576
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing with him the penuriousness and the land-hunger that obsess
James Tyrone, the father of
Long Day's Journey.
More imJX>rtant,
he was a member of a vast group of immigrants who did not so
much leave Ireland as bring Ireland to America. In New England,
in particular, partly because of their intense clannishness, partly be–
cause they were "outsiders," partly because they found themselves
"ruled" by a Protestant Anglophile culture- it was Ireland
all
over
again with the hostile "strangers" in control-the Irish remained
"Irish" and did not get assimilated for several generations, sometimes
for a half century or more; they were not merged in one or two
generations, as were other foreign groups, particularly Northern Euro–
pean ones, in other parts of the country. James Tyrone, of course,
was born in Ireland and is a professional patriot who thinks that
Shakespeare and the Duke of Wellington were dyed-in-the-wool Irish
Catholics. But even his two sons, who are in rebellion and who scorn
this patriotic nonsense, are still-hopelessly for them-"Irish," their
whole characters being dominated by the passionate tribal and fa–
milial customs and resultant character typology in which their souls
were forged.
How extraordinarily profound and pervasive were these char–
acteristics can be only fully appreciated when one becomes aware of
the fact that historical accounts of the Irish national character, even
in medieval and antemedieval times, sound remarkably like a descrip–
tion of the Tyrone family. It would be no exaggeration to say that a
straight line can be drawn from the primitive forests of antique Ire–
land to the haunted New London, Connecticut, residence of the
Tyrone family in the twentieth century.
In the first place there were no clans in ancient Ireland, with
the family being the basic unit although the family was not a one
generation affair. According to Sean O 'Faolain in his
The
Irish–
A Character Study,
the basic family unit was symbolized by the hand:
"The limits of the sacred nexus were symbolized by the hand. The
palm was the common ancestor; the joints of the finger were
his
descendents into his grand-children; the finger-nails were his great
grand-children." These families, moreover, were not inclined toward
communal enterprises, such as the founding of cities, and it was the
Normans, Danes, and Tudors who first constructed every Irish town
of any consequence that exists. To these observations by O'Faolain
