Biography: They say May Duignan was golden-haired and blue-eyed; in appearance the kind of woman Pearse might have celebrated as a rural Irish Madonna, in fact a more complex and unpaintable figure.
At 19 she stole 60 sovereigns, her parents' entire savings, and fled from post-Famine Edenmore (where she had learnt in childhood "to mix play with transgression") to America and a life that became the stuff of newspaper headlines.
Not merely an emigrant, this traveller was a fugitive: "She belong to nowhere and to nobody now." There was a spell in wild Nebraska, a territory of "claims lawyers, homesteaders . . . entertainers, enforcers, government agents, horse traders, peddlers, land-grabbers, dentists. And outlaws". She took up with a robber, moved to Chicago, then to the Tenderloin district of New York.
Henry James wrote of the city, around that time, that it was a place into which you resolved whatever sense of self you had brought to it. May's sense of self would know many assaults. "It wasn't my fault I was born," she wrote, but it must have felt that way from time to time.
She became a grifter, a chancer, a petty thief, a showgirl, and soon, in the parlance of the streets, a "badger" (a woman who entices a "john" to a bedroom where he is robbed by a male accomplice who poses as an angry husband.) And when times got tough, which they did pretty often, May Duignan worked as a prostitute.
Nuala O'Faolain's prose is scrupulous, elegant, and achieves a subtle lyricism while never straining for effects:
She grew up among cabins collapsed on themselves, their thatch rotted to lumps of weeds, saplings growing through their dirt floors . . . She must have pushed open frail doors into empty rooms where cobwebs made the light opaque.
O'Faolain's eye for social archeology is keen. She notices small things: details lost in shadow or bleached out by time and over- familiarity:
"In the warren of old rooms and offices above a Midtown store, you glimpse from the battered stairs what might have been the apartment of a prostitute back then - a board floor, a small, cast-iron fireplace, the brick of the walls showing through discolored wallpaper.
The sentences, zinging with detail, full of graceful loops, are wonderful to read even when what they are describing is terrible.
May met a burglar, Eddie Guerin, and ventured with him to Paris, where his gang robbed the office of American Express. She escaped with the booty but was later arrested. She did time in several countries, indeed was in Aylesbury Prison at the same time as Constance Markievicz (whom May claimed was "a great friend"). O'Faolain describes May and the countess on punishment detail together, the latter ladling gruel while loudly reciting Dante. "One of the most bizarre images in the long struggle for Irish freedom," O'Faolain writes, but perhaps, in its own way, an apt one.
Like the rappers of today and the flash-girls in Dickens, May was fond of jewellery, especially the bling of diamonds. It would be easy to characterise her as an Irish Ma Baker, 50 carats in her bosom and a barrelhouse blues on her lips, but she was not, in O'Faolain's phrase, "a brassy, lipsticked gangster's moll . . . She was a country woman - tough, but not sophisticated". She was acerbic, too, this foremother of the Chavs. "Were you baptised a Catholic?" she was once asked by a bishop. "Sure," she said, "but I'm not to blame for that."
Like many criminals and aristocrats, she went by different names ("A regular Who's Who," one newspaperman noted): May Churchill, May Wilson, Diamond May, May Avery, Chicago May, even "Mrs James Montague Sharp". An observation by the police reformer, August Vollmer, was wise: "This woman has the fighting qualities that make her very dangerous or very good."
This book, in one sense, is the story of a book: May's own autobiography, published in 1928, a model of the then-popular crook-confessional genre (one descendant of which is surely the strutting boastfulness of gangsta rap).
O'Faolain records the thrill of finding this forgotten text, her negotiations with its claims, her attempts to see through them. Parts of May's memoir are so hard to take, so flashily fake or subtly evasive, that O'Faolain has to look away from its jazzed-up pages at teenagers "pitting themselves against the decorum of the library". But this engagement with May's own words is one of the most exciting features of O'Faolain's compelling account. Seeing one of Ireland's ablest memoirists encountering a memoir, asking questions of that sometimes unreliable form, becomes a lesson in how to read a first-person narrative, how to discern if something is going on in the tensions between words.
The book is diligently researched, indeed the background work is amazingly broad, but this is no mere compilation of stodgy chronologies. May's story has the richness, the strange electricity of fiction - though it is not a fiction of any kind. People from O'Faolain's own life walk in and out of the pages. The passages about her late brother, Dermot, are moving, especially those detailing his fear-filled childhood. "I invest my picture of May with the loneliness that stood all around him." O'Faolain writes.
This multifaceted work is itself like a diamond through which it is possible to see refractions of a larger picture. There are rich insights about class, about men and women, the lives of the poor, how families work. But what makes the book beautiful as well as useful is the grace and integrity of O'Faolain's writing: unfailingly humane, never manipulative, shot through with almost startling shafts of empathy.
It's a risky piece of work, quite daring in its approach. Not everyone cares for the kind of biography that suggests to the reader how its subject "would have felt" or thought. But The Story of Chicago May draws its power to convince precisely from O'Faolain's respect for the fact that biography is a construct, another kind of storytelling, best read, and best written, with critical faculties switched on. By doing so, she has produced a fascinating and haunting book that makes you feel you have stood in the rain of another human life.
Joseph O'Connor's novel, Star of the Sea, is published by Vintage. He is a fellow at New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
The Story of Chicago May, By Nuala O'Faolain, Riverhead Books, 307pp. €13.99