Monthly Archives: December 2024

On Names

On Names – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally. Nollaig shona daoibh | Merry Christmas! — Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally.

In American culture middle names have a bad reputation. They’re most famously used in our childhoods to scold us, and in adulthood they most often appear in legal matters. A writer naming non-descript American characters John Booth or Lee Oswald might get away with it but include their middle names Wilkes and Harvey and you have two of the most notorious assassins in American history. Most accused or convicted murderers in our legal system tend to be known in the press by their full names: first, middle, and last. There’s an odd cadence to it when these people are identified by the police or the courts. It’s one of the more common times when middle names get used.

I go by my full name professionally. On my website, in my email signature, and in every conference program and academic publication that I’ll ever appear in I’m identified as Seán Thomas Kane. Trust me, I didn’t intend to draw any connection between myself & the men mentioned in the last paragraph who killed two Presidents who I’ve always looked up to. In my case, the use of my middle name has a different sort of significance. In my extended family I often get called Seán T., in part because I have many relatives who are named Thomas, one of whom goes by T. among the family. Whether intentional or not, my parents gave me one of the most traditional Irish names they could have. Irish names are traditionally patronymic, meaning the person is so-and-so, son or daughter of so-and-so, descendant, son, or daughter of so-and-so. Those last names (or surnames if you aren’t American) that begin with O’ refer to families who are descended from a specific person who lived centuries ago. The ones that begin with Mc however are Anglicizations of the Irish word mac, meaning “son” of a specific person who lived centuries ago. My father’s name is Thomas, so in Irish my name is Seán mac Tomás, or Seán, son of Thomas. Kane is an Anglicization, or better an English phonetic rendering of the Irish name Ó Catháin, pronounced two different ways depending on where you’re from in Ireland (for those reading this, listen to the podcast to hear those two pronunciations.) Cathán was a more common Irish given name in the Early Middle Ages and derives from the word cath meaning battle.

This was in the back of my mind when I decided to start going by my full name professionally. It was 9 March 2016 and I had a few hours without much to do while waiting for a car to pick me up at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry Airport on my way to the eastern French city of Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region and a city which Caesar mentioned in his book about the Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico 1.38). That cold and rainy Wednesday in March there was a national railway strike in France and I ended up booking a back seat of a Renault Clio driven by a Frenchwoman who spoke little English alongside two other Frenchwomen who again spoke little English from Saint-Exupéry Airport outside of Lyon to Besançon, a good 4 hour drive. Right before they arrived though, I was on Facebook posting an update about my trip and thinking about how I wasn’t entirely sold on sticking with Seán Kane as my name professionally, after all when you search Seán Kane on Google you get a fair handful of results. There on Facebook I noticed that my friend Luis Eduardo Martinez, a fellow graduate student in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, and a gentleman who I consider a good friend to this day, used his middle name professionally. I felt inspired and changed my name on my Facebook profile from Seán Kane to Seán Thomas Kane then and there standing in the airport parking lot.

Where the last paragraph took place.

This proved to be even more advantageous when the Renault carrying the three Frenchwomen arrived as the driver stepped out and proved that the way Seán is spelled makes little sense to a monolingual French speaker. I remembered when I started studying French at Rockhurst University and we chose French names to use in class how I immediately was discontented with being called Jean alone, as I’d rather be called Jean-Thomas because that’s essentially a French translation of my name coming from Irish. So, I suggested that she call me “Seán-Thomas” which was heard as “Jean-Thomas.” Et voilà, that’s how it all got started. For the record: the Irish name Seán is in fact just an Irish spelling of the twelfth century Norman French pronunciation of that French name Jean, which is also the source of the English name John. You can hear the connections better in an English accent than in my own American one where the oh sound in John has shifted closer further forward in the mouth.

This wasn’t the first time I’d changed my name on my Facebook profile. For a while in high school, I went by my Irish name, Seán Ó Catháin, and that was the name on my early membership cards with the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Yet as much as I was inspired by the Gaelic revival and wanted to do my part to restore our ancestral language, I found that it was impractical to use in America and that deep down I do identify more with Kane than Ó Catháin because that’s the name my grandparents, my dad, and most of my paternal relatives use. Kane itself began as a misspelling by the U.S. Army draft sergeant processing my great-grandfather Thomas Keane when his number was drawn in 1918. He enlisted and served as an artilleryman in France and eventually became an American citizen as Thomas Kane because the sergeant told him if he wanted that first e added back into Keane on his papers he would have to go back to the back of the line and start the process over again. 

