sovay | Head to the storm as they faced it before

It's Fritz, the Wonder Lurgi! No, actually, it's bronchitis. I just got back from the doctor's. No wonder the brass bands weren't doing a damn thing.

(The doctor was awesome. He told me to rest up, I mentioned I'd spent most of the week on the couch with the first season of Night Court, he recommended Boston Legal. Thoughts? I do like James Spader.)

Browsing in Rodney's a few nights ago, I discovered another hardcover of Brigid Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983). It had been shelved with the myths and fairy tales; I took it up to the front desk and explained that it was actually a monograph on Prince Grégoire Gagarin's courtship of Julia Taaffe in 1832, illustrated with the drawings and sketches he sent her in the spring of that year, and that it had nothing to do with crane wives or swan maidens, but mostly with politics and nationalities and flirtation and art. As a small child, I had been disappointed by this myself. The book was a present from my godmother; it took me years to appreciate it properly. The title seemed to promise shape-changing. But I was reading the wrong story for that.

One of Nicholas's descendants was created first Viscount Taaffe in 1628. In the next generation, however, a Taaffe was already shewing signs either of wanderlust or of discontent with Ireland and was pursuing a military career in the service of the Austrian Empire.

By the early 18th century, that perhaps inherent Taaffe tendency had been reinforced by the disabilities imposed by Parliament on Papists, which most of the Taaffes, including Julia, were. Catholics were excluded from the Dublin Parliament, from high military rank, from the learned professions and in some circumstances from land-owning—from, that is, virtually the only occupations that the top branch of the Taaffe family would have considered fit for its members.¹

Accordingly, a whole segment of the family broke away and became authentic wild geese, as the Irish migrants to the continent of Europe called themselves, serving the Austrian (or Holy Roman) court as soldiers and diplomatists.

If the wild geese had been shape-changers, they wouldn't have remained Catholic and culturally Irish wherever they found themselves. They would have assimilated more thoroughly, changed their religion or their names,² and Frederic Morton in A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (1979) would have been unable to describe Eduard Graf von Taaffe as "Cork County handsome . . . parlay[ing] blarney, Gemütlichkeit and elegance into a political infallibility which kept him at the right hand of the throne longer than any other Prime Minister during Franz Joseph's long reign." But it was important to them. The end of the story of the prince and the wild geese is that Julia Taaffe returned to Ireland. Swan maidens and crane wives don't stay, either.

Then again, here I am, with diaspora on both sides of my family, so there are some limits to the genealogical applications of folklore.³ And at the minute I am not feeling even vaguely like migration. The rest of this post is canceled in favor of going and lying down.

1. I was just reading about the Catholic Relief Act 1829, too. It's one of the high points of the Duke of Wellington's tenure as Prime Minister. All roads lead to the Napoleonic Wars?

2. Never mind Ludwig Patrick Taaffe, check out Maximilian Karl Lamoral O'Donnell, Graf von Tyrconnell, Laval Nugent von Westmeath, or Gottfried von Banfield (who would be awesome even if he didn't belong on this list: "He may have been the only flying ace who flew a flying boat to five or more victories").

3. In case it needs to be pointed out, I am not descended from Julia Taaffe. She married an assistant under-secretary at Dublin Castle named Theobald McKenna. I'm not descended from the Prime Minister of Austria, either. But I remain endlessly amused that he's a character in a ballet.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Sorry you're yet ill,* but I hope this diagnosis leads to appropriate treatment and a swift recovery.

Glad you were able to correct the library on the proper filing of the book**--it's neat that there is such a book, and that your godmother gave you your own copy, whatever Julia Taaffe's precise relationship to yourself.

*And also sorry there's not a more pleasing intersection of our common languages--I wish I'd ever got a decent handle on Attic Greek, or that you had Irish.
**Best I've ever managed was pointing out that a book on the archaeology of Martha's Vineyard wasn't a travel guide, or perhaps correcting the attribution of a 19th century edition of Immram Brain to some mysterious individual named "Brain". (If they'd at least put Bran in the right case, I might have left it lie.)

Boston Legal is a scream, though it is unhesitating in its eagerness to offend just about everyone; if this isn't by definition a bar, as it were, don't hesitate. James Spader is awesome even when he's being despicable.

And then moving on to the rest of your post -- wonderful quotes! Have you been able to trace your family's respective diasporas far back? I regret that I've done very little in that department, beyond my mother's parents; my grandfather's being shot down by the Red Baron was a prominent tale I heard repeatedly as a child, often enough in his own telling.

Curses, I need to proofread. Strike that "library" and replace it with "book shop."*

*Well, I'm sure it's all because I spoke too much French as a child. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

There's a Taaffe Street in downtown Sunnyvale; ever since I saw it, I'd been meaning to ask if you were related to anyone likely to have Californian streets named after them...

