toasted the future. “Don’t be surprised, “ he said, “at how far your banished children will travel and, if you’re lucky, at all the friends they’ll bring home.”

Tom was a prophet as well as a teacher.

(This essay was published in the 3/14/14 edition of the Irish Voice)

LAUREL FOR A LAUREATE

In my experience, most novelists have tried and failed at one profession or another before they turned to fiction writing. I failed at several. High school teacher. Court officer. Wall Street messenger. Historian. Alas, the list is long and sorrowful.

When I first took up writing, I aspired to be a poet not a novelist, but I failed at that too. Maybe that’s why I have such admiration for poets. I know how hard it is to succeed at producing a single worthwhile poem, never mind to do it year after year.

Except for an occasional foray undertaken as a private exercise and not an attempt to redeem my former failure, I no longer write poetry. But I continue to read the work of poets I admire, the famous (Yeats, Auden, Heaney, et al.) and the not so famous (Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a favorite).

Recently, I’ve found myself making repeat visits to Daniel Thomas Moran’s most-recent book of poems, A Shed for Wood (Salmon Poetry, 2013) Moran has made his living as a dentist, a trade marked by ruthless practicality and a prosaic focus on the material and mechanical–drill bits, needles, pliers, braces, bridges and the growing armory of hi-tech devices to prevent, remove and replace the ravages of routine and inevitable decay.

In essence, dentistry has always seemed to be the polar opposite of poetry. Certainly, there have been medical doctors who’ve excelled at poetry. The American poet William Carlos Williams comes immediately to mind. But dentists?  In my prejudiced view, dentists have always been to doctors what plumbers are to architects, mechanics rather than artists, their expertise necessary and useful but lacking the holistic vision and wider understanding that we expect (if rarely encounter) among physicians.

Moran has forced me re-examine that prejudice. His poetry is grounded in everyday realities as common and unromantic as canines and molars. But like the master dentist he is (Moran has been a private practitioner as well as a professor of dentistry at Boston University), he constantly probes, exposes, drills deep, undeterred by surfaces.

For me, Moran’s verse combines elements of my favorite triumvirate of American poets–Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. It is earthy, unpretentious, accessible, agnostic, sometimes comic, often serious, frequently both, rooted in the ordinary–mayflies, horseshoe crabs, sparrows, tumbled stones and treetops–yet capable of delivering a jolt of understanding as sharp and sudden as when a dental drill strikes an unanesthetized nerve.

I’ve been keeping A Shed for Wood beside my bed. I read a few poems each night. I mull their insights and their meanings. Moran and I differ in our worldviews: he, a stalwart unbeliever; I, an incurable adherent of the creed. But the wisdom in his poems transcends such boundaries. On my way to sleep, I embrace the poet’s invitation to go “Where we can be with our aloneness / at rest with its bottomless still / and inhale the life which inhabits us.”

Moran is a favorite of several prominent writers, including the late Samuel Menashe, a poet of the first rank and the first to be honored with the Poetry Foundation’s “Neglected Masters Award.” Yet despite this, and despite the fact he’s been accorded a number of honors–including a stint as the poet laureate of New York’s Suffolk County–Moran’s work, in my view, has never come close to receiving the attention it deserves.

Moran now lives with his wife Karen in the New Hampshire woods. I’m not sure if he still practices dentistry, but as A Shed for Wood makes clear, he continues to practice poetry at the highest level, turning out poems that serve as a source of wonder, enjoyment, enlightenment, and laughter.

You lovers of words, do yourself a favor: Neglect him no longer.

A Shed for Wood is available on Amazon.