Among those who think themselves wise, few words in our political vocabulary seem more likely to elicit a derisive scoff than nationalism. Little, as ever, do they know, as it is an idea whose importance, in our time of Brexit, Trump, and pandemic, has been somewhat rescued from neglect and disfavour. Nationalism, as any fair-minded thinker would allow, has both benign and pathological forms, and it isn’t inevitably guided or condemned to take one path over the other.
After pointing this out, one notices, with annoyance, more scoffs, the volume and contempt of which are calculated by the gender of the accused, the toxicity of his masculinity, his alleged racism, and, well, you know the list by now.
Perhaps such unthinking responses are best ignored, useless as they are, perhaps now more than ever. This almost seems to be the approach of Michael Brendan Dougherty in his memoir My Father Left Me Ireland, a serious and affecting reflection on fathers and sons, the nation and its survival.
Dougherty is, first of all, a masterly writer, and he so carefully interposes his personal narrative between the larger political, cultural and historical questions that one hardly notices the transitions. He writes:
“All nations are in some way dissolving, we’re told, and that the dissolution is a good thing. Ireland’s national pride is a font of violence, a spur to extremism and superstition. And besides, Ireland is a failure. It has always been a failure. After all, my ancestors left. James Joyce left. Ireland’s children still leave. They send back selfies from Bondi Beach in Sydney. They send back money from Vancouver . . . I have to laugh. They all leave, but you stayed.”
The addressee here is the father in the title, whose staying in Ireland left his son fatherless in America, loved at a distance. Now, the arrival of Dougherty’s first child prompts the collection of letters to his father which makes up the memoir.
The letters combine grief, humour, anger, reconciliation, and, perhaps most importantly, recovery:
“I am suddenly alive to the idea that I could pass on this immense inheritance of imagination and passion if only I could work up the courage to claim it for myself.”
First, however, his recollections must pierce the soul: all too brief moments of visiting his father and the tears that followed; and the abandonment and broken endurance of his heroic mother. “Your curse was in being so easy to love,” Dougherty tells his father, and it is that same love that compelled his mother to try to hold on to the Irish songs and stories, the political commitments, and even the language.
Despite the real hardship and the literary risks of the letter form, Dougherty never collapses into self-pity or sentimentality; his bigger themes wouldn’t allow it, anyway. He skilfully uses his own story to tell a more important one about the culture and its degradation. His insights are remarkable and convincing.
He contemns what he calls the myth of liberation: the combination of self-absorption and self-delusion by which his generational cohort has lived and suffered. This has led to the desecration of community and family institutions and their replacement with a focus on the self, who is always right. The preferred cliché, nowadays at least, is the exhortation to speak and live your truth, which is risible at first glance and nerve-wracking at the second.
Reflecting on the death of his mother, Dougherty ties this social deformation to his own mourning and anger:
“I was furious too at the ambivalence of our culture in the face of her death. This myth of liberation was like a solvent that had slowly and inexorably dissolved any sense of obligation in life. It dissolved the bonds that held together past, present, and future. It dissolved the social bonds that hold together a community, and that make up a home.”
For Dougherty, one part of the solution to this crisis is a return to the nation, and he finds solace and inspiration in the thought and words of Patrick Pearse, the teacher and revolutionary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Pearse averred:
“We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.”
How easy it is to imagine such words shrivelling the tongue of some sanctimonious fool, the one who loathes the mere idea of borders, his nation, and, in the end, himself. We live in a time when speaking in defence of one’s inheritance is something like bad manners, and even the use of the word manhood is a social solecism. One easily notices a reproach in Pearse’s words, and we would do well to reflect on it.
For Dougherty, this reproach from the past means doing away with our present conception of the nation as mere administration, as a rank in terms of GDP or policy success or whatever. It means a recognition of what his father has truly left him – Ireland, with all its wonder and complexity. It means remembering that a nation has a soul, and we are haunted by its ghosts: our fathers and grandfathers from whom we inherit a tradition, as well as a responsibility to pass it on. It means that in such an act, sacrifice may be called for, and it should be given joyfully.
Some of these are old ideas, and we have forgotten them. That is why, in Dougherty’s arresting prose, they seem very much alive: “To dance up to the idea of idolatry, you might say the life of a nation proceeds from the father and the son.”
My Father Left Me Ireland should be read widely and thoughtfully, as both an example of outstanding memoir and, more importantly, as a political intervention: perhaps our etiolated debate over the nation and its soul can be brought back to life.
My Father Left Me Ireland
by Michael Brendan Dougherty
(Sentinel / Penguin Books)
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search For Home was published in April of 2019 by Penguin Books.
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