Shanty Irish Read Free

question one always faces when reading Tully is: How much is true? Tully opens Shanty Irish with a clue. Hugh Tully is certainly the most memorable character in all of Tully’s books yet Jim was only fourteen when his grandfather died in 1900. And six of young Jim’s fourteen years were spent in an orphanage, separated from his grandfather. While family members could add a few stories to Jim’s memories, much of what Jim wrote about his grandfather came about through the hard business of writing. When Jim prefaced Shanty Irish with a quote from the Irish physicist John Tyndall (a move applauded by Mencken), he no doubt had the creation of Hughie in mind.
    There is in the human intellect a power of expansion—I might almost call it a power of creation—which is brought into play by the simple brooding upon facts.
    Jim later recalled writing and rewriting the scene that opens Chapter VIII . He originally wrote the scene with Hughie and a “group of hospitable yokels” sitting around a roaring fire one rainy night. When Jim was unable to loosen his grandfather’s tongue, he tried a change of venue. Instead of a campfire, Jim placed Hughie in a saloon. His writer’s block was broken with the introduction of a one-legged stranger who walked through the swinging doors and pushed the scene in a new direction. The barroom stories that followed, Jim later wrote, came not from any particular memory but from “the simple brooding upon facts” and the imagination, one might add, of a gifted and unique writer.
    As was his custom, Tully offered the chapters of Shanty Irish to his trusted friend and critic, H. L. Mencken, for possible inclusion in Mencken’s American Mercury . Mencken, who could be gentle but firm in declining work not up to his high standards, snapped them up. Late 1927 to early 1928 was a very productive period, with chapters of Shanty Irish and film pieces pouring from his pen. There was the filming of Beggars of Life and a considerable amount of time spent advising a couple of aspiring writers behind bars. He also was attempting to save a third prisoner from execution. Tully’s personal life, however, was starting to fray. Bouts of depression, “moods,” beset him and his three-year marriage to 24-year-old socialite, Marna Myers Tully, was beginning to unravel. Despite their troubles, he dedicated Shanty Irish to Marna.
    In the foreword to a later book, Blood on the Moon (1931), Tully described Shanty Irish .
    In “Shanty Irish” was depicted the background of a road-kid who became articulate. Down the avenue of years my grandfather, who dominates the book, has been very real to me. I can still hear, on quiet nights, the whisky rattling down his bony throat. That he talked a great deal was natural, of course, being Irish. He was a sad old man with a broken dream in his head and a fear of death in his heart.
    Broken dreams fill Shanty Irish but Jim inherited neither his grandfather’s sadness nor his fear. In an early chapter of Shanty Irish , Jim wrote of his father. “A most amazing Irishman was my father—one devoid of sentimentality. A man without tears, he often seemed without pity.” Like his father, Jim too was a man without tears. What made him different from both his father and grandfather—and from lesser writers—was his great capacity for empathy.
    Mencken was the first to recognize the book’s excellence and contributed a blurb which appeared opposite the title page.
    If Tully were a Russian, read in translation, all the Professors would be hymning him. He has all of Gorky’s capacity for making vivid the miseries of poor and helpless men, and in addition he has a humor that no Russian could conceivably have. In “Shanty Irish,” it seems to me, he has gone far beyond any of his work of the past. The book is not only brilliantly realistic; it also has fine poetic quality.
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