Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original

Strange Traffic:

An Introduction of Sorts

Thomas Morris

1.

I have no right to be editing this anthology.

I am not Irish. I am not a Joycean academic. And at a recent wedding dinner I had to be told, in a behind-the-hand hush, that I was using the wrong spoon for my soup.

The latter mightn’t seem all that relevant, but approaching an introduction to Dubliners – even this quasi-version of it – it’s easy to feel like a child sitting at a very high table, with a delicious, over-brimming broth in front of them, armed with only too small a spoon.

2.

At nineteen I moved from my hometown of Caerphilly, South Wales to Dublin to study English literature.

I had no connection with the city other than a notion, somehow transmitted to me at sixteen, that I wanted an Irish wife. I had googled ‘Ireland’ + ‘university’, clicked the first link, and requested a prospectus. Three years later, I found myself moving to Rathmines.

Three years and a day later, washing the pint off my shirt, I learned to keep the ‘Irish wife plan’ to myself.

3.

The first module on my English literature degree was something called ‘Writing Ireland’ and one of the first texts was Joyce’s Dubliners.

‘You have to be Irish to get it,’ I was told on the tram into class one day. It was rush-hour, we were standing. ‘Actually,’ the classmate boomed – this guy always boomed – ‘you have to be from Dublin.’

I nodded.

‘Oh, I’ve heard that,’ I said sadly, my Welsh accent gleaming in my ears.

It all made sense now. I had started reading Dubliners a few weeks before moving to Ireland, but I hadn’t felt I understood the stories. The blue Wordsworth edition I owned contained such small text – and so much text – on each tall page, that the stories felt like a chore to me.

And now, standing there on the tram, I understood why. I wasn’t Irish, I wasn’t from Dublin.

4.

The idea was simple: fifteen contemporary Irish authors ‘covering’ the fifteen original stories of Dubliners to mark the collection’s centenary. In my own reading experiences, ‘re-written tales’ tend to be dull affairs – stories that don’t stand on their own legs, whose energies are only derived from other people’s engines.

And I was thinking about this when I heard a Grafton Street busker butcher Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ – itself a transcendental cover of the Leonard Cohen song – a cover that seems to speak to and speak past the original.

Thinking of Jeff Buckley’s song – the heights its reaches, the depths it plummets – the seemingly nebulous idea of ‘covering’ a story came to me. It can work in music, I thought. And Joyce’s prose is, we’re always told, so musical …

5.

Author: What exactly do you mean by ‘cover’?

Me: Um, to tell the story again, but in your own voice.

Author: Like a contemporary version?

Me: Um, if you want. But not necessarily. You’re free to take the story wherever you like. Maybe even re-write it from another character’s perspective.

Author: Like a re-written tale, you mean?

Me: Um, like a cover. Like you find in music.

Author: But these are stories.

Me: I know, but …

This conversation never happened. I asked the authors to ‘cover’ the stories in whatever way they saw fit. They easily, absurdly, accepted the idea and went with it – wherever their firing minds took them.

6.

As the tram jerked its way towards town, the classmate continued. He told me that short stories were inferior to novels, and novels were inferior to essays.

‘Dickens should never have written Oliver Twist,’ he said. ‘If he really wanted social change, he should have written a political tract.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard people say that,’ I said quietly. The boy’s voice boomed so clearly I assumed he couldn’t be wrong about anything.

‘Another thing,’ he added, ‘I’ve noticed you don’t pronounce your words properly. It’s hurd not heered.’

An elderly man sat in a wheelchair near us, beside the door. He smiled at me intermittently, and cast his eyes upwards, letting me know that my gut feeling was right – this guy really was a …

I returned a smile, and thought of my family back home in Wales. I pictured all our movements, like dots progressing across a map. My mother would be driving to work now, my brother would be on the train, and my sister already at her desk. And I, because of some irrational whim of wanting an Irish wife, was here on a tram, in Dublin, being told I couldn’t speak properly.

