The Love of the Irish

The class was nervous: here it was the first day, and the teacher was already talking about Yeats. No mention of exams or papers or grading policies, or even a syllabus. And a bad stammer marred his soft brogue as he spoke briefly of gyres and regenerative cycles and Cuchulain and the Easter rising. But he was a dramatic figure, backlit by the sun through the room's only window. And when he started to read poems--when his stammer disappeared in the steady flow of rich, musical verse--the students were enchanted, as much by him as his subject.

John Kelleher, professor of Irish Studies, has taught at Harvard for upwards of 40 years, and somehow he has escaped much notice. Most of his anonymity is by choice; a Dartmouth colleague warned him early on that it is a great burden to be a popular teacher, he says, and when asked for an interview he replied at first, "I'm not much interested." And some of his relative obscurity is a result of his field. But if Kelleher is a well-kept secret, word may be getting out; last year, for instance, his Yeats class had to change venues twice before it found large enough quarters.

This year, however, will be Kelleher's last as a full-time teacher; beginning in 1982, he'll cut his courseload in half, the better to concentrate on his Irish historical and genealogical studies. It's a fairly traditional way to wind down an academic career that started in anything but conventional fashion.

Lawrence High School, you see, was not producing great numbers of college students in the early years of the Depression (though Robert Frost was a Lawrence alum; "It was one of the things I had in common with him when we later got to know each other," Kelleher says). Born into a family of carpenters, Kelleher joined that trade when he graduated. For two years --"the two most useful years of my life for growing up and getting to know people"--he was sub-assistant carpenter. "I hadn't any expectation of going to college," he says. But since his father dreamed of his son attending West Point, Kelleher enlisted in the National Guard though he was certain "my stammer was severe enough to keep him out of the service academy. In those days, Kelleher says, he used to "walk a lot;" one trip to Connecticut took five or six days of steady plodding, he recalls. And so, when it turned out the West Point physical was to be held in Boston, Kelleher walked in from Lawrence, a trek of about 30 miles. When he got there, he says, the first thing the doctor looked at was his feet, only to discover that Kelleher had low arches. "He told me that there was a lot of marching at West Point, and that I wouldn't be able to do it with feet like mine," Kelleher says. "So I told him I had just walked in from Lawrence on those feet. He looked up at me and said, 'Son, they only want truthful young men at West Point.' "

And so Kelleher kept working on roofs and walls, until one day in the fall of 1934 when an old high school buddy invited him up to Dartmouth for a visit. "I'd never seen a college before, and I was deeply impressed by it"--impressed by Hanover's beauty, impressed by the huge library, impressed perhaps most of all by the quiet, "almost cloistered," atmosphere. "I went back and told my parents, and they decided that one way or another they would get me there." With the help of an uncle who was a doctor, Kelleher was able to enter the school in the fall of 1935. The atmosphere was still pleasant, but somehow it wasn't as placid as he remembered: his visit, it turned out, had fallen on the weekend that all of the college was in New Haven for the Yale game.

Hanover was "a great place for walking. And it was a good time to be in school if you had no money, because in 1935 no one had any money to speak of." Supporting himself by waiting on tables and putting out fires, Kelleher soon discovered his passion, Irish literature and history. "It just plain fascinated me. You could almost say I had a mania for it," he declares. For three years he followed a normal undergraduate course; in his fourth, he was chosen as one of a select few senior fellows and allowed to pursue independent work. "I spent the year trying to master everything I've spent my life trying to master. I read through the Irish collection, and discovered the limits of my ignorance, which were huge."

Graduating in 1939--"the economists may have said the Depression was over, but no one else was saying it"-Kelleher took his Dartmouth degree and, lacking a job, returned to carpentry. After a year, though, fate in the form of Harvard intervened, asking him if he would like a position as a junior fellow at the University. So Kelleher joined "a distinguished lot" of junior fellows and a crew of senior fellows that included Alfred North Whitehead and Samuel Eliot Morison. He spent long weekends tramping through the country with Henry Lee Shattuck '01, a philanthropically-minded graduate who became so interested in Kelleher's work that he helped find the money for a chair in Irish Studies.

Marriage--to a Lawrence girl he'd known since first grade--and then the Second World War interrupted Kelleher's scholarly career. After a stint in the quartermaster corps, he was assigned to the Pentagon and military intelligence, which thought it needed an expert in Ireland. "They soon decided they didn't, and so I was switched to the Korea desk. I comforted myself with the thought that Korea must be the Ireland of Asia," he says.

It wasn't until the end of the war, in 1946, that Kelleher made his first trip to the island he had been studying for years. He spent six months in Ireland, first rooming in a Dublin club and meeting many of the people "I'd always wanted to know," and then cycling throughout both the North and the South. "You could do it at that time in a way you couldn't now--there were no tourists, and almost no traffic. And though the accomodations were often far from what the Tourist Board would recommend, it was a terrific way of getting to know the country and the people." In the years since, Kelleher has visited Ireland 12 times. "I'm always very happy and occupied while I'm there," he says, so happy that he has little desire to travel elsewhere. On one visit, Kelleher recalls, a friend said to him, "You've been to Ireland four times, but you've never been to Paris, you've never seen the Mediterranean--You bloody savage!"

