Memory and hearsay: ethnic history and identity in 'Billy Phelan's Greatest Game' and 'Ironweed.' (Irish-American Literature)

"I write this book... as a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place." The opening words of O, Albany!, William Kennedy's "urban biography" of Albany, prepare the reader for a richly detailed rendering of the history of a place where history is inseparable from "memory and hearsay" (371). Weaving together his own memories with those of other individuals as well as drawing upon historical documents, Kennedy seeks to "peer into the heart of [Albany's] always-shifting past" (7). As in his fiction, he closely ties historical memory to place in a manner that headily mixes nostalgia and political insight. Kennedy finds much to celebrate in his study of Albany's history and its people, and the multitude of reminiscences and anecdotes lends a nostalgic sheen to the text. But he does not uncritically venerate the city, and in his use of oral histories, he is clearly attuned to both the blindnesses and insights of reminiscence and anecdote, of "memory and hearsay," in the retelling of an ethnic past. In his urban biography of Albany and in his Albany novels - Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, and Quinn's Book - he allows memory and hearsay to permeate the boundaries of conventional historical narrative.(1) In doing so he explores not only the most visible contours of Irish-American history, such as machine politics, but also the everyday encodings of ethnic identity and distinctiveness.

In exploring what constitutes Irish-Americanness, Kennedy shows a keen interest in how the ethnic group uses (selects and interprets) history and reinvents the past in the process of self-definition. Ethnicity is not represented as a fixed psychological or socio-cultural entity in his texts, but rather as a dynamic process of identity formation - in which memory plays a significant role - implicated in specific material and political realities. I want to look closely at two of the Albany novels, Billy and Ironweed, as they depict the struggles of Irish-Americans to make sense of this process. Kennedy has produced what is often termed a "cycle" of Albany novels, documenting and expanding genealogies from novel to novel, constructing an intimate fictional and historical tableau of Albany life. In focusing on Billy and Ironweed I have selected the two novels most closely connected in terms of character, event, theme and temporal setting. The action of both texts takes place during a few days in October 1938, the former focused on Billy Phelan, a small-time hustler, and the latter on his father Francis, who has been "on the bum" for twenty-two years. As both characters in their different ways traverse the seamier areas of Albany they face personal dilemmas that force them to examine their ethnic identities and values.

1

In Billy, Billy Phelan, "forged in the brass of Broadway" (8), is at home in the world of nighttime Albany - pool rooms, poker dens and bars - where he survives on his street-tested skills and wits. It is a world that is harshly turned against him when he is caught up in the kidnapping of Charlie McCall, son of Patsy McCall, who is the city's political boss.(2) Refusing to "inform" on a friend suspected by the McCalls of involvement in the kidnapping, Billy finds Albany nightlife closed to him as the McCalls have him "marked lousy" (239), displaying their power "to control everybody's life, right down to the lowly hustler on the street" (Bonetti 75). What Kennedy terms the "absolutism" of this power and its history is something his protagonist is only dimly aware of. As Billy walks along Colonie Street where he grew up and the McCalls still live, Kennedy blends Billy's memories with fragments of social history that trace the evolution of political power from the founding of "The Colonie" (after which the street has been named) in 1630 by the Dutch merchant, Kiliaen Van Resselaer, "who was also known as the First Patroon" (145), to the Irish of the early twentieth century who "with the help of Jesus, and by dint of numbering forty per cent of the city's population" (147) gain control. Billy does not know the details of this history of power but is aware of its presence and import:

Billy Phelan knew the Patroon only as a dead word ... But in the filtered regions of his cunning Irish brain, he knew the McCalls stood for power far beyond his capacity to imagine.

They were up from below. And when you're up, you let no man pull you down. You pull your wagons over the faces of the enemy. (147-48)

Billy understands the basic drives inscribed in these metaphors of immigrant and frontier experience. Like many Irish-Americans of his generation, he responds to the immigrant drive ("up from below") encoded in dominant narratives of Irish-American history, where emphasis is on the ability and "freedom" to take opportunities and defend gains. The ethnic group constructs important aspects of its identity in relation to what has been left below." Ideologically, the immigrant need for upward mobility is naturalized as a metonymy of power within the ethnic group.(3)

In Billy, Kennedy shows us that the McCalls' power both draws on and promotes particular ethnic values and assumptions. When Billy is summoned to meet the McCalls, they show a close knowledge of his daily routines and his family, and inform him of their involvement, without his knowledge, in opening a temporary job to him - in Bindy McCall's words: "We do Albany people" (152). The McCalls' power to "do Albany people" requires a cultural basis. While their political machinations, such as rigging votes, may be fruitful, it is their endorsement and exploitation of ethnic values and assumptions that most powerfully reinforce their control. The McCalls successfully manage a rhetoric of family, morality and loyalty. The family metaphor dominates: the McCalls distribute patronage on the basis of familial connection and ethnic loyalty - this includes a numbers racket that has bookies pay a percentage to the Irish poor.

