Tag Archives: Leon Uris

More on Jill and Leon Uris in Ireland

I’m keeping my promise to follow up an earlier post, When Jill and Leon Uris went to Ireland. The couple first visited both sides of the partitioned island from May 1972 to January 1973, then published Ireland: A Terrible Beauty in November 1975. The book featured nearly 400 photographs by Jill and text by Leon, an established author.

Leon released his Irish novel, Trinity, in 1976. It became a best-seller. The couple returned to Ireland at least five more times over the next few years. Jill photographed places that represented the fictional locations in Trinity. She did a piece for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine headlined “Connor and Shelly,” which illustrated the novel’s main characters. Jill and Leon traveled the River Shannon on a houseboat, “a lovely second honeymoon,” she recalled in a second book of photos, Ireland Revisited, published in 1982.[1]Jill Uris, Ireland Revisited. [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982], 1-2.

Of her half dozen trips to Ireland, Jill enthused:

I always arrive with anticipation, wanting to be haunted by her mysteries and teased by her fantasies. I travel through her tortured landscape wondering what it is about this place that entices me so. Is it ancient ruins, wild seascapes, the hundred shades of green? Or is it the verbal jousting and continual singsong of stories in a language that is something beyond English …yet not quite foreign? It is all of these and more; it is a people whose goal is only to be themselves, whose spirit retains a dignity which is rare in today’s world. It is the Irish refusal to be servants to anyone but their own minds.[2]Ibid.

The Irish Independent published this advert on Dec. 8, 1982. The image appeared on the book jacket and on an inside page. Titled “Man of Aran,” the figure was Dara Beag Ó Fátharta, the “Bard of Inishmaan,” who died in 2012 at the age of 92.

Revisited received mostly tepid reviews. John M. McGown of Gannett News Service noted the Uris’s first photo book had become “a staple on the shelves of Irish Americans” and the second was “likely to become a companion piece.”[3]”Two authors write varying views of Irish”, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, Dec. 2, 1982, and other papers. But Doug Wells of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register compared paging through Revisited to sitting through a neighbor’s vacation slides as he rhapsodized about how much he “just loved Ireland.”  Wells continued:

To be sure Jill Uris is a much better photographer than the man next door. Most of her photographs are well done. … She has concentrated on the rural, older Ireland, the romantic image most Americans have of the country. … But just as your neighbor babbles on and on about how beautiful it all was, so Uris carries on about Ireland. Her dullish prose, combined with snips and scraps from Irish writers and poets, upset what flow and balance the pictures provide.[4]”Too much, too little”, Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Oct. 17, 1982.

In Ireland, Frank Miller of the Sunday Press described Revisited as “a headless horse of a book, a book of photographs based on an unreality, lost and wandering somewhere between the myths and mists of romantic Ireland.” He also complained that Dara Beag Ó Fátharta (image above) appeared “no less than four times through the book.”[5]”Lost between myths and mists of romantic Ireland”, Sunday Press, (Dublin), Dec. 5, 1982.

Historical context

Ireland Revisited appeared a decade after Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland. As copies reached American bookshops in autumn 1982, the Troubles’ death toll climbed to 1,794 by year’s end. This turned out to be roughly half the total of number of people killed in the conflict.[6]”Year of the death” in Malcolm Sutton’s Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland, found at cain.ulster.ac.uk. Sutton’s index ranges from 1969 to 2001, three years after … Continue reading

Jill Uris wrote that after each of her trips to Ireland “the headlines from the North became more piercing. The people in the Republic wish the ‘troubles’ would just drift away. After all, they are finally building their own country and who needs the continuing hostility and fanaticism of Ulster?”

In fact, the Republic in the mid-1980s was “crippled by political violence, mass emigration, mass unemployment, political paralysis and a sense of hopelessness,” Michael McDowell, an independent member of Seanad Éireann, wrote at the start of 2025. It would take another decade or so before the Republic began the economic modernization known as the “Celtic Tiger” and citizens confronted abuses by the Catholic Church that resulted in today’s militant secularism. More then 40 years after Ireland Revisited, Ireland faces “very real” new challenges, McDowell concluded, “but very different from the dark past we left behind.”

So, too, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”[7]”September 1913” by William Butler Yeats.

References

References
↑1 Jill Uris, Ireland Revisited. [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982], 1-2.
↑2 Ibid.
↑3 ”Two authors write varying views of Irish”, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, Dec. 2, 1982, and other papers.
↑4 ”Too much, too little”, Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Oct. 17, 1982.
↑5 ”Lost between myths and mists of romantic Ireland”, Sunday Press, (Dublin), Dec. 5, 1982.
↑6 ”Year of the death” in Malcolm Sutton’s Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland, found at cain.ulster.ac.uk. Sutton’s index ranges from 1969 to 2001, three years after the Good Friday Agreement.
↑7 ”September 1913” by William Butler Yeats.

