How I (Re)discovered My (White, Irish) Roots by Writing my Latest Novel
By David Corbett | June 1, 2023 |
Therese stepping in for a moment to offer a hearty congratulations to David Corbett on publication day for his latest novel, THE TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD! If you missed David’s Take 5 interview about the book, please click HERE to read all about it. Congratulations, David!
Right around three years ago, the debate as to whether to capitalize “black” and “white” as ethnic-racial-cultural descriptions was circulating among a variety of sources, including the American Psychological Association (which had long argued for the capitalization of both), the Atlantic and Washington Post (which now decided to agree with the APA guidelines), and the Associated Press (which recommend lower case ‘w’ for white but capitalization of Black in its style guide).
One of the more frequently referenced arguments for not using a capital “w” for White was that it suggested the racial chauvinism of White Supremacy—who but White Supremacists actively identify as White in a racial sense and thus insist on capitalizing “white?”
But this reflexive rejection of “white” in a racial sense skated past a subtler, more compelling point. Up until the middle of the last century, most White people didn’t think of themselves as members of a racial group. We were “individuals” in the Enlightenment sense of distinct human agents.
There’s an inherent sense of privilege in that—by being White, I somehow magically rise above the tawdry business of racial designation. That’s for “those” people. And so you’re still in the implicit, unconscious trap of seeing Whiteness as a cultural escalator taking you upward to the racial mezzanine.
This issue hit home with particular force as I was working my way through various drafts of my latest novel, The Truth Against the World, which comes out today.
I’ve written about this previously here at Writer Unboxed, specifically of how I was warned off by an agent not to use a Black-Cambodian woman as a major character given the #ownvoices movement in publishing. (I had also made her gay, which proved no less problematic.)
So I had to ask myself: Who am I allowed to write about other than, as the old Ink Spots song puts it, we three: my echo, my shadow, and me?
I was raised a White Catholic male in suburban Columbus, Ohio. Though I had my share of family drama, boyhood fistfights, hopeless crushes and so on, I’ve never found those personal experiences compelling enough to generate the prolonged interest and focus a novel requires. (Stories, sure, but that’s another issue.) So in my newfound attempt to try to root my book in something “above me but as I am,” to paraphrase [read: butcher] Wallace Stevens, the part of my past that suggested something larger and more interesting than mere me resided in that conspicuous word: Catholic.
By my late teens I’d already shrugged off my faith, like a coat unsuited to the weather. What remained resided in the peculiar nature of the Catholicism that had pervaded my childhood: Irish Catholicism.
Now, in the genetic sense I personally can attest confidently to being only a quarter Irish.
The four Corbett brothers emigrated from County Cork in 1850, the youngest of whom was my great-great-grandfather. He married a young Irish woman named Katie and they gave birth to my grandfather, William Augustus Corbett. Check out the photo of him here with my mom as an infant and you’ll see how strong the resemblance is between me and him.
He married a young German woman from a small farm in Wisconsin, making my mom half German, half Irish, therefore my mere quarter. But given the resemblance to my mom’s dad, and the fact my mom was a classic Celtic redhead—milk-white skin, sparkling blue eyes—with a profound fondness for jokes and stories, I easily found myself identifying with that strain of my heritage.
That identification was intensified by the tutelage (read: brainwashing, grooming) I received from the Diocesan priests and Dominican nuns at Our Lady of Peace elementary and Bishop Watterson high school, many of whom were themselves Irish. I gained a distinct fascination with Ireland, its history, its legends and folk tales, its writers, its music. If I was inescapably White, this was an essential aspect of that Whiteness.
So, as I asked myself what I could write about with authority and authenticity that would both be interesting to readers and fascinating for me to explore in greater depth, that little island across the Atlantic snapped into focus.
However, even writing about what you perceive as your own cultural heritage doesn’t come risk-free. I have Irish writer friends who have particularly keen sensors for phony “Irishness” and its pretensions. I could readily predict getting slagged off by these friends if I were to march foolishly into areas I had no business entering. And the particular risk of presuming I might understand Ireland because I’m Irish-American is especially unforgivable, as it represents that peculiar form of blindness known as sentimentality.
