US journalist makes public apology for calling Dylan Thomas Irish
We all make mistakes. Some however are more public than others.
American journalist Neil Steinberg discovered to his cost following this year’s St Patrick’s Day.
Writing about Ireland’s celebrated poets in an article in the Chicago Sun Times he made the somewhat momentous mistake of branding one of Wales’ greatest sons Dylan Thomas as Irish.
Now, as we know Dylan loved a drink and his wife Caitlin lay claim to Irish heritage, but the legendary poet was Welsh to the core, as the many people who contacted the writer to point out his glaring error were keen to inform him.
However, fair play to Steinberg he immediately corrected the error in the online version of the story, although the mistake was enshrined for posterity in the pages of the Chicago newspaper.
He also went someway to making for his Celtic faux pas by writing a fulsome apology in an online story where he very much owned his error with good grace and humour.
He wrote: Maybe all those years of 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. I’ve written about the pride Wales has for him. The information was 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.”
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.”
Thanks for the apology Neil. We’ll forgive you – this time.
You can read the full version of Neil’s piece HERE
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Americans are notoriously ignorant about anything beyond their ‘shining seas’. Most of them don’t possess a passport and never travel beyond their native land. There’s a sense in which, large at it is, the USA is nevertheless a sort of vast ghetto.
Aye, and given the s**tshow currently underway it’s comforting to see that there’s one Yank capable of owning up to his mistake.
It’s actually an understandable mistake. There is something of the AngloIrish about Dylan Thomas’s poetry which evidently springs from its Swansea and Carmarthenshire origins. Nevertheless it is also very Welsh. I have often thought that a good university essay would be “Dylan Thomas is an AngloIrish poet – discuss”. It’s really the luxury of his fluent vocabulary which is unique among AngloWelsh poets with the possibly exception of Gerard Manley Hopkins.