The seeds of books germinate in both well-lit and shadowy imaginative spaces. In this way, books exhibit an affinity with the dreams Sigmund Freud studied in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he learned that identifying the “background thoughts” from which dream symbols emerge, particularly those intricate or bizarre images resistant to quick explanation, was hardly a simple task. The search for their origins led him to free association, a process in which a patient focuses on specific images, not on a complete dream narrative, and to the conclusion that “interpretation en detail and not en masse” better enables an investigator to uncover the overdetermined nature of dream images—their provenance in several sources, not just one. Like dreams, books often arise from an untidy jumble of places: an archive of prior cultural texts (scrivened, visual, aural); major social, scientific and historical developments; and the imprints of individual experiences, large and small, etched on a writer's memory. Some of these are transformative or, in the worst of cases, traumatic—a stunning success or mortifying failure, a once-in-a-century pandemic and a pitched medical battle to vanquish it—while others are tethered to the banalities of everyday life that, surprisingly, demand expression. Such is the case with From the “Troubles” to Trumpism.

As a student of Irish history and culture for over forty years, I have enjoyed numerous opportunities to visit Ireland and Northern Ireland, and written about both, most often discussing literature, drama and theatrical production. This engagement constitutes one source of the pages that follow but, again, there are others. One in particular motivates the political bristle of this book: recent socio-political discord in America, particularly that associated with the presidential election of 2020, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the shocking state of affairs (and indictments) prefatory to the 2024 elections.

There is an incisive exchange about history and collective memory in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, a novel (and, later, film) set during the Troubles complete with Orange Lodge parades, deadly ambushes and the firebombing of Catholic homes. Over his career, MacLaverty has written several novels and short stories portraying in often excruciating detail the emotional toll of living through such violence, with Cal being, arguably, the most poignant. When discussing the novel, critics often point to similarities between the dilemma of its main characters and that of Shakespeare's “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet, as its protagonist Cal McCrystal (McCluskey in later printings), an unemployed, working-class Catholic, falls in love with Marcella Morton, the young widow of a Protestant policeman in whose murder Cal was complicit. In this “love across the barricades” story, as in Shakespeare's play, a sense of tragic foreboding is occasionally relieved by glimmers of possibility—for example, when Cal finds fulfilling work on the Morton family farm and makes a new home there to be near Marcella. His days of living on the dole may be over, and his new job hints at a better future. Unlike the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet whose fates are tied to family lineages and histories they cannot alter, Cal seems convinced that he possesses the agency to escape his connection to sectarian violence. Sadly, in the novel's closing scene, his arrest and imminent punishment destroy any possibility of a future with Marcella. But the question remains unanswered, to recall Haines's observation in James Joyce's Ulysses, of how “history is to blame” for Cal's fate. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps historical memory and the at times nefarious uses to which history is put are the culprits (Figure 6).

Unlike Cal, MacLaverty's later novel Grace Notes (1997) develops tensions between memory and aspiration that lead to a happier, even refulgent conclusion. The novel begins with a fledgling composer, Catherine McKenna, returning to Northern Ireland from Scotland to attend her father's funeral. At the cemetery where he is interred, she passes the grave of a boy she once knew who “gave his life for Ireland,” as an inscription beneath his name on his headstone clarifies. Reading the epitaph, Catherine wonders what musical composition might best represent the militant nationalism for which her former classmate sacrificed his life.

In the same spring that John Hume's seminal article appeared in the Irish Times (May 1964) advocating for nonviolent means of addressing a growing crisis in Northern Ireland, Wendell Berry published his first book of poetry. Accompanied by stunning illustrations, the book was comprised of a single elegy, “November Twenty Six Nineteen Sixty Three,” which first appeared the previous December in The Nation. At the same time, profound social change was occurring in Ireland, Northern Ireland and America that would redefine the relationships between all three—and between all three and Britain.

In America on October 1, 1962, after the governor of Mississippi defied a Supreme Court order and a riot ensued that required the National Guard to subdue, James Meredith became the first African American to matriculate at the University of Mississippi. Some 250,000 civil rights marchers traveled to Washington the following August, where Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech reverberated through the Lincoln Memorial. In the summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, with the Voting Rights Act signed into law a year later. The impact of these events was enormous, and it was not confined to America.

Acknowledgments

The story of American investment in Ireland that Charles Haughey related to the Economic Club of New York in May 1982 must have amazed many listeners. Because, as Tim Sablik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond characterizes it, the implementation of tight monetary policy to contain soaring inflation between July 1981 and November 1982 ignited the “worst economic downturn” since the Great Depression. Here, “downturn” denotes the “largest cumulative business cycle decline of employment and output” in America's post-World War II period (Goodfriend and King, 1). When Paul Volcker was named Chairman of the Federal Reserve on August 6, 1979, inflation had already risen to over 13% and the unemployment rate stood at 7.5% as manufacturing, residential construction and automobile sales languished. In the latter two sectors, unemployment reached levels of 22% and 24%, respectively, and mortgage rates in 1981 climbed to 18.63% in October. By 1989, they were still over 10%. However, eventually Volcker and the “Reagan recovery” brought inflation under control. During the president's two terms, the Standard and Poor 500 Index more than doubled; new jobs were created, and mortgage rates came down (though, speaking from personal experience, a 30-year fixed mortgage of nearly 12% in 1985 was hardly a panacea for first-time homebuyers). As economists Marvin Goodfriend and Robert King put it, Volcker's eventual victory over inflation made the “inflation peak” of early 1980 “stand out dramatically in the U.S. experience” (1).

It was a blustery July night in Galway, as if somehow November had finagled a new home on the calendar and banished summer for the remainder of 2017. Savoring the warmth of a banquet hall on the NUI-Galway campus, members of the Eugene O’Neill International Society and their guests gathered to dine; to honor Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne for their star turns in O’Neill's plays, particularly in Long Day's Journey into Night in 2016; and to enjoy President Michael D. Higgins's account of memorable evenings in the theatre viewing O’Neill's masterworks. Sitting with my wife, daughter and fellow banqueters—and having enjoyed speaking with President Higgins before—I recalled President Mary Robinson's learned remarks twenty-five years earlier at a convocation of Joyceans at Trinity College in Dublin. Irish presidents are expected to be well-read. And, much like a president's words, his or her reading matters.

Listening to President Higgins, my American friends and I felt more than a twinge of envy that our Irish colleagues could claim such a cultured man as their leader (fifteen months later, they reclaimed him when he won a second seven-year term). More than a published poet and theatregoer, Higgins is also a perceptive commentator on modern Irish literature, revising his 2012 remarks at a Dublin conference dedicated to Bernard Shaw's work to introduce the anthology Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (2020).