What did I know of being a man, back in another century, as I sat in that bar off Massachusetts Avenue, with the older men talking about the Red Sox, and so-and-so’s wife passed on, the saint she was,…
“The Plough and the Stars” started out as a reminiscence about a public place that nurtured me as a young writer. The Plough and the Stars is a bar and music venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that still exists, though it is not the same bar I learned to listen in decades ago. It takes its name from the famous play by Sean O’Casey. I’ve been working this year on a series of poems and essays on public places. But I immediately realized this brief essay was something slightly different. It was about forms of masculine discourse. Language as much as place was to be its focus. The essay begins with a question. This is a technique I learned from the flash fiction writer Sarah Freligh who says she often starts to write with a question in her head or on the page, then tries as long as possible not to answer it. The essay then proceeds to both answer and bypass the opening “What did I know of being a man.” The essay moves by a series of negations or obfuscations. “No one talked…” “Instead…” “I don’t know…” The essay suggests that what is not known is as important or even more important than what is known.
This is an essay less about the narrating “I” than about a specific real location and time. It is New England. It is Irish. It is the 1980s during a new wave of Irish immigration. And yet the essay lacks the deeper level of specificity I might want in another piece. The men are not named, for example. This is partly due to the passing of time, but also the essay’s intentions. Speech and tone are more detailed than physical character. And yet nothing is affirmed. So much is the conditional. Phrases such as “it might,” “I suspect,” “I guess,” “if I,” keep the questioning going until late in this brief essay. What is affirmed is a love of language and speech, not just in the speaker, but in the men at the bar. A sharing of discourse that cuts across class and avoids the narrow content that working class folks are said to speak of—for these are mostly working men, and yet they are far from uncultured. In the end there is something here of language and class, of learning just because someone is a working person doesn’t mean you just have to act dumb. There is something here of discourse and argument in the narrative. The ability to exaggerate, or as the last speaker does, to simply “make it up,” as the speaker makes up a facetious quote from The Great Bard.
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY’s most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His awards include The Lydia McCain Established Artist Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. He has new essays in Brevity, Common Ground Review, Midway Journal, and Talking River Review. A longtime disability worker, he works the third shift as a Medtech and Carer along Lake Erie, and teaches part-time for the MFA Program in creative writing at Western Connecticut State University.
