Since brunch this past Sunday, I’ve been wondering, “Is this at all how Alexis De Tocqueville felt? Or, less famously, Dervla Murphy? Did they both think like I’m thinking—what will they think?”
Tocqueville wrote in Democracy In America for, at least in part, a French audience, and for sure (I’m reading it now) for a not-American audience. Murphy wrote (among many things she wrote) A Place Apart about Northern Ireland for audiences not in the North.
In A Northern Spring, a good three-quarters of the prose and a healthy dose of the poetry is me writing about the North of Ireland for an American audience. And at brunch this past Sunday I did a frightening thing: I got two advance copies of A Northern Spring into the hands of a couple of acquaintances from the North—Réamonn and Fergal—back in Minneapolis for more cultural exchange (I first met them about this time last year, culturally exchanging).
I didn’t read Murphy’s book till this spring—well after my book was finished—but what I do is akin to what she did. If she invented this genre, I’m following suit. Did she wonder about what those in the North would think? Did Tocqueville wonder about what we would think? I know I do—very much so. I want them (Réamonn, Fergal, the rest) to find my take candid, honest, useful, and as duly generous as I found them to be. And that I may inadvertently not be what I hope I’ve been? Tom Petty was right: “the waiting [to hear what they think] is the hardest part.”
SIDEBAR: Tocqueville was a student at The Fabert School in Metz, France, from 1817-1823, from the ages of 12-18. My great, great grandfather Matthew Lewis was born in Metz in 1825. The population at the time was about 42,000. I wonder if the young Tocqueville ever happened upon the infant Lewis?
PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: Bobby Sands mural on the side of Sinn Fein office headquarters, Belfast; Europa Hotel, Belfast, known as "the most bombed hotel in the world" for the 36 bomb attacks there during the Troubles; a Troubles mural in the Bogside, Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre; another Bogside mural depicting the fourteen killed by British Parachute Regiment soldiers on Bloody Sunday; painting of poet Seamus Heaney in Bittles Bar, Belfast; Troubles mural in Bittles; Derry Girls mural, Derry; Dennis's Wee Shop from Derry Girls, Bogside, Derry; "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" sign, Bogside.
Tocqueville wrote in Democracy In America for, at least in part, a French audience, and for sure (I’m reading it now) for a not-American audience. Murphy wrote (among many things she wrote) A Place Apart about Northern Ireland for audiences not in the North.
In A Northern Spring, a good three-quarters of the prose and a healthy dose of the poetry is me writing about the North of Ireland for an American audience. And at brunch this past Sunday I did a frightening thing: I got two advance copies of A Northern Spring into the hands of a couple of acquaintances from the North—Réamonn and Fergal—back in Minneapolis for more cultural exchange (I first met them about this time last year, culturally exchanging).
I didn’t read Murphy’s book till this spring—well after my book was finished—but what I do is akin to what she did. If she invented this genre, I’m following suit. Did she wonder about what those in the North would think? Did Tocqueville wonder about what we would think? I know I do—very much so. I want them (Réamonn, Fergal, the rest) to find my take candid, honest, useful, and as duly generous as I found them to be. And that I may inadvertently not be what I hope I’ve been? Tom Petty was right: “the waiting [to hear what they think] is the hardest part.”
SIDEBAR: Tocqueville was a student at The Fabert School in Metz, France, from 1817-1823, from the ages of 12-18. My great, great grandfather Matthew Lewis was born in Metz in 1825. The population at the time was about 42,000. I wonder if the young Tocqueville ever happened upon the infant Lewis?
PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: Bobby Sands mural on the side of Sinn Fein office headquarters, Belfast; Europa Hotel, Belfast, known as "the most bombed hotel in the world" for the 36 bomb attacks there during the Troubles; a Troubles mural in the Bogside, Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre; another Bogside mural depicting the fourteen killed by British Parachute Regiment soldiers on Bloody Sunday; painting of poet Seamus Heaney in Bittles Bar, Belfast; Troubles mural in Bittles; Derry Girls mural, Derry; Dennis's Wee Shop from Derry Girls, Bogside, Derry; "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" sign, Bogside.