My grandfather died on the same day as JFK. I was five. Events on television and in our own house merged in my mind until I couldn’t tell the difference between the president who caused the grownups to huddle anxiously in front of the television and the grandfather I had met only once. I stood with my kindergarten classmates praying for the soul of the president and came home to find my mother packing for Florida—leaving us for the first time in our lives—and I believed her tears were as much for Mr. Kennedy as my teacher’s had been.
Over sixty years later, having watched politicians come and go, I wonder whose influence is more lasting: a president’s or a poet’s? My grandfather, Patrick MacGill, wrote fiction, memoir, poetry, and autobiography. A literary festival in his honor is held every year in Glenties, the tiny Irish village where he was born, and this year, thirteen of his descendants—grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-greats—gathered there to attend the forty-fourth edition of the Patrick MacGill Summer School. I was one of them, and it was perhaps the best conference I have ever attended.
Since its first iteration in 1981, the event has been a magnet for politicians, writers, journalists, and poets. The prime minister of Ireland usually makes an appearance, as he did this year; Nobel Laureates (Seamus Heaney, John Hume) and political leaders (Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, even Margaret Heckler, congresswoman from my home city of Fall River, later the U.S. ambassador to Ireland) have been speakers.
But while the speakers were outstanding, what set this conference apart from most I have attended was the audience. Well-informed and highly articulate, they participated without posturing or grandstanding. As an expatriate American, hearing views on the upcoming U.S. elections was particularly fascinating. At the pub on the last night, a man who had been attending for the past twelve years told me it was the only gathering he knew of where the values Patrick MacGill stood for—integrity, conviction, and commitment to social justice—were honestly debated, analyzed, and learned from.
Who was this famous writer most people have never heard of?
Patrick MacGill was a self-taught polymath, the eldest in a large family of devout but unquestioning Catholics. He left home at twelve with only three years of formal schooling to his credit, sent by his desperate parents to the “hiring fair” of Strabane, where they hoped he would get a job and help support the family. Patrick himself referred to it as a slave market—a more apt description for what being hired meant for a twelve-year-old.
His first job required him to work from 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. with miserable food and accommodations. He ran away (illegally) before long and began his life on the road, intermittently working on farms and mines across Ireland and Scotland. He made friends, learned to drink and gamble and fall in love. He gradually grew distant from his family back in Glenties, who never asked about his life or how he was faring, but constantly demanded more money.
Eventually, however, a change came over him: when he had spare cash, he bought books. As his love for language grew, he began to write poems and songs, entertaining his friends by performing them around the fire at night. By the time he became a “navvy” (the nickname given to the navigational engineers who built England’s canals and railroads), he was teaching himself German and French with the aid of dictionaries. He read Les Misérables in French and translated works by La Fontaine and Goethe for his own education.
His toils as a navvy continued, perilous in an era where worker-safety laws did not exist. The ruthlessness of being required to dig tunnels without supports, blast explosives without protection, and watch friends die terrible deaths turned my grandfather into a socialist. His experiences in World War I, in addition to inspiring much of his subsequent poetry and fiction, solidified his political views. Inevitably, he also began to look at the Church, which had until then influenced his language, gestures, beliefs, and biases, with new eyes.
Published in 1914, his autobiographical novel, Children of the Dead End, opens in his own village of Glenties and tells the story of his family’s grinding poverty, due in part to the constant demands of the village priest for larger donations. One of the book’s most heart-rending stories is of the death of his youngest brother, lost because his parents could afford neither a doctor nor the medicine he would have prescribed. In the same book, he describes the plight of women he had befriended on the road, many of whom were forced into prostitution to survive. None of them ever felt they could go home, having “fallen,” and MacGill is scathing in his condemnation of the unforgiving, hypocritical Church that imposed such rigidity.
Children of the Dead End was, for its time, a sensation, selling more than ten thousand copies in its first two weeks and going into multiple reprintings. Predictably, the book did not go down well in Glenties (both the parish priest and the local moneylender were easily recognizable) and the priest banned him from returning to his village. He revisited this expulsion later in the novel Glenmornan, in which the main character is denounced from the pulpit and shamed into leaving.
When we visited Glenties in July, one of my mother’s cousins, now in her eighties, told us that my maternal grandmother, Margaret Gibbons, had appealed to her uncle, James Cardinal Gibbons, to intervene with the bishop of Dublin to lift yet another ban on yet another of my grandfather’s books. For all his faults, Cardinal Gibbons was known to be a champion of the working class. According to cousin Mary Claire, he wrote to Dublin with a veiled hint that as a voting member in the College of Cardinals, the bishop’s advancement was in his hands. The ban was withdrawn.
After the festival, I traveled to meet friends in Edinburgh. Secondhand bookstores were on our itinerary. In the first one we entered, I found two of my grandfather’s books. I mentioned to the owner with delight how I was connected to the author and was touched by her response. “My father revered Patrick MacGill. Dad was Irish, too, and a Communist—your grandfather inspired him.”
He inspires me too. Over one hundred years later, as my son read his autobiography, he kept pausing to marvel at how fresh and contemporary his writing was, and how the issues he wrote about—corruption, injustice, and exploitation—are as compelling today as they were then.
I am now almost the age MacGill was when he died. As I read and re-read the novels and poems I first encountered in my twenties, I reflect on the legacy of this poet-novelist whose death was eclipsed by that of JFK’s. He was an unlikely prophet: an uneducated child laborer who toiled on farms and railroads and fought in a war for an occupying power that despised him and his people. He questioned Britain’s legitimacy in Ireland as fiercely as he criticized the Catholic Church in his own life and he was able to put those questions, doubts, and experiences into books people still read today.
My daughter quoted from his poetry collection Soldier Songs in her PhD dissertation:
“As I listened, I thought of the children of Israel, who hung their harps on the willows and mourned for Babylon.” So wrote Patrick MacGill as a young soldier during the Great War, reflecting on his experience of listening to his British and Irish fellow soldiers sing battle songs in the trenches of France. By drawing an analogy to the Judean exiles in Babylon, he made present an ancient past.
The Clancy Brothers said that the Irish were famous for happy wars and sad love songs. Humor, tragedy, sex, betrayal, music, friendship: Grandpa engaged with all of it, extending the past of his ancestors and the turmoil of his own present into the distant future we are living out today, touching the lives of the great-great-grandchildren he would never meet but in whom he would live on through poetry, song, and story.
