Abstract
If Ellin Berlin introduced readers to a class of Irish Americans rarely seen in literature, John Steinbeck introduced them to Irish Americans in a location rarely associated with them: California. Steinbeck, not considered an author of ethnic fiction but rather more broadly American, writes in East of Eden a character based on his own immigrant grandfather. Samuel Hamilton of County Derry moved beyond the urban ethnic enclaves of Boston, New York City, and Chicago, all the way to the west coast of the United States. There his family quickly blended into the wider American tapestry. Steinbeck characterizes the fictional Sam Hamilton almost exclusively by his Irishness, however. This chapter looks at Steinbeck’s Irish grandfather alongside other Irish grandfathers in post-World War II fiction that is more definitively Irish American. Samuel fits the trope of the generous, wise, kind grandfather, open to all walks of life and resistant to capitalism. His sons can be compared in interesting ways to other assimilating second-generation characters.
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Notes
- 1.
Tara Stubbs, American Literature and Irish Culture, 40.
- 2.
Matthew L. Jockers, “In Search of Tír-na-Nog,” 10.
- 3.
Jockers, “In Search of Tír-na-Nog,” 18.
- 4.
Jockers, “In Search of Tír-na-Nog,” 62.
- 5.
From a letter to Bo Beskow, November 16, 1951, just weeks after Steinbeck completed writing East of Eden. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, Editors, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 431.
- 6.
Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 115.
- 7.
Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 64.
- 8.
Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 63.
- 9.
Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 14.
- 10.
Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 64.
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Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 58.
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Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 106.
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Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, 103.
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Emmons, David M. Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910.
- 15.
Emmons, 212.
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Emmons, 213.
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Emmons, 221–32.
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Emmons, 8–9.
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Emmons, 144–46.
- 20.
Emmons, 6.
- 21.
Incidentally, Matthew Jockers notes fiction written by Irish Catholics who settled in California was more likely to be about success and prosperity than its gritty urban counterpart from the east. He explains that the Irish easily blended into the Spanish Catholic culture already in existence in California. There was not an Anglo-Protestant establishment there to discriminate against them, as there was in places like Boston. “In Search of Tír-na-Nog,” 190.
- 22.
Writing about the isolation of settlers on the American plains, Jockers contends it was difficult to maintain a connection with Irish identity there. He says, “the perseverance of the Irish identity in places such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco is best attributed to the strength of Irish community organizations. “In Search of Tír-na-Nog,” 105. There were no such organizations out on the Hamiltons’ isolated homestead in the Salinas Valley. In this way they had more in common with characters in Irish American fiction from the western plains than they did with the Hollywood or big city Irish.
- 23.
In “Steinbeck’s Family Portraits: The Hamiltons,” published in Steinbeck Quarterly in 1981, Martha Heasley Cox compares the fictional Hamiltons in East of Eden with their nonfiction counterparts. According to Cox, “He used the Hamiltons to represent mid-nineteenth-century Salinas Valley settlers as well as to provide family history,” 25. In the Journal of a Novel Steinbeck kept while writing East of Eden, Steinbeck insists that the family stories are true to life, though he had to write them in a nonlinear order and fill in some details he did not remember, Cox 27. Still, Cox argues that “one is struck far more by the correspondence between the accounts in the novel and the actual records than by the few divergencies,” 28. Since even written memoir is often colored by the author’s perception of events, and memories filtered through time must be filled in with our current interpretation of them, we can assume that fictional Samuel Hamilton shares much of his “real-life” model’s biography and also some of his grandson’s imagined characteristics.
- 24.
Anthony Burke Smith’s The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, from the University Press of Kansas, 2010, details how images of Catholics (and in particular Irish Catholics) were popular on both the big and (eventually) small screen. No longer were Irish Catholics discriminated against in the American popular view; rather, they could be portrayed as heroic Americans.
- 25.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 8.
- 26.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 9.
- 27.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 295.
- 28.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 291.
- 29.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 291.
- 30.
In his essay, “The Black Hills, The Gorey Road,” Eamonn Wall argues, “In Ireland, place, personality, and identity are inseparable,” 204. He says, “No critic of Irish writing can afford to ignore the connection between voice and place. Irish writers are collectively obsessed with place,” 220. For Irish immigrants who felt exiled from lands their families had lived on for generations, this would have been a traumatic loss. Catherine Nash posits that genealogy has become such a phenomenon in America because people need to feel a connection with place that gives them a sense of cultural identity. The family tree figuratively roots them to a place. Nash explains that for Americans who return to Ireland, “Despite what may have changed, the experience of the topography, the shape of a hill, the sight of the horizon is often imagined as a shared physical experience that links ancestors to their descendants across time and difference. The visit to Ireland is a pilgrimage and mission in honor of ancestors who could never go back,” 189. Sam Hamilton would have felt the loss of his land as an emigrant leaving Ireland, at least as much as he did leaving his dusty homestead.
- 31.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 8.
- 32.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 8.
- 33.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 9.
- 34.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 8.
- 35.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 9.
- 36.
“‘What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember’” Hansen, qtd. in Gerber and Kraut, 105.
- 37.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 42.
- 38.
Steinbeck, “I Go Back to Ireland,” 49–50.
- 39.
Steinbeck, “I Go Back to Ireland,” 49.
- 40.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, editors. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 807–08.
- 41.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 8.
- 42.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 140.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 140.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 140.
- 45.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 142.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 10.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 10.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 10.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 9.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 11.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 11.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 11.
- 58.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 161.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 162.
- 61.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 162.
- 62.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 162–63.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 39–40.
- 64.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 275.
- 65.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 276.
- 66.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 273.
- 67.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 146–47.
- 68.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 43.
- 69.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 148–49.
- 70.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 149.
- 71.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 37.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 37–38.
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Steinbeck, East of Eden, 38.
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Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 12.
- 75.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 433.
- 76.
Steinbeck, East of Eden, 252.
- 77.
Mary Doyle Curran, The Parish and The Hill, 220.
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O’Leary Anish, B. (2021). John Steinbeck’s Irish Grandfather: Samuel Hamilton, East of Eden, and Post-world War II Irish American Fiction. 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_7
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