When Jill and Leon Uris went to Ireland

Fifty years ago this month the American book publisher Doubleday released Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, by Jill and Leon Uris. The couple had traveled on both sides of the partitioned island from May 1972 (four months after Bloody Sunday) to January 1973.

Original dusk jacket.

Leon, an established author, conducted research for a new novel, Trinity, which became a best seller when it was released in 1976. Jill, his third wife, 23 years younger, photographed nearly 400 images of thatched cottages, mist-shrouded countryside, and gritty scenes of urban violence; in color, and in black and white.

Their Preface says:

“We were lured there by an intriguing people, their sometimes magnificent, sometimes harsh land, and, mostly, their poignant history. Our aim was to find the keys to that story which would clarify so much of the mystery and puzzlement of recent events and simultaneously photograph everyone and everything wherever the search took us. …

“Ireland is too vast and complex in its story for two people to cover it comprehensively in less than a decade. We made no pretense at attempting to.

“What we do have here is a social, historical, and political commentary on what we consider to be the guts of the matter of a unique people and their lovely but sorrowed island. This is our point of view on the “troubles” that have plagued Ireland for the fatter part of a millennium.”[1]Leon Uris and Jill Uris, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty. The Story  of Ireland Today (With 388 Photographs, Including 108 in Full Color). [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975]. … Continue reading

The couple covered 10,000 miles, mostly by auto, “on some decent and some indecent roads.” Their journey and their book recalled American photographer and antiquarian Wallace Nutting, who estimated he and his wife covered 700 miles in all 32 counties 50 years earlier, during the summer of 1925. Nutting’s book, Ireland Beautiful, was published in time for that year’s Christmas gift-giving. It featured 304 half-tone engravings of Irish landscapes—only six images show people—and his text in support of the title.

From his studio near Boston, Nutting wrote:

“This volume pretends to no place as a guide book, nor is its text intended to cover with precision or fullness any part of Ireland. It is merely a record of impression of beauty or quaintness, observed in a land which for romance and pathos, strange history and legend, for witching grace and mystery, is probably unsurpassed.”[2]Wallace Nutting, Ireland Beautiful. [Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1925]. 302 pp. Quoted from Foreword.

Though he began his career as a Congregationalist minister, Nutting insisted his book had “nothing whatever to do with political and religious matters.” He noted the work of the Boundary Commission, which later in 1925 fixed the partition line in place, and made sweeping, uncontroversial generalizations: “The people of Ulster were as insistent on remaining in the empire as South Ireland was on withdrawing from the empire.”[3]Ibid., 286.

For more on Nutting, see my August 2025 piece for History Ireland, “Ireland Beautiful–How A 1925 American Photobook Boosted Irish Tourism.”

More opinionated

Leon Uris was more opinionated in his analysis of an Ireland then descending deeper into sectarian strife, rather than the island emerging from the war of independence and civil war at Nutting’s visit. During the Uris’s nine-month stay, more than 400 people were killed and thousands of others were injured in shootings and bombings. More than 500 people were charged with terrorist offences. “Their visit coincided with one of the most violent years of the Troubles,” wrote biographer Ira B. Nadel.[4]Ira B. Nadel, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010], See Chapter 9, “Ireland,” 209-232.

Uris leveraged his identity as an American Jew, not an Irish-American of Catholic or Protestant faith, as well as his status as a celebrity author. He took particular aim at “the most diabolic by-product of three hundred and fifty years of the plantation of Ulster, a cancerous growth known as Paisleyism.” Grimly, he concluded: “The nightmare of Ulster has come about with Christian fighting Christian in one of the most advanced of Western societies. Continuation of this travesty with God can lead to the eclipse of civilization in that part of the world.”[5]Uris, Terrible Beauty, 128, 195.

The Troubles got much worse, of course, but not quite that bad.

By coincidence, Terrible Beauty’s November 1975 release was three months after the death of Éamon de Valera, the most consequential leader of twentieth century Ireland. The book says he “had the full measure of that detached, ruthless arrogance, political guile, persuasiveness, and total self-assurance that stamp greatness on a national leader. He was the rarest breed, the head of a small country that has achieved stature among the political giants of this century.”[6]Ibid., 162.

Photographing Ireland

Dev’s death ends the book’s 8-page chronology, which begins at 10,000 BC when the island emerged from the receding Ice Age. Naturally, the book included a map and, like the island itself, was divided into two sections: The Republic and Ulster.

“Photographing in the Republic was almost always a joy. Ulster was another story,” Jill Uris wrote. She described the difficulties of working as a woman and an outsider in the sectarian maelstrom of the North. Her “Photographing Ireland” in the Appendix also contains notes about the pre-digital camera equipment she used during the assignment.[7]Ibid., 209-212

Aside from the images of sectarian violence in the North, most of Jill’s photographs show a mid-twentieth century Ireland without much hint of the rapid modernization that emerged in the coming decades, and certainly since 2000. In this regard her images of the country are similar to those of American photographer Dorothea Lange, who arrived in County Clare in September 1954 on an assignment for Life magazine. See my September 2024 post, “Remembering Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’“.

