A Better Book There Never Was: Jim Tully’s “Shanty Irish”

If you ever watched Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series about the Civil War, you might recall hearing excerpts read from a book called “Co. Aytch.” “Co. Aytch”: A Side Show of the Big Show (the title refers to the author’s unit–Company H) is the memoir of an eloquent and perceptive Confederate soldier named Sam Watkins. Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With The Wind, said of Co. Aytch that “a better book there never was.” For me that kind of praise came to mind when I recently finished reading Jim Tully’s autobiographical novel Shanty Irish. 

Both “Co. Aytch” (1882) and Shanty Irish (1928) feature a straightforward, satisfying narrative, richness of description, masterful evocation of felt experience, and a brisk narrative pace that pulls readers in and carries them along to a powerful conclusion. Both books have the wisdom and understanding of men who have digested the experiences they write about and demonstrate compassion for those whose tales they tell. Books like these that strike deep in our hearts summon to my mind exactly Margaret Mitchell’s kind of praise, although we may feel such a way towards many well-told stories: “a better book there never was.”

Jim Tully was a novelist, short story writer and journalist popular during the Twenties and Thirties. He has not received the credit due him for his hand in creating and popularizing the punchy, short-and-tight hardboiled style associated with writers such as Hemingway, Hammett and Cain. Despite the success he enjoyed and the influence he had on the hardboiled style in American writing, Tully fell into obscurity, although as is so often the case, devoted readers and writers have kept his legacy alive. In the past ten years Jim Tully has had a long overdue revival. Paul J. Bauer’s and Mark Dawidziak’s excellent biography Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, was published by Kent State University Press in 2011, following the reprint of a number of Tully’s works by Kent State University Press’s Black Squirrel imprint in 2008 and 2009.

Tully’s autobiographical novel chronicles his upbringing and the lives of his impoverished Irish-American family in rural northwest Ohio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the story of a family who knows too well the bleak poverty and limited opportunity experienced by millions of Americans during this time. The book is episodic in nature. It follows Tully from his childhood in St. Marys, Ohio to his departure from town for a life on the road. Most of the book’s action revolves around Tully’s relatives and their interactions among themselves and with townspeople. At various points Tully relates his own story, and these interludes are markers recording different stages of his development against the backdrop of family events.

Tully creates especially memorable portraits of his parents, his paternal grandfather Hugh Tully, his sister Virginia, and his maternal uncle John Lawler, a horse thief who served a stretch in the Ohio Penitentiary and ended his days a respectable banker in Canada. Hugh Tully is the centerpiece character of the book and the family member who serves as an anchor for young Jim Tully. Hugh Tully nearly runs away with the story. He surfaces throughout the narrative, telling wild tales, giving his grandson advice and consuming gallons of whiskey. Hugh Tully is a man “capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.” A number of other interesting characters, including townspeople, a prison warden and even the beloved Tully family dog Monk, are rendered in short but colorful sketches.

Tully’s book is also a firsthand account of the more obscure Catholic Irish in American history. Many of us are familiar with the stories of the urban Irish Catholics who became municipal workers, policemen, politicians, and domestics. We do not hear enough about those other Irish Catholics—the ones who journeyed into the rural American interior, the men who dug the ditches and canals and built the railroads, the women who became domestics, waitresses and factory workers outside the urban centers. Tully’s family can be found among these members of the Irish-American diaspora who traveled into the hinterland.

Tully biographers Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak have aptly described Jim Tully as “the greatest long shot in American literature.” His circumstances could be said to have conspired against Tully having any kind of literary career or even acquiring an education. He was born in St. Marys, Ohio in Auglaize County in the northwestern section of the state on June 3, 1886. One of six children, he came from Irish stock on both sides of his family. His father, also named Jim, dug ditches for a living as did Tully’s paternal grandfather Hugh, an immigrant from County Donegal. This area in northwestern Ohio was once the site of the “Great Black Swamp,” a vast area of marshland that was drained and transformed into rich farm country. Ditching and canal digging were common jobs for Irish immigrants in Ohio. Many Irishmen labored to dig the Miami and Erie Canal, and the St. Marys Reservoir, now known as Grand Lake St. Marys, was created to help provide water for the canal. Tully grew up near the reservoir.