But Kelleher never remained in Ireland. "My family was here, my job was here. And one of the first things I realized when I landed in Ireland was that I was an American. My family had been gone for 75 years, and I was foreigner." That despite a brogue nothing short of authentic. "When I first went to college, two friends and I had to make an aluminum recording. We recited the preamble to the Constitution. And when we played it back, I recognized the other two voices. But the third guy sounded like he was fresh off the boat...I never knew till then that I had an accent. It was passed down from my father to me, but not to anyone else in the family."

Genetic disposition, then, may have helped form Kelleher's interest in Ireland. His early nurturing, though, played a part as well. His father's mother, a native of the county Cork, "for some reason picked me as the grandchild to talk to. She talked about Ireland--later. I realized what she was really talking about was being young. She came over to America at 17 or 18, and worked in the mills. Everything turned out well in the long run, but by then she was an old woman." And so she told the stories of her youth, told them so well that Kelleher says he felt a "tremendous feeling of deja vu" when first he saw the farms and hills he had heard about when he was three or four.

And the early love of things Irish has never left him. The small nation has produced so many great writers because "there was a sufficiently different life and culture"--the old Irish histories, myths, and lifestyles--close by, he says. "Irish writers could write with the sense of another culture; there are long roots in the past, and that vertical dimension compensated for the narrowness of the horizontal dimension," Kelleher says. He adds, however, that those days are ending: "It seems to me that Irish literature is caught up in a real problem. The more Ireland becomes a modern western country, the less it is Irish." Once, Kelleher recalls, he was traveling with a teacher in the Irish department at a Cork university. "We were coming back after a very successful day of archaeologizing, and our heads were stuffed full of the 7th and 8th century. We drove into the small development where he lived near Cork, and there were children riding around on tricycles, people out washing their cars, housewives talking over the fence, and he looked at me and said, 'Is there anything here you couldn't see from Geneva to San Francisco?' And of course he was right."

Ireland's entrance into the modern world has come simultaneously with another phenomenon Kelleher says is changing the nation's literature--the loosening grip of the Catholic Church. "The change in the church has made a lot of (Irish writing) obsolete. When I was first teaching at Harvard, Catholic students could understand what much of Irish literature was about in its reaction to an old and authoritarian church. Now that church is gone, and it is hard even for Catholic students to figure out why writers reacted so strongly against the overwhelming power of the church." Reactions against the church, and against England before the revolution and the new Republican government afterwards spurred most of the great Irish artists, Kelleher says. "Now, if they react, it's to a government, which, though it may be trying, has no more power than any other small government in the world" to control its own destiny.

When Bobby Sands died on hunger strike in March, he was not the first Irishman to be carried out of jail in a coffin; the continuing troubles in the North of Ireland provide a link, however tragic, to the country's history. "The violence is rooted in a very long tradition," Kelleher says, but he adds there have been new developments. "Up to this point, the violence has been a recurrent thing. The outbursts would last for one or two years and then subside," he says. The current troubles have been going on since 1968, though, and "the amount of hatred and contempt is enormous."

"I think, frankly, that the troubles in the North are largely a creation of television. If we could somehow get every camera and every reporter out of the North, and somehow we could keep them out no matter what horror the Irish Republican Army or the (unionist) Ulster Defense Association staged to get them back, I think violence would decrease by 90 percent," he says. The outlook for a long term settlement is not good, he admits, adding that those who live in the Republic are scared of any hasty unification of the island. "They realize that if they were suddenly handed back the North now it would be a disaster. If the British army can't handle the IRA coming out of one-third of the population, the Irish army certainly couldn't handle the UDA coming out of two-thirds of the population. And probably a tougher two-thirds at that." The paramilitary groups make any peace even harder to achieve, he adds.

Kelleher's early fascination with Irish literature bloomed in later years into deep interest in the country's early history. His extensive work on early written histories and genealogies--which will take up even more of his time when he reduces his teaching load next year-require as much sleuthing as anything else, searching for names in one place after another in an attempt to create a more solid history. It is scholarly work that does not require lecturing, which in some ways may be a relief for Kelleher. Though the Configuide and other sources have labelled him one of Harvard's finest lecturers, his severe stammer makes teaching more frustrating for Kelleher than for most. "I just keep going...but stammering is a terrible exhausting, business. After teaching a class where I've been caught in a bout of stammering, I come out feeling like I've been beaten with a baseball bat...Sometimes I only get to about half of what I want to say."

Forty years ago, when Kelleher came to Harvard, the University was a slightly different place. "I miss places like Hazens, where you could go with a student after class and buy a cup of cofee," he says. He describes the social order on 1940 as far from perfect, "the clubs were still fairly strong when I arrived, and there was great condescension towards 'meatballs' or non-members. To see the clubs lose their hold broke no one's heart, I think." But he still seems to miss many of the traits that marked the old Harvard. "It was an awful goddamn thing when Harvard Square became the Left Bank of America" during the late 60s, he says. "What had been a comfortably, undistinguished place was now infested by all kinds of people looking for something that probably wasn't there anyway."

And his other complaints about how Harvard has changed seem to echo his fears about the modernization of Ireland, the other isolated and traditional place he has known. "Students will ask me with a smirk if there was truly a time when there were parietal rules--when you couldn't have a young woman in your room with the door closed, when you had to sign in. They ask why people ever put up with that sort of thing. But in those days the gates to the Houses were always wide open, and there was no fear of being mugged. I think there was a lot more freedom than there is now, more taken-for-granted courtesy...And another thing," he adds, with the air of someone who chose Dartmouth for its "cloistered" atmosphere, "There was no stereo. You weren't compelled to listen to the blast from other's machines."