Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on a ‘Contrarian’ Approach to Writing Historical Fiction)

“I think many of us who write fiction are contrarians at heart. You know, the world says, ‘This is the this is the way the world is’ and we say, ‘Oh, no. No, we're going to make up our own world, even if it feels like the real world. We're going to correct it. We're going to tell it better. We're going to tell the story of history in a more interesting way.”—American novelist Alice McDermott, in conversation with David Rubenstein on “America’s Book Club,” C-SPAN, original air date Apr 19, 2026

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edwin O’Connor, on ‘The Essential Goodness of Man’)

“[W]hile only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small, redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and the glory of man is revealed.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish-American novelist Edwin O’Connor (1918-1968), The Edge of Sadness (1961)

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on Being Considered ‘A Woman’s Novelist’)

“I've been doing this long enough that I've been 'the soccer mom novelist,' I've certainly been 'the Irish-Catholic novelist,' so to be called a ‘woman’s novelist’ is about the broadest category I've found myself in so far. Maybe if I keep it up I'll be everyone's novelist.” ― American novelist Alice McDermott quoted by Emily Bobrow, “Weekend Confidential: Alice McDermott,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28-29, 2023

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Quote of the Day (William Kennedy, on the ‘Precarious’ Trip From Writing Journalism to Fiction)

“The transition from journalism to fiction is always a precarious trip, for journalism foists dangerous illusions on the incipient fiction writer. The daily journalist is trained, for instance, to forget about yesterday and focus on today. There is also a car parked downstairs, ready to carry him off into tomorrow, and so every new day becomes for him a tabula rasa. This is deadly. The fiction writer who puts little or no value on yesterday, or the even more distant past, might just as well have Alzheimer's disease. Serious fiction, especially the novel, has time as its essence and memory as its principal tool.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist (and former journalist) William Kennedy, “Why It Took So Long,” The New York Times, May 20, 1990

This Day in Irish-American History (Playwright Philip Barry Scores 1st Broadway Hit With ‘You and I’)

Feb. 19, 1923— Starting a career that would see him become an integral part of the “Golden Age of American Theater,” Philip Barry achieved his first Broadway success with a comedy written for a college class that won him a prize—and enough money to assure he could make a living from the theater to marry the woman he loved.

You and I, premiering at the Belmont Theater in its first of 174 performances, launched the 26-year-old playwright on a quarter-century run as one of the leading lights of the Great White Way, with several of his plays—The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, and The Animal Kingdom—adapted into classic films.

Those works, like his first, were comedies of manners in which razor-sharp repartee was joined to piercing insights into the lives of the rich and well-born.

Barry also served as a key signpost of Irish-American success in the worlds of theater and literature. He made his Broadway debut the same year—and with more success—than F. Scott Fitzgerald would achieve with his play The Vegetable; a year after George Kelly enjoyed a long, profitable run with his comedy The Show-Off; and in the same decade that Eugene O’Neill steered American theater away from its former shallowness into more probing, psychologically oriented considerations of the human dilemma.

While the quartet were most consistently popular in the 1920s, the overturning of traditional norms during that time—and the subsequent collapse of the bubble prosperity with the Great Depression—led them to deeper, more pointed examinations of how personal conduct could survive under such an onslaught.

At that point, popular and critical regard for their work became harder to come by.

The unstable Fitzgerald became a casualty of this more negative reevaluation—and O’Neill would require superb posthumous productions of his last plays (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten) to remind people of his greatness. Kelly, a member of the famous Philadelphia clan that also produced his brother John, an Olympic medalist and wealthy contractor, and niece Grace, lived with restraint and carefully managed his income.

The fickleness of success seemed far away for Barry when You and I packed the Belmont Theater. His play, colored by the anxiety of long-term failure, simultaneously celebrated a commitment to one’s muse and to one’s heart.

It was a triumph Barry knew intimately. He had followed his ambition to writing drama, even in the face of strong opposition from his brothers, who wanted him to take over the family’s stone-quarry business. He had followed his heart just as strongly, as hinted in his stage directions for the play’s ingenue, based largely on his fiancée and eventual wife, Ellen Semple—herself a talented artist:

She is about nineteen, slim, of medium height, with a decidedly pretty, high-bred face, lovely hair, lovely hands, soft, low-pitched voice  —whatever she may be saying. Heredity, careful upbringing, education and travel have combined to invest her with a poise far in advance of her years. She has attained the impossible—complete sophistication without the loss of bloom. Her self-confidence is an added charm —free, as it is, from any taint of youthful cocksureness.

