Conversing with Ruth Schwertfeger

Language, Life and The Wee Wild One: Stories of Belfast and Beyond

By Nick Michalski

When one finds out that a writer, teacher, traveler, and generally wise and witty human being holds an office on the campus of a nearby university, it is usually a good idea to take advantage of the situation. 

Consequently, it was an advantageous visit to the office of Prof. Ruth Schwertfeger in Curtin Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was delightfully eager to discuss her experiences with learning and teaching language and literature, living life and seeing the world, and writing her book of essay-stories, The Wee Wild One: Stories of Belfast and Beyond (University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 0-299-19880-4, 2004). 

Born in Ballycoan, Northern Ireland, Schwertfeger wrote her collection of stories on childhood and going to a girls' school in Belfast after being asked to contribute something to her old school, in remembrance of her time spent there. 

In contemplating her experiences at the school, she found that other ideas and memories began bubbling to the surface that might not represent the typical trials of going to school in Belfast. "We were encouraged to see it as the ultimate experience of inclusion, that it was a great place to be and it was fun to learn there, and obviously some aspects of this are true," Schwertfeger noted. 

But in order to more fruitfully express her memories and impressions of coming of age in Northern Ireland — and to look at that time period from perspectives other than those of a schoolgirl and former pupil —Schwertfeger continued the project on her own. She turned it into a collection of essay-stories that range from Belfast to Germany and beyond. 

As she began to revisit her early days in Belfast, she found that she viewed her time there from two perspectives distant from those that she possessed back then. "One, from my American homeland, and two from the perspective of an academic in German literature," she explained. 

She had read a couple of works that really impressed her because of their genre, especially Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen, or The Excursion of the Dead Girls, by German Jewish writer Anna Seghers. 

Mentioned in the preface of The Wee Wild One, the Seghers story reflects on the writer’s time in Germany and her exile from the Nazi Third Reich. This essay-story provided Schwertfeger with a template to do her own essay-story writing. There are 14 stories in The Wee Wild One, and while there exist threads that connect each of them, "there is an independence that the essay has," which allows Schwertfeger to dodge the trappings of chronology and tell-it-exactly-as-it-was memoir forms. 

Aiding Schwertfeger greatly in the writing of The Wee Wild One were the "green notebooks." These notebooks were filled with vocabulary lists and anything studied in class, which was to be saved and memorized. Schwertfeger was unsure why she’d kept them all these years, and she hadn’t looked through them for a long time before working on the book. 

"I found them very evocative of the times, and it gave me the details, although I have a good memory in general," she said. The notebooks allowed her to add texture and tiny details to her accounts of going to a girls’ school and growing up in Northern Ireland. Issued at the beginning of each term, the notebooks were formal documents that "became the repositories for everything you learned," she said.

Long lists of words in French, German, Latin and English dominated their contents. If the students read a poem, it was analyzed and everything from the ensuing discussion added to the notebook. "It was a very formal statement; one didn’t lose them. It was impossible to lose these things: too much was at stake," she said. 

Schwertfeger pointed out that The Wee Wild One is not the traditional memoir. Rather than possessing clear story lines and a focus on fact and nothing but, the essay-stories are less about her actual experiences than about her impressions and observations of those experiences. In addition, the stories make departures which lead outside of Belfast and beyond the borders of Northern Ireland. 

"I’m pretty hidden in this in many parts," she said. Her approach of not dominating the text with her own presence is not disingenuous or insincere, she said, and she is not trying to hide in the shadows. Instead, "I was actually playing with genre more, and very consciously using genre that I had acquired, as an academic, a respect for," she said. 

The collection is not the "this-is-what-happened-to-me-as-a-little-girl kind of book," she added. Rather, it is a group of stories voiced through the conduit of the genuine experiences of a private storyteller. Some of the stories defy fact and chronology to the point that readers must accept a little deviation once in a while. Some stories evoke characters that Schwertfeger never knew personally but that were related to her through the stories of her father. 

"Those were so much a part of the folklore around our fire, that they were very much real people," she said. Even though she didn’t know them, these characters became authentic for her, displaying the power of verbal Irish storytelling. Schwertfeger’s father influenced the writing of the collection in the way that he was a venerable storyteller, who often used vibrant language in interesting ways. "There were always unexpected words, and I loved that," she said. "He knew the land and he loved it. He was in love with the soil of Co. Down and somehow he found the words to describe it." 

