Submitted by admin on Sat, 2005-11-26 09:00. ::
I was in the west of Ireland when I heard about the Irishwoman who ran away from home towards the end of the 19th century and became famous in America as a crook known as "Chicago May". I was told that a book about her, written by a local historian from her part of the country, was based on the life story May published in the 1920s. I knew that, before my own time, there was very little autobiography by Irish women, and almost none by women who were neither saintly nor patriotic nor literary, so I had only to hear about the book to want to read it. But it seemed that no library in her native land had ever heard of her, much less had a copy of the book. I went online and found it in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, the words thrilling me as they came up: Chicago May, Her Story: A Human Document by "The Queen of Crooks", May Churchill Sharpe, 1928.
But the book about May by the local historian was in the main library of the county she came from, County Longford. So early one morning in late summer, soon after I first heard her name, I got ready to drive halfway up Ireland to read it.
When I was a producer with Irish television, I made a series called Plain Tales, in which older women looked into the camera and told their life stories uninterrupted, the editing cuts covered by their own innocent snapshots, little pictures faded to sepia of fat babies and girls in old-fashioned coats swinging arm in arm along out-of-focus streets. I found those women and coaxed them into talking - partly for myself, who had never felt myself enrolled into the company of women by my solitary mother, and partly as an act of redress on behalf of the millions and millions of women stuffed into graveyards who might as well never have been born for all anyone knows about them. Millions of men die unknown, too, but at least they once had an audience in a tavern or a marketplace. What they were like was of some consequence in the world.
I might not have gone after May if she'd written her life story when she was still young. Now that I'm not young myself, I see retrospection as the one source of insight available to everyone. Or I might not have gone if May had lived in one of the eras I have to struggle to imagine - among the dogs and sheepskins of a medieval towerhouse, or wearing beauty spots on her powdered face in the 18th century. But she ran away into her adult life just as the past turned into our present. In Proust, the richest of consequences unfold at the beginning of the last movement, when the narrator returns to Paris after the first world war and stands here in our time, where there are telephones and taxis and aeroplanes, and opens a perspective back on to the world which, up to this, he and his readers have been within. May would have as wide a span. She could look back on an antique, agricultural society from the vital chaos of the new cities of America.
She died in 1929, the year of the stock market crash. So, she was a famous criminal in the era of long skirts and big hats, but she was also a contemporary of my mother's.
The lineaments of the town that would have dazzled the eyes of little May Duignan when she was a country child - grey roofs rising from marshy fields, old shopfronts along the main street - can still be made out in Longford. But sun bounced off the glass and steel of the shopping centre where I ran up the stairs to the Local Studies library, eager to start reading. Below in the car-park, women marshalled their broods - slender daughters in full makeup, little boys in football shorts, calm, round-eyed infants. A mother bowled a buggy along, issuing instructions over her shoulder with such confidence that she never even looked around. What skills did May command, I wondered as I opened the book, that could compare to the way these women organised children and shopping and households? What was she good at?
I hadn't been prepared for the sheer amount of story, the number of places May had been, the number of things she'd done, the coincidences that had happened, the wonderful highs and terrible lows - the sheer speed of her tumultuous life. I hadn't realised that her world was much wider than Ireland and America: that it was in Paris, for example, with the most dangerous of her lovers, that she first came to real grief, after they burgled the American Express office there. But there was frontier America, too, Egypt, England, South America. There were marriages and murders, diamonds and absolute poverty, exotic places and here - home. I lifted my head and reminded myself where I was. Longford. Just under a hundred years earlier, then, the May of this book had come through this very town, a tall, straight-backed woman, fabulously dressed, and with a purse bursting with money for all to see.
And that was when she was only in her early 30s. There were extremes of experience still to come. I raced through the pages, shaking my head as I read the way people do when they can hardly believe what they're being told. Imprisonment. An oblique encounter with the Easter Rising. A lethal, obsessive jealousy. Collapse on the icy streets of Prohibition Detroit. And then - a miracle. May had lived down at grassroots level, looking up at important events and people; now, the eye of a great person fell on her - a caring eye - and against all the odds, she had it in her to respond. But even that was not the end. There was a last act still to come, and even at the very last minute, another development.
How like her, I thought, when death was staring her in the face, to be starting off in a new direction. But as I closed the book, I was already asking myself what I meant by that.
I had no real sense of May. She was indomitable, certainly; simply to have survived the twists and turns of her life proved that. But I had no real grasp of the self that was the only thing to connect so many people and events. It was as if May - the flavour of her, her appeal for other people, her interests, her characteristic ways of thinking and feeling, her beliefs, her tastes - was obscured by the drama of her life. And by the author's indifference. The local historian who wrote the book in front of me had not been interested in the mystery of personality. "She was a truly evil person," were his first words about May, and his analysis never got much further than that. His account of her life was a remarkable achievement in fact-finding by a gifted researcher, but it was the chase, not the quarry, that had interested him. It was as if this woman had been called forward out of the ranks of the forgotten, had opened her mouth to speak, and had then been told to be silent.
