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By Patricia Harty, Editor-in-Chief
“By standing shoulder to shoulder, hope for the future will triumph
over the hurt of the past”President of Ireland Mary McAleese
We were delighted to see Jennifer Connelly (cover story) take
home the Oscar for her performance in A Beautiful Mind. Connelly
is not only a beautiful star, but she’s also a hell of an actress
with a great mind. In this interview with Penelope Dening, she talks
about her time at Yale, her trip to Ireland and her fascination
with Irish literature.
Of course, it would have been a double-header for the Irish if
Russell Crowe had won the best actor award, him having Irish ancestors,
but that didn’t happen.
Crowe, who starred as Connelly’s husband, schizophrenic mathematician
John Nash, did, however, receive BAFTA’s Best Actor Award (the British
Academy Awards). In his acceptance speech, the Australian actor
was moved to quote Irish poet Patrick’s Kavanagh’s poem “Sanctity”:
“To be a poet and not know the trade,/To be a lover and repel
all women;/Twin ironies by which great saints are made,/The agonizing
pincer-jaws of heaven.”
Unfortunately, in the televised broadcast of the awards, the
poem was cut, which caused Crowe to lose his temper and rough up
the program’s director, Malcolm Gerrie.
How had Crowe happened upon the Kavanagh poem? Was it through
the auspices of the Irish Christian Brothers who are big educators
in Australia? As it turns out, it was Irish-born actor Richard Harris
who had given Crowe the poem. (Harris worked with Crowe on Gladiator,
for which Crowe did win the Academy Award in 2001).
Methinks Kavanagh, who died in 1967, would have gotten a great
kick out of the ruckus and the subsequent international media coverage
which has renewed interest in the Monaghan man’s poetry.
The fiasco is surely worthy of a William Kennedy novel. His latest
book, Roscoe, as with his previous works “acknowledges the absurd
imperfection of human beings.” It is, as Pete Hamill reflects in
his review, “a very Irish attitude created by the high-minded hypocrisies
of generations of British rulers.”
Kennedy, as his interview with Tom Deignan attests, is foremost
an American writer, yet the world he creates, peopled as it is with
Irish-American characters – those hardscrabble descendants of Famine
immigrants – is very Irish.
The author of such works as Billy Phelan’s Greatest
Game and Legs joined Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, and
others on stage at Lincoln Center recently to pay tribute to another
great American writer with Irish roots, John Steinbeck. Through
Kennedy I met the author’s son, Tom Steinbeck, who fondly recalled
the trip to Ireland he made with his father, written about in this
issue by Jim Dwyer.
It is something how Ireland can continue to influence its sons
and daughters generations removed from its shores. As John Steinbeck
said, “Irish blood doesn’t water down very well; the strain must
be very strong.”
“I am American but when I write Ireland liberates me,” Tom Flanagan
once said in an interview with Irish America. Sadly, Flanagan
passed away last March, soon after attending St. Partick’s Day festivities
in New York City. Poet Seamus Heaney wrote an elegant eulogy of
his friend for the New York Review of Books, which we are
pleased to reprint here.
In Flanagan’s work, as with many Irish novelists, artists. dramatists,
and poets, the great conflicts and dispossessions in Ireland’s history
are central. (One of the best long poems on the subject is Patrick
Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger). It is a theme that is examined
here again by artist Robert Ballagh, who talks to Elizabeth Martin
about his latest work and recent exhibition at The Irish Arts Center
in New York, which explored the relationship between the land and
language and the Irish.
September 11 was one more blow in the epic saga of the Irish,
as we are reminded in Lynn Tierney’s profile of Fire Chief Bill
Feehan – one of the many Irish Americans who, in the words of Irish
President Mary McAleese, when called upon “faced the test with no
thought for themselves.”
McAleese reflected on the ties that bind our two countries together
when she attended our “Tribute to the Spirit of America,” in March,
at which we commemorated those we lost and celebrated the efforts
of the rescue workers. As we’d envisioned, it was an evening in
the best tradition of an Irish wake.
Paddy Moloney played a couple of laments on his tin whistle.
Little Collier Willmer from North Carolina danced for us. Irish
tenor Ronan Tynan sang for us, as did Cathie Ryan. It was an evening
that brought Irish and Irish-American together and cemented the
bonds between the two.
The President brought the evening to a close when she presented
awards to representatives of the FDNY, the PAPD and the NYPD, and
told those gathered:
“The generations who went before them would be proud of a modern
generation who have known the easy times and comfort of prosperity
but who when tested, chose the hardest road of all.”
We hope you enjoy this, our summer reading issue, with its heavy
focus on literature and the arts. We continue, as always, at
Irish America, to explore the relationship between the Irish-born
and the American Irish, and foster understanding between the two.
In the words of the Irish President, “By standing shoulder to shoulder,
hope for the future will triumph over the hurt of the past.”
-June/July 2002 Irish America 7
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