Philip Larkin described James Joyce as “a textbook case of declension from talent to absurdity”. Having worked my way through Joyce’s works, as far as the second page of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, I’m inclined to agree with him. I was impressed by ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. I read it first as an impressionable boy of fourteen. The Hellfire sermon chapter scared me out of my wits - I doubled up on Confessions for the next six months. At twenty I tried to impress my student friends by reading ‘Ulysses’, and through utter doggedness finished it. Some parts I liked - Bloom watching Gertie, the dirty bits in Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated internal monologue. But much was simply yawningly boring. I concluded that life was too short to read it again. As for ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, I fell before I left the paddock. It’s a book unread by all but academics - only they, it seems, can understand its conceit.
His collection of short stories ‘Dubliners’, though, is of real quality, culminating in the most moving story of all, ‘The Dead’. It deals with the events at a twelfth night dinner, 1904, in suburban Dublin. Little happens - some singing, playing, dancing, a festive dinner, an absurd but appropriate speech by Gabriel, the somewhat smug, superior but interesting protagonist. At the end of a good evening, as he and his wife, Gretta, leave, she is transfixed by the sound of a voice singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. For a few moments she is a stranger to Gabriel. Then they leave. Gabriel is by turns, touched, baffled and piqued - and he can’t let the matter drop. Later at their hotel, he presses for an explanation. She tells of a young man who loved her, twenty years ago, who used to sing the song to her. He was sickly and died. She had never been loved as she was by him. Overwrought by her memories, she falls asleep, leaving Gabriel to his melancholy. The final pages are an immensely moving rumination on love, passion and death.
It’s a wonderful story that, in 1987, was made into a wonderful film by John Huston. It was his last film. It stars his daughter Angelica as Gretta, Donal McCann as Gabriel. They, and the rest of the cast, are well nigh faultless. Huston conceives the action differently from Joyce. For Joyce the events were contemporary, now. For Huston, and us, they are long passed, witnessed from a distance, the distance of more than 80 years, where all the actors in the drama are long dead. Like ghosts they are repeating the actions of that night, as we might do ours when we too, like they, are long dead.
The moving moment where Angelica stops to listen to ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ can be see here - it is the crux and turning point of the film, made all the more poignant by Huston having the camera hold on his daughter’s face for so long. The melody does return at the very end of the film, over the final credits. This time it is on the harp, a slight and fragile sound that might so easily be snuffed out. It is followed by a little waltz, as if referring back to the little joys of that evening long ago, a faded memory, almost gone.
It is played by Ann Stockton.
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