The ride into town that day was bumpy. The Luas seemed to jerk in spits of twenty yards. A woman – the elderly man’s daughter, I presume – stood behind him, gripping onto the wheelchair’s handles for support. When we arrived at Harcourt Street, the elderly man and his daughter disembarked.

Then, through the very same sliding door, a man in his thirties, pushing a little girl in a pram, got on.

He stood in the same spot as the woman had only a moment before.

The little girl, in her pram, sat in the same spot as the now-departed old man.

7.

‘A strange traffic,’ is how Anthony Burgess describes the relationship between the living and the dead in Dubliners. The two states, he says, seem to co-exist, walk past each other, rough up against one another, refuse to solely inhabit their allotted plots of land.

‘The Dead’, of course, is the example that comes immediately to mind, but there are so many instances of this ‘strange traffic’ in Dubliners. From ‘The Sisters’ where the dead body of Father Flynn literally inhabits the space of the living room – to ‘A Painful Case’ where Mrs Sinico’s death is, for James Duffy, haunted by the life he denied her – the living and the dead move through the collection in tandem, sometimes dancing, sometimes colliding on a one-way street.

And this collection of cover versions is another act of strange traffic. Living Irish authors in communion with the dearly departed Joyce, co-existing, their stories brushing up beside each other.

Like passengers in his sidecar, the fifteen authors here have traversed the same roads as Joyce – thematically, emotionally, sometimes literally – and felt the same bends, the potholes, the dips, the rough ground. They’ve taken in the periphery views, the landscapes, and the characters, and re-drawn the roadmaps in their own hands.

Or, to reach for a less arduous metaphor: they’ve sung Joyce’s songs in their own voices.

8.

The booming boy was, of course, wrong. You don’t have to be Irish to ‘get’ Dubliners. Literature would be pretty banal if that were how it worked. There’s no denying that your understanding of the texts can be deepened with knowledge and experiences of the locations and societies Joyce is depicting – but the stories stand alone.

Likewise, being familiar with the original versions of these stories will grant you access to nuances, to the finest and most interesting of nooks and crannies. And reading these new stories will undoubtedly diffract the loveliest of lights across Joyce’s own work, offering new readings and entry points into the originals (they could even be read as creative essays on Joyce’s stories).

But – and this is crucial – the fifteen stories here stand alone.

Out on the road, as spectacular vehicles in their own right.

9.

The Luas took off from Harcourt Street and railed its way towards Stephen’s Green. I watched the man place his hands on the pram, as the woman before him had placed hers on the wheelchair.

Then the driver tooted the horn – three sharp bursts. The tram came to a halt. A sudden lurch. The signal lights must have failed. And as the booming boy rambled on beside me, I looked out the window as a chaos of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars veered over the tracks and the road, from left to right – and right to left – corner to corner, all moving with their own secret purposes, all beginning at different points and ending God-knows-where.

Viewed from above, I bet it looked sublime.

10.

I have no doubt that some of the authors felt when writing these stories as I did in my first few weeks in Dublin – and as I still feel this minute – small-spooned, not right for the task, too far from home.

Indeed, to ‘take on’ Joyce is an audacious task. But writing is not a competitive sport, and the authors haven’t ‘taken on’ anybody. They have read, they have listened, and they have written.

And what we, the readers, have been given is a gift.

The Sisters

Patrick McCabe

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.

The consensus was absolute – it was the worst chimney fire the town had seen in years. Already a considerable number of residents (there were thirteen houses in all), clad only in their nightclothes, had arranged themselves in anxious conclave along the front of the humble redbrick terrace, unanimously decrying the fire brigade’s quite deplorable delay.

—Of all times for this to happen, I overheard someone observe ruefully, Christmas.

—It sure is a pity, sighed another broodily, turning his head from side to side.

One might have been forgiven for assuming that many present apprehended themselves as attending a major sporting event – the races, perhaps, or a football final. One individual in particular – a man in his fifties – standing not very far away from me, tapped a finger against his upper lip, frowning severely while delivering a stream of opinions in an impressively assertive voice. He was certain, he emphasised, that if the brigade didn’t appear within the next few minutes then, unhappily, the McCooey quarters would be comprehensively gutted. Without a doubt, he added as a coda. Little more than a shell, you’ll find, he concluded, with a candour that almost seemed rehearsed to me.

