The Look of the Irish (2024)

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The Look of the Irish:
It's a Heritage as Plain as the Nose on a Face

You don't talk much about English faces, Polish faces, Korean facesor Nigerian faces. You never say "He had a face like the map ofBelgium."

But Irish faces are artworks, monuments to Irishness, and we areall critics -- who knows how many people chased Sinn Fein leader GerryAdams around town this week just to see what kind of an Irish face he'dbrought with him. (The face of a tough, smart priest, the youngestpriest ever to be closest to the cardinal, who, in turn, is afraid ofhim and doesn't know why.)

So many Irish faces: "The common classes are strongly marked withthe national peculiarity of features, and by this they are readilyrecognized in other countries." -- "A Pictorial Geography of the World"(1856).

But what is the peculiarity? What is their Irishness?

Among these faces:

Map of Ireland: big chin, thin upper lip, nose of topographicalcomplexity and hooded eyes whose lids seem to cross the pupils on a slowdiagonal -- features almost too big for the face, heavy and quaint likea 1954 Buick Roadmaster.

Goddess Colleen: big-boned, redheaded, like Athena with freckles,skin as pale as Chinese takeout cartons, and a look of splendid uncaringabout their architectural cheekbones.

Black Irish: The same skin without the freckles, and hair that isnot dark but black, Spanish bullfighter black, telephone black, vestmentblack, a blackness said to come from survivors of the Spanish Armada,but come on, now. The Black Irish sometimes have quick eyes like theredhead goddesses, suggesting that they're thinking a little faster thanyou're talking.

Wait-and-See: Dark eyes and dark mouths, dark as bruises. They allslope down like chevrons. These faces give away precisely nothing. Theymake you worry they know something you don't. Georgia O'Keeffe had alittle of that in her face -- a dark, hard thing.

Leprechaun: Wide, with no upper lip at all, but a long, full lowerone, and slanting eyes.

Tip O'Neill: Faces of this model, named for the late speaker of theHouse, cannot be imagined young. They are huge, like barns shingled withjowls, layer on layer, chin on chin, eye bags on eye bags, sometimeswith the vast, red nose that has provoked the definition of anIrishman as "Thirty pounds of face and 40 pounds of liver."

The Irish do blue eyes very well. They have the best white hair inthe world. These are faces that can be so immediate, so 3-D, that whenyou talk with them they seem to be coming toward you without evergetting any closer.

But all we are doing is betraying the Irish yet again by castingthem into stereotypes.

The ultimate travesty was once known as the stage Irishman. Anaccount in 1913 said: "His hair is of a fiery red, he is rosy-cheeked,massive, and whiskey-loving. His face is one of simian bestial*ty, withan expression of diabolical archness written all over it." The moviesare full of tweed-capped schemers with crooked grins, and wisdomaccompanied by a wink: "The Informer," with Victor McLaglen; "Going MyWay," with Bing Crosby; "The Luck of the Irish," with Tyrone Power; "Topo' the Morning," with Bing Crosby; and Walt Disney's "Darby O'Gill andthe Little People," with Sean Connery -- all the cliches of the romanceof the Irish.

But the brogue-and-shillelagh romance has nothing to do with theIrishness you see instantly in the faces of John Kennedy, MaureenO'Hara, Sinead O'Connor, Tom Brokaw, Richard Daley, Pat Nixon, PhilDonahue, Cardinal Spellman, Jimmy Cagney, Joe McCarthy, Jimmy Breslin,Sandra Day O'Connor, Jackie Gleason, Mia Farrow, F. Scott Fitzgerald,Peter O'Toole, Jack Dempsey, Helen Hayes, Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracyor Brooke Shields, to take from a list of names in "The Book of IrishAmericans."

Is it the expression on the face? Like Italian faces, the Irishones seem to have a wisdom -- they've seen the worst the world can dishout, the difference being that the Irish are still proud of being toughenough to eat it. Ah, the perversity of it all. Teddy Kennedy tellsabout the Irishman jailed for a month for stealing a ham. After threeweeks, his wife asks the judge to free him.

"Is he good to you?" the judge asks.

"No, sir, he isn't," says the wife.

"Does he treat the children well?"

"No, sir, he's mean to them."

"Why on Earth do you want him back again?"

"Well, to tell the truth, Judge -- we're about to run out of ham."

Here, of course, is the stereotypical domineering Irish mother, andthe scoundrel father.

