Displaced in Mullingar: From the stage to the page, threads of an American way of life run through our lives, writes Michael Harding

The week before Thanksgiving I was invited to a small cottage beside a lake, with veins of Boston Ivy webbing the stone walls, and a climbing rose bush, whose winter stumps were as thick as blackthorn sticks, beside the red hall door.

The guests, mostly American, sat around a long wooden table in a glass room; an extension that added a strange opulence to the artisan cottage.

Turkey and sweet potatoes and pecan pie, were served on white plates. A slender white candle, added an understated centrepiece to the bare boards.

Americans have learned to be rather downbeat in recent years about their homeland, considering their foreign policy disasters. And yet no one can deny that their contribution to English literature in the 20th century was extraordinary.

Even the women at the table expressed sadness on the death of Norman Mailer. In soft mid-western accents, they seemed particularly proud of their nation's achievements in the gritty world of the 20th-century novel.

I suppose that is because America is a world built on too much realism, and too little metaphysics.

On a few occasions, my face stuffed with pecan pie and Californian wine, I whispered, "Baghdad". And I asked them had anyone seen Paradise Now, a movie that documents the story of a suicide bomber on the West Bank. But I got nowhere in my endeavours to revitalise the American civil war; their tummies were full of vittles, and they were not to be riled.

Some guests were born on open prairies, and their table manners carried a faint echo of people on wagon trains, or pioneering young farmers in rustic cabins, where slim women might ladle vittles into their bowls.

Their etiquette, and lonesome remembrances of parents, dead brothers, and pregnant sisters, far away in Colorado and Montana, was deeply moving.

As usual I talked too much about west Cavan.

"We didn't know much about American literature in Glangevlin in 1973," I said. "And we were as far from the centre of the empire as Kurdistan.

"We didn't even understand the anally retentive sophistication of Dublin, because we were culchies, without literature or art to guide us; instinctive, brutal and carnal." Americans are great listeners.

"Nevertheless," I continued, "in that mountain world, the sidewalks of New York meant more than Dublin. Queens and Woodlawn were neighbourhoods that old women knew far better than Finglas or Rathgar. Charlie Pride, Hank Williams, and Jim Reeves were the laureates of our universe."

The day after the party I gazed into the fire for hours.

It rained; rivers ran down the streets, flooding low gullies. By evening, I decided to brace the wind with a coat and a brolly, and set out for the Mullingar Arts Centre.

The place was packed for Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming. The set was a pub, so lavish in detail that one punter remarked to me that the bar on the stage was better than the bar in the foyer.

Don Wycherley was in fantastic form. In one scene, his character turned away from the audience, as he leaned on the bar, crippled by a toxic remorse; the bitterness of an unlived life oozing from every pore. It was a stunning performance and the audience loved it.

They didn't like the bit when Wycherley's character lambasted the "country and western" aspect of Ireland as "a rotten core". But there was relief when someone sang, There's a Bridle Hanging on the Wall. The play reminded me of America,

because the nature of the play's brutal realism owes so much to American theatre, and because the core idea in the drama is the sense of displacement Irish

people feel at home, and the intensity of our longing to be, not just elsewhere, but particularly, in the paradise that is called America.

Long ago, when Philomena Begley played in west Cavan, someone invariably interrupted her from the floor.

"Will you sing the Truck Driving Woman!" Dan O'Hara would make his steel guitar twang, and the singer always obliged.

I remember a middle-aged man in a grey suit, and an open-neck shirt, at home on vacation from the NYPD, swaying with the music, as he sucked frothy Cavan cola through a straw from a glass bottle, at the mineral bar.

On the way home in the old Cortina, the girls would sing all the way up the mountain. Cold cold heart. It's only make-believe. I'm so lonesome I could cry.

Sometimes it felt as if nobody knew that we were not in America.