His mother, the child of parents from County Kildare, was born in Butler County, Ohio above Cincinnati and named Maria Bridget Lawler, but was known simply as “Biddy.” She died when Jim Tully was only a month short of his seventh birthday, a death for which Tully blamed himself as he gave his thirsty mother water on her sickbed when she asked for it although the doctor had ordered her to have none. Tully paints himself in Shanty Irish as having knowingly disobeyed at his mother’s request, but according to the recent biography, Tully had been the only family member not told about the doctor’s prohibition. Either way, Jim Tully carried a burden of guilt in connection with his mother’s death. With his wife dead and several older children to raise, Jim Tully’s father sent the boy and two of his brothers to St. Joseph’s Orphanage in the Cincinnati neighborhood known as Cumminsville (now called Northside) where Tully spent six years of his childhood.

While there were some basic compensations at the orphanage—Tully was schooled, fed, clothed and sheltered—his sojourn there was miserable, and his account of this time in Shanty Irish is mostly given to his eventual release from the place. His brothers were eventually pulled from the orphanage after three years to work as bound boys for farmers, leaving Jim on his own at St. Joseph’s. Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak treat Tully’s time at St. Joseph’s more at length in their biography of the writer. Tully’s father never came to visit Tully or his brothers when they were in the orphanage. Tully omits from Shanty Irish the year he spent after leaving the orphanage working as a bound boy himself for a mean farmer. Tully finally had enough and ran away, deciding not long after to go on the road after a period spent working back in St. Marys. If anyone truly had it rough growing up, it was young Jim Tully.

After six years Tully was pulled from the orphanage by two of his siblings. He returned home to St. Marys, where he was eventually reunited with his emotionally distant father and lived with his siblings in poverty. He took jobs as a dishwasher and chainmaker. By the end of the book he is ready to go on the road, where he will spend the next six years of his life as a hobo, manual laborer, circus roustabout, boxer and tree surgeon.

During this time of wandering the country Tully eked out an education by reading in public libraries. He also learned hard lessons about life—after having encountered plenty already in St. Marys–in the hobo jungles, circus camps, brothels, boxing rings, saloons and other rough territory out on the road. He began writing poetry and published some in Ohio newspapers. He married and settled for a time in Kent, Ohio, but then headed west to California where he worked as a tree surgeon there and in other places around the country after quitting the boxing ring. A blow to the head that left Tully unconscious for twenty-four hours motivated Tully to leave the squared circle.

The boy from St. Marys continued to write, carving out time when he could and seeking out advice. Tully worked as a government chain inspector during World War One. He completed and published his first book, Emmett Lawler, in 1922, then began turning out articles and stories to provide more income. Tully became a publicity man for Charlie Chaplin for a while, then returned to freelance writing, composing articles about Hollywood people while writing the novels and stories that brought him to the wider reading public.

But a man who had cut his teeth in rural poverty and seen the worst of America had no desire to write puff pieces about celebrities. He wrote about them as real people from the perspective of a journalist who desired to write honestly about life. For this he found some friends in Hollywood who valued an honest writer, but he was disliked and feared by others.

Tully produced hundreds of articles and became a friend of writers and editors such as Rupert Hughes and H.L. Mencken. Beggars of Life, a powerful work about hobo life, appeared in 1924. Jarnegan, one of the first novels about the fantasy wonderland of Hollywood, appeared in 1926 and was followed by another autobiographical work called Circus Parade in 1927. One year later Tully’s Shanty Irish appeared.