So, to answer a question I often get in Kansas City: no, I’m not related to any other Kanes in this city except my Dad, and in fact outside of my Dad and his brother’s family all of my living paternal relatives who share our family name on either side of the Atlantic spell it Keane. I suppose I could change mine back to that one, I suspect my granddad’s cousin and longtime Wednesday Blog reader Sr. Mary Jo Keane would’ve approved of that, yet at this point the name dispute feels moot especially considering the Keane spelling only goes back another generation or two to about the 1850s before which in the official British government records written in English my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s name was written as Thady Caine. In Irish his name would’ve been Tádhg Ó Catháin, and we know he spoke Irish as his first language. So, what was his name? I’m honestly not sure.

I like how different naming conventions reflect different cultures in their own ways. Our Irish patronymic system is really more Gaelic than Irish, after all it’s the same system that’s used by our Scottish Gaelic speaking cousins and it mirrors a very similar system used in Welsh. In fact, my Welsh ancestors’ family name was Thomas, which derives from the Welsh ap Tomos. Fitting, eh?

When I teach about the Vikings I like to bring up the Norse patronymic system too and explain that Leif Erikson (as we call him in English) was actually Leifr Eiríksson in Old Norse, and that following this tradition as it’s today practiced in Iceland were I born there, or should I someday immigrate to that island republic I’d probably start going by an Icelandic version of my name: Jón Tómasson, dropping the Ó Catháin/Kane family name all together in regular use there to better fit Icelandic society while still retaining it outside of Iceland. I see this as similar to how patronymics are used in Russian, where Tolstoy’s tragic character Ivan Ilyich is known by his first and middle name and not by his first and family names Ivan Golovin as we’d do in the English-speaking world. There, for the record, Seán mac Tomás would translate as Иван Томасaвич (Ivan Tomasavich).[1] In a hypothetical blending of cultures where Irish speakers interacted more with French speakers in North America than with English speakers I could see our patronymic system developing into the French system of having double names, thus why when I still published a French translation of my C.V. I would write my name as Seán-Thomas with the hyphen which I don’t use in English.

Another set of naming systems that I’ve encountered that I appreciate are those originating on Iberia where the family names of both the mother and father are included. My same friend Luis Eduardo Martinez’s full name, and the name I first read when I met him in September 2015 is Luis Eduardo Martinez Mederico. In this Spanish naming custom, his father’s family name appears first followed by his mother’s family name. This is opposite to the Portuguese where the maternal family name precedes the paternal one. So, in the Spanish custom my name would be Seán Thomas Kane Duke, while in the Portuguese custom it would be Seán Thomas Duke Kane. My parents and I actually refer to our family as the Duke-Kane Family, and we’ve joked about what my life would’ve been like if I’d been given both family names at birth in that order. I often conclude that including the East Yorkshire name Duke alongside Kane would’ve made me sound more English.

Then there are the professional names like Smith or Miller. These derive from the first bearer’s profession, so Jefferson Smith had an ancestor somewhere in the distant unwritten past of that Frank Capra film’s imagination who was a blacksmith. Today, on Christmas, we celebrate someone who has such a name, that being Jesus. I get annoyed with my fellow Americans who see “Christ” as Jesus’s last name because it’s not a name at all but a title in the first stage of becoming a name. This name as we understand it ought to be written in English as Jesus the Christ, from the Greek Ἰησοῦς Χριστός through the Latin Iesus Christus, but that word Χριστός is merely a Greek translation of the Hebrew word māšiah (מָשִׁיחַ), which again is usually rendered in English as Messiah, the name of Handel’s most famous oratorio and what Brian certainly wasn’t (he was a very naughty boy.) This is a kingly title, fitting with our view in Christianity of Jesus as priest, prophet, and king appears most prominently this time of year in the Feast of Christ the King, something we celebrate in the Catholic Church at the Liturgical New Year, which was 24 November this year.

Jan van Eyck’s depiction of Christ the King from the Ghent Altarpiece (1426)

A brief digression here: this past Feast of Christ the King I learned that the official name of the day is the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. While that last title might sound overly grandiose in the twenty-first century it actually comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, where the most powerful monarchs of those city states as far back as Sargon of Akkad (r. c. 2334–2284 BCE) claimed this as their imperial title: šar kiššatim, which actually meant King of Kish, the primate of all Mesopotamian cities and according to the older Sumerian King List it was the first city to crown its kings following the Great Flood. So, in essence this title places Jesus, a humble carpenter who was incarnate as God the Son as the true “King of Kings (forever, and ever) and Lord of Lords (for ever and ever)” to quote from the Handel.

