Maybe all those years of living in Northbrook while writing about Chicago have made my brain soft. But when constructing Monday’s gathering of Irish poets for St. Patrick’s Day, I tucked in Dylan Thomas. Who of course was Welsh. Having been born in Wales. And lived his life there. As a Welshman.
I knew that. In the sense that the information was located somewhere in my brain.
Yet not readily accessible when the moment called for it. Because there was Thomas, on page two, tucked after W.B. Yeats and before Seamus Heaney and Oscar Wilde.
My blog readers leaped on the error when the column posted at the stroke of midnight — well, 12:13 a.m.
“Dylan Thomas is Welsh, not Irish,” someone commented, anonymously.
The only thing worse than being awake at 4 a.m. is confronting your failings at 4 a.m.
“Ah,” I replied, at 4:03 a.m. “You’d think ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ would have been the giveaway. Do you think I can get through today saying I consider him Irish by marriage? Probably not. Maybe I’ll try saying, ‘We’re all Irish on St. Paddy’s Day.'”
I went online and tucked a version of that into the column, pretending that I knew all along. I often wish I were as smart, or as eloquent, as the guy whose thoughts run under my picture in the newspaper.
Shamefully, some rebellious mental sub-circuit immediately tried to justify the error. Well, I thought, we consider Oscar Wilde Irish, even thought he lived for years in London, so why couldn’t…
No.
Wales isn’t that far from Ireland…
Don’t.
I actually checked: 154 miles from Swansea, where Thomas was born, to Dublin. That’s like saying someone residing in Peoria lives in Chicago.
Mistakes are a good way to air whatever corrosive narrative is running in the back of your mind, unnoticed. Mine, apparently, goes something like this: “You’re a hack and a bumbler who can’t do his job properly, who puts on this pretense of knowing stuff but in fact is the kind of ignorant stumblebum who would include Dylan Thomas among IRISH POETS when in fact he famously, no, VERY famously, is a [obscene gerund] Welshman from [the same obscene gerund] WALES!”
It’s good to get that out, from time to time. Cleansing.
I don’t like to make mistakes. But I do like copping to them, just because the ability to do so is rare. When you see someone whose ego is so inflamed — no names, please! — that any suggestion of error is an impossible affront, then taking responsibility for mistakes is a sign of confidence, almost a superpower.
Still, gaffes in print make for a long day. The first newspaper reader weighed in at 9:03 a.m.:
“Steinberg. Have you been drinking that green beer? The author of A Child’s Christmas in Wales? Maybe we say in Chicago that everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day but Thomas was not.
John D Cameron
(former waiter at the Quadrangle Club, not Irish either)”
I sighed, deeply, then replied:
“No, to the beer, green or otherwise. But yes, you are right. I own the sin. Maybe seeing his face on all those pub walls led me astray. It’s fixed online. As for the print edition, you are the first to point it out. No doubt there will be more. Thank you for writing.”
“Own the sin” is a phrase I gleaned from a history of colonial Harvard. A good Calvinist would, at Sunday meeting, declare wrongdoings.
To write is to err, or as I sometimes put it, “Too right is two air.”
Everybody does it. I mentioned the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik a few weeks back. Once I expressed envy for the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department. He gave me a hard look, then asked if I remembered the article he did about his friend, Saul Steinberg, the great illustrator. I said I did. He asked, with a certain steel building in his voice, if I further recalled the cartoon he mentioned with Goebbels plugging his epaulets into a wall socket. I said that I did.
“It was Goering,” Gopnik said, icily.
Moments of confusion happen. And must be guarded against. Monday’s gaffe hurt less because I originally mentioned Seamus Heaney eating at Chicago Cut Steakhouse.
But something made me check. Chicago Cut opened in 2010. Heaney last visited Chicago in 2006, making a visit there improbable. I snipped that part out, prior to publication. So I was checking, some parts. Others, not so much.
The “Dylan Thomas … now WHERE is he from again?” moment didn’t occur to me. It’s occurring to me now, big time. The Sun-Times and I regret the error.