I don’t mean a weepy fondness for the grand old songs that get dragged out every St. Paddy’s Day, though that’s part of it. I mean a failure to recognize the contradictions inherent in the Irish immigrant experience here, and how they resonate with life in the old country.
But if one is intent on ridding oneself of sentimentality when it comes to his cultural heritage, he better be prepared for some rude awakenings.
Racism and the Irish
Frederick Douglass remarked that the only place he had ever traveled where his skin color mattered not at all was Ireland. This only enhanced his astonishment at the vehement racism he encountered from Irish immigrants in the U.S.
One of the more glaring examples of that racism took place in 1863, during the Draft Riots in New York. Irish immigrants attacked Black people and torched their homes and businesses, including the Colored Orphans Home, killing over a thousand people, lynching at least eleven, and driving Blacks out of lower Manhattan and into Harlem. The reasoning: the Irish were being singled out to serve as cannon fodder in a “rich man’s war,” where someone with means could buy their way out of the draft. Even if the draftees managed to survive, they’d come home to discover that freed Blacks had taken their jobs—so went the logic from the Tweed and Tammany Hall contingent.
The self-serving notion at the heart of that justification, the idea that since we have suffered greatly we have the right to do “whatever is necessary” to protect whatever gains we now enjoy, is turned on its head by the singer Imelda May in a poem titled, “You Don’t Get to be Racist and Irish,” part of which reads as follows:
We emigrated
We immigrated
We took refuge
So cannot refuse
When it’s our time
To return the favour
Land stolen
Spirits broken
Unholy tokens of Christ
Nailed to a tree
That you hang around your neck
Like a noose of the free
(To hear her recite the entire poem, go here.)
I have elsewhere likened racism to alcoholism—it is not something one leaves behind forever, but something one struggles against “one day at a time.” Researching this book put me in greater touch with the shadowy reservoirs of my own racist thoughts and feelings, brought them into the light where I could better examine them, and strengthened my ability to recognize, resist, and reject them. But in exploring my “roots,” I could hardly ignore this element of my heritage.
Fatalism and a Reverence for Martyrdom
When over more than a thousand years you’ve been the target of multiple invasions, from the Vikings to the Normans to those ever-pesky English, and enjoyed few if any victories along the way, it’s little surprise that most of your heroes will be martyrs, a circumstance only intensified with how the Irish Catholic Church equates suffering with virtue.
But fatalism didn’t arrive with the Viking long boats. It was already there in Irish legend and folklore, so clearly represented in stories such as “The Children of Lir” and in the tragic ends of even the great heroes Cuchulainn and Finn mac Cumhal.
That pre-Christian gloominess proved impressively resilient, surviving even the arrival of St. Patrick. The fundamental focus of Irish Catholicism has remained the tragic figure nailed to his cross, not the triumphant Redeemer.
This had especially severe consequences once Ireland won its independence. When people invoke The Handmaid’s Tale to convey what an American theocracy might look like, my response is typically, “Why turn to fiction? Just look at what happened in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1990s.”
Church and state were joined at the hip, with Irish nationalism inseparable from Catholicism. The result?
- Poverty so severe and inescapable that the great Irish export remained its people.
- Women confined to second-class status, unable to work outside the home until the 1960s, with abortion and even contraceptives only accessible across the Irish Sea in England.
- The brutal, systemic abuse—sexual and physical—of children at the hands of priests and nuns, especially in the infamous industrial schools. Up until the 1990s, whenever those abuses were exposed, the Church and the government joined forces and actively suppressed the reports, blamed the victims and witnesses, and protected the perpetrators.
Learning all that made me more keenly aware of the strange, backhanded vanity that results from victimhood. It’s very seductive, like most forms of self-pity. It’s also stifling.
Quarrelsome, Clannish and Combative
George Bernard Shaw once quipped that if you ever want to roast an Irishman over a spit, you can always find another to crank the handle.
The history of Irish warfare is steeped in the lore of cattle raids, conducted for centuries between rival clans. This belligerent, tribal nature has undermined many an attempt to unite forces in the face of grave danger. Not even Brian Boru could unify the clans as he sought to drive out the Vikings
In the wake of defeat in the Jacobite-Williamite War of 1689-1690, Irish soldiers were banished from the island and went on to serve a number of Catholic monarchies in Europe, including both Austria and France, which were at war with each other. It would not be the last time Irish soldiers found themselves fighting fellow Irishmen. Irish soldiers would find themselves fighting not just countrymen but men they knew personally in the Mexican-American War, the Boer War, and civil wars in the United States, Spain, and Ireland itself.