Now, back to that rendering Christ as Jesus’s last name. In his lifetime, Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth, and in earlier times Christians were known as Nazarenes (Acts 24:5). This word is still used to describe Christians in Hebrew in the form notsrí (נוֹצְרִי) and in Arabic with naṣrāniyy (نَصْرَانِيّ). Thus, he was known more by a locator name than by a last name in the modern American sense. Furthermore in John’s Gospel, St. Philip referred to Jesus as “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.”[2] So, in the culture in which Jesus was born he would’ve been known most fully in this way rather than with any last name that we may recognize. It’s important to remember that Jesus’s ministry took place 2,000 years ago, and contrary to some popular belief he didn’t speak English. English wasn’t even a language then, though an older form of Irish was around, just probably not heard as much in Galilee or Judaea.

So, let me conclude with the bits that seem to have started as identifiers that came at the end of people’s names before there were family names in the sense that we use them today. These are often locators of where the person in question was from. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci, da Vinci merely refers to the fact that Leonardo was born in the Tuscan commune of Vinci. These particles of place tend to denote nobility in some names, see the French, Spanish, and Portuguese de, the Italian de’ and di, and the German von. However, I see the utility in having this locator in someone’s name to make it clear that even though they’re a Booth they’re not related to every other Booth around. That way a random John Booth living in 1865 would’ve had less trouble because of his more infamous counterpart’s scheming that Good Friday. I’d ask though, in my own case whither would such a locator in my name identify? Where would it refer to? Would it stick just with me, saying that my original hometown is Wheaton, Illinois, so I’d be Seán Thomas Kane of Wheaton? Or would it go back to the origins of my particular Kane/Keane/Caine/Ó Catháin family in the Derryhillagh townland outside of Newport, County Mayo, in Ireland? In Irish the way this would be written would either be with a different Irish preposition ó (yep, there are at least two of these), or with the preposition as. In my Irish as I speak it, I say as in this context more than ó, as in to say “Is as Meiriceá mé,” or “I am from America.”

We don’t do these in Irish names, in part because of our patronymic system which does a fine job on its own. Sometimes when I’m writing stuff in Latin and I want to adopt the style of the Renaissance humanists who I read in my research I’ll try to Latinize my name with one of these locators, rendering my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois by using the name of the Roman goddess of what, Ceres, and essentially making a town name from there. Thus, Wheaton becomes Ceresia. The tricky thing is that when I’m translating my name into Latin, something that was done in academia more into the nineteenth century but is almost never done today, I have a conundrum of whether to start from Kane or from Ó Catháin. I for one don’t like how a Latinized Kaniussounds, so instead I do go from Ó Catháin and use Cahanius, or Ioannes Thomae Cahanius Ceresius in full.

Names are important, and they say as much about the person who bears them as the people who named that person and the culture to which they belong. I’ve played around with my own name a fair bit, as you’ve seen. Today I’m more used to being called Seán-Thomas in French than in English, though the latter has happened more and more. I’ve even noticed that people have started calling me Thomas seeing that name and recognizing it faster than they do Seán, especially with the fada on the a. I smile and acknowledge them, after all I’m happy to be mistaken for my Dad. Looking forward, should I be fortunate enough to name my own children I’ll say these two things: first I’m not the one who’ll be pregnant with them for nine months, so I shouldn’t get first call on their names, and second there’s that Irish tradition that offers a simple answer to this conundrum. Will my first-born son be named Thomas as well then? Yeah, maybe. We’ll have to wait and see how this poorly named lifetime membership with one of the dating apps works out for me. I certainly hope I’m not putting my name out there for the rest of my life, though you can bet I’ll be using that lifetime membership joke for as long as I can.

Nollaig shona daoibh a léithoirí rúin! | Merry Christmas, dear readers!

[1] NB: I’m using Russian as the example here because that’s the one I’m more familiar with. No political inclinations toward the Kremlin in their invasion of Ukraine are intended.

[2] John 1:45 (New American Bible), see more here.

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On Democracy

On Democracy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

One of those great efforts with which human history is concerned is the question of what our original nature was at our beginning and if and how we have changed that nature. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the primitive as “closer to humanity’s origins” and living in a state without the societal and technological innovations “that obscure their nature” evokes this original nature, what in Christianity is called our original sin, or biologically our evolved state as a particular form of bipedal mammals among other lifeforms.[1] The seeming natural state of human societies until very recently has been toward forms of monarchy and aristocracy, the Tory Party in Britain today still refers to itself as the natural party of government because they descend through many generations from the old Cavaliers who supported Charles I and the aristocrats in the Parliaments of the Stuart and Georgian centuries who opposed the liberal reforms of the Whigs. Here in the United States, our own whiggish political tradition sees its modern manifestation in the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or G.O.P., whose founders in the 1850s included former Northern members of the Whig Party once led by our own aristocrats, men like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in the early republic.