I think that even if you're not directly descended from people, sharing a last name is sufficient that you can bask in their awesome if you like.

(It is odd to realize that, what with the hyphenation, no one in the entire world has my last name. Even pre-hyphenation, there were only six of us, now five.)

Have you been able to trace your family's respective diasporas far back?

In the case of my father's side, we can't—so far as I know—trace the immediate family farther than his father, who was born in San Francisco before the turn of the last century and whose birth certificate was lost in the 1906 fire and earthquake; when he died in 1962, he was either seventy-something or eighty-something and had claimed various different ages at different points in his life. He styled himself in descent from the aristocratic Austrian branch, but according to my uncle Thomas (who does all the genealogy on that side) it's now much more likely that his parents were Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, we have a ridiculous amount of information about the Taaffes in general. With the exception of one group in the United States who seem to have been the victim of a census-taker who couldn't spell, it's my understanding from Thomas that he's never run across anyone who wasn't related in some way, albeit distantly. The name originates in Wales. I've seen etymologies that route it back to Dafydd; I've also seen it explained by the rivers Tâf or Taff; couldn't tell you myself, but telemarketers hate it. My father's mother was a Quimby, meaning I'm tangentially related to Harriet.

My mother's side of the family is Russian-Polish Jewish and all four great-grandparents were immigrants; we know all of their stories, but in two cases can't go back much farther than how and when they got to the United States. There is a fair amount of information about my grandfather's father's family, who had a textile mill in Lodz and a tradition of religious scholarship that my great-grandfather decisively broke with, and there is at least one awesome story about my grandmother's mother's family, which involves law-breaking and Cossacks and an uncle right out of Sholem Aleichem (with whom we have a familial connection, although it is by marriage: B.Z. Goldberg, who married his daughter Marie, was a cousin of my great-grandmother's family). Somewhere in my mother's possession is an extensive family tree that her father compiled over a number of years, going back four or five generations and extending into branches like the cousins in Italy and Israel; I should find it and obtain a copy.

I regret that I've done very little in that department, beyond my mother's parents; my grandfather's being shot down by the Red Baron was a prominent tale I heard repeatedly as a child, often enough in his own telling.

That's awesome! I'm glad to know it was the survivable kind of being shot down.

James Spader is awesome even when he's being despicable.

Works for me.

Best I've ever managed was pointing out that a book on the archaeology of Martha's Vineyard wasn't a travel guide, or perhaps correcting the attribution of a 19th century edition of Immram Brain to some mysterious individual named "Brain".

*snerk*

I think that even if you're not directly descended from people, sharing a last name is sufficient that you can bask in their awesome if you like.

I'm kind of going on that principle. Otherwise I can't feel familial about the man who introduced the potato to Silesia.

(It is odd to realize that, what with the hyphenation, no one in the entire world has my last name. Even pre-hyphenation, there were only six of us, now five.)

I think that's wonderful. Your wife was telling me that no one actually knows its origins, except that it has to do with viking and, given that the name wound up in Lithuania, evidently with not being able to use a map.

I have to admit I've half fallen in love with the character Spader plays. I dearly wish Alan Shore existed in the real world; despite his many shortcomings, we need more folk with his peculiar combination of longgoings. Some of his closing courtroom arguments are among the most moving monologues I've ever heard.

I mean to reply at greater length, but want to say right away how wonderful all this is -- I'm honored that you shared it. Have your family stories inspired any of your own stories and poems? I've thought of exploring someof my own family stories in fiction, but haven't attempted it yet. But your comments prompted me to send an email today to my dad, who's 85, asking him to tell me some stories about his parents -- I know almost nothing about them, or have forgotten what I once knew, which astonishes me and makes me feel a little ashamed. Thank you for the encouragement of your witness.

Have your family stories inspired any of your own stories and poems?

Not directly, in most cases. Weirdly, the two examples that come first to mind are different takes on the same piece of folklore: "Exorcisms" (in Mythic #2) contains an allusion to my grandfather's mother's immigration story and The Dybbuk in Love has bits and pieces of family history remixed and scattered among different characters. The third section of the title poem of Postcards from the Province of Hyphens is a remembrance of my grandmother. (When I speak of my grandparents, I mean my mother's parents unless specified otherwise; they lived in Portland, Maine until my grandmother's death in 1997 and we saw them on a regular holiday-birthday-spending-summers-by-the-sea basis. My grandfather is now in Brookline and the only reason I haven't seen him since last week is that I really don't want to give him bronchitis.) A character in "The Salt House" has my birth story. There may be other references I can't remember right now or haven't noticed yet.

But your comments prompted me to send an email today to my dad, who's 85, asking him to tell me some stories about his parents --

Please let me know—if you are comfortable with it—what you find!

Head to the storm as they faced it before

Tá brón orm go bhfuil tinneas ort fós...

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