Series 6 - Francis Hackett memoir

544pp

Materials pertaining to American Rainbow: Early Reminiscences (New York: Liveright, 1971). the posthumous memoir of novelist/historian/journalist Francis Hackett memoir compiled by his wife Signe Toksvig.
Per Kerby A. Miller: 'Francis Hackett, b. 1883 in Kilkenny town, the son of shabby Catholic gentility; his father was a doctor, whose practice was severely injured because he supported Parnell against the Church and most of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie. Emigrated 1901 to New York City, to join siblings and cousins... ...Hackett's memoir may be the only one, which we're considering for our project, that is a self- conscious literary production, perhaps modeled after the autobiographical writings of Yeats and George Moore, and also Joyce'sPortrait of the Artist. As his [Dictionary of Irish Biography] entry puts it, Hackett was "a champion of individualism, cultural pluralism, social democracy, and literary modernism." Those attitudes informed his emigration and his rather ambivalent observations of, and responses to, American capitalism and society. He detested American capitalist greed and exploitation and yet he rejected socialism: he viewed both as crushing the individual human spirit. Like so many contemporary liberals, he fondly wished for some kind of humane, democratic capitalism, which would reward individual merit without crushing the weak. Arguably, Hackett was unusual in that he rejected Irish Catholicism and yet was a fierce Irish nationalist-influenced in both respects by his father, an avid supporter of Parnell against "clerical dictation." Some of the most relevant (to us) parts of Hackett's memoir are his reflections on the differences between Irish and American societies: differences which, he argued, make Irish immigrant adjustment to American capitalism difficult and painful. At least for a time, however, he seems to have preferred American society, because clerical influence was less stifling than in Ireland; yet, eventually he returned to Ireland, in 1922, because for a while he thought that post-revolutionary Ireland might offer a better future than an increasingly reactionary post-World War I America. Hackett wrote several books about Irish history, but eventually he found Irish Catholic bourgeois society-and Catholic church censorship of his and his wife's writings-even more stultifying and hypocritical than their US equivalents, and so they moved to his wife's native Denmark, which he extolled as humane, cooperative, and progressive. As a literary production, Hackett's memoir is often extremely perceptive and engaging. Some sections (e.g., his and his mother's conversations about hell and emigration; his later struggles with US telephone switchboards) are very funny.'
The series consists of: Miller's introductory notes; printouts of the Dictionary of Irish Biography and Wikipedia entries on Hackett; Miller's transcript of selected excerpts from American Rainbow; printouts of 2017 email correspondence between Miller and Sarah O'Brien of Trinity College Dublin regarding Hackett; a photocopy of American Rainbow; and a published hardback edition of American Rainbow.