Yet those same men stood for something beyond just preserving their own aristocratic power within their own society. These American Whigs and their Republican and Democratic successors aspired to a high ideal of human nature that entrusted power in the hands of the many rather than in those of a few or the one. Dr. Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her Letters from an American about how the Secessionists who dragged this country into our Civil War in 1860 and 1861 were trying to assert their own aristocratic vision of the republic that would benefit the few at the disregard of most and the expense of the many. As James J. Sheehan reminded us in his essay in the December 2024 issue of Commonweal, Tocqueville wrote that the chief difference between the source of power in an aristocracy or a monarchy, or their corrupted forms oligarchy and a tyranny, and the source of power in a democracy is that “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”[2] The despots rely less on our trust in their rule, and in many of the cases we see today they sew discontent in government, the economy, and for all of us with each other in order to assert their authority and keep hold of power. 

Democracy is a far harder thing to keep, as Dr. Franklin knew well. The inclusion of more and more people complicates any organization, yet it also allows that organization to better reflect all involved. Democracy requires the efforts of all of us to survive; if left unwatered and unnourished by each generation it will wither and die like any other flower or fruit on the vine. Throughout my life, I’ve looked to heroes in our history from Lincoln, Mandela, Óscar Romero, Popes Francis and St. John XXIII, to people closer to my own life. What all of them have in common is a desire to improve the lot of humanity, and in the case of Lincoln and Mandela to promote democracy in their homelands. When I look ahead and worry about what might be coming in these next four years, I often wonder if I would be safer, happier, healthier, and living a more fulfilled life elsewhere in another country where I can leave the troubles of my own behind. Yet I remember these heroes, MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse, my great-grandfathers who fought in the two World Wars, the dreamers and optimists who organized and marched non-violently for civil rights here in America and in Ireland too, and looking again at our own day I pause. This is our time to make life better for our successors while we live to overcome the long winter of fear before us. If I left now, could I look those heroes of mine in the eye when my time ends?

I believe in democracy because it is the best form of government we’ve yet imagined. I believe in representative government because I would rather have a say in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, and my country than not. I believe in democracy because I believe in humanity and that all of us can make something better if only we believed in ourselves and in each other. I believe that before that original sin there was original grace, original goodness; that before the first frown there was the first smile; that before the first thoughts of lust there were thoughts of love. I believe in democracy because I need to believe that I will have a future, that all the things which I’ve done in these last 31 years are building up to something which will, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world,” no matter how small that change may be. To do any of this, to see any of this goodness in our hearts, to believe in ourselves again we need to be willing first to acknowledge our faults and second to forgive ourselves and put in the effort to make our lives better. For all our technology and our ever increasingly complicated ways of life, we are still the same humans as our ancestors living in Lévi-Strauss’s primitive manner. We retain the same bodies and souls. Because of this, we can build a future for our posterity in a spirit of grace, compassion, and optimism that would make the heroes of old proud.

[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Montaigne to Montaigne, trans. Robert Bononno, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 25.

[2] James J. Sheehan, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Commonweal, December 2024, 13.

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The Versatility of Storytelling

The Versatility of Storytelling – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories.

My favorite sorts of stories are the ones where I feel that I’ve gotten to know the characters and can relate to them on a personal level; that these characters are either real people who I’ll never meet or entirely fictional is beside the point. I often remember the stories I was reading, or watching, or listening to more than the experiences from my own life that surrounded new tellings of those stories. This potent relationship is heightened in moments when my own life is dull or foreboding, as in the height of the recent Pandemic when I passed the long days of isolation in my Binghamton apartment or at home in Kansas City watching and reading stories in the Star Trek franchise which I only really began to discover in February and March of 2020.

I wanted to be a storyteller from my youth. I read a book by the Irish journalist Frank Delaney called Ireland which followed a young man as he discovered his own passion for storytelling by listening to the seanchaí who often visited his family’s home. I began to write for myself around this time, though my efforts were focused more on poetry and plays at first. A decade ago, I built up the endurance to write a longer-form short story called “Abducted and Abandoned,” and around that time started writing what today is The Wednesday Blog. By the time I was working on my first master’s degree in 2015 and 2016 I’d begun writing a longer work, my book Travels in Time Across Europe, which I self-published in 2017. That one tells the stories I collected from my year living in London, stories of my own adventures traveling from the British capital to other cities across Europe. At the time I imagined that it could become a sort of valuable source for readers seeking to understand the world as it was in that last year before the Brexit referendum and the rise of Trumpism swept across Britain and the United States.

