Reading Elizabeth Cullinan is for me both a pleasurable and a painful experience. Pleasurable because of the fineness of the style, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” But painful because she so perfectly captures the midcentury Irish-American habit of mistrusting joy, the acceptance of begrudgement, the fear of taking too much that results, finally, in taking nothing. My heart sank with remembered despair at her description of Catholic school etiquette in “Dreaming”:
Silence and restraint were drummed in so constantly as to seem to prevail. In the opinion of the nuns, self-expression needed no encouragement. Noises heard in the corridor…were faint, like the step of a solitary child on the stone stairs or on the wooden floor, going with a message from one classroom to another. Or there were solid heavy sounds—a whole class tramping up or down stairs, or reciting the times table or a spelling lesson, or learning a hymn; bodies moving and voices being raised in unison—another kind of silence.
“Dreaming” appears at the end of Cullinan’s 1977 collection Yellow Roses, now newly reissued by Fordham University Press. The story traces a young girl’s change of climate from her parochial school to a settlement house where the teachers and students, mostly Jewish, actually do encourage self-expression. To be called a dreamer is not a criticism, whereas the nuns were likely to say “Stop woolgathering…pay attention…keep your head where it belongs.” (I was a teenager before I understood that being called sensitive was not a castigation—“You’re so goddamn sensitive”—and that indeed there was a possible alternative version of the sentence: “You are wonderfully sensitive.”)
Who is to blame? The colonizing British? The repressive Church? The overlay of famine terror, famine shame? The genetic disposition toward alcoholism or depression? All of these and none, and yet the culture has survived, and more. Quite often it has thrived, and never lost its color.
To write about the Irish is to risk falling into several traps. There is, of course, sentimentality: weren’t they brave, weren’t they daring, think of all they had to endure, and they were victorious. Or they were heroically self-sacrificing; they were Davids overmastered by Goliaths. The temptation is to see them against the larger, alien world. The Protestant world that always has a leg up, a foot keeping the door tight shut, for fear that these others might be let in.
This is not Cullinan’s way. Her characters get out of the neighborhood, out of the parish; they can be pulled back, but that’s not the last word. In these stories, the women are their own worst enemies. Over and over, they engage in unhappy love affairs with married men. I want to shake these women and say: What did you think was going to happen? You want sex, and even that is a daring act for someone like you—but you know that this affair is not going to turn out well.
There is a kind of exhaustion throughout the stories, the struggle to hold on to family but to keep them at arm’s length emotionally: a tense necessity, for they are ready to suck the escapee back into the hole from which she has only just laboriously climbed. Sometimes mothers are loving but they are of no help. There is no help. Except for the visions that break through, a larger luminous reality that offers only hints. But how lovely the hints, how piercingly valuable.
If I had to choose what to name as Cullinan’s singular gift, I would say it is an ability to combine a peerless eye for ordinary corporeal detail, and a willingness to make large, abstract, and even metaphysical pronouncements. This combination is masterfully realized in her story “The Perfect Crime.” It begins on a ferry. Nora, the central character, is on her way to visit her parents, who have a cottage in this vacation community. She describes the problems of vacation provisioning:
If you were shopping for beer, quinine water, bitters, cans of anchovies or sardines or smoked oysters, salted nuts, pretzels, cheese spread, soda crackers...sunburn lotion, or aspirin, you were all right…if you wanted milk, eggs, bacon, bread, butter…you were still all right. But anything more, anything you could put together and seriously call dinner, had to be ordered from the mainland and shipped over by ferry in cardboard cartons that were always in danger of splitting or getting lost in the shuffle.
One of her fellow passengers on the ferry is an old woman in black, carrying what surely is a cake in a white cardboard box tied with string.
She was the ideal mystery woman...an apparition, set up for the benefit of whoever was there to receive her meaning, which, like most revelations, dealt with essentials: You were born into the world…you grew old and accepted it and maybe were even grateful…to be released from the obligations of having to please and to charm, grateful to be allowed to watch and be still, grateful to have a small outing on a beautiful day and to be able to bring a cake.
In the course of her trip from the ferry to the cottage, several images present themselves to Nora and, exhausted from her train trip and lulled by her parents’ familiar kindness, she sees that the man who delivers the canisters of gas looks exactly like Picasso. And she has her vision: “Resemblances, contrasts, contradictions, coincidence, anomaly, incongruity, ambiguity—the spirit that moves the world has these wonderful resources with which to confound us.”
But such raptures are anomalous in Cullinan’s stories. Even small pleasures are to be feared, as they are so easily lost or distorted. Better to renounce them on one’s own before they are stolen or corrupted. In the heartbreaking “In the Summerhouse,” which is about a mother and daughter’s journey to visit their husband/father in a mental hospital, the daughter, Angela, shrugs off the difficulty of having to give up her plans to travel to bail her family out “because there was no choice.”
Once again, large ideas are supported by a firm foundation of precise observation. The experience of riding in a too cold air-conditioned train after being outside in an oppressive heat is expertly evoked. Angela and her mother sit near the window: “The glass had been hit—probably by a rock thrown on a dark evening by some poverty-stricken child at the lucky commuters…. The rock had left a mark like a bullet hole, with a sunburst of icy cracks that gave Angela the feeling that the freezing inside of the train and the ninety-degree weather outside were one and the same sensation. Like chills and fever, she thought, and rubbed her arms.” As they approach the converted mansion that is now a mental hospital, Angela notes that the house was probably once grand and stately and safe—but “what house was safe…or couldn’t suddenly turn out to be some sort of madhouse.” The visit, so hard won, so anticipated, goes badly. Everyone has done their best, but their best has done no good.
Part of the sadness that is the basso continuo of these stories is the heroines’ consistent loneliness. These women seem to have no friends. They have families. They have lovers. But they are first, foremost, and finally alone. I thought of another master chronicler of loneliness who also worked at the New Yorker, Maeve Brennan. Both women silenced themselves prematurely. Perhaps the greatest sadness for me in reading Elizabeth Cullinan is to understand how young she was when she stopped publishing: her last book appeared in 1982 (she died in 2020).
The late 1970s and early ’80s were a golden time for women writers, a brief window that lasted for less than a decade, during which people seemed to be interested in what we were saying. It was the cultural fruit that grew from the tree of feminism, but Cullinan was determined not to call herself a feminist.
I met her once, in 1979. She was teaching at UMass Amherst and I at Amherst College. I was thrilled when she phoned to invite me to lunch. I knew that I owed her a great debt of gratitude. It was her novel House of Gold that gave me the assurance that I could write my own novel of Irish-American life. I could not have written Final Payments without her invisible presence behind me: the older sister who told me that there was a way. I expressed my gratitude, and she seemed pleased. She was gracious, but distant, and I was surprised at the anger that flared when she talked about the women’s movement. I understood its source: a lot of bad writing was going around under the banner of feminism—but a lot of good writing was going on too. These were the years when Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Marilynne Robinson were receiving the acclaim they would not have ten years previously. But I had no impulse to argue with her. I was only grateful. And I remember being sorry for her when we parted. She seemed to carry loneliness around her like a thin, loose shawl of a muted color, perhaps a bluish gray, a light violet, a smoky rose.
How good it is to have her work available to her old admirers and, one hopes, new audiences. She may not have been able to ask for what she needed, but we can thank her for what she has given us to satisfy needs that perhaps we didn’t even know—as she did—how to name.
Yellow Roses
Elizabeth Cullinan
Fordham University Press
$19.95 | 208 pp.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