Which brings to mind two other quotes I came across along the way:
Other men go into fights finely, sternly, or indifferently, but the only man that really loves it, after all, is the green, immortal Irishman. So there the brave lads from the old sod … laughed and fought and joked as if it [battle] were the finest fun in the world.
—Journal entry of army surgeon Thomas Ellis, as quoted in Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy by Ella Lonn
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse
What About Song, Poetry, Warmth and Wit?
Of course, not everything I discovered was so dour. Perhaps more important than the foregoing was a reacquaintance with a quality I can only describe as “otherworldly”—the understanding that the visible world is not the whole of the story. However you define it, “that which cannot be spoken” is no less real than what can.
Add to that the sheer joy in creativity, which is so prevalent in Irish music, literature, art, dating back to Celtic times.
Especially noteworthy is the love of language, specifically bending English to serve Irish cadences, and the love of storytelling that comes along with it. On that score, allow me to share the first few paragraphs of a New Yorker profile of the great contemporary Irish writer Sebastian Barry:
The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers?…
Instead of reaching for grand theories to account for this remarkable literary surplus, Foster did that very Irish thing: he told a story. One summer, he said, he’d been on holiday in County Kerry when the trunk of his aged Volvo became jammed. At a nearby garage, Foster asked the mechanic if he ought to take the car back to the dealership. The mechanic didn’t think so. He gave the trunk a good whack with his wrench, and just like that it sprang open. “In matters like this,” the man said sagely, “Volvo dealers wield no special magic.”
For Foster, the words were a small but irresistible example of Irish English, the unusually pungent dialect, or set of dialects, native to his homeland …What [the great Irish writers] did was to remake English, molding the language of the ruling élite into something beguilingly subversive, an unstable compound of familiar and foreign. If you want to understand Irish literature’s extraordinary richness, Foster suggested, the special magic of everyday Irish speech is a good place to start.
I have been encouraged that several readers of The Truth Against the World have remarked on my “unique writing style” and “elegant, lyrical prose.” I attribute that to my decision to make the narrator-protagonist Irish, forcing me to at least attempt to live up to my roots.
How have you explored your cultural, ethnic, or racial roots in writing your stories? What new or unexpected aspects of your own psychological makeup snapped into clarity?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
David, I can’t wait to read your book. All the best! I’ve spent the last two years researching Irish culture for a Celtic character in my own novel to be published in 2024 at Crystal Lake Publishing—but I’m not Irish. Studying Irish heritage and history—as an Italian—I found similar values of family and faith. So I felt right at home. What strikes me as so endearing about the Irish culture is the Irish myths and legends, the festivals and especially the Irish goddesses (Brigid, Morrigan, Danu, water, moon, sun deities, spirituality of trees and
birds, etc.). Such a strong connection to Nature. I was drawn in deeply. I came across a saying of the Irish: “May the Irish hills caress you. May her lakes and rivers bless you.” Do you know that blessing? I’m curious. Did you grow up with that ancient sense of the sacredness of Nature in your life?
Hi Paula. Thanks for the comment. I fear that that sense of wonder at the natural world has suffered over the centuries, especially here in America. I don’t know if you are aware of the housing boom in Ireland that took place in the early 2000s that came to a crashing halt with the financial crisis of 2008-2009, but it was almost like a cancer. There are now virtually empty housing estates all over the island. (For an eerie take on that, see the film Vivarium.) And nothing in my upbringing suggested I should revere nature the way the ancient myths and stories do. Obviously, there’s been a great deal of that reverence coming back over the past few decades, and the housing disaster has created an especially intense backlash in the form of a return to a stronger respect for the land. As for sayings, when I was young it was all the usual sentimental rubbish, but as I was researching the book I came across one that hit home for me, and said a great deal about the Irish as they are, not as we sweetly sentimentalize them: “Better the trouble that follows death than the trouble that follows shame.”