Reviews were positive. Upton Sinclair, a man who had once gotten into a bitter dispute with Mencken and Tully that nearly resulted in legal action, wrote, “Shanty Irish is a chunk of real life. It made me feel human and humble, which is good for anybody.” Tully’s friend H.L. Mencken wrote that Tully “has gone far beyond any of his work of the past.” Tully wrote of himself that he had “a capacity for remembered sorrow.” Shanty Irish is indeed—or “indade,” as Hugh Tully might say—a tale of remembered sorrow, but also one rich in humor, a book that had me laughing out loud at times. And when it came to an end I cried—for Jim Tully, for Hugh, for Biddy, for all of these characters, for myself and everyone else and for the lostness we all feel in this world.

The book is full of life’s richness and heartache. The hardness of human existence is there, but the book is also a testament to the powers of compassion and mercy that can still be found even in the roughest of situations. Shanty Irish is born out of an oral tradition. At times I was reminded of the work of Sherwood Anderson, which is also deeply rooted in oral culture and storytellers. We can see this oral foundation in the primacy of Hugh Tully’s barroom stories and tall tales, but also in the solid but rough-hewn episodic shape of the narrative itself, a book that doubles back occasionally to earlier events and meanders down some side roads at times, but ultimately keeps moving to a powerful conclusion.

It is revealed in the telling: I had a powerful sense while reading this book of Tully himself seated at an old tavern table or bar worn smooth over the years as he tells these stories, a glass of Old Hennessy at his side. His narrative voice has a directness about it that is delivered with a kind of authoritative finality, the testament of a witness. This is the work of a man who has lived with this material for a long time, carefully digested it and rendered it into a work of fiction.

Despite its rootedness in actual people and events, Shanty Irish is still a novel. Real people and situations have been transfigured by the novelist’s craft. The character of Hugh Tully is embellished to some degree. Events are foregrounded and highlighted in swift moving episodes that move rapidly across time. Tully is able to evoke essential elements in his characters with just a few brushstrokes. But the unmistakable feel of truth is all right there.

I mentioned that Hugh Tully anchors the book, and the narrative begins with him. Tully, his father and grandfather are seated in a bar, and the old man speaks of Ireland. Hugh Tully is a man whose tall tales are interwoven with accounts of actual events. A particularly powerful section in this early part of the book is Hugh’s descriptions of suffering during the Irish Potato Famine.

Soon the book shifts to an account of Tully’s mother and life on their rundown farm, but Hugh Tully surfaces again midway through the narrative and occupies an increasing amount of attention after Jim Tully’s return from the orphanage.

The following passage gives a good flavor of Hugh Tully’s voice and the observations he shares with his grandson. Tully is a teenage boy at this point working a lousy job as a dishwasher in town and frustrated by frequent teasing from many of the restaurant patrons. A word about this excerpt and the other in this post: much of Shanty Irish is in the form of short paragraphs, some of them only one sentence long. This is the reason for the typographical format of these excerpts in WordPress.

Here is the old man and boy:

“Come fer a long walk wit’ me,” he beseeched, “It’ll be undher the moon on the dark streets, an’ no one will see an old man an’ his boy.” As if to ease my heart, he talked constantly.
“You shouldn’t be washin’ daishes. Yere too wild a bird for so greasy a cage–”
“We’re both savages me boy—did ye iver think of that—well no—yere too young—but it’s much I know of Ireland and her payple—you an’ me come out of mud huts—our payple were dumber than the hogs they killed for the praist—indade, an’ I know—we are the Red Irish—wit’ the angry eyes an’ the bleuit faces. We were little more than two-legged cattle held together by the Holy Mither Church—a hundred years ago—we’re Danes an’ Irish, me boy—the descindents of big red Danes who traveled the says in canoes—an’ who came into Ireland an’ had their way wit’ the lovely girls—a kind fate for a Dane–’’
The old man stumbled at the curb. “Why in the hill ye have to stip up an’ down like a horse is more than I know in this town—they git enough money outta the saloons to have dacent streets.”
He recovered his equilibrium when he saw me smile.
“Laugh at yere old granddad an’ he’ll till ye no more about Ireland.”
“I’m sorry, Grandad,” I said quickly. “Please go on.”
“There’s nothing to go on to now, me boy, excipt to tell ye niver trust a woman an’ walk on yere heels round the dead—yere old Grandaddy knows things. He kin lie in bed at night an’ hear the world go round.”