The crime and dishonesty of the McCalls is absorbed in the family metaphor that calls on common religious and ethnic experiences. Kennedy's wry comment that Irish-Americans gained power in Albany "with the help of Jesus, and by dint of numbering forty per cent of the city's population," alludes to a powerful conjunction of political and religious structures. Martin Daugherty, a journalist who observes and reflects upon much of the novel's action, remembers Charlie McCall's confirmation:

the boy kissing the bishop's ring; then at the party Bindy gave

afterward ... the bishop kissing Bindy's foot. That was the year the

McCalls all but donated the old city almshouse to the Catholic diocese

as a site for the new Christian Brothers Academy, the military high

school where Charlie would become a cadet captain. Martin's wife

Maire, now called Mary, a third maybe fourth cousin to Bindy's wife,

sang "Come Back to Erin" at the confirmation party. ... And Mary, when

the bishop congratulated her on her voice and patted her on the hand,

felt fully at home in America for the first time since Martin had snatched

her away from Ireland. (46)

The McCalls' political machine and the Catholic Church together provide a sense of ethnic security and progress to Irish-Americans - the "old city almshouse" is to be replaced by the Catholic academy - while offering to ease the passage from Irish (Maire) to Irish-American (Mary). They provide structures, political and religious, that will mediate the demands of the larger society based upon an ethnic principle of protecting "our own." When Martin Daugherty argues with his wife about Billy's part in the kidnapping of Charlie, Mary voices the ideology that the McCalls can tap: "The boy [Billy] is evil," she tells Martin, and in response to her comment that her tone "lacks charity," she states: "Charity begins at home ... and I feel first for young Charles, my own flesh and blood, and for his father and his uncles" (273-74).(4)

To sustain their political power the McCalls patronize an ideology of Irish-Americanness that naturalizes specific values and traditions as organically and timelessly distinct to the ethnic group. Werner Sollors has argued the need to question the functions and coherence of ethnic "authenticity":

[Ethnicity] marks an acquired modem sense of belonging that replaces

visible concrete communities whose kinship symbolism ethnicity may

yet mobilise in order to appear more natural. The trick that it passes

itself off as blood, as "thicker than water," should not mislead interpreters

to take it at face value. It is not a thing but a process - and it requires

constant detective work from readers, not a settling on a fixed encyclopedia

of supposed cultural essentials. ("Invention" xiv-xv)

Kennedy goes some way toward helping his readers in such detective work by presenting ethnicity as an active social process and by historicizing the Irish-American desire for an idealized past as a desire motivated by the social, political and economic needs of the present. It is a desire, he knows, that must ride contradictions if it is to successfully support the parameters of ethnic difference. When Mary Daugherty sings "Come Back to Erin" in America, it signifies not a lament for a lost past and a desire to return but rather the founding of a new "home" distinguished in part as a community bound by a sentimentalized vision of displacement and difference. The conflict between old and new is symbolically represented but transformed in an ethnic synthesis. This is an uneasy synthesis, which the reader is frequently encouraged to recognize in Kennedy's texts. In Billy, the McCalls' dining room is decorated with "autographed photos of Jim Jeffries, Charlie Murphy of Tammany, Al Smith as presidential candidate, and James Oliver Plunkett," (29) and "a panorama of a Civil War battle, one of Patsy's well-known interests" (148). For the Irish-American inhabitant of such a room, the conjunction of images does not issue in contradictions but rather in a sense of "symbolic ethnicity."(5)

Irish-American (re)invention of an ethnic identity and an idealized past is an important feature of Ironweed. Francis Phelan has been "on the bum" for twenty-two years, a seemingly self-induced exile sustained by the guilt he feels about the deaths of a scab he felled during a strike and of his thirteen-day-old son Gerald, whom he accidentally dropped and killed. Francis adopts a vagrant life in order to punish himself for his violent actions. On his return to Albany he confronts voices and images of ghosts that press him to reexamine his past. He slowly becomes aware of the inadequacies of his code of guilt, but he is uneasy about letting go of it:

In the deepest part of himself that could draw an unutterable conclusion,

he told himself: My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have

stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing. (216)

While Francis abstracts his sense of guilt as a moral absolute, Kennedy takes care to historicize it. Toward the end of the novel Francis recalls Emmett Daugherty, an Irish immigrant who "found work building streets, and then with the railroads, and in time went all the way west on the rails and became a labor organizer, and eventually a leader of the Clann na Gael" (204-05). As a child Francis sat with Emmett "on the slate step in front of Iron Joe's Wheelbarrow and listened to his endless talk of days when he and the country were young" (204). These stories nourish a "fugitive thrust" in Francis and "inspire [him] to throw the stone" that killed the strikebreaker. This "fugitive thrust" is further idealized in a play written by Edward Daugherty (Emmett's son and Martin's father). The Car Barns depicts Francis as a heroic figure in the strike:

For a time Francis believed everything Edward Daugherty had written

about him: liberator of the strikers from the capitalist beggars who

owned the trolleys, just as Emmett had helped Paddy-with-a-shovel

straighten his back and climb out of his ditch in another age. The playwright

saw them both as Divine Warriors, sparked by the socialist gods

who understood the historical Irish need for aid from on high.... (206)

During his life of vagrancy Francis retains this image of himself as a Divine Warrior who must suffer exclusion from his society. He willingly flees "into heroism" and is "suffused further, through the written word of Edward Daugherty, with the hero's most splendid guilt" (207). Francis is written into public myth and accepts the image so inscribed as symbolic of key elements in his character and fate.

Confronting ghosts of his past in Albany, Francis comes to feel a need he has suppressed for many years, the need to "reenter history" (169). Francis has been symbolically excluded from history: he is interpolated as a mythic figure in the ethnic narrative of Irish-American progress, furthering the struggle begun by the immigrant's (Emmett Daugherty's) escape from poverty. Recognizing this, it is possible to view Francis not only as a character surrounded by ghosts, but as something of a ghost himself. When he visits his family after a twenty-two year absence, his daughter Peg angrily asks: "Why've you come back like a ghost we buried years ago...." (178-79). Francis may be viewed more broadly as a ghost of an ethnic, not just a familial, past, and as a ghost who refuses to be "buried," he reveals how aspects of that past have been idealized or wilfully obscured. This ghost-like existence also symbolizes the sense of social exclusion he experiences in being designated a "bum." Early in the narrative, when temporarily employed digging graves in an Albany cemetery, he comments to his co-digger Rudy, "I never knew a bum yet had a gravestone" (12). The recognition of social invisibility takes on a particular ethnic significance in the context of Kennedy's comments on the cemetery and the memories it stirs in his protagonist. When Francis muses that "being dead here [the cemetery] would situate a man in place and time. It would give a man neighbors..." (13), he responds to striking encodings of Irish-American history in this landscape of the dead. Scanning the cemetery he notices that the dead "settled down in neighborhoods," from the rich and powerful Irish-Americans "vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes," to "the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses" (1). The cemetery not only encodes class differentiation (a form of social differentiation that is largely obscured by imperatives of ethnic struggle), but also offers an intriguing figure of the passage from immigrant to ethnic. While the names on the oldest headstones at the foot of the cemetery hill have weathered away,

the progeny of those growing nameless at the foot of the hill were

ensured a more durable memory. Their new, and heavier, marble stones

higher up on the slope had been cut doubly deep so their names would

remain visible for an eternity, at least. (13)

Francis is implicitly identified with the "nameless" at the bottom of the hill, the virtually erased immigrant identity that has been displaced and incorporated by that of the ethnic. Denied the security of location "in place and time" this Divine Warrior/bum haunts the Irish-American present, straddling and blurring the realms of history and myth.

2

In both Billy and Ironweed the Irish-American past is always under construction, its reinvention important to the patterning of social relations in the present. Kennedy's narratives suggest that this reinvention of the past is neither a stable nor an easily controlled process; it cannot fully contain conflicting representations and memories. I have already observed how sites of ethnic identity - such as the McCalls' dining room and the Albany cemetery - offer conflicting significations of the Irish-American past. I now want to look more closely at memory as it frequently exposes the ethnic self as a contradictory category, suggesting that ethnicity is no simple matter of group assimilation or socialization.(6) Because ethnicity is a dynamic process of identity formation, its reinvention requires repeated revelations and repressions that are experienced both privately and publicly. One of the important functions of memory in Billy and Ironweed is to express an ethnic anxiety about the past and frame the protagonists' struggles to clearly define and locate their identities.

