Warrenpoint

...The author was educated by the Christian Brothers and describes their ethic in the education of young Catholic nationalists in an alien society: they were not encouraged to join the IRA or participate in violent acts but to "regard the history of Ireland as unfinished business...

...ffMr...

...Donoghue...

...There is value in this way of thinking, if it encourages cooperative resistance to exploitation...

...Warrenpoint sits between, with the dark, gray, icy lough a forbidding barrier that separates the two...

...I finally was able to confront nay addiction as I was chewing my way through my seventh biography of Virginia Woolf, and came to a chapter which included verbatim notes she used to leave for her cleaning / woman...

...A whole winter with Lytton Strachey didn't seem too much time to spend, or a summer with Madame de Stael...

...His basic thesis is that 1988 turned on the failure of political leaders to address the waning of the cold war--soon to turn from a whimper into a bang--waging instead a contest defined by the political past...

...I made notes in my diary when volume two was due to be published...

...None of this was focused research, just curiosity gone wild...

...It is also a challenge to self-pity and despair--temptations common to all of us, but especially to those born into the wrong social class...

...She quotes from her field' notes: "I can understand the appeal of such beliefs, but I really can't comprehend how people actually believe this stuff...

...WANTED: A DEMOCRATIC AGENDA PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE The Last Campaign of the Cold War Sidney Blumenthal HarperCollins, $22.95, 386 pp...

...but it is also debilitating insofar as it serves merely as an excuse for disclaiming any responsibility for oneself...

...and then their adherents are "disturbed" and "depressed" when people turn to religion instead...

...The town is white-washed and neat, without a sign of the cheerful messiness of a south-of-Ireland village...

...Denis Donoghue, the eminent literary critic who holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Literature at New York University, grew up in Warrenpoint, an austere little seaside town in County Down, on the edge of the Carlingford Lough...

...For many of us, then, and today, Warrenpoint is a better place to have come from than to be in...

...Nevertheless, it is the tragic complexity of Ireland, both North and South, which has tuned Mr...

...But then, many Catholics who have lived forever in the North feel strangers...

...I snapped the book shut and made a clean break...

...No detail was too trivial for my insatiety...

...Donoghue's voice, and for that gift we are grateful...

...Elizabeth Shannon used to have an addiction to overloaded biographies...

...Sidney Blumenthal's elegant account brings it all back, but with a decisive difference: while Blumenthal feels and evokes the old frustration and anger, he has humor enough to be at least halfamused by the campaign's too-frequent follies, and he sees the election of 1988 as a tale of missed opportunities, not a reason for disillusionment but a call for vision...

...I don't know if that's a feminist or what...

...One of the women interviewed by Stacey, citing pride in her mother as an important influence on her own desire for independence, says: "I don't really know what a feminist is, but I like to take charge of my life, try to be the best in whatever I'm doing...

...Donoghue's family, they were Catholics and did not see a bright and promising future for themselves and their children...

...This at least has the virtue of honesty, but it shows a limited understanding even ofthe"appeal"ofreligion its"seductive power," as she puts it elsewhere...

...As such, they would always be strangers in Warrenpoint...

...A GOOD PLACE TO HAVE COME FROM WARRENP01NT Denis Donoghue Knopf, $9.95, 194 pp...

...They were Catholics from the south of Ireland...

...One does not have to be a feminist in order to admire strong women, to see through male pretensions of superiority, or to assume responsibility for one's own life...

...Sheep graze on damp, spongy tufts of thick grass, smoke curls into the sky from the few cottages that sit sideways, leeward of the wind, on the 138: Commonweal slopes...

...Music is a dominant force in Mr...

...Donoghue is unforgiving that the politics of Northern Ireland did not allow his father, a Catholic, to rise above the rank of sergeant...

...Once in a great while I find such a book...

...Warrenpoint is not a straightforward account of boyhood or place, but rather a brief and fascinating journey without roadsigns through the circuitous routes of Mr...

...Submission to God makes people less submissive in everyday life...

...I search now for the small but perfect memoir from the author who can judge what is essential, even if the subject is as fascinating as he knows himself to be...

...Warrenpoint is one...

...On the southern side of the lough, soft, green hills of the Republic of Ireland rise gently from the edge of the water...

...On the other side of the tough, to the north, the taller, more impressive Mourne Mountains hunch their dark, rounded shoulders down towards the town, casting dark shadows in the sunlight...

...It enabled the Reagan administration to negotiate the INF treaty, largely salvaging Reagan's presidency from the wreckage of Iran-contra, and pro22 February 1991:139...

...Her son said of her: "She was neither stupid nor indifferent, but the implements she had to use---cloth, thread, meat, vegetables, the gas cooker, the stove--were invariably at odds with her need of them...