I looked around for some other avenue of approach. It turned out there was a history of May's home parish, written by a retired schoolmaster named James MacNerney, and I sat on in the library and read that. The book is a labour of love full of the most minute details of schools built, matches won, ambushes set, dances held, churches dedicated, and of poignant snapshots of haymaking and visiting relatives laughing in print frocks and windblown children with flower faces outside one-room schools, and barns once used for dancing, and stern football teams in baggy white shorts. It is a book to restore the reader's faith in the beauty and strength of community; and the community of the village of Edenmore, stretching from Saint Patrick to the present day, included even May. Though May was approached somewhat gingerly. What exactly she did was left vague, other than that she emigrated and "lived a flamboyant lifestyle. She was an attractive young woman ill-prepared for the lures and pitfalls of life and of money." A remote and largely unchanging community survives by not saying things rather than by saying them, and readers would understand, of course, that what was being said was that May turned to crime and that the crime, since it involved money and attractiveness, had something to do with sex.
There was nothing more to read. If I wanted to go further with May, I'd have to visit where she came from. So I contacted James MacNerney, and a few days later I drove north again, this time to be shown around Edenmore by himself and his friend, another retired gentleman, who also expresses his affection for his native place by writing about it, though what he writes are humorous, nostalgic ballads. The two of them climbed banks and jumped over stiles and reversed the car up lanes at speed and stood on the tops of breezy hills as if they were in their first youth, tripping over themselves with pride. Here was the schoolhouse - thatched then - that May attended, there a holy well Saint Patrick himself blessed beside a thornbush covered in the rags and socks and dishcloths of petitioners. There a mill, here a view of five counties, there the church where the Duignan family went to Mass, here an ancient wattle path across marsh ground.
They even saw to it that I was welcomed into the very house - blackish-green trees around, the stone of the original four rooms as thick as a fortress - where May was born and grew up. It was the most isolated dwelling in a lonely place, facing a hill, behind it a wilderness of purple bog.
We were received with the courtesy and hospitality of an Ireland of long ago and sat in "the room" - the room off the kitchen - drinking tea out of china cups and eating sandwiches and cake that the lady of the house and her daughter had prepared for us. They said nothing except to press their visitors to more. No doubt they're full of opinions in private - the young woman was a college student - but on this semipublic occasion, only the men were making statements.
"She was a fine person," James said, but he looked around a little helplessly, because there was no getting away from the fact that the fine person did become a notorious criminal.
I left Edenmore and took the road through the water meadows of the basin of the River Shannon - evening mist coiling slowly across them - heading for home.
It made me uneasy that I was sliding towards involvement with May before I knew anything about her at first hand, since I hadn't yet read her own book. Already, something within was trying to enlist me. Something that was more impulse than reason was telling me to stand beside her, to re-open the file on her, to call people back to look at her again. It was true of nearly everyone who ever lived that a careful estimate of what they had been had never been made. But though there was nothing to be done about their silence, May happened to live when there was a mass literate audience - an audience who wanted a vicarious thrill from crime the way audiences have always done, but who had to get it from books. There wasn't much radio or many films in that brief period, and there was no television - so she got her autobiography published. That made her different from all the billions of people, including every one of my forebears, who left absolutely nothing behind.
If I were to retell her life, I would have several natural advantages. I was Irish like her. I was a woman, and a woman who, like her, had never been a mother. That we'd both written life stories was no doubt due to that - that we hadn't done the work of mothers, or in any other way applied ourselves to what was called, by the Catholic Church of her childhood and mine, "the duties of our station in life".
And we had both looked to America as a place of transformation. She got there when she was young, I'd made visits there from time to time in the hope of changing myself, and now, as it happened, I was seriously engaged with the place. Orthodox biographers never talk about their personal reasons for embarking on such-and-such a piece of work. They present themselves as pure mind. But I was very conscious that May had spent a great part of her life in the States and that her book was in a library in New York and that I had been going to Brooklyn on and off for the last few years to stay with a friend and his young daughter. Time and again I almost became committed to them, but then I'd back off, and come back to Ireland. If I followed May, I'd be where I should be - where the unanswered question in my own life was.
I turned off west towards home, and drove along a straight stretch of road between sombre trees. Suddenly, flash upon flash, the lights of the car were caught by streaks of vermilion and gold. Posters! The poster for a circus. For a mile or so there was a poster every few yards, bright as parakeets lined up in greeting. The smell of warm canvas and crushed grass came back from when, when I was a child among dull green fields, the circus arrived from another world. The astonishing elephant. The acrobats like seals flipping and diving in the shadows under the Big Top. The circus people themselves, with their lurid makeup and their caravans that spilled tin basins and puppies and exotic pieces of cloth on the rough ground.
May had no information, I thought. How could she have - a barefoot child out on the edge of the bog in a forgotten corner of a forgotten country? But if she somehow knew, if she sensed that there was a world out there that had colour and oompah music and glittering women who balanced perfectly on the backs of plumed ponies, what would stop her from taking off?
Couldn't I take a risk? I never meant to write about a crook - I don't even read about crooks, insofar as there are celebrity crooks nowadays. I'm a bookish person; I'm not attracted to the street. But wouldn't there be something exciting about throwing away my old supports - as she would have done - and starting off in a new direction? Especially as I wouldn't be alone. I'd have her company, after I read her book.
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