I’ll return to my exploration of the Uris’s visit and their work in future posts.

References

References
↑1 Leon Uris and Jill Uris, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty. The Story  of Ireland Today (With 388 Photographs, Including 108 in Full Color). [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975]. 288 pp.
↑2 Wallace Nutting, Ireland Beautiful. [Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1925]. 302 pp. Quoted from Foreword.
↑3 Ibid., 286.
↑4 Ira B. Nadel, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010], See Chapter 9, “Ireland,” 209-232.
↑5 Uris, Terrible Beauty, 128, 195.
↑6 Ibid., 162.
↑7 Ibid., 209-212

Remembering Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’

Seventy years ago this month American photographer Dorothea Lange arrived in County Clare and pointed her camera toward the locals. Six months later, at St. Patrick’s Day, Life magazine advertised her work as “12 pages of beautiful and sensitive pictures” that put readers “face to face with the rural folk of Ireland.”[1]From advertisement for the March 21, 1955, issue, as featured in the New York Daily News, March 17, 1955. The spread included about two dozen black-and-white images from among Lange’s more than 2,400 negatives.

Then 59, Lange was accompanied by her 29-year-old son, the writer Daniel Dixon, who provided the accompanying text and photo captions. They visited Ennis, Ennistymon, Tubber, Sixmilebridge, and other locations.

Opening page of Lange’s 1955 Life photo feature on Ireland.

“The forefathers of the Irish around the world who are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day looked very much like the smiling lad above,” the feature began. “Here as always the families worship, work stubborn land, bend to bitter winds together, and are quietly content. His people live to the ancient Irish ways, and a visitor finds them, as the following pages show, humorous, direct and generous–good ancestors to have.”

View Lange’s “Irish Country People” photo essay, and the the entire March 21, 1955, issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

Lange conceived and pitched her idea to Life after reading The Irish Countryman by the American anthropologist Conrad M. Arensberg. The 1937 book emerged from his Harvard doctoral dissertation.

“What made it an instant classic … was not Dr. Arensberg’s specific observations on Irish society but the prescriptions he laid down for making and interpreting those observations with scientific precision,” the New York Times reported in his obituary. “The study became a model for other community studies, and a demanding model it was, requiring that researchers study a target culture from the inside, making meticulous notes on everything they saw, heard or experienced.”[2]”Conrad Arensberg, 86, Dies; Hands-On Anthropologist”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 1997.

By coincidence, Paris-based American anthropologist Robert Cresswell arrived in Ireland soon after Lange’s images were published in Life to conduct another analysis of Irish rural life, much like Arensberg. Cresswell’s work in and around Kinvara, County Galway, resulted in the 1969 study, Une Communauté Rurale de l’Irlande.[3]See “Ireland in the 1950s – Through the Lens of Robert Cresswell“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 23, 2020. His archive of more than 450 black and white photographs, nearly 100 Kodachrome slides, 16mm film footage, plus documents and notes, are held by the Kinvara Community Association.

Retrospective and revival

Lange is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. A few months after her death in 1965, six more of her previously unseen Irish images were displayed in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first one-person retrospective by a female photographer at MoMA.[4]See “1950s Ireland“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 16, 2020.

Four decades after Lange’s visit to Clare, Irish author Gerry Mullins reviewed her negatives at the Oakland Museum of California. He returned to Clare determined to find people she had photographed, as he recalled recently for the Irish Independent.[5]See “Grieving family had no photo of young Mary…” Irish Independent, Sept. 14, 2024. Mullins’ 1996 book, Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, included an essay by Dixon. Photos To Send, a documentary film, followed in 2001.

Ireland has long beguiled photographers, both domestic and foreign; from the late 19th and early 20th century black-and-white images of the Lawrence Studio’s Robert French to the 1913 work of the French women Madeleine Mignon-Alba and Marguerite Mespoulet. The pair produced what are believed to be the first color images of the country.[6]See my post, “Irish history movie ideas: The Colors of Ireland“, June 21, 2020.  In 1975, the American photographer Jill Uris joined her author husband, Leon, to produce Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, with more than 300 photos, about a third in color. His best-selling novel Trinity was published the following year. Her follow-up photo book, Ireland Revisited, appeared in 1982.

I welcome details of other photojournalism projects in Ireland, especially by Americans.

Another page of Lange’s 1955 Life photo feature on Ireland.

References

References
↑1 From advertisement for the March 21, 1955, issue, as featured in the New York Daily News, March 17, 1955.
↑2 ”Conrad Arensberg, 86, Dies; Hands-On Anthropologist”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 1997.
↑3 See “Ireland in the 1950s – Through the Lens of Robert Cresswell“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 23, 2020.
↑4 See “1950s Ireland“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 16, 2020.
↑5 See “Grieving family had no photo of young Mary…” Irish Independent, Sept. 14, 2024.
↑6 See my post, “Irish history movie ideas: The Colors of Ireland“, June 21, 2020.