As a young folklorist, Henry Glassie, flush with Guggenheim Fellowship money, went off with his family to Ireland. The year was 1972, and he was determined to make good work of opportunity, to accomplish an ethnographic study “that could meet the standards I had developed during years of hurried research in the United States” (501). By 1982, with the publication of Passing the Time in Ballymenone finishing the job that All Silver and No Brass had started in 1975, that work had been completed. And the less hurried labor in Ireland, this fine new book makes clear, was a central, formative experience. Glassie went on to acclaimed work in other places (Turkey, Bangladesh, Japan), but Ireland tempered and confirmed him. Hugh Nolan, Ballymenone’s great historian, was “the best teacher I have ever known” (2), while the musician Peter Flanagan was first of “three completely realized artists” (181) he would know, the one who taught him to recognize the other two.
And this is the focus of The Stars of Ballymenone. Where Passing the Time in Ballymenone placed emphasis on the community, the stars themselves now come to the fore, occupy the limelight they deserve. They are four, supported by a large cast of others—Michael Boyle, Ellen Cutler, Peter Flanagan, Hugh Nolan. Through story and song, the chat at the ceili and the singing at the pub, by their articulation of what Glassie calls an “epic of common life” (378), the stars guide their neighbors through difficult times, aid the forever imperfect harmonizing of their community’s first principle (faith’s injunction to “accept His commandment and love their neighbors” (267)) with its second (national and sectarian calls to political action, where “defeat, like love, becomes a salient condition of existence” (282)) and third (the “final uncertainty” (335) that edges all knowing). By their combined and repeated efforts, the neighbors are encouraged, better equipped to carry on, to endure. For endurance, after all, carrying on, holding off despair within the conditions imposed by principle, is the daily, ongoing, never absent imperative articulated by both Peter Flanagan and Hugh Nolan. “God knows life’s hardships,” says the first. “He understands the temptation to despair, but He knows the gallant effort to keep going. We must carry on” (52). “The closer you look at it, the worse it looks,” adds the latter. “But you can’t despair. You must carry on” (151).
In addition to its sharper focus on the stars, The Stars of Ballymenone features a new CD, twenty-six performances from the area’s musical and narrative repertoire, made possible by the application of Doug Boyd’s computer magic to Glassie’s 1970s field tapes (all but four selections are from 1972; two are from 1977 and two from 2000). On the CD as in the book Peter Flanagan and Hugh Nolan occupy center stage (fifteen minutes plus from each, with Ellen Cutler coming third with almost five), but one of its highlights is the voice of Michael Boyle (cut 21). Mr. Boyle was in the hospital when Glassie arrived; he died in 1974, the first of the stars to go, but not before he’d told enough of mumming to enable the making of All Silver and No Brass. And that book aided in turn the making of a play (Vincent Woods’s At the Black Pig’s Dyke ) where Michael Boyle’s words are heard anew. “For an instant, dead and unnamed, he lived again, as he will whenever the play is staged” (124).
This anecdote displays a researcher’s understanding of ethnographic art’s social responsibilities. The academic guest repays community hospitality by contributing scholarly “chat” to an ongoing, ever-widening ceili. The stars of the generation before them were mostly childless men, but as youngsters Michael Boyle and Hugh Nolan and Peter Flanagan listened, learned their stories and songs, and performed them when they in their turn grew old. They too were childless. Then it was 1972: “That is where I came in. They told me about the stars of their youth, and I, their historian, I tell you about the stars of mine” (113). And Vincent Woods, writing his play, using Glassie’s book, that’s where he comes in, sends Michael Boyle’s mumming forward to the future. And Cathal McConnell, rising “to international renown as a master of the flute and tin whistle” and honoring Peter Flanagan in a 2001 CD’s liner notes as his “first teacher” (161)—that’s where he came in.
The governing imagery of The Stars of Ballymenone is of light and dark, of shining stars in dark skies, humans gathered to small lights in dark houses. Beyond the book’s title, a chapter is headed, “Stars in the Dark.” “A spray of stars” (417) opens the book’s final sentence. So insistent a reference to celestial light must inevitably summon the Dante who ended each cantica of his Commedia with the same plural word. Stelle. Dante is cited only once in the text (99) but is surely also present when Glassie dreams a risen Hugh Nolan, his skin now “luminous and smooth,” his home a thatch of “living vines” (154). But The Stars of Ballymenone , despite a closing chapter exhibiting the stars at their most triumphant, their community united in “a moment of exhilarating oneness” (416), features no flying final cantica, no “Paradiso” freed at last of earth. Here we remain below; the stars are always “in the dark,” laboring and struggling to “carry on.” Journeying home from their great evening, they are stopped and questioned by armed soldiers. The final paragraph’s second sentence, just lines before the “spray of stars,” focuses on the home of Peter and Joe Flanagan: “The house is black against the blackness, an amber smudge at the window” (417). And this no less insistent reference to earthly dark must beckon also Dante’s own master, Roman Virgil, the darker star whose Aeneid ends with slaughtered Turnus plummeting to the underworld. Where Dante places “stelle,” Virgil deploys “umbra.” Shadow, shade, ghost. His epic and first eclogue close upon it, while the tenth eclogue repeats it three times in its final sentence. Stars and dark. From Dante a comedy reaches to heaven, from Virgil an epic closes in Hades. In between, mixture of both, lies a district of South Fermanagh where a distinguished senior scholar, returned to the ground of his most mature learning, uses the tropes of both to elaborate “an epic of common life” honoring the “stars in the dark” who taught him.
In his own evaluations Glassie assays panoptic superlatives, sweeping pronouncements of national and even global ranking. In Material Culture, for example: “Now that Samuel Beckett is dead, our finest stylist of English prose is V. S. Naipaul” (7). Stars of Ballymenone, in this vein, mentions the “hard fate” of Flann O’Brien, “Ireland’s third-best novelist” (99) of the twentieth century. Such ex cathedra grandiloquence is not possible for me. Were I capable of its straightfaced deployment, I’d use it here. In its place, instead, here is my chastened assessment: In Henry Glassie’s many studies, read over forty years, I have found the best demonstrations I have known of my discipline’s capacity for intellectually rigorous right livelihood. This latest effort, this warm and wonderful book, at once homage to his mentors and apologia for Glassie’s own practice, enlivened by voices he learned to love, measures up very nicely, for me, to the tall company of its predecessors. Its CD’s final cut, two tunes on concert flute by John Joe Maguire, closes upon Peter Flanagan’s applause. “God love you, John Joe,” he says (541). That’s a right note, for ending.
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[Review length: 1259 words • Review posted on January 12, 2007]