Schwertfeger dealt with the project in her own chronological terms, where the past is never something that is dead and gone completely. The essay-story form allowed her to play with time and space to the point where she could discuss the past openly within the present. "In one sentence you have simultaneity, where the past intrudes upon the present with this tremendous urgency and without really asking permission," she said. She found that this technique both helped and disturbed her writing process. 

The past constantly influences the present and disturbs the image of how one would like the present to be, but "the past has an insistence about it that intrudes on the text. It intrudes on one’s thoughts and by extension one’s writing," she added. So instead of trying to vanquish the past to a fixed position, which would be futile in any case, she allowed the past to disrupt the present and the visualized present about which she wrote. 

The true present is never the idealized present free of history that one might like it to be, regardless of any efforts to the contrary. As a result, the freedom of form that Schwertfeger employed probably allowed her to tell a more accurate and complex story, because it prevented her from drawing straight lines from point to point. Why try to distance oneself from the past when it’s always here in the present anyway?

In response to whether she put up any walls against memories of the past or defended against these intrusions, Schwertfeger explained that she selected and chose things to write about, instead of blocking out certain things wholly. "I think that is the great joy of writing, you get to choose what you’re going to tell," she said. A writer has the power to shape material into a cohesive pattern that doesn’t necessarily lack or overflow. 

"It’s not just spontaneous writing, it’s pretty controlled," she said. There are aspects of a stream-of-consciousness approach in her stories, but she has been able to draw on some of her own favorite writing and shape her stories according to her personal designs. 

A self-described novice in many ways, Schwertfeger doesn’t feel the need to conform to simply relating a factual account of her early days; instead she explores a more abstract space, at least in The Wee Wild One. Not all of her writing allows her to make such choices. "I write scholarly articles and books, I write about the Third Reich, I write about writers in exile," she said. 

Schwertfeger believed that it was important for people to revisit their roots occasionally during their lives. Separations and distances are inevitable, but one is never without a sense of home. Speaking of revisiting home, Schwertfeger said, "I think it happens unconsciously. It happens inevitably." In one chapter of the book, she describes visiting a man who’d lived in the United States most of his life and was on his deathbed. 

"He wanted to hear the market towns and their names. And I just kept going, and that’s the way he died," she said. The man wanted her to talk to him about home, and that was her response. Often enough, people want to forget about where they came from, and shield themselves from memories of the past. For the dying man, a yearning for home was not a conscious choice but a spontaneous urge, the reality of home never left him, according to Schwertfeger

"It’s an example of a universal urge, and sometimes, urgency," Schwertfeger explained, relating such universal human feelings to the universal human conditions expressed in great literature. She taught the Anna Seghers story in a freshman-seminar course at UW-Milwaukee, and began the class by asking the students what they understood by heimat, which is German for "home." 

"Very slowly, I got my students to identify and recognize that there were roots in their lives," she said. Many were reluctant to do so, however, a situation which Schwertfeger found very interesting. "There was this strange notion that there are certain parts of the landscape that don’t count for having roots," she said, relating that some students were embarrassed because they came from rural areas while others thought they didn’t possess roots because they were raised in the city. 

Sometimes people think that their roots are not acceptable to others, she said, a phenomenon especially poignant in the United States, where the mythology states that you can create yourself anew. 

"In the book I make the comment that my ear is always cocked for the sounds of home," Schwertfeger said when asked about finding home in the sounds of Irish dialects and colloquialisms. There are a few young women in Languages and Linguistics at UW-Milwaukee who teach Gaelic, and one is from Donegal. "When I hear her, when she goes into English, it’s wonderful," she said. 

"There was this mutual response, this lovely response between two Irish women. It was very touching, for me, to have that." 

She’s also found that response in places like Germany, which she relates in The Wee Wild One. Schwertfeger has taught German language and literature, and speaks several other languages. She finds that sometimes one language expresses a concept better than another, but "I do not see language as a weapon." She believed that can be a real danger in acquiring additional languages because "It becomes something that you impress people with. Or you use it as a weapon to, in a sense, represent something about you that is, perceived possibly, as superior to someone else. I find that notion very obnoxious," she said. 