Hello David. Thanks again for drawing from me a combination of admiration and envy. Admiration for the wit and focused attention you bring to anything you research, and envy of that same quality. I’m a quarter Irish, and prefer to think of that as the dominant feature of my makeup. Why is that? Perhaps I’m just appropriating the glamor I associate with the Irish use of language. Or is it the witty Irish lawyers I know?
Maybe being white–or White–is the more fundamental reason for thinking (actually, for not thinking) of myself as I do. If so, being white–and American–also explains my complacency regarding my origins. I have never had much wish to learn about my heritage. Why bother? I’m a white American. I resist suggestions that I sign up with one of the research companies that promise to lay bare my past. What, then, would I do with the personally manufactured myth of self that has served me all these decades?
It’s interesting to me (an all too easy and therefore un-Irish word) that you speak at the end of being pleased to think that, in your writing, you are living up to your Irish roots. In a more vague, undeserved and self-satisfied way, I suspect something like that is true for me. Minus, of course, all the hard work.
HI, Barry. I feel like I could have written your comment, because it’s true of me as well. I used the term “roots” semi-facetiously, because as I confess I too am an American mutt, but like you I found the allure of Ireland and the Irish irresistible even in the diluted, ersatz form in which I encountered it. Luckily, I knew enough to recognize that phoniness for what it was, and dug deeper. To the extent what I discovered resonated with me on a personal level could just as easily be said of any experience that made me think or feel more deeply. But that’s the journey, yeah?
David, I could almost feel the lilt of Irish words, Irish poetry and many many Irish jokes that always bring wonderful laughter. My mother, widowed with three children early on, was fortunate to have two Irish nurses live with us when I was very young. I look back, seeing this as an opening in my own understanding of language and how it can sound and feel different. I loved those two women. And have been reading the Irish writer Claire Keegan, once again hearing the lilt of the language. The history of any country is complicated, but Ireland had its list of intruders and raiders. Then there’s Protestant versus Catholic. All to now come down to the burdens yet also the widening and changing of culture and history. My one visit to Ireland underlined it all…a people warm and open to living, despite quarrels and famine…and of course, the English!
Hi Elizabeth. There is a musical quality to Irish-English that’s only approximated by working class or Cockney English. And you hear it in virtually any Irish writer you pick up. I’m reading Sebastian Barry now but Joseph O’Connor, Anne Enright, Edna O’Brien, the list is endless, they all bring that musical subversive creative quality to their writing. Also, on the religious conflict issue, let me end with a joke: An old woman goes into the post office in Belfast and asks for 50 stamps. “What denomination,” the postmaster asks. “Oh Lord,” the woman replies, “has it come to that? Fine, give me 35 Protestants and 15 Catholics.”
David, that joke made me laugh out loud. You’ve undoubtedly heard the “Two Irishmen walk out of a bar. No, it can happen” joke too. My mother, Eileen O’Brien (by way of a Kelly) was a couple of generations removed from the island, but carried so many characteristics of the wit, charm and storytelling ascribed to the land and its people.
I am aware of some of the dark history you recount, though not in detail. People of every stripe are contradictory, courageous and infamous, and just regular folk too. I was tormented by the nuns for eight years at my parochial school (Fr. Murphy was the pastor), and then by the monks in one year of Catholic high school before I fled. But the experience still gives texture to my thinking on religion and the skeletons underneath.
Oh, right now I’m a finalist in a cocktail-making contest (Irish whiskey being the base spirit, of course) where you win a trip to Dublin. A long shot, but sláinte! I hope your book does well.
Thanks, Tom. In tribute to your mom –and to wish you luck in the competition — here’s another:
Ever hear of the Irish boomerang?
It never comes back. It just sings really sad songs about how much it wants to.
David, I enjoyed reading about your book over the weekend, as well as today’s post. Your approach to life and work is fascinating and inspiring. When I was writing a paper while doing my MDiv, I used a book called Ethnicity and Family Therapy, which was astonishing in its relevance to my family and our lives. You might enjoy this chunk of it:
The Irish are a people of many paradoxes…They are typically clannish and place great stock in loyalty to their own, yet they often cut off relationships entirely.
Within the family, except under the guise of wit, ridicule, sarcasm, or other indirect humorous expression, hostility, pain, and anger are generally dealt with by silence.
