2 How It All Began
Posted by Christine on Aug 19, 2014 in Ireland | 4 comments People often ask me where my interest in Ireland comes from and how it became so…well…extreme. I’ve been obsessed with the country—its history, literature, landscape, culture and everything else about it—for a long time. My interest was piqued when I was ten or eleven and discovered a copy of Finnegans Wake on my parents’ eclectic bookshelves in our house on Lincolnwood Drive, Evanston, Illinois. Both of them were readers and always had books stacked on their nightstands and near their chairs. The bookshelves covered two corner walls in the living room and one long wall in the den and included everything from complete sets of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, P.G. Wodehouse, and Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II to the novels of Nevil Shute, Jack Higgins, Angela Thirkell, and John Le Carré. They even had the collected poems of e. e. cummings and The Kinsey Reports. But Finnegans Wake? I can’t imagine that either of them ever read it. I will admit to never having read Finnegans Wake either, but I remember thumbing through the book long ago and facing up to the fact that I had a lot to learn before I would understand what was going on in those pages. Connecting the book to Joyce and Joyce to Ireland followed in due course, and more associations began to emerge. My aunt Ellen (never Aunt Ellen, but just Ellen) mentioned that the family on the Cozzens side had an Irish connection (among the Swedes, Scots, English, etc.); our great grandfather Nicholas Cozzens came to the US as a boy during or shortly after the Great Famine of 1845-52. A glimmer of Ireland’s “underdog” status in history intrigued me further. I finally read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school and loved it, though it was a very different book for me than the one I read in Bill Chace’s Joyce course at Stanford following my first trip to Ireland in 1971. That first trip with Claudia Cohen, my roommate from Stanford, sowed the seeds of later interests in Ireland’s soggy, boggy soil. From our spring semester jobs at a primary school in London, we took the student budget route—the overnight ferry from Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire—and spent the first few days crashing on the floor of a friend’s “bed-sit” in the Dublin suburbs....read more