In Canada, however, “the Irish identity is definitely more removed than it is in, say, Boston — partly for historical reasons,” he says. “A big chunk of Irish came there early on, in the 1830s and ’40s, and they came at a time when Canada was just developing, so they were able to become kind of a pioneer people.” Compare that with Boston, where the Irish immediately had to fight their way through an entrenched Yankee establishment that viewed them as second-class citizens. “There was never any sort of stigma attached to being Irish in Canada.”
Sniffing out the truth
Behrens began his project with limited knowledge of the Great Hunger. So, in 1996, he got to work.
Among his sources were the novels of Liam O’Flaherty (Famine) and the histories of Robert Scally (The End of Hidden Ireland) and Kevin Whalen (Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape).
“Then I got bold enough to start contacting their authors. I started going over and meeting and talking to them. I made maybe four or five trips [to Ireland]. Sometimes they involved meeting people, but very often they involved just getting to know the landscape.”
Behrens’s decade of painstaking detective work imbues his writing with an unfeigned authenticity. You are there, among the “wrecks of cabins in little hamlets. Humps of rubble, the stink of moldy thatch.” The “snow scalped” hills. The peaty musk of cut turf.
Behrens knows intuitively that proper evocation of a place requires the full engagement of the senses. “I would go to Clare, where the famine had really happened, and I was able to really start understanding the way people lived on the land,” he says. “The physical sense of what it looks like and what it smells like and how light works there and the texture of the ground. That stuff’s really important.” He laughs. “I had someone tell me, ‘You’ve written a book about how Ireland smells!’ ”
The Great Hunger is arguably the most epochal event in Ireland’s history, second only perhaps to independence. But Behrens insists he had no political ax to grind. “I didn’t have an agenda,” he says. “It’s not true that the British caused the famine. Biology caused the famine.” He does see an interesting parallel, however. “Nature caused Hurricane Katrina last year. But the fact is that Katrina happened to a group of people that the current administration has no real interest in protecting or defending. So this natural phenomenon had disastrous consequences. Similarly, in Ireland, it’s not that [the English] caused the blight, but they had no real political agenda to pay much heed to those people.”
Behrens, however, does care about the Irish, and the glib way they’re often discussed astonishes him. “In American culture,” he says, “there’s kind of a fascination with the Irish, but also a kind of easy stereotyping, all these ‘wees’ and ‘lads.’ ” While reviews of his book have been largely positive, he’s been unable to shake the cringe-inducing headline of one of them: WHEN IRISH LADS ARE STARVING.
“If it was about Judaism or the Holocaust, people would see right away that that was terrifically insulting,” he says. “Talk about stereotyping! With the Irish, it just sometimes seems you can make all the jokes you want about leprechauns and drinking.”