The Irish mother had a reputation for ruling the family with an iron fist, being the unquestioning transmitter of…Church authority…There has long been a respected role for the unmarried “Auntie Mame,” the feisty, independent, funny, and important contributor to family well-being.
While having a tremendous flair for bravado, they (the Irish) may inwardly assume that anything that goes wrong is the result of their sins. They are dreamers but also pragmatic, hard workers…They are goodhumored, charming, hospitable, and gregarious, but often avoid intimacy. They love a good time…yet are drawn to tragedy. Although always joking, they seem to struggle continuously against loneliness. Although they are known for fighting against all odds, the Irish have also had a strong sense of human powerlessness…They often feel profound shame about, and responsibility for what goes wrong, yet they characteristically deny or project blame outward…Irish history has included…a remarkable adaptive ability to transform pain through humor, a fierce rebellious spirit, and the courage to survive.
All quotes from the “Irish Families” chapter in Ethnicity and Family Therapy by Monica McGoldrick
Wow, Doc, that’s pretty darn interesting. Though of course such generalities can always seem too broad to be accurate, I love the focus on contradictions, which here don’t seem to be a way of avoiding the “over-generalization” charge. Rather, it cuts across the tendency to sentimentalize. So much of what McGoldrick says resonates especially with what Fintan O’Toole describes in his personal history of modern Ireland, WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES, especially the parts about shame, sin, and powerlessness. Thanks for chiming in.
David, congratulations on your newest book! I enjoyed your interview with Therese. I’ve wondered too what a civil war might be like here because we are more divided than ever and living in SC, I run into people who have secessionist views. I just started reading Kaye Park Hinckley’s The Wind that Shakes the Corn, based on her family history from the 1700s and I can already see how hatred and revenge can never be the answer to injustice. The Irish Americans have a strong presence here and after I converted to Catholicism and discovered I was baptized on St. Patrick’s Day, I thank the Irish.
A while back I read My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home by Michael Brendan Dougherty and it really touched me given that I also grew up with an absent father. What was truly beautiful was how father and son forged a relationship in their later years. A search for home is often about discovering who we really are, where we come from, we’re going. When I was an atheist, my identity was rooted in my achievements, but now, it’s being a child of God, and it has made all the difference in the world. I know Whose I am, where I’m going–Heaven! Heaven!
Thanks for the kind words, Vijaya. Interesting title, The Wind That Shakes the Corn. One of the best films about the Irish Civil War is titled The Wind That Shakes the Barley, based on a 19th century song of the same titoe. If I may quote Wiki:
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is an Irish ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1836–1883), a Limerick-born poet and professor of English literature. The song is written from the perspective of a doomed young Wexford rebel who is about to sacrifice his relationship with his loved one and plunge into the cauldron of violence associated with the 1798 rebellion in Ireland.[1] The references to barley in the song derive from the fact that the rebels frequently carried barley or oats in their pockets as provisions for when on the march. This gave rise to the post-rebellion phenomenon of barley growing and marking the “croppy-holes,” unmarked mass graves into which rebel casualties were thrown. To many Irish nationalists, these “croppy-holes” symbolised the regenerative nature of resistance to British rule in Ireland. Barley growing every spring was said by nationalists authors to symbolize continuous Irish resistance to British rule, particularly in nationalist literature and poetry written about the rebellion
Fascinating. I didn’t know this. Thank you. I’m only 3 chaps into the book. Well written.
I’m looking forward to reading your book. The deep search behind your story is so important. I’ve been working through White, too. Digging up and exposing majority cultural influences is part of the work. Next week, I’m Zooming with a E&I group about writing the stories only you can tell. What a can of worms for us all.
Very good one, David. A lot to sort out. My WIP involves the grail of the Celts (not that other one), so I’m very sensitive to Irish and British pre-Roman beliefs. Fun. Of a sort.
Also, I would caution in general against thinking of oneself as Irish, or Polish, or in my case Swedish. I grew up among cousins and aunts and uncles and great grandparents who celebrated Sweden and the fine traits (and foods) of Swedish immigrants, etc. It took me much of my life to realize that, yes, my name is Swedish—originally Johansson—but when you consider the girls that all those Swedish boys married, I’m seven-eighths English. A bit of a twist in the old knickers.