The solid Broadway run of You and I also brought much-needed credibility to Barry’s Harvard drama instructor, George Pierce Baker. Barry had revised and renamed this play he had conceived of for Barry’s class, the “47 Workshop.”

By winning the prestigious Richard Herndon Prize for the comedy, the playwright was not only guaranteed a Broadway production, but also was able to vindicate the instructional methods of Baker.

Students in the latter’s class gained practical experience by mounting their plays on a makeshift stage far from the unforgiving eyes of New York critics. Many in the Harvard faculty had viewed Baker’s class with condescension and disdain.

But Barry’s success signaled that such a pedagogical approach could work in a real-world setting, and such other “47 Workshop” alumni as Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon effectively answered the naysayers, as I noted in this prior post on Baker.

You and I sprang from the urbane, witty side of Barry that not only captivated audiences but won him friends like artist Gerald Murphy, novelist John O’Hara, and Wall Street financier and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. There was another side—less successful, more experimental and preoccupied with religious and ethical concerns—that came to the fore in later years.

But, in whichever vein he worked, Barry was a diligent craftsman on whom nothing was lost or wasted.

In 2018, You and I enjoyed its first New York revival in 95 years at the Off-Broadway Metropolitan Playhouse. COVID-19 and the social disruptions of the last few years have led to more change in the New York theater scene than I recall during my lifetime. 

But when all is said and done, I hope theater producers and directors will look at Barry with the same fresh eyes they are using to assess everything else with.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on How Souls Are Saved by the Writer’s Art)

“All objects in fiction, even the most mundane, shimmer with mystery and meaning, with the souls of the dead as well as the image of some ultimate reality. Burnished buttons or shell-shaped cookies, mummified remains in a museum's glass case or a mundane registration card from the Florida DMV, these things are no longer simply the things themselves, but something transformed by the writer's attention, saved and stored and treasured by the writer’s art.”—Irish-American novelist Alice McDermott, “Last Word: Things,” Commonweal, July/August 2021

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, With Still-Relevant Predictions of VP Duties)

“Aside fr’m the ar’joos duties iv looking afther the prisidint’s health, it is th’ business iv the vice-prisidint to preside over th’ deliberations iv th' Sinit….It is his jooty to rigorously enforce th' rules iv th' Sinit. There ar-re none. Th' Sinit is ruled by courtesy, like th’ longshoreman's union."—Irish-American newspaper columnist and political satirist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Dissertations by Mr. Dooley (1906)

Change those possessive adjectives from male to female, and this, more or less, is still what Joe Biden’s eagerly awaited VP pick should expect, if the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee wins this November.

With both major party nominees over 70 years old, “looking afther the prisidint’s health” is going to be a greater preoccupation than usual for their running mates….

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on Miracles and Wall Street)

“Miracles are laughed at by a nation that reads thirty million newspapers a day an’ supports Wall Street.”—Irish-American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Mr. Dooley's Philosophy (1900)

I wish Finley Peter Dunne had tried a lighter touch in his use of dialect. Between all the exaggerated misspellings and contractions, it becomes difficult to read his pieces at any length. In the case of this quote, for instance, the auto-correct function of my word processing program kept changing what I typed so much that I finally gave up. 

Maybe it did you a favor, Faithful Reader. At his best, this Chicago newspaper columnist could be among the most bitingly funny of American writers. Assessing Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Riders, for instance, Martin Dooley, the bartender and mouthpiece for Dunne’s jibes, noted that it might have better called Alone in Cuba.  More than a few people have quoted his phrases while being blissfully unaware of the original source (e.g., “Politics ain’t beanbag” and “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”).

But the quote above really made me nod in agreement. More than a century removed from the robber barons—the fat cats that T.R. lambasted as “malefactors of great wealth”—America is still trying to make sense of Wall Street.

One American who tried but failed was H.R. Haldeman, best known to history as among the palace guard who abetted Richard Nixon in covering up Watergate—and who went to jail for the offense. As the President’s Chief of Staff and a former ad man, Haldeman had zero sympathy for anti-capitalist sentiments. But even he threw up his hands at the bipolar tendencies of The Street.

Fifty years ago this week, for instance, the nation’s weak economy, combined with growing unrest of the Vietnam War, led to a market crash, from a prior high of around 1,000 to 630. (How quaint, those numbers seem now!) Then, just the mere announcement of a dinner at the White House, in which the President and his economic advisers explained administration policy to Wall Street and industry leaders, was enough to produce a 31-point gain, the largest in history to that point.