Dr. Olivia Stephens, the main character of “Ghosts in the Wind.”

Like the main character of Delaney’s Ireland, I too went to university to study history, to use my passion for storytelling, and as things came about, I’m now close to earning my doctorate in the field. Today, besides my efforts here with the blog I largely am just writing things related to my research. Alongside my dissertation I currently have one encyclopedia entry soon to be published, a book chapter and a scholarly article submitted for editing and am now writing another article related to my translation of André Thevet’s Singularitez. I still try to write the odd bits of fiction, like “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released two weeks ago, or “Ghosts in the Wind” which I’m quite proud of. Yet I haven’t written anything to be acted in years. That’s striking to me, because my first big scribal efforts were for the stage and screen in my high school years. I do have an idea for a play that I might turn to someday in the next few years, yet even writing that here fills me with a sense of loss because it could well become another project that I’m excited about and have good ideas for yet don’t ever get to.

What I love most about writing for the stage and screen is that there’s a chance I’ll get to hear my words interpreted into lived experiences. Ideas that once only existed in my mind could be seen by many others played out before them and enlivened by the actors who utter those words & all the designers of sets, sound, lighting, props, effects, and music who flesh out that lived experience into something relatable and emotional in its truth. In short, to see my words brought to life in performance is to see a world created from what was once my thoughts, the smallest and most intimate of stages that I alone know.

To this end then, I am awed by the versatility of those storytellers who create these worlds in their performances. My erstwhile dissertation advisor Dr. Richard Mackenney, a man for whom I have the deepest respect and consider a friend, often talked about his own experiences on stage playing characters created by Shakespeare alongside many of the greats of the British theatre. In his lectures I saw a performance like any revival of King Lear or any of the Henrys or Richards that Shakespeare wrote. My own lecturing has taken on this same quality, yes at least in part in flattery, because I saw how he kept the rapt attention of most of the 150 or so students in the lecture hall with his art.

In recent weeks I had the pleasure to see the English actor Ralph Fiennes play two very different yet still akin parts in the films Conclave and The Return. In the former, Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals who is tasked with managing a papal conclave on the death of the Pope. In the latter, Fiennes returns to the screen a mere month after he appeared cassocked as an English cardinal this time dressed in rags as Odysseus returned to Ithaca after 20 years away at war against Troy. To see the same man inhabit two characters who on the surface could not be more distinct is a profound testament to the man’s mastery of his art. Both films are pieces of theatre imagined with the realism of a certain type of cinema that is more European than American, with less effects and a minimalist score that has its roots in the French New Wave. In the American context it’s reminiscent of the minimalism that we see in some of the television dramas produced recently for their streaming service by Apple.

I felt that I could instantly relate to Cardinal Lawrence in spite of his high office. The finest leaders I’ve met, whether cardinals and bishops or mayors, senators, and ambassadors are all people first and foremost. They acknowledge the trappings of their offices yet retain the everyman spirit that makes them relatable. I saw this in Cardinal Lawrence more than in many of the other characters who populate the halls of the Vatican in Conclave. That he is an English Catholic cardinal speaks to the post-Reformation moment in which we now live when the old sectarian wars of religion feel behind us and reflects on the Catholic Church in England and Wales that I know from my year living there and going to Mass in London. He speaks for a certain Anglophonic ideal that is democratic yet still upholding of tradition and custom.

Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence and Odysseus, in performances which premiered within a month of each other.

Odysseus in contrast is a man who has seen much and endured much more than I ever hope to. His pain is written across his mostly silent face, and in this role, Fiennes says more with a tortured look than with words. That he only acknowledges his own identity verbally once in the film is telling. This is a man who fears that he won’t be the man that his family have waited for over these twenty long years that he was away. I can merely relate in that I’ve noticed time and again how my home and my city change each time that I’m away. On this most recent return of my own from Mérida on 10 November I was startled in the weeks that followed to see that the last vestiges of the long summer we had in this region at last faded away into a brief Fall before receding into the winter cold far sooner than I expected. Even more dramatic was the city I found on my return from London at the end of August in 2016. Kansas City wasn’t the same place it had been even 8 months before when I flew home for Christmas. There were plenty of stories I’d missed while I was away, one relative who’d been born and who I met for the first time at a far later date than any of her cousins in the youngest generation of my family. In that loss that comes with being far from home I can relate, yet in the pain he suffered and inflicted while he was away at war, I am thankful to lack that experience.

