English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

“Emigrating backwards”: Journeys into Ulster Dreamtime and the Ur-Time of Brooklyn

Philip Brady.  To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife.  Ashland Poetry Press, 2003.  120pp.  $14.95.

By Mary Burke, Keough Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame

            Philip Brady’s To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife is a memoir in prose and poetry of twentieth-century Irish-America centered on the passage from Northern Ireland to New York of the four McCann sisters, rendered in the voice of one of their sons. Brady, a poet and a current professor of English and Creative Writing at Youngstown State University, was born and raised in New York City, and has taught at University College Cork, Ireland, and at the University of Lubumbashi as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He is also the editor of a volume of critical essays devoted to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a Joycean influence is evident in the work’s attempt to render life histories through the capricious filters of dream, memory, and drug-addled recall.

             Though primarily set in New York and Ohio, the narrative meanders to both pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland and revolutionary Africa, and the memoir’s subtitle, A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife, significantly juxtaposes flight and death. Reverie, memory, and morphine allow the narrator’s elderly aunt and the longest-living McCann sister, Mary Martin (“last stop on the McCann line”, “last spasm of the lust that drove Francis McCann”, and “senile muse” [27; 34; 35]), to resurrect the dead, return to her Northern Irish origins, and to journey beyond her own lifetime into what might be termed the Ulster dreamtime: the Irish mythological characters of Deirde, Finn and Oisin jostle with the McCann girls and the wily family patriarch, Francis MacCann, and twentieth-century Brooklyn and Tir na nÓg, the Land of Youth of early Irish myth, seem equally tangible locations. Individual choice appears oppressively influenced by the weight of history and the hex cast by timeworn names and words, particularly in the case of Deirdre, the wayward daughter of Mary and her northern Presbyterian husband, who plies her role “from the ancient script” (6). Deirdre’s attempt to abort an unwanted baby in the family bathroom is rendered through the incantatory vocabulary of the Deirdre tragedy of the Ulster mythological cycle, whose heroine is a “doppelgänger ensorcelling Deirdre Martin” (6). The narrator “emigrat[es] backwards” to Ireland with the contradictory aims of reclaiming Francis McCann’s life and smashing “all the designs that had made me” (35). The seascape is etched with the record of all the journeys made on and above it, the narrator and Francis McCann crossing “each other’s paths over the ocean”: “on the day of my first sea-crossing my stomach sank toward the Atlantic — maybe toward the very wave that crested in McCann’s stomach seventy years ago” (40). Words have ghosts in Brady’s memoir: although seemingly in possession of a copy of the original document, the narrator recreates a letter pivotal to family mythology in poetic language, thereby “unmoor[ing]” it “from time” (24). Brady invites us to view the McCann sisters and their offspring as both real historical characters — the book opens with a poignant black and white studio photo of newly-arrived emigrants entitled “The McCann sisters, Brooklyn, 1922” — and as manifestations of imagination and phantoms emerging from a breach of Irish history. The significance of the date of the McCann clan’s flight from Ulster — 1922 was the year in which the division of the island of Ireland into two jurisdictions was cemented — and their provenance in a contested and blood-soaked territory are subtly evoked at pivotal moments by Brady. A dozing, senile Aunt Mary “taps her foot softly on her wheelchair’s pad, as if warming to an antediluvian reel” (xix); as with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, imagination, cultural memory, and the liberation of senility and morphine allow life to stretch above and beyond its mere biological span and confines. Time is circular and stratified, and mundane events spanning different epochs and continents are seen to mirror and overlap with the monumental occurrences of Irish and classical myth. To the sophisticated, college-educated narrator, the early New York years of his struggling maternal family are rendered as “the ur-time of Brooklyn” (xviii), and his elderly aunt is a “link to myth” (3) that is both national and familial, universal and particular. Brady’s use of language is revealing and densely poetic: Betty McCann’s clinically tidy apartment is “kept as taut as a museum” (45), his fragile mother has a “Belleek heart” (88), the Golden Gate stands “in defiance of a million snapshots” (89), while the poem “Wiretap” suggests that “Queens was a world honeycombed with generations” (line 79, 105).

             Part two of the three-part narrative is prefaced by a Thomas Jefferson quotation: “I am a farmer so that my son can be a lawyer so that my grandson can be a poet” (31). The artistic narrator disclaims any easy sense of superiority over his Irish-American cop father, whose social ambitions permitted his son the middleclass privileges of a university education and leisurely dope smoking in the 1960s. Philip Brady Sr.’s occupation allows him access to a mythological world of gunmen and crooks “as exotic as Gods and Fighting Men” (56) closed to his intellectual son. In one poignant vignette, Brady Sr. takes a prominent contemporary Irish poet in his son’s charge on a tour of the legendary locales of Irish-American politics and crime, and the narrator is made to feel inadequate in the face of the evident bonhomie of policeman and poet. As ever, time curves to encompass and link seemingly unrelated events in the lives of the family members. The notorious murder of Sophie Toscan du Pantier in Cork in the 1990s is invoked by the narrator in a discussion of the well-known Alice Crimmins murder case with which Brady Sr. was involved, to the detriment of both his career in the police force and possibly his marriage. (Cuckolded husband figures hover on the edges of the greatest personal crises of father and son.) The seductive Alice Crimmins is accused of the murder of her children, and the police force is convinced of the woman’s guilt on the basis of her hard drinking and multiple adulteries. The narrator’s father exposes fabricated police evidence, but Alice is, nevertheless, ultimately convicted of the crime, and the traitor to his own is obliged to retire early from the force. Brady’s skill and subtly is apparent in the manner in which the question of whether the exposé is proof of his father’s professional integrity or of his apparent sexual desire for the accused is never satisfactorily answered. The father remains, ultimately, an “unknowable universe” (75), the Irish-American son a “changeling” obsessed with the displacement and deracination symbolized by the transplant of “American blood” (83) required at his troublesome birth: “He lived / with the wrong blood only / a week, and so I took / his name” (“Lagos”, lines 254-57, 118). (In Irish fairy lore, the changeling is a problematic, sickly, whining child left in the cradle in place of the stolen baby by malevolent fairies.) Brady rejects the one-dimensional thick cop and ogre father so prevalent in Irish and Irish-American fiction and memoir, generating instead a morally complex, contradictory, and torn human being, and this refusal is one of the memoir’s greatest strengths.

             Typical of the circular and self-referential nature of the work, the final section of To Prove My Blood consists of three long poems whose composition is referred to throughout the text, and which concern the events originally narrated in prose. The author also discusses the provenance and meaning of the painting utilized on the cover, and one of the last scenes of the prose text transcribes the narrator’s recitation of the opening lines of the memoir at a New York literary event. Ultimately, as the title intimates, Brady’s work concerns the resonant intersections of the word “blood” in Irish literature and history with the phantoms of sectarianism, violence, and, most significantly, unavoidable cultural and genetic inheritance.