An American road memoir stands up well beside its predecessors and is also in many ways a literary guide to the US, writes David Gardiner
TIMOTHY O'GRADY'S latest book, Divine Magnetic Lands, is written in the tradition of the great American road memoirs and stands up well beside its predecessors. Having left Chicago in 1973 at the age of 21 to accept poet and translator Anthony Kerrigan's invitation to stay in his empty home on Gola Island, off the coast of Donegal, O'Grady had returned to the US once since that time. Divine Magnetic Lands recounts his two journeys between October 2003 and June 2004 during which he drove from New York to San Francisco and then back again, covering nearly 24,000km and 35 states in an effort to find out what had happened to the country of his birth.
Divine Magnetic Lands is filled with lyric moments of the road and people of the US as well as cultural insight ranging from the current, lamentable political situation to the Enron scandal and voter scandals of the last presidential election. Driving into Woodstock, NY, following a literary and musical path that is heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, O'Grady writes in a memorable passage:
The road wound round through forest land and I pulled over for a moment to look at it. The leaves were wet from a brief rain. A breeze stirred the branches. Water moved through a stream, the rocks clicking like billiard balls. The leaves were orange as pumpkins, red as embers. Beads of rainwater moved over their veins and then fell, shafts of sunlight catching them. The road ran on before me like a body uncoiling from sleep, there was the whoosh of a birds wings, a flash of blue as it flew beneath the branches, vines twisting around fence posts. All around the woodland floor, moss-covered boulders and tree trunks lay around like drunks after a party. I went on, passing a golf course, and then was in Woodstock.
THE ROMANCE OF return is tempered through Divine Magnetic Lands with a keen eye for the transformation of American culture, particularly political culture, since O'Grady's departure from the US in 1973.
Throughout the work, which is as much an oral history of reconnecting with his friends and his past, the reader witnesses a grassroots story of the US at the turn of the century that - though predicated from the beginning by the author's approach - is given fairly and with ample precedent from literary examples extending back to the beginning of the great experiment that has been the United States. At one point, O'Grady reflects:
America is predicated upon this idea of beginning again. This is the immigrant experience. This is the Constitution. The entire country was an exercise in beginning again. This was meant never to cease. There is an innocence and idealism about this which Europeans, particularly the English, can find ludicrous . . . GK Chesterton, writing in 1931, said, "There is nothing wrong with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong."
O'Grady's work bridges between his ideal of the US and the reality he encounters in the people he meets. Perhaps this is one of the small criticisms of the work. Though his driving tour includes a remarkable cast of characters - William Kennedy in Albany, Studs Terkel in Chicago, some of the best university faculty members throughout the nation, and writers and artists - his modus operandi is well illustrated in the following passage:
I had found, and would continue to find, that in little bars in the little towns out on the American road, particularly those where the grooming is haphazard, the language coarse, the prospects bleak and where it is believed that disputes both international and personal are best solved by violence, you are unlikely to get from the door to your chair without being engaged in conversation, and very often being offered a bed in someone's house for the night, but in cities and university towns, no matter how politically or spiritually open the prevailing ideology, you are likely to pass your evening in silence.
There are many places to meet people in countries throughout the world. From the stories that occasionally become symmetrical, it seems this method might not be the best way. But then again, to fault someone for wanting to get a few beers after driving across some of these States may be small-minded indeed.
Divine Magnetic Land is very much an affair of people, and that remains one of its strengths. Wallace Stevens in his Adagia wrote: "life is an affair of people not places. But for me life is an affair of places that is the trouble". Some of the most memorable include: his former professor, for whom he was working as an editorial assistant when Kerrigan visited Chicago; his cousin, a Viet Nam veteran about whom he wrote previously with dignity and respect; and an entire cast of unseen important individuals - from Native Americans to New Orleans rappers to Los Angeles Gang members involved in community reform.
O'Grady's US includes memorable visits to Hibbing, Big Sur, Faulkner's Oxford, and the Chelsea Hotel in New York. His descriptions of the revitalised New York City are incisive:
Many Americans who have never been to New York assume it is a seething inferno of aggression, indifference and blinding speed. It seems to me, though, that the pace in general is a stroll, the manners incomparably considerate and the time available for others among the most ample in America.
Extensive research throughout also yields gems regarding everything from the topographical origins of the locations, to local curiosities, naturalist information, as well as long discursive sections on economic and political history and forecast, much in the nature of the earliest writers who had taken to the American frontier - each with varying success. His interviews and background work on the American penal and legal system will be of interest to many for its incisive distillation of sources. These yield information such as the fact that the homicide rate in the US actually dropped by 50 per cent during the last decade of the 20th century while the reporting of homicides on television actually increased by 400 per cent. In a road memoir, attention to perception such as this (handled with equal clarity in regard to the legal profession) is key to its relevance and success.
That said, Divine Magnetic Lands is not without its mistakes. Like O'Grady, I, too, am a native Chicagoan, though from a little further south than Rogers Park, and was at home for the 2003 baseball National League Championship Series between the Marlins and Cubs which provides a leitmotif for the first half of the book. It was Kerry Wood and not Craig Wood who was the pitcher who homered in the series and Dusty Baker was chewing sunflower seeds and not tobacco. These seem like small things. But reading a book like Divine Magnetic Lands - any road memoir - makes you want to inhabit those places. And if you have inhabited those places, you run over your own mental map. So such criticisms, when they arise as they sometimes do, may in fact be compliments.
AS A MEMOIR of the road, O'Grady's work is hugely successful. In many ways, it is a literary guide to the US with acknowledged debts and borrowings throughout, from, to name a few: Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day, and even an equally remarkable gem, The WPA Guide to America: The Best of 1930s America as Seen by the Federal Writers' Project. O'Grady's extensive knowledge of counter-cultural America, both historical and currently under siege, has the refreshing impression of at times reading work that is a combination of Dylan melded with de Tocqueville. And it is that perspective that allows some of the harshest criticisms of US culture to come across as honest, and even warm-hearted. In this concluding passage of Divine Magnetic Lands, O'Grady quotes from Robert Jay Lifton on his concept of the "superpower syndrome":
In its efforts to rule the world, the United States is, in actuality, working against itself, subjecting itself to constant failure. It becomes a Sisyphus with bombs, able to set off explosions but unable to cope with its own burden, unable to roll its heavy stone to the top of the hill in Hades. Perhaps the crucial step in ridding ourselves of superpower syndrome is recognising that history cannot be controlled.
• David Gardiner is professor of Irish studies at Creighton University and editor of the journal An Sionnach. He is currently visiting scholar at Boston College, Glucksman Ireland House (NYU) and the University of Ulster. His collection of poetry, Downstate, will be published by Salmon Press in January