Schwertfeger sees language as a communicative tool. "I see (languages) fundamentally and primarily as a bridge. I love having students who are competent enough on that bridge to realize they’re on it, and to lead them into the words of someone else, and to make all those wonderful universal connections and to see there’s really, at the end of the day, not that much difference." 

Schwertfeger has taught about the dangers of using language to harmful effect, and has written about the subject in her writings on the Third Reich. It’s important for her "to show them how language was used as a tool of propaganda and an expression of ideology, so there are dangers as well as beauties." 

Schwertfeger does believe that sometimes certain languages can express things in a different or beneficial lens, although her focus is much more on what connects different cultures and languages, peoples. "German lyrical poetry has a wonderful cadence to it," she said. She really enjoys being able to share with students the emotion and depth of a language. In some cases, Gaelic may describe something better than American English or English English, but not inherently. 

"Some people take bother with what they’re seeing and what they’re hearing, and they take more time and they connect with the place. As they hear a word, it enters into their consciousness and they may use it again in a different way with a new twist or connection to it," she said. "There’s a preciseness about language that is very startling." 

The Wee Wild One is just beginning to hit back home in Northern Ireland, Schwertfeger said. Some people in her native village found the book because her brother lent them a copy. On a recent visit she talked with a man who owns the local butcher shop, and he had read the book and recognized many characters. "It was marvelous," she said. "They can find very quickly what they relate to." 

She has received responses from Israel, Germany, Switzerland, and, of course, "the Province," Northern Ireland itself. Although she now makes the United States her home, she visits Northern Ireland several times a year. She also feels a profound kinship for the whole of Ireland. She has "a deep affinity to everybody from the bottom of the island all the way up to Donegal. "No question about that." She believes that is largely true of everybody she’s met from Ireland. "We gravitate towards one another. We understand what we like, be it wheaten bread or whatever, you know? There is a deep magnetism towards anyone from Ireland. It’s borderless." 

Schwertfeger also loves her adopted home, the United States. "I’m content here. And there’s so much about the United States that I really embrace and love: the diversity here, the openness, freedoms, the expansiveness, the generosity." Sometimes, though, it’s frustrating that many Americans seem to expect others to understand them, while they’re too busy to learn other languages. 

"There’s an insularity about this country which is astonishing," she said. She finds that Ireland is not becoming too Americanized, but rather more Europeanized. With the rise of the European Union, she thinks there’s a much more vibrant sense of "Europe." "It’s so accessible and people come and go, and you can spend a weekend in Dublin or Brussels or whatever; I think that’s happening with globalization in general," she said. At the personal level, however, she thinks that if one sits down and talks with people, and talks long enough, "you’ll find there’s always the quest for a much more delineated sense of self and identity."

She has found much joy in the fact that languages are now taught with a more communicative approach. "Now it’s about letting young people live another culture and communicate," she said, adding that in the past it was more about memorizing long lexical lists. A communicative approach also helps in breaking down stereotypes and clichés that muddy the waters. Schwertfeger noted that stereotypes probably flourish everywhere, but language can help destroy those misconceptions if used enlighteningly. 

Learning a new language can illuminate what we all share, but some people do just fine without one. It depends on the individual and what that person is open to taking in. "There are people who know how to make the narrow spaces of their lives vibrant and come alive," she said. "One’s experiences in life derive and flow from what one’s circumstances are."

A metaphor of the opposing and colliding separations and connections between peoples and places, as well as between the past, present and future runs throughout The Wee Wild One. Schwertfeger empathizes with the symbiosis of identities in Germany, and the people that she has met there have facilitated a more intimate understanding and connection to "the North Irish divided identity." 

The sometimes bipolar identity of her home country has highlighted both what distances people from one another, but also what brings them together. In pondering what she gained for herself in writing The Wee Wild One, Schwertfeger said, "I think it was discipline." She found it very satisfying to know that she could shape material effectively, which allowed her to write the way she wanted. She worked very hard on the endings of each of the chapters, which was "a very conscious part of my narrative strategy. I’ve always been fascinated by how an author or a writer begins and ends." 

Perhaps there’s not that much which separates a beginning and an ending. Or maybe an ending is simply a bridge to a new beginning.