Yet the brilliant versatility of storytelling here expresses itself in Fiennes’s ability to say so much with so little about the war he fought and the trials he faced on his homeward voyage. Odysseus suffered for his efforts, and in his suffering, I see his humanity & feel that I can relate to him. At the end of the film, I felt that I got to know Odysseus for the man he’d become, and that in spite of the Bronze Age setting and the far looser garments, in a film whose costumes are marked by a combination of loincloth & cloak, than anything I would wear, I felt that I could see myself, my own humanity in that moment in time on the island of Ithaca in the second millennium BCE, perhaps the 12th century BCE as the polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–194 BCE) dated the fall of Troy to 1183 BCE.Where both Conclave and The Return succeed is in placing the lives of their characters in moments and settings which feel real. Odysseus’s Ithaca feels as lived in as Cardinal Lawrence’s Vatican, yet the former seems to be set in a far brighter and younger world with different morals and values than the darker and starker built world which succeeded it in the monumental edifices of the Vatican. Yet both are in my imagination places which I now have visited & seen, and both are places that I would recognize again if I ever returned to them in my memory of those films, or should I ever venture there in my own life to the Vatican or to the Ionian Islands and Peloponnese where the filmmakers created their vision of Ithaca. That stage is as lived in as any seemingly sparser platform that Shakespeare’s Muse might have evoked in Henry V; it is as alive as any other that can be imagined in our art.

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Notes on Carruthers Smith’s Museum

Notes on "Carruthers Smith's Museum" – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some notes on the story I released here last week, more about Carruthers Smith and the other stories who populate that tale. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some notes on the subtext and background of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released in this blog last week.

            This story about Carruthers Smith was born out of a dream I had at some point between 5:00 am and 9:00 am on Saturday, November 23rd, 2024, after a late night working at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. I often have quite thematic dreams like this one, and so when I woke from this particular dream, I knew I had a story to write. The dream itself only lasted as far as Part I of the story you will have just read, or perhaps heard if you prefer the podcast version. I began writing it shortly after waking and finished it close to 3:00 pm on that same Saturday. It proved therefore to be one of the quicker ones that I’ve written in quite some time, though one of the stranger ones at that. I wanted to write out several notes about the story, its characters, and its setting so you might better understand the subtext behind the story, and to preclude any other interpretations of what I’ve written.

            In my original dream none of the characters had names. I observed the action from the perspective of Agent Pat O’Malley, which is why in the first part of the story he is the narrator. In my original dream he was filing some sort of metallic slide rule for the character that became Carruthers Smith, a reversal of roles as in the dream I was initially there to interrogate Smith for some uncertain cause. The setting of the story, Carruthers Smith’s Museum, was there in the original, though now writing this nearly 18 hours after waking today I remember it looking more like an art gallery built on a platform above the sanctuary of some old Upstate New York church with a big square base to the bell tower and a more Victorian looking wooden exterior that I often saw in the small villages in Broome, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties on my drives between Binghamton and Ithaca when I lived in Binghamton between 2019 and 2022. Agent Penny Wilson’s character was in the dream yet taken off-stage by Smith’s accomplice, trapped somewhere, yet my character couldn’t prove they were so entangled and thus I had no reason to properly accuse Smith’s character. At that point of desperation, I awoke and began writing.

            My characters’ names are always quite intentional and tell more about the characters than their actions or dialogue in the story might convey. Carruthers Smith was the first character who I named in this story. I wanted the villain to be a looming WASPish figure, the last scion of the Gilded Age living a recluse in this vast museum he built for himself somewhere far from the great cities of the Northeast yet still within a day’s drive of any of them. I settled on Southeastern Delaware as the setting simply because it seemed most practical for the federal agents to drive there from Washington than if they were in New Jersey, on Long Island, or on Cape Cod. Lewes became the setting for the story because I’ve always liked that name and its connections to the county town of East Sussex in the south of England. I went back and forth for a minute between the names Smith and Jones; several weeks ago, I’d gotten the idea for a story about a man who is always wrong about everything named Erroneous Smith, which I haven’t written yet though I took aspects of his sketched character and took them into the less comical Carruthers Smith. As for his first name, I drew that from an old Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” published at the beginning of 1904 in The Strand Magazine in London and a month earlier in Collier’s in New York. The 1984 Granada TV adaptation of the story featuring Jeremy Brett as Mr. Holmes was my introduction to the story and remains etched into my memory from watching that series in the early mornings on PBS during my high school days. Carruthers is one of the two suspects in Conan Doyle’s story, and it’s a British-enough name that it felt fitting for the old colonial New York type of person I was looking for.

