James Joyces’s The Dead is my favourite short story and I re-read at least once a year, often around now – 6th of January, the Feast of the Epiphany, around the time it is set.
“It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance.”
Only today, ON the Epiphany, I’m standing outside the four-storey Georgian townhouse in Dublin where the party took place – 15 Usher’s Island. James Joyce’s great-aunts, the Misses Flynn, lived and taught music here from the 1890s, just like Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia in the story, and Joyce’s parents attended the pair’s annual Christmas parties. The house faces the river Liffey near the James Joyce bridge, which was opened on Bloomsday, June 16, 2003, and designed to look like an open book.
The building is now derelict but if I close my eyes, I can almost hear the dance music drifting from the upstairs window, as Gabriel, the Misses Morkan’s nephew, prepares to give his annual after-dinner speech.
“The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing room floor. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music.”
Gabriel is full of ‘notions’, looking down on everyone, including his poor aunts who go through agonies of anxiety to give their annual dance, even as he eulogizes their lives and qualities of humanity and hospitality.
“What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women.”
He crashes through the party mildly insulting people, worried that the quotations he has chosen for his speech will “be above the heads of his hearers”, whose “grade of culture differed from his” and curtly dismissing an invitation to visit the West of Ireland because he’s holidaying on the Continent. In fact he does a pretty good job of insulting the whole country – “Irish is not my language”, “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it”.
One of the things I love most about The Dead is the descriptions of its hospitality, the big table staggering under the weight of food – the “fat brown goose”, the “great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs”, “a round of spiced beef” and “a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin”. The “minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers.” It’s like Nigel Slater wandered into 19th century Dublin, took off his galoshes and climbed the stairs to be greeted by Julia and Kate.
The longing to depict Irish hospitality is the reason why The Dead was written. It was a late addition to Joyce’s Dubliners short story collection, written three years after the collection was finished. In 1906, the year before he wrote it, he told his brother Stanislaus that:
“I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of [Dublin], for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it, except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenious insularity and its hospitality. The latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.”
The Dead was the remedy to redress the balance.
It’s a story of two halves: the busyness and bustle of the party which ends with the plaintive song The Lass of Aughrim, Gabriel’s wife Gretta in thrall, listening on the stairs, “grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something”. After the party, Gabriel and Gretta take a horse-drawn cab to the Gresham Hotel, where the mood changes and Gabriel is full of romantic notions.
“He felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure”. (This is the man who only a few hours earlier abruptly dismissed her entreaties to visit the West of Ireland where she is from.
“O, do go, Gabriel, I’d love to see Galway again”.
“You can go if you like,” said Gabriel coldly.)
What a wanker.
I follow the path they took along the quays to the Gresham, past Adam and Eve’s – the Franciscan Church of the Immaculate Conception where Aunt Julia was the leading soprano – the “lamps burning redly in the murky air” – “across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky”.
The second-hand bookshops that Gabriel visited every day, Hickey’s on Bachelor’s Walk, Webb’s and Masseys on Aston’s Quay, are long gone. But instead there’s the Winding Stair on Ormond Quay, now one of Dublin’s oldest bookshops, with cosy café and view of the Ha’penny Bridge upstairs.
I cross O’Connell Bridge and, just like Gabriel, salute the towering figure of Daniel O’Connell. Halfway down O’Connell St, I stop off to say hello to James Joyce himself, immortalised in bronze on the corner of North Earl St. Then I continue on to the Gresham, now owned by the Spanish RIU Hotels and Resorts, with a large Spanish staff and clientele – Gabriel would have been delighted.
Recently revamped, many of the bedrooms have had a shiny new makeover, though the swirly carpets and heavy chandeliers add a slightly old-fashioned touch. I can imagine Gretta standing by the thick brown curtains looking wistfully out at the falling snow, as Gabriel looks at her, longing to “cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her”.
He imagines she is thinking what he is thinking and feeling what he is feeling and “his heart is brimming over with happiness”, but she flings herself on the bed and starts to cry, sobbing “I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim”.
A boy she knew in Galway, Michael Furey, used to sing it to her – “I was great with him at that time”. Ill and delicate, when he heard she was leaving Galway for Dublin he stood outside her window one night to tell her he didn’t want to live and died a few days later – “I think he died for me” Gretta says.
Gabriel realises he has never felt like this “but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree”, as the snow starts to fall again.
“It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”