Shanty Irish Read Free Page A

mixed. James M. Cain, writing in the World , praised Shanty Irish . Praise that Mencken believed, given Cain’s “bilious” nature, would boost the book immensely. The New York Post concluded that Shanty Irish was “… Jim Tully’s greatest contribution to literature. In our opinion it will become a definite part of our national belles lettres.” The New York World review was so enthusiastic that the book’s publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, included part of it on the book’s dust jacket: “A yarn that soars up into the vaulted blue. It is, we submit, literature. In it, for a moment, the national letters have a glorious reversion to the roaring vigor of yore.” The Chicago Daily Tribune was both amused and shocked, citing the book’s “blasphemy” and “words that aren’t pretty” but was forced to conclude that “there is something sturdy and lusty about it.” Perhaps not quite so lusty as Tully intended. In the one-legged stranger’s story, Tully originally had the old man saying, “ … gigantic copulations shook the sky.” Tully would later complain bitterly to Maxwell Perkins about Boni’s poor job of editing Shanty Irish . Whether out of timidity, as Tully suspected, or sloppiness, “copulations” became “osculations” in the printed book. A review that must have particularly pleased the author washed up from Dublin. The Irish Times concluded that Shanty Irish was “far in advance of anything he has previously done.” It praised the book’s “clear-cut economy of phrase and stark precision of characterisation, a book wherein tragedy is splashed with humour and comedy steeped in sadness …” Even Upton Sinclair, with whom Tully had been feuding, wrote that Shanty Irish is a “chunk of real life. It made me feel human and humble, which is good for anybody.”
    Not everyone approved. The leftist writer and founder of The New Masses , Michael Gold, who had praised Tully’s earlier work, panned Shanty Irish , blaming the pernicious influence of H. L. Mencken. And another Dublin paper, the Irish Independent , under the heading, “A Slobbering Idiot,” considered Hughie as just another drunken Irishman. And in Tully’s hometown of St. Marys, Ohio, his cousin Gertrude Lawler wrote that the book was widely read, but never openly discussed.
    Shanty Irish sold well in both the United States and England, and as late as 1945, Tully wrote Mencken that the book was still selling. The book’s success certainly had much to do with the comic and roguish old Hughie, whom Jim tried making the main character in a stage version of the book, God Loves the Irish . It was never produced, but Hughie would make a return appearance as a principal character in Blood on the Moon . What made Hughie and Shanty Irish different was that Tully was the first to treat the Irish-American experience in something other than strictly comic tones.
    In The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), Emory Elliott concluded, “that by its focus on a poor Irish family [Shanty Irish] set the theme and by its title’s ugly epithet set the tone for the breakthrough of Irish-Americans into the fiction of cultural mediation.”
    â€œI developed early a capacity for remembered sorrow,” Tully wrote in Shanty Irish . “It is possible that I remembered too much.” It is from this well of remembered sorrow—and empathy—that Jim Tully fills Shanty Irish .

CHAPTER I
THE GREAT FAMINE
    M Y grandfather was known as old Hughie Tully. Born with the gift of words, he was never without a tale to tell.
    Drama was as natural to him as corn to an Ohio farmer. Arson, treason, and sudden death were as common in his Irish boyhood as gossip about the King of England.
    He respected nothing among men. He was capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the