The Lie of the Land

Irish Identities

Fintan O'Toole

Previously unpublished in the US, Fintan O'Toole's stories on the meaning of being Irish are both profound and beautifully told. In this extract from The Lie of the Land he describes how the Irish, including Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Oscar Wilde, conquered the West


The American myth is the myth of the taming of the wilderness, the conquering of the uncivilized Indian by the civilized white man. The Irish, of course, played more than their fair part in this process. But the ambivalence comes from the fact that the Irish are not, in this dichotomy, either/or, they are both/and. They are natives and conquerors, aboriginals and civilizers, a savage tribe in one context, a superior race in another. At the same time as the West of America is being opened up, British colonial language is using the savagery of the Indian tribes as a convenient analogue for the native Irish. In 1844, an English traveler in Ireland remarks that "The murderers of this country would disgrace the most gloomy wilds of the most savage tribes that ever roamed in Asia, Africa, or America." In 1865 an editorial in the London Times links the genocide of the American Indian with the genocide of the Irish, in a spirit of glee rather that outrage: "A Catholic Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as a Red Indian on the shores of the Manhattan." As the language of the Wild West and the Indian Wars becomes generalized through popular fiction and journalism - the one generally indistinguishable from the other - it becomes easy to apply this language to the wild Irish. A British visitor looking at Tuam in County Galway late in the last century thinks immediately of the Red Indians: "Not only are the cabins in this district aboriginal in build by they are also indescribably filthy and the conditions of the inmates is a whit higher than that obtaining in the wigwams of the native Americans. The hooded women, black-haired and bare footed, bronzed and tanned by constant exposure are wonderfully like the squaws brought from the Far West by Buffalo Bill." Punch talks of "a tribe of Irish savages, the lowest species of the Irish yahoo". For Britain, the Irish are the Indians to the far west, circling the wagons of imperial civilization.

Once in America, of course, the Irish cease to be the Indians and become the cowboys. They are the Indian killers and the clearers of the wilderness. They are the mythic cowboys. Jesse James's father comes from Kerry; Billy the Kid, though known eventually as William Bonney, is initially known as Henry McCarty, son of Catherine McCarty. According to some contemporary reports he was born in Ireland, according to others New York, and the ambivalence itself is perfect. In his legend as it grows up he is a prodigious killer of Indians. He kills three Apaches in Sonora, rescues Texas from Apaches with the James gang. He takes on twenty "well armed savages' in the Guadelupe Mountains with only his six-gun and his dirk. But in reality, or as much of reality as there ever can be in this kind of legendary terrain, Billy the Kid fought not Indians but Irishmen. In the Lincoln County Wars he fought against the Murphy-Dolan-Riley ranching combine. The first murder he was charged with was that of the Murphy-Dolan-Riley sheriff, William Brady, a fellow Irish-American. And of course, Billy himself was killed by another Irish-American, Pat Garrett. In this seminal American myth, the struggle of Irishman with Irishman in the new World is transmuted into a struggle of white man against native. Billy the Kid is Irish and American. His victims are Irish and Indian. The Irish are the killers and the victims, the civilizers are the wild men, the good guys and the bad guys. An important part of the American psyche, the ambivalence of the desperado as dangerous outlaw and rugged individualists, arises out of the ambivalence of the Irish in America. And the Billy the Kid myth is itself crucially ambivalent. The transformation of Billy from foot soldier in an economic war into a hero of the war against the Indians is an acceptance of the Irish as part of the governing American myth. But the ease with which Billy's Irish antagonists can become Indian antagonists shows how close the Irish remain to the Indians in the "civilized' mind. This tension between acceptance and exile, between being insiders and outsider, liberates a set of images that is enormously influential on the development of Irish culture.

This set of images is one which emerges always in a curiously self-referential way. It is not just in modern Ireland that the relationship with America is conducted through life-imitating-art-imitating-life. This is a feature of the Irish-American cultural construct right from the start. The whole myth of the American West is one in which life and art imitate each other with dizzying speed. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show has cowboys and Indians re-enacting their wars as theater almost as soon as they have ceased to be wars. Far from being the originator of a myth, Billy the Kid himself grew up in the mythological shadow of Jesse James. Theatrically, Irishness and the Wild West intertwine with abandon in the James story.

According to the legend, Jesse rode into the town of St. Joseph's on Saint Patrick's Day 1882 to lead the Saint Partick's Day Parade on a stallion with green ribbons braided into its mane and tail. A month later an Irish playwright, one Oscar Wilde, was in the same town in Missouri on his American tour. He wrote in a letter from there that "Outside my window about a quarter mile to the west stands a little yellow house and a crowd of people are pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic hunters. They sold his dust-bin and foot scraper yesterday by public auction, his doorknocker is to be offered for sale this afternoon, the reserve price being about the income of an English bishop.' The pal then took a job with the repertory companies who were playing dramas about the James Boys, appearing at the interval to tell the story of how he shot Jesse. Jesse"s brother Frank, meanwhile, got a job in another theater company playing a cowboy in Wild West shows.

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The same "if" was on John F. Kennedy"s lips when he spoke on New Ross quay about his great grandfather in 1964. "If he hadn't left, I"d be working over at the Albatross Company, or maybe for John V. Kelly." The double-edge was cutting. On the one hand, every factory worker in New Ross could imagine himself for an instant, as this tanned gorgeous man, radiating power and sex, and the thought, however instantaneous, could not be anything but pleasant. On the other hand, the instant after, the meaning of that sentence would clarify itself in the mind: "If we Kennedys hadn't got the hell out of here, even I'd be a no-good schmuck like you." Which would you rather be, the most powerful man in the world, or a member of John V. Kelly's loyal staff.

He went on, standing there on that quay, to tell a joke. It was the story of the New Ross man who emigrated to the States. He was doing all right, but not as well as émigrés have to pretend to be doing to the folks back at home. So he went on a trip to Washington, and stood in front of the White House, and got a passer-by to take a picture of him. He sent the photograph back home, and written on the back were the words: "This is our summer house. Come and see it."

Did he know what he was doing, telling this story to us? Did he know that that was what all those photographs of his visit would be, a message to ourselves back home in our dreary lives, to pretend to ourselves that we were doing well? Did he know that the unwritten words on the backs of those photographs of our faces in the crowds, beaming at him in beatific bliss, pressing towards him as towards a messiah, were "This is my cousin. He came to see me"? Was he savoring the secret triumph of his power, that he was inside the White House, while we, poor Paddys, were standing outside the railings concocting false images to hide our failures?