Elizabeth Cullinan & Her "Yellow Roses"

Abstract

Elizabeth Cullinan & Her "Yellow Roses" Angela Alaimo O'Donnell House of Gold, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 328 pp. $49.95. The Time of Adam, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 178 pp. Yellow Roses, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 208 pp. A Change of Scene, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 192 pp. How did we lose sight of fiction writer Elizabeth Cullinan? Or, perhaps the better question is why did we never really see her, never fully appreciate her subtle storytelling and penetrating vision of daily life as an American Catholic living on the edge of the Irish diaspora in New York City at the dead center of the twentieth century? I first heard Cullinan's name sixteen years ago listening to a lecture by Bronx-born novelist Peter Quinn at Fordham University where I had recently begun teaching. An alumnus of the university, Quinn had returned to give a talk on his genesis and career as a Catholic writer. Speaking of his literary influences, Quinn praised Cullinan's novel House of Gold as the first accurate depiction he had ever encountered of the hothouse world of pre- and newly post-Vatican II Irish American Catholics in the Bronx. "She was telling stories about us," I remember Quinn quipping, "our tribe, with all of its oddities and obsessions, our dysfunctional families and their closely guarded secrets." The authenticity and boldness of Cullinan's work was apparent to other readers, as well. Quinn mentioned his Irish-Catholic mother's disapproval of Cullinan for exposing the private lives of her own people to the common gaze, wondering whether her family would disown her for her disloyalty. In fact, these were the kinds of stories [End Page 69] Quinn himself wanted to tell, the hidden histories he wanted to unearth and reanimate, and reading Cullinan gave him permission to do it, freeing him to become the writer he felt called to be. I responded immediately to this bombshell Quinn had casually dropped, searching out Cullinan's works—her two novels House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982), and her two story collections The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977)—only to discover they were all out of print. Fortunately, I was able to find used copies of the books, and thus began my education about this remarkable American Catholic novelist who had somehow escaped my notice. Quinn, of course, was right. The bona fides of Cullinan's voice and vision, is immediately recognizable even to a reader, like myself, who did and does not belong to the world she describes, in such striking and particular detail. Her stories and characters have the charm of the local—they are often set in the Bronx, in a neighborhood just a few blocks from Fordham, and in Manhattan, a place that is at once mythic and dystopian, the cultural capital celebrated on postcards and the gritty city experienced by millions of citizens as dirty, crowded, and unkind to its human inhabitants. Yet, local as it is, her fiction also has universal appeal, addressing issues of concern faced by all Americans—and especially Catholics—living through the so-called sexual revolution and on the cusp of the Vatican II era. Her characters are almost always Irish Catholics who occupy the full spectrum of practice and belief—including pious parents and grandparents, priestly uncles and convent nuns, and alienated young people with a tenuous relationship to the religion that has defined their lives and their identities, up until now, and seems to have less and less relevance to the secular society they move in. Cullinan herself belonged to this latter generation. Born in Manhattan in 1933 and educated at Marymount College on the Upper East Side, her family suffered from financial setbacks and was forced to move to the Bronx. Cullinan, however, would return to Manhattan to work and live. She got a job at The New Yorker, first as a typist and then as secretary to editor William Maxwell, and eventually began submitting her own stories to the magazine. Over the course of two decades, 23 of them...