Much has been written on Irishness, much of it derogatory.

In 416, Saint Jerome wrote of an Irishman who argued with him: "Anignorant calumniator . . . full of Irish porridge."

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson said: "The Irish are a fairpeople; they never speak well of one another."

In 1808, J.W. Croker wrote in "A Sketch of the State of Ireland"that the Irish are "restless yet indolent, shrewd and indiscreet,impetuous, impatient, and improvident, instinctively brave,thoughtlessly generous, quick to resent and forgive offenses, to formand renounce friendships."

In 1851, the Rev. Theobald Mathew in the New York Tribune, ondrunken Irish feuding: "I implore you to discard forever . . . thosefactious broils (too often, alas, the fruits of intemperance) in whichour country is disgraced."

In 1922, Edmund Wilson wrote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, America'sfirst major Irish Catholic novelist, that "like the Irish, Fitzgerald isromantic, but also cynical about romance; he is bitter as well asecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role ofthe playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, alittle malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has an Irish giftfor turning language into something iridescent and surprising."

As for a face, Fitzgerald had a beautiful, fragile one, the face"of an easily frightened angel," as Hemingway said.

In 1963 William Shannon wrote in "The American Irish" of novelistJohn O'Hara: "Hard-drinking, quick to take offense, carrying a largeIrish chip on his shoulder, he was a young country-club buck strivingfor big-town sophistication in a raccoon coat and a button-down shirtfrom Brooks Brothers. But, underneath, there was genuine talent."

O'Hara's face was of the Map of Ireland variety.

Some Irish faces today still look like they're caught in the19th century, as if they've escaped from daguerreotypes or oldorthographic film shots (like Mathew Brady's of the Civil War, withtheir empty white skies) of hapless, sunstruck rebels about to be hangedor grimy barefoot women surrounded by grimier children who have whatPhilip Larkin called "shallow, violent eyes." Like so many of theircountrymen after centuries of British tyranny, they have the ephemeral,fatalist, yet perversely optimistic faces that seem to say: "A brokenleg! Be glad you didn't break them both. Then you couldn't have crawledout of the bog and you'd have died for sure."

You look at pictures of the Irish during the Great Famine's potatoblight, when a million of 8 million people died while the Britishshipped potatoes out of the country. You see the horrible blend ofignorance and cynicism that is the mark of the oppressed. And you seethe extreme poverty that's like extreme old age -- it makes whoeversuffers it raceless and placeless, universal citizens, members of theworldwide nation of the Poor and Downtrodden. They could be refugeeTibetans or captured Confederates or American Indians.

William Shannon -- a friend of the Kennedys who was ambassador toIreland -- writes: "Every Irishman was prepared to shake hands withDoom, since that gentleman had been so frequent a visitor in the past.He had no difficulty believing Christianity's doctrines of evil andoriginal sin. These were the most congenial truths of his religion. . .. Melancholy . . . was a common cast of mind, death familiar and evenlooked forward to."

Deaths and wakes are an art form with the Irish, who traipse pastthe coffin in the heft of their mourning clothes. Among the older ones,there may be flasks and wailing.

Danny Coleman, who owns the Dubliner restaurant and the PhoenixPark Hotel near Union Station, says: "You know what they call theobituaries, don't you? The Irish sports page. Back home in Syracuse, mybrother Michael goes to four and five wakes a week. Wouldn't miss one. Isay, Michael, who's this one for?' He says, That guy's father was ourmailman when we were little. I think the family should be represented.'"

Immigrant Irish are sometimes startled by St. Patrick's Daygreen beer, green neckties, green bagels, green leprechaun hats, greenshamrocks, jig-dancing, shillelagh toting and the occasional outburst offistfighting and puking in the gutters. Erin go bragh. Leprechaun lawnornaments. The smarminess of the Irish Spring soap ads. Winking,drinking, shuffling, snuffling Irish in ads and movies. Running "TheQuiet Man" on TV on St. Patrick's Day the way "It's a Wonderful Life" ison at Christmas. Wall plaques reading "May the road rise to meet you.May the wind be always at your back, the sun shine warm upon . . . ,etc." And they're all descended from kings! King Niall, Shane the Proud,Brian Boru, Rory O'Connor: At various times Ireland has been dividedinto as many as nine kingdoms, hence many kings, hence many genealogiesand crested rings belonging to the American Irish.