In Billy, Billy first appears to the reader, largely through the observations of Martin Daugherty, as thoroughly at ease in the role and world of the Irish-American hustler; to Martin, "Billy seemed fully defined at thirty-one" (2). However, we come to see that Billy's hustler identity exists in tension with family relationships - "Billy knew jazz and betting and booking horses and baseball. He knew how to stay at arm's length from the family and how to make out" (154) - and that he has difficulty in balancing his needs for distance and relation in the ethnic community. Throughout the novel, memories of his family past, often related to his father's absence, illuminate this dilemma. Billy's miserable childhood experiences on Colonie Street, where he lived with relatives following his father's departure, leave him with confused feelings about his ethnic past. He hates the street due to these experiences, and yet he

didn't hate Colonie Street entirely, for it would have meant hating his

mother, his greatest friends, Toddy Dunn, for one, even his ancestors. It

would have meant hating the city the Irish had claimed as their own

from vantage points of streets like Colonie. (144)

When Billy enters the McCall house he is "reminded of the hated house across the street, probably built from the same blueprints" (148). It is the similar ethnic blueprints that activate his memory; a sedimented, confused admixture of memories and emotions couches the unstated in the meeting with the McCalls and partly explains his reactions to their demands. Although he feels a commitment to help the McCalls, Billy lies at a significant moment and is unable to understand fully either the commitment or the lie: "He wondered why he'd even bothered to lie. It meant nothing" (154). Kennedy hints at meanings beyond Billy's comprehension, though, in his fragmented memories of his family past. These memories conflict with the "family" ideal represented by the McCalls. Dispossessed of a father and hating a number of his relatives, Billy finds it difficult to accept the imposing authority of the McCalls or unquestioningly identify with their family crisis. The absence of the father is a key trope of anxiety in the text, and Billy is unable simply to don an ethnic identity as a form of psychic resolution.(7)

Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Stern have argued that there is a "necessary and productive tension" between history and memory: "The explosive pertinence of a remembered detail may challenge repressive or merely complacent systems of prescriptive memory or history: memory, like the body, may speak in a language that reasoned inquiry will not hear" (Davis and Stern 5). In Ironweed, memory "speaks" constantly to Francis Phelan as he moves among ghosts and familiar places of his past. In the cemetery, where we observe this process beginning, Francis's memory begins "returning forgotten images" - of rich Albany Irishmen and of fellow bums - and eventually becomes "as vivid as eyesight" when he stands over his son Gerald's grave, able to "[reconstruct] the moment when the child was slipping through his fingers into death" (18). The intensity of these memories has an "explosive pertinence," to use Davis's and Stern's phrase, reconstituting history for Francis and opening up a dialogue between past and present. This dialogue - most overtly symbolized by conversations Francis has with ghosts - breeches the seeming inevitability in his course of violent actions and flight, and holds out the possibility of his relocating himself in time and place. There is a therapeutic promise in the process of rememorization: if Francis "can remember this stuff out in the open" he can "finally start to forget about it" (19). But to remember "out in the open" is also to expose the tension between history and memory and Francis soon finds that he is "conjuring memories against his will" (96). In doing so he is forced to recognize the instability of his self-identification with the concept of the heroic, alien wanderer. Needing "to believe in simple solutions," he finds that he is more and more confused by "his own repetitive and fallible memory" (223). However, if repetition signifies an ethnic anxiety, it also allows Francis to begin to come tentatively to terms with his past as a husband and father. When he visits his family toward the end of the novel, initial resentments and emotional conflicts are slowly overcome as stories are told and memories shared. Although Francis leaves his family once more, he has become more substantial than a ghost to them; as his wife Annie tells him, "You did something good coming home. It's something Danny'll always know about. And Billy" (176). Francis reaches no clear resolution of his need to locate himself in time and place, but he does discover that in releasing memories, in testing them against history and sharing them with others, he is able to begin piecing together an identity in the dialogue between past and present.