Hugh Tully is a great character. Some chapters are completely given to the old man and his hijinks. Two highlights in the center of the narrative include a wake Hugh gives for one of his friends. Another is a two-chapter account of Hugh’s run-in with a one-legged con artist with a level of blarney who gives Hugh a run for his money, followed by a drinking contest between Hugh and the fraud. These chapters are hugely entertaining and small masterpieces of comic writing.

Religion, an archetypal Irish and Irish-American concern, is woven into the thread of Shanty Irish. Conflict threatens the Lawler family at one point when Biddy’s sister begins attending a Methodist church, so her father and brothers decide to intervene in this apostasy in a memorable episode. Politics, another traditional Irish and Irish-American domain, isn’t dealt with as much in the novel except for some discussion of disputes over the reservoir and the tyranny of the British, although Grover Cleveland, the two-term Democratic President whose two non-consecutive terms interrupted Republican dominance in the late 1800s, comes in for high praise from Hugh Tully: “…….he’s a MAN–God love the big belly of him, an’ the big brain—he’s the best dimmycrat of thim all.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the book has its robust comedy, it is also full of sadness, conflict and loss. Tully’s family loses their cabin home to fire. Biddy’s parents lose their farm, and their son John Lawler becomes a criminal and is sent off to the Ohio Penitentiary. He returns home from the prison to bid his family farewell. He is concerned there may still be charges against him for some crimes in Illinois.

The scene where the family gathers together on a stormy night before John Lawler departs hidden in a wagon is a powerful rendition of farewell that has echoes of the themes of exile, removal, and the threat of incarceration that are part of the Irish experience. Tully also writes movingly of his mother, a sensitive and imaginative woman who tells her son wonderful tales. In her the old Celtic pagan traditions and lore of rural Ireland are fused with a deeply Catholic sensibility. Her death destabilizes the family.

This destabilization results in large part from the character of Tully’s father, a man whose legacy Tully struggled with his entire life. The man’s nature was complex. Tully describes him as a man who “had all the poverty, children, and work he could manage.” I noted earlier that the elder Jim Tully never visited his sons when they were in the orphanage, and following a brief reunion after young Jim’s return to St. Marys, the father is gone again. When he saw his father for the first time after leaving St. Joseph’s, Tully writes that “He greeted me with no concern when he met me with my grandfather.” One legacy he does pass on to his son is a love of reading. He bequeaths a number of paperback books to young Jim.

Tully treats his father in a chapter entitled “A Man Without Tears.” Here is our introduction to the elder Jim Tully:

A wife, six children, two cows, one hog, a blind mare and a sense of sad humor, were my father’s possessions.
We lived in a log house, in and out the windows of which the crows of trouble flew.
My father was a gorilla-built man. His arms were long and crooked. The ends of a carrot-shaped mustache touched his shoulder blades. It gave his mouth an appearance of ferocity not in the heart. Squat, agile, and muscular, he weighed nearly one hundred and ninety pounds. His shoulders were early stooped, as from carrying the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants.
A man of some imagination, he loved the tingle of warm liquor in his blood. He was for fifty years a ditch digger.

