Abstract
Alone in this study of Irish American fiction are Ellin Berlin’s characters who have not only achieved middle class, but are wealthy. Berlin gives her readers insight into the upper crust New York scene from before World War I to the end of World War II. Like many of the novelists studied here, Berlin grew up in the world about which she writes. She was born Ellin Mackay to a millionaire father (his Irish immigrant father had struck silver in the Comstock Lode). Berlin’s Veronica Reardon, though wealthy, still constantly feels she does not fit in among the upper crust, who shun her for being Irish as well as for being Catholic. In turn Veronica is dismayed to see her Irish American peers turn the same feelings of superiority onto other groups, most notably Jewish people. Berlin’s novels of this rarely seen element of Irish America should be better known, and this chapter on Lace Curtain will hopefully act as a corrective to her relative anonymity in Irish Studies.
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Notes
- 1.
Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir, 163.
- 2.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 291.
- 3.
An under-studied novel, Lace Curtain is given just one sentence in Charles Fanning’s bible of Irish American fiction, The Irish Voice in America. Fanning says “Berlin wrote of the transition from New York tenements to Southampton country clubs” (301). None of Berlin’s other novels get a mention from Fanning. She deserves another look. That said, I am grateful to Fanning for bringing Berlin up at all. I may not have heard of her otherwise.
- 4.
In her Afterword to Mary Doyle Curran's The Parish and The Hill, Anne Halley says that Berlin used “lace-curtain” to describe wealthy Irish Americans who were not fully accepted by Protestants of the same socioeconomic standing. Halley explains a more common use of “lace-curtain” refers to middle-class Irish Americans, especially as they distinguish themselves from lower class, or “shanty” Irish. In Berlin’s book Mrs. Reardon is looking back on her middle-class “lace -curtain” roots, from her current upper-class status.
- 5.
Ellin Berlin, Lace Curtain, 230.
- 6.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 12.
- 7.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 4.
- 8.
Frantz Fanon writes of the psychoexistential complex imposed on colonized and former colonized peoples, who are told by the colonizing culture they, their languages, and their culture are not good enough, not civilized enough. This condition prompts an identity crisis that leaves even someone as wealthy and accomplished as Xave Reardon trying to prove his worth. Black Skin White Masks, 12.
- 9.
Ellin Mackay, just before she was Ellin Berlin, wrote about a similar night of at the opera in nonfiction as well, in a piece for Vogue in 1926. It was published in her “As I See It” column of non-fiction vignettes of what the rich and popular set were doing in and around New York. In Lace Curtain, Berlin describes the socializing between acts of the opera as almost like another play, where all the characters had their assigned roles, equally dramatic as the one on stage. In Vogue, Mackay writes, “Boxes at the theater were originally planned to offer privacy, but not at the Metropolitan. There, the boxes seem to have been designed with the intention of making their occupants as conspicuous as possible. The ladies in the boxes are not merely part of the audience; they are part of the spectacle,” 79. If Mackay had any of the same feelings of being out of her element in this setting as Veronica does, she does not mention it in the Vogue piece. She does comment on the rituals as an outside observer would, however. It sounds like she is an anthropologist visiting another culture, rather than a native.
- 10.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 131.
- 11.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 132.
- 12.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 133.
- 13.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 134.
- 14.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 22.
- 15.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 22; Bernadine makes an interesting distinction between the “shanty” Sheas and the “lace curtain” Reardons, given that the Sheas are also wealthy, and they live just down the street from Pride’s Tower in another large (but not “hotel” large) house. Old Mr. Shea is an Irish immigrant, but has gained wealth and respect as a lawyer in the United States. The family certainly does not live in a “shanty,” but perhaps the direct connection with the immigrant, who himself admits to having been born poor in Dublin, is enough of a connection to warrant Bernadine’s disdain as a third-generation American. This prejudice against her own in-group can be read as another sign of Fanon’s psychoexistential complex, through which feelings of inferiority can turn to self-hate.
- 16.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 26.
- 17.
Bandage making for the Red Cross in World War I is one event that is for certain from Berlin’s own life. While in the novel Veronica, born five years later than Berlin, is watching her older sisters and their friends help in the war effort, in real life Berlin and her sister Katherine hosted a class in making surgical dressings at Clarence Mackay’s “Harbor Hill,” his summer home in Long Island. Among their classmates were Grace and Muriel Vanderbilt. This event is documented in Vogue’s Society page. “Society,” 66,67. One wonders if the Vanderbilts were the model for the Vorheeses, whose presence at the top of New York social life inspires Xave Reardon to arm his daughter with an ermine coat in Berlin’s novel.
- 18.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 29.
- 19.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 36.
- 20.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 36.
- 21.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 92–93.
- 22.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 92.
- 23.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 214.
- 24.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 217.
- 25.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 276.
- 26.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 340.
- 27.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 229.
- 28.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 264.
- 29.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 337.
- 30.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 334.
- 31.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 293.
- 32.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 290.
- 33.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 293.
- 34.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 186.
- 35.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 326.
- 36.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 326.
- 37.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 26.
- 38.
For more on the fascinating story of Louise and John Mackay, see Berlin’s Silver Platter (1957), a well-researched biography of her grandmother that she fills in with imagined details.
- 39.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 31.
- 40.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 122.
- 41.
Barrett, Irving Berlin, 181–182.
- 42.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 296.
- 43.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 296.
- 44.
Stephen Watt explores the parallels between the Irish and Jewish experience in the United States in “Something Dreadful and Grand.” In tenement fiction of the early twentieth century, Watt says Irish and Jewish American writers had an “uncanny affinity” for one another, 41. He finds that “the relationship of these two diasporic peoples exists not only in the psychical depths of characters languishing and struggling for survival on New York’s Lower East Side… but also in a larger political unconscious,” 18. In some instances the two groups worked together politically, but prejudices also existed. Robert Snyder details the deterioration of Irish-Jewish relations in the Washington Heights and Inwood areas of New York by the 1930s, with acts of anti-Semitism fueled by gangs influenced by radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. “The Neighborhood Changed,” 442–443.
- 45.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 199.
- 46.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 199.
- 47.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 197.
- 48.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 328.
- 49.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 317.
- 50.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 220.
- 51.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 166.
- 52.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 293.
- 53.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 292–293.
- 54.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 230.
- 55.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 251.
- 56.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 314.
- 57.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 39.
- 58.
Berlin, Lace Curtain, 38.
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O’Leary Anish, B. (2021). How the Other Half Lives: Ellin Berlin’s Lace Curtain. In: Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83194-3_6
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