The father of William Monahan

If William Monahan's father could perceive that the web now has a blog entry dedicated to the subject of him (you are reading said blog entry right now), he'd probably consider its author to be a true donkey, perhaps the primary donkey (I'd be fine with this distinction, I've earned it). Writer-director William J. Monahan's father was William Joseph Monahan, so both father and son carry the same initials: W. J. M (to avoid confusion I will refer to the writer and filmmaker as Mr. Monahan, and his father by his full name). Born January 21, 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts, William Joseph Monahan was the fifth child of Mary Regina McGee and Alphonsus George Monahan.¹ He had eight siblings, whose names, from oldest to youngest, were: Rose, John, Edward, George, Mary, Regina, James, and Ruth.¹ When William Joseph Monahan was seven years old, his father died. Mr. Monahan recalls in a New York Press essay:⁴

"My dad, whose own father had died when my grandmother's ninth child was unborn, had been shining shoes in Maverick Square in East Boston when he was 12."⁴

As a young man William Joseph Monahan served in the Korean War. His record with US Veteran's Affairs indicates that he eventually achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps.⁹ Mr. Monahan writes in another New York Press essay:³

"My dad was a combat infantryman and platoon sergeant at a shockingly young age in the Korean War, but if you heard about the war, it was never from him."³

Shortly before turning 30 years old, William Joseph Monahan married Constance Armstrong. Their wedding took place on February 20, 1960 at St. Ann's Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Constance Armstrong must have very recently become pregnant, or was shortly going to become pregnant, with Mr. Monahan who would be born less than nine months later on November 3, 1960. They would have one other child, a daughter named Susan. About six years later, William Joseph Monahan and Constance Armstrong divorced.

Although William Joseph Monahan was an engineer,⁵ he was apparently not an ambitious man which would be the primary reason that his marriage would fail.⁴ His father Alphonsus George Monahan had also been an engineer, a civil engineer for the Bay State Railroad.¹ Mr. Monahan writes:

"My father had an IQ in the 180 range and wanted (though he ended up with more than that by default) no more from life than the enough of the Irish ghetto. Had my mother not left my father owing to his lack of ambition (that is, his ambitions were to be an Irishman), I might have been a very different person. Maybe I'd be dead. And maybe my mother, on the whole, made the right decision on behalf of the child, as women with children will. It used to occasionally occur to me, on the evidence presented by my father, that being very clever and handsome and verbally brilliant wasn't enough--or otherwise he would have lived with us, instead of the more prosperous asshole who did. Perhaps it was for the best. But it was hard to take. It was hard to take at Christmas."⁴

Of his paternal family, Mr. Monahan has written that they were "deeply Irish, deeply Catholic and rigorously structured ('working class' to the bone, as some Irish families can be even when they've got a hell of a lot of money: translate 'working class' as 'ascetic Catholics' and you're more on the ball than a Marxist would be)."⁴ He has described his ancestors from the 1880s as also being deeply Catholic, if not more so than his aunts and uncles:

"While I know some Hispanics who are as Catholic as my paternal family was in Boston in the 1880s, there's not a single Irish or Italian or Pole of my acquaintance under the age of 50 whose Catholicism isn't totally lapsed into a condition of nostalgia."²

At least two of Mr. Monahan's aunts on his father's side were are nuns [see comment below]. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church took hold in the 1960s, his aunts the nuns were allowed to take off their medieval robes and veils and put on ordinary clothes, as well as leave the convents and live independently. While growing up, Mr. Monahan recalls having nuns around the house. His "eldest nun-aunt", Rose Elizabeth Monahan, "used to cram [he and his sister] into some wrecked convent school desks in the attic and teach [them] about God." He goes on to write:

"She nearly gave my sister a complex for life by dragging her out of a room full of uncles at the age of four and hissing at her, 'Those are men! Men!' forcing her to change, crying, aged four, out of a short yellow nightgown which only she had noticed."²

In "Growing Up Racist,"⁸ Mr. Monahan writes of his father's attitude toward African Americans:

"I come from a long line of Yankee racists, who never even saw any black people yet disliked them, and a long line of Irish Catholic urban racists, who saw black people every day and on the whole disliked them more. This was disturbingly contrary to popular wisdom (that is, opposed to Error, as both the Church of England and the Spanish Inquisition used to say) when I was growing up. It took me 20 years to get Dad to stop saying 'nigger,' and then when he did he said 'black chaps' instead."⁸

Among the Monahans, it was Mr. Monahan's paternal grandmother Mary Regina McGee who commanded authority over the family. Mr. Monahan describes her as "a matriarch of the Boston Irish variety (you don't mess with them, ever, take my word for it)".⁶ She lived a long life, but, unfortunately, had to bury four of her five sons before her own time came on April 27, 1997. It was on May 18, 1990 that William Joseph Monahan finally succumbed to the cancer that he had been diagnosed with several months earlier.⁵ He was buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts, where his brother, a retired Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, had also been buried.^9-10 It was exactly a year to the day that his father died that Mr. Monahan completed "Light House", later to be published as Light House: A Trifle by Riverhead Books.⁷ A fine tribute to his father, as well as perhaps the beginning of Mr. Monahan's literary career.

Sources:

1) Cathy Kendrick. "Descendants of John McGee", FamilyTreeMaker.com, Retrieved 2010-06-24.
2) William Monahan. "Actual Modern Popery: Pope-Art Through the Ages", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 42 (October 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 18, 20, 22, 24.

3) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.

4) William Monahan. "Merry Crucifix", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 48 (November 27–December 3, 1996), pp. 6–8.
5) William Monahan. "The Irish question", Old Crow Review, no. 6, FkB Press, December 1995, 5 pages.
6) William Monahan. "The Barbecutioner's Song: On Smoke, Flame, Boredom and Filial Piety", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 22 (May 31–June 6, 1995), p. 19.
7) Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher", The Hartford Courant.
8) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
9) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, William J. Monahan (1934-1990), Memorial No. 1004292"
10) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, George F. Monahan (1932-1990), Memorial No. 1004219"