Sidney Paget’s art in The Strand edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” (1904). Public Domain.

            The federal agents were all named in quick succession. Bill Hardy is named to make him appear as non-descript and American as I could with a nod to the Hardy Boys. I know a lot of Bills, though none from Buffalo, and so it seemed a fitting name to use here without nodding to one in particular. Pat O’Malley drew from the idea that I can best write from the perspective of someone like me, that is a fellow Irish American. My family comes from the townlands around Newport, County Mayo a part of the country which before colonization was ruled by the O’Malleys and Burkes. Everyone around Clew Bay is related to some degree or another if you go far enough back, and I have a handful of O’Malley ancestors myself. Patrick was an easy choice, it’s the most accepted Irish name in the English-speaking world, with my own Seán in all its phonetically spelled variations reflecting each country’s version of English coming in second, though Liam, the Irish version of William, is quite popular now too probably thanks to the recently buried Liam Payne of One Direction. Penelope Wilson was a harder one to name. I’ve used the name Penelope in my long awaited second novel in my romantic comedy series which I dramatically call the Plumwoodiad and was hesitant to use it again. It’s in part a nod to Penny Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory, one of my favorite TV shows, yet more so a nod to the original Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. At one point when I stepped away from my desk yet was still engrossed in this story while making breakfast, I considered putting a line in there about her having to wait a long time to find a man who can string her husband’s bow. The name Penny was intended to give her a deep well of resilience and strength that she would call on to save everyone else from Carruthers Smith. Wilson was another choice of trying to make her sound as American as possible, and while I did have President Woodrow Wilson in mind a bit here, I also thought about Robert Sean Leonard’s character Dr. James Wilson in the Fox series House in mind with this name.

            I didn’t initially plan on making everyone else in this story Irish Americans. This is something which makes me laugh now thinking about it. I’ll make a small digression here, if you’ll permit me. When I was in elementary school, I remember one day my teacher brought out a stack of books for us to all read together as a class that was about a character who she said, “was from an ethnic group that aren’t often talked about in books.” I remember thinking then how the only book about Irish people or Irish Americans I could remember reading in my school was Tomie de Paola’s picture book about the life of St. Patrick, the namesake and patron saint of my elementary school, St. Patrick’s in Kansas City, Kansas. That’s nagged at me since, and I do think we Irish Americans tend to get forgotten because the Carruthers Smiths of this country have largely accepted us as white in the last sixty years since the first of our kind was elected President. It’s often forgotten today how we Irish Americans were reviled by the old English colonial population in this country for a long time. I heard some stories about this, and in the older histories of my alma mater Rockhurst University, there are stories of Rockhurst students in the 1920s and 1930s sneaking into Klu Klux Klan rallies to try and fight back against their banality. And yet, all that fit neatly into the background of Carruthers’s assistant, who I decided would be a first-generation Irish American, whose parents crossed the Atlantic during the big wave of migration among our people to this country in the 1890s. That character developed into Peter Dougherty. I had to be careful here, the first couple of names I gave him ended up being changed because I realized they were the names of actual people I know either in the Kansas City Irish community at large or nationally among my brothers in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. I imagined Peter was a sort of Bob Newhart type character who spent his early life trying to get by amid the shifting tides of the world around him, and once he found Carruthers Smith he was eventually willing and able to give up on trying to just survive and instead enjoy something more comfortable even if it meant sacrificing the woman he loved. That woman became the penultimate character I named in this story. At first her named was Bridie McGinty, Bridie being a pet form of the Irish name Brigid, yet that changed near the end of the story when I decided instead to name her after my great-great aunt Delia McDonnell who came to America from Ireland in the 1940s or 1950s. yet I had a mental image of her from the start. She was going to be a cross between Mamie O’Rourke in the 1894 classic song The Sidewalks of New York, Dorothy Day, and many of the women who I’ve known in my life who day in, and day out work in the schools and hospitals and for nonprofits trying to make life better for others. There’s a subtle yet profound truth in this: if you make life better for other people who’re worse off than you are, it’ll eventually make your own life better too. Call it trickle-up economics if you will. Lastly, there was the town doctor, who got the name Ronald out of a desire to find something that felt like it’d fit a character born in the 1940s or 1950s, and Yancey because it was the end of the story, and I was looking for something at the end of the alphabet.

From Ric Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film, sung by Robert Sean Leonard who already got a mention in this blog post.

