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the next 30 minutes, Chandler— author of several books on Wordsworth,
as well as England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture
and the Case of Romantic Historicism (U of C Press, 1998)—dashes
through what he dubs “The Reduced History of Ireland.”
From the Ice Age, when the English Channel first separated Ireland
and England, to 500 A.D. and the arrival of St. Patrick, Christianity,
and Catholicism. Viking invasions: “Dublin is a Viking city.
Who knows? The red hair may be a Viking thing.” A quick stop
at 1172, when Henry II declared himself ruler of Ireland. Cromwell.
Protests. The penal laws: Catholics are forbidden to attend school,
practice law, buy or lease more than two acres of land, own horses
worth more than five pounds. Swift’s The Modest Proposal.
The Society of United Irishmen. The Whiteboys.
But the tourist coach awaits. “We’ll stop here,”
Chandler says as he plays another yearning melody from Moore: “The
Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls.” Around the room
come nods and sighs: “Oh, yes.”
The “Reduced History” pace doesn’t slow as the group
takes to the road, shepherded by Gohagan & Company tour guide
Eithne Twomey. A petite blond Dubliner, Twomey soon learns the special
demands of getting Chicago grads to march to the beat of the same
drummer, let alone get back to the coach on time. There’s always
one more photo to take, one more inscription to read, one more path
to go down.
Head counts become routine. Totals reached, the gleaming white
Volvo coach, with unflappable Kerryman Dermot O’Connor at the
wheel, daily heads off for still another destination. Turning into
the imposing (if narrow) gates of tree-lined drives to Georgian
mansions. Stopping at Glenbeigh’s Kerry Bog Village, where
the smoky reek of peat and a chill rain add extra verisimilitude
to the re-creation of peasant life in the early 1800s, before the
potato famine decimated the population. Waiting in Blennerville
as the group dons hardhats to tour the shipyard where young people
from the North and South are building a replica of a 19th-century
emigrant barque, the Jeanie Johnston, to set sail for American
ports in 2000 (plans immediately get made for a shipboard alumni
reunion at Chicago’s Navy Pier).
They continue on, traveling uphill and down past mutable landscapes
of green hills and blue sea, gray clouds and black-footed sheep,
houses with painted facades as bright as their flower-filled window
boxes. On a tour around the Ring of Kerry—miles of breathtaking
Atlantic coastline views and cliffhanger turns—the luck of
the Irish comes into play. A breakfast downpour yields to freshly
washed blue skies, and each twist of road brings new vistas—including
a view across Dingle Bay to the rocky outcropping of Skellig Michael
and its seventh-century monastery.
Other Ring of Kerry scenic encounters lie closer at hand. As the
westbound coach hugs a high hedge of fuchsia, O’Connor steers
slowly past an eastbound lorry. Looking up from the next day’s
readings, Jim Chandler addresses his busmates in reassuring, mock-erudite
tones: “There’s an excellent view of the local flora on
the left side of the coach.”
Back at the Muckross Park Hotel, the daylong battle between rain
and sun ends in a stand-off, with a double rainbow that seems to
descend directly to the lower garden; never will the pot of gold
seem nearer. Then a Hotel waitress, busily setting places for dinner,
surveys the meteorological gawkers and puts the matter into perspective:
“It’s a typical Irish rainbow.”
Her sentence is flat, but her voice is lilting. Lyricism, a sense
of the double-edged power and beauty of the music of words, overflows
into the everyday patterns of life. The U of C travelers hear it
when, in groups of four or six, they are dinner guests in Kerry
homes, and their hosts talk of their daily lives as farmers, office
workers, chef, homemakers, and students. They hear it in a passerby’s
greeting, in the jigs and ballads of a smoke-filled pub, the brogue
of a traditional storyteller.
Lyricism is a constant in a nation of contradictions and conflicts.
For the U of C travelers, too, it links the verdant hills of Kerry
with the motley streets of Dublin, where the “Celtic tiger”
of economic prosperity has turned a once-provincial metropolis into
Europe’s fastest-growing city.
In Dublin, the group stays at the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell
Street (named for the great Irish patriot). It’s almost directly
across from the General Post Office, seized at the start of the
Easter Rebellion of 1916 by a group of Irish revolutionaries, including
several minor poets—“one of the most bizarre revolutionary
acts ever,” as Jim Chandler describes it during Part II of
his “Reduced History of Ireland.” Minutes from the Writers
Museum and the Abbey and Gate theaters, the Gresham is also steps
away from a McDonald’s, a Burger King, and an Internet cafe.
An already brisk pace quickens to double time. Museums, churches,
a performance of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. And
Ireland’s No. 1 tourist attraction—the Book of Kells,
where the pace slows by necessity as the queue stretches the length
of a Trinity College quadrangle. Once inside the dark cubicle, where
the fragile illuminated Gospels produced in the ninth century by
the monks of Iona are displayed like Snow White under glass, it’s
hard to get close enough to see. The more claustrophobic simply
head up the stairs to safety—and the Old Library’s Long
Room. With a barrel-vaulted ceiling, high wooden shelves marked
with call letters of gold, and the rich leather smell of old books,
the Long Room is a bibliophile’s dream.
 Time
slows in the Long Room as harried tourists turn back into careful
observers, leaning over other volumes under glass—not as rare
or famous as the Book of Kells, but also beautiful and also part
of Ireland’s past. From the week’s whirlwind accumulation
of facts and experience, bits and pieces shift like a kaleidoscope
into a bright pattern, a flash of insight.
The pieces shift again and the pattern disappears. But the colors—greens
and blues, whites and grays—remain. And so does the lyric charm.
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