Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Forget Scrooge and Tiny Tim -- James Joyce's "The Dead," with its distinctively Irish blend of music and tragedy, is the ultimate yuletide tale. And why isn't John Huston's marvelous film version available on DVD?
Dec 14, 2004 | The greatest of all Christmas stories, James Joyce's "The Dead," the last story in "Dubliners," was written in little over a month as Joyce forged the uncreated conscience of his race from an apartment in Trieste, Italy. John Huston's 1988 film was made in roughly the same amount of time (in 33 days, actually ). Much of it, including all the interiors, was shot in a warehouse in Valencia, Calif.
Joyce was just 25 when he wrote the story, and Huston 80 when he filmed it, but the intentions of the self-imposed Irish exile and the American émigré who adopted Ireland were not dissimilar. Both the youthful writer and the aging filmmaker were coming to terms with their ambivalence toward both their families and Ireland; both gave themselves over to moments of reverie about home, family and the Christmas holiday (though, actually, the story is set on Jan. 6, 1904, on the Feast of the Epiphany -- the last of the 12 days of Christmas) that aren't to be found anywhere else in their work. Joyce's great works, the quintessential modernist novel "Ulysses" and the unclassifiable stream-of-unconsciousness narrative "Finnegans Wake," were still ahead of him. Huston's great films, including "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," all lay far in the past.
The central character in "The Dead," Gabriel Conroy (his name improbably stolen from an obscure novel by western pulp novelist Bret Harte) was awarded several biographical details from Joyce's life: Both reviewed books for the pro-British Dublin Daily Express, taught in college, became Europeanized and were largely indifferent to the nationalistic aims of their native country. In fiction, Conroy made the journey Joyce himself would never make, back to Dublin to deliver an after-dinner speech at a gathering in honor of his two spinster aunts and their spinster niece, all music teachers: "The three graces," Conroy calls them, "of the Dublin musical world."
"The Dead" is soaked in music, mostly Irish music, from reverential discussions of dead singers to references to tragic and dimly remembered folk songs. (As G.K. Chesterton noted of the Irish, "All their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.") The title itself is from one of Thomas Moore's "Irish Melodies," though the song around which the story turns, "The Lass of Aughrim," predates even Moore. D'Arcy, an Irish tenor and friend of the family, sings the song as Conroy and his wife, Gretta (modeled, of course, on Joyce's wife, Nora), are leaving the gathering; she withdraws into a reflective shell that her curious husband can't, at first, penetrate.
Back in their hotel room, Gabriel Conroy, probing cautiously, finds that the song was once sung to Gretta by a tubercular young boy named Michael Furey who was in love with her back in the wild country near Galway where she grew up. One night, in the cold rain, he came to her window and serenaded her with "The Lass of Aughrim"; he caught a cold and died a short time later.
"I think he died for me," she tells her stunned husband.
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