—I don’t like to say it but I have to accept that you are probably right, concurred another, tubbier man, tapping the plaid toe of his carpet slipper on the gravel.

My closest friend was standing directly beside me – Douglas Greenan. Or at least that had been his name until relatively recently – when, ‘on account of the telly’ as he’d explained, he had decided irrevocably to rechristen himself Virgil Tracy – a notable character from the children’s series International Rescue, in which a secret organisation of military-style puppets had pledged to make the earth a better place by comprehensively ridding it of subterfuge and suffering.

—This world, you know, Desie, behind everything, it’s full of sadness, Douglas attested, I am sorry to have to tell you that but it’s true as I am sure, like all of us, you will one day discover.

Being three years younger – Douglas was fourteen – I accepted that I had little choice but to acknowledge the veracity of this statement.

—But you and me we’ll make it happy, won’t we? I heard him suggest then with no small hint of melancholy. —You and me and the International Rescue team.

That was just fine by me, I assured him.

—Especially now that it’s Christmas, he said, abstractedly fingering his plastic triangular IR badge.

He had sent away for it in The Hornet, a funny paper to which we both subscribed.

—But none of us here will have to worry, the tubby man was saying with a smile of near-triumph illuminating his countenance, for all of us have been through chimney fires before – and worse. And one thing you can say is that we’ve always come through! As indeed we should – for this place means everything. It’s part of us. It is us.

*

Beneath the streetlamp where a sooty cloud idled dolefully inches above the power cables, the coloured glass sphere of an eight-vane catseye rolled from the slope of Douglas’s thumb careering in a trail of light towards the neat circle we’d described in the hard clay. We did that almost every day now – had done ever since we’d become close friends.

—Marbles are go! you would often hear Douglas peal, and you better watch out, for Virgil Tracy he gonna sweep the boards!

I hoped he did. I’d have given Douglas my entire collection if he’d asked, being as he was my friend – the best I’d ever known.

These were my thoughts when Jimmy Keenan happened along, knotting the cord of his dressing gown as the gravel crunched beneath his unlaced boots, biting on an Afton cigarette and agreeing with everyone that things had begun to look very bad indeed.

Jimmy worked as a supervisor on the railway – you’d see him going by with a pencil tucked behind his ear, whistling. He often engaged me in conversation. Addressing me as Spokeshave – by virtue of my reputation for learning, or so I’d assumed. Only recently I’d captured yet another much-coveted essay prize in the school for my response to the suggested title: Our Community and What it Means to Me, an account which saw our schoolmaster, after a protracted period of perusal, professing himself pleased with my ‘Herculean’ efforts, in the process citing a German word Heimat, with which until then I had been entirely unfamiliar.

—In a sense it means home, the castle in a person’s heart, if you will, he told the class, but in truth there is no specific English translation. However, Desmond’s composition appears not only to have understood the concept but described it with an eloquence and intensity of feeling I find quite extraordinary … Which is why I am awarding you, boy, first prize. Congratulations!

In terms of human happiness, there was but one day that could compare with it – which had occurred some years previously, a night where there had been no chimney fires, one other Christmas Eve when Santa had provided me with a little scarlet-jacketed dragoon made of tin, complete with bayoneted rifle and tall shiny bearskin hat. I’d kept him close for most of that year but had somehow, bafflingly, mislaid him and remained inconsolable for an unbearable length of time. Only for Douglas I don’t know what I’d have done.

At least we’ve got our marbles, he would soothingly suggest, and if you would like I’ll gladly lend you my IR badge. Then he would give me that reassuring smile, which seemed the repository of all the world’s contentment, agile and eager, genuine and bright – but also steady and fixed, like the pole star – entirely at odds with the profusion of sparks now capering ferally amongst the swaying electric wires.