You can practically see Haldeman shake his head as his notes in the diary he faithfully kept as Nixon’s Chief of Staff, “Really neurotic.”

And don’t even get me started on how the market has performed since the pandemic outbreak. I don’t think I understood Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s great quote in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage—“I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime”—until I understood how much “bubble,” in all its irrationality, has been associated with Wall Street. Nearly two months ago, for instance, U.S. stocks rallied at the thought that the pandemic might be slowing.

You might think, as the death toll reaches 100,000, that investors might be a bit more careful this time. No such luck. With an announcement looming that U.S. jobless claims would pass 40 million, Wall Street rallied again over the belief that reopened markets would set everything right again.

Well, let’s see how that turns out, okay?

(The image accompanying this post is a cartoon, “Wall Street bubbles - Always the same," which appeared in the May 22, 1901 issue of the British satirical magazine Puck. The cartoon shows American financier J. P. Morgan as a bull, blowing soap bubbles for eager investors. Several bubbles are labeled, "Inflated values." The image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division, under the digital ID cph.3g07880)

Quote of the Day (Pete Hamill, on When ‘The Way Out of Poverty Was Through the Library’)

“I come from the white working class, but I was fortunate. I had parents that thought things would be better tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the way out of poverty was through the library. My mother got me a library card when I was five. I couldn't read yet, and there were mothers like that all over New York.”—Irish-American columnist-novelist-memoirist Pete Hamill, quoted in Richard Turner, “Weekend Confidential: Pete Hamill—A Lifetime of Big Stories, Revisited,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19-20, 2019

(Photo of Pete Hamill taken in Brooklyn in September 2007 by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on Immigrants Who Forget Their Roots)

“An Anglo-Saxon, Hinnissy, is a German that's forgot who was his parents. They're a lot iv thim in this counthry. There must be as manny as two in Boston: they'se wan up in Maine, an' another lives at Bogg's Ferry in New York State, an' dhrives a milk wagon. Mack is an Anglo-Saxon. His folks come fr'm th' County Armagh, an' their naytional Anglo-Saxon hymn is 'O'Donnell Aboo.' Teddy Rosenfelt is another Anglo-Saxon. An' I'm an Anglo-Saxon. I'm wan iv th' hottest Anglo-Saxons that iver come out iv Anglo-Saxony. Th' name iv Dooley has been th' proudest Anglo-Saxon name in th' County Roscommon f'r many years."— Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (1898)

The Irish-American humorist Finley Peter Dunne was born 150 years ago today in Chicago. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, his 750-word pieces in the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Journal, featuring the bachelor saloonkeeper Martin Dooley, his millworker friend Malachi Hennessy, and Chicago’s working-class community of Bridgeport, became must reading for thousands—including an unlikely fan in Washington.

That would be “Teddy Rosenfelt”—better known, of course, as Theodore Roosevelt—who found himself a not-infrequent target of the anti-imperialist Dunne. (When Roosevelt quickly followed up his victory at San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War with his account of the group he commanded, The Rough Riders, Mr. Dooley thought it might have more accurately been called Alone in Cuba.)

Had one of this nation’s current crop of Republicans—say, Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, or What’s His Name in the White House—been similarly lampooned, we might expect a defensive reaction at a press conference, or a tweet about the humorist being “overrated.” Not TR, though. 

Instead, he wrote the satirist: “I regret to state that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. Now I think you owe me one; and I shall expect that when you next come east you pay me a visit. I have long wanted the chance of making your acquaintance.”

The two met at the 1900 Republican National Convention, where “Rosenfelt” gave him the scoop of scoops: he would accept the party’s nomination as Vice-President, if it were offered. Nor did TR forget him once he assumed the Presidency: in 1902, he sent the newspaper columnist a congratulatory note on his marriage.

The passage I’ve quoted from above provides one reason why Dunne is not read as much today as he once was: thick layers of dialect that can even give contemporary Irish-Americans pause. But it also shows another way in which he has hardly dated at all: views on subjects that remain an enduring part of the American experience: immigration, philanthropy, foreign wars, and the disconnect between the elite and the working class.

Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Screenwriter-Director Pecking Order)

“Once you accept the idea that says because you get paid $200,000 to write a script and the director gets $500,000 to direct it, he's $300,000 smarter than you are, then Hollywood becomes a very amusing place to work.”— Hollywood screenwriter/novelist John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003), “Tinsel,” in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006)