The Salon Interview Gabriel Byrne
Celtic kitsch
The new Dublin
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Marching against, therefore, the very first waves of this kind of bigotry, the first St. Patrick's Day Parades represented for the rank and file Catholic who marched in them a declaration of independence from the bigotry and intolerance that greeted them. These urban Catholic Irish of post-Civil War America were largely penniless, often diseased shantytown urban pack rats whose greatest contribution to their New Land was a native popular culture, which they helped to create in dialogue with the other great slave and immigrant populations and tribes of the New World. The emphasis on military service, pub life, popular education, the importance of the chief -- and we are free now to begin to call him by his American name, ward boss -- are all characteristics the Catholic Irish brought with them from Ireland. This popular culture, however, would eventually come to involve almost everything I hold dear about my own ancestors, and what they came to create, right here in the New World. As scholars will tell us, the history of American popular culture begins in the violence of the old minstrel stage, where immigrant Irishmen, their faces blackened by the smudge of burnt cork, created new dance forms out of the old Irish step dancing they'd learned back in Ireland. In America the patterns of the step dance were combined with the versions of African-American field dances that these blackface Irish performers were being paid to ape. To accompany these dances, the melodies of Irish fiddle music were blended with the rhythms of ritual African chanting. When the whole concoction was mixed and shaken, adding a little bit of Spain and a little bit of England and some other far-flung influences, American popular music as we know it began to race toward its own unique form. The first great composer of these new possibilities was Stephen Foster, who'd been raised on the melodies of Thomas Moore back in his own native Ireland. When you listen to Foster's songs today, what you are hearing is a marriage of form and culture that gave birth to an order of American popular music imitated today throughout the world. After Foster, the minstrel stage evolved into the vaudeville stage as the racism inside the minstrel tradition "coon song'd" itself into a welcome post-Civil War oblivion. One of hundreds of Irish-Americans who'd later have a role in the creation of Hollywood, Buster Keaton was a childhood star on this vaudeville stage. At the age of 6, wearing a thin mask that made him look like -- well, it made him look like a leprechaun -- young Buster was billed as "The Human Mop." The "Three Keatons" family act consisted, chiefly, of Buster's father, Joe, using a costumed Buster to sweep the stage. Then, when the job was finished, Joe would toss his only son out into the audience in a manner not unlike the swan dives certain mosh pit denizens take at more recent punk concerts. To their fellow vaudevillians, the Irish were considered the masters of knockabout or physical comedy, a fact not lost on a number of turn-of-the century American newspaper illustrators, who borrowed this branch of comedy as the proper subject for the new art form they were beginning to generate for the papers -- the art form called the comic strip. The screwball elements in "Mutt and Jeff," in "Barney Google" -- in the very brick that dear Ignatz would invariably toss at Krazy Kat's head -- were elements drawn, or simply lifted, from the life of comedy -- mostly Irish comedy -- as it evolved on the American vaudeville stage. And so American pop culture evolved. In not nearly so simple a manner, Stephen Foster's minstrel songs would become ragtime, and ragtime would lead to jazz. The comedic tradition would grow from the vaudeville stage into the comics, into the first silent comedies of Keaton and Company, into ultimately the great Irish social comedies written by Preston (Dempsey) Sturges in the 1930s and 1940s. The very lingo of these first Irish -- hard-boiled, darkly humorous, racetrack bitten -- would pass down many of these same streets through the lower-class newspapers into a kind of idiom that the great American writers of the 20s -- Farrell, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Hemingway, Runyon -- would ultimately employ to establish the fact that the future of the English language now belonged to the Irishman of Joyce's generation and an entire non-English ethnic world, including, especially, more than a handful of brilliant, wisecracking Irish-Americans. The real history of Irish America is a fascinating story; and yet, sad to say, most of it lies buried in forgotten playbills and brown-edged newspaper archives, which few, if any, of the current generation of culture historians have bothered to reopen. No, if the real details of our history were at issue, the Irish in America might still have reason to celebrate, reason to parade. Unfortunately, again this year you probably won't find all that much historical awareness from an otherwise most historical people. The universities have so far turned their collective backs on the histories of America's white ethnic peoples. Even worse, except for braggarts and fools, most white ethnic people have turned their backs as well, for to re-encounter this history is also to encounter the shame of being considered second-class. What the Irish in America have inherited instead, on St. Patrick's Day, is a green beer theme park. If the beer doesn't get to you first, the ensuing hallucinations most certainly will. "St. Patrick's Day itself," as I have long told my now 25-year-old son, David, "is a really great day to be an Italian." My advice: Go to the video store and take out a copy of "Singing in the Rain." Watch Gene Kelly. Everything we ever were, or still could be, can be found in the way Kelly danced. That shall always be the sound of our reawakening. Stay sober, too. We have given ourselves away too cheaply, just for the chance to call the new wilderness home.
Bob Callahan is the editor of the Neon Lit series (important contemporary fiction presented in comic-book form) and the co-creator of The Dark Hotel, a literary cartoon serial forthcoming on Salon. |