—But then it would come as no surprise that you’d be a scholar, Jimmy Keenan was murmuring, for Spokeshave is exactly what we all used to call your Dad in our time – aye, after Shakespeare the bard of Stratford, do you see. Boys but he had the brains, your father. Ah the world, I mind him saying this day in fourth class, this lonely place where we arrive like shadows only to find ourselves already preparing to depart. You’re a ringer for him, young McCooey, so you are – and that’s a fact. It might as well be your Dad standing there. Beneath the stars, watching them jumping sparks.

I was profoundly gratified by this revelation. But not, I regret to say, by the sight that was soon to meet my eyes.

Mrs Lavery and her maid Bridie had appeared without announcement or ceremony and were standing directly in front of me, frowning in their corded candlewick dressing gowns. Bridie kept wagging her finger as she spoke, erupting sporadically into episodes of what seemed faltering and unnecessarily clandestine laughter.

Some moments later they were joined by the genial, bluff, general handyman Pat Corgs. Pat often weeded Nurse Connolly’s garden. When they inquired as to her absence, her habitual inquisitiveness being well known, they were told that no, she wouldn’t be in a position to come out and have a look. Because she wasn’t, he whispered, angling his tousled head, in the best of health. Indeed, he continued, with his brows knitting ominously, the truth was that he feared the worst.

He had heard her the previous day, he elaborated, when he had been going past the house, rasping pitifully behind the front room’s heavily draped window where her nephew had arranged a little camp bed for her beside the fire.

—I felt sorry for her – in there in the sitting room all alone, racking the way she was, desperate hoarse don’t you know. Bad, aye.

This world which she entered like a shadow, I thought. But couldn’t – not even privately – bring myself to complete the sentence.

All of her children were abroad, I knew, with her nephew being the only relative remaining in our little town. I wondered where they all might be – and what they might be doing now.

Pat was leaning against a tree. He mopped his brow with a freckleblotched forearm, observing the small dark sputniks wheeling in slow arcs at an immense height.

Douglas appeared to have forgotten all about the smoke and the fire – which for me seemed to have become a bat-winged creature temporarily obliterating the face of the moon. He narrowed one eye and flicked the transparent catseye. A dull crack followed and marbles went scurrying like insects beyond the depressed circumference.

For the briefest of moments, it seemed as though it wasn’t Douglas Greenan at all – or Virgil Tracy from International Rescue either. It appeared as though in that briefest of instants he had been taken away, never to return. The prospect truly horrified me – the thought of having my truest friend replaced, for even the most infinitesimal period.

I swallowed hard and covered my eyes. Before a startling cry sharply splintered the air and Bridie and her maid both went hurtling forward simultaneously, standing transfixed with twin forefingers extended upwards.

—O in the name of God would you look at that! O may the good Lord Jesus come to our aid now!

Misshapen swirling penumbral whorls were simultaneously bloating lengthways and vertically, before dissipating and vanishing like rags that had been angrily torn. They seemed to me as id-creatures then – (whose essential essence had recently been comprehensively catalogued in the pages of The Hornet) – with their talons craned above every inch of the black-scarred brick of the terrace. We have come to darken your town, they seemed to say – or rather to suggest without ever speaking, stealing effortlessly into your mind, locating there recesses as formidably colourless and forbidding as themselves.

The smell was becoming close to unbearable. It was sharp and acrid, stingingly choking and perhaps if Bridie had not cried out the way she did maybe no one would have become agitated. But she had, however – and as a consequence some of the children began sobbing a little.

—If the fire brigade doesn’t come soon – what will we do? This is the worst chimney fire ever – it’s the worst fire of all! Why did it have to happen at Christmas – why? Please can anyone answer me that!

The children, not unreasonably, were concerned that the season of glad tidings had now been interrupted – perhaps even worse, irrevocably ruined. Perhaps they were thinking of melting rubber dolls, I thought to myself, or crooked malfunctioning clockwork toys. In spite of myself, I was at loss as to know why I persisted in entertaining such a variety of dread possibilities. To compound matters, my face had grown unbearably hot. I could see Jimmy Keenan smiling at my father, who by now had appeared in his