Benediction at the Savoia is the perfect gift for those (teeming masses) who believe that the subculture of Irish America is lathered in Catholicity, drowned in drink, laden with neuroses, and — occasionally — leavened by a titter of wit. And if I am inclined to resist the story, while still standing in admiration at the skill of the storyteller, perhaps it is a measure of my own wish to deny the – essentially miserable — truth of which she writes.
Despite this suggestion that Benediction at the Savoia is just another paean to the pains of Irish America, I utterly commend it as a fine first novel by Queens native Christine O’Hagan. (The young O’Hagan has paid her dues as a telephone operator, stock transfer clerk, bank teller, TV researcher, and reporter.) Yet I hope that, with this genuflection to her New York Irish “hometown” out of her system, she will find some road for her formidable talents other than the one that leads to an Irish America that might as well be called Melancholia, and be done with it.
If I had either the therapist or the time (or half an hour with Mary Gordon) I’m sure that I should learn to accept with good grace the integrity of O’Hagan’s picture of Irish America, the simple truth of it, instead of being dispirited by it.
It is not authenticity of the story she tells that gives reason to quibble about O’Hagan’s first novel. Indeed, one hesitates to criticize the work of anyone who so clearly is a careful, often tender, wordsmith.
It’s a bit of a cheek, in fact.
Certainly, her story about Delia Delaney, 32, mother of Iwo, expecting a third, rings authentic. Married too young to a pathetic boozer-cop (aren’t they inseparable in the cliché?), she is coming to term —and coming to terms — in the hot summer of 1963.
The place is Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, a staunch Irish neighborhood that is in sight of New York City, yet somehow hermetically sealed against infection from it. The Jackson Heights in Benediction at the Savoia resonates more with the sensibilities of small-town Ireland than it does with the possibilities of the big city that lies across the 59th Street Bridge. O’Hagan writes beautifully about the chasm, seemingly unbridgeable, between the two: “There seemed to be nothing much for people from the Heights to do in the city but go to work and then come back home again; nothing to buy there and bring home to the others, nothing they could afford. The crowds on New York streets dangled cameras from their necks and, in their enthusiasm, carried people from Queens past the lavish windows of stores on Fifth Avenue, and when they came home, the people from the Heights laughed at the dress-up window dummies in the city, like creatures from outer space.”
Jackie Kennedy is pregnant in the White House. And in Jackson Heights Delia shadows her pregnancy as if they were sisters in spirit… Meanwhile, about the only thing spirited in her own life is the alcohol consumed in vast quantities by husband Maurice. (What a terrible abuse by his parents to give him such a gently hopeful name. Then again, they had their own troubles, God bless ’em. But that’s another part of the story….)
Delia was born of an immigrant mother, Mae, who filled her with heaps of good healthy food — healthy by pre-nouvelle cuisine standards — a wealth of Old World superstitions (some of them new to me), and the usual stoicism, Guaranteed Irish brand.
Kind, manipulative Mae: “But I’m a different sort.” Mae kept talking. “I never had any time to meet any friends when I was a young woman like yourself. Even though I left her when I was small, I was the type to worry about my mother. Always.”
I think you’re very smart and modern not to concern yourself with me. Times were very different when I was Yoelia also has a boozer-da who in his old age, turns to rage, along with the drink.
Now, with the summer of 1963 ebbing and her baby overdue, she must come to grips with the realization that her boozer-cop husband might never shape up to more than her boozer-da. And come to grips with her secret hope that his “late” baby will bring a magic to her marriage. And be a boy. After all, might not the boozer-cop husband find a way back into the fantasy of perfect family life if he had a boy to go with the two girls, Maureen (13) and Patty, two years younger?
Just as Delia is facing up to the limitations of her life with the boozer-cop husband and her past with the boozer-da, oblivious to her, daughter Maureen is auditioning for a role in Young Irish American Victim, Female: The Next Generation. What will happen to Delia in her troubled pregnancy, and troubling life? How will things turn out for Maureen?
The trouble is that so painstaking is O’Hagan in her depiction of Delia’s state of misery that it is hard to maintain the stamina necessary to care about such a needy character. Nowadays, she could work a lot of it out with her therapist and not burden a novelist with so much responsibility. As it is, Delia, in today’s terms, would be worth at least an hour on “Oprah.” Back then she had to make do with Mae’s Old Country ejaculations (i.e., a recipe for escapism and/or self-flagellation).
Isn’t it true that the best literature illuminates the familiar and brings fresh perspective to old pictures? There never is much sustenance in simple, if painstaking, re-creations of reality, past or present.
They’re just photographs in words. And even if this first published novel gives ample evidence of Christine O’Hagan’s sure descriptive style, it also reveals her as perhaps too caring — of her old “home-town,” too caring of traditional Irish America, melancholia, misery, and all.
Too many memories. Too photographic.
Too much misery!
Christine O’Hagan has the talent for more than turning words into photographs.
With relish one can look forward to her kicking over the traces. (Of course, may God forgive me for saying it, for even thinking it.)
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November 1992 issue of Irish America. ♦
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