...They aim to make victims acutely aware of their victimization...

...They are beautiful and mysterious...

...Because Stacey assumes that profamily values are antifeminist by definition, she is repeatedly surprised to find evangelical Christians insisting, for example, that men and women are "equal with God" or that the husband's "headship" of the family does not entitle him to "rule over" his wife, as one of them puts it, but rather to "serve [her] with love and respect...

...In this way they discourage the assumption of personal responsibili...

...the familiar, homely, sight of rural Ireland...

...The third assumption that dominates and distorts her thinking is that religion interferes with a proper understanding of the world and perpetuates old patterns of domination and dependence...

...She was not a woman who stamped her children with her own imprint...

...but they also generated an equally ahistorical contempt for the benighted women in past times who could not grasp the essence of patriarchical oppression, alas, because they had no exposure to "gender studies...

...Modem social movements, on the other hand, tend to prey on resentment...

...The very word "Warrenpoint" has a resonance in my ear dating back from my earliest childhood family stories...

...Religion is not just a refuge, a means of security in a troubled world...

...Stacey is sure that it is and is therefore puzzled to find that working-class "feminism" can coexist with a belief in the importance of "absolute commitment in marriage," in the words of another informant...

...The landmine was allegedly set off by the terrorists who were hiding across the lough in the Republic of Ireland...

...Donoghue's life, and his def'mition of music in the book is the best I've ever read: "Music is the art which gives a formal destiny...

...Stacey notes that "the world's first generation of childhood television-viewers grew up, as I did, inundated by such weekly paeans to the male breadwinner nuclear household and modem family ideology as 'Father Knows Best,' 'Leave It to Beaver,' and 'Ozzie and Harriet.'" No doubt such programs helped to generate a certain "nostalgia" for a type of family life that never existed, as Stacey argues...

...Donoghue's memory, imagination, and formidable musical and literary references, a distillation of what it means to grow up Catholic in Northem Ireland, of what a father means to a son, of what the death of a sibling does to family life...

...Wilson Carey McWilliams he election of 1988 was a pretty depressing affair, fuel for the American public's raging disenchantment...

...Quite apart from the difficulty that feminism itself has a long history, it is clearly absurd to suppose that earlier generations of women, because they did not have access to current insights into the "social construction of gender," deferred mindlessly to men or wore helplessness as a badge of honor...

...Religion, likewise, looks like a "retreat from rationalism and secularism," from Stacey's point of view...

...They distrust any understanding that would seem to "blame the victim...

...The lough cuts into the land from the Irish Sea, dividing Northern and Southern Ireland, and creating a political metaphor from its geography...

...But political terrorism has not left it untouched...

...This libel on our mothers and grandmothers seems to derive largely from the media, which have given currency to an abstract image ofthe"traditional" family that finds little support in the historical record...

...But"doctrines" have nothing to do with it...

...my Irish great-great-grandparents emigrated from Warrenpoint as young adults...

...an author who couldn't bring himself to leave out one, single, boring, inconsequential fact was no problem for me...

...Like Mr...

...On the surface, it seems quiet, peaceful, and well-ordered...

...Donoghue's memories have a hero, it is his father, Sergeant Denis Donoghue of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a stern, upright, fair, and unimaginative man who would not seem able to instill such fiercely loving loyalty, but in memory he gave his son "everything I needed...

...Victims of social injustice find it easy to blame everything on systematic oppression---capitalism, patriarchy, racism, the "system" in general...

...His mother appears in his book as a lesser figure, fragile and remote, a woman who suffered attacks resembling epilepsy, and had a hard time coping with the simplicities of her life...

...It was an embarrassment to the Christian Brothers that Davis, [Thomas Davis, the leader of the Young Ireland movement], like many of the great exponents of Irish nationalism, was a Protestant...but it was implied that, after the generation of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory--Protestants all, regrettably--the sentiments those writers expressed could be retained and transposed into Catholic terms...

...Whenever Stacey encounters such opinions, she describes them as "surprisingly feminized, even protofeminist, doctrines...

...Wait a minute," a voice of reason said...

...In fact, Blumenthal argues, the relaxation of the cold war was the central event of the campaign...

...to feelings which are still free to postpone their dependence upon particular objects and events...

...And on some deep level it depresses and disturbs me that they do...

...For Stacey, such commitments can only be described as a "retreat" from the "arena of postmodern gender and family reform...

...This will never do...

...It makes them less fearful but also less bitter and resentful, less inclined to make excuses for themselves...

...So do many Protestants...

...On August 28, 1979, the Provisional Irish Republican Army blew up eighteen British soldiers by the side of the Carlingford Lough...

...The Donoghue family went to live in Warrenpoint in 1928 for the employment it offered to the elder Mr...