The Great Depression has dealt the cotton textile industry repeated blows. Mills are failing and unemployment is rampant. Irish and Franco-American workers in the fictional Southeastern New England town of Millbank, Massachusetts are desperate, but based on years of strife they distrust each other almost as much as they fear management. For decades, the owners have succeeded in keeping labor divided by ancestry. Au Revoir, L'Acadie describes the heroic efforts of working men and women of great character to overcome their long-held prejudices to become workers and Americans instead of merely disgruntled ethnic victims. As working conditions deteriorate and profits disappear, a violent strike ensues and a worker is killed. Labor leaders, management, clergy, and town fathers must find their way back from the abyss of anarchy to save their followers and the town.
After retiring from a career with the federal government, William Brennan wrote his first novel. As it is recommended that one might be better off writing about what one knows and having been born and raised in the New England shoe factory city of Brockton, MA, he examined the Irish American experience during the first half of the twentieth century, so his early novels are filled with characters that were composites of those roaming the streets outside his windows in the Tip section of Brockton.
While these novels are set in such locales as Boston, Washington, the fictional town of Millbank, MA, and even France, only after writing for years did what Brennan was about as an author begin to become clear to him: relating the experiences of life in Irish American ghettoes as the Industrial Revolution was coming to its close, and not until he was almost finished with the third book, Murphy's War, did it become obvious to him that he had written a trilogy based on his old neighborhood in Brockton which was called The Tip. Only later did he come to label these three novels, A Tattered Coat Upon A Stick, Au Revoir L'Acadie and Murphy's War, his Tipperary Trilogy.
In the midst of his recently completed fourth novel, Charity For All, which does not depend on characters from the old neighborhood, he came to see the nature of his life's interest, the examination of the role of the individual within the society that he or she exists, was a topic worth devoting his remaining energy and drive. While it continues the saga of the integration of immigrants in America, the assimilation is so successful that the Irish are mostly just supporting actors in the story.
Brennan's first novel, A Tattered Coat Upon A Stick, is now available as an e-book on most of the major sites, including Kindle. It is recommended for those interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case and working class ethnic life in the first half of the twentieth century.
In talking about his work, Brennan said, "My writing career began with A Tattered Coat Upon A Stick in which I attempted to look at the Sacco and Vanzetti case from the point of view of working class Irish and Italians.
Were it not for the case, I would never have become a novelist. When I was a young boy of perhaps twelve toward the end of World War II, I witnessed a near violent confrontation between two middle aged friends in my neighborhood. The men were ready to fight over the guilt or innocence of two men I'd never heard of, Sacco and Vanzetti. In the end, one man foreclosed all further argument by saying he'd been in Braintree on the day of the robbery and killings and saw them. "They did it!"
The confrontation amazed me and, despite the passage of almost half a century, never left my mind, and I was compelled to do research on the case and to write the novel which condemns the legal system but does not attempt to address their roles in the crime. It was my conclusion that the wrath of the paranoid establishment of Massachusetts had been directed at the workers of the Commonwealth to assure that the disease of anarchy was nipped in the bud and did not infect the first and second generation immigrants who were essential to the economy.
Writing the book was a joy, as I was able to set the case among all of the great events of that tumultuous era. The novel and all the rest of my work stemmed from a street corner argument."