In Billy and Ironweed Kennedy exposes rich seams of ethnic memory, which partly contextualize the thought processes and actions of his characters. In doing so he refuses to isolate memories as individual insights removed from history. It is the necessary interdependence of history and memory that comes to the fore in his narratives, and in order to illuminate this interdependence he attempts to represent the forms and mediations of a common or collective memory. His significant formal achievement in this respect is to employ a language of memory, or better, of "memory and hearsay." His narratives have been described as "magic realist," and while it might be misleading to associate them too squarely with this genre, it does signify interactions of realism and romance, and of historical and mythical vision, that are present in his writings.(8) In Billy and lronweed, the "magic" of the narrative frequently operates to establish a sense of the past in the most mundane and everyday activities of the present. The Albany streets in particular appear surfeited with echoes of past lives. As the boundaries of past and present dissolve - in Billy,

Martin [Daugherty] parked his car on Colonie Street in front of the

vacant lot where his former home had stood before it burned. He

stepped out onto the sidewalk where he'd once pitched pennies and

election cards, and the charred roots of his early life moved beneath his

feet. (27-28)

and in Ironweed,

Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel

of this city, city once his, city lost. The commerce along with its walls

jarred him: so much new, stores gone out of business he never even

heard of. Some things remained: Whitney's, Myers', the old First Church,

which rose over Clinton Square, the Pruyn Library. As he walked, the

cobblestones turned to granite, houses became stores, life aged, died,

renewed itself.... (63-64)

- the city appears "a magical place where the past becomes visible" (O Albany! 7).

Kennedy offers his readers a richly detailed world where language is always inventive. What is truly "magical" about Albany in his narratives is the atmosphere of intimacy they construct. Not only places, but also characters and everyday objects are animated by memories and anecdotes. In Billy, for example:

Footers was smiling as he chewed his cigar, his nickel Headline. The

Great Footers. Nobody like him. Drinking pal of Billy's for years,

always good for a touch. Footers knew how to survive, too. Told Billy

once how he came off a four-day drunk and woke up broke and dirty,

needing a shave bad. Called in a neighbor's kid and gave him a nickel,

the only cash Footers had. Sent him down to the Turk's grocery for a

razor blade. The kid came back with it and Footers shaved. Then he

washed and dried the blade and folded it back i,.q its wrapper and called

the kid again and told him, take this back to the Turk and tell him you

didn't get it straight. Tell him Mr. O'Brien didn't want a razor blade, he

wanted a cigar. And the kid came back with the cigar.

Billy looked at Footers and laughed at the memory. (122)

The sounding of a common past and shared memories is an important element in Kennedy's writings. He fashions a world of intimacy, carefully drawing his reader into this milieu (often, as above, by utilizing the vernacular humor and adumbrated syntax of the oral story-teller). The sense of intimacy is heightened by the steady buildup of fragmented stories, anecdotes and reminiscences. The fragmented narration conspires to cumulative effect, as the reader comes to expect a story for each character or place; streets, bars, shops, songs, and photographs are charged with associations, all have histories kept alive in "memory and hearsay." While memory and hearsay may act to generalize the past into the realms of myth, they also take on a peculiar force as we recognize that they constitute history in the everyday lives of these Irish-Americans.

Kennedy's fragmented narration allows him to challenge dominant codes of historical understanding - the coherent and causal - in favor of the partial and particular, the intimate and personal, in stories and anecdotes engendered by commonplace stimuli. As the Popular Memory Group point out:

A knowledge of past and present is ... produced in the course of everyday

life. There is a common sense of the past which, though it may lack

consistency and explanatory force, none the less contains elements of

good sense. Such knowledge may circulate, usually without amplification,

in everyday talk and in personal comparisons and narratives. It

may even be recorded in certain intimate cultural forms: letters, diaries,

photograph albums and collections of things with past associations.

(Popular 210)

It is important to recognize that this "popular" or "common" sense of the past is inevitably socially constructed and cannot be "readily unscrambled from the effects of dominant historical discourses," but it may conflict with these discourses and offer alternative histories (Popular 211). The tension between history and memory in Kennedy's texts is a result of their very interdependence; they are not posited as pure or autonomous realms - each supplements the other. By illuminating this interdependence he shows that history is not simply in the service of those who dominate; his Irish-American pool hustlers and bums do more than helplessly observe or submit to history, they make it and remake it in rememorizations of the past that give meaning to their present social conditions.