This is the romance, and it goes on and on, even though, as Yeatssaid, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone."

"Of all the tricks which the Irish nation have played on theslow-witted Saxon, the most outrageous is the palming off on him of theimaginary Irishman of romance. The worst of it is that . . . theinsubstantial fancies of the novelists and music-hall songwriters of onegeneration are apt to become the unpleasant and mischievous realities ofthe next." -- George Bernard Shaw.

There is a bleak romance of perversity, as seen recently in the facesof a great movie, "The Commitments," in which a group of young peoplerise from the sullen grime of North Dublin with their soul music band,then ruin it all with jealousy, egotism, alcohol, blarney, impossibleexpectations and, at root, the belief in the inevitability of failure.

"The Irish are great at supporting each other when they're down,but if you start to rise up they knock you down," says Lorna Hovell,born in Ireland and now director of sales at the Phoenix Park Hotel.

There is an even bleaker romance of the Irish Republican Army too,a romance of revenge and the revolution that ended for most Irishmen inthe 1920s. Bombings and shootings, mortarings and kneecappings whilemoney and guns are gathered in New York and Boston to support theski-masked men with machine guns, their faces wracked with thesubliminal dysplasia of defiance when they're arrested and we see themin the newspapers.

Gerry Adams, head of the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, has beenin Washington, inching his way toward legitimacy, and opening an officehe decribed as a "diplomatic mission."

A Britisher at Adams's press conference at the Capital Hiltondrawled: "Will you have a military attache?"

Adams has mastered the look of lightly bearded, thick-spectacledgentleness one associates with peacemakers or saving the whales, but itseemed a cover, a veneer like the leather stretched around a blackjack.Then again, he's in a tough business.

Like a lot of native Irish, he seemed less Irish than the AmericanIrish in the room with their shamrock pins, members of the Ancient Orderof Hibernians doing slow intense prowls over the television cables,shaking hands and talking as if Everything Was Understood."

"A lot of them have been activists," said Rep. Thomas Manton of NewYork. "There are a lot of memories of a rural Ireland and a lost timethat may never have existed."

On his way out of the room, Adams said: "People are always sayingthe Irish Americans are romantics. I've never found it to be true."

He walked off in a broil of cameras and lights, and something abouthim suggested that through an act of will he may have given up watchingfor the sort of violence he's trying to quell -- the romance of destiny,fatalism, doom.

Rock musician Bob Geldof was quoted in the Irish Echo as saying:"Irish Americans are no more Irish than black Americans are Africans."

Anne Marie Schmidt, a Washington restaurant manager from Dublin,says of Irish Americans: "We don't necessarily call them Irish."

There are 5 million Irish in Ireland, north and south. There are 39million Irish in America -- almost one out of six Americans claimedIrish ancestry in the 1990 census. Whose Irish are the real Irish?

The faces are everywhere in America.

Side-of-beef faces, faces with fabulously understated blond hair of acolor James Joyce described as "oakpale." Smiling mouths and mournfuleyes. Mournful mouths and smiling eyes. Faces of bitter precision thatlook right in octagonal rimless glasses. Tired women's faces that knowwhat's going to happen next, because it's all happened to them before.Pink, round, breathless faces. Knife-edge faces on altar boys gone bad.Flat, merciless faces of mama's boys. Proud, double-chinned fathersstanding next to daughters in new nuns' habits. Faces that capture thecamera as much as it captures them. Easter portraits with hundreds ofchildren arranged by height, like organ pipes, and the mother holding ababy -- you can almost smell the boiled food and the candles.

And the names! What is it about Irish names, particularly boys'names, regardless of last names? Kevin Shapiro, Brian Priebowicz, BarryFleming, Murphy Brown, Ryan Ostroff, Tyrone Washington and, for girls,Eileen, Shaun and the popular Kelly, as in Kelly Nguyen. You get thefeeling it's the mothers who give them to the sons, at least -- thatthey like the thought of having a Brian or Kevin for a son -- loyal,brooding, unpredictable, angry, funny, cute, solemn and chaste, even ifhe takes a drink now and then.

Odd -- there are 58 million Americans who claimed German ancestryon the census, but we don't have our schools filling up with Helmuts andKarl-Heinzes.

Wouldn't a lot of mothers choose Irish faces for their children too?

But who would choose the sorrows that made them?