AMERICA:Joyce's vivid details bring a warm Dublin glow to Irish people of a harsh January evening, writes LARA MARLOWE
STELLA O'LEARY holds a dinner party every January 6th, based on James Joyce's masterpiece short story The Dead. As Joyce wrote of the Misses Morkan's Feast of the Epiphany dinner, never once has the celebration fallen flat.
The evening is carefully choreographed. Every guest – gentlemen in dinner suits, ladies in period dresses – is a performer. O’Leary spends two weeks preparing the feast.
“It gives me the chance to renew friendships, to enjoy the camaraderie,” she says.
O’Leary shares an old house in a Washington suburb with her partner of 35 years, Tom Halton, a retired professor of Greek and Latin at the Catholic University. On this 12th and last night of Christmas, garlands and fairy lights decorate the front porch. O’Leary welcomes guests in a white lace dress, circa 1915.
In the first act of dinner, guests stand before a table laden with white linen cloth, red glasses and food.
Michael Whelan, who in real life conducts seminars on business writing for the World Bank, reads from The Dead.
Guests point to “a fat brown goose . . . on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley . . . a great ham stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this, a round of spiced beef”. No detail of Joyce’s description is forgotten.
Guests include three former priests, a full range of Irish and American accents and a strong contingent of Republicans.
But Ireland’s great writers, actors and music – not politics – are the ties that bind us this evening. O’Leary is a committed Democrat close to the Clintons, but she is bipartisan in friendship.
“The common interest is Ireland and Co Cavan,” she says.
O'Leary's partner, Halton, was born a few miles from Ballyjamesduff, so Come Back Paddy Reillyis sung for him.
In their years with the World Bank, Michael O’Farrell, also from Cavan, and his wife Catherine have hosted Cavan nights in India, Africa and the Balkans. Tom Corcoran left economic hardship in Cavan in 1958, at the age of 13, to become an aerospace executive in the US.
He and Jack McDonnell, who sought his fortune in US telecommunications, are members of the Taoiseach’s economic advisory board.
Angela Moore, an Irishwoman from Newry with a golden voice, joins McDonnell in singing The Lass of Aughrim.
Gabriel Conroy’s speech about “the tradition of genuine warm- hearted courteous Irish hospitality” rings especially true.
The Irish in America are more likely to go to Florida than the monks at Mount Melleray to recover from holiday excesses, and iPhones are today’s modern innovation – the equivalent of galoshes in Joyce’s story.
O'Leary recalls starting her Deaddinners the year John Huston's film came out. It takes Ambassador Michael Collins just a few seconds to find the year of Huston's film on his iPhone. O'Leary gasps and crosses herself, saying "'87, 97 . . . so it's 22 years". Guests sing the lyrics of Thomas Moore's Endearing Young Charmsfrom their iPhone screens.
As McDonnell reads Gabriel Conroy’s closing speech, a website news photo on a phone of snowy Ireland is passed around the table.
Thoughts of the dead include Cardinal Cahal Daly, who died on New Year’s Eve. Halton knew him decades ago at Maynooth and this week received a Christmas card signed by Daly in Belfast on December 16th.
In New York, consul general Niall Burgess and his wife Marie also hold an annual Dead dinner. “This year was particularly poignant because we had invited Donal Donnelly, and we used the occasion to remember him,” Burgess said.
Donnelly, who played the endearing, sentimental drunk Freddie Malins in Huston’s film, died on January 4th in Chicago.
O’Leary’s guests were from the business and diplomatic community. New York is the capital of culture, though, and Burgess’s friends include the novelist Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award in November, the Tony award- winning actor Jim Norton and Gabriel Byrne.
“Byrne spoke very movingly of all Donnelly’s performances, said he should have won an Oscar for his role as Freddie Malins,” recounts Burgess.
"Just as the English have A Christmas Caroland the Welsh have A Child's Christmas in Wales, The Deadis our Christmas story," Burgess continues.
This week’s dinner gave him “a sense of a great generation of actors passing; Donal McCann 10 years ago, now Donal Donnelly.”
John Huston achieved the feat of bringing them together on a set in California to direct what Burgess calls “one of the most authentic films ever made about Dublin”.
The illusion of being transported in time was strongest at the end of the evening.
As we piled on overcoats and scarves to leave the O'Leary- Halton party, one half expected to step on to an icy Dublin quay. As in The Dead, this is the coldest winter in 30 years, but there were no horse-drawn carriages, only cars parked amid drifts of frozen snow.