Both Billy and Ironweed ask readers to recognize the "always-shifting" nature of the past, of ethnic history and identity as these depend upon interpretations of that past. Kennedy's aims seem to me neither satirical nor overtly critical. There is much that he questions, such as. the assimilationist pressures that justify a harsh upward mobility and social division among Irish-Americans. Yet the history he offers is not simply one of oppressor and oppressed; while recognizing forces of corrupt power within Irish-American life, he celebrates the very mobility of ethnic identity in an its contradictions and ambiguities. If anything, he risks sentimentalizing or idealizing his Irish-Americans, but appears to be aware of the risks. For all that is legendary and "magical" in Ironweed, Francis Phelan's experiences and world are not sentimentalized, the harsh material conditions are not sepia-tinged. Kennedy also seems to be wary of nostalgia as it is popularly encoded in Irish-American culture. When Francis listens to a rendition of the song "Sweet Sixteen" in a bar, he realizes that "The song is frayed. The song is worn out" (50) - the song's melancholy appeal to a pastoral ideal jars with his present material conditions and his anxieties. Sentiment is certainly present in Kennedy's texts, but it is usually foregrounded as such and represented as a significant cultural factor in Irish-American responses to the past.(9)

Kennedy concentrates on the internal mechanisms of ethnic identity and its historical conditions, aware that he is himself playing a part in the reinvention of the Irish-American past. As a writer he must bear a responsibility for his public part in this process. The admixture of celebration and critique in his texts foregrounds his self-conscious attention to this responsibility. In this, as in much else, his writings are attuned to the constructed and contingent nature and meaning of ethnicity. In Billy and Ironweed the history of Irish-Americans is not merely "there" awaiting rediscovery. In detailing and juxtaposing multiple rememorizations of the ethnic past, both texts question the validity and function of particular categories and cultural representations of historical understanding. At the same time, they take account of the role memory can play in constituting meaningful cultural and historical bearings. In the dialogue between past and present that takes place in memory and hearsay, history will always have to answer to the intimate and the particular.

Notes

(1.) Billy Phelan's Greatest Game will be abbreviated as Billy in the text of this essay. (2.) The character of Patsy McCall is based upon Dan O'Connell, "Boss" of Albany politics from the mid-1920s until his death in 1977. See O, Albany! 43-53, 271-303. (3.) Colin Greer has observed that for established ethnic groups the immigrant past has formed a "heroic base" for ethnic identity, valorizing "the idea of the room for struggle" in America. See Greer, 121. (4.) On the immigrant experience of "culture shock" and its dissipation in ethnic institutions, see Andrew Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation: The American Irish (New York: Quadrangle, 1972). (5.) See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 15-17. (6.) In my comments on ethnic anxiety I am indebted to Michael Fischer's examination of ethnicity as "a deeply rooted emotional component of identity." See Michael M. J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory." (7.) Martin Daugherty is also concerned (though more self-consciously so than Billy) about this sense of absence: he knows "how it is to live in the inescapable presence of the absence of the father" (7). Indeed, his view of Billy as "fully defined at thirty-one" is clearly influenced by his own anxieties, for this is "the age when Martin had been advised by his father that he was a failure" (2). (8.) Kennedy has acknowledged an interest in Latin American "magic realist" writers, but he has also identified a relation between his writings and a tradition of humorous journalism in America - the lyrical treatment of larger-than-life characters in Damon Runyon's sketches and stories would seem especially relevant. See Edward C. Reilly, "On an Averill Park Afternoon with William Kennedy," South Carolina Review 21.2 (Spring 1989):18. (9.) On the continuing importance of "mist of sentiment" in Irish-American visions of the past, see Shaun O'Connell, "Boggy Ways: Notes on Irish-American Culture," Massachusetts Review 26. 2-3 (1985): 379-400.

Works; Cited

Bonetti, Kay. "An Interview with William Kennedy." Missouri Review 8.2 (1985): 71-86. Davis, Natalie Zemon and Randolph Stem. "Introduction." Representations 26 (Spring 1989):1-6. Fischer, Michael M.J. "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Greer, Colin. "The Ethnic Question." The Sixties Without Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, and Frederic Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Kennedy, William. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. 1978. Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1983. _______. Ironweed. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. _______. O, Albany! New York: Viking Penguin, 1983. Popular Memory Group. "Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method." Making Histories: Studies in History- Writing and Politics. Ed. Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz, and David Sutton. London: Hutchison, 1982. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford U P, 1986. _______. "Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity." The Invention of Ethnicity. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford U P, 1989.