A little further on we learn some more:

At heart my father was an agnostic without knowing it. His wife relied too much on God. He did not interfere.
Aware of the trap in which life had caught him, he bowed to his peasant futility like a gentleman.
He treated his children like unavoidable evils, and deserted them early.
Violating all rules of health, he was never ill.
He would read by the hour. Whether it helped him mentally, I know not. With but one exception, he was a man who never made comment.
He was nearsighted. When reading, he never moved his eyes. A country newspaper, a frayed volume of Shakespeare, or a medical almanac, it moved backward and forward within two inches of his left eye.
He would give his last dollar away—and take another man’s last dollar without compunction. He gave away his money to the person nearest him at the time.
He was always in debt.
He was a man whom calamity followed.

The characters in Shanty Irish absorb the hammer blows of fortune and environment. There is little of upward mobility in this world. Life is often a grim business offset only by fleeting moments of beauty, but mostly by drink and the promise of an eternal reward. Sensitive, perceptive spirits can still be found. One is Tully’s mother, a woman with “all the moods of April” who weeps when frost destroys some flowers she has carefully nurtured. “She cried over them as though they were dead children,” writes Tully. On the night he leaves Ohio forever, her brother John Lawler the convict tells her, “yere too white an egg for a black nest—may your bed be made of roses in heaven.”

Endurance and toughness are common virtues among the people of Shanty Irish. One remarkable scene in the book is that of John Lawler’s arrival at the Ohio Penitentiary. The warden solemnly imparts to Lawler what he needs to do in prison to survive. Lawler listens carefully before enduring fifteen years of soul-crushing prison life. Another remarkable character is Tully’s sister Virginia. She is betrayed and abandoned by her lover and others she cares for, but she soldiers on. She was someone who always looked out for and believed in her brother Jim.

In Shanty Irish we read the stories of people undone by drink and desperation. Tully even includes a story about a prosperous Irish-American lawyer in St. Marys whose life goes to pieces after an adulterous affair, and he devotes a chapter called “Good-Bye Nellie!” to the story of “Blinky” Morgan, a convict executed by the state of Ohio who declared his innocence to the end. John Lawler was a trusty serving on the Ohio pen’s death row when Morgan was hanged. John Lawler often got to know these men to some degree, so it is possible he had contact with the condemned man. Morgan’s story seems to be a metaphor for Tully of the weird and inscrutable twists of fate that can befall anyone, although Morgan is also presented as a model of grace under pressure and dignity when facing death. His last words when the rope dropped were “Good-Bye Nellie!”

While the world’s unforgiving hardness is found throughout Shanty Irish, so is sensitivity and compassion. Despite the rough lives these characters endure, a sense of an uncanny beauty in life permeates its pages. The acts of kindness stand out like stars among the dark sky of suffering that looms over them. One can still feel all these years later the appreciation Tully had for a woman who fed and sheltered Tully and Virginia when they went searching for their father after Tully’s return from the orphanage. They went looking for him at a hotel forty miles from St. Marys and found him gone once again. She took them in them and fed them, then purchased train fare so they could return home. Virginia later sent her some money, which the woman returned. There’s a role model for us all.

Reading Shanty Irish has not only been a pleasure, it has also “made me feel humble and human” as it did Upton Sinclair. Anyone who enjoys books can celebrate the revival of Tully and his work. I’ll leave the final word to director, screenwriter and novelist John Sayles and his concluding sentence in his foreword to the Kent State reprint of Shanty Irish: “That Jim Tully wrote at all was a miracle. That he wrote so well is a gift to the world.”

Patrick Kerin

 

 

Sources:

Shanty Irish by Jim Tully. Foreword by John Sayles with an introduction by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak. Black Squirrel Books (Kent State University Press), Kent, Ohio, 2009.

Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak. Foreword by Ken Burns. The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio. 2011. Anyone seeking biographical material on Tully will be well served by this work.

Ghosts: Ohio’s Haunted Landscapes, Lost Arts & Forgotten Places by Randy McNutt. Orange Frazer Press, Wilmington, Ohio. 1996.

Photo credit for concluding photo: IndieWire.

This post is dedicated to my Irish-American friend, classmate and fellow University of Cincinnati alumnus Patrick Donnelly. Slainte!