            Let me say something briefly about the time in which this story is set. From the first moment I thought of this story taking place in 1990, thirty-four years ago. I felt this was far enough removed from the turn of the twentieth century to have much of the off-stage action feel removed yet still before the millennium which feels like a profound break in time in my own life. I did have aspects of the lived environment of the 1979 Peter Sellers film Being There in mind when I thought of the décor and technology that Carruthers Smith would have in his museum, where the building itself was largely designed forty years earlier in the first few years just after World War II, yet the technology kept getting updated to a certain point at which Carruthers no longer felt comfortable replacing things. I’ve seen this in people who prefer to stick with certain technology that they’re most familiar with even if many years or decades have passed since that technology has been commonly sold or can be repaired with replacement parts on hand with the manufacturer. Doing the math here, this places Carruthers Smith’s birth in 1914, Peter Dougherty’s in 1899, and Delia McGinty Dougherty’s in 1898. The agents meanwhile are largely children of the 1950s and 1960s, with Penny Wilson the youngest at around 25 years old. It seemed less important for me to settle their ages than it did the characters in Carruthers’s orbit. There is something of the nostalgic for me writing about characters in the seventies, eighties, and nineties who were born in the decades just around the turn of the twentieth century. These birthdates were the norm for the oldest generations when I was born in 1992, and today I do miss something of the expectation that my great-grandparents’ generation born between 1890 and 1918 would still be living in our world with us today. I in fact only met one of my eight great-grandparents, the last of them to be born, who died when I was three years old.

The Walter Parks Thatcher Archive in Citizen Kane

            Finally, I want to end by addressing the museum itself. I love museums, or musea as Carruthers would surely use the Latinate plural of that word, and so Carruthers Smith’s Museum was intended to be a twist on that happy place of mine as it was in my dream. The museum is made of one long gallery whose white walls and white marble floors match the place where I work yet whose shape is more akin to some of the galleries at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, yet I often thought of how it appeared with its own internal lighting in a manner similar to the private archive of Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane with its long shadows and stark surfaces. That warm and welcoming space is twisted however when you remove all of the art from its confines except for something that seems eerily out of place. The great rubber artifact is a phrase that made me laugh the first time I wrote it, and yet what’s essentially a giant eraser-shaped blob of milky white goo became the unintended means of Carruthers Smith’s fall into depravity. Was he ever afraid of it? I think so at first, yet by the time we met Carruthers he’d lost any real desire to live and was happy to have something that could take his life at any moment be a constant presence in his life. He may have once loved another, he may have once been happy with his success, he may have once believed in being the patriotic good boss whose tires helped drive the Allied advances across North Africa and Europe, yet by the time we meet him he is so jaded about life itself that he sees no reason to cherish it. I imagined this rectangular piece of rubber standing atop a foot-tall podium, with the object itself reaching up to about six or seven feet in height, so it would tower over anyone who approached it, yet not by too much. Was the rubber alive? Perhaps in a sort of imagined monstrous way, yet only as much as a Venus fly trap is alive.

            The giant rubber monolith in the center of the room stands for the corruption at the heart of Carruthers, his willingness to sacrifice others for his own success. His two-faced approach to people like Peter who keeps the keys to his house, yet he still sees as little more than a servant speaks to just how morally bankrupt Carruthers is. Here is a man who was once on good terms with presidents for his wartime industrial service. In one line which I cut he admitted for the first time how on the morning of the 1948 election he voted for Dewey and then put a call to President Truman to wish him good luck because if Truman thought Carruthers Smith was a friend then maybe he’d sign another contract for more tires and tank treads for the impending war in Korea. Money for the sake of money alone is the corruption at the heart of this man, a heart that’s been hollowed out so he can hide away even more of his gains. He is the true face of an oligarch who puts on a nice mask for the sake of selling his wares in a democracy yet would rather all the nice people who buy those goods stay out of his way and leave the governing of society to the captains of industry and their cronies in government.

            Carruthers Smith then is a warning, a vision of the last echoes of the First Gilded Age at the dawn of its successor. All the successes for expanding suffrage, workers’ rights, and improving our education, healthcare, and overall quality of life are at risk if we allow the oligarchs of today try to return us to a limited regulation small government policy of the late nineteenth century. If we let the wolves into the henhouse the chances are good that they’ll turn it into a buffet for themselves to feast upon while everyone else is left out in the cold to fight over scraps or starve. Of all the federal agents who seek to bring Carruthers to justice, it’s Penny Wilson who is successful. Without her tenacity or her compassion for Peter Dougherty that reinvigorates his soul after decades of uneasy slumber in his boss’s shadow, Carruthers would have remained at large, a glowering menace on the far horizon of the seat of our democracy. The youngest of all the characters in this story is the one who saves them all.

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