The first event in the Joycean centenary takes place next week, with a re-enactment of 'The Dead', writes Hugh Linehan
In a "dark gaunt house", on the south quays of the Liffey, 100 years ago this week (approximately, or most probably, or as well as we can ascertain from the evidence), the Misses Morkan's annual dance took place in James Joyce's short story 'The Dead'. Next Tuesday, that memorable event will be re-created in a fundraising dinner at the same house, No 15, Usher's Island. It's the first major event in what threatens to be an avalanche of Joycean festivities in 2004, culminating with the centenary of Bloomsday this summer.
Understandably, the focus of most events will be on Ulysses, but, in this week leading up to the Feast of the Epiphany, over the course of these cold, dark days at the end of the Christmas season, what better time to remember Joyce's supreme work of short fiction? And what better time to open the doors of the 250-year-old house itself? Saved from dereliction and restored to life, it has survived (barely) the greed and ignorance which wrecked so much of Dublin in the second half of the 20th century.
In 1987, this writer worked as a production runner on the Irish unit for John Huston's film of The Dead, the interior scenes for which had already been shot by the dying director on a studio set in California. Appropriately enough, it was freezing cold during the shoot, which mostly involved getting shots of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy arriving and leaving the house, their carriage travelling through Dublin, and the closing images of snow across Ireland.
Even then, 15 Usher's Island was in disrepair. Its top floor had been ripped away in the 1950s, to save the then owners the trouble of repairing its crumbling roof. By 1987, it had been derelict for several years, and was to remain so for another decade, during which more damage was wreaked. The fireplaces and fanlight were ripped out; the windows were smashed, then boarded up. Earmarked for demolition to accommodate a new road serving a new bridge over the Liffey, it sank further and further into miserable decrepitude. For most passersby, it would have seemed just another one of those abandoned, doomed ruins which littered the Liffey quays. But the building was finally listed for preservation. It was bought by a Dublin lawyer, Brendan Kilty, who set about the long, arduous and expensive process of restoring it. That process has picked up speed in recent months, as the Joyce centenary year approached.
Four working days before Christmas, I visit 15 Usher's Island for the first time in almost 16 years. The place is bustling. Carpenters and plasterers are hard at work behind the 50-foot portrait of Joyce shrouding the building's façade. We step gingerly over newly-laid cement, stoop under scaffolding and try to avoid wet paint. Many of the windows are still unglazed, and cold air sweeps in from the grey December evening. It's a little hard to believe that everything will be ready in time for the planned "Dinner of the Century" on January 6th. But project manager Aoife McIlraith assures me with steely determination that she's on target.
The entire back wall has been removed and replaced. In the process, a huge crack appeared in the side wall, worryingly widening to a size big enough to stick your arm in. Remedial action was taken to prevent the house leaning any further to the left, but the effects can still be seen in the off-kilter angles of some of the sills and sashes. The staircase, with its wrought iron bannisters, is exactly the same as it would have been 100 years ago. Much of the plasterwork on the ceilings is intact and, where damaged, has been repaired.
The handsome sash windows at which I once waltzed clumsily to provide shadows behind the (fortunately very opaque) net curtains, have been restored. They now look down on Calatrava's fine James Joyce bridge, a juxtaposition of old and new which would surely have pleased the author. Across the river, still, "the palace of the Four Courts [stands\] out menacingly against the heavy sky". The dining room itself, at the back of the house, has been painted in rich but sombre Victorian colours. No wallpaper, I notice, though there surely would have been wallpaper in 1904. It's a relief that for whatever reason, aesthetic, intellectual or practical, this renovation will not attempt a forensic recreation of the scene of the party. If 'The Dead' is, among other things, a meditation on the ambiguities of memory, it would be a particular travesty to turn the house into a museum of how it might or should have looked at one particular point in its long history. In any case, it's quite atmospheric enough as it is, even with all the building work going on. 'The Dead', after all, is also a ghost story and, standing on those stairs, it's not hard to imagine the image of the dead Michael Furey being conjured up by the singing of The Lass of Aughrim. According to McIlraith, the house is being returned to roughly the condition it would have been in at the turn of the 19th century. Remarkably, the project has received no funding from the State or from local government, so has to pay its own way. The reception rooms on the first floor will be available for private hire for dinners, parties or corporate functions. Ultimately, McIlraith hopes to convert the upper floors into an upscale B&B. The ground floor (a corn factor's at the time of the story) has already been turned into a commercial art gallery. Gifts and memorabilia will be on sale - nothing too tacky, I'm assured, although apparently you will be able to purchase glass snow globes - one quick shake and snow will be "general all over Ireland".
Those last few pages of the story - Gretta's revelation to Gabriel of her long-lost dead love, his reaction and those lines about the snow falling "on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves" - have, understandably perhaps, overwhelmed many people's memories of reading 'The Dead'. One of the great merits of Huston's film is that, while it can never translate all the ambiguities, psychological and political resonances and disconcerting shifts of perspective of the story to the screen, it does reassert and reaffirm the importance of the party at Usher's Island.
This minutely observed portrait of Dublin middle-class life is far from sentimental, but it is certainly generous. And, in its fidelity to speech, manners and attitudes, it is remarkably recognisable even a 100 years later. The tradition of live-music performance so crucial to the story may have been dying a slow death ever since, thanks to the encroachment of recorded music and electronic technology, but the sociability, the little tensions, the sometimes forced jollity, the genuine affection, all these would resonate with an early 21st-century Dubliner almost as much as they would with an early 20th-century one.
"Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh," wrote Joyce to his brother Stanislaus around the time he was writing 'The Dead' as a late addition to Dubliners. "I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city . . . I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality, the latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe." To reproduce that insularity and hospitality, Joyce drew on his own family's traditions. Every year the Joyces would visit James's hospitable great-aunts, Mrs Callanan and Mrs Lyons, and Mrs Callanan's daughter Mary Ellen, at their home above the corn factor at number 15, which was also known as the "Misses Flynn school".
Joyce's father, John, would carve the goose and give the after-dinner speech, just as Gabriel does in 'The Dead'. In the story, Mrs Callanan and Mrs Lyons became the spinster Misses Morkan, and Mary Ellen Callanan became Mary Jane. Most of the other guests are also drawn from Joyce's recollections.
A century on, the story inevitably seems to us a period piece, an evocation of a time long gone, of characters who are now long since dead themselves. That sense is reinforced by the intimations of mortality which hang over all those characters. But it would be a deep mistake to read the story in a purely nostalgic way. It is in itself a critique and interrogation of nostalgic sentiment of a very Irish sort. It was written as a completely contemporary piece of fiction, and its political and sexual undertows still resonate strongly, and sometimes controversially. 'The Dead' still lives, just as Joyce intended. We should be grateful that the dark, gaunt house lives too.
Tours of 15 Usher's Island are given every Saturday, see www.jamesjoycehouse.com for further details